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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  Swerling raced over to Bailey’s apartment and spent the next half hour calming her down. When she regained control of herself, together they called Roy Huggins, waking him up to break the news. Huggins recalled, “I immediately decided that the show was cancelled. That was it.” He told Swerling to begin shutting down the production company. Neither man wanted Ben Murphy to learn of his co-star’s death through the media so, before heading to Universal, Swerling and Bailey stopped at Ben’s apartment. [15]

  It was now a little before 6:00 a.m. Instead of his alarm clock, Ben was roused by them knocking on his door. He was shocked, but not surprised by Peter’s suicide. Ben always looked up to Peter as a talented and experienced actor, but he’d had a premonition that one day Peter would screw things up for him. Now he’d done it, although not the way Ben expected. He thought Peter would break his contract or in some way sabotage the show, not end his life. “His psychology was set up to view it as a trap,” Ben explains, “So, it was doomed…The more success [the show] had, the more he would have felt trapped and undermined it.” The two men had been amicable co-workers, but not close friends. Still, it seemed to Ben that Peter was spiraling downhill, abusing alcohol and growing more depressed. “Peter and I never talked about these things,” Ben admits, “but it just seemed that he was despondent about his life, his situation, even being on the show, the work.” Swerling advised Ben to stay away from the studio that day. Ben took the advice. [16]

  By 7:00 a.m., the crew was on the set, silently milling around, unsure what to do. Huggins and Swerling arrived at the studio expecting to shut down the company. But ABC had different plans.

  After sitting at the side of the road for awhile, Singer continued to the studio, expecting to go in, meet with the crew and producers, and then go home. He made his way to the set where he found Roy Huggins, Jo Swerling, Glen Larson and Steve Heilpern. They all just sat there, staring at the walls. “What do we do, guys?” Singer asked. “Go home? End the series? Have you heard from the Tower?” No one had heard anything at that point but, after Frank Price called the producers to his office, eventually a call did come down to the set from the Black Tower. The message: shoot around Peter. Singer was appalled. Not only did the order make no sense to him, but also the entire day’s schedule revolved around Peter. How much material did they have that didn’t involve him that they could possibly shoot? Singer remembers scrambling to find scenes to film. “You know, a horse riding up with some other guy on it, somebody getting off the horse and a close-up of the gun and a close-up of my foot and somehow [we] put together, not a day’s work, but sort of a half day’s work. It’s the first time in my life that I watched a crew and, not only watched them, but cheered them on internally for working at a snail’s pace. It was a way of saying ‘You shouldn’t do this to us.’ ” [17]

  Up in Universal’s Black Tower, Frank Price was also in a state of shock. “It was devastating,” Price remembers. “I liked [Peter] a lot. He was an interesting guy to talk to, troubled in some ways, but bright and thoughtful.” [18] Besides facing the personal heartbreak of Peter’s death, Price was also frustrated by what had happened. The series that he nurtured and fought for now had the potential to be as dead as its star. “Here’s this series that we loved, that was hard to keep alive, to keep on the air. This could have been the blow that really got it cancelled.” Price also found himself besieged by the press. Reporters were outside, clamoring for information, eager to get all the gory details in time to meet their deadlines, but Price had nothing of real value to tell them. At this point no one knew anything for certain beyond the fact that Peter was dead. Even the manner of his death was still a matter for the police, who hadn’t yet made a final determination on whether it was accident, homicide or suicide.

  As the head of television for Universal, Price had to look at the matter from several different perspectives. Personally, he spent the day operating in a state of shock. Professionally, he had a job to do, which was to deliver a series to ABC and fulfill the studio’s contractual obligations. Artistically, he had to decide what was best for the show — recast the role or shut down the production. The studio’s obligation to the network took precedence when ABC made it clear they wanted the series to continue. As Jo Swerling remembers, “The show was doing well for them…They had sold the time to sponsors and didn’t want to default to (them), so they expected us to keep delivering the show. And if we didn’t, they would sue us…They said, ‘You’ve got a contract. We expect you to deliver, and if you don’t, you’re in breach of contract and we will pursue all legal remedies.’ ” [19] Peter Duel’s death put ABC in a tough spot and they in turn put Universal in a tough spot.

  In 1971, ABC was ranked third in a three-network television universe, a position they often found themselves in for a variety of reasons, not all of them relating to the quality of their programs. In the early days of radio, NBC had gotten a jump on the competition with CBS by creating two networks, which they called NBC Red and NBC Blue. The two networks offered different programming and had different affiliate stations but as the television race began, the Federal Communications Commission became concerned about a potential monopoly and created a regulation prohibiting anyone from operating two competing networks at the same time. As a result of the new law, NBC sold the smaller Blue network, whose new owner renamed it ABC. [20]

  Because of its late start in the new field of television, ABC had been playing catch up from its very inception. FCC regulations limited network station ownership to five owned-and-operated stations. To further expand a network, local stations had to be signed up as affiliates. NBC and CBS had been going after television affiliates with gusto since the FCC declared commercial broadcasts could begin on July 1, 1941, although World War II and the subsequent focus on war-related technologies temporarily halted all work in television. An FCC freeze on the processing of new television licenses, enacted just as ABC was trying to get established, added to the network’s problems. By the time ABC was able to enter the television race in earnest, most of the larger local stations had already become affiliates of the other two networks, leaving ABC to work with newer, smaller stations that reached a correspondingly smaller audience. Many areas of the country still lacked the capacity for broadcasting three channels, creating a further challenge for ABC, which often found itself shut out of the television market altogether.

  Affiliate agreements between local stations and a national network are meant to be beneficial to both parties — the network gains a wider audience to sell to advertisers and the affiliate gets quality programming to fill the prime time hours, along with a certain number of minutes they can sell to advertisers themselves. However, affiliates are not required to broadcast the network’s offerings, and in 1971 ABC found itself caught in a seemingly unending cycle of anarchy with its affiliates, who would often choose to air alternate programming rather than the network feed with disastrous results for ABC’s ratings. Les Brown describes that situation in his book Televi$ion: The Business Behind The Box:

  Such was the spiral: ABC ventured a new show, too few stations carried it, advertisers buying the circulation therefore paid too little for it, the show failed in the ratings, and ABC was forced to cancel it and offer a new program in its place, which in turn would be passed over by the stations. Thus failure perpetuated failure.

  Alias Smith and Jones was not a highly rated show when considered against the whole prime time schedule, but it was able to hold its own against the formidable competition of The Flip Wilson Show on NBC. Peter’s death also came at a strategically bad time for the network. The number of completed episodes the studio would be able to deliver to them would take ABC through the month of January, but February is the most crucial of the sweeps months; ratings during this time set the advertising rates for the next year. Already struggling in the ratings race, this would not be the best time for them to be trying out a brand-new series, assuming they could get one on the air that quickly, nor did they have a library of sp
ecials that could air in its place. In fact, ABC had recently dumped millions of dollars worth of programming because of a new FCC regulation that had gone into effect changing the number of hours networks could program in prime time. [21] Programming executives at ABC were not willing to abandon Alias Smith and Jones because of this latest crisis and turned to Frank Price for a solution.

  Price felt like the captain of the Titanic. “You’ve just struck an iceberg. What do you do?” he wondered. “Can the ship be saved or do you hit the lifeboats?” Under pressure from the network, Price decided to try and save the ship. He called a meeting with Roy Huggins, Jo Swerling and Glen Larson to discuss options. If anything were to be done to save the show, it had to be done immediately. “My first question was ‘What do you think?’ ” Price recalls. “What should we do here?” Despite the circumstances, each of them wanted to keep the show alive and as Price points out, “If you’re doing Hamlet and Hamlet dies one night, you don’t say ‘We retire this play.’ You cast a new Hamlet and go on.” The conversation turned to recasting the role. Huggins immediately suggested Roger Davis, an actor he knew and liked. Larson disagreed. Although he also liked Roger, he had reservations about using an actor who had recently guest starred on the show as a villain suddenly returning as a replacement for the star. But there was little else to do. Larson recalls, “It’s not that there [was] that great a panoply of performers that you [could] call on, especially on short notice. Again, we were behind and we had to kind of keep moving.” Jo Swerling believed Roger had a different comedy sense than Peter’s, but Roger in his own way knew how to read the kind of wry lines that Huggins and Larson wrote. “It was his own distinctive way of doing it, but it worked. And Roy had been happy with Roger’s work in the part that he did [in The Young Country]. He just popped into his mind and he said, ‘Here’s somebody I think can do it and he’s available.’ ” There was no time to hold auditions or screen tests, so Price went with Huggins’s suggestion. “I [knew] that Roger was good and it’s hard to find people that are good.” [22] Swerling contacted the network and got their approval to hire Roger Davis. Now all they had to do was find him and bring him in as quickly as possible.

  Unaware of the tragedy, Roger Davis was on his way from Houston, Texas, where he and his wife had spent Christmas with her parents, to Denver, Colorado, to record some voice-overs. With flight information provided by Roger’s wife Ellen, better known as Jaclyn Smith, Huggins hoped to intercept Roger at the airport. Roger noticed two airline officials questioning the exiting passengers. As he got closer he realized they were asking, “Are you Roger Davis?” Replying in the affirmative, Roger was directed to a phone where Roy Huggins was holding for him. “Roger, something has happened and you’ve got to come straight back to California, no matter what you’re doing.” Surprised by this urgent summons, he asked Huggins what was going on. Huggins was reluctant to go into details over the phone and at first only offered the explanation that he was needed to replace Peter Duel in some shows because there had been an awful accident. But Roger’s confusion eventually led Huggins to elaborate as far as he could. “Pete has shot himself…Roger, let’s talk about this when you come back. Just come back, okay? Get on the next plane out of there.” Not able to believe what he was hearing, Roger asked, “Roy, when’s he gonna be back? I mean, how many shows?” And Huggins finally said what he’d been trying to avoid. “Roger, look, Pete has shot himself and he’s dead…I really don’t know any details. All I know is what we’ve got to deal with…either the show’s going to go off or we’ve got to move very quickly. As sad as this is and as difficult as it is, if we don’t it’s going off.” Roger silently absorbed that information before asking his next question. “Do I have a choice?” Huggins responded, “From my point of view, I hope you don’t. I do want you to think about it, but I hope that you will do it.” [23]

  So Roger booked a seat on the next flight to Los Angeles. During the flight, a hundred questions raced through his mind. He had doubts about stepping into Peter’s role. A few years earlier, against producer Jerry Davis’s advice, Roger had taken the Montgomery Clift role in a remake of From Here To Eternity. The producer argued that Clift “owns that role. You’ll only be compared, and never favorably…you’re making a huge mistake…” Would it be the same stepping into the Heyes role that Peter owned? Roger thought about Edward G. Robinson’s line from The Cincinnati Kid and that became part of his philosophy — “That’s really what life’s all about. Life’s really about making the wrong move at the right moment. When you screw up is [when] you make the wrong move at the wrong moment.” Despite his doubts, Roger was touched by the personal nature of Huggins’s appeal to him. “And I’m gonna refuse Roy Huggins, who [was giving] me a great show?”

  Roger was met at the airport by representatives of Universal and discovered that the local papers were already running the story of him being Pete Duel’s replacement. He was whisked straight from the airport to Western Costume Company, where Jo Swerling was waiting for him. Together they assembled a wardrobe for the new Hannibal Heyes, picking out suitable attire and tailoring it to fit Roger.

  That weekend Huggins held meetings at his house with Roger and Alex Singer, giving the actor and the director a chance to meet privately before facing cast and crew when shooting resumed. “It made it more comfortable for us to relate,” Singer recalls, appreciating the grace Huggins showed in making the transition technically easier for him and more palatable for Roger. Although Roger still had reservations on the wisdom of accepting the offer, on Monday morning, January 3, 1972, the new year would begin with a new actor in the role of Hannibal Heyes.

  Peter ended his pain with one bullet. While the world mourned the loss of this talented young man with tears, one friend raged. Jack Jobes confesses, “I wasn’t thrown into fits of depression and sadness and all because I was so annoyed at him for doing it. I was so angry, I mean, I was just angry all the time.” What truly broke Jobes’s heart was that he knew Peter was getting his life back on track. The two friends had had a heart-to-heart talk in Peter’s kitchen two weeks before his suicide, talking and laughing late into the night, drinking gallons of coffee, catching up on what was going on in their lives. “We talked about life, love, the pursuit of happiness, everything like that. But he was really getting it together…He was so on the mend. He really was.” Jobes thought Peter was on his way onward and upward, with a great series and a great future. “Then you get that kind of news…it was just awful.” To add to Jobes’s anger, Peter’s manager, John Napier, was arranging for the funeral to be held at Forest Lawn, a place Jobes knew Peter would hate. “Usually I wouldn’t even say anything and let them do what they want, but that [was] just so blatantly wrong,” Jobes recalls. He went to Peter’s sister Pam and suggested the Self-Realization Temple on Sunset Boulevard, a beautiful and peaceful reserve near the ocean. “That’s the perfect spot. That’s what he would like,” Jobes told her. Pam agreed and Napier changed the arrangements. [24]

  The memorial service drew a crowd of over one thousand mourners, among them Frank Price, Roy Huggins, Glen Larson, Alex Singer and the entire Alias Smith and Jones crew. Ben chose not to attend the service, feeling his presence would only create a distraction at a time when the focus should be on Peter and his family. Instead, he went to the funeral home the day before, slipping through the back door to avoid the media and keep his visit private. “I paid my respects, said good-bye, then that was it. It was over for me.” [25]

  Roger did attend the service, expressly against the wishes of Roy Huggins, who warned him it would be a mistake to go; that replacing Peter would be difficult enough without the added trauma of attending his funeral the day before taking over his role. But Roger felt it wouldn’t be right not to show up, especially since he knew both Geoffrey and Pam. “It was the one thing to do that was completely right,” Roger says, but admits Huggins was right about the emotional toll. “It made it much harder for me to do it.” [26]

  Jon Roger Davis w
as born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on April 5, 1939, the middle son of Edwin and Virginia Davis. The family soon moved to Louisville, where Edwin Davis established a successful tire company, the profits from which allowed him to indulge his desire to own racehorses. Though the tire company no longer exists, Roger still owns the property, a corner of historic downtown Louisville. Roger remembers his dad as a colorful character who could have been an actor, a cross between Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire.

  Roger, along with older brother Edwin and younger brother Brent, attended school in Louisville, where he enjoyed his first acting experience at the young age of nine, playing the Archbishop in a school production of The Prince and the Pauper. After graduating from Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee, he attended New York City’s Columbia University, majoring in American and British literature, with a minor in architecture. The acting bug had bitten him so, along with keeping up his studies, he also appeared in summer stock at Woodstock, New York, and with the Repertory Theatre in New York City. To further his education, his father insisted he study law at Harvard, but Roger didn’t care for his studies there and instead took a job teaching freshman English at the University of California at Los Angeles. He made the trip to California by bus with only $13 to his name. Once there, besides teaching, he pumped gas, washed dishes and waited tables to make money. While at UCLA, Roger completed his Master’s degree.

  Right out of college, Roger was signed to a contract at Warner Brothers. His professional acting debut came in 1962 on the ABC series The Gallant Men, a World War II drama about the American campaign in Italy. Robert Conrad befriended him while he was at Warners and helped him to get other jobs, to break out of the mold of the series. Dorothy Bailey, secretary to Hugh Benson who ran the day-to-day operations of Warner Brothers under Jack Warner, later became Roy Huggins’s secretary. It was she who brought Roger to Huggins’s attention.