Have Gun―Will Travel (TV Milestones) 081433976X, 9780814339763

Citation preview

Have Gun—Will Travel

TV Milestones Series Editors Barry Keith Grant Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

Have gun—will travel

gaylyn studlar

tV

mIlestones seRIes

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954836 ISBN 978-0-8143-3976-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-3977-0 (ebook)

Lyrics from “Ballad of Paladin” reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. Song words and music by Johnny Western, Richard Boone, and Sam Rolfe. Copyright 1958 by Irving Music, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved; used by permission.

Contents Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1 1. Making the Dandy Mythic 15 2. Kisses for My Paladin 47 3. Corpses Enough for Shakespeare 71 4. Liberalism, Gradualism, and the Failure of Human Solidarity 97 5. Auteurism, Aesthetics, and the Cinematic Impulse 127 Legacy 151 Notes 161 Works Cited 167 Index 177

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wish to thank a number of people who made this book possible. First, I wish to thank Philip Sewell, television historian extraordinaire, who made the book better, first through his encouragement and then through his incredible generosity in reading chapters, answering questions, and sharing sources. Thanks also to Ina Rae Hark, who served as an insightful manuscript reader, and to the anonymous reader who also offered helpful criticism. The Office of the Dean, College of Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis kindly provided funds for indexing. The staff of the Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library, helped me access the CBS, Inc. film and television collection. Thanks to Brett Smith for technical assistance with illustrations and to my colleague Todd Decker for helping me track down music permissions, granted for the following: “The Ballad of Paladin” Words and Music by Johnny Western, Richard Boone and Sam Rolfe. Copyright © 1958 IRVING MUSIC, INC. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation. I want to acknowledge Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press. Never has an editor made me feel more welcomed

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as a person and an author. Thank you for your graciousness and for everything you have done to make this book a reality. Thanks to Kristina Stonehill at the press for her help in working out the details that brought me on board. Barry Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski were enthusiastic series editors. Press staffers Kristin Harpster, Emily Nowak, and Sarah Murphy ably shepherded the book through the production and marketing process. I want to extend my gratitude to Sue Matheson. I feel honored to count Sue as a friend and Film and History Conference “trail pal.” Thanks for making it fun to think and talk about buckskins, walkdowns, and all things Western. My brother, Professor Donley Studlar, was a terrific sounding board for this project and an excellent ad hoc research assistant. Finally, as always, I must thank my husband, Thomas Haslett, for signing on for the duration—brave man that he is.

Introduction

Who’s going to buy this radical? Sam Rolfe, co-creator, Have Gun—Will Travel (Edson 82)

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ebuting in September 1957 in CBS’s Saturday night lineup immediately preceding Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel quickly acquired a place among the top four most popular series on primetime television (“There’s No Stopping”). Although never surpassing Gunsmoke in drawing viewers, Have Gun—Will Travel maintained a position among the top ten most watched weekly programs on television during its first four years of broadcast (1957–61). The black-and-white half-hour episodic show was a sustained success for six years in a crowded field of Westerns that dominated television in the late 1950s and early 1960s.1 The Western was old, but these Westerns were

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Introduction

associated with something new on the small screen: they were “adult.” CBS chief James Aubrey was credited with the term “adult Western,” and Gunsmoke was regarded as the prototype on television.2 In spite of coming to dominate prime time, the adult

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Drawing his gun. Paladin (Richard Boone), the hero of a different kind of Western.

Introduction

Western was a rather amorphous category. Some suggested that the term referred merely to the intended audience (Martin, “I Call” 80), but most generally defined these Westerns as showing greater psychological motivation and realism (Barrett and Bourgin 53; Scott 44). One writer said that in them, “Good and Evil had turned a Freudian gray” (Weaver 79). The “adult” moniker was believed to signal changes to characters, narrative, and tone that distinguished these programs from the small-screen action-oriented oaters of Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry of the early 1950s, programs squarely aimed at juvenile audiences (Autry 52). The surge in popularity of television Westerns left critics, psychologists, and network executives scratching their heads as Westerns regularly held up to six of the top ten coveted slots of most watched primetime series in the late 1950s (Smith, “Writer Says”). In March 1959, Time devoted its cover story to explaining the phenomenon (“Six-Gun Galahad”). In an era characterized by what one industry wag called “ratings madness,” networks used copycat maneuvers in programming to best the competition, no doubt contributing to thirty primetime Westerns broadcast in the 1959–60 season (“Ratings Madness” 30–31; Boddy, “‘60 Million Viewers’” 139). Not just another program riding to success on a surge of interest in Westerns, Have Gun—Will Travel was a milestone in television history. Writing of the series in the Saturday Evening Post in 1960, Lee Edson claimed that critics were “a bit awed by its impact on United States culture”; its title became part of the everyday lexicon, riffed on by comedians and the general public alike (82). A CBS radio program (1958–60) was spun off from the TV series. Its theme song, “The Ballad of Paladin,” was widely popularized in several recorded versions. Have Gun— Will Travel made its star, former film heavy Richard Boone, into an unlikely sex symbol and one of TV’s most highly paid actors. Regarded as one of the most violent TV Westerns, the series was soon implicated in a pitched cultural debate about television programming. Commercially and culturally important, Have

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Gun—Will Travel was a milestone also for its daring revisionist take on the Western within the confines of a highly circumscribed medium. Even before it became a hit show, Have Gun—Will Travel was recognized as being distinctively different. “‘Have Gun— Will Travel’ Has Aura of Difference” announced Billboard in the title of its review of the first episode (Spielman). Variety’s reviewer put the new series “in the hardboiled category of western” and declared: “It’s different enough from ‘Gunsmoke’ to make their back-to back Saturday night combination a palatable one” (Chan). TV Guide, however, criticized the new horse opera for striving “mightily to be different” and for being “selfconsciously arty” (J.M.). The series continued to cultivate its differences from other Westerns, defying expectations for formula television. Perhaps the series was so different because its creators did not originally intend for it to be a Western. Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow originally conceived of Have Gun—Will Travel as being focused on a contemporary man of mystery and adventure living in New York City. He scours newspapers for situations that require intervention, sends his card to likely clients, and then, for a hefty fee, undertakes a dangerous assignment with exciting and unexpected results. When Meadow and Rolfe pitched their series idea and title to CBS, the network told them that what it wanted to best competition from other networks was a Western, not a globe-trotting adventure-detective series (Smith, “High Stakes”; Smith, “Rise and Fall”). In response, the former big-screen scripters quickly reconfigured their idea but worried that transferring the original premise to the Old West defied the temporal logic and technological limitations of frontier communication and transportation. CBS was unconcerned with such details: Have Gun—Will Travel retained the original premise but with its sophisticated midcentury modern protagonist transformed into a post–Civil War gunslinger for hire.

Introduction

Have Gun—Will Travel’s gunfighter for hire—known only as Paladin—quickly emerged as the element of difference most intriguing to viewers as well as to commentators. Naming him after one of the twelve legendary knights of Charlemagne linked Paladin to medieval and chivalric ideals and allowed the series to signal from the get-go that its hero was more than a mere mercenary with a fast gun. At some point in almost every episode, a four-note musical motif written by legendary Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann accompanies a close-up revealing the protagonist’s business card with the logo of a white chess knight and the words “Have Gun Will Travel—Wire Paladin San Francisco.”3 Paladin regards himself not as a hired assassin or bounty hunter but as a businessman “hired for a job of work.” Ostensibly operating on the basis of a temporary contractual obligation, Paladin inevitably is governed by obligations of a different sort, to principles of gallantry, honor, and justice. Paladin met traditional expectations that the Western hero is a man whose gun violence is motivated by more than money, but he sent the type into new territory. Recognizing something of the transformation that Have Gun—Will Travel was imposing on the Western hero, Rolfe initially asked, “He’s a great character but who’s going to buy this radical?” (qtd. in Edson 82). What made Paladin so “radical”? First, he was not a taciturn man of the frontier or a classless “natural” aristocrat like the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Whether balancing a teacup on his knee as he holds down an overstuffed hotel settee or steadying a jug of whiskey against his shoulder at a gold strike tent city, Paladin was always ready with a quotation from Shakespeare or Voltaire, Montaigne or Milton. Yet in keeping with the series’ refusal to take itself too seriously, Paladin’s erudite emphasis on reasoned discourse often inspired impatience in laconic Westerners. In one episode, a cunning old assassin for hire asks him, “How many men

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have you talked to death?” (“Blind Circle,” episode #169, Dec. 16, 1961, season 5). In a major departure for the Western hero but in keeping with Meadow and Rolfe’s original series idea, the protagonist of Have Gun—Will Travel was not only talkative but was also a cultured man of the city. He operated his business from his home, the Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. Many season 1 episodes began with a scene in which Paladin reads newspapers to find clients all over the West. Soon this was supplemented by showing him in other cosmopolitan pursuits—going to the opera, playing chess, practicing his fencing, or watching and being watched by an endless stream of beautiful young women who glided through the Carlton’s elegant lobby. Defying the norms for masculine self-presentation in the Western (unless you are a villain), Paladin wore expensive hand-tailored suits and elegant ruffled shirts. He drank fine wines and smoked expensive cigars. To finance his lifestyle in the city, Paladin ventures into the hinterlands/wilderness on jobs, traversing the land on horseback.4 His trail clothes are form-fitting black pants and shirt. His black cowboy hat is adorned with concho silver. He always wears a Colt Single Action Army revolver in a black holster adorned with the silver image of a chess knight. His sidearm is supplemented occasionally by a rifle and always by a hidden two-shot derringer, the so-called stingy gun that Westerns usually associate with women or duplicitous gamblers (FosterHarris 100–101). As the central issue of chapter 1, “Making the Dandy Mythic,” I consider how Have Gun—Will Travel reconfigured its protagonist as a dandy, a move that was not without precedent in the Western but was made radical by the series in terms of television and the genre. I argue that the series is a milestone of the medium in foregrounding intersections of gender, sexuality, and the performance of male identity by presenting a hero who suggests the instability in masculinity, its need to be

Introduction

constructed rather than merely assumed. Although other television Westerns of the time such as The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–61), Bat Masterson (1958–61), and Yancy Derringer (1958–59) gave their protagonists flourishes of dandyism, Have Gun—Will Travel defied normative expectations attached to the Western hero by ratcheting up its dandy’s more subversive implications. In 1954, Robert Warshow linked the mythic impact of the Western hero to his gentlemanly ethos in the sense that he never was expected to draw first (37). Certainly, the Westerner’s emphasis on style and his adherence to protocols of honorable conduct provide potential common ground with the dandy. However, the latter’s alignment with the highly civilized habits of polite classed society deconstructs the prevailing norms of manliness as traditionally defined in Westerns. On this point Warshow argues: “In the American mind, refinement, virtue, civilization, Christianity itself, are seen as feminine” (37). More recently, literary scholar Jane Tompkins claims that men in Westerns seek most of all to be free of the feminized arena and its values (39, 46). Yet Paladin immerses himself in myriad forms associated with feminized civilization—high culture, fashion, décor, etiquette. Paladin also knows his Bible!5 Neither Tompkins nor Warshow account for the possibility of a dandyhero like Paladin, a connoisseur of all civilization has to offer. Paladin’s spectacle as gunfighter-dandy signals a rejection of bourgeois conformity. Although cultivating ambiguity around heroic masculinity by aligning Paladin with the city, civilization, and dandyism, the series also worked to recuperate Paladin as a man who has honed the survival skills required of a gun for hire. Whether in a Barbary Coast dive or a frontier saloon, the man in black is a man’s man who can slug it out with the roughest of them. His invincible fast draw and intimidating demeanor bestow upon him the superiority so necessary to constructing the gunfighter as a mythic figure. While Have Gun—Will Travel asserted American exceptionalism through

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the hero’s manly physical skills and intellectual superiority, the series realigned numerous conventions of the genre to question the genesis myth of America as well as the role of the heroic gunfighter in that myth. In chapter 1, I argue that Have Gun—Will Travel revivified the figure of the dandy through a powerful cultural referent— the playboy life promulgated by Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. In October 1957, Richard Boone described Paladin as a man who “lives like a king with the need to make the most of every moment” (“A Hired Gun” 14). By focusing on a pleasureloving bachelor who has no interest in building community or wealth, Have Gun—Will Travel was a milestone of television in representing a notion of the good life remarkably convergent with the Playboy philosophy. Through dandy superiority and connoisseurship, including in the sexual realm, Paladin offered audiences a powerful fantasy for soothing postwar fears about the dissolution of masculine power linked to conformity, corporatism, and female-dominated domesticity. In this respect, Have Gun—Will Travel was a milestone of television in offering a complex figuration of a protagonist through which we can read the era’s response to stresses and strains on postwar masculinity. Chapter 2, “Kisses for My Paladin,” extends the discussion of dandy masculinity in chapter 1 to address how Have Gun— Will Travel represented sexual politics. The series appeared in a transitional period in U.S. society when attitudes regarding women’s sexuality and heterosexual relations were changing, influenced by the social upheaval of World War II, the publication of the Kinsey reports, and the emergence of culturally permissive tracts such as Playboy. Have Gun—Will Travel defied norms of television by working through sophisticated visual codes and verbal innuendo to suggest sexual intimacy outside of marriage.6 While the series took a more liberal view of female sexuality, it also worked to confirm masculine dominance. Thus, Have Gun—Will Travel might be seen as sustaining an

Introduction

anxious discourse about women reflected on a wider scale in postwar U.S. culture, but the sexual politics of the show deserve to be explored rather than automatically dismissed. In spite of its often stereotyped representations of females, some episodes sensitively treat the problems of women in the Old West, including (but not limited to) their oppressive sexual exchange, whether through the familiar generic trope of Indian captivity or in stories of mail order brides and saloon girls/prostitutes. Chapter 2 also takes up the question of why the series was so popular with women. Chapter 3, “Corpses Enough for Shakespeare,” explores Have Gun—Will Travel as a milestone of television in challenging the optimistic conservatism and middlebrow conformity of late 1950s’ television. I argue that the series offers an unusually pessimistic view of a frontier steeped in violence. Extending beyond a simple cowboys-versus-Indians model of conflict, the series’ dark portrait of society cast doubt on the Western as a primary narrative venue for promulgating an uncomplicated myth of pioneer fortitude and heroic national origins. Instead, the series emphasized civic complacency, corporate greed, and dysfunctional families. Privileging the harsh and inhospitable characteristics of the Old West in which the hero operates, Have Gun—Will Travel challenged the community or family-centered formula that became ubiquitous in television programming, including Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, The Virginian, and Bonanza. Not only is the utopian promise of the social milieu often questioned, but so too is the value of Paladin’s violence, thus bringing an unusual revisionist tenor to a television series of this era. Although it is true, as Ina Rae Hark claims, that “television westerns prior to Deadwood . . . never went through a clear-cut revisionist period” (7), this does not mean that individual series were not capable of furthering revisionist tendencies. It could be argued that other adult Westerns on television such as Gunsmoke had dystopian elements, but Have

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Gun—Will Travel was among the few series that consistently emphasized revisionism as Hark defines it: “the de-romanticizing of the West by showing the anti-heroism, bloodthirstiness, vulgarity and greed” (7). Andrew O’Hehir recognizes this when he says that “the purported optimism of the Western genre [was] not borne out by the most interesting shows, like the relentlessly stark Have Gun Will Travel or The Rifleman.” In its particularly pointed acknowledgment of the oppressive force field of class and capital, conformity and community, Have Gun—Will Travel can be seen as anticipating television’s most uncompromising revisionist articulation of the Western, HBO’s Deadwood (2004–6). Have Gun—Will Travel was remarkably unsentimental, but like most long-running series, it had its share of gimmick episodes: Paladin rides a camel to win a wager, Paladin rescues Oscar Wilde from kidnappers, Paladin helps a French restaurateur transport a plate glass window. The series displayed a wry sense of humor, but its tough-minded scripts revised the genre’s traditional mythologizing intentions. Many episodes were the work of writers who had been or would later become associated with challenging, disturbing, and often violent films. They included series co-creator Rolfe (The Naked Spur), Sam Peckinpah (director, The Wild Bunch), frequent scripter Harry Julian Fink (screenwriter of Peckinpah’s Major Dundee and co-creator of the iconic vigilante cop “Dirty Harry” Callahan), Robert E. Thompson (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), and Frank R. Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon). Although Have Gun—Will Travel may continually affirm Paladin’s expressed desire to uphold civilized, rational law, his principles and the blunt instrumentality of his violence are frequently called into question by other characters. Because violence on Have Gun—Will Travel was not only frequent but also often fatal, the series became a magnet for criticism in an intensifying cultural debate about the impact of television on viewers.

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A series with a sense of humor: Paladin rides a camel to win an impossible bet in “The Great Mojave Chase” (season 1).

The issue of violence is also taken up in chapter 4, “Liberalism, Gradualism, and the Failure of Human Solidarity.” This chapter investigates the ways in which Have Gun—Will Travel functions as cultural commentary representing the Old West as a site of multicultural interaction reflecting on historical issues

Introduction

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but also on midcentury American attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and religion. In tracing the series’ sociopolitical sensibilities, I explore the construction of the only other continuing character on the series besides Paladin: Kim Chan, the hotel porter known as “Hey Boy.” Played by Kam Tong, the character was replaced for most of season 4 with his much younger sister, played by Lisa Lu. Although they were negatively stereotyped in a number of ways, Chinese immigrants were highlighted in many episodes, most strikingly in “Hey Boy’s Revenge” (episode #31, Apr. 12, 1958, season 1), which exposes American racism in the mistreatment of Chinese railroad laborers. A number of episodes revolved around Paladin’s interaction with new immigrants at the margins of society, including Russian Jews, Romanies (Gypsies), Mennonites, and exiles from many nations and regions. Sometimes written by frequent Have Gun—Will Travel scripters such as Gene Roddenberry and Shimon Wincelberg, these episodes had their own offbeat charm that did not go unappreciated by critics.7 Chapter 4 is centrally interested in the question of whether the hero’s liberalism challenges or merely perpetuates the overdetermined value of whiteness and WASP values. Have Gun— Will Travel rewrote the history of Native American–Anglo relations on the frontier, and this chapter also takes up the question of how the series represented Native Americans in a contradictory fashion, trending toward a liberal white discourse that favored depictions of them as the “Noble Anachronism” yet often stereotyping them as savage (Michael Mardsen and Jack Nachbar qtd. in Prats 163). The series also worked to address Civil Rights–era issues through a strategy of displacement of contemporary racial justice issues onto the Old West and in practical terms through its inclusion of African American actors, including the groundbreaking casting of Ivan Dixon in “Long Way Home” in the role of a former slave turned outlaw (episode #138, Feb. 4, 1961, season 4).

Introduction

Because Have Gun—Will Travel was both so very popular and so very different, or radical, it offers the opportunity to examine and question assumptions about what television Westerns could be at the height of their popularity, what form they took, and what pleasures and challenges they offered audiences. This requires a multifaceted approach that considers cultural context and ideology but moves beyond these aspects into issues of aesthetics as well as authorship and production history. Chapter 5, “Auteurism, Aesthetics, and the Cinematic Impulse,” considers Have Gun—Will Travel in relation to the question of television’s assumed tendency to reduce complexity as compared to film not only on the levels of character, narrative, and theme but also in terms of aesthetics. Through such analysis, I argue that Have Gun—Will Travel challenged the stereotyped assumption that television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s could not rise above being less interesting and aesthetically inferior versions of film Westerns of the period. Thus, chapter 5 raises questions about the intermediary relations between film and television. The production history of Have Gun—Will Travel raises important issues specific to television. The series was a milestone in anticipating the future of television because its star assumed control in the creative realm of production without acting as a producer. Unlike most other television Westerns of the period, Have Gun—Will Travel was shot on location in a number of western states, cultivating a visual style that, although not uniform over six seasons, defied most of the current clichés about television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The series also evidenced tendencies, whether labeled as hardboiled, noir, or revisionist, that incorporated cinematic impulses. I will show how many episodes, especially those directed by Boone, including “Squatter’s Rights” (episode #171, Dec. 30, 1961, season 5) and “The Mountebank” (episode #132, Dec. 24, 1960, season 4), reflected a recognizable sensibility and stylistic choices linked to film noir.

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In the concluding chapter, “Legacy,” I consider the longterm impact of Have Gun—Will Travel, particularly its reputation and influence as a milestone of television that demands our attention as one of the most morally ambiguous, tonally complex, and sexually sophisticated adult television Westerns of the era. Television remains an ephemeral medium, and highly popular and aesthetically challenging programs from the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Have Gun—Will Travel remain at the margins of media scholarship, in spite of improved contemporary access to classic TV through DVDs, YouTube, and subscription services such as Hulu, Netflix, and Apple TV. Just as Have Gun—Will Travel challenges received wisdom about the appeal and potentialities of a major television genre, it also reminds us that the history of television must be reclaimed one series at a time.

Chapter 1

Making the Dandy Mythic

The only way to atone for being occasionally a little overdressed is by being always absolutely overeducated. Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (434)

I

n a highly stylized rather than realistic fashion, the introductory credit/title sequence of Have Gun—Will Travel leaves no doubt that this will be a program about a lone gunfighter of the Old West, a hero in keeping with U.S. popular culture trends of the 1950s (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation 384). This sequence places stark emphasis on the central iconography of the genre that Robert Warshow calls attention to in his famous essay of 1954, “The Westerner”: “the values we seek in the Western . . . are in the image of a single man who wears a gun on his thigh”

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(47). As if responding directly to Warshow, the credits offer the equivalent of his description. Expanding upon its original oneshot introduction, starting in season 2 of Have Gun—Will Travel a male figure in a cowboy hat appears in silhouetted profile in a full shot. The man—series star Richard Boone—starts to turn and draw his gun as the camera quickly tracks forward into a medium shot in which the lighting changes so that the audience can now see the hands of this mysterious figure clothed in black. With the man’s face out of the frame, this medium shot reveals the figure from thigh to lower chest, as his Colt revolver, pointed toward the viewer, is held motionless (also the key image in the first year’s one-shot introduction, which starts with a tracking movement in and then ends with one out/ backward). In a majority of episodes until season 6, Boone (the man with the gun) speaks in voice-over in direct address to a character or characters who will be part of the narrative that follows. Then he precisely snaps his revolver back into its black holster. That movement becomes the impetus for a shot change to an insert, a jump cut to a frozen close-up of the holster highlighting its adornment, a silver chess knight. The title credits finish as the series’ main musical theme, an ominous four-note motif by Bernard Herrmann, washes over the soundtrack in a brassdriven orchestration.1 The protagonist of Have Gun—Will Travel, the man known only as Paladin, has just been introduced. This is as efficient an introduction of the gunfighter’s body and weapon as we may ever hope to see in a Western—on any size screen. The voiceover of the opening credits anchors the visuals to add individuality to what is still a faceless hero. Although the sequence is brief, Paladin’s persona is nevertheless figured by his monologue as articulate, commanding, sardonic, and supremely confident. Throughout the series, Paladin is framed in visually striking shots in which he steps from offscreen space to dominate

Making the Dandy Mythic

17 The man with “a gun on his thigh.” Opening credits.

the foreground. These shots are synedochic, focusing on the holstered gun strapped to the hero’s body. Usually accompanied by the opening musical motif, they extend the introductory credit sequence’s iconic presentation of the menacing prowess of a gunfighter, whose identity is affiliated with guns, violence, and (we assume) death.2 The mythically embodied, mysterious black-garbed lone gunfighter in the credits of Have Gun—Will Travel is complicated in numerous episodes by a move to a rather unexpected setting for a Western—the city.3 The first scene of the narrative often takes the audience to a San Francisco street scene circa 1870s. The pilot, “Three Bells to Perdido” (episode #1, Sept. 14, 1957, season 1), starts with a bustling night view of the city’s notorious Barbary Coast district, then takes us to the street outside the imposing Hotel Carlton, the permanent residence of Paladin. The series soon settles into a signature

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high-angle extreme long shot, sometimes by day, sometimes at night, of an exterior view of the hotel, most often with the bay in the background and the hotel on the left but sometimes in a reverse shot, with hills on view in the distance and the hotel on the right. Then a dissolve takes the viewer into the interior of the elegant hotel. Unlike the traditional Western hero, Paladin is a city man— of a particular type. He is a connoisseur and a clotheshorse, a lover of women and of leisure. In other words, Paladin is a dandy. Variety noted exactly this in its review of the series pilot (Chan), and TV Guide soon echoed that assessment when it described Paladin as “the San Francisco dandy with no first name and a double life, half of which he puts in as a playboy of the gaslight era and half as a single-minded adventurer whose gun is for hire” (“A Hired Hand” 12). Many other venues of commentary and publicity would reiterate this basic observation. Paladin as a dandy also becomes a key reference point in the show as other characters categorize and attempt to understand what makes the mysterious hero tick. As I will demonstrate, this makes for a different sort of difference in the television Western at its peak of popularity. Have Gun—Will Travel cleverly renegotiates the dandy, drawing on its historically rich definition of masculinity in what will be a highly successful strategy for demarcating this television series in a market saturated with Westerns. The performative and rebellious dandy proved to be compatible with another type of masculinity gaining interest and notoriety in postwar U.S. society—the playboy. By combining these related models of masculinity, Have Gun—Will Travel broke with the traditional Western hero. This change was in harmony with cultural fantasy and consumerism, inarguably the main thrust of television in the 1950s and early 1960s as a broadcast medium based on selling things—the greatest advertising medium in the world, as television executives bragged (Martin, “Master Planners” 35–36).

As a dandy, Paladin is linked to a long line of men who were stereotyped as obsessed with clothes and gambling, finely bred horses and not so finely bred women. Often traced to Regencyera England and the rise of George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840), the dandy is a man preoccupied with style and self-presentation. Brummell was credited with revolutionizing male fashion, but he was more than a clotheshorse. He exemplified a masculinity associated with elegance, urbanity, and impertinence. Dandyism had political and social as well as stylistic implications for masculinity. As revolutionary fervor took hold in the Old and New Worlds, dandyism came to be associated with late eighteenth-century changes in social stratification (Moers 12). The dandy’s claim to social status or power could be based on style and intellect rather than on land and lineage. Not an aristocrat but well educated and a friend to royalty, Brummell set the standard for the dandy’s attitude, as important as any affectations in dress. That attitude blended nonchalance and impertinence with aloof, disdainful superiority. The purpose of the dandy performance has been debated, but as Deborah Houk suggests, “The dandy intentionally designed not only his dress but also his whole manner of being around the notion of difference in order that he might stand out and be noticed” (59). The dandy was expected to be charming, well mannered, and elegantly pleasing to the eye. However, dandies often expressed disdain for bourgeois clichés through scornful utterances or ironic behaviors. This made the dandy potentially dangerous and disruptive because he took as his object of scorn anything (or anyone) associated with vulgarity—whether originating in the higher or lower classes (Moers 122). The dandy’s alignment with urbanity meant that he regularly showed special contempt for the provincial or rustic. Gene Roddenberry, who wrote a number of episodes of Have

Making the Dandy Mythic

From Brummell to Paladin

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Gun—Will Travel throughout its run, described Paladin in terms that apply equally well to the dandies who preceded him: he had a “detached and superior, sometimes almost condescending, perspective from which he viewed the fallible world about him” (qtd. in Cantor, Invisible Hand 82). Scorn is Paladin’s stock-in-trade, indicative of his perceived superiority to his surroundings. Men and women of the hinterlands become a particular target. He continually addresses as “ladies” and “gentlemen” those on the frontier whose behavior is impolite, crude, lawless, or just plain stupid. Paladin’s voice-over featured in the opening credits of “Winchester Quarantine” is characteristic of this contempt: “There’s an irritating roughness about the way you people speak—makes me obstinate. If you want me to leave, you’re going to have to make me” (episode #4, Oct. 5, 1957, season 1). Dandy aggression was commonly associated with the verbal realm, but some dandies were renown for swordplay or pistol dueling. If he became a military man, a dandy might turn his flair for theatrical self-presentation into feats of valor and even sacrifice (Moers 256). Nevertheless, the dandy frequently aroused suspicion that he was not manly enough, an affront to masculine norms structured by assumptions of naturalness. Because of their performativity and refinement, dandies challenged the complementarity status of men and women, provoking anxieties about sexual difference (Lane 50). As a result, the dandy encountered wide-scale resistance famously articulated by Thomas Carlyle, who defined the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (qtd. in Moers 181). Carlyle attacked the dandy’s pretentiousness, superficiality, and effeminacy as an affront to any morally serious society (Adams, Dandies 21–23; Nixon 363). The dandy provoked public disdain for emulating the shopping and spending of women, but his more “masculine” vices of gambling and whoring also drew criticism. The display

Making the Dandy Mythic

of these vices could make the dandy a public spectacle—not of distinctive difference, but as a man who had abandoned himself to temptation. Paladin is accused of a similar failure in “The Vigil” (episode #156, Sept. 16, 1961, season 5). The action begins with a medium close shot of Paladin standing in a public room in the Carlton. He is laughing boisterously and wiping his eyes. He grabs and kisses a black-gloved, bare-shouldered brunette. From off screen, a man’s voice urges him, ”Come on, come on, your kings are high.” Paladin is in the midst of a highstakes poker game. The camera follows his hand as he throws chips onto the table laden with playing cards, champagne glasses, and cigars. Paladin returns to kissing the woman. Hey Boy justifies Paladin’s behavior to a potential client, Miss Liggett (Mary Fickett). He says that what she is seeing is the gunfighter’s preferred method of unwinding after “two months of perilous jeopardy without closing an eye—uh, very tired now, so tired he can’t even sleep.” But Miss Liggett remarks sharply, “He’s not too tired to debauch himself.” After continuing to press Hey Boy that she must talk to Paladin, Miss Liggett counts out coins for the porter to take to the gunfighter, remarking that “It takes money to live the way that one does.” In San Francisco, Paladin is linked to stereotypical dandy vices but also to feminized culture through his careful attention to fashionable self-presentation. As suggested by this scene in “The Vigil,” he is immediately given away as a dandy by his clothes: finely tailored Prince Albert coats, ruffled shirts, and satin bow ties and vests topped by a Mueller half-cut (top hat) when he goes out. Boone was quoted as admitting that Paladin’s clothes “might not be regarded as wholly masculine by modern standards” (Leavy). He claimed that “effeminate” though they might seem, “When I put on this outfit, I feel sensational” (Thomas). Introductory scenes often show Paladin in evening clothes—full tuxedo, white tie, ruffled shirt, satin-lined cape— accessorized with a silk top hat and an ornate cane. He is often shown in this attire as he enters the lobby of the Hotel Carlton

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A dandy dressed for the opera. Richard Boone as Paladin, in costume, ca. 1958.

before or after an evening at the opera, as in “Full Circle” (episode #112, May 14, 1960, season 3). Among his other artistic interests, Paladin is a connoisseur of opera, ridiculing an aspiring diva in “The Singer” for planning to audition with “a piece of sticky, sentimental drivel” from Vincenzo Bellini’s La Somnambula (episode #22, Feb. 8, 1958, season 1). Opera aligns Paladin with refined European musical

Making the Dandy Mythic

tastes but also with dandy snobbery: English dandies regarded opera as preferable to the theater, which they thought far too accessible to many types of people (Moers 273). Paladin always refers to his box at the opera, indicative of a desire for greater exclusivity (and privacy) in a public setting. He has his own highbrow musical aspirations. In one episode opening he is shown at his piano, busy composing “the first Paladin concerto” (“The Hunt,” episode #176, Feb. 3, 1962, season 5). Paladin shows in his quest for distinction that the dandy’s performance moves beyond dress and decorum into the realm of cultural and intellectual superiority. This produces unusual verbosity in a Western hero. Because of his love of language as well as of artistic and intellectual discovery, Paladin is a hero of a radically different sort for the Western. Echoing many others who have written on the genre, Jane Tompkins says that the Western hero’s “frugal way with language” bespeaks “the importance of things that cannot be said” (84). That may be true for the erratically schooled nature boys who often populate the genre, but in Have Gun—Will Travel Paladin fails to adhere to Western expectations in his use of language. He is constantly questioning the order of things and calling upon his reservoir of classical knowledge to support his observations. Paladin’s erudition and eloquence in his performance of dandyism elicit a variety of reactions. In one episode Paladin is warned, “You talk better than me but how will you when I smash your mouth in?” (“Homecoming,” episode #74, May 23, 1959, season 2). Many frontier locals find perplexing Paladin’s habit of quoting great authors and philosophers (from both Eastern and Western civilizations). In “A Matter of Ethics” (episode #5, Oct. 12, 1957, season 1), Paladin is shown sitting on the train across from a sheriff and his prisoner. Paladin seeks the sheriff’s commitment to getting the accused man, Bartholomew Holgate (Harold J. Stone), safely to trial. The lawman pledges his help. Paladin’s response to this news is a double dose of Robert Browning: “Tis not what man does that exalts him, but

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what man would do!” and “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A reverse two-shot shows Sheriff Swink (Roy Barcroft) and Holgate looking at each other in silent bemusement. By way of contrast, in “Maggie O’Bannion” (episode #67, Apr. 4, 1959, season 2), Paladin’s recitation of Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet to a beautiful educated lady (Marion Marshall) becomes a most effective part of seduction in the middle of cow country. Paladin’s display of intellectuality rests on more than his ability to quote “fancy writers.” As the series develops, he is given the opportunity to offer impressive displays of logic and eloquence in courtroom settings where he is called upon to defend his actions or those of others, as in “Silver Convoy,” “The Last Judgment,” and “Trial at Tablerock.” However, Paladin encounters many people who are closed to the power of language or argumentation. He almost always is shown losing his legal battles. For example, in “The Trial” (episode #116, June 11, 1960, season 3), directed by Ida Lupino, Paladin reacts with shock when he is convicted of a murder he did not commit; the jury wants only to carry out the will of the richest man in town. Men begin to walk Paladin to the gallows. Desperate, he grabs the barrel of a deputy’s shotgun. When the gun goes off, his accuser (the rich man who initially hired him) is killed accidentally. “You can’t just walk away. You’ve already been sentenced to hang,” says the corrupt judge as Paladin starts to leave. Paladin has the last, sarcastic word: “Perhaps out of all your years of selfless devotion to the law you’ll be able to think of some technicality to cover it.” Who Is Paladin?

Like Beau Brummell, Paladin excels at sarcasm but also at shopping and spending, flirting and conversing. Unlike Brummell, Paladin is a mystery man. His origins are obscure, but his display of education and elitist social graces suggests that he may

Making the Dandy Mythic

have sprung from American aristocracy—or at least money. He speaks many languages, collects Santa Clara (Native American) “ceramics,” and is a trained pianist (accompanying a Mozart aria in “The Singer”); of course, he also has gracious manners and, as we are told over and over, “exquisite taste.” The audience learns in the pilot episode, “Three Bells to Perdido,” that this man with an assumed name grew up in a family that could afford fine things (including bone china); like Brummell, Paladin is a dandy who has enjoyed a superior education. He is a graduate of West Point. However, the appearance of education, just like the appearance of refinement and manners, is no absolute guarantee of aristocratic origin, especially in the United States where the act of making oneself over—especially in the West—has long been regarded as part and parcel of the national character. The audience learns in the first season of Have Gun—Will Travel that Paladin was a Union Army officer in the Civil War and then afterward served with the U.S. Army on the western frontier. We learn that he has fought in duels and traveled all over the globe. “I am not a tourist,” he sniffs. Paladin often reconnects with old friends—usually military or ex-military men who have a shared past with him—but Have Gun—Will Travel waits until season 6 to give any explanation of how or why the man whose original name we never know became Paladin. This explanation occurs in “Genesis” (episode #194, Sept. 15, 1962, season 6), scripted by Sam Rolfe and directed by William Conrad. The audience learns from this episode something of Paladin’s motivation for his unusual approach to working as a gunfighter for hire, although whether this reduces or enhances the protagonist’s complexity may depend on the tastes of the viewer. “Genesis” begins in the present (of the 1870s or 1880s, apparently ten years after the embedded flashback) as Paladin fights off a young intruder (James Mitchum) who attacks him in his hotel room. Subduing the well-dressed assailant, Paladin

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learns that the man has been sent to kill him in lieu of paying a gambling debt, paralleling an incident in Paladin’s own life. Revealed in flashback, we see how, seeking to avoid jail or cause embarrassment to his family, the unnamed man who will become Paladin agrees to kill someone he does not know to settle thousands of dollars in gambling debts owed to the intimidating Norge (William Conrad). Norge tells the unnamed man that Smoke (also Richard Boone), the man he is to kill, is evil; in the countryside, Smoke cleverly entraps Paladin-to-be but also instructs him in gunfighting. He calls the younger man a “paladin.” After Paladin kills Smoke, he learns that the ailing white-haired gunfighter actually protected the valley from Norge. Paladin is moved to tears when he sees the townspeople eulogize the dead man. When Norge arrives, Paladin stands on the hilltop as Smoke did; in an act of atonement or redemption he has assumed the black clothes and protective mission of the man he wrongly killed. Paladin’s assumption of a mission is a major departure from the dandy ethos, associated almost exclusively with pleasure rather than duty. Thus, the character’s performance of identity is linked not only to the dandy’s hedonism (wine, women, and song) but also to chivalry. Paladin’s assumed moniker suggests the chivalry of the twelve knights of Charlemagne, echoing the twelve apostles. Maurice Keen says that chivalry is “a word elusive of definition, tonal rather than precise in its implications” (2), but it has been associated traditionally with a code of honor attributed to medieval knights; chivalry is regarded as a set of qualities assumed by highborn men who swore their armed allegiance to a king or higher aristocrat. Chivalry was the imperative to “uphold justice, protect the weak, and defend the Church,” says Keen, but it has sometimes also been dismissed as a “polite veneer” to “relieve the bloodiness of life” (3).

Making the Dandy Mythic

Paladin’s service to civilization occurs in a wide range of activities, from settling disputes to finding lost loved ones, apprehending miscreants or protecting the accused from “Judge Lynch.” Not all of these activities are necessarily chivalrous, but his attitude often reflects chivalry, an element of behavior regarded as being at home in a Western. Chivalry has often been attributed to men of the Old West in historical accounts as well as fictional ones. In his history of notorious gunfighters and outlaws, George Hendricks claims that “the Western man, bad or otherwise, was very chivalrous to women—any kind of woman—or if he wasn’t, he immediately and dearly paid for his discourtesy—either with his blood or his life” (191). What is left unspoken in Hendricks’s account of how politeness and protecting women figured as part of the Code of the West is that the chivalry of Anglo-Saxon western frontiersmen was oriented almost exclusively toward white women (Courtwright 64–65). Eschewing the medieval alignment of chivalry with Christianity or religiosity, Paladin’s activities otherwise move beyond the Western’s amorphously defined model of chivalry to realign masculine heroic virtue with the older tradition. Updating this tradition, Paladin performs the duties of a noble warrior class that seeks to find both relief from and a higher meaning in “the bloodiness of life.” A self-possessed bachelor knight of the Old West, he uses a business card illustrated not with the chevalier or knight but instead with a game piece, the chess knight. The knight piece is his signature motif that appears on his holster, rifle stock, and watch fob. The chess knight suggests a selfconscious, style-driven assertion of the higher meaning of the bloody “game” he is called upon to play on the frontier. It is no wonder that the series highlights Paladin as an expert at chess; he compares himself to the knight piece that moves unexpectedly. Thus, rather than being associated directly with the fealtydriven goals of medieval knighthood, he is associated with a competition dependent on both rules and intellectual skills.

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Instead of swearing fealty to a king, Paladin has sworn allegiance to another ennobling cause—secular law, the processes in a democracy that are aimed at preventing miscarriages of justice through respect for the rights of the accused. In doing so, he rewrites again and again his mistake in assuming Smoke’s guilt and killing him. Paladin’s devotion to the principles of secular law results in confrontations with as well as dependence upon extralegal violence in contradictory ways that reflect a peculiarly American view of justice, as I discuss at length in chapter 3. Go West, Young Dandy

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Dandies were not unprecedented in Westerns, though their stereotyping in the genre often meant that they were not as richly connotative to masculinity as in the broader cultural history of the dandy. In Westerns, the term “dandy” is often applied to well-dressed, well-spoken men associated with the East. In fact, movie Westerns predating Have Gun—Will Travel typically associated dandyism with insufficient or incompetent masculinity, exemplified by the tenderfoot, the newcomer whose refined dress and polite deportment bespeak his ignorance of a frontier life that calls for sturdy clothing and candid speech. In Westerns, the term “dandy” was often used interchangeably with the term “dude,” which Richard Hill claims was likely created from “a melding of duds and attitude (indicating a preoccupation with clothes)”; the term also signaled that the “sharp dresser” was an outsider in the West (321). Martin Pumphrey argues that the Western is extremely uncomfortable with the dandy, who becomes a source “of confusion and anxiety” in the genre (55). This is because, he claims, to have the Western hero concerned “with appearance and self-adornment” is to align him dangerously with feminized civilization and thus with narcissism and weakness (54–55). In contrast to the dandy, “the forms of masculinity the Western

Making the Dandy Mythic

registers as most authentic are characterized by a disregard for self-exhibition” (55–56). If this is the Western’s standard of authentic masculinity, Paladin is a most disruptive figure. Other characters frequently use the terms “dude” and “dandy” to refer to him. Because of his appearance, Paladin is typically accused of being too good for plain realities of frontier life (a snob); like other dudes or dandies, he is subject to being called out on the assumption that he is not tough enough to defend himself against the lower social classes of armed men in the West. These tough men, of uncertain backgrounds, could exert a great deal of rowdy influence over the Old West’s homosocial environments. This is illustrated in the episode “Saturday Night” (episode #122, Oct. 8, 1960, season 4) when Paladin rides into a small town at night. Arriving in a drenching rain, he walks into a crowded saloon where fights are breaking out. Adroitly avoiding the fracas, he tries to drink quietly at the bar, but a drunk takes immediate offense at him, calling him “Mr. Dude” and accusing him of refusing the local whiskey because he is “too good.” Paladin is wearing his black trail clothes, but these “big-boy clothes” (as one man calls them in “Ella West”) also mark Paladin as different, an outsider or dude who must be tested—or expelled. The terms “dude” and “dandy” also are typically applied to the familiar figure of the gambler, a type of masculinity in the Western presented frequently as competent but inauthentic. Typically, the gambler’s fancy clothes mark him as a professional cardsharp who cynically exploits people’s weaknesses through his disreputable profession. Although Bret Harte’s 1869 short story “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” was sympathetic to the gambler as a man of compassion (and honor), in movie Westerns the gambler’s capacity for civic virtue typically is stunted because his primary concern is the acquisition of money. His dishonest lifestyle necessitates his moving from town to town. Representing this vein of the dandy as gambler is Mr. Hatfield (John Carradine) in Stagecoach (1939), directed by John

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Ford. Hatfield’s sartorial elegance (complete with cape, cane, and beautiful large-brimmed hat) fascinates Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt), an army officer’s wife; she sees Hatfield and asks, “Who is that gentleman?” Her military acquaintance replies, “Hardly a gentleman, Mrs. Mallory.” His wife adds: “I should think not. He’s a notorious gambler.” Hatfield lives under an assumed name, just as Paladin does. And Hatfield is denounced as a pretender to the qualities of the true gentleman (as Paladin is occasionally). In spite of drawing social rebuke, he is shown to be chivalrous, going on a dangerous stagecoach journey solely to protect Mrs. Mallory. Hatfield was in the Confederate regiment of her father during the Civil War, but now he is in exile from his aristocratic southern origins. Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) accuses Hatfield of being a back shooter, a cowardly type. That is not proven, but at the very least he is a well-mannered snob. In the film’s famous stage-stop dinner scene, Hatfield quietly moves Mrs. Mallory away from the offending presence of the prostitute, Dallas (Claire Trevor), because, he says, it is “cooler by the window.” Such values place him outside the democratic ideal of community building represented by the film’s “natural” gentleman, the Ringo Kid (John Wayne). Hatfield prefigures the construction of dandy masculinity in Have Gun—Will Travel, especially in the character’s gentle manner and his chivalrous attitude toward women, also displayed when he covers the body of a dead woman, the victim of the Apache. Perhaps even closer to Paladin is the fusion of the dandygambler with the gunfighter in the character of Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) in John Ford’s dark post–World War II Western My Darling Clementine (1946). When a newly arrived Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) asks who controls the gambling in Tombstone, the answer is Doc Holliday. Holliday’s gambling skills are not shown, but we do see that he is handsome, charismatic, and a dangerous man with a gun. There are hints that he may be Harvard educated. However, he is dissipated in every sense. The former physician from Boston has a horrible cough, signaling

Making the Dandy Mythic

that he may have moved to the West to remedy consumption (tuberculosis), considered a disease of city dwellers. Like Paladin, Holliday recites Shakespeare from memory and enjoys champagne. Also like Paladin, Holliday is refined in his grammar and in his tastes.4 Holliday anticipates Paladin’s wearing of all black trail clothes and shares his penchant for more dandyesque wear in town. Scott Simmon records that the original shooting script of My Darling Clementine called for Holliday to be wearing evening clothes and a cape when he attempts to help a faltering thespian finish Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy (225). Cut short by his coughing, Holliday’s recitation is of a play that will be quoted more than once by Paladin. With this interruption, the audience understands that Holliday’s self-exile to the West can only be a way station on his journey to an early death. The gambler-dandy and gambler-gunfighter-dandy in Ford’s Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine bespeak a figure invested with some of the mythic qualities expected of frontier heroes, such as charisma, chivalry, and skill with a gun. However, as if confirming Pumphrey’s argument about Westerns’ discomfort with the dandy, the gambler-dandy/fallen aristocrat occupies a marginalized status in both films, excluded from full participation in society. He is regarded with ambivalence by others and is unable to move into the future. Hatfield will be mortally wounded in a desperate fight with the Apache. Holliday dies in the fight at the O.K. Corral. Both narratives suggest that although Hollywood films may show sympathy for such dark, divided characters, there is no mythic garden in the West where such a man can become a revered nation builder and model of heroic masculinity for future generations. Have Gun—Will Travel uses aspects of the dandy exiled on the frontier to anchor the construction of its Western hero. While redeeming this type from his role as a doomed supporting character, Paladin does not free him from moral ambiguity or all the negative associations of dandyism in the Western

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genre. Like Ford’s Doc Holliday, the dandy of the frontier West represented by Paladin is a hybrid character combining the gunfighter’s deadly competence with the dandy’s traits of elegance, self-consciously cultivated irony, and aristocratic exceptionalism. Like Hatfield and Holliday, the character of Paladin calls attention to qualities and values that may seem out of place or maladaptive in the West, pointing to the broken moorings of self-exile. In a different fashion than these filmic predecessors, Have Gun—Will Travel uses the dandy in exile to call attention to the importance of intersections of gender, sexuality, and class in the performance of a heroic survivor masculinity rather than of a doomed one. Thus, the series exploited the ambiguities, pleasures, and tensions that swirl around a character who is both a cultured gentleman from the East and a man of highly stylized violence in the West to pleasurably recuperate notions of picturesqueness. By providing a dandy hero who functions as a charismatic counterweight to masculine conformity, Have Gun—Will Travel suggests the inherent instability—and pleasure—of masculinity as a performance. ”Fastidious Mr. Paladin”

Brummell set the standard for dandies as fastidiously clean. He also established the expectation that they would be outfitted in elegant, expensive, well-fitted attire aimed at revealing the male figure (Moers 31–34). Confirming his own investment in fashion, Paladin is the most elegantly dressed man we ever see in San Francisco, and we observe him in his tailor’s shop in one episode and being fitted for a new suit in his hotel room in another. Like Brummell, Paladin is fastidiously clean, a fact confirmed by his eagerness to find a bath (or at least wash up) as the first thing he does in whatever frontier town he enters while on the job.

Making the Dandy Mythic

Paladin’s devotion to clothes and his fastidiousness are played for humor in the episode “Maggie O’Bannion,” scripted by Gene Roddenberry. In the opening scene Paladin is bushwhacked and robbed of his signature black trail clothes, gun, and horse. Waking from unconsciousness (which happens a lot in the series), the normally dapper Paladin is forced to don hillbilly rags left by one of his assailants. He smells the abandoned clothes and reacts with disgust. In the next shots we see him in rough shirt and shabby, oversized pants, the latter held up by a strap of cloth. Paladin resembles Li’l Abner Yokum of comic strip fame. Delighting in the spectacle of the dandy-hero’s discomfort, the camera holds in a long-take deep-focus shot as the normally lithe protagonist lumbers into the distant prairie in search of the nearest ranch house. When he finds it, his cultivated speech and perfect manners cannot save him from being dismissed by the beautiful female ranch owner as a “drifter” in dire need of a bath. Clothes, indeed, make the man. Because Paladin is a dandy, his normal appearance at the Hotel Carlton often disappoints those who seek to hire the services advertised on his business card: “Have Gun Will Travel—Wire Paladin San Francisco.” Typical in this regard is the opening sequence of “Alice” (episode #182, Mar. 17, 1962, season 5), also written by Roddenberry. A well-dressed young lady, Maya Ferguson (Jena Engstrom), accidentally bumps into Paladin in the lobby of the Carlton. In the distracted jostling, Paladin’s business card drops from her hand. He plucks the card from where it has fallen—on one of the ruffled cuffs of his shirt. A comely blonde in a low-cut gown walks by them. “Good evening, Paladin,” she purrs, looking at him intently. Maya, the primly dressed young lady who dropped his card, proceeds to stare at him, for she now realizes that this is the man she is seeking. Paladin says to her, “Oh, I can see from that look on your face that you are looking for what you think is a real gunman—leather britches and fringed shirt and two guns down

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somewhere around his knees. [pauses] Paladin—uncouthly and savagely at your service.” This scene is typical of how the series, often with humor, establishes Paladin as a dandy in his association with urbanity and impertinence as well as with fashionability and fastidiousness. He defies expectations for a gunfighter with his sartorial choices, by his mastery of the English language, and by his impertinent attitude, which he wears as lightly as his ruffles. Similarly, in “The Twins” (episode #113, May 21, 1960, season 3), the term “dandy” comes into play in a traditional way for a Western to suggest Paladin’s insufficient masculinity. A young man enters the lobby of the Hotel Carlton. Unlike anyone else we ever see in the hotel—including Paladin—he wears a gun in a holster. Adam Mirakian (Brian Hutton) is accused of a murder that he claims was committed by his twin brother, “Sam.” He wants Paladin, whom he knows only from his business card, to find his brother. The audience sees Paladin in the dining room enjoying the company of a beautiful woman as he carefully consumes what appears to be an iced fruit cocktail. His clothes are as effete as his menu fare. Dressed impeccably in ruffled shirt and a perfectly tailored form-fitting suit, Paladin is the image of urbane refinement. His hair is curled; his mustache (which turns up jauntily at the ends) is carefully groomed. Learning that this man in the ruffled shirt is the one he has been looking for, Adam looks Paladin up and down, smirks (in close-up), and remarks with a voice full of derision, “I was told you were a gunfighter. I didn’t think you’d turn out to be some kind of a dandy.” Self-consciously exploiting Paladin’s appearance as a dandy allows Have Gun—Will Travel to use a well-defined historical type of masculinity to create a very different hero in the Western genre, one reliant on an established type associated with qualities—elegance, superior wit, and education—seemingly far removed from the norms for the Western hero. As noted in the introduction, Warshow and Tompkins both suggest that

Making the Dandy Mythic

the Western reflects a rejection of civilization aligned (negatively) with the feminine (Warshow 36; Tompkins 42–44). The melancholy Westerner as an archetype possesses a heightened authenticity linked to his attachment to the land and freedom. Such authenticity makes this frontier hero uncomfortable with

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Paladin, the elegant dandy, with his stingy gun. Richard Boone in costume, ca. 1959.

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civilization and often unsuited to the society that will ultimately result from his conquering of the wilderness (Warshow 36–38). Paladin’s status as a dandy realigns those elements of the Western that are often regarded as antithetical but necessary for a mythical hero to reconcile: West and East, masculine and feminine, ruggedness and refinement, violence and gentleness. In Have Gun—Will Travel, all are united in a performance of masculinity in which style is a key characteristic that ultimately furthers the self-determining code of a hero but in ways unexpected for most Westerns. Richard Boone confided in a 1957 interview that “We deliberately set out to create an elegantly deadly character as different as possible from any other Western series” (Johnson). Cecil Smith confirmed the success of this strategy in 1960: “A dilettante, an intellectual, a gourmet, he [Paladin] has almost nothing in common with the Earps and Dillons and Randalls, with the usual TV gunman” (“Paladin” 10–11). Indeed, what other series would have dared to have its burly hero, in the middle of a half-built mining camp, look up at a mirror suspended over an outdoor saloon bar and ask, “Is that French Baroque or Cuvilliés?” (“Gold and Brimstone,” episode #78, June 20, 1958, season 2). Such a moment illustrates the dandy’s love of beauty and his connoisseurship. It also demonstrates his irony, placed into circulation in a frontier setting through performance, since he is acting out a dilemma (of cultural recognition of an antique European style) that no one around him has the education to understand or care about. “Uhh?” says the bartender dully before Paladin brightly answers his own question: “Silly me, Baroque.” Paladin chides himself in a mocking performance that sets him apart from the rough environs. He asserts his own superior cultural values—dandyesque and feminized though they may be. This scene may elicit the kind of the audience response explained by Sima Godfrey, who notes that “the easy pleasure that one derives in watching or reading a play by Wilde is the pleasure that comes

Making the Dandy Mythic

from a certain sense of shared superiority with the Dandy that permits one, temporarily, to partake in his ironic vision of our world” (31). In his display of superiority and rebellion against conformity, the dandy expects to shock rather than be shocked. If Paladin’s identification of the mirror is unexpected and potentially shocking for a Western hero, in a few minutes he will punch a swindler who wounded an old immigrant prospector. This act of manly aggression, while typical of the Old West’s rough justice, is blended with dandy irony. Paladin first thanks the villain for his nefarious deeds in exaggeratedly polite language before he knocks him down: “Thank you so much for shooting that old man. That was a very kind thing to do.” As Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. notes, “Courtesy is a performing art” (89). The upper class traditionally was expected to perfect that art. Paladin’s dandy-precise performance of the protocols of courtesy in “Gold and Brimstone” and other episodes emphasizes the ironic potential of manners, illustrating what Aldrich says: “The recipient of a courtesy can never be sure whether [the] gift expresses the actual sentiments of the giver—her ‘real’ respect for you, for example—or masks quite opposite feelings [of disrespect]” (88–89). The dandy was a master of this kind of deceptive courtesy that impeccably adheres to social protocols on its surface but also rebelliously calls their situational application (at this moment, with this person) into question. Paladin presents himself as a gentleman, a cultured man of the city, a dandy who keeps his ironic attitude intact no matter where he is, but he generally abandons his hand-tailored suits when he travels for business on the frontier. There he assumes his distinctive black trail clothes, his hat and gun holster trimmed in silver, his finely tooled saddle and saddlebags. These continue to communicate his difference from the rustic frontiersmen with whom he comes in contact as surely as his refined speech and manners mark him as a city man wherever he goes. Paladin defines himself as a gentleman, in contrast

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to most in the hinterlands: “In the world around us there are men who are not gentlemen,” he warns Melissa (Suzi Carnell), a beautiful young missionary against violence who goes into the town of Bugbear to persuade its inhabitants to give up their guns (“The Gospel Singer,” episode #161, Oct. 21, 1961, season 5). Paladin is always seeking civility, but he does not expect to find it on the frontier. Without the politeness of the gentleman as the deferred-to standard, how can the frontier be anything but violent? Often Have Gun—Will Travel featured witty dialogue and comic relief supplied by a supporting cast filled with colorful eccentrics who find Paladin’s dandy manners irritating if not downright alarming. In “Crowbait” (episode #127, Nov. 19, 1960, season 4), Paladin’s cultured language and smooth manners inspire the plain and plain-speaking daughter (Jacqueline Scott) of a desert prospector to call him a “big-city gunfighter.” This term would be an oxymoron, a chimerical impossibility in a proper Western, but not in Have Gun—Will Travel, where it forms the basis of a running joke. Sent by the daughter into the desert hills to keep her father from being harmed by Indians, Paladin continues to be met with suspicion; the father, Crowbait (Russell Collins), accuses him of “charming the poor little man-starved filly with those fancy city manners of yours.” Crowbait is one of the many aged male eccentrics featured in the series, an old desert rat/prospector who can quench his thirst with arsenic-laced cave water. He proudly declares to Paladin, “I got a powerful edge on you. I’m more treacherous.” Poor “white trash” country folk often wag their fingers at Paladin as a city slicker who thinks himself superior, but Crowbait and his daughter prove to be tough and tough-minded, counted among the many frontier inhabitants on Have Gun—Will Travel with self-interested tricks up their ragged sleeves. Paladin loves courtesy and culture, leisure and refinement. He is openly scornful of ignorance and vulgarity, but he earns

Making the Dandy Mythic

his living as a violent man among largely uneducated, unrefined people who commit crass and sometimes morally repugnant acts. As a former West Point man and Union officer, he stands in contrast to the many dirty, socially degraded, and often dangerous frontiersmen who are either former Confederates (as in “Juliet” and “The Teacher”) or who carry the signifiers attached to being so-called white trash. They are clannish, lazy, uneducated, and bigoted but sometimes frustratingly difficult for Paladin to get under control. The contradictory qualities of the dandy put pressure on ideas that had long shaped popular culture constructions of the man of the West as a natural gentleman at home in his environs. Instead, Paladin is the equivalent of the knight who ventures beyond the castle gates into a hinterland both alien and dangerous. He is a man of duty but also a sardonic hedonist whose pursuit of pleasure in his lifestyle is completely at odds with that of the usual Western hero. Paladin does, however, adhere to the tradition of the Westerner as a man who lives by a code, the self-actuated basis of values that do not depend on others for approval. Have Gun—Will Travel exploits the imbrications between the traditional Western figure of the man who lives by his code and the dandy who is renowned for living by his. There is no doubt that Paladin, as the gentle and polite city man who works as a gunfighter in the Wild West, is a hero with a suspicious amount of charm and education, fastidiousness and verbal finesse. By making the dandy mythic, the series produces a protagonist who is active and heroically masculine when necessary but who mediates his experience through the repertoire of manners expected of a gentleman of refinement. Paladin’s code is based in dandy values, but while it is nonconformist and different, it is also aligned with the Western tradition in which the hero’s freedom and his very life depend entirely on his own powers. Thus, as a fantasy figure, Paladin stands in opposition to the conformism so feared in 1950s’

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popular discourse, an aspect recognized as one possible source of the adult television Western’s popularity in some commentary of the time (Nussbaum 26). This suggests that his character draws on the dandy model of rebellion in style but blends it with the inner directness of the traditional Western hero and the nonconformity of the modern American playboy. The result is a complex and attractive alternative to a model of masculinity thought to be all too characteristic of contemporary American life. The Dandy as Playboy

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Instead of challenging norms through a contemporary hero, Have Gun—Will Travel takes the figure of the Victorian-era dandy and updates him for midcentury American audiences. Within the apparently infertile soil of the Western (variously labeled as “earnest,” “sexless,” “melancholy,” and “rural”), Have Gun—Will Travel created a virile yet dandified fantasy figure that challenged the dominant hegemony’s normative masculinity focused on centralist values and domesticity. Adding to its defiance of dominant ideological norms, the series persistently portrayed the family as a site of violence and psychological abnormality. Have Gun—Will Travel was different in its presentation of an elegant middle-aged dandy-gunfighter, and its difference was not without broader cultural resonance, for it offered a number of challenges to mid-twentieth-century norms of U.S. masculinity. It must be remembered that a vigorous public debate took place in the postwar United States regarding men. At issue were aspects of postwar life such as corporate culture and middle-class conformity that were believed to be negatively impacting American masculinity, but the biggest threat to men was often posited as women. Women were being blamed “for the ravages of ambiguity and anxiety sweeping the nation” (Gilbert 74).

Making the Dandy Mythic

As early as 1942, Philip Wylie coined the term “momism” in his book Generation of Vipers. He argued that American men were being dominated and, indeed, destroyed as independent individuals by women, first by their small-minded, power-hungry mothers, who encouraged blind fealty to all forms of authoritarianism, and then by their wives, who become the same kind of “useless” women who were ruining American society (186–94). Many commentators in the 1950s expressed a similar view. J. Robert Moskin claimed that “Scientists who study human behavior fear that the American male is now dominated by the American female. . . . [He] is no longer the masculine, strong-minded man who pioneered the continent and built America’s greatness” (3). In addition to the danger presented by women, the pull toward conformity was also cited as a major factor in creating men who were nothing like the independent-minded forefathers of the country, who were guided by their own instincts and intelligence. Numerous reflections on postwar U.S. culture emphasized the impulse to conform and its creation of a masculinity dominated by the herd mentality of corporate America. Perhaps most influential among these was David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), which argued that the American character had radically changed from being “inner-directed” to being “other-directed,” dependent on seeking the approval of others. In the postwar milieu, the American middle class craved love rather than respect. Likewise, William Whyte’s bestseller The Organization Man (1956) condemned the effects of corporate America. Men were being turned into conformists, “organization men who lower their sights to achieve a good job with adequate pay and proper pension and a nice house in a pleasant community populated with people as nearly like themselves as possible” (300). Typical of this widespread public discussion about the desire for conformity and its perceived negative impact on masculinity is “The American Male: Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?”

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in which author George B. Leonard argued that American men were entrapped by a society that broadly claimed that “The Group” was more important than the individual who had to “adjust” to the opinion of the former. Leonard asserts that conformity had to be fought in order to reclaim the traditional strengths of American manhood: “The present age, as every other, demands dedication, daring and persistent individualism” (“The American Male” 103–4). In Riesman’s taxonomy, the independently minded person might achieve a rare classification, the “autonomous” type consisting of those who selected their own goals and “are free to choose whether to conform or not” (287). Although he might seem to fit Riesman’s “autonomous” type, Paladin’s nineteenth-century dandy-gunfighter very clearly shares characteristics with a masculinity of the 1950s regarded by some as dangerously out of step with the dominant ideal but also by many as an intriguing alternative to conformity and the increasing domination of women. This type was the “playboy,” a term used in the 1920s but not made ubiquitous in American culture until the 1950s with the rise of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, first published in 1953. The Playboy vision of masculinity attempted to recapture male individuality and autonomy by focusing on a pleasure-oriented, consumerist lifestyle. Elizabeth Fraterrigo has characterized the Playboy philosophy as promoting the value of “unbridled self-indulgence” that is part of “a fantasy lifestyle”—”an unattainable vision of luxury”—especially in the magazine’s first decade of publication (six years of which ran concurrent with Have Gun—Will Travel) (59, 72). Hefner realized the value of promoting himself as an exemplary playboy to represent the Playboy philosophy and its lifestyle to other men. Indeed, he was wildly successful in promulgating a version of modern manliness that countered the dominant postwar image of the ideal American man as a responsible, domesticated

Making the Dandy Mythic

breadwinner. Playboy incorporated numerous elements of masculinity long attributed to the dandy: the playboy was a sophisticated man of the world who defied conformity to reap the sexual and social benefits of unencumbered bachelorhood. He centralized values attached to urbanity, cultural superiority, and consumerist pleasures. Women were a key part of those pleasures. To secure Paladin’s heterosexual virility in terms that would resonate with its post–World War II audience, Have Gun—Will Travel updates its hero’s dandyism to reflect the sexual ideology as proffered by Playboy magazine in the 1950s. Yet Paladin’s residence, the Hotel Carlton, anticipates in style and function Hefner’s first Playboy Mansion, an elaborate 1899 Victorian house in Chicago (which the publisher bought in 1959). The gunfighter’s home is redolent of luxury, with marbled staircases, crystal chandeliers, luxurious rugs, and expensive furniture. The hotel is presented also as a space allowing sexual display and erotic encounters between strangers or those (lovers) who might need to pretend to be strangers.5 Paladin, like Hefner, is surrounded by beautiful women and is sometimes overwhelmed by their attention, such as when a troupe of Tahitian female performers (in sarongs) pounce on him with glee in the Hotel Carlton’s lobby in “The Siege” (episode #145, Apr. 1, 1961, season 4). Playboy editor Jim Petersen declared that in spite of Playboy’s focus on sex, there was something more important than women to the true playboy. This “one thing,” said Petersen, was the gentleman bachelor’s “attitude” that “trumped everything” (qtd. in Pitzulo 72). Hefner described the ideal playboy as “an alert man, an aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who . . . can live life to the hilt” (qtd. in Fraterrigo 49). Paladin is an updated dandy, molded to fit a 1950s’ Playboy ideal and defying many generic assumptions about masculinity even as the series speaks to both anxieties and aspirational fantasies associated with the postwar era.

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Have Gun—Will Travel approaches the central drama of the performance of masculinity in ways that defy expectations for a genre in which heroism is often associated with self-denial, melancholy solitude, and inarticulate “natural” manliness. Paladin is a signifying nexus bringing together the mutable, performative figure of the dandy with the gunfighter to uniquely privilege elements that are often regarded as foreign to the Western. In spite of its complicating differences, the series perpetuates mythic masculinity, affirming the importance of independence acquired through self-creation and the “superiority of spirit” aligned with the dandy’s code (Feldman 113). However wittily the series presents the drama of its protagonist’s defiance of the conventions of the Western hero, Have Gun—Will Travel is not a demythologizing satire like Maverick, a comedy-centered television series about a cowardly, conniving Old West gambler that also debuted in the fall of 1957. Instead, Have Gun—Will Travel goes about making the dandy mythic in terms that expand the boundaries of the Western’s conventions. As I will explore in subsequent chapters, Paladin facilitates a mythic reconciliation of civilization and the wilderness that is configured differently. At its most basic level of signification, the dandy-hero is aligned with a place (the city) and with characteristics (high culture and educated refinement) regarded as feminine. But he is also associated with individualism and male physical and intellectual superiority. Exploiting the rich terrain of the intersection of ritual violence, gender, and post–Civil War U.S. frontier mythology, the series engaged in a revisionist social critique that also appeared in movie Westerns of the time. Yet, with more daring than many of these films, Have Gun— Will Travel placed its dandy protagonist within a frontier largely stripped of its utopian potentiality dependent on the triumph of striving, forward-looking pioneers. As embodied by Richard Boone, Paladin brings a dandy’s performativity and irony to the Western’s traditional focus on violence as he moves within a

Making the Dandy Mythic

vulgar and morally flawed world that regards his occupation as an ethically deviant enterprise.

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Kisses for My Paladin

She’s beautiful; and therefore, to be wooed. She is a woman; therefore, to be won. William Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI, 5.3.79

Nameless woman: “Now that you have won me, Paladin, what do you intend to do with me?” Paladin: “Well, I have been giving that some medieval thought.” [He kisses her ardently.] Opening scene, “Knight to Remember” (episode #168)

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n many Westerns, sexual politics would be a negative field of inquiry in relation to women—that is, there would be nothing to explore other than male characters, homosocial settings, and overwhelmingly male-driven plots. Martin Pumphrey argues

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that the history of movie Westerns demonstrates the consistent presentation of a carefully constructed environment in which women are rare but the hero’s heterosexuality is an important assumption: “In the symbolic universe of the Western, femininity is represented as a threat to masculine independence and accorded a highly circumscribed place in the plot structure. . . . [I]t either generates male action to create plot movement . . . or interrupts male fun . . . to create plot endings” (53). Unlike many other television Westerns of its time, Have Gun—Will Travel was extremely interested in women. Nevertheless, the series offered a protagonist typical of the period in being “womanless,” that is, “wifeless and/or motherless” (Golden 13–15). Robert Sparks, who would become among the last of six different producers of the series, was quoted in Pageant magazine in 1958: “In nearly every show a woman is strongly involved, either directly concerned or directly affected” (Hano 35). To that end, Have Gun—Will Travel offers many archetypal female figures of the Western: saloon girls and schoolmarms, masculinized frontierswomen and ranchers’ beautiful daughters, mail-order brides and Indian captives. At the same time that the series invested in the generic repertoire of familiar female types, it introduced unexpected ones, most notably the urban socialite and the demimondaine. However, well-developed female characters are rare. Often disguised by humor, stereotyping treatment renders women in Have Gun— Will Travel both objectified and inferior to men—typical of the dandy ethos. As one contemporary commentary on television Westerns noted, Paladin is “that unspeakable thing in old-fashioned Western terms, a ladies’ man” (Barrett and Bourgin 53). Because of the series’ emphasis on the hero as a suave, sophisticated dandy who is a connoisseur of women, a different picture emerges than is typical of Westerns. Women often figure as part of Paladin’s life as objects of his sexuality as well as of his chivalry and, as a consequence, are more important and differently important

The Dandy Flâneur

Paladin sprang from dandy origins, but his attributes were easily adapted to and associated with the mid-twentieth-century urbane playboy. This meant that he deviated greatly from the usual model of the Western’s gynophobic hero. Representing the dandy-hero as a serial seducer or womanizer, Paladin redeems a bad habit confined to villainous and deviant types in many other Westerns. Thus, in Have Gun—Will Travel women are not necessarily the agents for interrupting “male fun,” as Pumphrey

Kisses for My Paladin

in Have Gun—Will Travel than in many Westerns. The primary reason for this change is that Have Gun—Will Travel challenges the tradition of the sexually reticent Western hero. Certainly, the Western’s emphasis on the frontier as a place of freedom where men are men and women are in short supply contributes to a genre in which men’s relationships to other men (whether as friend, rival, or both) are inscribed as being more important than the relations—including the sexual relations—between men and women. The Western hero’s traditional lack of interest in sex has been explored by a number of scholars over the long history of the genre in film and in its literary antecedents but less so in its televisual articulations. Jane Tompkins says of Western movies that “the hero almost never has sex” (84). In the conservative Commonweal, one commentator’s remarks point to how television Westerns may have resonated with postwar anxiety concerning women: “The Western Hero expresses for the American male his feeling that sex as he knows it . . . is a tyranny, and that woman will unman him in proportion as her sexual function over-fascinates him” (Sisk 368). Most famously avoiding the “tyranny” of female sexuality was Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness). Dillon shared many cold beers but no hot kisses with saloon owner and “friend” Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake) during the show’s record-breaking twenty-year run.

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claims of the genre. Nevertheless, even though women figure differently in Paladin’s life than in that of the typical Western hero, their power over him is securely contained by his dandy ethos. Paladin remains the elusive, dialectically driven dandy, a man who is himself a spectacle but remains a flâneur who moves from one view to another, from one woman to another.1 Walter Benjamin describes the paradox of the type: “on one side, the man who feels himself viewed by all and sundry as a true suspect and, on the other side, the man who is utterly undiscoverable, the hidden man” (420). Paladin is a typical dandy who is defined as superior to women in every way except, in this instance, beauty. As discussed in chapter 1, the dandy shares interests stereotyped as feminine (such as fashion, art, music, and leisure) with women, but it is through his connoisseurship—including connoisseurship of women as erotic objects—that he proves his superiority to them. The dandy embodies a transgressive, overtly stylized masculinity that nevertheless is valuable to the patriarchy in asserting dominance over women whose ways he masters, producing himself as neither woman nor bourgeoisie. Following this construction of the dandy in relation to women and femininity, Have Gun—Will Travel provokes unusual reverberations around Paladin in relation to the usual symbolic connotations accrued along the lines of gender difference in the Western: that is, men = nature, the frontier, the rural West; women = civilization, culture, the urban East. The inscription of Paladin’s sexual appetite on the frontier (when he is at work) as well as in the city (when he is at play) confirms the character’s heterosexual virility, a necessary strategy to avoid throwing the dandy into the category of sexual invert. As noted in the previous chapter, dandies such as Beau Brummell were frequently associated with promiscuous heterosexuality that led them to engage in erotic exploits that sometimes defied the norms of class and nationality. Questions were raised about the sexual ambiguity of some dandies (such as

Kisses for My Paladin

Count D’Orsay), but the dandy’s relationship to heterosexuality was not radically altered in the public imagination until the late Victorians’ most famous dandy, Oscar Wilde, was convicted in 1895 on charges of “gross indecency” (i.e., having sex with other men). If Wilde’s conviction contributed to the commonplace notion that the dandy was a sexual invert, in the 1950s fears of being labeled effeminate or homosexual haunted the new version of the dandy constructed by Playboy magazine and Hugh Hefner. One scholar notes that “When much of American culture was denigrating the effete, urban male as a weak sissy, Hefner joyfully exclaimed that he was actually the manliest man of all. The playboy was so confident in his promiscuous heterosexuality that few doubted his manhood” (Pitzulo 34). The display of alluring women in various states of undress in Playboy worked to confirm the heterosexual interests of the playboy (and the reader) (Osgerby 127). The playboy was supposed to enjoy sex with women frequently and with a sense of fun mutually shared by the man’s female partner. Television censorship meant that the objects of Paladin’s desire had to be represented with significantly less display of female flesh, but he shares the playboy’s approach to women, with his desire to avoid commitment (and female-centered domesticity) guaranteeing also the kind of masculine freedom and autonomy expected of a Western hero. To be a connoisseur of women, the dandy-playboy must first look at them. It has been claimed that in the Western it is dangerous for the hero to look at females, because in the genre looking “is not a matter of pleasure but wholly of power and dominance. Looking at . . . women is to invite disruption or worse” (Pumphrey 57). Instead of looking to attain sexual pleasure, Western heroes are expected to cultivate a look aimed at assessing and then dominating dangerous men who threaten the hero’s very existence, whether in main street shoot-outs or in running battles on the prairie. In contrast, Paladin is shown

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looking at women at all times of day and night, often in his hotel but also in the hinterland. Paladin is a flâneur attuned to the pleasures of public spaces where women become the spectacle he most enjoys observing. In the Hotel Carlton, Paladin stares at, compliments, and pursues females who are almost always depicted as anonymous ornamental objects. There is a running joke in Have Gun—Will Travel that Paladin is in some stage of observation, pursuit, or seduction when Hey Boy (or his sister Hey Girl in season 4) brings him a telegram or a newspaper article that reports a situation just begging for Paladin’s intervention. In “Hobson’s Choice” (episode #185, Apr. 7, 1962, season 5), Hey Boy thwarts Paladin’s erotic pursuit of a woman he spies in the hotel lobby with news of a potential client. Paladin barks at him, “Do you do these things on purpose?” Hey Boy’s response has an insouciant edge: “Oh, I did not realize you know that lady.” Paladin retorts, “I didn’t know her, and now, I probably never will.” However, duty inevitably wins out over pleasure, and Paladin will tell Hey Boy (or Hey Girl) “Pack my saddlebags” or “Pack the gear.” Paladin must depart immediately, leaving the women he does “know” waiting for him at dinner, the opera, the ballet, or in the hallway after being hustled out of his room. “What about me?” asks one woman left middance. Often, he bids adieu to a woman with a stroke on the cheek and, starting in season 3, with a kiss blown across the room or transferred from Paladin’s mouth via his index finger to her nose. A memorable exception to these silent, dismissible women occurs in the introduction to “The Waiting Room” (episode #179, Feb. 24, 1962, season 5). The scene is coded as being in the middle of the night or very early morning, for the lobby of the Carlton is empty. Hey Boy reads the newspaper at the reception desk. The camera focuses on a two-shot of Hey Boy and the desk clerk when suddenly we (and they) hear the voice of a very angry woman emanating from offscreen space. Hey Boy’s look guides us to the next shot. We see a shapely young blonde

An assignation gone wrong: Paladin and Margaret in “The Waiting Room” (season 5). Richard Boone with Ingeborg Kjeldsen and Kam Tong.

Kisses for My Paladin

(Ingeborg Kjeldsen) in a picture hat storming down the stairs of the Carlton and yelling at Paladin. He (in his velvet-trimmed smoking jacket) tries to catch up with her. She yells, “Don’t you lay a hand on me, don’t you touch me. You’re impossible. You wretch. . . . You are a cad, sir. . . . You are not a gentleman. . . . You are a beguiler and a deceiver.” Paladin maneuvers his body to block her way on the stairs. He first refers to her as “Miss Thorndike,” then “Margaret,” and finally “darling!” Interrupting her tirade, he grabs her and whispers in her ear (in close-up). She bites her lip (as if in pleasure) and then walks off in silence, looking at Paladin over her shoulder with a smile on her face. This scene appears to register the aftermath of an assignation gone wrong—and then right. Hey Boy asks, “What did you say to her?” But Paladin refuses to tell him, saying that if he does “then very shortly everyone will

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know.” As is the case with most of Paladin’s playmates, Margaret will not make another appearance in the series. And in spite of the woman initially causing a scene with her noisy rejection of Paladin, the end of the sequence confirms the hero’s masterful heterosexuality, his finesse with women that is his stock-in-trade. It is also established early on in the series that Paladin does not exercise his sexual finesse only with white women such as Margaret. In the pilot episode, “Three Bells to Perdido,” he flirts twice (in the opening scene and the final scene) with a woman who may be Hispanic or Asian. In another episode it is stated that he enjoys the company of what are characterized as “brunettes” (implied to be Asian, Mexican, or Polynesian) as well as “blondes” (white women). As I discuss in chapter 4, Paladin has a love affair with a Chinese woman in “Lady of the Fifth Moon” (episode #222, Mar. 30, 1963, season 6). He is not just a flâneur and connoisseur of beautiful women in the city. There may be considerably fewer women in dusty backwater towns or in the desert, but his desire to look is not abated. For example, in the Boone-directed episode “Out at the Old Ball Park” (episode #121, Oct. 1, 1960, season 4), Paladin is summoned by the city fathers of a small town to serve as an honest umpire for a hotly disputed baseball game (with lots of town money riding on it). There, a remarkably beautiful blonde meets with the city council. Mrs. Castle (Jan Harrison) draws his attention again and again and again, emphasized in medium-close two-shots showing him staring at her. When the city fathers hand him his payment, Paladin pays no attention to the cash but stares at Mrs. Castle instead. He never touches her, but he does bid her a gallant farewell when he addresses the town in the final scene: “Dear, beautiful, Mrs. Castle, I believe you were right—the West is not quite ready for baseball.” Paladin does find women to woo in other frontier outposts of civilization, as in “Maggie O’Bannion,” “The Gospel Singer,” and “No Visitors.” The final scene of “Lady with a Gun” (episode #108, Apr.

Kisses for My Paladin

9, 1960, season 3) shows Paladin tearing up the check from his client, Rudy Rossback (Jack Weston). Paladin explains: “Well, I can’t really accept a fee from both sides, and somehow I believe that Miss MacIntosh is going to find a way to make up for all my trouble.” He touches Miss MacIntosh’s hand before he climbs onto the buckboard beside her and drives away. There is no doubt that Paladin expects to enjoy the sexual favors of the gorgeous (and repentant) woman who threatened the life of his hapless client. The series’ insistence that Paladin hold enviable erotic power over women—the equivalent of a modern playboy’s charisma—means that he must ultimately exercise a measure of self-restraint or else become a rake or a “cad,” as Margaret calls him. In “Juliet” (episode #59, Jan. 31, 1959, season 2), Paladin encounters a sexually curious seventeen-year-old beauty, Juliet Harper (Miranda Jones), who is being pursued by a murderous family of former Confederates. Her romantic interest in Paladin leads him to lecture her about the importance of self-control and the differences in appropriate comportment for a woman and a young (presumably virginal) teenager. While this episode seems to make male sexual behavior the responsibility of girls and women, other episodes such as “The Bride,” “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player,” and “The Debutante” demonstrate his courtesy to a woman (or half-grown girl) to reassure the audience: Paladin’s chivalry will win out over unbridled or codeless sexual expression that might threaten to violate decency. The category of women that does not draw Paladin’s interest is that of saloon girls, a.k.a prostitutes. We rarely see Paladin giving but a fleeting glance at them, since for the hero to have to pay for sex would undermine his status as a master seducer. Women marked as prostitutes, saloon girls, and madams (or exmadams) do become important in motivating the plot in some episodes, including “The Uneasy Grave,” “Dream Girl,” “Alice,” “Ben Jalisco” “The Piano,” “Odds for Big Red,” and “The Marshal of Sweetwater.”

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Does She or Doesn’t She?

Even though the series cannot show the sexual act, an erotic atmosphere is certainly cultivated in some episodes and especially in many introductory scenes that are saturated with sexual implications in their dialogue and visuals. As a result, Paladin’s erotic encounters frequently look like foreplay but also may resemble the aftermath of sex. An example of the latter occurs in “A Proof of Love” (episode #160, Oct. 14, 1961, season 5), directed by Boone. The opening scene in the Hotel Carlton begins with a medium shot of the back (including derriere) of a woman leisurely walking away from the camera, down a hallway of the hotel at night. She is wearing a low-cut satin evening gown; one shoulder strap sags on her right arm. Her blonde hair is in a state of dishabille. She moves languorously, her hips swaying as if she were an acolyte of Mae West. There is never a reverse shot to her face, but when Hey Boy runs briskly from around the corner and crosses her path, he exclaims, “Oh, boy!” It is uncertain whether the woman merely surprises him or the usually unflappable porter is startled because she looks like she’s been “banged.” As we follow Hey Boy into the foreground, the camera backs up to show us the likely “banger,” Paladin. Paladin leans against the door frame of his hotel suite as he watches the woman. He is dressed in a Chinese-embroidered satin robe (over a shirt and pants) that he will frequently wear in his private suite in the Hotel Carlton. His outfit bears a marked resemblance to the iconic images of Hugh Hefner in his satin jacquard dressing robe or velvet smoking jacket. In retrospect, we understand the first shot’s point of view on the woman’s backside as being aligned with Paladin. Is any unchaperoned Victorian-era woman en route to (or from) Paladin’s hotel room inevitably a prostitute, courtesan, or demimondaine? Certainly if the series was historically accurate that would likely be the case, but in keeping with Playboy notions of the ideal playmate, these women can be coded by

Kisses for My Paladin

their attire and manner to be respectable and are sometimes identified in dialogue as being of high society. In “The Piano” (episode #164, Nov. 11, 1961, season 5), Paladin, the bachelor gourmet, hosts dinner for two in his room. His guest is a “very wealthy young lady” (Erin Leigh) who, he speculates, has probably never tasted the gourmet delicacy of chuck wagon–style “buffalo haunch” (which he has renamed in French). Nauseated by his description of its preparation, she flees the table. Paladin sighs and says, “Well, Hey Boy. A woman who would forgo ragout buffalo would be incapable of enjoying other rare pleasures. I will dine alone.” The adult viewer does not have to venture too many guesses as to what “other rare pleasures” Paladin had in mind to offer his stunningly attractive guest. All of these scenes and episodes show how Have Gun—Will Travel put considerable pressure on gendered social expectations regarding women, challenging norms of the genre and of television by making sexuality more permissible and visible on the small screen. Those expectations have been described by media scholar Susan Douglas: “The legacy of the 1950s was that no ‘nice’ girl ever, ever, went all the way before marriage, and no nice woman ever really liked sex” (61). Douglas also says that by the early 1960s, elements in popular culture—including in advertising, books, movies, and music—were beginning to send American girls and women different (if often mixed) messages about female sexual conduct, especially that expected of the middle-class “single girl” (63–68). Have Gun—Will Travel was part of that trend, heralding a change in the sexual double standard. However, women— especially those seen in San Francisco—are stereotyped as little more than desirable (if also desiring) objects. They are almost never allowed an opportunity to express anything other than appreciation for Paladin’s sexuality. In this respect they are rather like the seminude women of Hefner’s Playboy centerfolds, which were criticized for degrading and objectifying women as interchangeable sexual commodities in spite of their

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girl-next-door stylization. Nevertheless, Have Gun—Will Travel defied normative expectations of primetime television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps not exactly celebrating female sexuality but participating in an impulse toward sexual liberalization. Whether identifiable as prostitute, city socialite, or demimondaine, women are not automatically condemned as bad in Have Gun—Will Travel merely because of their desire for Paladin or other signs of their sexual experience. Paladin’s enjoyment of sex with women is implied in many scenes, yet the moral standards of the time for television meant that the audience never saw Paladin in bed with any of them. As Boone recalled in 1972, “On ‘Have Gun,’ we could only imply that Paladin was going to bed with all those beautiful broads” (Berkvest D24). The daring—for television—presentation of sexual relations on Have Gun—Will Travel is dependent on strategies reminiscent of those developed by American filmmakers to cope with the industry’s self-regulatory system. Under the direction of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, the U.S. film industry self-regulated the content (including violence and sexuality) of its feature films through the guidelines of the Production Code (written in 1930). The industry did not rate movies for viewers of different ages, which meant that children as well as adults could be in attendance at any feature film exhibited in the United States. Filmmakers were forced to learn how to convey sexually sophisticated content obliquely or elliptically in ways that could be decoded by adult members of the audience but passed over without notice by juvenile viewers. Television had its own nascent Television Code by the time Have Gun—Will Travel aired, but unlike the Production Code (from which it freely borrowed), the Television Code was largely concerned with advertising rather than program content. Television commercials were considered the primary nuisance and disturbance to normative standards of good taste. Judging the acceptability of program content was largely left to networks,

Kisses for My Paladin

although sponsors sometimes still played a role. Enforcement varied by network and involved standards and regulation departments as well as continuity departments. Moreover, all of these players were sensitive to the fact that great fears attended the delivery of television programming into a domestic setting where children might be watching (and listening) to anything, even if the program was clearly intended to be broadcast after their bedtimes (as was Have Gun—Will Travel) (Murray, “Television Wipes Its Feet,” 128–29). All of these factors made television censorship unstable, shifting, and defensive. Exploiting as well as being constrained by this situation, Have Gun—Will Travel depicted sexual relations in ways that were familiar to audiences trained by their experience with American feature film. The Production Code led filmmakers to create a lexicon of narrative conventions, visual techniques, punctuations, and strategies of elision or ambiguity to represent actions that they knew would otherwise not pass regulators. Have Gun—Will Travel communicates sexual actions in similar ways, through ambiguous dialogue as well as nuanced codes of performance, figure placement, costuming, and careful line reading. A highly relevant example of these multiple strategies for communicating erotic meaning occurs in “Ella West,” discussed in chapter 1. There is a scene of rapprochement between Paladin and Ella, the unruly female sharpshooter he is hired to “tame.” In his room after she has cleaned up for him and donned a dress, he tells her, “You’re a woman, a very attractive woman. . . . Pity is not included in the course, Ella.” He moves in and passionately kisses her. Fade out. The next scene shows her alone, wearing a different dress but still in Paladin’s room. She is singing and pouring champagne for two. Audiences trained in reading Production Code–era films would have understood that Ella and Paladin have had sex. Well-established Hollywood conventions of presentation (same room, new dress, champagne) and punctuation between scenes (dissolve or fade-out

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on kiss) would clue audiences in, as would the subsequent action. Suddenly the door opens (there is no knock), and Ella moves to offer a glass to Paladin, whom we assume as her lover has no reason to knock. But it is another man, her childhood sweetheart Tracey (William Swan), who is looking for Paladin. Tracey declares his love for Ella. In the last scene of the episode as Paladin prepares to leave, there is an exchange between him and Tomahawk Carter (Earle Hodgins), the Wild West show owner who hired him. Tomahawk appears to be aware that Paladin has slept with Ella and in coded language suggests that the gunfighter “must need money awfully bad” to act (make love?) as he did with Ella. Paladin replies, “Not particularly. I just like to do a job right.” A scene even more suggestive of Paladin’s sexual activity with a woman occurs at the beginning of “24 Hours at North Fork” (episode #36, May 24, 1958, season 1). A lovely young blonde woman at the opera sweeps by Paladin and drops her program in the lobby. In keeping with many of the eligible women depicted in the series, she is coiffed and groomed like a late 1950s’ debutante rather than a socialite of the 1870s. Paladin bends down to retrieve the program, and they attempt to talk to each other back-to-back without directly looking at one another. “Where were you last night?” Paladin asks the woman. Sotto voce, she says that her guardian is upset because “rumors about us reached him.” Paladin asks, “Were the rumors exaggerated?” She does not answer that question directly. “He insists upon killing you,” she tells Paladin, who responds in mock solemnity: “Well, even in self-defense I wouldn’t like to kill Uncle Ned.” The blonde advises Paladin to get out of town while she works to convince her uncle that “ours is the most platonic of friendships.” This scene is typical of how the series cultivated ambiguity, elision, humor, and a cover of plausible deniability so that the answer as to whether Paladin and the woman are lovers rests in the imagination of the viewer. A sophisticated audience

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member might conclude that the answer is “yes.” However, room for a naive reading was created for the unsophisticated or juvenile viewer. Such erotic strategies in Have Gun—Will Travel did not immediately change norms of television, but they point in the direction of change, anticipating the 1960s’ sexual revolution and the loosening of censorship in numerous entertainment media. No White Wedding

Paladin is as enthusiastic and energetic in his pursuit of women as he is in the pursuit of justice, but his approach to the opposite sex suggests the characteristic dandy desire to remain aloof from emotional entanglements. Brummell and his dandyesque imitators were frequently condemned for hedonistic lifestyles in which they maintained their bachelorhood in order to satisfy their lusts with women of all social ranks (Kelly 192–208). The dandy sought to differentiate his lifestyle from bourgeois conformity, a move that often included rejection of the imperative to marry and sustain patriarchal lineage. The fundamental refusal to be brought to the altar is also foundational to the Playboy philosophy. As Elizabeth Fraterrigo has said, the “power to seduce women was a chief attribute of the playboy” (49). In his relentless heterosexuality, the Hefneresque playboy of the 1950s was a man who treated women as playmates for recreational sex without emotional commitment. He operated on the assumption, as Fraterrigo notes, that “all of the consumptive delights were meant to be enjoyed with a lovely, single, sexually available girl who had no intention of charting a course to the altar” (49). The Playboy philosophy could be said to be Paladin’s, but it is occasionally tested. In “The Return of Dr. Thackeray,” Paladin is shown giving up a $10,000 job to help Dr. Thackeray (June Lockhart) when she sends him a telegram asking for his help but with no explanation of why (episode #35, May 17, 1958,

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season 1). Dr. Thackeray is introduced in an earlier episode, “No Visitors,” that ends with Paladin gleefully accepting a diagnosis of three-day measles so he can stay with the doe-eyed doctor. “I’m just lucky I guess,” he boyishly answers with a grin when a man asks how he caught the disease (episode #12, Nov. 30, 1957, season 1). In “The Return of Dr. Thackeray,” dialogue and action in their scene of reunion imply that they are lovers. When the physician sits on a couch to rest after having tended to a smallpox victim, Paladin sits on the floor in front of her, holding her knees as he looks into her eyes with affection. She lies down. He covers her with a blanket and starts to make love to her, kissing her face. Dr. Thackeray reacts like a woman who has experienced this scenario before. The emotional bond and sexual attraction between them is obviously strong, but he later feels obliged to explain why he is not proposing to her. Dr. Thackeray does not seem too disappointed in Paladin’s explanation that neither one of them is “ready,” since unlike almost every other woman in the series, she has her profession. She declares that she tried the “velvet settee” way of life and does not want it—even in San Francisco and with Paladin. While taken somewhat seriously in “The Return of Dr. Thackeray,” Paladin’s refusal to marry becomes the subject of an extended joke in the introduction to “The Killing of Jessie May” (episode #125, Oct. 29, 1960, season 4). The introduction in San Francisco features Kim Li, known as “Hey Girl” (Lisa Lu). As noted earlier, Kim Li is identified in season 1 as Hey Boy’s sister, but in her continuing role in season 4, she works in the Hotel Carlton. A beautiful, feisty, and astute woman who functions as Paladin’s personal assistant, Hey Girl is not in awe of Paladin’s sexual prowess. Unlike Hey Boy, she offers sometimes startling and ironic commentaries on Paladin’s determined sexual pursuit of women but avoidance of marriage. In this episode, we see her dusting Paladin’s living room mantel (with its phallic but miniature reproduction of a cannon). She then stands behind the

Hey Girl encourages Paladin to marry. Richard Boone and Lisa Lu in the introduction to “The Killing of Jessie May” (season 4).

Kisses for My Paladin

chair in which Paladin is sitting, reading the newspaper. Facing the camera, she starts to talk to him in a manner that imitates Paladin’s frequent quoting of famous men. “As your great Benjamin Franklin says, ‘A single man has not nearly the value . . .’” This is probably one of the longest speeches allowed a woman is the series, but almost none of it is audible. In the middle of quoting Franklin, Hey Girl’s voice is drowned out by Paladin’s as we hear his voice-over reading of a newspaper article about Jessie May Turnbow, a young man on a killing spree to avenge his father. Paladin’s voice completely eclipses Hey Girl’s until the moment when she says, with much satisfaction, “And it is time, Mr. Paladin, that you got married.” She moves out of the frame. The camera tracks in on Paladin to a medium close shot. He looks quizzical, as if he is not sure what he has heard. “Married?” he

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asks, breathing deeply and making a surprised face. He takes out his business card and places it on the newspaper. A journey to catch the young man on a gruesome murder spree is a more appealing adventure than marriage. Chivalry

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Paladin cannot be educated into marrying, but, as shown in “Ella West,” he sometimes educates women, sexually and otherwise. Just as he rants against vulgar rustics, this ladies’ man is not beyond scolding women as childish (“The Bride”), selfish (“Bear Bait”), or masculinized (“Ella West” and “Bandit”). Nevertheless, as his name suggests and as the genre’s definition of a hero demands by tradition, Paladin is often engaged in chivalrous actions directed toward women or girls. In keeping with the traditional chivalry of men of the Old West, in Have Gun—Will Travel female vulnerability facilitates an encounter with the hero whose exceptional skills are brought to bear in assisting the women or girls. In such situations, the gunfighter’s fee becomes secondary or forgotten. There are numerous episodes centering on Paladin’s coming to the aid of a woman (or adolescent girl) he encounters on the trail and whose life is in danger, but the females he helps are not always beautiful white women. In the opening scene of “The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs” (episode #163, Nov. 4, 1961, season 5), an African American woman sits beside the trail comforting a dying mule. In spite of the fact that Sarah Gibbs (Odetta) has almost nothing of value to offer Paladin, he helps her resume her journey to a remote mining camp. In “Justice in Hell” (episode #173, Jan. 13, 1962, season 5), Paladin responds to the heartrending appearance of Anne Marie (Betsy Hale), a young child brought to his suite by her grandfather. “Please, Mr. Paladin,” she haltingly pleads, breaking through her mutism. Paladin recognizes that his emotions are being played upon, but he takes the assignment to bring to justice the notorious

Kisses for My Paladin

outlaw who brutalized her and killed her parents. Paladin is often hired by a woman to find a lost or wrongly accused loved one, as in “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player,” “The Chase,” “Comanche,” “The Black Handkerchief,” “Ransom,” “The Search,” and “The Brothers.” As in “The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs,” monetary concerns are often shown to be unimportant to Paladin in situations where a woman seeks justice.2 Elliott West has claimed that in “golden era” television Westerns, “a woman’s role was mostly to give the hero someone to protect, and by her helplessness she emphasized the man’s power and abilities” (74). This generalization finds support in a number of episodes in Have Gun—Will Travel but is complicated by a number of other episodes and flatly contradicted by a few others. In “The Lady” (episode #49, Nov. 15, 1958, season 2), an overly confident English woman, Lady Diana Coulter (Patricia Medina), hires Paladin to take her to her brother’s remote New Mexico ranch. When she and Paladin arrive, they find the family massacred by Comanche. Diana doesn’t panic, but she also takes foolish risks that endanger them. She proves to be an excellent shot, but it is Paladin who demonstrates the requisite knowledge of the wilderness and its inhabitants that will get them back to San Francisco alive. No matter what their virtues, women like Lady Diana are typical of many females in Have Gun—Will Travel who are inadvertently dangerous because they are poor judges of men’s character and are ignorant of the West and western ways. A classic complication to the series’ presentation of women as vulnerable is “The Bride” (episode #6, Oct. 19, 1957, season 1), scripted by Gene Roddenberry. Riding on the stage in the desert, Paladin chivalrously refuses to let a “shortsighted” woman from the East get off and wait alone in the remote desert. When the stagecoach driver asks why he is disembarking in scorching heat in the middle of nowhere to wait with the woman for her “brother,” Paladin says, “Somebody has to take care of small children and stubborn women.” The audience

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might join in this dismissal of Christie (Marian Seldes) as a foolish woman who endangers herself and the hero, but she proves to be a resilient and interesting person. It is revealed that she is a mail-order bride who is deeply insecure about her looks and her ability to create a new life in the West. Of course, Paladin educates the self-declared “plain” woman into accepting her many virtues and encourages her confidence. Trusting her instincts for self-preservation helps Christie save her own life when she intuits that the man who claims to be her fiancé is an imposter. So, although the episode portrays the woman as dependent on Paladin as a man who must educate her into greater knowledge about the West and herself, Christie is more than a mere object for rescue, and her relationship with Paladin develops as one of mutual respect. Christie wins Paladin’s and the viewer’s admiration. Chivalrous rescue of or assistance given to women may be expected in a Western and particularly of a dandy (such as Mr. Hatfield in Stagecoach), but the presence of women in Have Gun—Will Travel, as I have argued, is heavily impacted by Paladin’s figuration as emphatically heterosexual. This means that sympathy and seduction are often linked, with chivalrous assistance of the woman leading to a sexual relationship, albeit one that is not long term. In “The Princess and the Gunfighter” and “The Lady of the Fifth Moon,” it is strongly implied that Paladin has sex with the women he is professionally charged to protect. In “The Princess and the Gunfighter” (episode #136, Jan. 21, 1961, season 4), Paladin is hired to retrieve a headstrong Montenegran princess who has escaped her handlers (a la the 1953 film Roman Holiday). In an episode played largely for comedy, Paladin finds her in the desert, scares away her guides, and assumes control of her expedition. A romance ensues, and we see them kissing before the campfire at night. After their return to civilization, Princess Serafina (Arline Sax) learns that her royal handlers employed Paladin to bring her back to San Francisco. She calls him “a gigolo.” Her remarks and her subsequent

Feminine Fascination

Throughout the original broadcast of Have Gun—Will Travel, publicity for the series played up the fact that women were fascinated with the show, its protagonist, and its star, challenging the belief that Westerns were not much interested in females of any age—either as characters or as viewers.3 A few weeks after Have Gun—Will Travel debuted, Boone was quoted by Erskine Johnson in a syndicated newspaper article: “‘It’s fantastic,’ he [Boone] grins. ‘They say women in the audience outnumber men three to one.’” Other reports suggested that females formed 60 percent of the audience and contributed “over 70 per cent of Boone’s fan mail” (Hano 35). The article “So Ugly He’s Beautiful!” claimed that Boone received more than four thousand fan letters each month (Carpozi 92). In contradistinction to the long-standing belief that women tended to be disinterested in or disliked Westerns, the female demographic proved important to the remarkable record of high Nielsen ratings for Have Gun—Will Travel and other adult Westerns (Kirkley 118–25). Have Gun—Will Travel cultivated women viewers from its beginnings. For many years Lever Bros. and American Home Products sponsored the series, which suggests that it was assumed early on that many women would be watching (“Dick Boone TV’er to Lever & AHP”). After the airing of the pilot, Billboard opined that the hero of Have Gun—Will Travel was “sinister” but “likely to have a fatal fascination for the feminine part of the audience” (Spielman). Suggesting pleasure tinged with danger, the Billboard reviewer raises questions about what women were expected to enjoy from watching a program that, in standard generic terms, might be expected to appeal to men. Yet it was acknowledged in the Chicago Tribune in 1958 that all of the most highly ranked television Westerns (six out of

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dialogue suggest that more has happened on the prairie than mere snuggling.

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the top ten shows) needed female audiences to draw their big ratings numbers (Wolters, “It’s Women”). One academic researcher claimed that “more women watched the Adult Western than men nationwide,” which the author attributes to women’s marked preference for drama and their appreciation of rugged masculinity (Day 111, 43, 63). In McCall’s in 1959, Boone recounts the story of seeing a group of schoolgirls while shooting. They waved at him. He blew them a kiss, and “‘They screamed—just the way girls used to scream when Sinatra sang.’ I thought, ‘Who, me?’” (Havemann 40). In response to Boone’s story, author Ernest Havemann declares that “The sudden rise of stars like Richard Boone is one of the most spectacular and mysterious events in the history of American show business” (40–41). In contrast to the smooth-faced handsomeness of James Garner in Maverick or Gene Barry in Bat Masterson, rivals in TV Western dandyism, star Richard Boone was unconventionally attractive. With a battered, acne-scarred face and a large nose, he was regularly described as “ugly” (Gehman 10), and commentaries compared him to Cyrano de Bergerac and W. C. Fields. Paladin’s charisma was enhanced by the actor’s famously resonant, flexible voice (Hano 38). He also possessed what one male character (looking for a scalp) admires as “a fine head of hair” (“A Head of Hair,” episode #120, Sept. 24, 1960, season 4). Suggesting how important Paladin’s hair was regarded by the series’ makers, it was not only curled but was also made to appear a glossy coal black through use of a magenta light (Hano 25). Richard Schickel remarked that the Method actor had “mastered” a “graceful, almost indolent, ease” (52). Boone often spoke of his ballet training with Martha Graham and told reporters that it influenced his interpretation of Paladin (Berkvest D23; Shanley, “Has Guns and Ideas”). Female audiences might have agreed with Maude Smuggley (Jeanette Nolan), a widow of some sexual experience (having had five husbands) who in “The Tender Gun” (episode #124, Oct. 22, 1960, season 4)

Conclusion

Paladin’s deep and abiding sexual interest in a variety of women and theirs in him had to be carefully negotiated not only to keep the hero from becoming a rake and the women from being dismissed as harlots but also to make its way through television’s complex and uncertain censorship mechanisms. While those mechanisms were intended to protect juvenile viewers and prevent controversy, the show’s emphasis on the Western as an eroticized field of heterosexual encounters was inscribed as a source of pleasure meant to entertain but not offend the program’s primary demographic of adult viewers, including women. The gender-specific pleasures that women took in viewing Have Gun—Will Travel are uncertain, but it would not be the first time that female audiences enjoyed watching an actor/star who displayed indolence, grace, and practiced skill at pleasing women, all qualities that had served Rudolf Valentino, “The Great Lover” of silent film, well. Like Boone, Valentino was dance trained and described by some commentators as ugly; Valentino’s screen persona, like Boone’s, was affiliated with menace, thus providing feminine wish fulfillment for a masterful masculinity that promised sexual excitement (Studlar 177–82). But just because the series succeeded in attracting women as viewers does not necessarily mean that the changes it offered in the Western in the realm of sexual politics were progressive. It is difficult to know exactly how the sexual politics of Have Gun—Will Travel contributed to the strong appeal of the series to women, but it is clear that its depiction of gender relations, while conservative in many ways, challenged traditional mainstream expectations of middle-class women’s sexual behavior

Kisses for My Paladin

looks the hero up and down and asks, “Paladin, are you married?” Paladin shyly shakes his head “no” without speaking. Maude emphatically declares, “Good! I like the way you move.”

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and spoke to female viewers in ways that may have helped secure their loyal viewership. While more sexually liberal, the series stresses the man’s sexual mastery and the woman’s willing subordination to him as a representative (however charming) of patriarchal control. As episodes such as “Ella West,” “Bandit,” and “The Walking Years” suggest, to be a “true” woman depends not just on a female ridding herself of her masculine attire and behaviors but also on her becoming desirable to a man—to Paladin—who confirms that she is a woman by making love to her. Mediated through the sexually charismatic presence of its dandy-playboy hero and often presented with a light touch of humor, Have Gun—Will Travel reproduces patterns of representing gender difference and heterosexual relations that may be seductively pleasurable but are also inevitably imbued with ideologies of power.

Chapter 3

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

Murder most foul, as in the best it is, But this most foul, strange, and unnatural. Paladin quoting the ghost in Act 1, scene 5, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in “Quiet Night in Town,” Part 2 (episode #135).

Dot (Phyllis Love), referring to Paladin: “He killed three men. He’s worse than they are!” Paladin: “No, I had a reason. They were just playing.” “Quiet Night in Town,” Part 2

V

iolence is one of the most recognizable, controversial, and, some might argue, enjoyable elements of the Western. Richard Slotkin has identified violence as the essential aspect of America’s frontier mythology and claims that it functions as a “regenerative” device setting the culture on the correct path

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to Manifest Destiny and then sustaining the mythic identity of the United States as a nation (Gunfighter Nation 10–13). Film scholar Roger Horrocks says that “Violence is at the heart of the western, its raison d’etre. . . . The violence is justified ethically, salving our guilty feelings, but then we can settle down and enjoy it for its own sake!” (77). Writing in the mid-1950s, Robert Warshow argued something quite different: “it is not violence at all which is the ‘point’ of the Western movie,” he said, “but a certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence” (47). Made only a short time before the debut of Have Gun—Will Travel, Warshow’s observation seems especially relevant to how this television series centralizes masculine performance and the protagonist’s threat of violence as important and pleasurable elements of the series—signaled from the get-go in the memorable opening credits discussed in chapter 1. To triumph as a protagonist rather than as an antihero or villain, the Western hero is expected to represent law and restore order or at least demonstrate “utilitarian ethics,” actions and ideals that can be identified as producing good for a number of people (Hada 188). But the meaning and form of law and order are not unvarying in the Western as a genre, and neither is the hero’s use of violence to achieve his ends. Issues of ethics, justice, morality, and guilt cannot help but be raised in a genre in which the killing of men (especially but not exclusively) is expected to come with the territory; we might also expect these questions to have a heightened presence in television at a time when the medium was self-consciously attempting to reorient its Western fare to adults. Have Gun—Will Travel complicated the style and substance of violence of all types, including that of its dandy-hero. Paladin’s use of extralegal violence to secure the rights of the accused and guarantee proper legal process is paradoxical in its motivation and complex in its affect. Yet not until the “Genesis” episode of season 6 is a backstory offered to explain Paladin’s

Violence in the Old West: Fiction and Fact

Whether they involve families or communities, individuals or gangs, or formal organizations or nations, conflicts in the fictional Old West of Have Gun—Will Travel are suffused with acts of violence. With 225 episodes, Have Gun—Will Travel has innumerable scenes depicting violent activities typically associated with the Old West: banditry, Indian warfare, cattle industry conflicts, water and land disputes, and the violence that comes from having “fun” in saloons, from extended brawls to an extremely disturbing moment in “Everyman” (episode #144, Mar. 25, 1961, season 4) when a man attempts to set a drunk on fire. Have Gun—Will Travel differed from many other Westerns by presenting the broader purview of national and international conflict with some unexpected forms of violence: Irish rebels bent on taking over Canada exhort Irish Americans to rob a bank (“Invasion,” episode #188, Apr. 28, 1962, season 5), the Japanese government smuggles two men into the United States to stir up rebellion among Japanese and Japanese American residents (“The Coming of the Tiger,” episode #186, Apr. 14, 1962, season 5), an Austrian duke raises an army to set up yet another monarchy in Mexico (“Duke of Texas,” episode #148, Apr. 22, 1961, season 4), and opposing factions of Hawaiian royalty murderously vie for control of their islands (“International Affair,” episode #107, Apr. 2, 1960, season 3).

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

obsession with the rights of the accused. While the hero’s attempts to secure these rights constitute a liberal antidote to Cold War discourses emphasizing individual violence as a righteous judgment against evil, the violence in Have Gun—Will Travel darkens the Western genre and its picture of American mythic origins considerably. This darkening extends to the visual level, as discussed in chapter 5.

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Though a number of episodes feature conflict between international players, these conflicts take a backseat to the nature and meaning of violence on the U.S. frontier, played out largely between the inhabitants of the West. In this respect, Have Gun—Will Travel exploits the commonplace view that the historical West was an extremely violent, dangerous environment. It should be acknowledged that the relative frequency of violence as well as the mortality rate associated with it in the Old West is a topic debated vigorously among historians (Roth, Maltz, and Eckberg). David Courtwright persuasively argues that the prevalence of an armed male populace was crucial in that the “American habit of gun-toting . . . [turned] ordinary disputes, usually flare-ups between men, into extraordinary and fatal crimes” (43). In his opinion, what made the Old West so “wild”—that is, marked by unusual disorder and violence— was a passing period of homosociality caused by men-first settlement patterns (65). Evan S. Connell adds that “The West was not dull, it was stupendously dull, and when not dull it was murderous” (159). The violence of television Westerns prompted one TV critic to suggest that the very definition of the adult Western was that “they shoots to kill” (qtd. in Rose 60). Numerous fatalities are incurred in Have Gun—Will Travel in the Western set piece of shoot-outs, but fatalities also result from poisonings, mine explosions, knifings and beatings, and, in two unusual cases, from a poisoned blow dart and an Aztec atlatl (spear thrower). Have Gun—Will Travel not only depicted many fatal events but did so with unvarnished results: dead men sprawled grotesquely in the street after being shot in “Deliver the Body” (episode #38, June 7, 1958, season 1) and an Indian massacre conveyed by the hand of a dead rancher raised in rigor mortis beside a table of uneaten food in “The Lady” (episode #49, Nov. 15, 1958, season 2). Writing a few months after the debut of Have Gun—Will Travel, a commentator noted the gap between reactions to

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

violence in real life and those spawned by television Westerns: “Apparently, in the mind of the American public, bloodshed in the living room or modern street is repulsive—but on a dusty trail or in a dirty bar in Dodge City, it is not only acceptable but noble” (Scott 44). In 1959 Fred Remington, a television columnist, told a national conference of English teachers that there were too many Westerns on TV but that understanding the context for their public acceptance was key: “The television industry is programming . . . for a nation whose favorite author is Mickey Spillane” (95, 96). Spillane’s novels were soundly criticized for their bloody, bone-crunching brutality, but they had sold twenty-four million copies by June 1954 when Christopher La Farge condemned Spillane’s detective hero, Mike Hammer, as evil, sadistic, immoral, and a dangerous cultural phenomenon (11). Spillane didn’t think he needed to defend his protagonist, a character who declared at the end of One Lonely Night (1951) that “I lived to kill because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled in the thought of taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their business. . . . I was the evil that opposed other evil” (Spillane 148). The chivalrous Paladin, determined to uphold rather than run roughshod over the rights of the accused, seems far removed from Spillane’s sadist-hero who is willing to serve as judge, jury, and executioner. Nevertheless, like Hammer, Paladin kills again and again, frequently killing more than one man in an episode.1 Typical of the mythologized Western hero of popular media, Paladin’s violence is grounded in his status as a man who fascinates by his style, his deportment. As Warshow says, “A hero is one who looks like a hero” (47). In a world in which violence and death are commonplace, Paladin’s masterful style in handling guns proves central to his business, his personal mission, and his survival. Although Paladin sometimes accomplishes his tasks or assignments without violence (especially in season 1), Have Gun—Will Travel has many episodes that contain three, four, five, or even six killings. Harry Julian Fink

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scripted a number of these episodes filled with lethal violence. Series co-creator Sam Rolfe praised Fink’s work, calling his episodes for Have Gun—Will Travel “the toughest, grimmest, most vicious, wonderful Westerns now being written for television” (qtd. in Whitney, “The Life and Good Times” 21). Not all television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s were as violent as Have Gun—Will Travel. The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, though considered to be an early example of an adult Western, did not have the hero killing anyone until season 3 (Barrett and Bourgin 51). On Bat Masterson, the title hero played by Gene Barry often subdued men with a whack of his cane rather than with a bullet from his gun. In spite of these exceptions, violence in television Westerns became a central motif in a controversy reflecting collective nervousness about the impact of a medium that with moving pictures as well as sound reached into the homes of sixty million Americans. Have Gun—Will Travel played a prominent role in this debate, which involved the general public as well as network and government regulators and extended beyond the borders of the nation, wherever U.S. television was distributed. In 1959 when Swedish television decided to import American television Westerns, their violence-sensitive broadcasting executives rejected Have Gun—Will Travel, opting instead for Gunsmoke (Bjork 311). In the next year (the same year as Rolfe’s remarks), at least one U.S. citizens’ group protested TV violence, including what they observed in Have Gun—Will Travel (“Video’s ‘Citizen Censorship’”). In 1963 a psychosocial study of the relationship between aggressive behavior in children and TV viewing assigned Have Gun—Will Travel a classification of “violent” in its scoring (Eron 194). Moreover, the show appeared to be a dangerous influence on the behavior of grown men, who were participating in “fast-draw” clubs and contests (“Another Fast Draw Artist Wounds”). Most disturbing, a Pennsylvania man was widely reported to have shot at his wife when

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she turned off Have Gun—Will Travel while he was watching (“Six-Gun Galahad” 53). Newton Minow, newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, provided the watershed commentary implicating Westerns in television violence. On May 9, 1961, he delivered the most famous dismissal of television in the era—and perhaps ever—in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. In what would become known as the “Vast Wasteland” speech, Minow bemoaned the lack of quality in television programming. He offered a litany of the powerfully debasing characteristics that dominated the small screen in the name of profit, including “blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men.” As Michele Hilmes has noted, “the repeated emphasis on violence in Minow’s address indicates what would become the dominant note to be sounded by future regulators: the problem with television was primarily its violence” (197). Violence in Have Gun—Will Travel is played out in a moral landscape where armed men are accustomed to using potentially lethal violence to settle conflicts, whether those conflicts are between individual men or groups of men. However, this is a fictional West in which violence is not just between “cowboys and Indians.” The motivations for violence are extremely varied in the series. They include Civil War–related political alignments, racial prejudice or ethnic antagonisms, and group traditions of violence. There is also emphasis on violence that is more individual and psychological, sometimes appearing to be beyond reason, such as the violence of perversity (“sadism”) in “Justice in Hell” and “Three Sons” and the violence of overt insanity in “The Misguided Father,” “Scorched Feather,” and “Sweet Lady of the Moon.” No matter what the motivation, violent conflict in Have Gun—Will Travel often leads to the desire to secure justice through punishing revenge and retribution. In this tradition, people frequently seek their own justice outside of the formal

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procedures of civilized, codified law. Historically, such acts of self-redress were normalized, says Richard Maxwell Brown, by a Western tradition that believed available state-sanctioned jurisprudence systems to be uncertain and inferior to the “simplicity, certainty, and severity of vigilantism” (Strain of Violence 146). Brown says that this reflects something more than a primitive response to an absence of jurisprudence. Instead, “Americans supported a dual system of legal and extralegal justice by adherence to the primary value of repression of crime with little regard for procedural safeguards” (Strain of Violence 148). In this respect, Paladin—the West Point–educated dude, the former Union man, the city slicker—can be seen as being out of step with local tradition and with people who believe in a different kind of justice, one that considers revenge killing or lynching to be appropriate responses to the slowness, corruption, or ineptitude of the law or merely the appropriate reaction to any assault on home and family. This shadow system of “extralegal justice” was associated with the rural way of life but also with southern traditions that informed notions of western self-reliance and self-redress (237–39). The contrast between Paladin’s approach to justice based on elevating the regime of rights and the tradition of self-redress is illustrated in “The Education of Sarah Jane” (episode #157, Sept. 23, 1961, season 5), written by Betty Andrews and directed by Boone. In the mountains, Paladin comes upon a riderless horse with blood on the saddle. He follows the horse to the dead body of a middle-aged man. When the man’s daughter arrives, Paladin learns that her father is the latest homicide victim in a blood feud between two families with southern origins. Over the father’s grave, Paladin recites John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me / For I am involved with mankind.” Sarah Jane Darrow (Jana Engstrom) admonishes him: “Words spoken over the dead should be from the book.” She invokes the wrath of an angry deity: “The Lord my God is a jealous God”

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(Deuteronomy 6:15). Paladin interrupts her string of vengeful Old Testament selections with biblical quotations emphasizing love and forgiveness. Followed by the camera, Sarah Jane suddenly squats down behind her father’s grave and angrily whispers, “Don’t you listen to him, Pa. I’ll get me a Tyler, I’ll get me a Tyler for sure and then you can rest in peace.” She wants to go it alone, but Paladin insists on accompanying her. He reminds her about justice and the law, but Sarah Jane defines her own family tradition: “The law. Well, the Darrows don’t have no truck with the law.” After they come upon the young member of the Tyler clan who shot her father in retribution for killing a member of his family, Paladin restrains Sarah Jane. He decides that they should camp for the night “for therapeutic reasons.” Paladin convinces Sarah Jane to forgive Whitney Tyler (Duane Eddy). In the morning, she allows him to ride away unharmed. Sarah Jane has been educated, and the cycle of revenge is broken. Rooted in stereotypes of rural southern notions of self-redress, this episode’s emphasis on forgiveness is the exception to the rule in Have Gun—Will Travel. It may be tied to gender assumptions about femininity, since a southern woman also turns from vengeful violence in “Lady with a Gun” (episode #108, Apr. 9, 1960, season 3). Far more often in Have Gun— Will Travel, the quest for self-redress becomes pathologically insatiable and insurmountable, as in “The Brothers” (episode #166, Nov. 25, 1961, season 5). One of many tales of human darkness written for the series by Robert E. Thompson, it is exemplary of how far Have Gun—Will Travel will go with characters pathologically immersed in a desire for vengeance—even against members of their own family. An old desert rat, “Possum” Corbin (Paul Hartman) comes upon Paladin and his prisoner, Bram Holden (Buddy Ebsen), in the desert. The old man claims that Holden is his brother Arnie who, years before, stole his common-law Native American wife and his gold. Possum kills Holden/“Arnie” in cold blood but afterward agrees to let Paladin deliver him to the law. On the

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trail, they randomly encounter a man. “That’s Arnie!” the old man exclaims, scrambling for his rifle as Holden’s corpse lies moldering in the back of the wagon. In episodes such as “The Brothers,” “Ambush,” “The Search,” “The Twins,” “One Came Back” “The Sons of Aaron Murdock,” “The Road,” and “Darwin’s Man,” Have Gun—Will Travel uses the interaction between brothers or between fathers and sons as a source of violent conflict resolved more often with death than in reconciliation. The Western as a genre often freed heroic masculinity from family obligations, but a deep nostalgia for family as a wellspring for normality and human solace still governed the actions of many movie protagonists, even in the postwar period. This nostalgic respect for family characterizes Shane in George Stevens’s film of the same name (1952) and many of John Ford’s protagonists, including those in My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), Wagon Master (1950), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). However, the violent consequences of emotionally twisted family ties were emphasized in a number of other big-screen Westerns of the postwar era, including King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), Jacques Tourneur’s Pursued (1947), Rudolph Maté’s The Violent Men (1955), Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and the psychologically dark films of Anthony Mann, among them Winchester 73 (1950), The Furies (1950), and Man of the West (1958) (Kitses 151–57). In this respect, we should not forget that Have Gun—Will Travel’s co-creator, producer, and sometime screenwriter Sam Rolfe co-wrote Mann’s The Naked Spur (1953), a Western described by Jim Kitses as deriving its power from “the resemblance of the five characters to a malignant family bent on murdering each other at the first opportunity” (158).2 Obviously, one influential discourse for this trend of family-centered pathology in postwar Westerns, on both big and small screen, was U.S. culture’s fascination with Freudian psychoanalysis, evidenced in broad swaths of popular culture in the 1940s and 1950s including but not limited to film noir.3

Death and the Ambiguous Dandy

Paladin is an ambiguous figure who raises convoluted issues about murder, money, and the law. His violence is constructed as both commodified and extralegal. This is not atypical of 1950s’ movie and television gunfighters, but Paladin is a different kind of Western hero whose violence relates to his social identity as a dandy. Just as Paladin disappoints the expectations of those in San Francisco who do not think he looks like what a gunfighter should look like, he also disappoints those on the frontier who hire him on the assumption that for money he will do whatever they want—and what they want is “justice” doled out by a fast gun. The fact is that Paladin’s business card sets up the expectation that what he is selling may very well be murder for hire. Paladin’s presentation of his card often elicits a moral judgment against him. “Why that’s terrible,” says one woman in “Lady on the Stagecoach,” “you’re just as bad as those bandits” (episode #57, Jan. 17, 1959, season 2). In “The Eve of St. Elmo” (episode #221, Mar. 23, 1963, season 6), Paladin is called an “imported butcher,” and he soon learns why. Colonel Draco (Warren Stevens) wired Paladin and now expects him to kill two brothers

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

In this context, Paladin’s violence seems less transgressive because of its apparent detachment from primal hurts and family rivalries. His lack of a family of which he can or will speak registers his alienation from origins but accrues weight as a normalizing contrast to the series’ depiction of many deeply destructive relationships that emerge from families, especially all-male ones. These are often ruled by harsh, insensitive fathers whose offspring suffer from the absence of the softening influence of women, especially living mothers. By psychopathologizing family relations, Have Gun—Will Travel obliquely critiqued the postwar family ideal enshrined on television of the 1950s and 1960s as it enhanced the symbolic dichotomy between Paladin and conventional society.

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who crippled him in a gun altercation. Paladin tells Draco, “I don’t hire out for hatred. I don’t hire out for revenge.” Similar language in which the gunfighter-hero denies he is an “assassin” appears in numerous other episodes, including “Charley Red Dog” (episode #91, Dec. 12, 1959, season 3) and “The Prophet” (episode #94, Jan. 2, 1960, season 3). On the frontier, Paladin is frequently assumed to be a bounty hunter. These men are depicted as being particularly despised because they seem to be doing the work of the law, but like Ben Jalisco (Charles Bronson) in the episode of the same name, they murder under the cover of law—preferring to collect the reward by always bringing in a fugitive dead. In “Deliver the Body,” Paladin tells a man who thinks him a bounty hunter, “I don’t sell men. I sell a job of work and that’s all you pay for.” But he does sell men (and the occasional woman) to the law, even if he does not seek to sell them as corpses. Sometimes, as in “Bandit” and “The Trial,” he tries to protect a fugitive from bounty hunters. Although he may succeed in this, he cannot protect his prisoner from the consequences of her or his own actions—or from Paladin’s own code of honor. This core paradox in Paladin’s hunting of men for money is powerfully represented in a noirish episode of remarkable stylistic and tonal control, “Pandora’s Box” (episode #191, May 19, 1962, season 5). In the opening scene, Paladin is hired by a U.S. cabinet member to find the man’s son and bring him in to face justice for murder. After finding Billy Joe Lamont (Martin West) in the high desert, Paladin encounters a wagon full of people who knew his prisoner as a child, when his mother, a “dancehall girl,” raised him. Paladin dismisses the itinerant “clapboard and canvas saloon people” as “dregs, the bottom of the pit, the slag of society,” but Paladin’s young prisoner suggests that these “dregs” think that Paladin is a bounty hunter—a man lower than they are. One of them, a gambler, Lucky Lasky (Ken Curtis), insultingly tells Paladin that he knew he was a bounty hunter because “I could smell it the moment you rode

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

in here.” The saloon people distract Paladin and release Lamont to party with them. Paladin watches from a distance. By the end of the night, Lamont has stabbed a woman in the back, and the saloon people beg Paladin to intervene; he shoots Lamont as the young killer moves in for another murderous attack. Rather than taking the body of the wanted man back for a reward (as a bounty hunter would) or to his upper-crust father, Paladin harshly admonishes the survivors: “You killed him, you bury him. He’s with his own kind now.” Although Paladin has pulled the trigger, he blames the “dregs” of society for releasing Lamont to wreak havoc among them. We can only assume that Paladin’s failure to return Lamont alive for trial/punishment means that he will not be paid. In season 1, Paladin’s relationship to money suggests that it is key to his identity, particularly to maintaining his lifestyle of leisure in San Francisco. While the role of money as the reward for Paladin’s services is a foundational premise for his travels through the West, payment for his violent work is increasingly obscured as the series develops so that he appears to function more on the order of a knight-errant whose travels are primarily in the service of chivalry or idealistic principles. As the series develops, it virtually eliminates the depiction of the exchange of money for Paladin’s services and mutes references to payment, yet his lifestyle does not change. Paladin’s identity as a gunfighter obviously is bound up with his sense of duty as well as his prowess with weapons but also depends on his manners and his application of intellectuality. Although his iconic card seems to define Paladin by his weapon, the chess knight it depicts connotes a broader range of meanings and actions than the automatic recourse to raw, violent power. It is a game piece, the “most versatile piece” on the board, he tells one client. It is logical, then, that Paladin comes to be associated with a mythic game player—the trickster, an archetypal figure who appears as a shape shifter, both salvific and demonic.

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This is represented most aptly in “Gold and Brimstone” (episode #78, June 20, 1959, season 2), in which a feverish old prospector (Eduardo Ciannelli) offers to sell his soul to the devil for help in defending his mine. Paladin—“a fancy black devil”—suddenly appears, stepping lightly out of a puff of smoke, explained later as ignited sulfur deposits. Paladin’s limp-wristed batting away of the smoke adds to the sense of dandy humor—and sexual ambiguity. His performance continues when the miner’s son asks Paladin to tell his father that he is no devil. In close-up, Paladin replies in a soft and lilting voice, “Now why would I do that?” The idea of the dandy who is socially and sexually ambiguous is easily accommodated to the notion of the trickster figure that is not unequivocally heroic or good. Such trickster ambiguity is played upon again and again in Paladin’s representation, especially in season 1 in which he often appears out of nowhere, getting the drop on people, showing up unexpectedly and in surprising ways. “You are not the only trickster in the West,” Paladin tells Dooley (Strother Martin), a down-onhis-luck high-wire walker, as he spirits him out of a dangerous situation (along with a lot of money) in “High Wire” (episode #8, Nov. 2, 1957, season 1). As in “High Wire,” Paladin often resolves disputes and solves mysteries by using his brains instead of bullets. In fulfilling his hired or self-appointed tasks, he does so in ways that often call upon him to use the city manners by which a gentleman has to deal with many people nonviolently. However, to suggest that Paladin is just a violence-avoiding trickster ignores the development of the character over the course of the series. In spite of the intellectual skills and social finesse he brings to the Old West, ritual combat between men is inevitably attached to Paladin’s presence. The gunfighter carries with him the expectation that he will be involved in gunplay or, more specifically, a showdown or walkdown in the street. Occurring less in the series than one might expect, it is given an unusual twist in

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

“Bear Bait” (episode #151, May 13, 1961, season 4), scripted by Robert E. Thompson. In “Bear Bait,” Paladin is forced to defend himself against three young cowboys who are the Western equivalent of one of the iconic signifiers of postwar social anxiety in the United States: juvenile delinquents. Coming into town to collect a wire payment, Paladin encounters these bored bullies looking for fun—and a victim. The locals (including the sheriff) tolerate them because they don’t want to lose the business of the rancher for whom the cowboys work. After he is bushwhacked in the hotel (killing one cowboy in self-defense), Paladin goes to the sheriff demanding that the remaining cowhands be put on trial for assault, but when his witness recants, he is forced into a shoot-out at the point of their employer’s shotgun. The rancher mockingly refers to this drawdown on main street as the “trial” Paladin has demanded. Director Andrew V. McLaglen starts the scene of the face-off in deep focus as Paladin (in the foreground) refuses to look at his opponents but readies his body against impossible odds. As Warshow says the genre demands, the hero’s sense of fair play means that he refuses to draw first (38). McLaglen then captures in unusual low-angle setups Paladin’s fall to the ground as he is wounded. The camera remains on the hero, who is facing away from us. Because our eyes are diverted by the movement of a local girl running to aid the gunfighter, we may be surprised by Paladin’s sudden, unexpected shooting of the rancher who, startled that the man in black has survived, suddenly turns his gun on him. It all happens very quickly, but three are dead. Focused on the gracefulness of Paladin, the thrilling pace and stylistic freshness of the direction, and the satisfaction of seeing bullies get their comeuppance, this scene illustrates the overdetermined way in which the series cultivated audience acceptance of—and pleasure from—its violence. Although his actions are always justified as self-defense, Paladin sometimes becomes a truly frightening figure who

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is so implacable in his quest for justice that he may indeed seem to be the thirteenth god he describes in “The Wager” (episode #55, Jan. 3, 1959, season 2). In this episode, Paladin tells a story to a gunfighter who is following him in the desert: Twelve gods learned that there was another god and invited him to dinner, but they did so to their “everlasting

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Paladin as intimidating harbinger of death. Richard Boone in costume.

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sorrow” because this god was death. Paladin’s intimidating black-clad presence is often read as a harbinger of death, as in “Eve of St. Elmo” when a man remarks that he looks “like an undertaker” (episode #221, Mar. 23, 1963, season 6). Indeed, those who summon Paladin are not immune from his threat. In “Love of a Bad Woman” (episode #106, Mar. 26, 1960, season 3) and several other episodes, he kills the man who hires him. Whose Violence? Whose Law?

With a varied repertoire of skills related to his dandy origins, Paladin updates the chivalric ideal that can be summarized as the desire to protect the weak and prevent injustice. In Have Gun—Will Travel, that injustice often takes the form of lynch law, a land (or water) grab, or the curtailment of rights—especially those of minorities, immigrants, or people down on their luck. Paladin’s clients call on him to perform a task, and his jobs often focus on the individual—whether finding missing persons, protecting accused men from lynching, or bringing escaped criminals to justice. Nevertheless, he is often led to working for, negotiating with, or opposing powerful agents, often commercial or institutional—cattle barons, railroads, even governments. Historically, these were often important forces in violent confrontations that resulted in what Richard Maxwell Brown calls the “Western Civil War of Incorporation.” Brown argues that between the 1860s and 1900, “there were thousands of gunfighters and thousands of gunfights” in the West (No Duty to Retreat 40). In spite of their historical importance, gunfighters, he argues, have been stripped of their social and ideological implications by mythology, which represses the politically charged conflicts between “incorporation” or “glorified” and “grassroots” or “resistant” gunfighters and the factions they represented (40).

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As a mythologizing discourse, American cultural texts have erased the political (Republicans vs. Democrat) and commercial (big capital vs. small) alignments of many of the most famous gunfighters who were “incorporation” rather than “grassroots” or “resister” gunmen. The former were hired by those bent on “the commercial and financial conquest of the cattle-studded prairies” (Brown, No Duty to Retreat 60); the latter rose up out of the ranks of Democrats, populists, or freedom-loving outliers who did not look forward to the day when the West would become modernized and ordered (45–46). In keeping with the mythologizing force of Westerns, Have Gun—Will Travel represses the political and commercial implications of Paladin’s actions and instead emphasizes the personal. In spite of this, the series is often critical of big capital, which works to monopolize every valuable resource in the West. In a real-world historical context, a gunfighter as expensive as Paladin ($1,000–2,000) could only ever function as an “incorporation” gunfighter serving these big interests, but because his principles outweigh his material self-interest, he often works for nothing or switches sides, becoming a “resister” gunfighter, as in “The Tender Gun” (episode #124, Oct. 22, 1960, season 4) when he helps Mrs. Smuggley (Jeanette Nolan), a feisty shotgun-toting sheriff who is threatened by railroad gunfighters who want to wrest her land away from her by force. Dandy Justice

What happens when the dandy is placed within a locale where set boundaries of civilized behavior no longer have pride of place and, in fact, good manners—the foundation for lawful social relations—are almost nonexistent? While it is common for a Western hero to live by his own code, Paladin’s actions perpetuate a dandy-like gesture in his idealizing the law and elevating abstract justice above a world that he has otherwise made ironic. His dandy values, including aesthetic refinement,

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

appreciation for the protocols of etiquette, and a sense of superiority, also govern his relationship to justice and to violence. On the frontier, although he may get the occasional chance to appreciate a good meal (“Gun Shy,” episode #29, Mar. 29, 1958, season 1), a fine painting (“The Lady on the Wall,” episode #101, Feb. 20, 1960, season 3), or a lovely woman (“The Gospel Singer,” episode #161, Oct. 21, 1961, season 5), Paladin’s dandyesque refinement is transferred largely to the domain of justice and expressed in his unyielding support for the protocols of jurisprudence. Paladin’s de haut en bas attitude and his actions represent a complex nexus of signification around the issue of law and lawlessness, civilization and savagery. It is expected that a Western hero mediates between savagery and civilization, but Paladin emerges as more than a formulaic figure. He brings a dandy’s finesse and sense of civilized refinement to the West. The “fastidious Mr. Paladin” does not often dress like a dandy on the frontier, but he always brings a dandy’s refinement to questions concerning the proper form of justice and its protocols for preserving democratic rights. Not interested in merely controlling crime or meting our retribution, he seeks to further the procedures of the state that demand utmost respect for the rights of the accused. Paladin is oriented toward upholding abstract principles of justice (an ideal of the democratic republic focused on procedures and protections of the law) rather than a manifestation of the real (a set of codes that control or punish actual behaviors). As a result, he often finds himself at odds with a frontier society in which values centered on the real— that is, on family, the local, and the personal—trump social values based on law and order (Brown, No Duty to Retreat 45). As a dandy, Paladin has a relationship with justice that is complicated because he makes an art of his profession as a gunfighter, an art that is ironic since it is dependent on his use of extralegal violence to further a refined mode of justice. Given this, the central paradox of Have Gun—Will Travel is in offering

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a dandy-hero who knows the law, philosophizes about it, and is devoted to its principles and formal procedures but uses his gun to kill men extralegally. Although he is sometimes put on trial for killings he had nothing to do with, only once, in “Deliver the Body,” do we see him arraigned or asked to account before a judge or jury for his violence. Paladin’s views on justice are not shared by many of the Westerners he meets, but he shares one central belief with almost all other citizens he encounters of the frontier: the accepted American principle that a man has no duty to retreat or flee from a threatening adversary. “Gunfighter’s pride” a man calls it in “Everyman” (episode #144, Mar. 25, 1961, season 4), but violent self-defense as the right of the American male is enshrined in centuries-old judicial precedent and played out in midcentury television fiction through its heroes (Brown, No Duty to Retreat 3–37). Thus, after killing in self-defense, Paladin can just ride away. In this respect, Paladin’s defense of the accused is extraordinary, mythical, and strikingly in contrast with the common practice in the nineteenth-century West in which lawmen frequently gave up their prisoners to enraged constituents who threatened violence (Leonard, Lynching 107–8, 120). In fact, protecting a lawbreaker/accused prisoner can make Paladin’s dandyesque elevation of justice an abstraction that seems to have an inverse relationship to justice and real-world fairness, as in “The Man Who Lost” (episode #70, Apr. 25, 1959, season 2), directed by Ida Lupino and scripted by Harry Julian Fink. In one of the series’ more disturbing meditations on contrasting views of justice, Paladin is hired to find a man, Benjamin Coey (Mort Mills), suspected of murdering a rancher and attacking (raping?) his wife. The woman’s two brothers have hired Paladin to find the accused man, who upon capture claims over and over that he is innocent, falsely accused. John Wildhorse (Rodolfo Acosta), the Native American tracker who helped Paladin find the accused, will not allow his wife and

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

Coey to be in the same room because he believes that Coey is guilty. Paladin refuses to turn over his prisoner for vengeance to one of the brothers, Will Gage (Ed Nelson). The other brother, Joe (Jack Elam), brings his sister to identify her attacker. Coey is shackled to a bed after having tried to escape. Mrs. Bryson (Pat Silver) recognizes him as her assailant. He makes a lewd remark to her, seeming to reveal both his guilt and lack of remorse. Paladin’s reactions to this scene indicate that he strongly suspects the man is guilty. For the woman’s brothers, the appearance of guilt is everything. They attempt to buy Coey from Paladin with more money; when Paladin refuses, they try to take Coey by force. After Paladin shoots them down, leaving Joe dead and Will wounded, Wildhorse asks Paladin, “This thing you talk about, this justice. Do you think it was worth it? Worth all this?” Paladin says grimly in close-up, “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have done it.” Paladin is high-minded, but he exercises extraordinarily savage violence in the service of civilization. We are not offered a satisfying catharsis in this episode; instead we are offered a troubling conclusion. Has the hero prevented lawlessness or just impeded another kind of law—of retributive justice that is just as “American” as Paladin’s? Terry J. Aladjem has argued that “When Americans say they want justice, they most often mean something angry and punitive. . . . Such justice would address the more immediate feelings that arise when a family member’s murdered, one’s home invaded, or one’s faith is challenged” (3). If this is so, then we understand the actions of Mrs. Bryson’s brothers and may even empathize with them, but Paladin defends a different mode of justice through his extralegal fast draw. Through violence, he protects democratic justice in the abstract. In this type of justice, Coey’s judgment must come from those whom civilization regards as upholding “the proper moral and emotional distance between the judgment and the punishment” (134). Vengeance has been defeated, but John’s question to Paladin suggests the high price paid for the

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gunfighter’s idealism. His absolutist devotion to principles no matter what the context may represent killing power exercised in the defense of civilized law, but considered from populist traditions of self-redress, that devotion also has an edge of injustice, especially if the viewer considers Mrs. Bryson, whose reaction to Paladin’s violent defense of Coey’s right to due process and a fair trial we are not allowed to see. Judge Lynch Is in Session

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In Westerns, revenge often extends from individuals or families into shared acts of violence in larger groups and communities that seek quick justice or an entertaining spectacle of punishment, as in the people’s ad hoc courtroom of “Judge Lynch.” Lynching is often defined as any illegal execution carried out by a group, whether a spontaneous or well-organized mob, a posse, a kangaroo court, or a vigilante committee. In the Old West, lynching by hanging could function as a harsh public warning against the criminal class. It was also used as torture to extract a confession before death by a repeated process of partial strangulation of the victim (Leonard, Lynching 109–12). However, illegal summary executions occurred in the region in many different forms other than hanging (Gonzales-Day 1). Lynching served as one of the primary mechanisms for dealing with serious crime in the Old West, and the notion of a people’s sovereignty was transferred to nonelected, nongovernmental groups. Kangaroo courts sprang up outside of the U.S. judicial system, supposedly first in the gold fields and mining camps of California where ad hoc assemblies of white men meted out justice to lawbreakers. These courts were sometimes popular in territories or towns with contested or faraway government centers, as was the case with the People’s Court in Denver, Colorado (Leonard, Lynching 18). However, contrary to what we might assume, these approaches to crime were not confined to the most remote or primitive pioneer communities.

Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

As a populist approach to crime control, lynching reflected broadly held notions of justice in the nineteenth-century West that was praised by some historians, including Frederick Jackson Turner (9). Lynching was often hotly debated in the West, with newspapers being a primary means of expressing local opinion. Yet, lynching continued in the region into the twentieth century. As demonstrated by “The Man Who Lost” and illustrated across the spectrum of six seasons, Have Gun—Will Travel is virtually obsessed with the hero’s response to revenge killing, extralegal vigilantism, and lynching that represent this “dual system of legal and extralegal justice” and the notion of a people’s justice. In Have Gun—Will Travel, lynching is shown not to be the justifiable result of good citizens banding together to respond to an absence of a viable legal system, as it is in the paradigmatic Western novel of 1902, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (320–22). Instead, the dangerous results of a people’s justice are pointedly shown. This occurs memorably in the darkly comedic episode “Incident at Barrasca Bend” (episode #66, Mar. 21, 1959, season 2), written by Jay Simms. Paladin arrives in a wilderness mining camp, a tent city where he is soon put on trial for the murder of a miner recently found dead. No one will listen to Paladin’s arguments of innocence, but then exciting news interrupts his trial: A “real live woman,” a “yellowhaired woman,” has arrived in nearby Juniper. The entire jury scrambles onto a wagon to go see this woman. Paladin and the mayor/presiding “judge” (Jacques Aubuchon) are the only ones left in camp. “Well, what happens now?” asks Paladin. The mayor replies, “Case dismissed. . . . I knew you were innocent. . . . I found this [dated paper] in your saddlebag. . . . Shows you were telling the truth.” “Why the trial?” asks Paladin. The mayor explains that “things were dulling down a little. You know we hold a kangaroo court on all strangers. . . . Just funning a little, you know.” Later the actual murderer is revealed, and the mayor invites Paladin to stay and play pinochle with

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him after they hang the killer. But Paladin demurs, stating that he is “not quite sure about the rules of this community. Winning might be a capital offense.” In “Posse” (episode #82, Oct. 3, 1959, season 3) Paladin is actually lynched, but he wiggles out of the noose before it strangles him. He is brought back to the hanging tree, but in the interim the actual murderer has unwittingly revealed evidence of his crime to the posse, which was in too big a hurry to take Paladin back to town for trial. The posse members apologize for their mistake. Paladin issues a stern warning, but they proceed to lynch the man who accused him. As the gunfighter rides into the foreground, the man’s cries for help and then the sound of a slap on the horse’s rump reverberate over the prairie. Paladin stops and looks back. We do not see the body of the executed man swinging, but we do see the horse that was under him galloping riderless across the landscape. The men have learned nothing about the importance of due process. Paladin’s dandy-gunfighter is made mythic because he uses his gun in the service of his code of honor and in pursuit of justice, but the gun becomes an extension of the dandy’s social illusions. He cannot guarantee justice. Why? Because his elevation of the protocols of justice into the realm of perfectionism (by being the fastest of the fast draws) is applied within a social order in which the possibility of a fair trial is shown to be virtually impossible. This point is demonstrated in “The Fifth Bullet” (episode #196, Sept. 29, 1962, season 6), where Paladin waits at the prison gates for John Bartlett (Ben Johnson) to be released after eight years. Paladin delivered Bartlett to the law and declared “I promise you a fair trial,” but a rich man’s money led to Bartlett’s conviction even though he was innocent. If the innocent are sometimes found guilty, the guilty are easily set free, as in “A Drop of Blood” (episode #167, Dec. 2, 1961, season 5) when an appeals court judge is bribed so that a convicted outlaw is freed to harass the honest man who testified against him. In episode after episode of Have Gun—Will Travel, we see

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legal and kangaroo courts, posses and lawmen, politicians and the rich all distorting the law and destroying due process. It is no wonder that those accused of crimes (guilty or not) mightily resist Paladin’s efforts to “bring them to justice.” One historian suggests that the odds of hanging were so high in the Old West that “the bad man preferred being shot with a small chance for freedom than surrendering” (Hendricks 41). Paladin pursues many fugitives already judged guilty. Among them is Manfred Holt (Charles Bronson) in “The Outlaw” (episode #2, Sept. 21, 1957, season 1). He wants to “die by a man’s hand” instead of being “hung at a county fair with them hawking the buttons off my shirt.” Paladin understands the impulse to resist, just as he understands the desire for self-redress and revenge. Thus, in keeping with big-screen Westerns such as High Noon (1952), the hero of Have Gun—Will Travel often is less interested in judging the perpetrators of violence than in berating the passive bystanders who allow it or, as Paladin says in one episode, “the ten thousand who will stand by and let it happen.” These bystanders who gather to enjoy spectacles of violence think of themselves as civilized, but Paladin calls them “modern savages” (“Episode in Laredo,” episode #80, Sept. 19, 1959, season 3). Within such a socially dystopian West, Paladin’s relationship to differing notions of the law and the problem of public order is made even more acute by prejudice and fear of difference. Those tensions and the ethnic and racial assumptions on which they are based will be examined in the next chapter, for whether spoken or unspoken, relatively benign or corrosively destructive, they also lead to violence and injustice.

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Chapter 4

Liberalism, Gradualism, and the Failure of Human Solidarity

You know, Paladin, I guess everyone’s gotta have someone to hate. Now the gringo, he hates the Mexican, the Mexican hates the Apache, the Apache—[laughs] he hates both of them. Joselito Kincaid (Robert Carricart) in “Quiet Night in Town,” Part 1 (episode #134)

Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the “land of the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won’t let other people testify.] Mark Twain, Roughing It (391)

H

ave Gun—Will Travel displays considerable interest in the contact and conflict between various ethnicities and races in an Old West that is not multicultural but is not merely Anglo-Saxon either. The world depicted in Have Gun—Will Travel

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moves beyond historian Elliott West’s claim that “pioneers of the picture tube were almost entirely of Anglo-Saxon origin. When other elements were allowed, they usually were used as dashes of color in the writers’ desperate search for something— anything—to make a plot different. . . . But such characters enlivened the plots precisely because audiences did not expect to see them. . . . If sturdy pioneers had to grapple with many challenges, learning to live with a diversity of cultures and beliefs was not one of them” (74). This view might be applicable to some television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it is a picture that Have Gun—Will Travel complicates. Rather than suggesting the triumph of a monoculture of Anglo-Saxonism, Paladin’s interactions in the Old West emphasize the promise and challenge of a more diverse society. Although this fictional Old West is not without tensions and tragedies rooted in racial, religious, or ethnic antagonisms, Paladin himself offers an exemplary model of “learning to live with a diversity of cultures and beliefs.” He is shown appreciating the customs and traditions of a wide range of immigrants as well as of Mexicans and Native American tribes. He speaks several languages, including Chinese. He knows the customs of Romanies as well as of Armenians, whom he proclaims to be “the best people in the world.” He participates in Jewish religious ceremonies (“A Drop of Blood,” episode #167, Dec. 2, 1961, season 5) as well as Buddhist ones (“The Monster of Moon Ridge,” episode #63, Feb. 28, 1959, season 2). Paladin is comfortable with difference of many kinds, but Have Gun—Will Travel does not show a West in which tolerance and respect—especially across racial and ethnic boundaries—is the norm. In episode after episode we see inscribed the difficult process of moving beyond racism and intolerance within deeply distrustful communities. Racism and prejudice are the objects of Paladin’s scorn, as they often block the formation of an inclusive society, with reconciliation across differences tentative at best. Co-creator Sam Rolfe remarked that Have Gun—Will

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Travel was deeply involved in explicating prejudice as a moral issue. Addressing prejudice as part of the drama of “human failure,” the show often faced the displeasure of CBS (Grams and Rayburn 65), which depended heavily on nonurban viewers and southern affiliates, something the network would seek to change by the late 1960s.1 In a series suggesting a culturally, ethnically, and racially varied frontier experience, cross-cultural understanding occasionally emerges as a possibility, even though human solidarity—whether at the level of family, community, or nation—is an elusive goal in Have Gun—Will Travel. In spite of highlighting racial contempt and violence, especially as focused on relations between Anglos and Native Americans, many episodes of Have Gun—Will Travel trace emotional and economic transactions across ethnic boundaries as a model for a vital forward-looking national culture. A more hopeful portrait of the ability of non-Anglo-Saxons, especially immigrants, to make a home in the United States is offered in “The Fatalist” (episode #118, Sept. 10, 1960, season 4), directed by Buzz Kulik and scripted by Shimon Wincelberg. In the dining room of the Hotel Carlton, a young woman with big eyes, long braids, and a shy manner interrupts Paladin’s meal. Rivka Shotness (Roxanne Berard) has Paladin’s card. His name appealed to her because “in the holy tongue it has a very favorable meaning, pala—wonder, din—judgment.” She is referring to Hebrew, and we learn her family is from Russia.2 Rivka recounts to Paladin and his female dinner companion how in spite of her family’s current troubles in Calabasas, California, she agrees with her father that they are much better off than they were in the Old Country, where they were “surrounded by murderers.” As historians Robert V. Vine and John Faragher note, prejudicial treatment of foreigners was endemic in the West toward the end of the nineteenth century. They observe that “the residents of small western towns developed intense localism as a shield against unwelcome change” including the assimilation of new immigrants (158). In “24 Hours at North Fork” (episode

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#36, May 24, 1958, season 1), Mennonites provide refuge to a young woman (Jacqueline Scott) sold by her drunkard father to a cruel gunman. The only store in town refuses to sell to the Mennonites, but they manage to overcome the distrust of their neighbors with the help of Paladin and by demonstrating their usefulness to the community: the Mennonites generously share their blight-resistant seed from the old country with their Anglo neighbors.3 Instead of clinging to a presumption of Anglo-Saxon superiority, in Have Gun—Will Travel different skill sets and traditions are brought to bear to resolve conflict and improve the lives of all, no matter what their ethnicity, race, or religion. The blending of those of different cultures often includes romance, positively portrayed as long as it is between different ethnicities or nationalities rather than different races. In “24 Hours at North Fork,” it is implied that Tildy Buchanan, the young Anglo woman who finds a home among the Mennonites, will marry one of them, an attentive young farmer. In the comedic “Helen of Abajinian” (episode #16, Dec. 28, 1957, season 1), scripted by Gene Roddenberry, an Armenian immigrant accedes to his daughter’s choice of a husband, a rawboned Texas (Anglo) cowboy. The father says proudly, “I am a liberal man.” The bride has pursued the cowboy unashamedly as her choice, and the young man’s knowledge of cattle suggests that he can improve upon the thriving agricultural enterprise established by his in-laws. The couple’s sexual compatibility promises new generations of ambitious, hardworking Americans. Hispanic and Anglo couplings are also naturalized by the series, with the former often portrayed as adding refinement to the latter, as in “The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk” (episode #42, Sept. 27, 1958, season 2) in which a socially awkward California rancher (Charles Bronson) needs Paladin’s help to court his highborn Latina neighbor, Maria de Castro (Grace Raynor). By way of contrast, interracial sexuality between AngloSaxons and Indians is usually shown to be tragic in its results,

Intercultural Frontiers and Racial Justice

Although sharing an interest with other adult Westerns in the psychological implications of ethnic and racial conflict, Have Gun—Will Travel takes advantage of two distinct realms in which to present these interactions. The city of San Francisco is aligned with cosmopolitanism and the intersection of cultures, especially Chinese and white. The open frontier of desert,

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especially for the woman—whether Anglo or Indian. The white men involved in these relations frequently display neurotic or psychotic tendencies, such as in “The Prophet” (episode #94, Jan. 2, 1960, season 3), written by frequent Have Gun—Will Travel scripter Shimon Wincelberg. In this episode, an army colonel turns renegade after soldiers rape his Indian wife. He leads the Apache against the U.S. army. The colonel’s desire for revenge turns into a full-blown display of insanity, and the Apache kill him. Often, sexual relationships between whites and Indians produce alienated, aggressive, or psychotic male offspring, as in “The Trial,” “The Long Hunt,” and “Scorched Feather.” The most extreme result is portrayed in “Scorched Feather” (episode #61, Feb. 14, 1959, season 2), in which Paladin encounters a young dandy in San Francisco with tastes as refined as his own. The elegant young man asks Paladin to defend his father, a former army scout (Lon Chaney Jr.), against a “ComancheShoshone” warrior who, it turns out, is the young man’s own alter ego. The young man cannot reconcile himself to the role his father played in decimating his mother’s tribe and contributing to her death. His other personality reflects a psychoneurotic split between his white and Indian selves. This episode appeared a little more than a month before Time magazine noted that “schizophrenic half-breeds” were not uncommon in “the Psychological Western,” a “subspecies” of the adult Western (“Six-Gun Galahad” 52).

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prairie, ranches, forts, mining camps, isolated homesteads, and small towns features a number of different ethnic and racial players sometimes locked in long-standing bitter conflict, most often disputing the land itself. In looking at what the series does with the Old West as a land disputed by various claimants, historian Robert Utley’s definition of the Western frontier should be considered. He says that the West was “not a single frontier line, white on one side but lacking any discernible color at all on the other, but of groupings of frontier zones in which white and red mingled” (qtd. in Namias 12). Referencing the fundamental conflict between whites and Indians involved in Manifest Destiny, Have Gun—Will Travel generally differentiates (with broad and sometimes uncertain strokes) one Native American tribe from another: Paiute from Comanche, Navajo from Apache, Nez Perce from Lakota (called “Sioux” in the series). Utley’s definition can be extended to show how Have Gun—Will Travel explores intercultural frontiers in a fictional Old West in which the zones go beyond that defined by white and Indian. There are many different groups and zones, with freed black slaves from the southern United States, immigrants from Europe—English, French, Irish, Italian, Swedish, Russian, Romani (Gypsy), and Greek—as well as immigrants from Asia and Australia, all participating in the frontier experience of the Old West. This is in keeping with statistics on the nineteenth-century West that suggest that a number of states had major or significant minority populations of immigrants. David Courtwright notes that peasants from China and Europe (especially Italy and Ireland) were often “brought to work on frontier mining and construction projects” because of their capacity for “sustained physical labor” (50). The result, he claims, was that the West was “the country’s most ethnically diverse region. . . . In 1870 roughly a third of the population in California was foreignborn; in Idaho and Arizona, more than half” (50). These states and others also had significant populations of Mexicans and

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Native Americans whose lands were either coveted or already taken over by the United States or powerful corporate entities (such as the railroad), whether by purchase, treaty, or illegal seizure. Conflict with those who are perceived as different becomes one of the primary tropes in Have Gun—Will Travel’s depiction of the U.S. social order in the Old West. As a result, immigrants as well as native-born Americans who are people of color (brown, black, red, and yellow) are often marked as objects of ethnic, religious, or racial prejudice that is acted out on a continuum—from veiled disapproval to lynching. In Have Gun—Will Travel, the question of how to cope with this range of prejudicial acts is presented in ideological terms that implicitly or overtly call for the victims, especially minorities, to be patient, to endure, to trust U.S. systems of justice and depend on gradualism rather than fight for immediate relief. Paladin becomes the voice of gradualism in “The Coming of the Tiger” (episode #186, Apr. 14, 1962, season 5), in which he tells a young Japanese American that it may take twenty to fifty years for his people to attain equality in the United States. While Paladin’s statement implicitly acknowledges that the problem of racism is deeply engrained, it represents the position of gradualism soon to be denounced by Martin Luther King Jr. in his “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, as a solution to segregation. On at least one occasion, Have Gun—Will Travel suggests that “white” racists may be hiding their own racial secrets, as in one of the most masterful and disturbing tales in the entire series, “Quiet Night in Town,” a two-part episode directed by Buzz Kulik (episodes #134 and #135, Jan. 7 & 14, 1961, season 4) and written by Harry Julian Fink. Paladin is taking a middle-aged sheepherder, Joselito Kincaid (Robert Carricart), to face the law. Kincaid is accused of murdering three cowboys who burned sheep in Montana. They stop for the night in Jody Town, a small hamlet in southwest Texas. Because there is no

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jail, Paladin is forced to chain his prisoner in a general store, where Kincaid absentmindedly eats crackers out of a barrel. When Kincaid says that he is thirsty and wants to have a drink in the saloon next door, Paladin agrees. In the saloon four bored young men confront Kincaid, who is of Mexican-Irish ancestry. This confrontation represents a common ethnic element to the historical struggle all over the trans-Mississippi West between Anglo cattlemen and Hispanic or Basque sheepherders, a struggle in which ethnicity is usually repressed in most movie and television Westerns (Vine 129– 30). Rather than meekly accept harassment, Kincaid baits the leader, Joe Culp (Sydney Pollack): “Now this fellow here, he reminds me of a man I used to know down south Texas, a quarter-blood Apache. Not enough to make him an Indian but just enough to make him afraid other people might think he was. Yeah, you got that same look around the eyes, mister. Is that why you gotta find somebody like me to hate?” Paladin tries to protect Kincaid from lynching, but he is overwhelmed, beaten senseless, his gun hand smashed. Before the men can string him up, Kincaid spits at Culp, who shoots the handcuffed man point-blank, leaving him dead in the street. In the historical Old West, men who lynched usually were not punished; they were too much a part of the (voting) community to elicit much enthusiasm from elected officials to bring them to justice (Leonard, Lynching 2, 120–21). In this story, the local deputy sheriff does not want more violence in his town but is helpless to stop Paladin, who, quoting the ghost’s “murder most foul” speech in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, embarks on what looks like a quest for revenge. Unable to draw with his smashed right hand, Paladin confronts Kincaid’s killer in the saloon. Culp says he’s sorry he shot the sheepherder, but his apology is shockingly casual in tone. Paladin reacts with what can only be characterized as thymotic anger, his fierce rage boiling over.4 Turning Kincaid’s observation that Culp looks as if he were “quarter-blood Apache”

Chinatown and the Lure of the Exotic East

If racism and Paladin’s violent response to it on the frontier can have fatal consequences, cosmopolitan San Francisco is not immune from bigotry either. Racialized disdain for Chinese immigrants leaks out in Paladin’s beautiful home, the elegant Hotel Carlton. This is brought to the foreground in “Hey Boy’s Revenge” (episode #31, Apr. 12, 1958, season 1), directed by veteran film director Lewis Milestone. Paladin returns from a trip to discover that Hey Boy, or Kim Chan, has been missing from work for days. No one has checked on him. The Hotel Carlton hired another Chinese porter to replace him because, as the desk clerk tells Paladin in a matter-of-fact tone, “It’s not important. These people are easily replaced.” Paladin presses the issue and threatens to take his business elsewhere. Armed with Hey Boy’s address, he seeks to find out what has happened to a man who is his friend as well as the hotel’s employee. As this episode suggests, narrow-minded Anglos in the Old West often practiced everyday racism in discrimination against

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into an insult in language sufficiently coded to pass television censorship, Paladin says, “I give you the same chance I gave him, live and stand trial. I give you that chance, though you are a pig and a half-breed Apache squaw in your tribe eats with pigs.” Paladin seems to be saying that Culp’s part-Apache mother fucked (“eats with”) pigs and produced him (“a pig”) or perhaps even that he is a mother-fucker. Culp draws. Paladin, reaching for his revolver with his undamaged left hand, shoots him dead. Paladin’s taunting of Culp into a gunfight is the kind of act that the series reserves almost exclusively for criminals or lawmen who abuse their power. Moreover, Paladin uses a racist taunt, confirming the observation by Jack Smith that the hero of Have Gun—Will Travel often seems to fight evil with evil, an approach proudly assumed by Mickey Spillane’s violent detective hero Mike Hammer (see chapter 3).

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and exploitation of nonwhites. However, racism also was politicized in discriminatory policy aimed at selected immigrants, especially the Chinese and, later, the Japanese. The immigration of Chinese females was cut off almost completely in 1875 to prevent the growth of the Chinese population in the United States, and immigration of all Chinese was banned in 1882 for a period of ten years by federal legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act (Courtwright 155–56). Steering clear of acknowledging legalized discrimination, Have Gun—Will Travel instead explores inter-Chinese conflict motivated by the illicit activities of tongs in “Lady of the Fifth Moon” (episode #222, Mar. 30, 1963, season 6) and “Hatchet Man” (episode #103, Mar. 5, 1960, season 3). In the latter, written by Shimon Wincelberg and directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, a leader in the Chinese community, Hoo Yea (played by Korean American Philip Ahn), points to racially motivated danger to Chinese immigrants. He explains to Paladin how any violence in San Francisco’s Chinatown involving Paladin—as a white man—might spark “rage against my people,” implying the possibility of anti-Chinese riots. Riots actually took place in San Francisco in 1877 and in Denver in 1880 (Leonard, Lynching 132–35). Nevertheless, the episode quickly moves into depicting the cultural cliché of Chinese gangs profiting off vice; they threaten the life of one stubbornly honest Chinese American (and Christian) detective, Joe Tsin (Benson Fong). Have Gun—Will Travel depends on racial stereotypes but also reflects a changing U.S. attitude toward nonwhites. Christina Klein argues that these changes were driven by U.S. international policy. From the 1940s, the U.S. government encouraged an altered collective consciousness, emphasizing the need to reshape feelings as well as thinking about people the world over who might play an important role as U.S. allies in the Cold War (21–23). Klein suggests that U.S. policy also recognized the need to improve the integration of minorities at home because “the domestic project of integrating Asian and African

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Americans within the United States was intimately bound up with the international project of integrating the decolonizing nations in the capitalist ‘free world’ order” (226). Applying these concerns to television, Charles Winick remarked in 1959, in Taste and the Censor in Television, that “If media like television and films had been more effective in representing the Negro’s actual role in the daily life of America, thus helping to create an atmosphere hospitable for integration, there might have been less need for the complicated explanations by official spokesmen to other countries at the time of the Little Rock incident in 1957” (18). Klein says that the movement toward cultural pluralism in the postwar United States was influenced by this “geopolitical imperative” and that it especially impacted the discursive ethnicization of Chinese Americans, whose difference came to be represented “in cultural rather than racial terms” (228). Klein sees this change evident in many “middlebrow” cultural discourses that resulted in “new meanings” for Asianness (226). Klein’s argument certainly seems to find support in Have Gun— Will Travel. Paladin has an obvious respect for the culture and a special affinity for Chinese art. His sexual attraction to Asian females is normalized. On the rare occasion when they are shown, Asian families are depicted as close-knit and caring. In spite of these positives, the core relationship between Paladin and Hey Boy foregrounds troubling questions of race, power, and liberalism. As the only other continuing character in the series, Hey Boy is an important and sympathetic persona, but with the exception of the episodes “Hatchet Man,” “Gun Shy,” and “Hey Boy’s Revenge,” he appears exclusively in sequences set in the Hotel Carlton. Functioning as Paladin’s personal assistant, Hey Boy is energetic and hardworking. He is also intelligent: he is the only person ever shown besting Paladin at chess and has a lively sense of humor. The two men love to trade quotations from the wisdom of the Orient and speak Chinese to each other.

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Paladin and Hey Boy in San Francisco.

Paladin describes Hey Boy as his “good friend,” but Hey Boy is undeniably servile. He is stereotyped as an acquisitive, desexualized, and physically weak Asian male. He speaks in mildly fractured English, and Paladin sometimes ridicules Hey Boy’s lambdacism, his inability to pronounce r’s (that come out as l’s), a trait often assigned to Chinese in television programs of the period (Hamamoto 50). Paladin’s superiority to Hey Boy

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in all matters sexual is also emphasized in many episodes, as in the introduction to “The Waiting Room” (see chapter 2). Yet Paladin is extremely dependent on Hey Boy, who locates jobs for the gunfighter, assesses clients, and often cleverly protects Paladin from annoying people (including discarded lovers). Hey Boy undermines the idea of the hero’s self-sufficiency, but the series constructs a permanently subordinate position for Hey Boy while also constructing Paladin as a masterful, privileged white male. As noted in the introduction, Kim Li replaced Hey Boy in most of season 4 as Paladin’s helper/assistant. Called “Hey Girl” at the hotel, she is young and beautiful. She speaks perfect English and tends to poke fun at Paladin’s veneer of masculine control. She replies sarcastically with “eternally master,” reminds him of his many debts (and debtors’ prison), and, as noted in chapter 2, regales him with the logic of why he needs to marry. Both Hey Girl and Hey Boy typify how American film and television of the period often created domestic and social intimacy between different classes and races by blurring the boundaries between friend and domestic servant. Asian domestic help also appeared in other television series such as Bonanza (1959–73) as well as the sitcoms Bachelor Father (1957–62) and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969–72). In Have Gun—Will Travel and many other popular entertainments, fascination with the Far East is often made sexy, secured through an eroticism dependent upon beautiful East Asian, South Asian, and Pacific Island women. These women are drawn into Paladin’s orbit to confirm his universal sexual appeal. In the series’ adaptation of Jules Verne’s book Around the World in 80 Days (1873), Paladin flirts with a Southeast Asian woman, Princess Aouda (Arlene McQuade), until Phileas Fogg (Patric Knowles) finally proposes to her (“Fogg Bound,” episode #129, Dec. 3, 1960, season 4). In “International Affair” (episode #107, Apr. 2, 1960, season 3), Paladin unsuccessfully attempts to seduce a mysterious Hawaiian princess (Ziva Rodann).

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Sexual attraction between Anglos and Asians or Pacific Islanders was part of a vogue of exoticism in the 1950s and 1960s that was exploited in several very popular big-budget Hollywood movies, including Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955), Sayonara (1957), The King and I (1958), and South Pacific (1958). In “Hey Boy’s Revenge” (episode #31, Apr. 12, 1958, season 1), Paladin is drawn into a mutual sexual attraction with Kim Li (Lisa Lu) in her first appearance in the series before her personality was radically altered for her continuing character in season 4. Reversing the male gaze, Kim Li is shown staring openly at Paladin in two scenes with remarkable closeups that defy her construction in all other respects as a shy, newly arrived immigrant. This gaze of sexual curiosity aligns her with the many white women in the series who openly flirt with Paladin. In his search for Hey Boy, Paladin finds Kim Li hiding in a Chinese antiquities shop (with which he is familiar); she emerges as the shop owner, a friend of Hey Boy’s, explains what has happened to the man he knows as Kim Chan. Kim Li watches Paladin intently as he struggles to read the letter (in Chinese) that Hey Boy’s brother wrote from a camp of railroad workers. Then she stands very close to him in an extended scene in which she helps him translate the letter. That her look in this early scene should be interpreted as erotic fascination is confirmed in the final scene of the episode set in the lobby of the Hotel Carlton. Kim Li appears in a gorgeously embroidered silk dress. We learn that Paladin anonymously paid the debt incurred by Kim Li’s passage that would have forced her to marry an “ancient merchant.” Paladin vociferously denies that he paid for her release from a loveless marriage, but Hey Boy protests: “Excuse me, I know you!” Paladin refuses to take the money back; Kim Li attempts to kiss his hand; he softly kisses her hand instead. Then with a humorous, self-mocking wave of his arms, Paladin stands up and urges Hey Boy to take Kim Li home, no doubt before the

Kim Sing and Paladin declare their love for one another. Bethel Leslie and Richard Boone in “The Lady of the Fifth Moon” (season 6).

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dandy-gunfighter yields to sexual temptation. Kim Li does not say a word in this scene. She is a beautiful but silent China doll. Although “Hey Boy’s Revenge” emphasizes looks, body language, and physical proximity to inscribe the sexual lure between the hero and the “Oriental” woman, interracial sexual interest is left unconsummated. However, sexual relations are strongly implied in one of the series’ last and most melodramatic episodes, “Lady of the Fifth Moon” (episode #222, Mar. 30, 1963, season 6). In this highly stylized episode, directed by Boone, Paladin falls in love with an aristocratic Chinese woman, Kim Sing (played by white actress Bethel Leslie), and it is implied that they consummate the relationship. In a night scene by a campfire, Paladin and Kim Sing are shown lying on the ground in close-ups, their faces close together. The mood is one that audiences primed by their experience with Hollywood

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under the Production Code would likely interpret as postcoital, but the scene is staged with enough ambiguity to build in plausible denial. “We’re happy, aren’t we?” asks Kim Sing as they begin to discuss the possibility that they might spend their future together. This scene is staged very much like one in Sayonara when the interracial couple (played by Marlon Brando and Miiko Tako) declares their love for one another as they lay on a grassy hill under a night sky filled with the explosions of fireworks. Later Kim Sing will die in Paladin’s arms, the victim of assassins sent by her late father’s enemies. Like South Pacific and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, “Lady of the Fifth Moon” uses the death of one of the lovers to permit an erotic screen fantasy. Ending the love affair in this way preserves the frisson of taboo love. Kim Sing’s death also avoids a sudden reversal of Paladin’s six-year portrayal as a dandy-playboy who assiduously avoids emotional entanglements that require long-term commitment. Filmed on a studio sound stage with highly stylized sets, moving camera, and voice-over framing, the story is told as if it were an Oriental legend, bound to a romanticized past. The love story between Kim Sing and Paladin is interracial romance as American audiences were used to seeing it in the early 1960s—a beautiful, exotic dream with a sad ending that avoids the real-world complications of interracial marriage that existed in midcentury America—family disapproval, social prejudice, stigmatized biracial children, and, for black-white couples in some states, legal obstacles. Racial Terrorism and “Nostalgic Imperialism”

Have Gun—Will Travel often portrays an Old West dominated by big capital and ruthless, greedy white men. This social critique was a recurrent aspect of B-Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s (Stanfield 113; McGillis 57). In Have Gun—Will Travel, Anglo capitalists in “Brotherhood,” “The Trial,” “The

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Race,” “Squatter’s Rights,” “The Long Weekend,” and “Love of a Bad Woman” are shown as twisting the law to their own ends or believing that they are the law. Insensitive to the rights of others, they represent a collective Anglo-Saxon desire to transform the world to serve selfish ends. This often results in especially grim commentaries on the eradication of Native Americans. One example of such a commentary is “Fight at Adobe Wells” (episode #104, Mar. 12, 1960, season 3), an episode directed by Boone and scripted by Frank R. Pierson and Samuel A. Peeples. “I’ve come to buy you,” Commodore Jonathan Guilder (Ken Lynch) imperiously announces to Paladin in the lobby of the Hotel Carlton. Made wealthy by the Comstock Lode, Guilder has also made “enemies.” Among them is Quanah Parker (Brad Weston), the half-white Comanche chief who is “stirring up” the Kiowa and Comanche tribes against white ranchers. The settlers have been killing his people to collect a bounty of a dollar each on scalps. Guilder is deathly afraid of Parker, and Paladin promises to protect him as he journeys by public stagecoach. During the trip, they are attacked by the Comanche and find refuge in an abandoned adobe compound. In “Fight at Adobe Wells,” Guilder’s disillusioned wife (Miranda Jones) reveals that her husband, the “empire builder,” is the one who “pays the bounties” on Indian scalps. In the end both Commodore Guilder and his wife die, but not by the hands of the Comanche. The Maddoxes, a seemingly nice young couple, tell Paladin that they have decided to farm in the area so it won’t remain a desert overrun by “naked savages with stone axes.” Under his breath, Paladin calls Mr. Maddox (Gregg Palmer) “Commodore.” Maddox scoffs when Paladin reminds him that Quanah Parker let them live. He tells Paladin that his trust in the Comanche chief is misplaced. Whether they collect scalps or not, the Maddoxes also will bring the Comanche closer to extermination. Quanah Parker

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anticipates the genocidal results of white settlement: “This will all be your land, white eyes, but it was ours, and when you walk here, even after we are dead, you will not be alone.” Only the spirits of the Comanche will remain. Parker asks that his people be allowed to “live out our time before you take it all away.” “Fight at Adobe Wells” takes a position reflecting what Renato Rosaldo has called “nostalgic imperialism,” defined as “the process of yearning for what one has destroyed as a form of mystification” (109). Nostalgic imperialism offers the audience an elegiac fantasy that covers over guilt for the destruction of the environment as it existed in a more natural state and for the extermination of the peoples who inhabited it. The series relied on nostalgic imperialism in numerous episodes focused on Native Americans, including “The Race” (episode #162, Oct. 28, 1961, season 5), in which Sam Crabbe (Ben Johnson) lusts after fifty thousand acres of Indian land. He hires Paladin to ride in a no-holds-barred race in which this land is at stake; the hard Anglo rancher declares that the local tribe is “dead” and that some white man will get the Indians’ land, whether he wins the bet or not. Paladin sarcastically replies, “You’re the new man—the new world!” This “new” world is the world of Manifest Destiny, which extends beyond one greedy man and, in fact, required Native Americans from coast to coast to cede their lands to whites who might want them for mining, farming, land speculation, or just more elbow room. Although Have Gun—Will Travel often presents “nostalgic imperialism” infused by a critique of whites’ racism, rarely does the series point to the legalized and systematic nature of racial attacks, such as United States government policy against Native Americans that led to violent removal from their lands or more overt acts of genocide (Vine 68-72, 90–92). An exception occurs in “A Head of Hair” (episode #120, Sept. 24, 1960, season 4), written by Harry Julian Fink and directed by Andrew

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V. McLaglen. Paladin hires a former army scout to guide him into Indian country to rescue a white woman from the Nez Perce. John Anderson (Ben Johnson) lived with the Lakota tribe (“Sioux”) for a decade and, although white, still considers himself a Sioux. Paladin accuses him of contempt when he calls all U.S. Army officers “general.” Anderson denies the accusation in a flatly intoned response: “Exterminating the Indian nation is a dirty job, and they do it was well as the next.” Paladin, the former Union Army officer, has no reply. As a man who knows Indians, Paladin reveals his most traditional link to the classic frontier hero going back to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. In season 1 it is established that Paladin lived for a period of time with the Puma tribe. But he is unlike many wilderness heroes of frontier mythology who Richard Slotkin says live with Indians but then are motivated “always to use the acquired skill against the [Native American] teachers, to kill or assert their dominance over them” (Regeneration 551). Instead, Paladin’s understanding of Native American ways is often used to further the element of nostalgia in nostalgic imperialism. However, his sympathetic view of vanishing tribal cultures is complicated by frequent references in the series to Indian ferocity and torture, including the staking out of captives. In “Yuma Treasure,” Paladin himself is staked out and barely manages to escape with his life (episode #14, Dec. 14, 1957, season 1). At the end of “A Head of Hair,” Paladin once again barely escapes with his life. John Anderson suddenly turns on him and attempts to kill him. At first, Paladin is completely befuddled by Anderson’s motives, but the logic of the attack is revealed to be pure Indian thinking: As a Sioux warrior returning home, Anderson believes he must show that he has performed a brave act or counted coup. He wants Paladin’s scalp. The Red Man is a savage who cannot be assimilated even when he is white. It is implied in Have Gun—Will Travel that white female captives of Indian tribes are often sexually mistreated

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by Indians, reinforcing the stereotype of racial otherness. In “A Head of Hair” when Paladin finds the white captive Mary Grange (Donna Brooks), he asks, “Did they hurt you?” She stands silent, the camera revealing no emotion on her face, but in a reverse shot Paladin displays embarrassment, as if he should have known better than to ask. Anderson says he will take Mary with him to the Sioux. Paladin, who is being paid by the Grange family to bring the young woman home, refuses. Mary Grange later says that she would have gone with Anderson because “They say the Sioux are kind to their women.” Her comment suggests the depth of her suffering with the Nez Perce as well as her knowledge that a happy return to white society will be impossible. The sexual degradation of the woman captive is made the central issue in “The Walking Years” (episode #218, Mar. 2, 1963, season 6), in which Molly Dean (Elen Willard) kidnaps those she blames for handing her over, years before, to renegade Apache to save a wagon train from attack. She blames Paladin for bringing her back to civilization, for she considers herself untouchable, her life ruined because of her sexual degradation in captivity. It will take Paladin to suggest otherwise— by making love to her. This episode (directed by Boone) shows how Have Gun—Will Travel uses the white woman as a central figure in its circulation of a racially stereotyped view of Indian savagery traditional in the Western. Liberalism and Law

Racism is also often present in television’s inscription of white paternalism, says Darrell Hamamoto, and when coupled with “the mask of liberal benevolence,” it gives the impression that nonwhite minorities actually are granted equality and equal rights to due process under the law (48). Such strategies smooth over the social system’s exploitation of these groups or, as in the case of Native Americans, their wholesale extermination. Also

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ignored, Hamamoto claims, are the legal biases exacted against nonwhite minorities. Have Gun—Will Travel certainly can be said to be guilty of racism masquerading under “liberal benevolence,” yet as “Fight at Adobe Wells” shows, it also is capable of hinting at what Hamamoto claims is absent from television Westerns of the period, “that racism is woven into the very fabric of the American republic” (49). Instead of showing racial conflicts to be “the result of cross-cultural misunderstanding, irrational fears, or perhaps unfamiliarity with ‘foreign’ modes of dress and speech” (49), Have Gun—Will Travel often cultivated ambiguity around the source and depth of prejudiced, violent behavior, implying, as in “Fight at Adobe Wells,” that in spite of evidence clearly contradicting racist thinking, such thinking is perpetuated by white people’s financial self-interest as well as ideology. However, Have Gun—Will Travel is not always so bleak about the future of racial minorities in the United States—if they follow the rules. Finding striking confirmation in “Hey Boy’s Revenge” is Hamamoto’s argument that “the television Western has thrived on stories that perpetuate the myth of equal protection under the law” for racial and ethnic others (49). As noted earlier, Hey Boy disappears from the Hotel Carlton. He journeys to the railroad camp where his brother, Kim Sung, died in an “accident.” Kim Sung wrote a letter to Hey Boy explaining how he and the other Chinese workers building the railroad to pay for their passage to the United States were beaten, cheated of wages, and deprived of food; protesting their exploitation, Kim Sung feared for his life. When Paladin arrives at the camp, he sees the workers being subjected to long hours and dehumanized by their white bosses, who call them “China boys” and “little monkeys.” Paladin finds Hey Boy in jail for trying to knife the white foreman, Maury Travis (Pernell Roberts), who killed Kim Sung. The sheriff is surprised that a white man wants to see his prisoner. Paladin explains that “the Chinese gentleman is my very good friend.” Hey Boy poignantly recounts to Paladin how the death of his brother has shattered

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his dream of being reunited with his family: “now we would all be together, after so many years.” Paladin tries to keep Hey Boy in jail to protect him, but he is released. When the railroad workers show up as an armed mob to punish Travis, Paladin tells them that they must abide by the American justice system. Hey Boy, who leads them, protests that “the law is for the whites not the Chinese.” Paladin counters that “our law is meant for everyone.” He tells Hey Boy that the men who saw the murder of Kim Sung must attest to Travis’s guilt. One steps forward, and the sheriff then leads Travis to jail. This is a resolution based on fantasy, since it assumes that the courts would be—as Paladin says they are—a fair and objective mechanism, blind to racial and ethnic difference in determining guilt or innocence. In actual fact, as the chapter epigraph by Mark Twain reminds us, many states in the Old West, including California, barred the testimony of Chinese immigrants on the excuse that they were “pagan” (Courtwright 156). Throughout Have Gun—Will Travel, the racialized myth that minorities have “equal protection under the law” gains strength by the force of white paternalism embodied by the hero who reassures them of this fact or uses his gun to enforce it. Thus, permeated by a liberal but falsifying attitude, Have Gun—Will Travel buys into the “revisionist gloss on events drawn from the historical past” that is evident in television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s (Hamamoto 49). Not unusual in its liberalism for television Westerns of the time period, Have Gun—Will Travel uses its hero to lead a constant call for tolerance, especially racial and ethnic tolerance. Hamamoto claims that “never has there been a single instance in the television Western where discrimination or racism has been condoned by going unpunished by the authorities” (52). His observation should be qualified, at least with regard to Have Gun—Will Travel. Highly prejudiced comments and racial violence are consistently condemned in the series (often through

Displacing Blackness/Casting Blacks

In a 1959 article in the left-leaning New Republic, Frank R. Pierson, who wrote for and then produced Have Gun—Will Travel, noted that the television industry’s fear of offending anyone meant that it was almost impossible to depict “real moral conflicts” in a TV program with a contemporary setting: “Television is fenced in by so many vexations in handling honest drama that its only solution is to make Westerns.” Pierson said that shows such as Gunsmoke did not avoid reality but instead fictionalized it, making good Westerns “more honest, varied, and interesting than anything else on the air.” A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report of 1960 confirmed that self-censorship was so thorough that networks and sponsors rarely had to intervene. The majority of television writers had absorbed the chief lesson that the system demanded: stay away from anything that might be regarded as socially controversial (Boddy, Fifties Television 203; Winick 6). Demonstrating the networks’ attitude toward the dramatization of racial problems on television, Harold A. Carlborg, CBS’s chief censor, warned that issues such as segregation “would be difficult to present . . . particularly at a time when the subject is considered highly inflammatory” (qtd. in Boddy, Fifties Television 202). Have Gun—Will Travel co-creator and producer Sam Rolfe later complained, “We couldn’t have an actor . . . tell a whole town that they’re prejudice[d]. . . . We had more problems with that God damned CBS than with the censors” (Grams and Rayburn 65). This was also a time when some southern television stations with multiple network affiliations preempted network programs perceived as having too liberal a racial bent (Classen 50).

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Paladin’s sardonic responses), but, as I show in the next section, they are not always punished.

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The result of this situation was that a straightforward dramatization of racial prejudice was all but forbidden on primetime entertainment programs because networks lived in fear of generating social controversy that might lose a program viewer share or alienate sponsors (Pondillo 153–57). Have Gun—Will Travel responded by displacing contemporary social controversies, including racial ones focused on relations between blacks and whites, into the realm of the past and sometimes onto the relations between Native Americans and whites. Many of these socially conscious episodes were directed by series star Boone, and they sometimes drew fire from the network, as Sam Rolfe, Andrew V. McLaglen, Frank R. Pierson, and other participants in the series recounted years later (Grams and Rayburn 369, 402). “Brotherhood” (episode #210, Jan. 5, 1963, season 6), written by Herb Meadow and Albert Ruben and directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, is an episode that begs to be read as a displaced commentary on contemporary black-white relations and racism in the United States. On the trail, Paladin picks up the stagecoach. At a rest stop, Mr. Stennis (Myron Healy), a local capitalist, encourages a drummer coded as a “dude” to shoot an Indian they observe in the distance. The Indian is not threatening them but Stennis wants to use the Indian as target practice because, he says, they aren’t really “human beings.” This type of racial terrorism is prefigured in the episode “Charley Red Dog” (episode #91, Dec. 12, 1959, season 3), written by Gene Roddenberry, in which a young Navajo sheriff recounts how his father died because he was “used for target practice” by whites. Paladin angrily attempts to stop the shooting of the Indian, Abe Redrock (Michael Keep), who carries a message for his brother, a local sheriff. In town Paladin meets the brother, Jim Redrock (Charles Bronson). As a Native American, he was elected sheriff as a joke. He does whatever the white bully, Stennis, and his cohorts tell him to do because he wants a more comfortable life for his family (a bed instead of a buffalo robe).

Failure of Human Solidarity

Paladin accuses Jim of undermining what the badge is supposed to stand for—”justice under the law”—since he has never arrested a white man. Jim Redrock is ridiculed and verbally harassed by the townspeople led by Stennis. He is continually referred to as “boy,” a common racial put-down used against African American men. Jim is constructed as an “Uncle Tom” figure in contrast to his brother, whose thievery and drunkenness can be seen as stereotyped Indian (or African American) behaviors. Jim accuses Abe of performing these acts just to embarrass him. Interestingly, Paladin counters that at least Abe has his “self-respect.” This may seem a strange remark, but it suggests that Abe is his own man rather than the tool of white oppression, like his brother. Abe is jailed. Stennis leads a mob that takes Abe away after Jim knocks Paladin unconscious so that he will not use violence to stop the townspeople. When he awakens, Paladin persuades Jim to help him stop an abduction clearly meant to end in Abe’s lynching. As he prepares to lynch Abe, Stennis’s actions mimic those of an antebellum period slave owner. He viciously whips Abe and declares that, “you’re going to holler if I have to cut you in half.” When the mob starts to falter in supporting him, Stennis hectors them in language implying that they are not living up to their duty as white men: “Well, take him home to supper. Let him meet your women folk.” This echoes racist stereotype of the black man as a sexual threat. After Jim and Paladin rescue Abe, the episode ends with assertions that the town can become “decent” and that Jim Redrock has a chance to become a real sheriff instead of a joke. As the ringleader who blocks a town’s better intentions, Stennis is rather quickly defeated. However, he is never punished except in having his power over the mob broken. Although there are deeply disturbing ambiguities in the episode’s racial message, the tone of the final scene of “Brotherhood” is meant to suggest hope. Have Gun—Will Travel may have commented on the situation of African Americans in contemporary American society

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A show that took risks in casting: Richard Boone and Odetta pose for a publicity shot during the filming of “The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs” (season 5).

through a strategy of displacement in “Brotherhood,” but the depiction of actual African Americans is extremely rare in the series. Nevertheless, on occasion the program took risks in casting African American actors in featured roles of dignity and

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substance. Tony Award–winning actress Virginia Capers was featured as a sympathetic saloon girl in “Odds for Big Red” (episode #159, Oct. 7, 1961, season 5). Capers is given an unusual number of close-ups as she reacts to the accidental shooting of another woman. However, Paladin’s sexual crossing of racial boundaries never steps over into including black women, which would have been impossible at the time for a nationally broadcast series. The casting of black actors in “The Waiting Room” and “Lazarus” went without remark in the press, but attention was paid to Ivan Dixon’s appearance on Have Gun—Will Travel as a former slave who becomes a gunfighter and an outlaw in the Old West in the emotionally moving episode “Long Way Home” (episode #138, Feb. 4, 1961, season 4). This, Variety claimed, was the first time a black man was cast as an outlaw in a television Western (“Inside Stuff”). The episode, directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, creates great sympathy for Isham Spruce (Ivan Dixon) as a decent man who pays dearly for his violent response to racism. The series also drew interest for casting Odetta, a famous African American folk singer, in a Boone-directed episode, “The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs” (episode #163, Nov. 4, 1961, season 5). Odetta appeared in the central role of a woman trying to see her husband for one last time before he is hanged. Her dramatic debut on television was not mentioned in the Los Angeles Times, which always covered her singing appearances in Los Angeles. In contrast, African American newspapers in several major cities reported on this appearance as a notable occurrence.5 The decision to include black actors on Have Gun—Will Travel was attributed to Boone in the New York Amsterdam News, which also praised him for attempting to talk on The Tonight Show about “segregation in our backyards,” that is, outside the Deep South (Hepburn). Black actor Hari Rhodes was cast in the role of cattleman Ansel James in another Boone-directed episode, “The Killing of Jessie May” (episode #125, Oct. 29, 1960, season 4).

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James is shown to be a partner in the cattle business with an old white man, George (William Talman). They live together, work together, and interact as friends and equals. The two men release Jessie May Turnbow (Robert Blake) from Paladin’s custody because they cannot believe Paladin’s claim that the babyfaced young cowboy has murdered almost a dozen men—and a woman. Jessie May returns to their camp and starts firing his homemade Gatling gun, killing George and sending Paladin diving into the river. In a most unusual move, the script by Harry Julian Fink allows Ansel to shoot Jessie May when Paladin’s waterlogged revolver jams. After he saves Paladin’s life as well as his own, Ansel drops his weapon and grieves over the body of Jessie May. Paladin comforts him. Although not covered in major elite newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Rhodes’s casting and the fact that his character saves Paladin’s life were reported in the African American newspaper Los Angeles Sentinel (McGee). Conclusion

Great emphasis is placed on Paladin’s living in a manner that suggests the value of respecting other cultures, races, and religions, but Paladin could be dismissed as representative of white paternalism. The series can also be seen as part of a liberal discourse in which racial integration and acceptance of cultural and racial differences could serve national imperatives in the context of the Cold War. Within the confines of television of the era, the series took risks in portraying everything from Jewish religious rituals to the inequalities and oppressions that lead a former slave to outlawry. Paladin cannot solve racism, and the series’ position toward it is complex. Some episodes offer uncompromising portraits of the ugliness of racial hatred, especially against Native Americans, but Have Gun—Will Travel participated in many of the stereotyping trends in representing ethnicity and race that scholars have identified in mythically

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loaded frontier stories in general and in television Westerns of the era more specifically. This results in contradictory depictions of ethnic and racial Others, with the series aligning itself with liberalism and inclusion while simultaneously perpetuating problematic ideological positions toward race, such as gradualism and nostalgic imperialism. At the same time that the series points to the problem of prejudice, it identifies racial and ethnic difference as potentially enriching U.S. culture rather than just as an unsolvable problem. In these sometimes contradictory and paradoxical ways, Have Gun—Will Travel suggests that the promise of a better nation resides outside of narrow notions of Anglo-Saxon dominance and beyond the force field of racial animus.

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You have to use the power you acquire to protect the integrity of what you’re doing. And to do that, you have to be prepared to go all the way. Richard Boone quoted in Richard Schickel, “TV’s Angry Gun” (53)

A

lthough dependent upon the changing contexts of television reception, meaning in and pleasure from Have Gun— Will Travel cannot be divorced from the powerful effects of textual specificity, including the role of lighting, photography, editing, figure placement, set design, and acting in the formation of visual arguments. If, as noted in the introduction, television Westerns and their puzzling appeal received a great deal of

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press coverage in the late 1950s and early 1960s, their aesthetic qualities did not. In an exception to the rule, Richard Schickel suggested in Show in 1961 that Have Gun—Will Travel was a better program than its rivals: “polished slick and trimmed tight[,] . . . even the camera setups seem more adroit than they do on competing programs. . . . [The series] casts good actors and buys good scripts. It also prospers through careful attention to detail” (53). Schickel’s generalized remarks offer very little to go on, but they offer more than newspapers and trade publications, which reviewed season openers of a new or very popular television program. These reviews might offer a line or two on scripting or acting but provided almost nothing concerning visuals or other aesthetic elements. Even now, aesthetic aspects of television remain an understudied phenomenon in modern media studies, residing among those issues—including authorship, genre, and narrative—that are often suppressed in order to favor cultural or ideological concerns. The success of network primetime series during this period of television history is almost never related to the aesthetic aspirations of their makers or to the visual and aural qualities of these programs. In modern media studies on the rare occasion when discussed at all, any aspirations that the makers of adult television Westerns might have had in the realm of visual style have generally been discounted. For example, in Televisuality, John Caldwell notes how television began to import the stylistic tropes of cinema in the 1950s. He allows that a few series “represented a weekly exercise in proficient and capable feature film studio cinematography” but argues that more daringly creative articulations of lighting or camera work were limited to moments of the “special expressive statement” or were subject to narrative framing that marked them as unusual (50–51). Caldwell concludes that more generally, incorporation of Hollywood cinematic style into television in this era was highly circumscribed in its impact; he characterizes it as being “of a very muted and constrained kind” (51).

Cinematic Impulse

It is telling that Caldwell uses a Western—Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958–61)—to illustrate his point that the importation of cinematic techniques could fail to be aesthetically interesting or meaningful in television. This series’ visual style, he says, presented only “mindlessness, a blank but efficient replication of the classical Hollywood style” (51). While admitting that “halfhour westerns of the late 1950s open up the image” through an emphasis on landscape, Caldwell is dismissive of this too, claiming that the “images quickly became redundant as recognizable back lot settings through endless repetition” (51). Caldwell’s remarks are based on widespread unexamined assumptions about television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s in which these shows are often assumed to be exemplary of a zero-degree televisual aesthetic, characterized by limited production values in comparison with big-screen Westerns. Short shooting schedules in genre television may contribute to the low aesthetic value attached to these programs—accused of the kind of slapdash mimicking of “classical Hollywood style” attributed to Wanted: Dead or Alive by Caldwell. Admittedly, the speed of shooting television Westerns was breakneck, responding to the medium’s voracious demand for programs. This reached a peak in 1960, when there were seventy-six weekly series broadcast in primetime network hours (Cantor, Hollywood TV Producer 47). There was little time for rewrites, rehearsal, or reshooting. In this respect, the process of filming genre television in this era is parallel to B-picture and “poverty row” productions in the film industry, a mode of filmmaking that television was quickly supplanting, especially in the arena of Westerns (Fenin and Everson 304–11). Actress Lorna Thayer, featured in a number of episodes of Have Gun— Will Travel, recalled that “those westerns like Have Gun moved so fast. We just came and did it and moved on to the next one” (qtd. in Grams and Rayburn 315). Most television Westerns of this era were filmed; hence, in some commentary they were called “films.” The CBS production

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unit that made Have Gun—Will Travel was originally called Filmasters. In spite of sharing celluloid and equipment with the movies, television “films” of this era are assumed to lack the cinematic impulse. It is generally believed that they displayed uncomplicated lighting, studio or back-lot sets of diminished realistic value, and hastily staged setups, eschewing the complexities of tracking, dolly shots, and choreographed figure movement in well-composed deep space. Even if shot on 35mm film stock by professionals experienced in motion pictures, as were many of these television Westerns, genre programs of the era also are assumed to have lost a great deal of aesthetic value in the process of broadcasting. The transmission of images to relatively small television receivers capable of reproducing only in black and white meant that some production units might have considered careful attention to nuances of visual style as wasted effort. Color videography was not secured in the majority of television primetime network programs until the mid-1960s, convergent with the precipitous decline in the popularity of TV Westerns (Barnow 401). Like most weekly television series, Have Gun—Will Travel was required to produce thirty-eight or thirty-nine episodes in the regular season each year of broadcast. The series usually operated on a shooting schedule requiring completion of an episode in a week, normally with one day of rehearsal and three days of filming.1 In some years the schedule was altered to accommodate Boone’s professional obligations elsewhere, including the stage (Smith, “The TV Scene—‘Never on Sunday’”). Entering the last year of shooting Have Gun—Will Travel, in February 1962 Boone announced that a “speed-up plan” would turn out thirty-eight episodes in thirty weeks between March 5 and September 28, 1962 (Adams, “News”). Within a factory model of media production with a pressing imperative to produce quantity, was it possible to produce a weekly twenty-fiveminute black-and-white television program showing aesthetic

The Auteur Difference

Why did Have Gun—Will Travel develop in these ways? Illuminating aspects of the production history of the series, most particularly the role played by Richard Boone in shaping Have Gun—Will Travel, can address this question. Boone constituted an auteur presence committed to a serious artistic approach to what many dismissed as disposable entertainment. The series made Boone known widely to the American public as a top television personality, the name-above-the-title star of a megahit series. By 1958, Variety was referring to Boone as

Cinematic Impulse

ambition and consistent qualities of value within a format associated with a well-worn, highly formulaic genre? While the drive toward greater character-centered complexity in the adult Western is recognized, primetime Westerns are trapped within a clichéd view of formulaic television as uniformly short on aesthetic sophistication. Have Gun—Will Travel once again intrigues by its departure from assumptions about television Westerns of the era. The series blends the intimate aesthetic of television with a cinematic impulse that offers more than the mindless reproduction of Hollywood technique. Close-ups and shot–reverse-shot setups are thought to typify the former. What I call the “cinematic impulse” points to the epic qualities of the big-screen Western but also incorporates expressionistic tendencies. The result is an effective hybrid approach to the televisual creation of meaning and pleasure. Although not all the program’s 225 episodes are equally good, the series reveals remarkable achievement in that term long applied to good television—“quality.” Two major arenas distinguish Have Gun—Will Travel stylistically from many other adult Western series of the time as well as from a number of primetime offerings of the era: extensive location shooting with emphasis on cinematic style and the development of both a hardboiled sensibility and a visual style sharing a great deal with film noir.

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A personality embraced by the public: Richard Boone on the cover of TV Guide.

Cinematic Impulse

the “singular reason” for the success of Have Gun—Will Travel (Thompson and Bates). In 1960, the Los Angles Times television critic remarked that “it is difficult to think of Paladin played by anyone other than Boone” (Smith, “Paladin” A10). In that same year, James Garner’s bolt from ABC’s Maverick and the subsequent sharp decline in that series’ popularity no doubt reinforced the perception among network executives that letting a star leave a high-ranking series could spell the demise of an important program in the primetime lineup. Networks learned quickly an obvious fact summarized by television scholar Lynne Joyrich: “Personality is one of the primary selling points of television” (138). Boone had no financial stake in Have Gun—Will Travel. He was an employee of CBS with a five-year contract, but the network wanted more. As early as 1959, trade publications were reporting that Boone was denying any interest in staying with the series beyond five years (Chandler 33). However, in February 1961 in what was front-page news in Variety, CBS agreed to pay him more than one million dollars in deferred compensation to stay with the series in its sixth and final year (“Cost $1,100,000 to Keep Boone”). How much power did Boone have over Have Gun—Will Travel? CBS records are not available to scholars, but the memoirs of and retrospective interviews with those who worked with him on the show create a clear picture: Boone called the shots. In 1998, Harry Carey Jr. recalled that Boone “had extraordinary authority as to the casting and the scripts” (Carey 162). Albert Ruben says that by the time he was hired in season 3 as an associate producer and story editor, Boone was “completely in control of the show” and “the dominant figure in the production” (qtd. in Marc 112). Ruben claims that Boone “didn’t know anything about what was being prepared in the way of a script until he got the draft. . . . But all other aspects of the production were pretty much dominated by him” (112). As character actor Rayford Barnes, frequently cast on Have Gun—Will Travel,

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recalled in 1999, “Dick had a view of the esthetic qualities that he wanted in the show that he thought would make it successful. . . . [H]e had director approval . . . and casting approval” (Rothel 121). Already at the time of the show’s original broadcast, Boone’s power over the hit series frequently was remarked upon in the press. In 1959, an article in Variety noted that Boone’s “role in the Have Gun production transcends the status of a usual leading man” in that he was “called in on scripts, casting, choice of director and other facets of the series” (Chandler 52). Schickel echoed numerous other accounts in his declaration that Have Gun—Will Travel was a “program over which . . . he [Boone] has gained almost complete creative control” (52). Talking with Schickel, Boone condemns other productions as “shoe factories” (53), echoing remarks he made in 1959 when he criticized prolific creators of television Westerns—Ziv, Screen Gems, and Revue—for failing to offer quality programs because, in his words, “there the production office runs the shows and nobody else” (Chandler 52). Thus, we have Boone articulate a position that posed a fundamental challenge to television’s emergent normative structures. As a result, he became widely discussed as a “controversial figure” (Leavy), unusual for a television star of the era. In a three-part series titled “The Paradox of ‘Paladin’” in TV Guide in early 1961, Richard Gehman, like many others, describes Boone as being “in complete charge” on the set and describes him directing an episode. Gehman states that “In one sense he has directed them all [this year], for he makes his presence felt everywhere” (26). A rather unflattering portrait of Boone emerges: “Few other stars are so earnestly, piously and vehemently hated. . . . Other actors resent Boone’s all-but-total takeover of Have Gun. . . . [H]e gradually has hauled in the reins until they all are knotted in his hamlike fists. No script is bought until Boone has approved. No actor is cast until Boone approves. He even supervises the costumes” (26). In this account, Boone is usurping

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the creative role and executive authority of the producer and imprinting his ideas, style, and values on the program.2 In effect, Gehman is calling Boone what film studies usually calls an auteur, the person who imprints a film with his or her personality, vision, or creative presence, whether or not the individual directed, authored the script, controlled the shooting schedule, or supervised the final cut. Yet Gehman safely contains any resentment of the star into the realm of other hired help—that is, actors—and avoids suggesting that Boone’s power is a threat to the network’s industrial hierarchy. Given that the record indicates that Boone functioned as this kind of auteur, he had a deep involvement in creating meaning as well as in controlling the style and content of the series. This exceeds the influence that television studies often assigns to television stars as auteurs whose power derives from their on-camera performance and public identification with their programs. Thomas Leitch refers to Raymond Burr as this kind of auteur, explaining that even though Burr “took no part in writing, director, or producing Perry Mason,” he “possessed the role” and so substituted “incarnation for invention,” becoming identified as “America’s lawyer” and “the figure most identified with the program’s success” (74–78). David Thorburn makes a similar kind of claim more broadly for television performers: “far more decisively than the movie-actor, the television-actor creates and controls the meaning of what we see on the screen.” Richard Boone was, like Burr, the visual center of his show, carrying the narrative; similarly, he was its face in all publicity and ancillary products. Boone was closely identified with his character and frequently wore the Paladin trail clothes costume in public appearances.3 Boone took credit for changes in the Paladin persona, not out of line with an actor in a long-running series, but unlike Burr, Boone moved into behind-the-scenes decision making for Have Gun—Will Travel, striving for perfectionism that he saw lacking in other television series, especially Westerns. The production history of the series forces us

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to reconsider received wisdom concerning dominant industrial models of the 1950s and 1960s in relation to televisual aesthetics. Have Gun—Will Travel came to CBS at a time when the relationship between networks, sponsors, and creative talent was changing. These were years in which sponsors and advertising agencies were ceding control to networks and independent

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Richard Boone takes direction from Ida Lupino, ca. 1959.

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producers (Martin, “Master Planners” 34; Murray, “NBC”). In such a transition period, a power vacuum might occur even at a network as known for its rigid hierarchy as CBS (Martin, “Battle” 56). In 1960 before the U.S. Congress, CBS vice president of network programs Oscar Katz offered a picture of “quality” control at the network. He explained the model: a staff member was assigned to read scripts, make casting recommendations, “approve or disapprove directors,” attend shoots, view rough cuts, and oversee “quality, storytelling values, matters of taste” (qtd. in Boddy, “‘60 Million Viewers’” 126). Katz’s description of CBS’s smooth-running control of its product was completely upended by Schickel’s picture of Boone “stalking down the corridors of networks and advertising agencies in search of the nameless mediocrities who, the way he tells it, constantly threaten his integrity and that of the program” (52). Have Gun— Will Travel was produced by CBS, but it was Boone instead of a network-appointed producer or executive who read scripts, made casting recommendations, and approved or disapproved directors. Boone was reported to have brought Ida Lupino in to direct Have Gun—Will Travel because the actor “liked his direction hard-boiled” (Whitney, “Follow Mother” 15). This made her the first female to direct a television Western (“Horses Are Just ‘Poodles’”; “Boss Lady”). Boone’s power, combined with his interest in acting, contributed to making the series extremely unusual in having its casting selections determined internally for much of its run. Lynn Stalmaster’s casting company was let go, and Peggy Rea, originally secretary to Sam Rolfe but also an actress, was put “in charge” of the process, on the basis of an agreement between Boone and then-producer Frank R. Pierson (Rothel 107–8). However, in reality Boone was making many of the decisions on hiring actors in consultation with Rea and Pierson. Boone was deeply committed to the Method. After serving in World War II, he studied acting with Sanford Meisner

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at the Neighborhood Playhouse and worked with Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio. In one interview Boone commented, “I’m a Method actor and I’ll defend The Method against all comers” (Whitcomb 78). It followed that Have Gun—Will Travel hired an unusually large number of actors who were trained in the Method. These included Peter Falk, Andrew Prine, Marian Seldes, Sydney Pollack, Gary Walberg, Al Ruscio, Martin Balsam, Barbara Baxley, Jack Lord, Philip Pine, and many others. Like Gunsmoke, Have Gun—Will Travel also featured actors who would become major icons of film and television: James Coburn, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Lee Van Cleef, Angie Dickinson, Mike Connors, Wayne Rogers, and Pernell Roberts. Have Gun—Will Travel regularly hired actors from the John Ford stock company, including Ken Curtis, Ben Johnson, Grant Withers, and Harry Carey Jr. Carey in particular contributed many varied and effective performances to the series, ranging from the comedic (“The Taxgatherer”) to the quietly dramatic (“Sweet Lady of the Moon”). Boone cultivated new talent such as Robert Blake and Hal Needham, the latter the stunt coordinator on the series (“Acting Gives Stunt Man”). Many of these young actors would join Boone’s weekend acting workshops. He also helped older talent who had issues such as Hank Patterson, Crahan Denton, and former silent film star Raymond Hatton. This category of actors enriches the series, as in the episode “The Trial” in which Hatton gives a scene-stealing turn as a simultaneously crafty, eccentric, and funny old buffalo hunter/ bounty hunter (episode #116, June 11, 1960, season 3). When William Talman was fired from Perry Mason over a drug arrest, he was graylisted even though he was adjudicated not guilty. Boone and Frank R. Pierson were credited publicly with overcoming network resistance to bring Talman back to television in “Long Way Home” and “The Killing of Jessie May” (“Actor William Talman Gets First Role”). Boone bragged to Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times in 1962, “I’m very rough on producers. . . . I’ve worn out more

Location, Location, Location

Rea’s and Ruben’s stories point to an unusual aspect of Have Gun—Will Travel, the importance of shooting on location often far away from the immediate radius of Los Angeles. That radius had visually defined Hollywood B-Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s and continued to be exploited as settings for television Westerns. The sites proximate to Los Angeles that were often used included the Iverson Movie Ranch, the Melody (former Monogram) Ranch, and the Red Rock Canyon area (McGillis 143–44). In moving beyond these locations, Have Gun—Will Travel became the television equivalent of a runaway production. In the 1950s, moving picture production staffed by American talent, fueled by American money, and meant for American screens often went to Europe to shoot in order to take advantage of lower costs. Have Gun—Will Travel also ran away from Los Angeles but for different reasons. Shooting on location allowed the series’ makers to escape the watchful eye of CBS executives. Location shooting in the California desert, the Oregon

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producers than boots” (Smith, “The TV Scene—‘Never on Sunday’”). Boone no doubt contributed to the frequent change in producers on the show. Have Gun—Will Travel would cycle through six producers over its six-year run: Julian Claman, Sam Rolfe, Ben Brady (who also produced Perry Mason at one point), Frank R. Pierson (the longest serving at almost two years), Robert Sparks, and Don Ingalls. In a retrospective interview, Peggy Rea recounts that Rolfe left the show after going out to the shooting location to assert his authority. Instead, he came back declaring that he was leaving. As Rea tells it, Rolfe and Boone had a physical altercation (Grams and Rayburn 74). Ruben recounts going to the filming location in his capacity as associate producer and being “frozen out” of participation on Boone’s orders (Marc 112).

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wilderness, and New Mexico and Arizona became a hallmark of a series that used this strategy not just to escape network authority but to offer images that escaped the redundancy that Caldwell condemns. However, it must be acknowledged that this was not a total escape from the Los Angeles basin, and the series sometimes shot on the same Western street as Gunsmoke at Paramount or at the Hertz Ranch, the Melody Ranch, or Iverson’s Movie Location Ranch. Nevertheless, Have Gun—Will Travel placed great emphasis on outdoor location shooting in far-flung locales in the western United States. Although locations in more remote areas of California such as Lone Pine, Bishop, the Alabama Hills, and Big Bear National Forest were used, many episodes were shot in the Mt. Bachelor area near Bend, Oregon. In 1960, Cecil Smith reported that “17 of the 38 shows were shot on location, most of them in Bend, Ore. Next year, there are plans to make 28 of 38 on location” (Smith, “Paladin” A10). As a result, location shooting gives the series remarkable authenticity and a heightened sense of the epic and the picturesque sometimes thought impossible for television articulations of the genre. Television studies pioneer Horace Newcomb completely discounts the epic possibilities of Westerns on the small screen. The television Western best exploits intimacy, he claims, with attempts to assert “expansiveness” misguided: “In the Western movie, panorama, movement and environment are crucial to the very idea of the West. The sense of being overwhelmed by the landscape helps to make clear the plight of the gunfighter, the farmer, the pioneer standing alone against the forces of evil. . . . On television this sense of expansiveness is meaningless. We can never sense the visual scope of the Ponderosa” (248). Newcomb claims that the appearance of Paladin’s business card defines the program (246). Certainly this repeated moment is iconic, but Newcomb’s notion of the television Western ignores the rich textuality of the series and stands in direct contrast to what Have Gun—Will Travel attempted to accomplish with

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location shooting and strategic use of backcountry settings to create a sense of epic space. Even the final shot over which the end credits of Have Gun—Will Travel appear is indicative of this difference: it is an empty landscape shot with the eastern Sierra Mountains in the background and stream-crossed chaparral country framed on the right and left by cottonwoods. Paladin, on horseback, enters from the left, close to the camera (full-shot framing). He surveys the landscape (toward the camera), looking for what we do not know. He adjusts his hat, turns his horse, and rides off into the distance toward the mountains as the camera rises up slightly. The “Ballad of Paladin” is heard on the soundtrack. This ending would vary slightly over the years, but it provides a sense of panoramic, wide-open western landscape and Paladin’s place in it as the lone hero. This sense of epic space is not evoked just at a privileged moment of opening or closure, as it is in some television Westerns that were largely confined to back lots (McLoone 88–90). A cinematic sense of space is also reasserted in episode after episode in the use of “authentic” landscapes rather than merely imaginative ones. Many of the Have Gun—Will Travel episodes shot in Oregon or California take advantage of similar Western vistas. For example, in “Silent Death, Secret Death” (episode #184, Mar. 31, 1962, season 5), the introduction in San Francisco shows Paladin agreeing to find a woman’s long-lost brother. The episode, directed by McLaglen, then shifts (via a lap dissolve) to the Oregon wilderness. While the scene opens with long shots that emphasize sunlight, grass, and sky, Paladin’s gaze motivates a reverse shot that reveals what appears to be a dead body in the grass. Paladin gets down off his horse to approach the man, then gently lifts him up and holds him on his lap in a medium shot. This gesture might be called the “Paladin Pieta,” a frequent visual trope in the series when the gunfighter cradles a man he has shot, as in such episodes as “The Outlaw” (episode #2, Sept. 21, 1957, season 1) and “The Long Weekend” (episode

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#146, Apr. 8, 1961, season 4). The man is not dead, and his first words are laconic and unexpected: “Hot enough for you?” Paladin is surprised and amused. “It’ll do,” he replies. Western manners are observed: introductions are made, accompanied by a handshake. In keeping with televisual aesthetics, Paladin and the man are presented in shot–reverse-shot close-ups as they exchange information. Emmett Wilholt (Shug Fisher) knows something of the “colonel” Paladin is seeking, but danger lies ahead—the Indians who shot him. “You look out now” are his last words as he expires. The next shot shows Paladin galloping through a magnificent expanse of land marked by chaparral and pine trees, with the Deschutes River below (to the right). As Paladin’s horse gallops into the foreground, the camera reframes to show Mt. Bachelor, Oregon, in the distant background. Our sense of the Old West as a picturesque locale

Both epic scope and intimate feeling: “Silent Death, Secret Death” (season 5).

Going Noir in the Televisual Western

Like many film noir heroes who search for a truth in a dangerous, deceitful world, Paladin operates in a Western setting that

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of limitless space is reaffirmed. Suddenly the Nez Perce attack. Paladin (and we) hear them before seeing them. His gaze motivates a long shot of the Nez Perce coming out of the woods. This is reminiscent of John Ford’s visualization of the landscape of the West as a place where Indians can suddenly materialize as the alien Other (Dagle 104–5). The picturesque West can also frame nostalgia for the Indian as the vanishing red man, a notion that circulated broadly in the late nineteenth century. This is shown in “Return to Fort Benjamin” (episode #98, Jan. 30, 1960, season 3), also filmed in Oregon; the last scene of the episode (directed by McLaglen) opens with a low-angle shot that shows a Lakota burial platform backlit by the sun breaking through clouds. The shadows are long as Paladin enters the shot from offscreen right. He holds a torch. After Paladin adjusts a shell necklace on the body, the last shot of the scene shows him setting the burial platform on fire, then stepping away (into foreground left). He takes his hat off and stands in respect. This scene fulfills Paladin’s promise to the chief, who wanted his son’s remains treated with honor after the army’s planned execution of him for murder. Moments like this reveal how Have Gun—Will Travel went against the grain of televisual norms on a number of levels. Through attention to shot choice, lighting, camera movement, and other nonverbal elements, Have Gun—Will Travel exploits the potential of location shooting. The series relies on visuals and even ambient sound (such as birds chirping or the sound of the wind) to convey a sense of time, place, and atmosphere. Have Gun—Will Travel is a series that challenges the viewer to pay attention to the small screen through strategies made familiar on the big screen.

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has been transfused with elements from other postwar genres and movements. Vocally and visually, the opening credit sequence of Have Gun—Will Travel might conjure up to audiences some of the mystery or ambiguity of films noir. Certainly, the use of first-person voice-over narration harkens back to a key audio technique in the postwar cycle of influential films that often immersed the audience in the subjectivity of a character. Noir visualization is evoked in the opening credits through the use of silhouette and the unsettling lack of a face to anchor the direct address that appears in most seasons. Film noir’s visual style and thematic preoccupations were first evidenced in detective and mystery films but also found a home in some postwar Westerns, such as Pursued (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur. The hardboiled qualities of character and thematics noticed in Have Gun—Will Travel from its beginning may have emanated, as explained in chapter 4, from co-creator Sam Rolfe’s belief that the series was best when it dwelled on the drama of “human failure” (Grams and Rayburn 65). Have Gun—Will Travel’s view of the frailty of human nature lends itself well to a film noir visual style, but the storytelling remains rooted in linear narrative rather than the circular, convoluted flashback mechanisms associated with film noir (with the exception of “Genesis”). Although television is rarely talked about as a director’s medium, there were remarkable and remarkably recognizable directorial contributions from McLaglen, Boone, Buzz Kulik, Ida Lupino, and Richard Donner, among others. Boone and Kulik in particular cultivated an aesthetic style aligned with the conventions of film noir, which emerged in postwar Hollywood filmmaking. Film noir is often considered to be a sensibility (darkness of the soul as well as in its lighting style), and episodes directed by Boone and Kulik suggest a literal darkening of what was already a series with a rather dark sensibility. These episodes contribute to developing an emergent signature look that complemented the realism-oriented signature style of acting

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(the Method) and the morally dark vision of many scripts, especially those of Harry Julian Fink and Robert Thompson. The series had several directors of photography, starting with William Margulies and Fleet Southcott (both working in seasons 1 and 2). Stuart Thompson shot season 3, and Frank Phillips took over in seasons 4, 5, 6. High-contrast lighting, emphasis on night scenes, deep shadows and silhouettes, and the abstraction of space in claustrophobic settings are not just expressionistic icing on the narrative cake or punctuation (as Caldwell argues of his examples) but instead are part of a sustained darkening of the Western in Have Gun—Will Travel. This was especially notable in episodes directed by Richard Boone, such as “Ambush,” “Fight at Adobe Wells,” “The Walking Years,” “The Night the Town Died,” “The Killing of Jessie May,” and “Squatter’s Rights.” These episodes often take the form of chamber dramas in which a group of people is confined in one nighttime location. In this setting, an emotionally charged conflict emerges that reveals past wrongs. Boone-directed episodes such as “The Killing of Jessie May” and “The Mountebank” offer more varied settings but also take advantage of high-contrast lighting and night scenes, as does “The Campaign of Billy Banjo” (episode #114, May 28, 1960, season 3). Although using the familiar set of the Paramount studio Western town, used also for Gunsmoke and for John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the lighting of “The Campaign of Billy Banjo” and the camera setups transform this much-used studio set into an inhospitable noir world befitting its tale of the perversion of the political process. In the final sequence, a torch-lit funeral procession culminates in the defeat of the title character. The camera holds on Billy (Jacques Aubuchon) in a deep focus shot as he dejectedly walks down the dark, empty main street and then pauses under his campaign banner for the fade out. In spite of adherence to linear plotting, an obsession with the past, memory, and guilt, so frequently at the center of film

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noir, is also key to many episodes of Have Gun—Will Travel. These memories often relate to the imperative to avenge injustice or pay back a debt. This underscores the actions of many characters, including Paladin, in “Squatter’s Rights” (episode #171, Dec. 30, 1961, season 5). Paladin takes an assignment to help Costigan (Warren Stevens), the brother of the man who saved his life in the Civil War. Strangely, enough (considering that Paladin fought for the Union), Costigan is a Texas cattle rancher. He wants Paladin to remove a squatter and his wife who occupy a cabin on the rancher’s vast acreage. After Paladin fails to stop the lynching of a hired man who works for the squatter, Paladin abandons Costigan’s cause and visits the shack of the squatters. They live in the darkness, waiting every night for the arrival of Costigan and his men. Paladin asks Clemenceau (Robert J. Stevens) why he does not just accept Costigan’s offer of money and move on. Clemenceau is haunted by his poverty, the death of his daughter (who is buried outside the cabin), and his failures in life. The scene becomes a chamber drama defined as much by darkness and chiaroscuro lighting as by failed aspirations and regret. These “hauntings” may close down the landscape of the Western into a mindscape, as it does also in the Boone-directed episode “The Mountebank” (episode #132, Dec. 24, 1960, season 4), scripted by Shimon Wincelberg. “The Mountebank” (sometimes called “The Puppeteer”) opens with Paladin standing on a floodplain in front of the Oregon mountains. The freedom of the wide-open West seems to beckon, but Paladin’s horse is down, and he is forced to shoot it. Cooling his feet in a stream, he hears a snorting horse. A subjective shot (tilt moving into a pan) captures his first look at a decorated wagon stopped on the road. He hitches a ride with the wagon’s owner, a puppeteer named Burnaby (Crahan Denton). However, the man offers an ambiguous response to Paladin’s simple question, “How far are you going?” “The end of the line,” Burnaby says ominously. Showing the wagon ascending the trail in front of the Cascade

Boone’s episodes show the influence of film noir: “The Mountebank” (season 5).

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Mountains, panning shots follow it into a fort. Editing and reframing blend the spaces so that the audience can see that the fort is not a back-lot or movie-ranch creation but is actually in this wilderness setting. The banner across the fort’s open gates announces that Pawnee Croft (Denver Pyle) commands the post; it declares the general to be “The people’s choice for the whitehouse.” In the fort children happily respond to Burnaby’s preview of his show, to be held that night. Filled with references to death, the preview is sinister even for a Punch and Judy act. The episode switches to night-for-night shooting as Paladin enters the Mountebank’s wagon. A shot of all the puppets in low-key, high-contrast lighting suggests an atmosphere of menace. Paladin learns that Burnaby seeks revenge against the general. Burnaby’s evening performance on the fort’s parade ground sustains a noir

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sensibility. The puppeteer exposes Croft’s famous “Pawnee Victory” over the Indians as having been based on his torture and murder of Burnaby’s Pawnee wife. In spite of achieving his aim, in the end Burnaby appears to be a broken man. Cradled in Paladin’s arms in the darkness, he repeats in his high-pitched Punch-and-Judy voice “Judy, Judy, Judy.” “The Mountebank” sustains its atmosphere through nightfor-night shooting and low key, high contrast lighting characteristic also of film noir. The episode creates a sense of a vast darkness existing immediately outside the fort’s meager pools of light, provoking a sense of dread. This is contrary to Alan Barr’s claim that location shooting emphasizing open spaces in Westerns contradicts the aims of noir stylistics (166–68). Also, some landscapes in Have Gun—Will Travel shot during the day can convey a sense of an inescapable and hostile environment. This occurs in desert scenes in “The Wager” (episode #55, Jan. 3, 1959, season 2) shot in the Alabama Hills, and in the disturbing episode, “The Road,” in which Paladin is forced to flee on foot across the mountains when he is pursued by vengeful scavengers (episode #153, May 27, 1961, season 4). These two episodes, both directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, may not duplicate the impact of urban locales as handled in film noir but they do, like “The Mountebank,” produce feelings of unease and paranoia. Conclusion

Mediating television’s penchant for the intimate with the cinematic impulse, Have Gun—Will Travel became one of the most striking visual articulations of the Western on television. Whether taking advantage of location shooting that opened the epic proportions of landscape to lend authenticity to its narratives of the West or closing down into literally dark chamber dramas exploring the human condition, the visual impact of Have Gun—Will Travel justified the efforts of Boone and his

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collaborators to keep the series from becoming just another factory product. In this respect, it also proves that television studies must escape the grip of questionable generalizations and unexamined assumptions about the aesthetics of the small screen that prevent us from seeing distinctive contributions to our televisual past.

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Have gun will travel reads the card of a man. A knight without armor in a savage land. His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind. A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin. Paladin—Paladin—Where do you roam? “The Ballad of Paladin,” lyrics by Johnny Western, Sam Rolfe, and Richard Boone

Now here is the stuff of dreams! I am drawn to the Paladin Way as to no other cowboy hero. . . . Paladin is someone whose spirit I have conjured up for myself, though it took television to give him substance. Floyd Skloot, “The Wink of the Zenith” (434)

W

riting in the Los Angeles Times, Jack Smith memorialized Have Gun—Will Travel in the final week of its original broadcast in May 1963. Sad to see it go, Smith declared himself

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to be “a Paladin man.” He remarked on the influence of the series: “Someday sociologists may note that a whole generation of American boys grew up on Saturday night doses of Paladin, for better or for worse. . . . My own boys for six years absorbed these weekly Paladin sermons. For that’s what they were. Paladin played no less a role than redeemer. He staked his skin to deliver the weak and punish the wicked” (“Hero Today”). Although scheduled in evening hours, television’s adult Westerns were watched by many children (such as Smith’s sons) who missed out on the heyday of the movie B-Westerns in the 1930s and 1940s.1 The popularity of TV Westerns among children was registered in the tremendous sales of games, toy guns, and Western paraphernalia branded by show or hero. Have Gun—Will Travel enjoyed brisk sales in merchandise aimed at the child market that included comic books, a board game, a checkers set, cap gun pistol and holster sets, a toy derringer, play costumes, a Paladin action figure, and, of course, copies of the hero’s famous card. As Smith’s elegy for the show suggests, Have Gun—Will Travel made a deep impression on many growing boys and teenagers even as the appeal of the programs to juveniles remained controversial because of violent content (Shanley, “Realistic Censorship”). Years after the series’ original broadcast, the number of fan websites, mainly authored by men, register the legacy of nostalgia generated by the series, one also explicated by Floyd Skloot in his memoir essay “The Wink of the Zenith.” Skloot narrates his growing up with television in the postwar era. Critical to his maturation is the moment when, as a tenyear-old, his family-centered experience of television is replaced by viewing allegiance based on private fantasy. Skloot becomes fixated on Paladin as a role model (434). In an apt summary of the dynamics of parasocial fascination, he recalls loving “the peculiar mixture of gravity, sensibility, elegance, alienation, and depressiveness that marks Paladin for me” (434). The casting of Richard Boone is important also because it “encourages me to

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believe that a man doesn’t have to be handsome to be the hero of his own imaginings” (435). Men and boys may have been fascinated with Have Gun—Will Travel, but as noted in chapter 2, the press made more of Have Gun—Will Travel’s appeal to women. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there was more than just publicity hype to claims concerning women’s loyalty to the program. In writing this book, many times when I mentioned the topic of research I was met with middle-aged men and women who would exclaim, “Oh, my mother loved that show!” A trade-press article of 1967 claimed that Have Gun—Will Travel had grossed CBS fourteen million dollars (“Paladin Claimant Loses”). The initial round of syndication of the program sold for one million dollars in 1963 (“‘Have Gun’ Racks Up $1-Mil”). The syndication of Westerns was never as popular as some other programs, encountering resistance in the East Coast market. That trend became a moot point in the early 1990s as a ruling on litigation impeded rebroadcast (Grams and Rayburn 142–43). In spite of this temporary obstacle, Have Gun—Will Travel has become a cult object, spawning websites, fan books, blog commentary, and eBay bidding on toys and items related to the series. Attention was paid to its release on VHS and then on DVD. The series’ critical reputation remains high. In 2006 on the release of DVDs of the series, Richard Corliss remarked that Paladin “needed no supporting cast to cheer on or question his decisions; he already had the writers and directors to make this series the best in the West.” In spite of being part of a formulaic, highly popular, and often denigrated genre, Have Gun—Will Travel was a sophisticated program on many levels, or as one commentator noted, it was “the most adult of the adult Westerns” (Sharnik). Although constrained by the forces of television censorship and network timidity, Have Gun—Will Travel managed to address important social problems in the 1950s and early 1960s and broke barriers in television in casting minorities. The series mixed sardonic humor with an almost existential view of the world. As a result,

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Have Gun—Will Travel seems more modern in tone and attitude than many series of its type and time. It is no wonder that in the early 1990s, a movie version to star white hip-hop artist Eminem was announced. This project did not come to fruition, but in 2013 it was reported that David Mamet was developing a serial incarnation of Have Gun—Will Travel for CBS television (“CBS, David Mamet”). As I have argued, Have Gun—Will Travel was different from innumerable other television Westerns of its time in providing a model for how great programming could be constructed “out of the box,” that is, outside of those venues, like the anthology series, that were associated with “quality” television at the time. Have Gun—Will Travel emerges as an attempt to strive for better television through a genre that, at the time, was blamed for knocking the anthology—widely regarded as the “best” of television—off the air (Martin, “Battle” 58–60). As Schickel noted, in that context it might appear to some that “the integrity of a half-hour length of film about a fancy cowboy hardly seems worth the trouble . . . but the half-hour film show is television’s basic unit and . . . is the very place to begin the fight for quality” (53). The ambition of Have Gun—Will Travel is a legacy that led to the kind of television we now take for granted, as evidenced in the stylistic sophistication and daring revisionist depiction of U.S. origins in the HBO Western series Deadwood. The legacy of Have Gun—Will Travel is also a reminder that there is a significant amount of work to be done to understand the relationship of individual episodes to each other in a series. Assumptions about this era of television have discouraged visual analysis, and microtextual analysis of series remains rare, since many popular programs produced a very large number of episodes that are not always easily accessible. The question of how to position individual episodes in relation to the complete series is challenging, and attention to how one series relates to another is also lacking. What distinguishes the work of Andrew V. McLaglen on Have Gun—Will Travel from his direction of

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episodes of Gunsmoke? Are there other series of the time that also display noir stylistic tendencies consistently or emphasize a cinematic approach to televisuality? Future scholarship should address these textually centered questions to give us a more precise picture of the aesthetics of television in the era of Have Gun—Will Travel and beyond. The legacy of Have Gun—Will Travel must be measured also in the unusual role that Richard Boone exerted over the series. As discussed in chapter 5, Boone imprinted his “personality” on the show in terms that are compatible with the notion of an auteur. Although his alleged “driving urge for power” (Edson 84) was controversial at the time of original broadcast, the quality of the show across many seasons demonstrates that it was possible to offer a well-crafted program that took aesthetic risks in the face of the manic network drive for ratings superiority, a key factor that was thought to condemn the medium of television to inferiority. The type of control that Boone had over the series has now become commonplace in television for actors. Ironically, his obituary in the New York Times in 1981, while noting that Paladin was his most famous role, made no mention of his input into Have Gun—Will Travel beyond his acting (“Richard Boone, Actor, Dies at 63”). His contributions as an auteur who shaped the series aesthetically were overlooked. Perhaps it is an inevitable aspect of television, as a purveyor of “personality,” that Boone’s embodiment of Paladin, thought to be a key factor in the series’ original popularity, is a key element also in Have Gun—Will Travel retaining the aura of a cult object. In spite of the fact that the series occupied a denigrated category of fictional entertainment, its implications are indicative of the potential of mid-twentieth-century narratives, more broadly, to take on culturally important issues. Have Gun—Will Travel could be analyzed as a Cold War narrative, but I have avoided dwelling on that aspect of the series because of the danger of a formulaic reading of its relationship to political

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context and especially to Cold War stresses on U.S. nationalism (Corkin 5–7). Nevertheless, adult Westerns were often thought to provide models for national as well as individual behavior at the time of their broadcast. One conservative commentator, David Shea Teeple, asked, “Can you imagine Paladin . . . standing aside, while women and children were being massacred?” (116). Teeple called for a return “to the days when things were either black and white, right or wrong,” and declared that TV Westerns should be “compulsory viewing for U.S. diplomats so they will have a better idea of how the majority of the American people are really thinking” (117). The notion of a make-believe gunfighter as a role model for foreign policy may seem farfetched, but media and film scholar Christopher Sharrett has raised legitimate questions about the cultural legacy of television Westerns of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He argues that they furthered a destructive gun culture contributing to the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and unrealistic notions of male heroism (106–10). More recently, controversy over stand-your-ground laws and the shooting down of unarmed citizens by other citizens has returned discussion to the questionable legacy of American legal definitions of justifiable self-defense. Recalling the opening credits of Have Gun— Will Travel, gun manufacturer Henry Reporting Arms used a picture of the torso of a black-garbed man with a gun and holster to advertise its wares in 2009, confirming the iconic status of Paladin’s image as representative of the invincible American as a man who is armed (Elliott). Returning to the legacy of Have Gun—Will Travel allows us to reconsider how television, often regarded as ephemeral, inspires a lasting impact, however difficult it may be to gauge exactly what this impact may have been on a range of impressionable—or sophisticated—viewers. Was the impact of Have Gun—Will Travel part of a dangerous Cold War valorization of a fantasy of American male violence unleashed with righteous zeal on those judged to be ignorant, inferior, or just

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ideologically suspect? Was it, as Christina Klein might argue, a lesson on learning to live together in a world that was decolonizing and realigning in the wake of World War II? Was it an attractive fantasy to women (or men) about sexual liberation without moral condemnation? Or was it, as Jack Smith suggests, a weekly lesson about moral commitment, one that resonated in an era obsessed with the loss of inner-directed masculine autonomy and the triumph of a corporatized world of conformity? It seems pointless to speculate on which kinds of readings Have Gun—Will Travel encouraged when it was originally broadcast, for it probably inspired all of them to some degree or another in different viewers. It is clear that postwar cultural texts such as Have Gun—Will Travel could elicit complex and varied reactions depending on the age, gender, race, and life experience of the viewer. The impact can only be even more complex and varied if the audience is extended to include consideration of succeeding generations who watch episodes of the series via television reruns, VHS, DVD, YouTube, and myriad other sources. The demise of the Western on television in the late 1960s means that the impact of the series is not at once discernible in television Westerns that followed, since production of the genre dropped off precipitously. Nevertheless, something of its sardonic, tongue-in-cheek tone as well as its construction of the dandy-hero can be detected in a modern series such as Justified (2010, F/X channel). Based on source material by Elmore Leonard, widely known for his hardboiled detective fiction, Justified focuses on U.S. deputy marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant). A man born in impoverished Kentucky into a defiantly criminal family, Givens rebels against his heritage. Style is important to his reinvention, and he manages a Paladin-like change of identity that obviously references the Old West gunfighter/lawman as his chief model. Givens assumes the trappings of an old-fashioned Western hero (boots, big hat, big gun). He is a master of the fast draw, but this is a

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world in which the rules have changed. A government lawyer interrogates Givens after he has outdrawn and killed a Mafioso in an armed confrontation in Miami. Givens asserts, “He drew first.” The lawyer barks, “It doesn’t matter who drew first.” As punishment, Givens is assigned to his old stomping grounds— Harlan County, Kentucky—and his past comes up to meet him. Have Gun—Will Travel anticipates television programs such as Justified in which a dandified hero in exile works to effect selfrenewal as he struggles to define himself in relation to justice and violence. In this respect, the central trope of constructing a coherent, meaningful masculine identity in Have Gun—Will Travel is asserted also in television’s popular series set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, AMC’s Mad Men. Its protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is a darkly handsome, stylish New York advertising executive. His success with clients is very much dependent on his elegance and eloquence. He is, however, a mystery, as his underling Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) remarks in an early episode: “Draper? Who knows anything about that guy? No one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know.” Mad Men ultimately does lift the rock to reveal Draper’s poverty-stricken and emotionally troubled past as the orphaned child of a drunkard father and a young prostitute who died after childbirth. Like Paladin but for very different class-related reasons, Draper has assumed a different name than the one he was born with. Like Paladin, Draper assumes a new identity based on that of a man he kills. In this instance, enlisted man Dick Whitman (Hamm), a private in the Korean War, accidentally ignites an explosion that kills Donald Francis Draper (Troy Ruptash). Whitman will assume Draper’s name and history. Because television studies generally privileges interepisodic analysis over generic and comparative analysis, returning to the legacy of Have Gun—Will Travel outside of the Western suggests the persistent power in the cultural imagination of many of the tropes that did not originate with but circulated within Have Gun—Will

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Where does he roam? Paladin rides away.

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Travel. Richard Slotkin argues that “the most potent recurring hero-figures in our mythologies are men in whom contradictory identities find expression” (qtd. in Vine 192). Certainly, Don Draper, Raylan Givens, and Paladin confirm the mythically resonant power of deeply contradictory men over the American imagination. Have Gun—Will Travel was part of a popular trend, and while it achieved the top echelon of aesthetic and financial status in that trend, it was also one of the most unusual of its type, capitalizing on a difference that was recognized at the time and has continued to be noted in the many tributes to the series. Our critical curiosity should be piqued by postwar television texts such as Have Gun—Will Travel that seem to speak to or play with normative masculinity, mythic formulas, violence, and dominant racial and sexual assumptions, whether seen as embedded in a popular genre on the small screen or in twentieth-century narratives more broadly. We should also be interested in a series that seems to have embraced difference, revisionism, or radicalness conceptualized in a wide variety of ways in the 1950s and early 1960s, whether in terms of dandyism, intellectuality, visual style, or rejection of a utopian vision of the United States as a garden wrested from a wilderness. In all these ways, Have Gun—Will Travel is a milestone in television history.

Notes

Introduction 1. For a summary see MacDonald (50), and for more detail see Kirkley (117–25); see also “A History of 10 Top Winners.” For weekly Nielsen rankings, see issues of Variety and Billboard for the period. 2. On James Aubrey, see “Six-Gun Galahad” (52). Until the radio debut of Gunsmoke in 1952, the genre was, says MacDonald, “treated as children’s entertainment” in that medium (54). Other early adult TV Westerns were The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–61) and Cheyenne (1955–63). MacDonald makes the argument for the anthology Frontier (1955–56) as an outstanding early network example (52–53). 3. Two episodes from season 6, “The Predators” and “Memories of Monica,” are without the iconic moment of the card’s appearance. It seems that everyone Paladin meets in the West who needs to read his card can, with the exception of Mrs. Maude Smuggley (Jeanette Nolan) in “The Tender Gun” (episode #124, Oct. 22, 1960, season 4). 4. Paladin’s almost exclusive use of the horse as a means of transportation in the first three seasons ignores the completion of the transcontinental railroad into San Francisco in 1869. “A Matter of Ethics” (episode #5, Oct. 12, 1957, season 1) is the only episode in which we see him actually sitting on a train; he waits in a small-town station to board one in “The Waiting Room” (episode # 179, Feb. 24, 1962). We see him disembarking from a train in “The Revenger” (episode #158, Sept. 30, 1961, season 5). He carries a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which he starts to read as he waits for the stage. 5. Doug Williams argues for the possibility of the dandy-hero in Westerns (105–7). He generalizes the type to include a character like the Lone Ranger but chooses to focus on the “false dandy” as an “imitator of Satan” who is inevitably the villain of the Western. Paladin is

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compared to Satan in at least two episodes, “Gold and Brimstone” (episode #78, Jun. 2, 1959, season 2) and “The Vigil” (episode #156, Sept. 16, 1961, season 5). 6. In addition to the reviewers who noted the “playboy” aspect of Paladin at the time of the original broadcast of Have Gun—Will Travel, scholar Erin Lee Mock situates Paladin’s heterosexuality within the impact of “episodic boundaries” on the series. Although we share an interest in sexuality as a defining difference of Have Gun—Will Travel, I disagree with her readings of how visual and verbal cues construct its erotic meaning. My research suggests also that her claim that the “show’s creators expected . . . an audience almost exclusively of men” (105) is not supported by the available evidence. See my discussion of these issues in chapter 2. 7. The series was described as off-beat more than once, as in “Pilots Ready for Fall, 1957” in Billboard and in a Variety review (Gilb) of the 1960 season opener in which Paladin helps a Russian-Jewish immigrant whose identification of a lawbreaker endangers his family. Television critic Jack Gould appreciated the “quiet warmth and charm” of that episode, which he said proved “that sensitivity and intelligence do have their place in a Western.”

Chapter 1 1. Bill Wrobel concludes that the music for the pilot of Have Gun—Will Travel was recycled from the Gunsmoke episode “The Man Who Would Be Marshal” (June 15, 1957, season 2). Bernard Herrmann’s score to the pilot is in CBS, Inc. Film and TV Collection, 1955–1991. Special Collections (PASC 72-M, Box 187), University of California, Los Angeles, Library. Wrobel is correct that “Herrmann had no input after the pilot show.” However, his musical themes would continue to be used throughout Have Gun—Will Travel, in the opening and closing sequences and in other important moments, such as when Paladin’s card appears. The series depended on a number of composers for its scores, including Fred Steiner, Lucien Miraweck, Rene Garriguenc, and Jerry Goldsmith. 2. The introductory credit sequence, almost noir-like in tone, takes advantage of Boone’s distinctive, resonant voice. An oft-repeated story was that Boone read the part of the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie in a screen test for Lenka Peterson, a New York actress.

Chapter 2 1. On the similarities between the American dude and the European flâneur, see Osgerby (26–28). 2. Boone would take credit for lessening the mercenary dimensions of the character. See, among other sources, Hopper (“‘Paladin’s My Pal’”). 3. Before Have Gun—Will Travel debuted in the fall of 1957, women’s attraction to the handsome hero of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp was already being discussed. See Wolters (“Hard Riding Heroes”). Women were regarded as particularly important viewers to capture because they were seen as having control of the family’s purse strings. See Pondillo (57) and Boddy (Fifties Television 155, 159).

Notes

Boone’s back was to the camera in this scene, but director Lewis Milestone was impressed with his voice and asked him to come to Hollywood (Carpozi 91; Hano 38; Edson 23). In 1950 Boone was given a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox. In his television series Medic (1954–56), he introduced most episodes in character as Konrad Styner, MD. Medic was a much-honored series noted for its unusual realism, but it faced stiff competition in the race for ratings. 3. About half of the 225 episodes have a San Francisco introductory scene. For example, in season 1, 23 episodes start in San Francisco, and 16 start in or on the frontier. In season 6, 16 episodes are introduced in San Francisco, and 16 begin in media res with Paladin on the trail or in a frontier town. 4. The historical gunfighter John Ringo was said to have been a quick-witted “gentleman” who quoted Shakespeare and was refined in dress and manner; it was claimed (falsely) that he was college educated, but it appears true that he was keenly sensitive to his respectable family’s disapproval of his dissipated and violent lifestyle (Burrows 100). Boone plays a murderous miscreant waiting to be hung in the Universal B-Western Star in the Dust (1956). His character wears black, claims to be from a good family, and quotes Shakespeare. He is called Sam Hall, a name based on the famous English folk song about a daring criminal awaiting execution. 5. Hefner’s Playboy Clubs were anticipated by Gaslight, a gentleman’s club started in Chicago that offered its patrons an opulent nineteenthcentury setting. See Fraterrigo (71).

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Chapter 3 1. Other episodes with multiple deaths include “Deliver the Body,” “The Misguided Father,” “Fight at Adobe Wells,” “The Siege,” “Treasure Trail,” “Juliet,” “The Trial,” “Fandango,” “Taxgatherer,” “The Killing of Jessie May,” “Sweet Lady of the Moon,” “One Came Back,” “Squatter’s Rights,” “Death of a Gunfighter,” “The Waiting Room,” and “The Predators.” 2. The protagonist (James Stewart) of The Naked Spur (1953) is a rancher who becomes a bounty hunter to obtain the money he needs to buy his ranch back after having been cheated and then jilted by his fiancée. 3. The Freudianism or psychological bent of television adult Westerns was noted in many commentaries of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Lardner, Reddy, Sharnik, Smith (“Writer Says”), Nussbaum, and Barrett and Bourgin.

Chapter 4 1. On television’s timidity in addressing racism—its own and that of the country at large—in the 1950s, see Pierson, Winick (18–20), and Pondillo (142–60). 2. The words “Jew” and “Jewish” are never spoken in this episode, but the reference to Hebrew, the recounting of the family’s Old World experience with Cossacks and pogroms, as well as costuming and other details point to the family’s Jewishness, including a scene in which a local outlaw kidnaps Rivka to keep her father from testifying against him. The outlaw threatens to slit Rivka’s throat the way he saw her father butcher a cow, a reference to the kosher way of slaughtering animals. The Jewishness of the Shotness family is made the centerpiece of another episode featuring them, “A Drop of Blood” (episode #167, Dec. 2, 1961, season 5). Richard Boone’s mother, Cecilia, was from a Russian-Jewish family. Because Boone’s father, Kirk, was a highly placed corporate lawyer and a gentile, Cecilia’s Jewish heritage remained a closely guarded family secret. Later in life, Richard Boone became active in the Israeli film industry (Peter Boone interview in Rothel 66). 3. In his historical analysis of agriculture in the American West, Allan G. Bogue says that Mennonite farmers in Kansas were the source of the red winter wheat that became the region’s “most dependable cash crop” (299).

Notes

4. Someone should do an analysis of Paladin as a representative of “thymos” or “thumos,” the complex quality linked by the ancient Greeks to manly courage displaying indignation and anger. Often discussed in terms of spiritedness, thymotic warriors overcome natural human fear and act bravely on moral principle to defend the group. See Fukuyama (163–67) and Koziak (1081–85). 5. See “Odetta Has Gun,” “Odetta Has Role,” and “Folk Singer.”

Chapter 5 1. See Adams (“News”), Hopper (“But Has Gun”), and McLaglen, quoted in Rothel (95). 2. Muriel Cantor’s seminal The Hollywood TV Producer (1971) contains information from her interviews with many TV producers working in Hollywood in the 1960s. She notes of the television producer: “He has both executive and creative authority. The producer is in charge of hiring the cast, the directors, and writers for his show; he serves as coordinator between the network for whom the show is produced and/or the parent film company; and he has the final responsibility for cutting and editing the filmed product. . . . [He] has many of the tasks that in the motion picture industry are assigned to the film director. . . . [T]he producer has final authority . . . [but] does not have complete control” (7–9). 3. Boone was afraid that when Have Gun—Will Travel ended the public would not accept him in any other role, so he took steps to separate himself as an actor from Paladin and from television. Boone appeared as Abraham Lincoln in Norman Corwin’s play The Rivalry, co-produced on Broadway in 1959 by Cheryl Crawford of the Actor’s Studio (see “Richard Boone: Evolution of an Actor”; Whitcomb). He appeared in a cameo role as Sam Houston in John Wayne’s epic film, The Alamo (1960). After Have Gun—Will Travel, Boone embarked on an ambitious repertory anthology series, The Richard Boone Show (1963– 64), but it was cancelled by NBC during its first season. Disillusioned with Hollywood, he moved to Hawaii in the summer of 1964 (see interview with Claire Boone in Rothel, 58). Boone appeared in an occasional movie role and, in 1971 he returned to the mainland to live, but his relationship with the U.S. film/television industry remained fraught. He was cast as the villain in two big-screen Westerns starring John Wayne: Big Jake (1971) and The Shootist (1976). On Boone’s

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brief return to the television Western in Hec Ramsey (1972–74), see Rothel (258–65) and Armstrong (218).

Legacy 1. On the relation of B-Westerns to TV Westerns, see Fenin and Everson (309–16) and Barrett and Bourgin (51). For Boone’s extensive comments on children’s relationship to TV violence and programs such as Have Gun—Will Travel, see Evans.

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Index

Note: Bold locators reference photographs in the text. Acosta, Rodolfo, 90–91 acting techniques, 137–38, 144–45 “adult” westerns, 1–3, 9–10, 39–40, 76, 101, 153 advertising: guns, 156; merchandising, 152, 153; Paladin’s calling card, 4, 5, 27, 33, 34, 63–64, 81, 83, 99, 140, 152, 161n3; targets, 163n3 (ch. 2); television, 18, 58–59, 67, 119, 120, 136–37 aesthetics: female beauty, 50; filming and production, 127–49; Westerns, TV, and film, 13, 127–29, 139, 140 African Americans and African American characters: actors and characters, 12, 64, 122, 122–23; media outlets, 123–24; race relations and integration, 106–7; race relations content and censorship, 119–22; stereotypes, 121

aggressive behavior, 76–77 Ahn, Philip, 106 Aladjem, Terry J., 91 Alamo, The (film; Wayne), 165n3 Aldrich, Nelson W., Jr., 37 “Alice” (episode), 33–34, 55 ambient sound, 143 ambiguity: causes of prejudice and violence, 117; content and dialogue, 58–59, 60–61, 111–12; film noir, 144 “Ambush” (episode), 80, 145 American dream, 25 American exceptionalism, 7–8 American frontier. See frontier, American American Home Products, 67 “American Male: Why Is He Afraid to Be Different?, The” (Leonard), 41–42 American South. See also Confederates, former: justice notions, 78, 79; program content censorship, 119 American West. See frontier, American; Old West

177

Index

178

Andrews, Betty, 78 anthology series, 154, 161n2, 165n3 Apache tribe, 102 arms manufacturers, 156 Arness, James, 49 Around the World in 80 Days (novel; Verne), 109 art appreciation. See also education and manners: gender stereotypes, 36, 44, 50; music, 22–23, 25; theater, 23, 36–37; visual art, 36, 107 Asian and Asian American characters: portrayals, Have Gun—Will Travel, 12, 73, 98, 101–2, 103, 105–12; romantic relationships and exoticism, 109–12; settings, 102, 105, 106; stereotypes, 12, 106, 108, 111, 118; western series, 109 assimilation, 99–100, 115, 117–18 Aubrey, James, 2, 161n2 Aubuchon, Jacques, 93, 145 audiences: children, 3, 152–53; men, 8, 152–53, 162n6; ratings, 1, 3, 67–68, 155; regions, 99; women, 67–70, 153, 163n3 (ch. 2) audio effects. See ambient sound; music; voice-over; voices auteurs, 135, 155 Bachelor Father (television program), 109 “Ballad of Paladin, The” (song), 3, 141, 151 Balsam, Martin, 138 “Bandit” (episode), 64, 70, 82 Barcroft, Roy, 24 Barnes, Rayford, 133–34 Barr, Alan, 148 Barry, Gene, 68, 76 Bat Masterson (television program), 7, 68, 76

Baxley, Barbara, 138 “Bear Bait” (episode), 64, 84–85 Bellini, Vincenzo, 22–23 “Ben Jalisco” (episode), 55, 82 Benjamin, Walter, 50 Berard, Roxanne, 99 Bible quotations, 78–79 Big Jake (film; Sherman and Wayne), 165n3 black characters. See African Americans and African American characters “Black Handkerchief, The” (episode), 65 Blake, Amanda, 49 Blake, Robert, 124, 138 B-movies, 112, 129, 139, 163n4, 166n1 Bogue, Allan G., 164n3 (ch. 4) Bonanza (television program), 9, 109 Boone, Claire, 165n3 Boone, Richard, 3, 44–45. See also Paladin (character); direction and creative control, 13, 54, 56, 58, 78, 111–12, 113, 116, 120, 123, 127, 131–39, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148–49, 155; family, 164n2 (ch. 4); fans, 67, 68–69, 132, 133, 152–53; musical compositions, 151; other work, 26, 130, 163n2 (ch. 1), 163n4, 165–66n3; on Paladin, 36; visuals, 2, 11, 16, 22, 35, 53, 63, 67, 68–69, 86, 108, 111, 122, 132, 136, 152–53, 159; voice, 68, 162–63n2; on wardrobe, 21, 135 bounty hunters, 82–83, 113, 138, 164n2 (ch. 3) Brady, Ben, 139 Brando, Marlon, 112 bribery, 94–95 “Bride, The” (episode), 55, 64, 65–66

Caldwell, John, 128–29, 140, 145 “Campaign of Billy Banjo, The” (episode), 145 Cantor, Muriel, 129, 165n2 Capers, Virginia, 123 capitalism: American values, 107; critiques, Have Gun—Will Travel, 9, 10, 88, 112–13; incorporation history, American West, 87–88, 102–3 captivity narratives, 9, 115–16 card playing. See gambling Carey, Harry, Jr., 133, 138 Carlborg, Harold A., 119 Carlyle, Thomas, 20 Carnell, Suzi, 38 Carradine, John, 29–30 Carricart, Robert, 97, 103 CBS: radio programming, 3; television production, 129–30, 135–36, 139–40; television programming, 1, 4, 99, 119, 133–34, 136–37, 153, 154 censorship, and avoidance methods: language, 104–5; sexual content, 51, 59–61, 69, 111–12; social issues, 119, 153–54 chamber dramas, 145–46

Chaney, Lon, Jr., 101 “Charley Red Dog” (episode), 82, 120–21 “Chase, The” (episode), 65 chess, 6, 27, 83, 107. See also knight motif Cheyenne (television program), 161n2 children and television: children as viewers, and content awareness, 58–59, 69; viewer memories, 152–53; violence and effects, 76, 152; westerns, 3, 152 Chinatown (San Francisco), 105, 106 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 106 Chinese immigrants. See also “Hey Boy” (character); “Hey Girl” (character): portrayals, Have Gun—Will Travel, 12, 98, 101–2, 105–12; settings, 102, 105, 106; stereotypes, 12, 106, 108, 111, 118 chivalry, 26; Paladin character and action, 5, 26–27, 30, 31, 48, 55, 64–67, 83, 87; “thymos” concept, 165n4 Ciannelli, Eduardo, 84 citizens’ group protests, 76 city settings: character effects, 6, 19–20, 32, 34, 37–38; femininity vs. masculinity, 44; film noir, 148; frontier vs., 44, 50, 163n3 (ch. 1); series differences, 6, 17–18, 38 Claman, Julian, 139 class and ideology. See capitalism; education and manners close-up shots: as cinematic technique, 131, 142; facial expressions and acting, 34, 53, 54, 63, 84, 91, 110, 111, 111–12, 123; series motifs, 5, 16 clothing and costume: creative control, 134–35; dandies, 6, 19,

Index

Bronson, Charles, 82, 94, 100, 120, 138 Brooks, Donna, 116 “Brotherhood” (episode), 112–13, 120–22 “Brothers, The” (episode), 65, 79–80 Brown, Richard Maxwell, 78, 87–88 Browning, Robert, 23–24 Brummell, George Bryan “Beau,” 19, 32, 50, 61 Burr, Raymond, 135 bystanders of violence, 95

179

Index

180

20, 21–22, 22, 28, 31, 32, 34– 35, 35, 37; descriptions, 15–16, 17, 21–22, 29; merchandising, 152; stereotypes, 29–30, 33–34; visuals, 17, 22, 35, 86 Coburn, James, 138 Code of the West, 27 Cold War, 106–7, 124, 155–56, 156–57 Collins, Russell, 38 “Comanche” (episode), 65 Comanche tribe, 65, 101, 102, 113–14 “Coming of the Tiger, The” (episode), 73, 103 commercials, 58–59, 67. See also advertising Confederates, former, 30, 38–39, 55, 77 conformism: 1950s America, 9, 39–40, 40–42; Westerns, 1–2, 9, 13, 40 Connell, Evan S., 74 Connors, Mike, 138 Conrad, William, 25, 26 consumerism: mid-20th century social norms, 18, 41, 42–43; playboy lifestyle and spin, 42–43 consumption (disease), 30–31 Cooper, James Fenimore, 115 copycat programming, 3 Corliss, Richard, 153 corporate culture, 40, 41 corporate power. See capitalism; corporate culture Corwin, Norman, 165n3 costume. See clothing and costume courts and courtrooms: race and rights, 97, 103–4, 118; scenes, 24, 90, 92, 94–95, 118 Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The (television program), 109 Courtwright, David, 74, 102

Crawford, Cheryl, 165n3 creative control. See Boone, Richard; CBS; Rolfe, Sam credits: end, 141, 162n1; music, 16, 162n1; opening, 15–16, 17, 17, 72, 144, 156 crime fiction, 75, 105 critical reviews. See media coverage “Crowbait” (episode), 38 cultural sophistication. See education and manners Curtis, Ken, 82, 138 dandies and dandyism: costume, 6, 19, 20, 21–22, 22, 28, 31, 32, 33–34, 35, 37; dandy as “playboy,” 8, 40–45; history and figures, 19, 20, 32, 40, 50, 61; interests and personalities, 19– 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 31–32, 32– 33, 36–37, 43, 61; other figures in culture, 8, 56; Paladin as, 6, 7, 8, 18, 19, 29, 31–40, 35, 43, 49, 50, 88–89, 161–62n5; series theme and uniqueness, 6–7, 18, 34–36, 39–40; sexuality, 43, 50–51, 61, 66, 84; Western films and characters, 28–32, 66, 157–58, 161n5 “Darwin’s Man” (episode), 80 Deadwood (television program), 10, 154 death as character, 86, 86–87 “Death of a Gunfighter” (episode), 164n1 (ch. 3) “Debutante, The” (episode), 55 decency standards, 58–61, 69, 111–12 “Deliver the Body” (episode), 74, 82, 90, 164n1 (ch. 3) democratic justice, 91 Denton, Crahan, 138, 146

Ebsen, Buddy, 79 Eddy, Duane, 79 Edson, Lee, 3 education and manners: dandy justice, 88–89; “educating” women, 64, 65, 66; ironic deliveries, 19–20, 32, 36, 37; language, 20, 23, 33, 37, 38, 98; as “new hero” characteristics, 5–6, 23, 27, 34–36; Paladin character, 5–8, 20, 22–25, 26, 29, 32, 33– 34, 36–39, 78, 83, 84, 98, 110, 161n4; playboys, 43; Western characters, 30–32, 163n4 “Education of Sarah Jane, The” (episode), 78–79 Elam, Jack, 91

“Ella West” (episode), 29, 59–60, 64, 70 Eminem, 154 end credits, 141, 162n1 Engstrom, Jena, 33, 78 “Episode in Laredo” (episode), 95 eroticism, 56, 57, 59–61, 69, 162n6 “Eve of St. Elmo, The” (episode), 81–82, 87 “Everyman” (episode), 73, 90 exile themes: dramas, 158; immigrants, 12; Western heroes, 30, 31–32, 158 exoticism, 109–10, 111–12 extralegal justice: Have Gun—Will Travel plots, 77–79, 81, 87, 89–91, 92–94, 118, 121; literary characters, 75; Western law, 92–93; Western themes and stories, 77–78 Falk, Peter, 138 falsely accused, 90–91, 94 family violence, 40, 80–81 “Fandango” (episode), 164n1 (ch. 3) fans and fan mail, 67, 68 Faragher, John, 99 fashion. See clothing and costume “Fatalist, The” (episode), 99, 164n2 (ch. 4) Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 77, 119 female audiences, 67–70, 153, 163n3 (ch. 2) female sexuality: changing portrayals, 57–58, 69–70; curiosity, 110; stereotyped portrayals, 8–9, 55, 57 femininity vs. masculinity: criticisms of women, 64; dandyism, 20–22, 28–29; stereotypes, 36,

Index

detective fiction, 75, 105 Deuteronomy, Book of, 78–79 Dickinson, Angie, 138 Dillon, Marshal Matt (character; Gunsmoke), 49 directors of photography, 145 diversity, populations. See multiculturalism Dixon, Ivan, 12, 123 Donne, John, 78 Donner, Richard, 144 “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player” (episode), 55, 65 Douglas, Susan, 57 “Dream Girl” (episode), 55 “Drop of Blood, A” (episode), 94, 98, 164n2 (ch. 4) dualities, Paladin character, 8, 36, 39, 44, 50 dueling, 20, 25, 85, 158 Duel in the Sun (film; Vidor), 80 “Duke of Texas” (episode), 73 dystopias, 9–10, 95

181

Index

182

44, 50; Westerns’ privileging of masculinity, 7, 8, 28–29, 34–35, 44, 47–49, 65 Fickett, Mary, 21 “Fifth Bullet, The” (episode), 94 “Fight at Adobe Wells” (episode), 113–14, 117, 145, 164n1 (ch. 3) film directors: television writing, 10; Westerns, 5, 29–31, 80, 143 film noir, 13, 80, 82, 131, 143–48, 147 film ratings, 58 film techniques, 127, 129–30; cinema vs. television, 128–31, 143, 144–45, 148–49; close-up shots, 53, 54, 63, 110, 111–12, 131, 142; credits, 5, 15–16, 17, 17, 72, 141, 144, 156; flashbacks, 25–26, 144; lighting, 16, 127, 128, 130, 143, 144, 145, 147–48; location shooting, 13, 131, 139–43, 148; long shots, 17–18, 33, 141, 143; Production Code influence, 59–60; production value quality, 127–31, 140–41, 148–49; reverse shots, 18, 24, 116, 131, 141, 142; scene transitions, 59–60; tracking shots, 16, 130 film vs. television: cinematic techniques, 128–31, 143, 144–45, 148–49; complexity levels, 13 Fink, Harry Julian, 10, 75–76, 90, 103, 114–15, 124, 145 firearms ownership, 74, 76–77, 156 Fisher, Shug, 142 flashback scenes, 25–26, 144 “Fogg Bound” (episode), 109 Fong, Benson, 106 Ford, John, 5, 29–31, 80, 143, 145 foreign language skill, 25, 98, 107, 110 foreign policy, U.S., 106–7, 155–56, 156–57

forgiveness, 79 Fort Apache (film; Ford), 80 framing: shots of nature/landscape, 129, 140, 141, 142, 146–47; shots of Paladin, 16–17, 21, 33, 56, 85, 141; television production, 130, 141 Fraterrigo, Elizabeth, 42, 61 Frontier (television anthology), 161n2 frontier, American: diversity, 102–3; industry, 102, 112–13, 114; law of, 89, 90, 92–93; literature, 115; location filming importance, 140–43; masculinity equations, 50; Paladin setting and business, 81–82, 89, 163n3 (ch. 1); violence and American history, 72–73, 74 “Full Circle” (episode), 22, 22 Furies, The (film; Mann), 80 gambling: dandies’ interest, 19, 20–21, 29, 30–31; series plots, 25–26; Westerns, 6, 29–30, 30–31, 44, 82 Garner, James, 68, 133 Garriguenc, Rene, 162n1 Gaslight (club), 163n5 Gehman, Richard, 134–35 Generation of Vipers (Wylie), 41 “Genesis” (episode), 25, 72–73, 144 “gimmick” episodes, 10 Godfrey, Sima, 36–37 “Gold and Brimstone” (episode), 36–37, 84, 162n5 Goldsmith, Jerry, 162n1 “Gospel Singer, The” (episode), 38, 54, 89 Gould, Jack, 162n7 “great man” theory, 41, 42 “Great Mojave Chase, The” (episode), 11

hair, 34, 68 Hale, Betsy, 64 Hamamoto, Darrell, 116–17, 118 Hamlet (play; Shakespeare), 71, 104 Hamm, Jon, 158 Hammer, Mike (literary character), 75, 105 hanging, 92, 93–94, 95 “Hanging of Aaron Gibbs, The” (episode), 64, 65, 122, 123 Hark, Ina Rae, 9–10 Harrison, Jan, 54 Harte, Bret, 29 Hartman, Paul, 79 “Hatchet Man” (episode), 106, 107

Hatton, Raymond, 138 Havemann, Ernest, 68 “Head of Hair, A” (episode), 114–15, 116 Healy, Myron, 120 Hebrew language, 164n2 (ch. 4) Hec Ramsey (television program), 165–66n3 Hefner, Hugh: publishing and cultural power, 8, 42–43, 51, 57, 61, 163n5; style and dress, 56 “Helen of Abajinian” (episode), 100 Hendricks, George, 27 Henry Reporting Arms, 156 heroes. See also chivalry: contradictions within, 28, 158, 160; genesis myth, 8; language use, 23; masculinity, 65, 70; modern Westerns, 157–58; moralism, 118; Paladin as, 2, 5–8, 23, 26–27, 36, 39, 64, 70, 151–52; traditional Westerns, 5, 6, 7, 15–16, 34–35, 36, 44, 49, 65, 72, 118, 156; violence, 75, 105; visuals, 15–16 Herrmann, Bernard, 5, 16, 162n1 heterosexuality, 43, 48, 50–51, 54, 61, 66, 70, 162n6 “Hey Boy” (character), 12, 21, 52–54, 53, 56, 62, 105–6, 107–9, 108, 110, 117–18 “Hey Boy’s Revenge” (episode), 12, 105–6, 107, 110–11 “Hey Girl” (character), 52, 62–64, 63, 109, 110–11 High Noon (film; Zinnemann), 95 “High Wire” (episode), 84 Hill, Richard, 28 Hilmes, Michele, 77 Hispanic characters, 100, 104 “Hobson’s Choice” (episode), 52 Hodgins, Earle, 60

Index

gunfighters. See also Paladin (character); Westerns (television and film genre): action, 84–85; dress, 17, 33–34; Old West, and reasons for violence, 74, 87–88, 163n4; others, in Have Gun— Will Travel, 12, 86–87, 90, 100, 123; Paladin, 4–5, 7–8, 17, 38, 39, 81, 88, 94; Westerns, 15–17, 30–31, 156 gun ownership and culture, 74, 76–77, 156 “Gun Shy” (episode), 89, 107 Gunsmoke (radio and television program): actors, 138; as “adult” western, 2, 9, 161n2; directors, 154–55; Have Gun—Will Travel compared, 4, 9, 162n1; international distribution, 76; plots and characters, 49, 119; ratings, 1; shooting locations, 140, 145 gun violence (real-life), 74, 76–77, 87 gynophobia and misogyny, 40–41, 42, 49, 50–51. See also patriarchy

183

Index

184

Holliday, Doc (character; My Darling Clementine), 30–31, 32 Hollywood TV Producer, The (nonfiction; Cantor), 129, 165n2 Holmes, Odetta, 64, 122, 123 “Homecoming” (episode), 23 homosexuality, 51 homosocial environments, 29, 48–49, 74 honor. See chivalry; knight motif Horrocks, Roger, 72 horses, 6, 78, 94, 141, 146, 161n4 Hotel Carlton: setting and home base, 6, 17–18, 21–22, 33–34, 43, 52– 53, 56; staff and staff relations, 62, 105, 107–9, 110–11 humor: in Have Gun—Will Travel, 5–6, 10, 11, 33–34, 38, 52, 60, 84, 109, 153; running jokes, 38, 52, 62 “Hunt, The” (episode), 23 Hutton, Brian, 34 iconography: business card, 5, 27, 83, 140, 161n3; character, 17, 17, 83; credits, 15–16, 17, 17, 141, 156 identity: American, 25, 72; assumed, 158; gunfighters, 17; Paladin, 26, 158 immigrants: historical prejudice, 99–100; historical presence, 102–3; portrayals, Have Gun— Will Travel, 12, 98, 99, 100, 103, 164n2 (ch. 4); stereotypes, 98 immigration laws, 106 imperialism: “nostalgic,” 114, 115, 125, 143; U.S. foreign policy and history, 106–7, 156–57 “Incident at Barrasca Bend” (episode), 93–94

Ingalls, Don, 139 institutional racism, 106, 112, 115–16, 117 integration, 106–7, 124 “International Affair” (episode), 73, 109 international plots, 12, 73–74 international policy, U.S., 106–7 international viewers, 76 Internet, as media watching venue, 14, 157 interracial characters: Hispanic/ Anglo, 104; Native American/ Anglo, 113, 115 interracial romance, 54, 100–101, 107, 109–12, 123 “Invasion” (episode), 73 Japanese immigrants/characters, 73, 103, 106 Jewish culture, 98, 99, 164n2 (ch. 4) Johnson, Ben, 94, 114, 115, 138 Johnson, Erskine, 67 Jones, Miranda, 55, 113 Joyrich, Lynne, 133 “Juliet” (episode), 39, 55, 56, 164n1 (ch. 3) jump cuts, 16 justice. See also racial justice: American views, 28, 103; “dandy” justice, 88–92, 94; democratic, 91; Paladin motivation and action, 10, 27–28, 39, 64–65, 72–73, 75, 78–79, 82–83, 87–95, 103–4, 104–5, 120–21, 146; vs. power, 87–88; revenge and extralegal violence, 77–79, 90–91, 93–95; Western characters and values, 5, 27, 81 “Justice in Hell” (episode), 64–65, 77

kangaroo courts, 92–94, 94–95 Katz, Oscar, 137 Kazan, Elia, 138 Keen, Maurice, 26 Keep, Michael, 120 Kennedy, George, 138 “Killing of Jessie May, The” (episode), 62–64, 63, 123–24, 138, 145, 164n1 (ch. 3) Kim Chan (character), 12, 21, 52–54, 53, 56, 62, 105–6, 107–9, 108, 110, 117–18 Kim Li (character), 52, 62–64, 63, 109, 110–11 King and I, The (film; Lang), 110 Kinsey reports (1948, 1953), 8 Kitses, Jim, 80 Kjeldsen, Ingeborg, 52–54, 53 Klein, Christina, 106–7, 157 knight motif, 2, 5, 6, 16, 17, 26–28, 39, 83, 151 “Knight to Remember” (episode), 47 Knowles, Patric, 109 Kulik, Buzz, 99, 103, 144 “Lady, The” (episode), 65, 74 “Lady of the Fifth Moon, The” (episode), 54, 66, 106, 111, 111–12 “Lady on the Stagecoach” (episode), 81 “Lady on the Wall, The” (episode), 89 “Lady with a Gun” (episode), 54–55, 79 La Farge, Christopher, 75 Lakota (Sioux) tribes, 102, 115–16, 143

landscape shots, 129, 139–43, 146–47 language. See also names: argument and rhetoric, 24; “dudes” and “dandies” roots, 28, 29; manners, 20, 31, 33, 37; Paladin character and personality, 5–8, 20, 23–24, 33, 34, 37, 38, 98, 107, 110; “playboy” roots, 42; racist, 104– 5, 108, 118–19, 121; as weapon, 5–6, 20, 24, 104–5, 121 “Last Judgment, The” (episode), 24 law. See also courts and courtrooms; extralegal justice; justice: miscarriages of justice, 94–95, 113; Old West, 92–93, 95, 103, 104; race and injustice, 97, 103, 113, 116–19; Westerns, 72, 112 “Lazarus” (episode), 123 legacy, Have Gun—Will Travel, 14, 151–60 Leigh, Erin, 57 Leitch, Thomas, 135 Leonard, Elmore, 157 Leonard, George B., 41–42 Leslie, Bethel, 111, 111 Lever Bros., 67 “liberal benevolence,” 116–17, 125 Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The (television program), 7, 76, 161n2, 163n3 (ch. 2) lighting, 16, 127, 128, 130, 143, 144, 145, 147–48 location shooting, 13, 131, 139–43, 148 Lockhart, June, 61 logic, 24, 109 Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 41, 42 Lone Ranger (character), 161n5 “Long Hunt, The” (episode), 101 long shots: film directors, 143; series use and views, 17–18, 33, 141, 143

Index

Justified (television program), 157–58 juvenile delinquents, 85

185

Index

186

“Long Way Home” (episode), 12, 123, 138 “Long Weekend, The” (episode), 112–13, 141–42 Lord, Jack, 138 Los Angeles locations, 139, 140 Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (film; King), 110, 112 “Love of a Bad Woman” (episode), 87, 112–13 Lu, Lisa, 12, 62, 63, 110 Lupino, Ida, 24, 90, 136, 137, 144 Lynch, Ken, 113 lynching and lynch law, 78, 87, 90–91, 92–94, 103, 104, 121, 146 MacDonald, J. Fred, 161n1, 161n2 Mad Men (television program), 158 “Maggie O’Bannion” (episode), 24, 33, 54 male gaze, 6, 51–52, 110 Mamet, David, 154 Manifest Destiny, 71–72, 102–3, 113–14 Mann, Anthony, 80 manners. See education and manners Man of the West (film; Mann), 80 “Man Who Lost, The” (episode), 90–92, 93 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (film; Ford), 80, 145 “Man Who Would Be Marshal, The” (episode; Gunsmoke), 162n1 “Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, The” (episode), 100 Mardsen, Michael, 12 Margulies, William, 145 marriage: arranged/purchased, 110; intermarriage, 100; interracial, 112; mail-order, 9,

48, 66; Paladin, 62, 63–64, 109; rejections, 61, 62, 63–64 Marshall, Marion, 24 “Marshal of Sweetwater, The” (episode), 55 Martin, Strother, 84 masculinity. See also dandies and dandyism: changes, and blaming women, 41, 42, 49; changes, mid-20th-century America, 8, 18, 39–40, 40–43, 51; character appreciation, 68–69; criticisms of women, 64, 70; vs. femininity, 7, 8, 20, 21–22, 35, 47–48; heterosexuality, 43, 48, 50–51, 66, 70; HGWT’s/dandyism’s takes and shifts, 6–7, 18, 19, 20, 29–30, 32, 34–37, 39–40, 44, 50; as inherent hero quality, 48, 65, 70; male-male relationships, 49, 80; modern dramatic portrayals, 158; norms, and Western characters, 6–7, 8, 20, 27, 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 34–35, 37, 40, 43, 80; as performance, 6–7, 32, 36, 44, 72; “playboy lifestyle” alternatives, 42–43, 51, 61 Maté, Rudolph, 80 “Matter of Ethics, A” (episode), 23, 161n4 Mature, Victor, 30 Maverick (television program), 44, 68, 133 McLaglen, Andrew V., 85, 106, 114–15, 120, 123, 141, 143, 144, 148, 154–55 McQuade, Arlene, 109 Meadow, Herb, 4, 6, 120 media and methods, viewing, 14, 130, 153, 157

movement, character, 68–69, 85 multiculturalism: American attitudes and changes, 11–12; exoticism, 109–10; integration, 106–7; Paladin as appreciative, 54, 98, 100, 107, 124; in romances, 54, 100–101, 107, 109–12, 123; in series portrayals and plots, 12, 54, 64, 73–74, 98–100, 102, 103, 124, 153; tokenism, 98; TV history, 97–98, 107, 109 murder for hire, 81–82 music: musical motifs, 5, 16, 17, 162n1; stories/plots, 22–23, 25; theme song, 3, 141, 151 My Darling Clementine (film; Ford), 30–31, 32, 80 Nachbar, Jack, 12 Naked Spur, The (film; Mann), 80, 164n2 (ch. 3) names, 5, 26, 30, 99, 158 narration: direct address, 16; variety, 59; voice-over, 16, 144 National Association of Broadcasters, 77 Native Americans: land theft and racial extermination, 71–72, 102–3, 113–15, 116; portrayals, Have Gun—Will Travel, 12, 65, 73, 74, 90–91, 100–101, 102, 113–16, 120–21, 124–25, 143, 147–48; portrayals, Westerns, 9; racism against, 104–5, 113, 114– 16, 120–21, 124; stereotypes, 12, 115–16, 121, 124–25; tribes, 102, 113, 115, 116; violent actions/plots, Have Gun—Will Travel, 99, 100–101, 115–16 nature: framing of shots, 129, 140, 141, 142, 146–47; long shots, 141

Index

media coverage: of Have Gun—Will Travel, 3, 4, 12, 18, 67–68, 123– 24, 128, 131–33, 132, 134–35, 138–39, 151–52, 162n7; of Westerns, 3, 127–28 Medic (television program), 163n2 (ch. 1) Medina, Patricia, 65 Meisner, Sanford, 137–38 “Memories of Monica” (episode), 161n3 Mennonites, portrayals, 12, 99–100, 164n3 (ch. 4) mercenary qualities, 81–82, 163n3 (ch. 2) merchandising, 152, 154 Method acting, 137–38, 144–45 Milestone, Lewis, 105, 162–63n2 Mills, Mort, 90 mining communities, 92, 93, 102 Minow, Newton, 77 Miraweck, Lucien, 162n1 “Misguided Father, The” (episode), 77, 164n1 (ch. 3) misogyny. See gynophobia and misogyny Miss Kitty (character; Gunsmoke), 49 Mitchell, Thomas, 30 Mitchum, James, 25–26 mob violence, 92–95, 118, 121 Mock, Erin Lee, 162n6 “momism,” 41 monologues, 16 “Monster of Moon Ridge, The” (episode), 98 Moskin, J. Robert, 41 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America, 58 “Mountebank, The” (episode), 13, 145, 146–48, 147

187

Index

188

Navajo tribe, 102 Needham, Hal, 138 Nelson, Ed, 91 Newcomb, Horace, 140 Nez Perce tribe, 102, 115–16, 142–43 Nielsen ratings, 67 night scenes and episodes, 29, 52, 103–4, 111–12, 145–46, 147–48 “Night the Town Died, The” (episode), 145 “Noble Anachronism” approach, Native Americans, 12 Nolan, Jeanette, 68, 88, 161n3 “nostalgic imperialism,” 114, 115, 125, 143 “No Visitors” (episode), 54, 62 objectification: effect, faceless figures, 16–17, 17; of women, Have Gun—Will Travel, 48, 50, 51, 109; of women, media, 57–58; of women, playboy lifestyle, 43, 51 “Odds for Big Red” (episode), 55, 123 Odetta, 64, 122, 123 O’Hehir, Andrew, 10 Old Testament, 78–79 Old West: “Civil War of Incorporation,” 87–88, 102–3; immigration and prejudice, 99; industry, 102, 112–13, 114; landscape shots, 129, 139–43; lynch law, 92–93, 95, 103, 104; violence, reality and myth, 27, 74, 77, 87–88, 90, 92–93, 104; white expansion/Manifest Destiny, 102–3, 113–14 Olyphant, Timothy, 157 “One Came Back” (episode), 80, 164n1 (ch. 3)

One Lonely Night (novel; Spillane), 75 opening credits, 15–16, 17, 17, 72, 144, 156 opera, 22–23 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 41 “Out at the Old Ball Park” (episode), 54 “Outcasts of Poker Flat, The” (story; Harte), 29 “Outlaw, The” (episode), 94, 141 Paladin (character). See also Boone, Richard: business card (“Have Gun, Will Travel”), 4, 5, 27, 33, 34, 63–64, 81, 83, 99, 140, 152, 161n3; dandyism, 6, 7, 8, 18, 19, 29, 31–40, 35, 43, 49, 50, 88–89, 161–62n5; dualities, 8, 36, 39, 44, 50; female audience reaction to, 3, 67, 68–69, 152–53; hero qualities, 5–8, 12, 23, 26–27, 36, 39, 64, 151–52, 160; image, credits, 15–17, 141, 144, 156; influence, 151–52; justice motivation and action, 10, 27–28, 39, 64–65, 72–73, 75, 78–79, 82–83, 87–95, 103–4, 104–5, 120–21, 146; origins, 24–26, 28, 72–73; personality, 16, 18, 20, 21–24, 29, 33–34, 38–39, 54–55, 83–85, 88–89, 152; violence, 9, 10, 37, 38–39, 72, 75–76, 81–83, 84–92, 93, 104–5; visuals, 2, 11, 15–17, 22, 29, 35, 63, 68–69, 86, 108, 111, 122, 136, 152–53, 159; writers’ descriptions, 19–20 Palmer, Gregg, 113 “Pandora’s Box” (episode), 82–83 Parker, Quanah (character), 113–14 patriarchy. See also gynophobia and misogyny: dandies, consideration

R.; Rolfe, Sam; Ruben, Albert; Sparks, Robert Production Code, 58–59, 111–12 production details. See also film techniques: credits, 15–16, 17, 72, 141, 144, 156; Have Gun—Will Travel, 13, 15–16, 127–49; location shooting, 13, 131, 139–43, 148; schedules, 129, 130–31, 135–36; Westerns, general, 112, 127–29, 134, 135–36, 139, 140, 141, 145, 148–49 promiscuity, 50–51 “Proof of Love, A” (episode), 56 “Prophet, The” (episode), 82, 101 prostitutes, 9, 48, 55, 58 “psychological realism,” 3, 164n3 (ch. 3) psychological violence, 77, 79–80, 101 psychosocial research on violence, 76 Pumphrey, Martin, 28, 31, 47–48, 49–50 “Puppeteer, The” (episode). See “Mountebank, The” (episode) Pursued (film; Tourneur), 80, 144 Pyle, Denver, 147 “Quiet Night in Town,” Parts 1 and 2 (episodes), 71, 97, 103–5 quotations: Bible, 78–79; historical, 63; literary, 23–24, 31, 71, 78, 104, 163n4; philosophical, 107 “Race, The” (episode), 114 race riots, 106 racial integration, 106–7, 124 racial justice, 12; gradualism, 103, 125; injustice, 97, 103, 113, 116–19, 125; series hope, 99, 118, 121, 125; series

Index

and fit, 50, 61; values preserved, Have Gun—Will Travel, 70 Patterson, Hank, 138 Peckinpah, Sam, 10 Peeples, Samuel A., 113 Perry Mason (television program), 135, 138, 139 pessimism, in series, 9 Petersen, Jim, 43 Peterson, Lenka, 162–63n2 Phillips, Frank, 145 photography direction, 145 “Piano, The” (episode), 55, 57 Pierson, Frank R., 10, 113, 119, 120, 137, 138, 139 pieta pose, 141–42, 142 Pine, Philip, 138 Platt, Louise, 30 Playboy (periodical), 8, 42–43, 51, 57–58 “playboy” lifestyle: dandy as playboy, 8, 18, 40–45; modern world, 8, 18, 42–43, 51, 163n5; Paladin’s world, 8, 18, 51, 55, 162n6 Playboy Mansion, 43 plots: early ideas, 4; gender issues, 47–48, 55; Paladin origin, 24–26, 28 poetry quotations, 23–24, 78 political violence, 73–74 Pollack, Sydney, 104, 138 “Posse” (episode), 94 “Predators, The” (episode), 161n3, 164n1 (ch. 3) “Princess and the Gunfighter, The” (episode), 66–67 Prine, Andrew, 138 producers, 48, 136–37, 138–39, 165n2. See also Boone, Richard; Brady, Ben; Claman, Julian; Ingalls, Don; Pierson, Frank

189

Index

190

shortcomings and dangers, 103, 118–19; women’s inequality, 27 racial stereotypes, 12, 106, 108, 111, 115–16, 118, 121, 124–25 racial terrorism, 120 racial themes, and networks’ policies, 119–24 racism: actions and effects, 103, 104–5; institutional, U.S. history, 106, 112, 115–16, 117; language, 104–5, 108, 118–19, 121; series/episodes addressing, 12, 98–99, 103, 105–6, 114–15, 117, 118–19, 120–21, 123, 124–25; series’/episodes’ racial wrongs, 12, 107–9, 115–16, 118–19, 125 railroad construction and workers, 12, 87, 103, 110, 117–18, 161n4 “rake” character qualities, 55, 69 “Ransom” (episode), 65 ratings, 1, 3, 67–68, 155 Raynor, Grace, 100 Rea, Peggy, 137, 139 Remington, Fred, 75 “Return of Dr. Thackeray, The” (episode), 61–62 “Return to Fort Benjamin” (episode), 143 revenge: desire for justice, 77–79, 90–91; Have Gun—Will Travel plots, 78–79, 81–82, 90–91, 146, 147–48; literature, 75; Old Testament, 78–79 “Revenger, The” (episode), 161n4 reverse shots, 18, 24, 116, 131, 141, 142 reviews, media. See media coverage revisionism, Have Gun—Will Travel, 9–10, 13, 44, 118 Rhodes, Hari, 123–24

Richard Boone Show, The (television program), 165n3 Riesman, David, 41, 42 Rifleman, The (television program), 9, 10 Ringo, John, 163n4 riots, 106 Rivalry, The (play; Corwin), 165n3 “Road, The” (episode), 80, 148 Roberts, Pernell, 117, 138 Rodann, Ziva, 109 Roddenberry, Gene, 12, 19–20, 33, 65, 100, 120 Rogers, Wayne, 138 Rolfe, Sam, 10; episodes scripted, 25, 72–73, 144; musical compositions, 151; on other writers and episodes, 76; on Paladin, 1, 5; screenwriting, 80; show creation/production, 4, 139, 144; social issues, Have Gun—Will Travel, 98–99, 119, 120; staff, 137 Rosaldo, Renato, 114 Roughing It (Twain), 97 Ruben, Albert, 120, 133, 139 running jokes, 38, 52, 62 Ruptash, Troy, 158 rural justice, 78, 79 Ruscio, Al, 138 Russell, Miss Kitty (character; Gunsmoke), 49 saloon girls, 9, 48, 55, 82, 123 San Francisco: Chinatown, 105, 106; multiculturalism, 101–2, 105; as setting, 6, 17–18, 21, 32, 33, 81, 101–2, 105, 163n3 (ch. 1); transportation, 161n4 sarcasm, 25, 37, 109, 114 Satan, 161–62n5

sexual politics. See also dandies and dandyism; female sexuality; masculinity: in Have Gun—Will Travel, 8–9, 49, 55, 69–70; Westerns, 47–49 sexual violence, 101, 114–15, 121 Shakespeare, William: plays, 47, 71; quoted, 24, 31, 71, 104, 163n4 Shane (film; Stevens), 80 Sharrett, Christopher, 156 shooting and production schedules, 129, 130–31, 135–36 shooting on location, 13, 131, 139–43, 148 shooting schedules, 129, 130–31 Shootist, The (film; Siegel), 165n3 short stories, 29 Shoshone tribe, 101 shot-reverse-shots, 131, 142 “Siege, The” (episode), 43, 164n1 (ch. 3) “Silent Death, Secret Death” (episode), 141–43, 142 Silver, Pat, 91 “Silver Convoy” (episode), 24 Simmon, Scott, 31 Simms, Jay, 93 “Singer, The” (episode), 22–23, 25 Sioux (Lakota) tribes, 102, 115–16, 143 Skloot, Floyd, 151, 152–53 Slotkin, Richard, 71–72, 115, 160 Smith, Cecil, 36, 138–39, 140 Smith, Jack, 105, 151–52, 157 Sommer, Rich, 158 Somnambula, La (Bellini), 22–23 “Sonnet 18” (Shakespeare), 24 “Sons of Aaron Murdock, The” (episode), 80 sophistication. See education and manners

Index

satire, 44 “Saturday Night” (episode), 29 Sax, Arline, 66 Sayonora (film; Logan), 110, 112 scene transitions, 59–60 Schickel, Richard, 68, 127, 128, 134, 137, 154 “Scorched Feather” (episode), 77, 101 Scott, Jacqueline, 38, 100 screen tests, 162–63n2 screenwriters, film, 10 “Search, The” (episode), 65, 80 Searchers, The (film; Ford), 80 segregation, 119, 123 Seldes, Marian, 66, 138 self-censorship. See censorship, and avoidance methods self-defense: American norms and definitions, 90, 156; killings, Have Gun—Will Travel, 60, 85, 90, 156 self-regulation, media, 58–59, 76 series episodes and cohesiveness, 154–55 settings: cities, 6, 17–18, 19–20, 37–38; frontier vs. city, 44, 50, 163n3 (ch. 1); landscape use, 129, 139–43, 146–47; location shooting, 13, 131, 139–43, 148 sexual ambiguity: behavior, 50–51, 84; television content, 58–59, 60–61, 69, 111–12 sexual behavior: American history, 8, 61; dandies, 43, 50–51, 61, 70; Paladin interest and activity, 8, 43, 51–55, 57, 58, 59–62, 64, 66–67, 69, 70, 108–9, 109–10, 111–12, 162n6; playboys, 43, 51, 61, 70; as power trait, 108–9; rakishness, 55, 69; traditional Westerns, 40, 49; women, 8–9, 55, 57

191

Index

192

Southcott, Fleet, 145 Southern United States. See also Confederates, former: justice notions, 78, 79; program content censorship, 119 South Pacific (film; Logan), 110, 112 Sparks, Robert, 48, 139 Spillane, Mickey, 75, 105 “Squatter’s Rights” (episode), 13, 112–13, 145, 146, 164n1 (ch. 3) Stagecoach (film; Ford), 5, 29–30, 31, 32, 66 Stalmaster, Lynn, 137 “stand-your-ground” laws, 156 Star in the Dust (film; Haas), 163n4 Steiner, Fred, 162n1 stereotypes: African Americans, 121; Asian Americans, 12, 106, 108, 111, 118; clothing and, 29–30, 33–34; dandies, 19, 21, 28, 29–30, 34; gamblers, 29; Native Americans, 12, 115–16, 121, 124–25; racial, 12, 106, 108, 111, 115–16, 118, 121, 124–25; rural/ southern, 79; about Westerns, 13, 33–34; women, 9, 48, 50, 65 Stevens, George, 80 Stevens, Robert J., 146 Stevens, Warren, 81, 146 Stewart, James, 164n2 (ch. 3) Stone, Harold J., 23 stunts, 138 supporting cast, 12, 38, 153. See also specific actors Swan, William, 60 Sweden, 76 “Sweet Lady of the Moon” (episode), 77, 138, 164n1 (ch. 3) syndication, 153 Tako, Miiko, 112

Talman, William, 124, 138 “Taxgatherer” (episode), 138, 164n1 (ch. 3) “Teacher, The” (episode), 39 Teeple, David Shea, 156 television censorship. See censorship, and avoidance methods Television Code, 58–59 television history. See also children and television; Westerns (television and film genre): advertising, 18, 58–59, 67, 119, 120, 136–37; complexity and simplicity, 13, 119, 153–54; Have Gun—Will Travel amidst 50s programming, 9, 13, 14, 67–68, 98, 109, 127–29, 131–49, 132, 153–54, 160; multiculturalism or lack thereof, 97–98, 107, 109, 119, 153; production schedules, 129, 130–31, 135–36; quality standards, 154; sexual standards, 51, 58, 69; social commentary and censorship issues, 119–20, 153–54, 164n1 (ch. 4); viewing media, 14, 130, 153, 157; violence standards, 76–77 “Tender Gun, The” (episode), 68–69, 88, 161n3 Thayer, Lorna, 129 theater, 23, 36–37, 165n3 Thompson, Robert E., 10, 79, 85, 145 Thorburn, David, 135 “Three Bells to Perdido” (episode), 17, 25, 54 “Three Sons” (episode), 77 “thymos,” 165n4 title sequences, 15–16, 17, 17, 72, 144, 156

violence: bystanders, 95; dandies, 20, 37; family, 40, 80–81; Have Gun— Will Travel, 9–10, 72–80, 81–95; literature and entertainment tastes, 71, 75; Old West, 27, 74, 77, 87–88, 90, 92–93, 95, 104; Paladin, 9, 10, 37, 38–39, 72, 75–76, 81–83, 84–92, 93, 104–5; political, 73–74; protests against, 76, 77; psychological, 77, 79–80, 101; real-life, 74–75, 76–77, 156; television history and standards, 76–77; types and scenes, 73, 74, 76, 77; Westerns, 3, 17, 37, 44–45, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 152 Violent Men, The (film; Maté), 80 Virginian, The (novel; Wister), 93 Virginian, The (television program), 9 visual framing. See framing voice-over, 16, 20, 63, 112, 114, 144 voices, 68, 162–63n2

“Uneasy Grave, The” (episode), 55 urban settings. See city settings U.S. Army, 25, 101 U.S. domestic policy, 106–7, 114–15, 124 U.S. foreign policy, 106–7, 155–56, 156–57 utilitarian ethics, 72 Utley, Robert, 102 utopia vs. dystopia, 9–10

“Wager, The” (episode), 86–87, 148 Wagon Master (film; Ford), 80 Wagon Train (television program), 9 “Waiting Room, The” (episode), 52–54, 53, 109, 123, 161n4 Walberg, Gary, 138 “Walking Years, The” (episode), 70, 116, 145 Wanted: Dead or Alive (television program), 129 Warshow, Robert, 7, 15–16, 34–36, 72, 75 Wayne, John, 5, 30, 165n3 West, Elliott, 65, 98 West, Martin, 82 Western, Johnny, 151 “Western Civil War of Incorporation” (R. M. Brown theory), 87–88, 102–3

Van Cleef, Lee, 138 Verne, Jules, 109 veterans, 25, 30, 39, 115 Vidor, King, 80 viewers. See audiences “Vigil, The” (episode), 21, 162n5 vigilante justice. See extralegal justice Vine, Robert V., 99

Index

tokenism, 98 Tompkins, Jane, 7, 23, 34–35, 49 Tong, Kam, 12, 53, 108 torture, 92, 115, 148 Tourneur, Jacques, 80, 144 toys, 152, 153 tracking shots, 16, 130 “Treasure Trail” (episode), 164n1 (ch. 3) Trevor, Claire, 30 “Trial, The” (episode), 24, 82, 101, 112–13, 138, 164n1 (ch. 3) “Trial at Tablerock” (episode), 24 tricksters, 83–84 tuberculosis, 30–31 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 93 TV Guide, 4, 18, 132, 134–35 Twain, Mark, 97, 118 “24 Hours at North Fork” (episode), 60, 99–100 “Twins, The” (episode), 34, 80

193

Index

194

“Westerner, The” (essay, Warshow), 15–16 Westerns (television and film genre): “adult” subset, 1–3, 9–10, 39–40, 76, 101, 153; character traits and behaviors, 27, 28–29, 31, 34–36, 39, 40, 44, 49, 80, 156; complexity or limitations, 13, 156; cultural legacy, 156, 157; Have Gun—Will Travel’s differences, 3–4, 5, 9–10, 13, 14, 18, 34–36, 40, 44, 65, 128–29, 131–49, 153–54, 160; heroes, 5, 6, 7, 15–16, 34–35, 36, 44, 49, 65, 72, 118, 156, 157–58; optimism, 9, 10; portrayals of women, 9, 48–49, 65; production, 112, 127–31, 134, 135–36, 139, 140, 141, 145, 148–49; programming decisions, 4, 119; sexual politics, 47–49; syndication, 153; TV history and popularity, 1, 3, 13, 65, 67–68, 75, 119, 127–28, 130–31, 157; 21st century, 10, 154, 157–58; violence, 3, 17, 37, 44–45, 71–72, 74, 76, 80, 152; visuals and iconography, 14, 15, 16, 17, 17, 129 Weston, Brad, 113 Weston, Jack, 55 white paternalism, 116–19, 124 “white trash” characters, 38–39 white women, 27, 54, 64, 115–16, 121 Whyte, William, 41 Wilde, Oscar, 15, 36–37, 51 Willard, Elen, 116 Williams, Doug, 161–62n5 Wincelberg, Shimon, 12, 99, 101, 106, 146 “Winchester Quarantine” (episode), 20 Winchester 73 (film; Mann), 80 Winick, Charles, 107

“Wink of the Zenith, The” (essay; Skloot), 151, 152–53 Wister, Owen, 93 Withers, Grant, 138 women: audiences, 67–70, 153, 163n3 (ch. 2); captivity narratives, 9, 115–16; cultural blame, mid-20th century, 40–41; Have Gun—Will Travel direction and production, 24, 90, 136, 137; Paladin’s treatment, 21, 27, 38, 43, 47, 48–49, 50, 51–55, 56–57, 61, 64–67, 70, 109, 110– 12; portrayals, Have Gun—Will Travel, 9, 48–49, 49–67, 69–70; portrayals, Westerns, 9, 48–49, 65; sexual expectations, 55, 57; stereotypes, 9, 48, 50, 65 writers and writing, 3, 10, 12; descriptions of Paladin, 19–20; quality, 128, 134, 137, 153–54; realism, 144–45; social commentary and censorship, 119–20, 153–54; violence, 75–76 Wrobel, Bill, 162n1 Wylie, Philip, 41 Yancy Derringer (television program), 7 young viewers. See children and television “Yuma Treasure” (episode), 115