Alias Smith & Jones: The Story of Two Pretty Good Bad Men

by Sandra K. Sagala

  Huggins became a writer accidentally during World War II. A bad knee kept him out of the military; instead he ended up in a government job and became the Special Representative in Charge of Recruitment, National War Agencies (West Coast). By late 1943, his work was essentially finished and, with the war in its final stages, personnel turnover had become a serious problem which the government addressed by freezing people in their jobs. No government employee was allowed to quit. Huggins was one of those who found himself going to his office every day, but not having anything to do once he got there. To pass the time, he decided to write a novel. Having read and enjoyed Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Huggins decided to, in his words, “shamelessly [write] a Chandler novel of my own.” [30]

  When the manuscript was finished, he sent it off to Howard Browne, editor of Mammoth Detective magazine. Browne responded with a rejection letter and a long list of notes on how to improve the story. Huggins revised the book and sent it back to Browne, who bought it instantly. Following that sale, Huggins wrote eight hours every day, “just as if I knew what I was doing.” He wrote two novelettes which were published in the Saturday Evening Post and a second novel that went nowhere. By this time the war was over and Huggins decided to go to graduate school as he originally intended. He was making arrangements to return to UCLA and begin working toward a Ph.D. in political science when he got a call from Hollywood agent Ray Stark.

  Within a few days of that phone call, Huggins had been hired to write a screenplay adaptation of his novel The Double Take. This deal led to his being hired as a screenwriter at Columbia, a position from which he was summarily fired and rehired twice before moving on to Warner Bros., where he first became involved in television. In 1955 he was summoned to a meeting by William T. Orr, Executive Producer of Warner Bros. Television. Warner Bros Presents, the umbrella title for three rotating series based on the films King’s Row, Casablanca and Cheyenne, was that studio’s first venture into television. Orr was in desperate need of a new producer for Cheyenne, the western portion of the series, which was in danger of losing its sponsor because of the poor quality of its scripts. He offered control of the show to Huggins, who worked on many westerns during his time at Columbia. Huggins agreed and so began his lengthy career in television.

  Roy Huggins knew instinctively what made a good television series and the audience usually agreed with him. Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive, The Rockford Files — these are just a few of his creations that enjoyed enormous popular and critical success. He was perhaps best known for Maverick, a show that turned all the conventions of the traditional Western upside down. Huggins left that show after only two years due to ill health, long before he had a chance to get tired of it. Looking at the concept of Alias Smith and Jones, he realized it had wonderful possibilities. “I took it over because I saw a chance to revive Maverick but with the two guys playing together all the time,” Huggins recalled. “And I thought, ‘Hey, that’s great, I can do some more.’…I would never have taken it if it hadn’t been for the idea of being able to resurrect Maverick with a different kind of background and a slightly different pair of heroes.” [31]

  On November 16, 1970, Huggins and Price screened a rough cut of the pilot. Huggins was not impressed. He felt the pilot was dreadful, a non-story. He knew that Larson used Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as the basis for the show and felt that “as an imitator [Larson] had no understanding of what was good about what he was imitating and what was bad about it. He just imitated.” Huggins added two conditions that would have to be met before he would agree to take over the show. First, the outlaw gang had to be changed from integral characters appearing in every episode to recurring characters appearing only occasionally. Second, the time period had to be switched from 1900, where Larson had set it, back two decades. “A western must not go beyond 1880,” Huggins explained. “As soon as it gets into telephones and the earliest versions of automobiles you have a different world.” Larson disagreed with this assessment; he thought the turn-of-the-century western was unexplored territory and would make an interesting backdrop. Frank Price had the final say, however, and decided to go with Huggins’s instincts. “I agreed because that wasn’t going to make or break the series and it would be confusing…better to keep it simple. If it added a great deal that was another thing, but it wouldn’t. This was going to be based on the appeal of these two guys as these characters.” [32] Price rewrote the opening narration of the pilot, changing Larson’s references to the end of the Wild West and early twentieth century technology into an introduction of Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry as “two pretty good bad men…and in all the trains and banks they robbed they never shot anyone.” With his conditions met, Roy Huggins officially became the executive producer of Alias Smith and Jones, the final man to come into the West.

  Roy Huggins had a somewhat unusual method of working, a habit that grew in part out of a dispute he’d had with Warner Bros during his Maverick days. Warner Bros was a company known for what is politely termed its thriftiness. In violation of a new rule that was part of the Writers Guild of America’s Basic Agreement, Jack Warner had been successful in keeping Huggins from receiving a creator’s credit on Maverick which would have given him a royalty for every episode produced. Warner followed that with another blow. He refused to pay Huggins for scripts he wrote for a show he was producing, despite a clause in Huggins’s contract requiring such payment. Huggins had no choice but to go along if he wanted to get Maverick on the air, but he fought back in a subtle way. His “don’t get mad, get even” scheme was to give his stories to other writers. Those writers turned them into scripts, which Warner then had to pay for. Huggins wasn’t being paid for his stories, but Warner wasn’t getting them for free, either. [33]

  On Alias Smith and Jones, Huggins again gave his stories to other writers, but he did retain full story credit under the pseudonym John Thomas James. [34] The prolific John Thomas James receives story credit on forty-three of the fifty episodes of the series, a sign of the total control Huggins wielded over the storytelling process.

  Huggins’s favorite method of story development was to go on long “story drives.” With a tape recorder on the seat beside him, he would talk out the story while driving aimlessly, often ending up in Oregon, Arizona or New Mexico. This unlocked his creativity, but often worried his staff. According to Jo Swerling, “He was a perfectly terrible driver, and we used to worry about whether we would ever see him again when he would take off.” His trips usually lasted about a week and he would return home with six or seven fully worked out stories. Swerling says, “All of us who worked with Roy were in awe of his ability to do this.” [35] Huggins’s story tapes would be transcribed, then a writer would be called in. Huggins would tell the writer the story and the two of them would refine it, tossing ideas back and forth, working out rough spots. After the meeting, the writer would go off to write the teleplay armed with a lengthy outline, often twenty to twenty-five pages of detailed notes and sample dialogue. The collaboration between Huggins and the writer would continue through numerous story conferences as the script was rewritten and polished.

  It was now the middle of November 1970. The pilot film was in postproduction, on schedule to be completed and delivered to ABC for its January 5, 1971, broadcast. Eleven scripts were in varying stages of development, but after reviewing them, Huggins threw out nine. During his first week on the show, in between meetings with ABC executives and his production staff, Huggins developed four totally new stories. With only two months to go before Alias Smith and Jones would have its series premiere, there was no time to waste. The final two weeks of November were filled with story conferences, with scripts being written and rewritten at great speed. “The McCreedy Bust” was selected to be the first episode to air and the work required to meet the network deadline called for a grueling pace. Huggins told the story to writer Sy Salkowitz at a story conference on November 24, received Salkowitz’s first draft on November 29, and after read
ing it, decided to completely rewrite the script himself, finishing his own draft on December 1. He revised the script between December 1 and 3, then held a production meeting on Friday, December 4. On Monday, December 7, shooting began. In just two weeks “The McCreedy Bust” had gone from a story in Roy Huggins’s head to a final shooting script.

  Alias Smith and Jones was already behind and they had only just started. Huggins knew from experience it was going to take eight calendar days to shoot each episode of a show that aired every seven days. To solve this mathematical problem on Maverick, Huggins had introduced Brother Bart and was able to shoot two episodes simultaneously. On Alias Smith and Jones he already had two characters, so the only solution was to split them up. Huggins developed stories that separated Heyes and Curry so production could be expedited, but kept these episodes to the absolute minimum number necessary to solve his production issues. For the next four months, the cast and crew worked non-stop. Production was so tight that the schedule didn’t allow for days lost to illness, weather or any other delay to shooting.

  It was an exhausting time for all concerned, but the result was a program that held its own against the fierce competition of The Flip Wilson Show, a modicum of success for which third-ranked ABC was extremely grateful.

  The Penfield, New York, house in which Peter Duel grew up. It is now home to several businesses.

  Peter Duel as Hannibal Heyes.

  Peter Duel as Hannibal Heyes.

  Peter Duel.

  Teenage Ben Murphy with younger brother, Timothy Patrick. Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  “A new-fangled invention.” This publicity photo was taken before Roy Huggins set the series back to the 1880s.

  Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Materials Store

  Chapter 2

  Two Latter-Day Robin Hoods

  As the super-posse pursues Butch Cassidy and his cohort the Sundance Kid over scrub, across rivers and up mountains, Butch frequently turns back to observe the unflagging pursuit. “Who are those guys?” he wonders, that they can hold to the trail with nary a misstep or wrong turn. Television viewers might wonder the same thing about outlaw partners Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry. However, in trying to determine the wheres and whens of Heyes and Curry, alias Smith and Jones, subtle, frequent missteps and obvious, ubiquitous wrong turns are not only required study but also unavoidable.

  Wise writers, whether they pen stories for fiction tomes or television series, create a canon or backstory for their characters. Having a history and a list of characteristics guarantees consistency throughout the work. When different writers submit story ideas for a TV series, it is especially important to have such a written bible. Roy Huggins admitted Alias Smith and Jones did not. Given his genius and experience in westerns, Huggins knew his characters, what they would do and how they would act in any situation and often literally sent writers back to their typewriters with notes about how his people would behave. In one set of notes, Huggins told the teleplay writer: “In their own rough way, they should be a lot more sophisticated than they are in the present draft. They are more worldly. Curry is just as knowing as Heyes. The writer should go through the script and upgrade the level of sophistication. Our boys should be sharper, smoother. When they’re with women, they’re much more apt to say things like Cary Grant than like John Wayne.” [1]

  Occasionally a story line allowed Huggins to insert his own philosophy, humor or love of history into a script and if it made a good story, it didn’t much matter that it didn’t jibe with tenets already established. Viewers of Alias Smith and Jones in the 1970s had no access to video recorders which would allow them to record the program at 8 p.m. and view it later, repeatedly, or in slow motion. Inconsistencies were hard to spot unless one had a perfect memory. In the pilot, Kid Curry doesn’t know what “amnesty” means. A few episodes later, he refers to their newfound friend Michelle as a chanteuse, yet when they encounter Georgette on her way to Tombstone for her audition as a chanteuse, he doesn’t know what that means. Another time, he cautions the Jordan girls to use “finesse” when pulling a con on a gullible stranger. Was he, or was he not, an educated man?

  An attempt to create a canon or a timeline from the “facts” supplied by the characters leads to frustration. Because creator Glen Larson and producer Roy Huggins were history buffs, occasionally they used a verifiable date as a story tack as in “The Strange Fate of Conrad Meyer Zulick,” when in 1885, Zulick became governor of Arizona with a little help from Heyes and Curry. In other instances, some dates are verifiably wrong. According to Huggins, the 1880s is the decade for westerns, so how does Hannibal Heyes know about Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel which wasn’t built until 1892? In one instance Wheat Carlson, wannabe leader of the Devil’s Hole Gang, cites the excitement at Black Jack Ketchum’s hanging that wouldn’t take place until 1901. It is mental exercise to figure out just who those two lovable rogues were who gave up their outlaw identities, Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry, to become the less infamous Joshua Smith and Thaddeus Jones. We must deal with the unwritten canon so far as we can deduce it from what the characters reveal in conversations or situations and from the few dates provided. With a little fudging, it almost makes sense.

  The narrator calls them Kansas cousins but, since Kansas did not open for settlement until 1854, it is more likely that they were born elsewhere. Hannibal Heyes may have been named for the Missouri town. Glen Larson named him and liked the alliteration. It didn’t much matter what his first name was, as only one person, Big Jim Santana, ever referred to Heyes by his Christian name. Jedediah Curry may have become “the Kid” out of several options. “Jed” sounds similar to “Kid.” Michelle Monet guessed in “Journey from San Juan” that he was called “Kid,” because “there’s still a lot of little boy” in him. It may have been simply Larson’s fascination with the historical Kid Curry of Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

  Initially identified in the narration as latter-day Robin Hoods who “robbed from the rich and kept the money,” Heyes’s and Curry’s names are already familiar to the train conductor when viewers meet them in the pilot. Up to that date, they had never been caught, probably because, as Wyoming Governor Baxter noticed, they “don’t look like outlaws.” But they are also already wanted dead or alive and worth $10,000 each, according to the posters circulated to lawmen about them. Though the posters may have been printed mid-way through, or nearer the end, of their outlawry, Curry is listed as being twenty-seven and Heyes twenty-nine years of age. Other posted details are more reliable. They are both five feet eleven inches in height. Curry, at 165, outweighs Heyes by five pounds. Curry’s blond hair and blue eyes contrast nicely with Heyes’s brown hair and brown eyes.

  Of Irish and English ancestry, Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry share a common grandfather, making them cousins. Historically, it was not unusual for family members to run in the same outlaw gang. Frank and Jesse James; Emmett, Grat and Bob Dalton; and Billy and Ike Clanton are a few of the well-known familial desperadoes. Even Huggins’s earlier creations — the Maverick boys — were related. Though the idea of Heyes and Curry being related was not specified until well into the second season, Roy Huggins knew all along that they were. It wasn’t until he had gotten used to working with them that he decided he needed to know a little bit more about how they got together in the first place. Because they were so close, and in many ways much alike, he made them cousins. [2] However, in the beginning of the third season, he inexplicably decided to abandon that relationship in favor of their simply growing up together. [3]

  The boys reveal their folks were killed in the border wars, and they were about ten years old when the war started. Here their birth dates can be judiciously manipulated to account for ambiguous discrepancies. Did that mean the Civil War in general or the war when it reached their corner of Kansas two years later or even the border skirmishes that preceded the war? Unlike other men they encounter in the episode “The Bounty Hunter,” it is clear from
their lack of prejudice toward Joe Sims, the black bounty hunter, that they would have fought for the Union had they been old enough. During his impressionable pre-teen years, though, both the Rebs’ and the Unionists’ arguments made sense to Heyes. For his part, Curry dismissed both as wrong.

  After the death of their parents, they were sent to the Valparaiso School for Waywards, implying that, not only were they orphans, but perhaps had already gotten into mischief. There they attended church services every Sunday, accounting for their many references to religion in later years. Curry quotes the Bible as though he is very familiar with it. In San Juan, he tells Michelle that Blanche will believe what she says as though it were “carved in stone and handed down from a mountain.” He advises evangelist Sister Grace in Apache Springs that she has to have faith, just like it says in the book she carries, even though she is incapable of spewing hellfire and damnation. Evidently Curry has heard enough good preachers who made his blood run cold that he recognizes an inferior one. He has enough faith to believe that Heyes can pull off a miracle in Santa Marta and he even suspects the amnesty brochure Miss Birdie hands him in the pilot may be some sort of religious tract. Heyes too has his religious moments, reminding the sheriff in Red Rock, Montana, that “he who lives by the sword has got to expect to die by the sword.” It may have been at a Sunday service where he learned the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” with which he entertains the Jordan family. Borrowing an adage from the good book, he pleads with the Kid to “turn the other cheek” at Joe Briggs’s bullying in “McCreedy Bust: Going, Going, Gone.” But perhaps the most fervent we see Heyes is when he hollers a “thank you” heavenward at finding water in the desert after Danny Bilson steals their horses and canteens.