Have Gun—Will Travel

By Gaylyn Studlar

One of the most successful series of its time, Have Gun—Will Travel became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1950s and made its star, Richard Boone, a nationwide celebrity. The series offered viewers an unusual hero in the mysterious, Shakespeare-spouting gunfighter known only as “Paladin” and garnered a loyal fan base, including a large female following. In Have Gun—Will Travel, film scholar Gaylyn Studlar draws on a remarkably wide range of episodes from the series’ six seasons to show its sophisticated experimentation with many established conventions of the Western. Studlar begins by exploring how the series made the television Western sexy, speaking to mid-twentieth century anxieties and aspirations in the sexual realm through its “dandy” protagonist and more liberal expectations of female sexuality. She also explores the show’s interest in a variety of historical issues and contemporaneous concerns—including differing notions of justice and the meaning of racial and cultural difference in an era marked by the civil rights movement. Through a production history of Have Gun—Will Travel, Studlar provides insight into the television industry of the late 1950s and early 1960s, showing how, in this transition period in which programming was moving from sponsor to network control, the series’ star exercised controversial influence on his show’s aesthetics. Because Have Gun—Will Travel was both so popular and so different from its predecessors and rivals, it presents a unique opportunity to examine what pleasures and challenges television Westerns could offer their audiences. Fans of the show as well as scholars of TV history and the Western genre will enjoy this insightful volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: May 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780814339770

Gaylyn Studlar

Gaylyn Studlar is David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and director of the program in film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Among her many books are John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era, co-edited with Matthew Bernstein, and This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age.

Book preview

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

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

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

Introduction

1. Making the Dandy Mythic

2. Kisses for My Paladin

3. Corpses Enough for Shakespeare

4. Liberalism, Gradualism, and the Failure of Human Solidarity

5. Auteurism, Aesthetics, and the Cinematic Impulse

Legacy

Notes

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I 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 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)

Debuting 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 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 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 3 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 prime-time Westerns broadcast in the 1959–60 season (Ratings Madness 30–31; Boddy, ‘60 Million Viewers’ 139).

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

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 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 self-consciously 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.

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 5 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 (Foster-Harris 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 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 dandy-hero 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 7 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 pleasure-loving 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 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,