Francis suffered the vicissitudes of show business with a crafted bonhomie until even the valiant attempts of the finest Beverly Hills surgeons to cosmeticize his “flaws” proved less than futile and the studio executives shifted the onus of his diminishing ‘star power’ to his agent and his agent shifted it back to the studio until Francis found himself wandering down the median of the 405 till he reached Tijuana; there he painted himself with black and white stripes, called himself Francisco, and none of the thousands of tourists who posed next to this “Tijuana Zebra” ever realized that he was once the world famous Francis the Talking Mule.