Alias Smith & Jones
Page 51
However, a leading role came along in 1988 when Barry Diller, now head of the new Fox network, tapped Ben to play the lead in Dirty Dozen, a World War II series. As Lieutenant Danko, he commanded a troop of twelve ex-convicts promised an amnesty of sorts if they could carry out top-secret missions against the Germans and come out alive. The show was not one of Ben’s favorites because it required a lot of hard work and was produced in Yugoslavia, a long way from home. It goes down in the record books, however, as being one of the first programs on the new Fox network.
Since then, Ben has guest starred in shows as diverse as Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and JAG. Unfortunately his foray into the movies, Hanging Up, ended up on the cutting room floor. Still, he is a happy man; he likes Malibu “because there’s no smog, there’s a good tennis club and a track at the nearby university where I can run.” [25] Very conscious of being physically fit, he exercises and still plays tennis regularly.
After years of renting out the home he bought in the Malibu hills, he decided to move into it and has spent several years renovating it to his taste. Details of wall color, stucco texture and stonework occupied his attention for hours each day. As a segmenter, Ben found the experience both frustrating and fulfilling. “I’m not personally a guy that likes to have eight balls in the air at once. I like to deal with this issue and then I like to go deal with that issue, but I can weave things together,” he said. After all is said and done, though, it’s his two dogs that make the house “home.”
As for his acting career, he’s philosophical. “Life is still going to go on. There are still going to be ups and there are still going to be downs. And what is success? I'll tell you this: My career peaked almost at the very beginning…with Alias Smith and Jones.” How does he feel about that? “A little sad maybe. But I’ve enjoyed life.” [26]
Roger Davis, the other half of the Heyes-Curry partnership, continued to keep busy, interspersing his two loves: acting and architecture. He began buying and managing several complexes in Beverly Hills. After losing out on the starring role in The Way We Were to Robert Redford, Roger put his architectural education to work by designing and constructing improvements for his properties. In 1974, Roger was hitting the big and small screens once again, appearing in films such as The Killer Bees and The Education of Sonny Carson and guest starring on The Rockford Files premiere.
One day, Roy Huggins phoned almost apologetically. “I have a show that Ben’s starring in that I want you to narrate.” The show was This Is the West That Was and Huggins felt Roger’s voiceover would be just the thing to tie the loose ends of the script together. He told him, “I want you to treat it as if you were a character in the show,” so, in a way, it was technically the last time Roger and Ben worked together.
In 1975 came the theatrical release of Flash and the Firecat, in which Roger’s younger brother, Brent, also appeared. It’s a “light-hearted, cute movie where I do have a real good time.” He was not having a good time at home, however, and around this time, he and his wife divorced.
At the end of 1976, he was at Universal ready to play the romantic lead in the Glen Larson produced show Bionic Woman with Lindsay Wagner, when he became seriously ill with a ruptured appendix, peritonitis, and gangrene. For four months he fought for his life. Seven operations later, doctors finally gave him a clean bill of health.
Roger married Suzanne Emerson in the late 1970s, becoming a first-time father to a daughter, Margaret, in May 1981. He continued his acting career with Nashville Girl and Ruby. Then, in 1976-77, Douglas Heyes was directing a TV miniseries called Aspen and talked producer Roy Huggins into hiring Roger. Heyes thought he would be perfect for the rich boy Maxfield Kendrick role. By spring 1980, Roger was on-screen again, guesting on the short-lived sequel to Battlestar Galactica, Galactica 1980.
Roger then relocated to Kentucky where he revived his interest in real estate investing and development and built the Louisville edifice known as 1600 Willow. He purchased the 1905 Seelbach Hotel and completely redesigned and restored it. In 1982, he appeared in the movie The Act and on television in the late-1980s in Highwayman. He is also credited with acting in Larson’s TV pilot, Chameleons. Larson remained loyal to Roger over a long period of time and used him in several of his shows.
Roger moved back to Los Angeles, divorced a second time, and resumed his real estate business. By this time, he had a collection of antique label art from California’s citrus packing days. He decided to use them in a sports line design and opened a tee-shirt manufacturing business, Packing Crate Classics, in Santa Monica, which still thrives and boasts over one hundred employees. But now, about the only time he involves himself with the tee-shirts is to take them to the annual Dark Shadows festivals. Roger appears at every convention and still appreciates the undying interest in the show.
He got into the production side of the film industry when he produced and starred in Beyond the Pale and is currently developing a film based on the Pinkerton detectives. His most recent real estate projects have taken him to Ventura, Pacific Palisades, and Hollywood Hills, where he is designing and constructing lofts built into the sides of mountains. To do this, he has had to shore up the land with massive retaining walls six stories tall and four hundred eighty feet long, containing twenty-five thousand tons of concrete. He is a far-sighted developer, moving mountains to create new homes. [27]
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Architecture is my delight. Putting up and pulling down my favorite amusement.” Roger Davis identifies with Jefferson’s sentiments because he has “always subscribed to the theory that architecture is an art…Ruskin said it better. ‘Architecture is an art that so disposes the edifices built by man that they increase his power, his pleasure, his whole state of being.’ ” Roger believes “if you design a house right, a person gets into it and he feels great, [it’s] wonderful to wake up in it every morning.”
When a reporter once asked him, “What are you in this for?” he replied, “No matter what I design, no matter how long it lasts, or how upset you may be by it, or how much money it may make in the end…I’m an actor. I mean, people have seen [me] as an architect, builder, designer, businessman, all this stuff,…and I’m very good at that stuff, and understand the process and everything, every little nuance about building twenty-story high-rises and running a hotel, being that kind of person, whatever. But still, I’m an actor…” [28]
Looking back, Roger wonders, if he had taken another road, how life would have worked out. From the moment Huggins phoned him about replacing Peter, Roger wondered if doing so was the right thing. “I was really putting my career on the line; I was at a point where my stock was real high and I needed to make the right move. It would have been tough for anybody to rise out of [replacing Peter], but I was more motivated by the fact that I really owed Roy not to say no. The potential was that if it didn’t work, I could be done for. I think, for the most part, it came to pass.” Alex Singer understood his ambivalence and told him that first day on the set, “It’s a horrible tragedy; there’s nothing to be done for it. If you don’t get the job, it doesn’t mean that somebody won’t get the job or that Peter isn’t dead. It’s not your fault. You didn’t pull the trigger.” [29]
Roger’s greatest achievement “has always been doing my own thing, working for myself. And there I have had just enormous success and had enormous monetary rewards, [and a] feeling of accomplishment…Working as an actor is really working for someone else. It is doing the director’s bidding, the producer’s bidding, the studio’s bidding.” Huggins once told him he liked his work as an actor but felt he had the temperament to be a producer. Roger admits, “That bothers me a little bit…and it may be, [but] I didn’t take that direction in the business.” [30]
Ben, too, speculates how his career might have turned out differently, “had I been a smarter businessman,” but he knows he would have had to be a completely different person with negotiating and business skills he lacked at the time. Instead, he admits, he never concerned himsel
f with the business end. “I probably could have positioned myself to do better shows than I did. I just usually took what they offered me. Moved on with it…Had I known more and what my powers were, I might have put myself in a better product or held out for better parts. That’s poor business on my part.” [31]
Roy Huggins, the producer extraordinaire, made actors look good with his interesting, well-written stories. With the cancellation of Alias Smith and Jones, Frank Price, who had put Huggins in association with Glen Larson, next brought him together with Stephen J. Cannell. Together they created The Rockford Files in which Huggins used one of his favorite actors, James Garner, as a slightly disreputable private eye, just the kind of unconventional character Huggins liked to write about. Cannell, who later hired Huggins to serve as executive producer on his show Baretta, eulogized Huggins, saying, he “taught me everything that I used in my career on how to create and write and produce a television show.” [32] Huggins came out of retirement to produce Hunter for Cannell and then concentrated on writing his memoirs. When he was eighty-three years old, he was still involved in filmmaking and had a hand in the movie version of The Fugitive, and later received Executive Producer credit on the series remake in 2000. Roy Huggins passed away in April 2002.
Glen Larson, creator of the show, left the production team at the end of the second season. “It was a great experience,” Larson says, “but I was happy to leave…to move on, because I wanted to be able to create some more things and have them my own way, do them the way I wanted to do them.” Larson observes, “[Roy]’s very autocratic…We saw a lot of things differently, especially the humor.” This clash of tastes and styles led to friction between the two men, but Larson readily admits, “I was also learning. I learned a lot from Roy.” He was often frustrated when Huggins cut out his jokes, but developed an appreciation for the wisdom of such cuts later in his career, when he was the one doing the cutting. “I had to do the same things on occasions later when the writers would want to do something that was funny or precious…We get the joke, but we lose the hero.” [33] He learned his lessons well. After leaving Alias Smith and Jones, Larson took over as showrunner on McCloud, then went on to create many more series, among them Battlestar Galactica, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Magnum, PI. The current nostalgia craze has been good to Glen Larson. Several of his old television shows are in development as feature films, Battlestar Galactica was re-made as a mini-series for the Sci Fi Channel in 2003, and in 2004 he returned to his roots as a musician, performing on stage once again as part of The Four Preps in a reunion concert filmed for PBS.
Frank Price pointed out a basic tenet of writing a book about a television series when he observed that getting everyone’s viewpoint about a show like Alias Smith and Jones was like the blind men and the elephant. In that fable, seven blind men encountered an elephant and as each man felt a different part of it — trunk, legs, hide, tail, tusks — he came away with a different impression of what the whole animal was like. Similarly, each person involved in Alias Smith and Jones had his or her perspective on the show. But if any one theme ran through the memories of all those involved, it would be that doing Alias Smith and Jones was fun. For each, though the sad memories will always be there, of course, not only for Peter Duel, but also for what might have been had the show gone on longer, the sweet memories survive the bad. In the re-write notes for “The Posse That Wouldn’t Quit,” Huggins noted a bit of humor in the script he particularly liked: “It’s interplay, the fun our two boys have with each other.” [34] The good times were not only had by the actors and production team, but by the audience as well.
Alias Smith and Jones was on the air for only two short years. It has now been more than three decades since Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry roamed the West in search of their elusive amnesty, but they are still fondly remembered by those who enjoyed the show during its original run, and they gain new fans whenever the show reappears on television. Huggins proudly admitted his shows were rare. “They actually are stories that hook you, that surprise you, that hold your interest and then leave you satisfied. They are so rare on television that [Alias Smith and Jones is] still your favorite show.” The spirit of fun and collection of good stories became the legacy of those two pretty good bad men. But that legacy, as Ben Murphy says, “…exists with those fans who love it now. Roy’s job is done; my job is done. Those people who love that show are now keeping it alive.” [35]
Ben Murphy. Sagala collection
Ben Murphy with Molly. Sagala collection
Roger Davis on the deck of home he built in Malibu. Sagala/Bagwell collection
Roger Davis at front door of home he built in Malibu. Sagala/Bagwell collection
Courtesy of Ben Murphy
Endnotes
Introduction
1. James D. Horan and Paul Sann, Pictorial History of the Wild West (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954) 206; Joseph Rosa, ed., The West (New York: Smithmark Publishers, 1994) 165.
2. Horan 198, 96.
3. Horan 210.
4. Larry Pointer, In Search of Butch Cassidy (Norman, OK: Univ. of OK Press, 1977) 240-250; Jack Cox, “Who Were Those Guys?” Denver Post, Sep 12, 1999: 1F.
5. Cox, Denver Post.
6. Horan 217.
7. David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992) 172.
8. Roy Huggins, interview by the authors, May 23, 2001.
9. Jeff Greenfield, Television — The First Fifty Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977) 141.
10. J. Fred MacDonald, Who Shot the Sheriff? (New York: Praeger, 1987) 55.
11. Ibid. 48-9.
12. Frank Price, interview by the authors, Feb 25, 2003.
13. www.imagesjournal.com/issues06/infocus.htm, accessed Sep 5, 2003.
14. MacDonald 8.
15. Jeff Gremillion, “Back in the Saddle Again,” TV Guide, May 23, 2003: 4.
Chapter One
1. That’s equivalent to $482 million in 2003 dollars. Samuel H. Williamson, “What is the Relative Value?” Economic History Services, Apr 2004, URL: http://www.eh.net/hmit/compare/, accessed Sep 8, 2004.
2. Leon Claire Metz, The Shooters (New York: Berkley Books, 1976) 125; Time-Life Books, The Gunfighters (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1974) 93.
3. Glen Larson, interview by the authors, Feb 19, 2003.
4. Frank Price, interview by the authors, Feb 25, 2003.
5. Contrary to speculation, the name “Hannibal Heyes” was not chosen as an homage to Douglas Heyes.
6. Glen Larson, interview by the authors, Feb 19, 2003, and Apr 29, 2004.
7. Brenda Marshall, “Face In The Mirror. Pete Deuel: Gidget’s Brotherly Brother-in-law,” TV Radio Mirror, May 1966.
8. “Peter Deuel ‘I Have To Be The Best’ So What Else Would You Expect With Parents Like These?” Motion Picture, Aug 1967.
9. Lou Larkin, “Peter Deuel: He Kisses The Girls And Makes Them Cry,” Modern Screen, Mar 1967.
10. Ibid.
11. Fredda Dudley Balling, “Deuel With Death,” Movie World, Mar 1967.
12. Kim Darby, interview by the authors, Apr 29, 2004.
13. Swerling interview, 2004.
14. Modern Screen, op. cit.
15. Jack Jobes, telephone interview by Sagala, May 10, 2004.
16. Ibid.
17. “From The Private Pasts of Pete & Ben,” Teen Life, Jan 1972.
18. Dennis Fimple, interview by the authors, Aug 4, 2002; Jack Jobes, telephone interview by the authors, Sep 4, 2004.
19. Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Four Decades of American Television (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982) 194.
20. Jo Swerling, Jr., interview by the authors, Aug 8, 2002.
21. Percy Shain, “He Prefers Duel to Deuel,” Boston Globe TV Week, Feb 14, 1971.
22. Price interview.
23. Bettelou Peterson, “He Was Headed For the Top,” Boston Globe TV Week. Feb 3-9, 1980.
24.
Ben Murphy, phone interview by authors, Dec 12, 2002.
25. Ben Murphy, interview by the authors, Apr 25, 2004.
26. Viola Hegyi Swisher, “Hollywood’s Professional Training Ground,” After Dark, Nov 1970.
27. Percy Shain, “He looks just like…” Boston Globe TV Week, Mar 7, 1971.