Clint Walker

He was a mountain of a man and a western legend thanks mainly to playing TV's favorite wandering adventurer, Cheyenne.  He parlayed that role into movie westerns playing heroes as taciturn and emotionless as western folk are thought to have been.  But those same traits kept him rather pigeon-holed as an actor and his overall opportunities in Hollywood were rather limited.

Thinking of his acting made me think of the piece we just did on Fred MacMurray whose acting style is similar to Walker's.  Why did I usually find MacMurray uninteresting while I paint Walker as a more fascinating creature?  Well now, I wonder.

Could it be that this handsome, ultra-manly creature with his 6'6" frame, 48" chest and 32" waist with a propred being an actor.  He and his twin sister were born in Hartford, Illinois, in 1927.  His family had little money and life became even worse as the depression hit.  He was tall and good-looking from early childhood and he quickly got used to folks commenting on physical appearance.  After he began working out some, he became the dreamboat to many a lass.  Things turned more serious, however, when at age 16 he decided to quit school to go to work to help support the family.

He began with such jobs as a factory worker, a riverboat lackey, a carnival roustabout and a caddy.  He was willing to do anything and was seemingly good at everything he undertook.  His physical presence was most imposing and as he became less shy and more outgoing, employment came easier for him.  He always had a need to keep moving.  No wonder he understood Cheyenne.  

He joined the Merchant Marines toward the end of the war and later found himself working his way west with jobs in Texas oil fields and stints in California as a sheet metal worker, nightclub bouncer, deputy sheriff and an undercover agent for a detective agency.

His wanderlust next took him to Las Vegas where he hired on as a security officer at the Sands Hotel when he ran into actor and Cecil B. DeMille bff, Henry Wilcoxon.  He got hired to play a small role in the director's The Ten Commandments (1956) but not before he had an uncredited part in a silly Bowery Boys comedy, Jungle Gents (1954). 

I've never heard any serious rumors about Walker's sexuality but at this point he did hire on for representation with noted gay agent, Henry Willson (Rock, Tab, Troy, Guy, Rory) whose male clientele were whispered about in Hollywood as casting couch actors.

In 1955 Warner Bros signed him on to play Cheyenne Bodie for 108 episodes and a seven-year run.  Walker was set in life.  For most people no matter what big-screen western he played in, he was always Cheyenne.  Walker and his mega-popular show set the stage for many westerns to come at WB and elsewhere.  

The western Fort Dobbs (1958) was so-so although I loved him in it.  Of course, being one of those long trek things, he got dusty and had to take off his shirt and bathe.  Then it went from so-so to oh-oh.  Costar Virginia Mayo said in her autobiography that he was a nice guy but a terrible actor.

My favorite Clint Walker performance is in Yellowstone Kelly (1959), a highly-fictionalized story of a real-life trapper.  The wide-open spaces and color of Sedona, Arizona, the skirmishes with a local Sioux tribe and the homoerotic relationship between Walker and Edd Byrnes, hired, more or less, as a houseboy for Walker, certainly captured my imagination.  

He was a trapper again in Gold of the Seven Saints (1961) with Roger Moore (so unbelievable in westerns) as his partner as they try to keep their stash of gold from the bad guys.  It came and went with barely a mention.

By 1962, Cheyenne, still doing well in the ratings, was no more.  Most press releases said he and the notoriously cheap WB couldn't come to any agreement over him doing more and better film work.  But the truth appears to be the age-old gripe... money.  He felt he wasn't paid enough and they thought he was.  So Walker said adios and by the time the brouhaha reached the news outlets, his reputation was suffering.  Who does the big cowboy think he is?

He made an attempt to get off a horse and make an honest-to-goodness contemporary romantic comedy, Send Me No Flowers (1964).  Walker actually gets rather lost in the third and final Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedy in which he plays her former boyfriend who comes back into her life when her husband (Hudson) mistakenly thinks he's dying.  Walker's part was too small for anyone to get excited about it and the film was not nearly as praised as Hudson & Day's first two.

For None but the Brave (1965), Walker's first war picture, he heads a platoon of Marines who, along with a Japanese group, are stranded on a small Pacific island and must learn to get along with one another.  Frank Sinatra, in his only directorial effort, is one of Walker's men.  It was not an especially noteworthy film but I, because of Walker, enjoyed it.

Night of the Grizzly (1966) was the first of three family-oriented films he made.  They all have that Disney feel and yet they were made elsewhere.  Walker, wife Martha Hyer and their son move to Wyoming to start a new life living on and working the land.  In addition to two familiar and expert villains, Jack Elam and Leo Gordon, the family is terrorized by a giant grizzly.  There are some genuinely scary scenes but who better to fend off the beast than Clint Walker.  I mean, come on!

I guess that beast wasn't big enough because next came an Indian elephant, the title star of Maya, also 1966.  Its slight story concerns a boy (Jay North, recently grown up from TV's Dennis the Menace) who gets mad at his father (Walker) and runs off into the jungle with a local boy and the mighty Maya.  It had a few fun moments but this was no way to re-ignite Walker's career.

The best movie the big guy ever made is The Dirty Dozen (1967).  Directed by gutsy Robert Aldrich, it concerns a rebellious army major (Lee Marvin) during WWII who is assigned a dozen miscreants to train and lead into a mass assassination of Germans. 

It is a good film, immensely popular with male filmgoers, that had far more comedy than accuracy.  Walker got lost in the shuffle with costars like Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Charles Bronson, far better actors all. 

A funny scene had Marvin out to engage gentle giant Walker, who as Samson Posey can be goaded to fight, into taking a swing at him.  Towering over Marvin, Walker says I don't want to hurt you, Major.  The major responds you're not gonna hurt me.  I'm gonna hurt you.  That dialogue and its aftermath was a highlight.

On the other side, there was a scene where Posey pretends to be a general inspecting Ryan's troops and Walker told Aldrich he was uncomfortable playing it.  It seems odd, at best, and may shine a light on the actor's inability to truly hit his marks.  The scene was given to Sutherland.

In 1969 came two supporting roles in western comedies with robbery at the center.  Sam Whiskey was just plain knee-slappin' funny from start to finish and if you don't think so, meet me out in the street at sundown.  Widow Angie Dickinson, always so watchable and willing to poke fun at her real-life image, hires a trio (Burt Reynolds, Ossie Davis and Walker) to retrieve gold bars from the bottom of a river and return them to the bank from where her husband stole them, without the bank knowing.  Preposterous, yes, but Reynolds and Dickinson sparkle and Davis and Walker are right there, too, in their co-starring roles.

We wonder how Walker felt being back at WB after their touchy departure to make the flamboyant comedy, The Great Train Robbery.  At its center is a couple (wild and crazy Zero Mostel and beautiful Kim Novak, once again trying her hand at comedy) pretending to be church people in a Texas town while, in fact, they are getting set up to rob a bank.  Walker plays a ranger out to nab the devious pair.  It's a corny thing but its outlandishness worked well.  A very funny scene has Novak giving peyote to lawman Walker while he reactions are priceless.

Walker at this point had returned to television but in a number of TV movies and not especially memorable ones.  He also began something that he would do for the rest of his life... use his cowboy image to brighten various venues around the country that saluted the western.  The public found him kind, unassuming and seemingly as happy to meet them as they were to meet him.  

I saw him at one of those events in Southern California and also once on a Santa Monica street and lastly at the Phoenix airport.  He was hard to miss.  I wish we had spoken (I was too shy) but he noticed me as well because I was taller than he was.  

In 1971 he was involved in a serious skiing accident.  He fell out of a lift and his ski pole pierced his heart.  He was originally pronounced dead but then rushed into surgery when signs of life were detected.

He made a return to the family film with Baker's Hawk (1976).  Beautifully filmed in Utah, it's another outdoor yarn about a boy who finds an injured hawk and nurses it back to health while his parents (Walker and Diane Baker) are treated like pariahs by the townsfolk.  Burl Ives adds his usual flavor as a wise, old hermit.

After making the film, Walker did no more work that warrants even a modicum of attention (with the exception of a one-episode appearance in 1978's mega TV blockbuster Centennial).  His last work, a voiceover, came in a forgotten 1998 flick.

I wonder how many recall that Walker had a pretty decent singing voice.  He sang occasionally in Cheyenne and also a few of his films.  He even made an album called Inspiration.  When that beautiful speaking voice erupted into song, I half wanted to scream like a teenage girl but I resisted.  I thought you should know.

He was married three times, approximately for 20 years to each woman.  During his last marriage he kept a pretty low profile.  Other than with stunt men and some of the crew, he never really felt a part of the Hollywood community, never felt that they totally accepted him or respected him.  So it wasn't a problem turning his back on them.  Perhaps, too, after two failed marriages, he wanted to give more to his last.

The big guy, a life-long health addict, died last year of congestive heart failure in Grass Valley, California.  He was 90 years old.


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The four films of two actor-friends