Horse of a Different Color

By John Skow and James Willwerth/Aspen

To put the matter politely, memoirs are self-serving. Still, it's something of a shock to learn that Monty Roberts' enormously popular, enormously self-approving memoir The Man Who Listens to Horses may assay out as part fiction. Call it horse puckey for the soul, if charges by Monty's younger brother Larry and others close to the author's life are to be credited. By these accounts, backed up by TIME's reporting, the stirring tale with more than 800,000 copies in print--out this month in paperback--contains an embarrassing number of seeming untruths, some harmless, others outrageous.

What is true about Monty Roberts is his ability to establish rapport with a wild, unridden horse and, within 30 minutes or so, "join up" with the animal to the extent that it will accept a saddle, bridle and rider. He observes the horse's body language and responds with his own motions to anticipate the animal's fears. Other trainers use versions of the technique. So did the hero of Nicholas Evans' weepy best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer, which later became a Robert Redford film. But though Roberts' book jacket bills him as "a real life horse whisperer," Evans has publicly cited other trainers as the models for his character.

So much for truth. Much of the book's melodrama comes from Roberts' account of abuse by a father he describes as angry, violent and a killer. The late Marvin Roberts, a horse trainer in Salinas, Calif., beat Monty with a chain, so goes the account, when the seven-year-old boy began to question rough, traditional training methods. These beatings, writes Monty, went on weekly for several years. Worse: during World War II, when Marvin worked as a policeman, Monty saw his father disarm a knife-wielding black soldier who was trying to hold up the Golden Dragon bar in Salinas and then beat the man to death.

Larry, at 62 one year younger than his brother, says disgustedly that there is little truth to Monty's portrait of their father, a gentle and kindly man known around town for his generosity. Among former townspeople who back up this view is Joyce Renebome, an aunt roughly the brothers' age who often stayed overnight at the Roberts' house. She and her daughter Debbie Ristau are writing a protest book, Horse Whispers and Lies. Both Larry and Renebome say they never saw any beatings. Larry and Monty shared a bedroom and took baths together; Larry says he would have known. And, he says, there was no killing. Both young brothers were riding with their dad, Larry says. There was a fight in front of the Golden Dragon. "A man was down. Dad got out, and someone gave him a jacket to put under the guy's head." End of incident. Skeeter Garcia-Innocenti, then one of Marvin's riding students and now a Salinas police clerk, says there is no record of any such attempted holdup and death.

Monty's understanding of the unspoken language of horses coalesced in his early teens, he writes, during a magical trip to Nevada to round up mustangs for a race in Salinas. He, Larry and a friend named Tony Vargas made the trip together, camping and studying the mustangs. So says the British edition of his book, published two years ago. But both Larry and Vargas deny that such a trip occurred. "They're lying in their teeth," says Monty. In the U.S. edition, published last year by Random House, Monty told a similar story but used the names of Ralph and Vivian Carter, horsey friends who are now dead.

Monty claims that as a young boy, wearing a wig, he was Elizabeth Taylor's stunt double for National Velvet. Larry says Monty did no stunt riding, and the book Liz, by C. David Heymann, lists Billy Cartlidge as Taylor's stunt double. Monty also claims that James Dean, a great buddy, lived with him before the filming of East of Eden. But, no, it seems; Dean's pal was Tony Vargas, according to Renebome and Vargas himself. California rancher Bill Dorrance, an early teacher of horse whispering, was "like a grandfather to me," Monty writes. But Dorrance's son Steve says his father hardly knows Monty. Similarly, horse trainer Don Dodge, in whose stable Monty claims to have worked 16-hour days, told TIME, "Oh my goodness gracious! Those things just aren't true."

And if they aren't? Monty's editor at Random House, Deborah Futter, sees the many accusations as "part of a family squabble." Monty himself, a friendly, convincing talker, boyish smiler and earnest eye contacter, is not apologizing. Choking back tears, he told an audience recently, "When you read that book, that was my life." It was written for his maltreated friends, the world's horses. "Don't take this wrong," says Monty to a reporter who has grown skeptical, "but if everything I said was 100% false, look at the good it's doing."