During this time, Stacy married one of the sixties’ most charming actresses, Connie Stevens; the marriage lasted four years. Then, after numerous guest shots in the late sixties, Stacy would do the project that set him up for TV stardom.
At the time, one of the most popular shows on the CBS schedule was Gunsmoke. But by the late sixties, Gunsmoke star James Arness tried to appear on the show as little as possible. Even though Arness only made guest appearances on his own show, the series was such a staple of the network that it never affected viewership. So CBS let him get away with it (Arness didn’t want to leave and do movies, he just didn’t want to work). But that allowed CBS the opportunity to build episodes around exciting guest stars. And if those guest stars scored on their Gunsmoke episode, they were pretty much guaranteed a show of their own on the next season’s CBS fall schedule.
Well, James Stacy scored one of the best episodes in the entire run of the series. Which, considering that Gunsmoke was one of the highest-quality shows of its day, is saying something.
The episode that James Stacy did in the thirteenth season of the series was entitled Vengeance. It was written by Calvin Clements, one of the great TV-western episodic writers of his time, and directed by Richard C. Sarafian, a talented episodic-TV director just before he made his leap to feature films with cult classics like Vanishing Point and Man in the Wilderness (Barry Newman is okay in his button-down white shirt and his Jew-fro as the Dodge Challenger driver Kowalski in Vanishing Point, but James Stacy would have been both way sexier and way cooler). Vengeance was a two-part episode that guest-starred Stacy, John Ireland, Paul Fix, Morgan Woodward, Buck Taylor (just before he joined the show as Marshal Dillon’s deputy Newly O’Brien), and Kim Darby one year before True Grit.
Stacy plays Bob Johnson, who along with his older brother, Zack (Morgan Woodward), and his foster-father figure, Hiller (James Anderson), are saddle bums riding the range. Being seasoned saddle tramps, they’re aware that the unwritten law of the range is that wounded calves must be slaughtered in order not to draw wolves to the herd. So, when riding through a herd of cattle they come across a wounded little animal, the three men do their duty and prepare to partake in a free steak dinner. That’s when the low-rent cattle baron Parker (John Ireland), flanked by his sons, his ranch hands, and his puppet sheriff (Paul Fix), ride up. The calf they found was Parker’s and was found on Parker’s land. The Johnson brothers try to explain the situation. But Parker deems them cattle rustlers.
They kill Hiller, paralyze Zack, and leave a wounded Bob for dead, with Parker’s bought-and-paid-for sheriff legally officiating over all of it (shades of The Ox-Bow Incident).
Bob survives and gets himself and his brother to the nearby town of Dodge City, where series star U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) presides. Marshal Dillon informs the Johnson brothers that Parker owns his own town, called Parkertown, which was supposed to rival Dodge as a municipality. But where Dodge grew and became a stagecoach stop, Parkertown remained a one-dog town run by a wealthy family of Wild West Borgias. While Marshal Dillon believes the Johnson brothers’ story and knows full well that Parker is completely capable of doing what they claim, the fact remains they were on Parker’s land and it was Parker’s calf. And the sheriff who presided over the execution, although a weak-willed puppet of Parker, is the legal law of Parkertown. So, as unjust as it is, the execution was legal.
Marshal Dillon instructs Bob to sit tight and heal up from his wound and let Doc (Milburn Stone) care for his bedridden brother.
But what nobody in either Dodge or Parkertown knows is, Bob Johnson possesses a lightning-fast gun hand. Now, Bob is aware enough to know he can’t just go out and kill Parker and his sons without hanging for it. But he also knows he can bait Parker’s asshole son Leonard (Buck Taylor) into a gunfight, where he can kill him legally. So Bob starts running down the Parkers to everyone in Dodge, in order to lure Leonard into town. And Bob’s plan works. By playing a psychological game with Parker’s idiot son, he gets Leonard to draw on him in the middle of town, at a town dance, surrounded by practically every resident of Dodge City.
Legally shooting him dead.
Naturally, Parker and his men ride into town loaded for bear and demanding retribution. But Marshal Dillon informs the bloodthirsty cattle baron what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. While legally he couldn’t interfere with the initial murder over the calf, neither can he interfere with this killing, because Bob has the whole town as his witness that he was defending himself.
Nevertheless, Matt Dillon knows full well Bob orchestrated the whole damn incident. And he doesn’t appreciate saddle tramps coming into Dodge City and turning his main street into a killing ground for their own private vendetta. So he tells Bob that once his brother is fit enough to travel, he wants them the fuck outta Dodge. Unfortunately, Bob’s brother Zack will never leave Dodge. Parker sends an assassin in the night to murder Bob’s bedridden brother.
Everybody knows Parker is responsible, but proving it is another matter.
So as Vengeance, Part 1 comes to a close, we witness James Stacy (all alone) riding into the shithole known as Parkertown to face down John Ireland’s Parker and all his men.
Wow! What a cliffhanger!
Vengeance, Part 2, also written by Clements and directed by Sarafian, picks up right where Part 1 left off. And what follows is one of the most exciting shootouts ever filmed for a sixties’ western television show. The beginning of Vengeance, Part 2 doesn’t feel like an episode of Gunsmoke but like the exciting climax of a terrific seventies’ revenge western movie.
What happens? What do you think? Bob kills every son of a bitch in that town.
Hooray! Fuck those motherfuckers!
And you don’t have to wait for it, it just happens—bam—right off the bat. Now, after the opening of Part 2, as anybody familiar with the structure of a Gunsmoke episode could have told you, the show falls off a cliff. Because from that point on we know Matt Dillon’s going to have to kill Bob Johnson, and we just kill time waiting for it to happen. And then, just before the end, that’s exactly what happens. Stay tuned for scenes from next week’s exciting episode of Gunsmoke!
Every young budding leading man in town wanted to play Bob Johnson. Rick Dalton would have given his back molars to play the part. Instead, the week Jim Stacy shot Vengeance, Rick was fucking around on a botanical garden, wearing a pith helmet, playing scenes with a practically naked Ron Ely as Tarzan. But once you see the episode, it’s hard imagining anybody else but Jim Stacy.
Another storyline on the episode included Bob’s burgeoning romance with an innocent young Dodge City girl played by Kim Darby. On the show, Darby played a sweet girl who fell for the troubled rascal Johnson. And while filming the show, sweet girl Kim Darby fell for troubled rascal Jim Stacy. The two were married after filming and divorced a year later.
The suits at CBS knew they had a hot property in Stacy when they cast him in the coveted Gunsmoke guest-star slot. Now that they’ve seen the results, they are positive.
CUT TO Jim Stacy, dressed in Johnny Lancer’s sangria-red ruffled shirt with a brown leather short coat, sitting in a wooden chair out in front of the Hotel Lancaster on the Twentieth Century Fox western back lot, filming the first day of the pilot for his new series. His silver-studded legs stretched out before him, he takes sips from a tiny green bottle of 7 Up.
At that moment, he feels an ever-so-slight irritation. The reason is the sight of Rick Dalton’s mustache. When he first heard that Rick Dalton—Jake Cahill himself—was going to be playing the heavy Caleb DeCoteau on the pilot of his show, he was thrilled.
For a few different reasons. One, he’s always dug Dalton. Both on Bounty Law and in The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey (he also liked him in that western he did with Ralph Meeker, but he couldn’t remember its name).
Two, the fact that both Fox and CBS were spending the money to get a legitimate TV star to play the heavy in the pilot meant they were serious about the
show’s potential. And from an ego standpoint, number three, the day had finally come where somebody like Rick Dalton was the heavy to Jim Stacy’s hero. It also was a dynamic way to launch his Johnny Lancer character. At the end, when Johnny defeats Caleb, he’s not just coming out on top with that week’s bad guy. The audience is going to see Johnny Lancer going up against Jake Cahill (an icon of western television) and Lancer emerging triumphant. He remembers discussing it with the pilot episode’s director, Sam Wanamaker. For the role of Caleb DeCoteau, it was between two choices. One was Dalton, the high-profile guest-star route. The other was an exciting young actor named Joe Don Baker, who had been one of the convicts in Cool Hand Luke and one of the seven in that last Magnificent Seven sequel with George Kennedy (Jim had read for the McQueen role but lost it to Monte Markham). And Wanamaker liked Baker. He looked like a movie actor, and Sam liked his size (Baker was bigger than Stacy). But the idea of taking a known TV cowboy and subverting his image was just too delicious for Wanamaker to pass up. Wanamaker didn’t want this series to look like Bonanza or The Big Valley or any of the dozen other sixties’ western shows on TV. The spaghetti westerns out of Italy had introduced a gritty new look that was finally catching up to their American counterparts. Yeah, there was still the Andrew McLaglen and Burt Kennedy–directed junk starring Wayne, Stewart, Fonda, Mitchum, and all the other old fucks who were still cranking out nostalgia-based vehicles for their ever-dwindling audience. But the American westerns of 1969 started having a different flavor. Partly in response to Eastwood’s startling sex appeal in the Leone westerns, the stars started being younger. They dressed with far more panache than was the standard wardrobe over at Western Costumes on Santa Monica Boulevard. And, more often than not, they fell into the “antihero” category. To such a degree, some of the older stars left over from the Eisenhower era sought to subvert their personas.
William Holden in The Wild Bunch led a band of bastard murderers. His first line in the film, in regard to the innocent customers of the bank they’re robbing: “If they move, kill ’em!”
Henry Fonda started his performance in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West by shooting a five-year-old boy in the face.
Actors who had spent their careers playing villains in both western movies and practically every western show on television, like Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, and James Coburn, were now suddenly the heroes . . . and the movie stars!
And the villains of these new westerns weren’t just bad men; they were bloodthirsty, sadistic maniacs. And any parallel with hot-button political issues of the time was encouraged. In Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, they fought the Vietnam War. In Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, Robert Blake’s Indian on the run from “the man” was a de facto Black Panther. And when characters got killed in these movies, they didn’t just clutch their bellies, grimace and groan, then slowly fall to the ground. They got the shit blown out of them and the blood sprayed across the screen. If Sam Peckinpah was behind the camera, they got the shit blown out of them at a hundred and twenty frames per second, and the spurting red blood squibs achieved a visual poetry beyond mere Don Siegel–style brutality.
Naturally, Sam Wanamaker couldn’t achieve much of that for a CBS television series airing at 7:30 on Sunday nights. But he could strive for the ambiance of this new style of western. And he intended to do it in two ways. One was the look, especially in regard to the costumes. And two was in the personification of one of his three series leads, Jim Stacy’s character Johnny Lancer aka Johnny Madrid. Of all the western series on television during that time (and actually Lancer marked the beginning of the end of that time), Johnny Lancer was hands down the closest thing to an antihero in the entire genre.
It was this shady aspect to the character that excited both Stacy and Wanamaker. And an idea that both men had to exploit this aspect of the character was to give Johnny Lancer a mustache. Now, Jim Stacy wanted Johnny Lancer to have a mustache for more than just integrity-of-characterization concerns. One of the clichés of the sixties’ western TV series was when casting the two leads, almost always, one had dark hair and one had light. Stacy’s co-star Wayne Maunder, who played his half brother, Scott Lancer, was the light-haired lead. And Jim was the brunette. But Jim also knew if he wore a mustache he’d draw the audience’s attention away from his co-star even more and break further new ground.
The network told both Stacy and Wanamaker, “Nice try. But no fucking way. You want to put a mustache on somebody, you put it on the heavy.”
And now here we are, first day on the set and Rick Dalton looking fly as fuck in his brown rawhide fringe-style jacket, sporting a fabulous soup catcher that they’d never let Stacy wear in a million years. Those fucking assholes, Stacy thinks. One of these days they’re going to let some numbnuts wear a mustache on his show; then everybody’s going to be wearing mustaches. And that numbnuts could be me!
But there’s more in Stacy’s racing mind than just Rick’s mustache. He was going over his lines last night for their big scene together, and it hit Jim that Dalton had all the best lines. Sam acted contrite to Stacy when the network nixed the mustache idea. But the director couldn’t hide his excitement at the news that they were casting Rick Dalton as Caleb.
So much so that now Jim thinks, rather than introducing Johnny Lancer, it’s subverting Rick Dalton’s persona that his director is the most excited about. And it’s this thought that can’t help but run through the actor’s mind as he sits on his set, on the first day of his series, and he watches Rick Dalton and his director sitting in director’s chairs, laughing it up and chatting away like this is their fifth film together. What the fuck’s up between these guys? Stacy wonders as he sips his soda.
Right then, Trudi Frazer, the little actor who plays his half sister, Mirabella Lancer, comes skipping up to Jim and plops herself in his lap.
“What’s up, doc?” she asks. She notices he’s staring in the direction of the actor playing Caleb and the director Sam, sitting in their director’s chairs, gregariously shooting the breeze.
“Sizing up your competition?” she cheekily inquires.
Tearing his eyes away, he looks down at the little girl in his lap and says, “What’s up, squirt?”
“Well,” she observes, “I could see you getting all puffy-chested over Caleb from across the set. So I thought I’d come over here and give your feathers a few loving pets.”
He doesn’t protest to the child that he’s not bugged looking at his dramatic antagonist. Instead, he tells her, “I can’t believe they put that goddamn mustache on him.” Stacy spits out, “I wanted Johnny Madrid to have a mustache. Fuckin’ know-nothings at the network wouldn’t go for it.”
She asks Jim, “Have you met the actor playing Caleb?”
“Not yet,” he says.
“Well”—extending her arm toward the furry-faced actor—“He’s right over there. What are you waiting for?” she challenges. “This is your show. He’s your guest. Go over and introduce yourself and welcome him aboard.”
“I will, honey,” he promises. “He’s talking to Sam right now.”
She shakes her head from side to side in a tsk-tsk manner, then murmurs under her breath, “Excuses, excuses, excuses.”
“Hey, squirt, I’m gonna do it,” he says, getting irritated. “Get off my back.”
Trudi puts up her hands. “Okay, okay, okay,” she says. “It’s your show, you know what you’re doing. Take your time.”
Jim Stacy huffs and takes a swig from the small green 7 Up bottle.
Trudi wiggles in his lap and asks, “Do you know Caleb as an actor?”
“As an actor?” he repeats. “Of course I do—”
She quickly interrupts him. “Don’t tell me his real name,” she warns. “I want him to just be Caleb to me!”
“Well, in that case,” he explains, “Caleb had a cowboy show of his own about six years ago.”
She asks Jim Stacy sincerely, “Was he good on it?”
Jim glan
ces over at Rick Dalton looking really hip and really different in his Caleb costume, wearing the mustache he wanted to wear, getting on like a house on fire with his director, and says, more to himself than to her, “He wasn’t bad.”
Rick Dalton sits in his director’s chair, in the shade, in his Caleb costume, reading his paperback, Ride a Wild Bronc. As he reads, killing time before his first big scene (the 1st AD told him they’d probably get to it in about an hour and a half), he contemplates the book more seriously than he’d done before his emotional encounter with the little girl. The little girl was right, this is a pretty frickin’ good novel. And Tom “Easy” Breezy is a pretty frickin’ good character. Like maybe it might be worth trying to get the rights and make a movie out of it, with Rick playing Easy Breezy. Maybe he could talk Paul Wendkos into directing it.
His first scene of the day is also his first appearance in the story. And it’s a pretty nifty introduction scene. Before we meet his character, he’s been talked about by a lot of the other characters. And that always sets up excitement for when the character is finally revealed to the audience. If this were a movie, he would have demanded that this scene not be shot on the first fucking day! But this is TV, and on TV they don’t shoot a script, they shoot a schedule. And if your big scene makes sense to do the first day—even first thing in the morning—that’s how they’re doing it. In the scene, he deals with two actors, James Stacy playing series lead Johnny Lancer, and Bruce Dern playing his henchman Bob “the Businessman” Gilbert. Rick has known Bruce going on a few years now (everybody knows fucking Bruce Dern). And Rick knows the co-lead Wayne Maunder from when Wayne starred in his earlier show, where he played Custer. Rick never appeared on it, but his buddy Ralph Meeker did. And one night when Dalton and Meeker were sippin’ sauce at the Riverbottom Bar and Grill (across the street from Burbank Studios), Maunder came in and joined Rick and Ralph for a couple of drinks. Rick and Wayne hadn’t seen each other since that night, so they traded hellos and Wayne welcomed him on the show. As did Andrew Duggan, who plays patriarch Murdock Lancer (Duggan had appeared twice on Bounty Law). Once Dalton got out of the makeup trailer, he and Duggan smoked cigarettes and caught up. Dalton congratulated Duggan on what looks to be a successful new series. But Rick Dalton has yet to officially meet his co-star, James Stacy.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Page 21