Rory Calhoun: Unintentional Actor

Had it not been for his good looks, it's not likely he would ever have been in show business.  Despite being born in Los Angeles (in 1922), being in the movies hadn't entered his pretty head.  About the only thing he knew how to do in his early life was get into trouble and have nonstop sex.  He thought both activities were his true calling.

He was born Francis Timothy McCown, half Spanish and half Irish.  His father died when he was just a few months old and his mother, whom he was close to despite her being very old-fashioned and straight-laced, was likely the person who directly influenced his rebellion.  It didn't help matters when she remarried and the stepfather beat the kid regularly.  He began running away from home frequently.

At age 13 he stole a gun and was sent to a reformatory prison although he would escape.  He robbed a succession of jewelry stores and later in life would confess that he loved to steal, as much for the adrenaline rush as anything.  He also stole a series of cars and after he took one over state lines and was caught, he was sent to prison in Oklahoma where he remained until shortly after his 21st birthday.

Once out of prison and back in Los Angeles, he had a series of jobs that included grease monkey, logger, miner, crane operator, firefighter and cowboy.  He had a great love of horses and for awhile he wondered how he could combine that with a good-paying job.  When he fully realized that he needed to be outdoors, he decided to be a forest ranger.

One day he was horseback riding alone in Griffith Park when he came across Alan Ladd who was also riding alone.  You might say they were both horsing around.  They struck up a conversation.  He had no idea who Ladd was but found him pleasant and friendly.  Ladd told him that he was an actor and said that he thought the tall (6'3") good-looking stranger ought to be an actor himself.  Ladd also told him he was married to an agent (Sue Carol) and felt she could open some doors for him.

He probably didn't tell Ladd that he was not impressed with the acting profession, especially for men, but might have said how interested he was in the money actors could make.  He thought it might be nice to take a wad of cash with him into the forestry service.  Carol got him a screen test at 20th Century Fox and he worked unbilled in such Fox pictures as Something for the Boys, Sunday Dinner for a Soldier and Nob Hill in the early 40s.  

He went looking for an agent.  It's not clear why he didn't sign on with Carol although it was well-known that she didn't like any of her husband's male friends, especially new ones.  He hired on with Henry Willson, a super agent at the time, outrageously gay, especially for the time, who was known for outrageous parties and for turning handsome, questionably talented young men into actors.  He gave most of them new, unusual names (think Rock and Tab).  He had the perfect name for Francis Timothy McCown... Troy Donahue.

He didn't like the name but he did like the blindingly handsome Willson client, Guy Madison, and they began an affair that lasted for several years.  What was most surprising was how public they were about it.  If others talked about it, somewhere in there was oh, you know Henry's boys.  It didn't stop this boy from seeing scores of women as well.  He was a debauched soul who wondered how work would get in the way of his hedonistic lifestyle.

Rory and Guy

In 1945 he returned to prison briefly for belting a detective.  It wouldn't be the first or last time his short fuse would get him in trouble.  

He met producer David O'Selznick at a Ladd party and he was impressed with the young man's handsomeness and masculinity.  He saw him as a potential star and signed him to a contract.  It was O'Selznick who tagged him as Rory and Calhoun was Rory's idea.  Oddly Calhoun never did a film for O'Selznick.

In 1946 he began a torrid but brief relationship with French import Corrine Calvet although she would have to share time with Madison.  She was crazy about his sexual prowess and started hounding him about getting married.  That was a deal-buster and they ended the affair.  Before they did, he became hot under the collar about the thuggish head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, bothering Calvet and the two men got into a physical altercation of some sort.  While Calhoun came out the victor, in terms of his career, one wonders.  

Fox signed him to a less-than-standard contract but immediately loaned him out for the Edward G. Robinson 1947 noir, The Red House.  The brutish role got him his first good notices.

He would one day claim to have slept with most of his leading ladies but I'm guessing Shirley Temple was not one of them.  He did play a high schooler who yearned for her in That Hagen Girl (1947) but she had eyes only for Ronald Reagan.

Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun

In 1948 he married Spanish singer-actress Lita Baron.  While the union lasted until 1970, it was fraught with problems from the beginning.  They shared a similar volatile temperament and their exploits made the pages of gossip columns for years.  

In 1949 he made Massacre River, a routine western that would within a few years become just about all he did.  He said he liked doing westerns because they made me feel like a kid again. This one costarred Madison (wasn't that handy?) who himself would marry shortly after production wrapped.

Finally Fox sat up and took notice of him.  Before he left the lot for good, they would team him with the studio's biggest movie queens... and more than once.  He made three films with Monroe, two with Grable and two with Hayward.  Grable would get special mention in his divorce suit.

He played the second husband of Susan Hayward in the Jane Froman biopic, With a Song in My Heart (1952).  I thought he was great and so did he.  He would also claim it was his favorite film and I can see why.  He adored Hayward from a year earlier when they made I'd Climb the Highest Mountain.  He would say I learned a lot from that lady.  I learned more about my trade, about my presence in front of the camera by watching her.  She acted like it was nothing, with no effort.  He said she was one of his four favorite costars.

Another one was Gene Tierney, his leading lady in the Argentine western, The Way of a Gaucho (1952) where he played a fiery bandit leader and a lusty one at that.   Those perky gossip columnists reported frequently about the Calhoun-Tierney affair which was hot on location but cooled back in California.  

Powder River (1953) is a decent-enough oater about a temporary town marshal looking for his partner's killer.  Both he and Calvet were a bit itchy about working with one another after the acrimonious ending of their love fest.  But hey, they were troupers...  

Shouldering Betty Grable

Calhoun got to costar with his other two favorite costars, Grable and Monroe in one film, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).  It was the most financially successful film he ever made.  His squeeze was Grable who mistakenly thinks he's the millionaire she's searching for when, in fact, he was a forest ranger.  He must have been happy about that, given he had wanted to be one in real life.

It was Monroe who was his girlfriend in the Otto Preminger western, River of No Return (1954).  He was a snake which, of course, his Vaseline Hair Toniced mop of black hair attested to.  She had the good sense to leave him for Robert Mitchum.  It was gorgeously filmed near Calgary and fraught with problems not involving Calhoun.

With RM and MM

Good as he was in his latest films, he and Fox parted ways and in 1954 Calhoun signed on with Universal-International, the home, as you know, of the handsome and moderately talented.  Nonetheless, in 1955 he made three colorful films I liked.  He and Ray Danton, in The Looters, play mountain climbers who come across a plane crash in the Rockies.  One is genuinely concerned about the welfare of the three survivors while the other is determined to make off with a booty of cash.

Danton joined Calhoun again, along with Jeff Chandler and Anne Baxter, in the third version of Rex Beach's The Spoilers.  It is an Alaska gold adventure story with Calhoun jealous of Baxter's attention to Chandler and involves one of filmdom's great fight scenes between the two men.

The Treasure of Pancho Villa (1955) is about an American's involvement in the Mexican Revolution... routine but done in a most entertaining fashion.  He and Shelley Winters got to know one another very well.

Also in 1955 agent Willson got wind that the sleazy Confidential Magazine was going to out his cash cow, Rock Hudson.  The equally sleazy Willson begged them not to do it and instead gave them the prison details of Calhoun's life.  Hudson was spared (a sham marriage with Willson's secretary helped) and Calhoun said it didn't harm his career.  That may be left to others to judge.  (By the way, and I said as much in the posting on George Nader... I remember hearing that it was Nader who was sacrificed-- and his career did suffer-- but over the years the winds blew stronger that it was Calhoun.

The films got worse... Red Sundown, Flight to Hong Kong, Utah Blaine, The Domino Kid... and he turned to television.  He still didn't care all that much for being an actor.  He cared more about being a rancher, which he now was.  But he began filming TV's The Texan in 1958 and it brought in a paycheck until 1960.

The 60s began his downslide.  The movies were moving away from the handsome actors with marginal talent to the not-so-good-looking with talent to burn.  When he looked back to the first half of the fifties, the days of his greatest glory, all he could say was I sure liked how they turned you loose on all those starlets.  In 1965 he auditioned for the lead role in TV's The Wild, Wild West but the producers didn't like his screen test and hired Robert Conrad instead.

Calhoun and Baron divorced in 1970. She accused him of sleeping with 79 women.  She didn't even include half of them, Calhoun mused.  Others said the number was in the hundreds.  Six months later he married for the second and final time to an Australian journalist.

He began appearing as a guest actor in a lot of television series.  I wonder if he thought he'd hit rock bottom when one of them was Gilligan's Island.  He did some producing, screenwriting and wrote one novel.  Not surprisingly he would wind up doing cheapie horror films like Night of the Lepus (1972) and Motel Hell (1980).

From 1982 through 1987 he appeared on the daytime soap opera Capitol.  He said he did so because of the regret he carried around for turning down a lead on Dallas.

I hadn't seen his work in years (I was sick about missing Hell Comes to Frogtown, 1988) but there I was in 1992 watching singer George Strait in Pure Country and who should come ambling into a scene but Rory Calhoun?  What the.....?  Who knew it would be his last film?

The longtime cowboy star who loved horses but never wanted to be an actor and rarely poured his heart and soul into it died at age 76 of emphysema and diabetes in a Burbank, California hospital in 1999.


Next posting:
Friday, January 3
A little time off for 
the holidays