JURASSIC TV—COWBOY DREAMS AND THE WILD, WILD WEST

Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) in Gunsmoke

I grew up a-dreamin' of bein' a cowboy

And lovin' the cowboy ways

Pursuin' the life of my high ridin' heroes

I burned up my childhood days

I learned all the rules of a modern day drifter

Don't you hold on to nothin' too long

Just take what you need from the ladies, then leave them

With the words of a sad country song

My heroes have always been cowboys

And they still are, it seems

Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of

Themselves and their slow movin' dreams

—Willie Nelson—

My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys

Like most boys of my generation, I loved guns and cowboys. We were the first television generation, and the guns we wanted were the ones our cowboy heroes had. Among others, I had a beautiful Hubley toy replica of the kind of Colt .45 revolver that Matt Dillon carried on Gunsmoke. It could be taken apart and the rotary chamber removed, just like a real Colt revolver. It was a well-made thing of beauty, crafted in polished steel and with simulated pearl hand grips. I also had a Mattel Fanner 50 that simulated, not nearly as accurately as the .45, a faux bone-handled Colt .44 Peacemaker—a second-generation Colt favorite in the Old West among gunslingers because it was lighter and more compact than the .45, which started out as military ordnance (the famous Colt Army  model, also later known as the Peacemaker—the similarly-styled Colt Navy was a .36-caliber single-action revolver), and because its ammo was interchangeable with the rounds used in the Winchester .44 rifle.

Speaking of which, when The Rifleman, starring Chuck Connors, was a popular TV show, I also had a special ring-lever rapid-fire Winchester like his...a toy, of course, also made by Hubley. I identified with Connors’s character, Lucas McCain, because he was tall, like me,  and fearless, and just, and he was built like I wanted to be someday. By the way, that never happened and contrary to all expectations, I stopped growing at six-foot-one. Chuck was six-six.

If I identified with Connors, my brother Dennis James, whom we called Jim at home, identified with Josh Randall, the bounty hunter portrayed by Steve McQueen in a show called Wanted Dead or Alive. Randall was small-built, feisty, quick and dangerous, but also often soft-hearted. And so was Jim. He would, indeed, grow up to be the same type of man as the characters McQueen often played. A small, wiry guy with swift reflexes, a short temper and a smart-assed attitude that, matched with his surprising generosity and empathy,  was singularly endearing. Randall’s weapon of choice was, like The Rifleman’s, a gimmick. It was a chopped-down version of the standard 1892 Winchester rifle, with a sawn-off stock and a short barrel, which could be holstered and carried as a handgun. Jim had one of those, or rather, a pretty precise toy replica made by Marx (the toy company, not Karl).

All of these beautifully-made replicas were Christmas gifts from our mother, Reba Mae. Our dad, Whitie, never would have spent that kind of money for something as frivolous as a toy. And most of the time he kept a tight rein on Reba Mae’s “allowance” to make sure she didn’t either. But at Christmas-time she usually managed to wheedle an extra holiday stipend out of him and when she did, she would splurge on fine gifts for us kids—toy guns, trucks and cars for us boys, and dolls or games and Golden Books for our sister, Darla. 

Like Willie Nelson, Jim and I  “burned up our childhood days” pretending to be our cowboy heroes, crossing over plot-lines and networks to insert these characters into one and the same story. We refused to share our characters with our neighbors. If they wanted to play with us, they had to settle for being the bad guys and, at the end of the day, getting killed. Game over. Go home. Come back alive some other day.

There were Westerns on TV that were specifically for children. But they never managed to ring my bells.

Take, for instance, The Roy Rogers Show. It starred Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, who both always dressed in outfits that made them look more like they were going to a square dance than to impose law and order at the point of a six-gun. And there were disturbing influences like sidekick Pat Brady who seemed too stupid to live and drove a jeep—a jeep!—that he called Nellybelle. It was like, what is this, a Western or World War II movie? Mr. and Mrs. Rogers (I wondered why she was called Dale Evans if they were husband and wife both on the screen and in real life: or were they living in sin?) were such a pair of saccharine sweet rubes that it was hard to take them seriously, and there was always an imminent threat of their suddenly picking up a “guee-tar” and breaking into (all too often inspirational) song. As Robin Williams says in the movie RV, “Whenever a big white man picks up a banjo, my cheeks tighten.”

Roy and Dale with Roy's horse Trigger

Breaking into song was another clear and present danger if you watched The Gene Autry Show. In fact, Autry was already known on national radio and in movies as The Singing Cowboy when he came to TV in the 1950s. Like Roy and Dale, Gene Autry suffered from terminal niceness and naïveté. He directed himself in the series that ran for six years, and his lack of a self-critical sense was pretty obvious. He failed, for instance, to ever establish credible personae for himself or his cast. For example, in different episodes, he played a rancher, then a sheriff. Later he was a lowly cowpoke—what happened to the ranch, did he lose it in a game of hearts?—and then he was a border guard. Moreover, in a few episodes he had Alan Hale playing his sidekick, Tiny. Then all of the sudden, in the same season, Hale was back as a bad guy in a few episodes, in which we were supposed to pretend he’d never been Tiny. Even as young as I was back then, I found the whole thing both confusing and irritating. Did he think kids were stupid?

William Boyd’s portrayal of Hopalong Cassidy was, to my mind, just as boring, if, thankfully, not as musical. He went up against all sorts of “bad hombres” looking way too much like somebody’s sweet old grandpa and wearing an all-black outfit with white piping and knee-high boots that gave him an air of...what was it?...a dominatrix? The only Western series for kids that I watched consistently was The Lone Ranger, starring Clayton Moore, as the masked crusader. But I think my two main reasons for watching that one more or less assiduously were the theme song and his sidekick Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels. I would only later discover that what I thought of as the cool “Lone Ranger theme song” was actually Rossini’s William Tell Overture. But not wanting to miss hearing it at the beginning and end of the program was what attracted me to come running from wherever I was playing in the neighborhood whenever it was time to watch the show. Between orchestral performances, I figured I might as well watch the episode. Even back then I had a kind of inborn sense of the ridiculous and couldn’t help wondering if the star wouldn’t be more convincing as a tough guy if he were to lose the matching tights and shirt (which, in a color photo, I once saw were powder blue!) and wear something a little more befitting of a cowboy star.

Jay Silverheels, better known as Tonto

But Tonto (which means stupid or dunce in Spanish, which is why in Spanish-dubbed versions of the show, Silverheels’ character is called Toro, meaning Bull) was an entirely different story. Dignified, implacable, knowledgeable, trail-wise,  loyal, skilled and fearlessly strong. He’s what made me want to be the Indian when we played cowboys and Indians, despite my unconvincing Teutonic complexion and in spite of the fact that I was always destined to die by game’s end. I kept wanting to play Custer and Indians, but, for some reason, no one else was game.

Silverheels was the Native American name that the actor chose as his screen name. It was a reference to his nickname when he was a player for the Toronto Tecumsehs pro indoor lacrosse team. He was born Harold Jay Smith, a full member of the Mohawk Nation and grandson of Mohawk Chief A. G. Smith. He was also an anomaly in Hollywood, where Indians were usually played by painted white guys—Jeff Chandler, for instance...what’s up with that?

Silverheels grew up on the Six Nations of the Grand River reservation in Ontario Province, Canada. He was a natural athlete and played a number of sports before going pro in lacrosse and playing, as Harry Smith, for teams including Toronto, Vancouver, Buffalo, Rochester, Atlantic City, and Akron. Not satisfied with that, he was also to become a skilled and dangerous amateur boxer, ranking second in the middleweight Golden Gloves boxing tournament of 1938. His ticket to Hollywood, or so the story goes, came in the person of former vaudevillian and movie star comic Joe E. Brown, who apparently saw Silverheels fight and convinced him to do a screen test. He started his film career as an “extra” and stunt man but later landed actual acting parts in major Hollywood productions, including, for instance, Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart, Broken Arrow with James Stewart, Walk the Proud Land with Anne Bancroft and Audie Murphy, and Alias Jesse James with Bob Hope. His last Hollywood appearance was in the mid-seventies (he would have been in his fifties at the time) in a film called The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, in which he played a wise old Indian chief.

https://youtu.be/0W_A6VJEDYc

But, as I say, my passion, even as a young boy—when I wasn’t really supposed to be watching them—was “adult Westerns”. And my favorite by far was Gunsmoke, in its earliest and starkest manifestations. It had already been a radio show starring William Conrad (who later starred in an unconventional TV detective show called Cannon) for a decade before it debuted on the small screen. On TV, it was a late-prime time (10 p.m.) show for after the kiddies went to bed. But since it was shown on Saturday nights, I was allowed to stay up for it, and usually watched it with Whitie.

The male lead was a little-known Hollywood actor, a big, rugged-looking, corn-fed Minnesotan called James Arness (elder brother of Peter Graves who would debut in the children’s adventure series, Fury, as Mr. Jim, and later become the head of the Mission Impossible team, Mr. Phelps). As an introduction to the first episode, Arness was presented by iconic Hollywood Western and war film star John Wayne. He had been in three of Wayne’s many cowboy films and they had become buddies—both great big guys, birds of a feather, although Wayne had done all of his combat on Hollywood sound stages, while Arness was a decorated veteran infantry rifleman who was severely wounded in the Battle of Anzio.

After the glowing intro provided by “The Duke”, Arness didn’t disappoint. He was Matt Dillon, the six-foot-seven-inch US marshal who was the embodiment of law and order in Dodge City, Kansas, someone not just any man could get around. And he would be Marshal Dillon for the next two decades in one of the longest-running TV shows in the history of television.

My favorite seasons will always be the earliest, when the series still portrayed a stark picture of life in the Old West, where civilization was beginning to take fragile root, but where prairie justice was still mostly dispensed from the barrel of a gun. Although he sought to keep law and order by the book, if it came to the other, Marshal Dillon was your man. Swift, unwavering, certain of his place as the keeper of law and order in a lawless land.

The frontier marshal’s life didn’t let Matt Dillon ever entertain the thought of a wife and home. But there was a tantalizing romantic involvement with “fancy lady” Miss Kitty (the sultry Amanda Blake), who ran the Longbranch Saloon, where Matt and just about every other man in the Kansas Territory seemed to hang out.

The Marshal and Miss Kitty...
Did they or didn't they?

Everyone but the “baddest” of bad guys treated Miss Kitty with utmost respect. And although thousands of American dads were surely fantasizing vicariously from their armchairs at the end of a hard work-week about what Miss Kitty must look like naked, there was never a hint about what “improprieties” might be taking place in the rooms above the bar. In those Jurassic days of black and white TV, gunplay, cruelty and murder were one thing, but you didn’t talk about sex. Jurassic TV anthologists point out that only in one episode, well into the long history of the show does a would-be whorehouse madam who has been shut down ask the marshal why Kitty gets a pass and Matt’s answer is, if not in so many words, that brothels operate at the discretion of the law (i.e., him). There was, however, plenty of speculation about the relationship between Kitty and Matt. It was clear from the script that they were close friends, but the nagging question was...did they or didn’t they?

The six-hundred-odd episodes that paper Gunsmoke’s history were littered with some of the finest scripts in Western writing. None more well-crafted than those penned by later best-selling author Elmore Leonard. The level of Hollywood fame that Leonard reached in the latter years of his writing career with feature film adaptations of stories of his like Jackie Brown, Out of Sight and Get Shorty, tends to make all but those of my generation forget that before his tough urban noir portraits with a touch of wicked humor made him the modern day toast of the Motor City, he was a great Western writer in the tradition of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. He wrote literally hundreds of short Westerns, many of which were adapted for TV or the big screen, including, 3:10 to Yuma, with Glenn Ford and Van Heflin (a later version starred Russell Crowe and Christian Bale) and, even more famously, Hombre, with Paul Newman and an unconscionably evil Richard Boone.

And speaking of Richard Boone, he starred in one of my other favorite adult Western series of the black and white era—namely, Have Gun — Will Travel. https://youtu.be/HZzY6KZuLUo If for no other reason, the show was fascinating because of its unconventional nature. While all TV lawmen found themselves forced in the majority of episodes to reluctantly do “justice” with their six-guns, Boone’s character was a whole other animal—a hired gun, a problem solver, an exterminator and although he invariably forced the bad guys into having to draw down on him so he could kill them fair and square, he felt no remorse about punching their one-way ticket to hell. He clearly accepted his role as the grim reaper. And Boone had just the rough-hewn cruel face and powerful character to make you believe him. “Now, if you want me to go, Mister, you’ll have to make me.” Chilling.

Richard Boone as Paladin

Boone’s father, Kirk, was a fourth great-grandson to Squire Boone (1696-1765), father of the legendary frontiersman, Daniel Boone. His mother was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States. Richard was born within spitting distance of Hollywood and grew up in Glendale, California. Despite this fact, he first honed his method acting skills in New York City, where he attended The Actors Studio on the GI Bill following World War II, in which he served in the Navy’s Pacific campaign and was discharged as a petty officer first class. It was also in New York, on Broadway, that he became a dramatic stage actor, forming part of the cast for a Broadway version of the adapted ancient Greek tragedy Medea, starring Sir John Gielgud, which ran for over two hundred performances. He was later also cast for a Broadway version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. (Which explains why his character in Have Gun Will Travel, a cultured if ruthless gun for hire, would not infrequently quote The Bard of Stratford upon Avon).

The gunman that Boone portrayed was called, simply, Paladin (a not unintentional name that spoke of the age of chivalry), and his trademark was a chess piece—obviously, the knight. It was embossed on his calling card and ornamented his black leather holster rig. It was hard to play Paladin in our childhood games. None of us had the vocabulary to be the erudite assassin. We had to settle for playing more down-to-earth gunslingers.

When he was on the clock, Paladin was already dressed in mourning wear for his victims—an all black outfit from head to toe. But off work, Paladin was a San Francisco dandy who wore fine suits and ruffled shirts. He often met his clients at the luxury hotel where he made his residence. They would set the plot-line by telling him the “problem” they wanted to solve, and Paladin would usually offer them his knight-emblazoned calling card, on which the camera would zoom in. It read:

HAVE GUN — WILL TRAVEL

Wire Paladin

San Francisco

Now, the first time Whitie and I were watching the show and Paladin said, “My card,” and handed it to the client, Whitie exclaimed, “Wire!? What the hell kinda name is Wire?”

Hearing my dad laughing I started laughing too and saying, “Wire! He’s called Wire! What a funny name, hahaha...”

Reba Mae was also laughing, so hard that she had to hold her sides. But it soon became clear she wasn’t laughing at Paladin. She was laughing at us!

When she could catch her breath, she gasped, “It means ‘telegraph Paladin’ ya dummies!”

Whitie stopped laughing and, mouth still open, but now in surprise, he looked at her and looked back at the screen, then back at her, and then we were all laughing hysterically again until Mom and I ended up with hiccups. It remained a standing family joke for twenty years after that, and whenever Richard Boone appeared in a movie—he was in more than fifty during his career—Whitie would say, “Hey Dan, Wire’s in this one.”

McQueen at Josh Randall

Another unconventional and highly unlikely hero like the one Boone played was the one portrayed by Steve McQueen in Wanted Dead or Alive. But in his case, there was none of the hard-bitten lack of remorse that Paladin demonstrated. On the contrary, McQueen’s character, Josh Randall, stands apart from the normal everyday bounty hunter. Mainly, because he isn’t merely interested in collecting a bounty at any cost and returning his prisoner dead or alive, but rather wants to see justice done. Nor is the justice he seeks the single-minded retribution that Boone’s character dispenses. Often as not, Randall helped more than he hurt, clearing the names of men falsely accused or even breaking out innocent ones already jailed. It was only the truly deserving of their fate that he delivered to justice at the point of his abbreviated version of the 1892 Winchester rifle—which he refers to as his “mare’s leg” and with which he is deadly adept.

He was a natural to be my brother Jim’s favorite, because for all their apparent confidence and wise-guy attitude, they shared uncommon concern and even obsessive preoccupation with, above all, doing the right thing by others, the legitimate thing no matter what blind justice might have decided. They neither one took “what everybody says” at face value but pondered what they believed in their hearts, based on the facts and on getting into the other guy’s shoes and walking around in them.

McQueen riding shotgun for Brynner in The Magnificent Seven

The show ran for ninety-odd episodes before being taken off the air. It was fundamental in McQueen’s training and exposure as an actor, before he earned the title of “The King of Cool”. He had already had some major film credits in Never Love a Stranger, The Great Saint Louis Bank Robbery and the horror film, The Blob, in which he starred. But McQueen himself is quoted as admitting the great influence the series had on his career, calling it, “Three hard mother-grabbin' years, but I learned my trade and it gave me discipline.” It placed him on the road to becoming a singular Hollywood anti-hero icon. And it made him the sort of cool Western star that could land him a starring role, next to Yul Brynner, in one of the greatest gunslinger pictures ever filmed, The Magnificent Seven.

And then there was my third favorite, as I mentioned earlier—The Rifleman. https://youtu.be/9IVCwYPjFXc The weapon of choice of Chuck Connors’ character, Lucas McCain, was also a Winchester 1892. Gun enthusiasts probably picked up on the fact that both Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rifleman were set long years before John Browning had crafted the first 1892 model of that rifle. But we fans couldn’t have cared less.

Over the course of the series, we learn that McCain is a Union Army veteran and junior officer (lieutenant) and that he earned the Rifleman moniker during the later Indian wars. There is something about that period of which he is not particularly proud, and that has made him reluctant to enter into any more gunplay with his dangerously accurate weapon. Like the Roman military leader and politician Cincinnatus, who simply wanted to be finished with war and get back to his farm, however, Lucas McCain is a homesteader who wants to hang his rifle up for good. But in every episode, one bad guy or another makes that dream impossible.

Chuck Connors as The Rifleman

We are given to understand that Lucas is a widower whose wife died in the smallpox epidemic and left him with a young boy to raise, his son Mark, who is his greatest admirer. The close relationship between father and son is the backstory to the shoot-‘em-up segments of the show. And no few of us were jealous of the boy for his relationship of mutual respect and caring with his father and, indeed, for having Lucas McCain to look up to (not realizing that our own World War II vet fathers were real-life heroes who sacrificed everything during the war, only to come home and work themselves silly to provide us with what we had).

Johnny and Chuck alias Mark and Lucas

Mark was played by child star Johnny Crawford. If he looked familiar to us, it was because a few years earlier, before we were “big kids”, we had seen him as one of the original Mouseketeers on Walt Disney’s wildly popular Mickey Mouse Club.  

A term that fascinated me in that series was “clod-buster”. The program made it seem as if that were a standing insult for farmers, but I’d never heard it anyplace else before. In almost every episode, however, one of many bad guys itching for a fight they were sure to lose would call Lucas McCain a “clod-buster”. My question was always, “How do they know?” He dressed like any other cowboy, walked the same, wore his hat the same, had on the same kind of boots, and they only saw him in town, usually at the saloon. So unless they knew him, which they usually didn’t or they wouldn’t have messed with him, how did they know to called him “clod-buster”. Was there some pig manure or cow dung on his boots the audience couldn’t see?

Game over, the Marshal's here...
and he's brought a friend

Whatever the case may be, the town marshal, a recovering alcoholic and aging tough-guy veteran lawman called Micah Torrance (played by Paul Fix) seemed to have no one that he and his two-barrel scatter gun—loaded (one bad-guy character once indicated) with shells filled with steel balls—could fall back on in a crisis other than Lucas McCain. And we couldn’t wait for him to be called in.

Before starting his acting career, Connors gained a reputation as an incredible athlete. He was one of the few players in history to successfully go pro in two distinct sports: baseball and basketball.

As you get older, you quickly realize that being a cowboy might not be all it was cracked up to be. As Willie Nelson laments in another verse of his cowboy heroes tune:

Cowboys are special, with their own brand of misery
From being alone too long
You could die from the cold, in the arms of a nightmare
Knowin' well that your best days are gone

Pickin' up hookers instead of my pen
I let the words of my youth fade away
Old worn-out saddles, and old worn-out memories
But no one and no place to stay...

Nevertheless, the black and white lessons about right and wrong, freedom and justice, legality and legitimacy, courage and cowardice have tended to stick with me all my life. And I have to confess that no matter how old I get, I’ll always be a sucker for a classic Western saga.