WESTERNS: The Six-Gun Galahad

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I’ve labored long and hard for bread

for honor and for riches

But on my corns too long yov,e tred

You fine haired Sons of Bitches

let come what will ‘I,ll try it on

My condition can’t be worse and if there,s money in that Box

Tis munny in my purse.

The author of these desperate verses, a notorious California road agent known as Black Bart, removed “that Box” at the risk of life and limb from a westbound stagecoach on the afternoon of July 25, 1878—and found inside it a mere $600 in cash and kind. Poor old Bart. He was born a century too soon. In 1959 he would have found, in nearly every parlor in the land, a box from which any man with enough strength to pull a hair trigger and enough chin to hold a hat string can apparently remove as much as a million dollars a year.

Tail over dashboard, wild as a herd with heel flies, the U.S. television audience is in the midst of the biggest stampede for the wide open spaces since the California gold rush. TV’s western boom began four years ago, and every season since then, the hay haters have hopefully predicted that the boom would soon bust. Yet every season it has been bigger than the last. Last week eight of the top ten shows on TV * were horse operas. The networks have saddled up no fewer than 35 of the bangtail brigade, and 30 of them are riding the dollar-green range of prime night time (from 7:30 to 10 p.m.). Independent stations too have taken to the field with every wring-tailed old oat snorter they could rustle out of Hollywood’s back pasture. This season, while other shows, from quizzes to comedies, were dropping right and left like well-rehearsed Indians, not a single western left the air. Indeed, 14 new ones were launched, and the networks are planning more for next year. Sighs a well-known writer of western scripts: “I don’t get it. Why do people want to spend so much time staring at the wrong end of a horse?”

They have more than that to look at, including some of the most exciting new faces—and figures—that U.S. show business has produced in many a year. James Arness (Gunsmoke), Ward Bond (Wagon Train), Richard Boone (Have Gun), Hugh O’Brian (Wyatt Earp), James Garner (Maverick), Chuck Connors (Rifleman), Dale Robertson (Wells Fargo), Clint Walker (Cheyenne)—one day these he-manly specimens were just so many sport coats on Hollywood’s infinite rack. The next, they were TV’s own beef trust. Their teeth were glittering, their biceps bulging, their pistols blazing right there in the living room; it was more fun, as they say in Texas, than raisin’ hell and puttin’ a chunk under it.

The Talking Horse. Behind the hand that holds the gun is, of course, the hand that strokes the typewriter, and television scriptwriters are frantically trying to find new packages for one of the oldest staples on the shelves of U.S. show business. The new horse operas are generically known as Adult Westerns, a term first used to describe the shambling, down-to-biscuits realism of Gunsmoke, but there are numerous subspecies. First came the Psychological Western, which populated the arroyos with schizophrenic half-breeds, paranoid bluecoats, amnesic prospectors. Then there was the Civil Rights Western, and all the persecuted Piutes, molested Mexicans, downtrodden Jewish drummers and tormented Chinese laundrymen had their day. Scriptwriters are now riding farther from the train, rustling plots (from De Maupassant, Stevenson, even Aristophanes), introducing foreigners (an Italian tailor on Zane Grey Theater, a samurai on Wagon Train) and dabbling in rape, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism.

Good or bad, adult or infantile, psychological or just physical, the TV western is the No. 1 talking horse of the average trail-feverish American. A man in Pennsylvania, angered when his wife turned off Have Gun, Will Travel while he was watching it, ran for his revolver and took a shot at her. (He missed.) In Florida one priest bet another that Marshal Matt Dillon was faster on the draw than Paladin—loser to say early Mass on Sunday. Tie-in sales of toys suggested by TV westerns are expected to hit $125 million this year. And at last count, the U.S. had about 600 “fast-draw clubs.”

American Odyssey. Why has the television western far surpassed the popularity of its previous incarnations in the dime novel, the tent show, the wide screen? Why has it overtaken the space cowboys, the precinct operas and the llama dramas? Says ABC Program Director Thomas W. Moore: “The western is just the neatest and quickest type of escape entertainment, that’s all.” But few are willing to let it go at that. Parents and professional worriers are concerned about the violence and sadism in the horse opera. Psychoanalysts are looking for sex symbols (all those guns, of course), Oedipal patterns (to kill the wicked sheriff really means to kill Pop), indirect aggressions (“Women are apt to think of their husbands in the villain’s role,” says one Payne Whitney staffer).

A much more convincing case is made by theorizers, both professional and amateur, who think the western helps people to get away from the complexities of modern life and back to the “restful absolutes” of the past. Western Man in Zane Grey’s definition of the term is in fact an almost exact opposite of Western Man in Toynbee’s sense. In the cowboy’s world, justice is the result of direct action, not of elaborate legality. A man’s fate depends on his own choices and capacities, not on the vast impersonal forces of society or science. His motives are clearly this or that, unsullied by psychologizing (except, of course, in the Freudian frontier yarns). Moreover a man cannot be hagridden; if he wants to get away from women, there is all outdoors to hide in. And he is not talk-ridden, for silence is strength. Says Sociologist Philip Rieff: “How long since you used your fists? How long since you called the boss an s.o.b.? The western men do, and they are happy men.” Says Motivational Researcher Ernest Dichter: “America grew too fast, and we have lost something in the process. The western story offers us a way to return to the soil, a chance to redefine our roots.”

Whatever truth there may be in such explanations, the fantasies of the television tube are perhaps most truly understood as shadows of a larger drama. The western is really the American morality play, in which Good and Evil, Spirit and Nature, Christian and Pagan fight to the finish on the vast stage of the unbroken prairie. The hero is a Galahad with a six-gun, a Perseus of the purple sage. In his saddlebags he carries a new mythology, an American Odyssey that is waiting for its Homer. And the theme of the epic, hidden beneath the circus glitter of the perennial Wild West show, is the immortal theme of every hero myth: man’s endless search for the meaning of his life.

Salt Pork & Sundown. The western hero, as worshiped in 1959, is derived from a type that was extant for only a brief moment of history—between 1865, when the Civil War ended, and 1886-87. when 80% of the cattle in the West froze to death in two savage winters. “There’s no law west of Kansas City,” the saying went, “and west of Fort Scott, no God.” The Sioux and the Apache were making their last stands. The first big gold and silver strikes were made in Colorado and Nevada, and the no-good and the adventurous went west by the thousands “to see the elephant.” Up from Texas (“The whole south end of Texas was sinking under the weight of its cows”) the longhorns came plodding to Kansas railheads, 2,000 and 3,000 to a herd.

It was the era of flue-scorching “twofer” stogies and forty-rod whisky (known as “red disturbance”), and there were real drinking men to lap it up, e.g., the miner in Bodie who, when he ran out of gold dust, slashed off his ear, slapped it on the bar and demanded credit. Manufacturers of bone combs were paying $1.25 for Indian skulls, and a white man’s life was not worth much more.

The real western hero of the period bore little resemblance to the sweet-smelling show-business variety of latter days. He was literally ”wild and woolly and full of fleas/And seldom curried below the knees.” Instead of skintight pants and store-boughten fumadiddle. he wore a pair of wide “hair pants.” cut straight off the cow. He stank of bear grease and was usually crawling with “pants rats,” as he called his lice. He slept with whores and Indian squaws, because there weren’t many other women around, and whenever he got the chance, he got bear-eatin’ drunk, because the rest of the time life had little to offer him but salt pork and sundown. Somebody once counted 3,620 bullet holes in the ceiling of a bunkhouse —drilled there by cowhands who had nothing to do but shoot at flies.

The Fighting Pimps. Courage the cowboys had—enough to “charge hell with a bucket of water.” as somebody said—but they were not necessarily dangerous. The Colt single-action .45 (Peacemaker) and the Colt .44 (Frontier), the preferred pistols in the West, were clumsy objects; they weighed 3 lbs. 1 oz.. stretched 10¼ in. from butt to sight. To learn the quick draw with this blunderbuss took a lot of practice, and the man who could fire it accurately beyond 20 ft. was rare. Nevertheless, the best of the gunsharks—with the help of sawed barrels, tied triggers, shifted grips, lowered hammers and greased holsters—could slap leather and spill five shots, all in less than a second. (The modern record is claimed by a Denver butcher named Jim—no kin to Matt —Dillon: draw and shoot in twelve-hundredths of a second.) Most of them, besides, carried a “stingy gun” and were masters of the border shift and the road agent’s spin.*

Most of the famous gunmen of the Old West would provide their romantic armchair admirers with some unpleasant surprises. Billy the Kid, of sentimental memory, was a psychopathic killer who dropped most of his 21 victims from ambush or tampered with their guns before he picked a fight; and he was not even fast on the draw. Jesse James, no matter what the legend says, never gave a buffalo nickel to the poor. Wes Hardin, the tiny Texan who was probably the most dangerous gunman in the West, was as mean as a mountain boomer; he had killed twelve men before he started to shave, and by the time he was mercifully shot in the back, at 42, he had slaughtered more than 40. The lawmen were not much better. Most of them were coldblooded, cat-eyed killers who spent so much time in the gambling halls and brothels that the cowboys called them “The Fighting Pimps.”

In real life, TV’s Wyatt Earp was a hardheaded businessman, less interested in law and order than he was in the fast buck. He reorganized the red-light district while he was in Dodge City, charged a fat fee for protection, and collected besides a sizable percentage of every fine he levied. He rarely fired a shot, made his reputation pistol-whipping drunken waddies.

As for “Bat” Masterson, he resembled the television character in only one respect: he used to bat disorderly types over the head with a heavy cane he sometimes carried. Otherwise, he was a cautious fellow who hid behind a piano in a bawdy-house when a gunman was on the prowl, later bought a gun in a New York pawnshop, filed 22 notches in the handle and, as a reporter for the New York Telegraph, set about making his own myth.

The Novels. The trouble with most of the famous gunskinners was that they started to believe their own publicity. The legend of the West was growing almost as fast as the reality. The dime novels, with a bow to James Fenimore Cooper, had begun to give a first, rough literary form to the western story. By 1890 the “flesh-times in Kansas” were a thing of the past. Wild Bill Hickok had been tamed by Writer-Promoter Ned Buntline, and was playing in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show (“Fear not, fair maid, you are safe at last with Wild Bill, who is ever ready to risk his life, and die if need be, in defense of helpless womanhood”). But the legend of the two-gun terror lingered on, and in 1902, when Owen Wister published The Virginian, the legend “came from the woodshed into the parlor.”

Novelist Wister established the basic form of the modern sagebrush saga: the strong, silent, shy and virtuous hero; the hard-drinking, materialistic villain; the pretty, intelligent schoolteacher-heroine; the cattle politics; the slow drawl, the fast draw; the long, wary walk down Main Street to a blazing finish. And Zane Grey, a cactus-happy New York dentist who wrote 54 western novels that sold more than 25 million copies, started the mass exploitation of the Wister formula that soon turned the western story into a beltline business. Only since World War II have the cliches been rescued by a serious set of younger writers—A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Way West), Tom Lea (The Wonderful Country), Dorothy Johnson (The Hanging Tree).

The Movie. The western story was perhaps never meant to be told in words. Hollywood and the Wild West were made for each other, and it was love at first sight. The first real feature movie ever made, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a western that introduced to the public a man who soon became the first of the great horse-opera heroes: Broncho Billy Anderson, a studio janitor who was drafted as a masked bandit. Hard on Broncho Billy’s tracks came William S. Hart, a Minnesota farm boy who grew up among Indians. He rode a beautiful paint horse named Fritz, and when they stood side by side, it was hard to tell them apart. After Hart came Tom Mix, “the fearless man of the plains,” who looked like a mail-order cowboy but was a genuine rough-string rider.

By this time, the visual language of the basic western had been written. The Good Guy wore a white hat, the Bad Guy wore a black hat. G.G. was clean-shaven, B.G. had 5 o’clock shadow, and an experienced horse fan could predict the depth of the villain’s depravity by checking the length of his sideburns. The villain chased the hero from right to left, but when the hero was winning, he was naturally headed right (with his pistol hand closest to the camera). Anybody shot was assumed dead, unless the audience was notified to the contrary. The stock situations had also been worked out—the stage robbery, the Indian attack, the big stampede, the necktie party, the chair-throwing brawl in the barroom—and in the subtitles, the dialogue had been perfected: “We’ll head ’em off at the pass!”

Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Bob Steele had little to add to the formula, and the singing cowboys, Gene Autry and later, Roy Rogers, added little more than a sour note. Nevertheless, during the ’30s the oats ripened rapidly. Gary Cooper, a sort of Abe Lincoln in Levi’s, and John Wayne, a smoke-wagon Siegfried, represented in different ways a more mature attempt on the part of the western hero to behave like a man. And in such pictures as John Ford’s Stagecoach and William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident, the mythological struggle between Good and Evil was enacted on the personal plane; while in George Stevens’ Shane and in Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the western hero for the first time in movie history had to face what that struggle really means: the necessity of moral choice. For the first time he experienced his free will, his individuality.

The Prima Donnas. TV’s Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, carried the revolution a step further. Gifted, Colorado-born Scriptwriter John Meston took pains to place the psychological realism in a setting of regional realism. When the show hit hard, a hasty passel of horse operators tried to follow his lead, but soon got lost in the chaparral cliches. Almost two years passed before a few of the more carefully written shows (Rawhide, Rifleman) began to get trailwise.

Meanwhile Hollywood, where all the television westerns are filmed, had begun to jump like a bronc with a belly full of bedsprings. Every rent-out ranch within a hundred miles was overrun with milling steers, yipping dudes and grinding cameras. The riding academies were booked solid, and the shooting instructors were taking in more money than the psychoanalysts. Horses were making more than people—up to $100 a day, while the average extra was getting $22.05. And the Hollywood hills were alive with “Method Cowboys” who would display their diplomas from the Actors’ Studio at the drop of a Stetson.

What the critters lacked in talent they made up in hard work. They wiggled through more walking lessons than Brigitte Bardot, and rasped themselves raw-handed to perfect the fast draw. Times without number they blasted holes in their own britches, and one of them, while poking his hat brim with a pistol, accidentally shot his own sideburns off. They became the prima donnas of horse opera, and sometimes it seemed as if they would rather pull hair than triggers. “Oh, Hugh O’Brian doesn’t matter,” Dale Robertson sniffed recently. “He’s just a itty-bitty fella.” And Hugh O’Brian is disgusted with Audie Murphy. When Hugh offered to bet $500 that he could beat anybody in Hollywood to the draw, War Hero Murphy upped the ante to $2,500 and demanded live ammunition for the test. Hugh did not press the matter. “Most of these fellows are gigantic babies,” says a TV director. “They pout, they sulk, they demand attention.”

They certainly have been getting it.

The Big Guns:

James Arness (6 ft. 7 in., 235 lbs., 48-36-36), who plays Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon, is probably the biggest thing ever seen in blue jeans. (One director had to stand him in a hole in order to get his head in the picture.) What horse, short of a Percheron, could carry him for more than a couple of miles? But at his best, Actor Arness manages to behave with a sort of unheroic, splatter-dabs-and-huckydummy homeliness that makes the customers imagine themselves in the West as it really was; and the illusion is further fostered by Heroine Amanda Blake as Kitty, who is “obviously not selling chocolate bars.” Arness can shake hands with grandma (Colt .45) almost as fast as the next man, and he wears his pants so tight he can’t bend over. Minneapolis-born, wounded at Anzio, he rode with the posse in a few John Wayne westerns. Gunsmoke pays him $2,000 a week for 39 weeks, and on top of that, he says, “I can make $100,000 a year in personal appearances, just working weekends.”

Ward Bond (6 ft. 1 in., 225 lbs., 48-41-44), a 55-year-old veteran of more than 150 Hollywood films, is the trail boss of Wagon Train, one of the biggest (60 min.) and costliest ($90,000-$120,000) of TV’s saddle-soap operas. Bond shares the billing with a new guest star every week, and with a capable young actor named Robert Horton, who plays a tough scout. On the show, Actor Bond is fatherly one minute, the next he is roaring like a mule with the colic. An extravert’s extravert, he has a grin like a Texas river, a mile wide and an inch deep, and a laugh that can shatter a klieg light. He also has guts. When a backing horse broke his hip, Bond bellered for his Scotch and milk (the milk is for his ulcer, he explains, the Scotch for him), was on the set next day.

Richard Boone (6 ft. 2 in., 200 lbs., 44-34-38) is perhaps the only television gunslicker who is worth his whisky as an all-round actor (he is currently playing Lincoln in the Broadway production of The Rivalry). The name of his TV character, Paladin, is meant to suggest a knight errant. But the hero of Have Gun, Witt Travel is actually just a hard-boiled egghead, western style, who spouts Shakespeare while the lead flies, smokes 58¢ cigars, advises the public to “try marinating venison in whisky.” He is a private eye in peewees, and though he always brings the villain to account, he usually tempers justice with money. At 41, bulb-nosed, thrice-married Actor Boone, a veteran of TV’s Medic, is well-preserved in a rugged, meaty way (he was light-heavyweight boxing champion at Stanford). Has gun (Colt .44), will travel on horses, but much prefers sports cars.

Chuck Connors (6 ft. 5½ in., 215 lbs., 45-34½-41), the big news on a fast-coming “family western” called The Rifleman, is a smiling Irish plow chaser who carries the biggest weapon seen so far on the small screen: a full-length .44-.40 1892 Winchester carbine, which he twirls like a pistol. Fortunately, the man is so shad-bellied tall that he can spin the barrel under his arm without scraping his armpit. Raised in Brooklyn, Chuck spent six years in minor-league ball, wound up with the Los Angeles Angels in 1952 (batted .321, hit 23 homers). When he walked in to try out for Rifleman, the director suddenly pitched a rifle at him. Chuck fielded it neatly, got the job.

James Garner (6 ft. 3 in., 206 lbs., 44-33-40) is the anti-hero of a counter-Western called Maverick, the “lace-shirted, self-centered, irresponsible” opposite of everything the Good Guy ought to be. He and his brother (Jack Kelly), who takes the lead in the hour-long show every other week, are slow on the draw, cautious, seething with dishonorable intentions toward girls in gingham. They are self-tooting tinhorns who play poker in such a way that it is not a game of chance. “Work,” proclaims Maverick, “is a shaky way to make a living,” and he firmly believes that “there are times when a man must rise above principles.” Maverick Garner, born James Baumgarner in Norman. Okla., fought in Korea, had a bit part in Sayonara. Now 30, Jim looks like a sort of Fred MacMurray with muscles.

Hugh O’Brian (6 ft., 176 lbs., 44-32-36) plays the title role in Wyatt Earp, which is perhaps best described in O’Brian’s own words: “It’s a relaxing show. You can walk away from our program and come back five, ten minutes later, and you haven’t really missed anything.” At 32, dark-haired, fine-boned Actor O’Brian (real name: Hugh Krampe) looks like an Oklahoma Olivier. In his flowered vest, ruffled shirt, string tie and sideburns, and with two 16-in. Buntline Specials strapped to his thighs, he really cuts the mustard with the teen-age cow bunnies. An exmarine, he is easily the most ambitious of television’s men on horseback. He looks pretty silly on a horse (“That boy,” says a Hollywood riding instructor, “can’t ride nothin’ wilder’n a wheelchair”), but Hugh knows how to hold his seat on a board of directors. Among his business interests: a building-equipment firm, a company that rents guns to TV westerns, a hotel, a line of men’s toilet articles. Last year Hugh paid taxes on more than $500,000 personal income.

Dale Robertson (6 ft., 180 lbs., 42-34-34), the hero of a plain, everyday, bowlegged western called Wells Fargo, is probably the richest ranahan now riding the airwaves. He owns almost 50% of his show, makes about a million a year out of TV alone, not to mention oil wells, motels, ranches and the use of his name on merchandise. As an actor, Robertson can hardly say heck with his hands tied, but he is probably the best horseman in television, and his shy. Sunday-go-to-meetin’ smile provokes what an agent describes as “the sexiest mail in Hollywood.” Gimmick: he draws his .38 with his left hand (“That’s so’s they can’t git the drop on me while Ah’m shakin’ hands”). Born in Harrah, Okla., Dayle LyMoine Robertson earned a Silver Star during World War II. At 37 he spends much of his spare time drinking milk (three quarts a day), racing quarter horses and taking potshots at his TV opposition. Says Robertson: “The adult westerns are dishonest. All that conversation is just a cheap, underhanded way of makin’ up fer the lack of a good story.”

Clint Walker (6 ft. 6 in.. 235 lbs., 48-32-36), who after a spectacular case of bunkhouse sulks will shortly resume the big hat in Cheyenne, a routine ride-’em-cowboy story, is generally known in Hollywood as “the next John Wayne.” At 31 he looks rather like an unweathered Wayne, with a nice, uneventful face and a chest as big as a wardrobe—on producer’s orders, he bares it at least once a program. But unfortunately, Clint, according to the people he works with, is “a mighty mixed-up kid.” He is a nature-food crank, demands The Star Treatment at all times. Born in Hartford, Ill.. Norman Eugene Walker quit high school to join the merchant marine, steeplejacked, punched cows in Texas, got married at 21. Van Johnson discovered him working as a deputy sheriff in Las Vegas.

Taproot in Tradition. To provide stories for these heroes and for their dozens of less famous fellows. Hollywood keeps 100 or so writers busy. (One of them, Frank Gruber. once wrote four scripts in four days.) A great many of the shows have shoddy plots, ludicrous situations. They are “shot from the hip,” as one director puts it, in three days or less, “take what you get.” Studio filmed for the most part, they are ironically known in the trade as “four-wall westerns—as big as all indoors.” It hardly seems the sort of climate in which creativity could flourish and the legend grow.

And yet, despite all its vulgar errors and commercial excrescences, the western story has given television something that it seriously lacked: a taproot in the American tradition, a meaning beyond the moment. And television has given the western story, the youngest and most prodigiously alive and kicking of the world’s mythologies, a fresh chance to express itself, and to change with the times.

Myth into Man. Change it does. Now as always, the legend is primarily concerned with Good and Evil and with man’s relation to the powers of light and night. But in recent years a difference can be discerned. In earlier times (Buffalo Bill, William S. Hart), the hero was completely identified with Good, the villain with Evil. In the upshot, Good destroyed Evil. But the victory often proved an illusion. Usually, the prize for which the hero fought was a woman; but in the end he often did not claim her at all, or if he did, what he got was a sexless ninny. Yet in many of the recent westerns, the woman is far less passive. She is continually attempting to bring the hero down to earth, to make him face reality. She is behaving like a real woman, “and the hero, as a result, begins to lose his superhuman disinterestedness and sexlessness, begins to behave like a real man.

At the same time, something of a more deeply problematic nature is happening to the western legend. Good and Evil, it seems, are beginning to understand each other, to be reconciled to each other’s existence. Often in the modern western a sudden sympathy flashes between hero and villain, as though somehow they feel themselves to be secret sharers in a larger identity. Often the hero cannot bring himself to kill the villain until fate forces his hand, and then he performs the act almost like a religious sacrifice (Shane).

And now and then there is a western story—more often seen in print, but sometimes on film as well—in which there is neither a hero nor a villain in the traditional sense, but only a man, containing both Good and Evil, taking up the burden of his life and his times. In such stories the myth seems to discover what it may have been seeking all along: a way of rising above itself. The myth is transcended in the individual, the free man. In the freedom of the great plains the story of the West had its beginnings; in the freedom of the heart it seems to seek its end. In its finest expressions, it is an allegory of freedom, a memory and a vision of the deepest meaning of America.

* Latest Nielsen ratings: Gunsmoke (40.1), Wagon Train (38.3), Have Gun, Will Travel (35.7), The Rifleman (34.0), Maverick (32.9), Wyatt Earp (31.8), Zane Grey Theater (31.1), Wanted, Dead or Alive (30.6). Only nonwesterns in the top ten: Lucy-Desi (34.9), Danny Thomas (34.5)

* A stingy gun is a concealed derringer. The border shift is a quick method of transferring a gun from one hand to the other. The road agent’s spin was used when a man was forced to surrender his gun. As he handed it to his enemy, butt first, he slipped his forefinger through the trigger-guard, at the last minute spun the butt back into his palm and started chucking lead.