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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  When The Gallant Men was cancelled, Roger took the role of a ranch hand in Empire, an NBC western. The next year, he and Peter Duel vied for the role of a surfer in the beach movie Ride the Wild Surf. At that time, Peter told Roger, “You’re going to get it. I’m not the surfer type.” Roger believes Peter could do whatever he wanted, but Peter’s prediction was on target. Roger got the role. Working in Hawaii for three months at the age of twenty-three, “Well, it was pretty great to be able to go do that,” Roger remembers.

  Roger continued acting, winning a role in the feature film PT 109 and guest starring in shows such as The Twilight Zone, Bonanza and The Big Valley. Roger’s and Peter’s paths crossed once again when Roger turned down the lead in Love on a Rooftop in favor of the remake of From Here to Eternity. Producer Jerry Davis told him, “You know, you’re turning down a role that is perfect for you, that will make you a star, that will…allow this gift for light humor that you have to come through…” Nevertheless, Roger took the ill-advised role of Pvt. Prewitt in From Here to Eternity and the role of David Willis in Love on a Rooftop went to Peter Duel. The pilot was filmed and Roger recalls the reaction, “I was compared to Montgomery Clift and, oh, what the hell…So I land back in New York doing off-Broadway shows.” [27] He admits ruefully that Jerry Davis was absolutely right.

  In 1967, he played the role of Bobby Kennedy in the drama MacBird in Boston and then in New York City. Because of his ability to mimic Kennedy’s Boston accent, during the production, MacBird directors gave Roger his first voiceover job. He went in to do an aspirin commercial using Kennedy’s voice and was so dead on the producers were afraid they would get sued, so they told Roger to read the words in his own voice. When he then sounded like Henry Fonda to them instead, they asked if he could he sound even more Fonda-esque. The commercial went on the air with “Fonda’s” voice. “And a career in voiceovers, which made me millions of bucks, was born. So I had this great voiceover career, doing the play, and starting to do lots of commercials on-camera. I’d go in for off-camera and they would say, ‘What the hell are you doing off-camera? You could be on-camera.’ ”

  The next year, Roger was offered the role of lawyer Peter Bradford in ABC’s afternoon gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, and met his future wife, Jaclyn, the former Ellen Smith of Houston, Texas, on an elevator in New York. Roger would go on to play several different roles on Dark Shadows for the next two years: Peter Bradford, Jeff Clark, the ghost of Peter Bradford, Ned Stuart, Dirk Wilkins, and Charles Delaware Tate, appearing in 129 episodes. Roger and Jaclyn were married in 1968. His career as an announcer was thriving as well; he and Jaclyn appeared as announcer and actress in toothpaste commercials in the early 1970s. He also did guest shots on Night Gallery, The Bold Ones and Medical Center during this period, as well as a couple of ABC Movie of the Weeks.

  Roger and Peter came together again when they were both cast in Roy Huggins’s pilot The Young Country. Huggins had initially cast Peter as Stephen Foster Moody, the lead. After talking with Roger, Huggins decided he’d erred in that decision and switched their roles around, making Roger the lead. Roger was concerned that Peter would resent being demoted from star to supporting character, but Huggins brushed aside his protests. “No, no, no. You don’t know Pete Duel. It won’t bother him at all. First day of shooting, he’ll understand completely.” Huggins was right. Peter didn’t mind and, in fact, phoned Roger to talk about it. Roger remembers Peter joking, “I followed you into Love on a Rooftop and now I’m going to follow you into The Young Country. What kind of a life is this?”

  Huggins had a firm rule that his actors were not permitted to ad-lib dialogue, however, Roger could get away with it occasionally. One time Huggins told him, “One of the things I love, Roger, is that you don’t ad-lib bromides…stuff that you hear constantly. You come up with some stuff that I never (could)…I couldn’t write it.” In The Young Country, Roger’s character had Peter’s character tied up and was ready to leave. Peter motions for Roger to remove his gag and he says, “Untie me!” Roger, however, secures the bandanna in his mouth and heads for the door. His line was supposed to be simply, “So long, H.J.” Instead, he turns back and says, “You know the old saying, ‘I love ya when your money’s gone, but I can’t be with ya! So long, H.J.’ ” Roger remembers, “That is something my old daddy used to say…Roy saw that and he called me up the next day on the set and he said, ‘I love getting credit for that line…That was really a perfect moment and the perfect thing, and I didn’t write it!” The Young Country did not go to series, but Roger developed a lasting friendship with Roy Huggins. [28]

  In 1971, when his roles on Dark Shadows were finished, Roger was hired as the narrator on Alias Smith and Jones and also guest-starred in the episode “Smiler with a Gun.” “I think it was Doug Heyes who liked me for [that episode], who went to Roy and said, ‘You know, you’re not going to believe this, but we should do this.’…I think Roy went along with it, but I don’t think he would have thought of me because Roy had a way of pigeon-holing you. He had a way of thinking, ‘This is what you do.’…This was a rather straight leading man…No humor to him at all. And I don’t think Roy saw me that way.” Ironically, in his role of Danny Bilson, Roger was the only man Kid Curry killed.

  Monday, January 3, 1972. The first day on the set was the toughest. Everyone had returned except the director of photography, William Cronjager. Cronjager, a very close friend of Peter’s, had walked out on Friday and he just couldn’t bring himself to return. A substitute was brought in to finish the camera work on “The Biggest Game in the West,” although Cronjager later returned to finish out the season. Ben, although he also would have preferred to quit, returned to work without argument. “I could have been a thorn in their side and been petulant and said, ‘No, I can’t go on.’ But that would have been bullshit. My job is to be an actor and do a job. I can’t quit because someone else chooses to end their life.” [29]

  Director Alex Singer gave a speech to the cast and crew, then work began. Singer remembers, “I think that all I got to say to Roger was ‘Good morning.’…There wasn’t time to do that…So, he’s dumped into the middle of this thing.” [30] The plan called for using all the footage already shot of the guest stars, which meant Roger had to duplicate Peter’s performance so the reactions would match properly when the film was edited. A movieola was brought to the set and Singer and Roger studied every move Peter had made in every shot. Roger then gave his own performance, matching Peter’s in every nuance. Singer was impressed with the results. “He [did] this with a level of professionalism and good will and good humor that I [found] really quite remarkable.”

  The work continued throughout the morning, going very well under the circumstances. “I’m thanking my lucky stars that we have another actor that’s clearly a competent professional,” Singer remembers. “He is, I think, going to be easy to work with.” At lunchtime, Singer had cause to wonder if his first assessment was correct. On his way to the screening room to watch the dailies from the previous Thursday and Friday, Roger stopped him and asked if he could come along and see them on a big screen rather than the television-sized movieola. Singer normally refused to let actors watch dailies, but, under the circumstances, this time had no objections. He wanted Roger to feel as comfortable as he could. “I certainly didn’t want him to feel he was getting the cold shoulder from me, so I said, ‘Sure, come along.’ ”

  They walked along in silence for a while. “I hear the sound of choking,” Singer recalls, “and I look over and Roger is strangling with an effort to hold back tears.” Singer put his arm around the actor. “I wasn’t using my head. I’m a director on the job and my first thought is, ‘My God, I have another nut and this is not going to be funny.’ ” He then asked Roger what was wrong. Roger knew that the opportunity to play a role as good as Hannibal Heyes was a lucky break for him, but Peter had been a friend, and he didn’t like how he had gotten the part. Roger broke down and wept. The two men went into the screening room.
“He sat through the dailies then and that was the worst moment,” Singer remembers. “Whatever he felt after that he was able to keep pretty much to himself and [he] didn’t tell people about this. It was kind of forbidden terrain.” [31]

  While Roger had the unenviable task of imitating Peter, Ben Murphy had his own problems to face. “It was like waking up in bed with a different wife,” Ben recalls. “That’s the way I best describe it. It was very jarring. It was emotionally just very, very difficult.” [32] Ben found himself re-doing scenes he had done just days earlier with Peter, reciting the same lines “and now there’s somebody else there.” He recalls that everyone just did what they had to do and somehow managed to get through it. “[It] wasn’t fun for Roger, wasn’t fun for me, wasn’t fun for anybody.” While he managed to perform on camera, in between shots Ben retreated to his dressing room, not feeding lines to Roger for his close-ups. Roger did what was required of him and, in his own dazed state, didn’t think too much about it, but guest star Jim Backus was furious. He said, “You can’t do these close-ups without the other boy, what are you talking about?” He felt that Ben’s behavior was unconscionable and lost no time in telling him so when Ben returned to the set for a three-shot. Roger recalls that Backus “turned and said, ‘You know, I’ve been at this a long time and…I wouldn’t put up with it. I guess this fella has to put up with it, ‘cause he’s stuck. But you’ll get yours. You know, what goes around…’ Oh, he was really angry.” [33]

  The cast and crew struggled through their grief and completed “The Biggest Game in the West.” Singer notes that Peter’s temperament had given the crew its share of trouble, but he was well liked and the crew was deeply affected by his loss. “Peter…was a good, good craftsman and a kind of charming guy. And for all the trouble that he gave people because his temperament did slow them down, they liked him and they cared about him…They were really affected by it.” Singer was also affected. He had worked with Peter on The Bold Ones as well as previous episodes of Alias Smith and Jones and recalls, “For all the behavioral things that [were] troublesome or irritating about Peter, he was a beautiful young man and a very good actor.” There was also lingering resentment over the Black Tower’s actions. Already shocked by Peter’s death and dismayed that they were asked to continue shooting, the crew expected Universal executives at least to come to the set and acknowledge Peter’s death. No one did. More than thirty years later, Alex Singer is still angry about that. “The absence of human connection was chilling. It was bone-chilling.”

  The old show-biz adage “the show must go on” was followed with a stubbornness that left cast, crew and fans alike reeling. “I think there was shock in general and some anger at Peter that he’d done that to himself and to everybody. In situations like that, it’s always something you can figure out [later]. Maybe you could have handled it better,” Frank Price explains. “But, again, if you were present at the time, who knows?” Price made the decision to recast the show with the full agreement of the producers who were, as Jo Swerling recalls, “accused of being ghoulish at the time, because we barely skipped a beat. I think we lost half a day of production.” The only thing making the decision bearable was that continuing production saved a lot of jobs. “Our rationale…I don’t think it’s a spurious rationale…was that there are 125 jobs on the line,” Swerling explains. “And Peter wouldn’t have wanted all those people out of work and that was sort of the bright spot in the clouds that kept us from feeling like complete ghouls.” [34]

  “The Biggest Game in the West” aired on February 3, 1972, with no explanation of why Hannibal Heyes was now played by Roger Davis. Although the reason was certainly common knowledge among the audience, many of Peter Duel’s fans were dismayed that no acknowledgment of his death was made publicly; that Roger Davis simply appeared one Thursday night and the show continued as if nothing had happened. Today Frank Price admits that things probably should have been handled differently, but that’s an easy call to make from the perspective of several decades later. It was not so easy in 1972. At the time, Price explains, “the fact of the matter was that we were casting another actor and wanted him to have his shot at showing the audience who he was and how this relationship worked.” Neither the studio nor the network wanted to dwell on the tragedy to the possible detriment of the series they had just struggled to save, so the broadcast of Roger’s first episode was made with as little fanfare as possible.

  ABC was fairly confident the audience would accept the new actor. The studio had sent test tapes of the episode to several television stations around the country to gauge audience reaction before the national network broadcast. On January 29, 1972, these stations broadcast the show in their local markets, then surveyed viewers and sent the results back to ABC, who was anxious to see how well the show would stand up after the cast change. The results were favorable and the network felt the series could survive the death of Peter Duel. They watched the ratings closely and were pleased that they didn’t significantly drop. The audience appeared to be willing to give Roger Davis a chance to give his own interpretation to the role of Hannibal Heyes. ABC renewed Alias Smith and Jones for a third season.

  There were four more episodes to be filmed before the season ended. But the relationship between the actors was strained and Universal nearly lost Ben Murphy. When he was working with Peter, he was earning $450 a week, significantly less than his co-star. Roger was not under contract to Universal and came in as a replacement earning Peter’s salary of $5,000 per show. The injustice angered Ben. “You’re bringing in another actor, I should at least get what he gets and I shouldn’t have to take second billing to a new person if we’re going to do this.” Ben held out despite threats from Lew Wasserman; he called in “sick” and refused to meet with anyone, letting his agents bargain for him. They eventually negotiated a deal that satisfied Ben. He graciously finished the season at his original pay, but got the parity he wanted for the next season. The crisis was over.

  Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  Peter Duel as Hannibal Heyes. Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  Roger Davis in The Young Country. Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Materials Store

  Roger Davis as Stephen Foster Moody in The Young Country. Sagala collection

  Roger Davis.

  Peter Duel’s grave in Penfield, New York, cemetery. His mother lies next to him on the left. Sagala/Bagwell collection

  Roger Davis. Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  Chapter 7

  The Show Must Go On: Continuation of the Second Season

  Roger Davis takes over as Hannibal Heyes — February 3, 1972-March 2, 1972

  The Biggest Game in The West

  “You’re all right, cousin, you’re all right!”

  Hannibal Heyes

  STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  DIRECTOR: ALEXANDER SINGER

  SHOOTING DATES: DECEMBER 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 1971; JANUARY 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: FEBRUARY 3, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: NOVEMBER 26, 1973

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry doze in a gully on a beautiful day. A satchel of money thrown from a passing stagecoach lands near their heads, disturbing the idyllic scene. A galloping posse pursues the coach.

  Curry opens the satchel and finds stacks of money inside which Heyes recognizes as counterfeit. Since they can’t spend it, they decide to build a $200,000 bonfire but, as they’re about to set it alight, Heyes comes up with a way to use it.

  Heyes exits the stagecoach in Lordstown dressed in suit and derby hat and heads for the hotel. He orders Curry, who rode on top with the driver, to bring in his bags. After signing in, they visit the Lordstown bank, managed by Joseph P. Sterling.

  Introducing himself to Sterling, Heyes tells him he wants to put $200,000 in his bank, not deposited or collecting interest, but merely in the vault for safe-keeping. He plans on looking for cattle land with Jones to advise him. Over the next few days, they ride around os
tensibly looking at land with rich ranchers who may be in the market to sell.

  On Saturday, as Heyes shaves off his mustache because he’s afraid it makes him look sinister, Curry worries that their real objective in coming to Lordstown is not working. An invitation to the poker game Heyes is hoping to get hasn’t been forthcoming. Just then two wealthy ranchers, Bixby and Halberstam, arrive to extend an invitation for the biggest poker game west of the Mississippi. The game lasts from 3 p.m. on Saturday to 3 a.m. on Sunday and players can generally afford to lose as much as $200,000. For appearance, Heyes declines, then lets himself be talked into it.

  At 3 p.m., the ranchers sit down and lay their money on the table. Heyes is chagrined to see the bundles; he figured they’d play with chips and settle with bank drafts later. Bixby apologizes for not telling him and lends him $5,000 to get started. The ante is $200. Thousands are raised and tossed in the pot.

  Meanwhile, Curry plays poker in the saloon. He tosses in twenty-five cents and requests four cards. Between hands, he flirts with a pretty saloon girl. When one player raises $2, the others toss in their hands. The game has become too rich.

  That night, Heyes returns to their hotel room with a handful of money — $14,800. The Kid sees the money as a stake toward a trip to China, while Heyes wants to stay and play poker again the next week. The following Saturday, Kyle and Lobo of the Devil’s Hole Gang watch with binoculars as the ranchers enter the hotel for the weekly game.