Matt Dillon made me a Lefty

Matt Dillon, not Winston Churchill or even Biggles, was my post-war childhood hero. Along with Gil Favor, Adam Cartwright and Cheyenne Bodie.

Part of the first TV-hooked generation, I grew up watching small-screen Westerns, up to three a night as during the 1950s and early 1960s they were ideal and readily-available low-cost imports for the cash-strapped BBC and the fledgling ITV.

As a product of a Scots-Irish family brought up in England, in my imagination I had no affinity with kilts, Oirish fiddles or top hats and tails but bonded with the idea of riding the high country in chaps, gun belt and a big hat. So I devoured them all – Have Gun, Will Travel, The Rifleman, Tenderfoot, Rawhide, Wells Fargo, Cheyenne, Laramie, Branded!, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Gunsmoke and, a bit later, Bonanza, The Big Valley and The High Chaparral.

Too many people dismiss such series as Right-wing, red neck culture built on myths and downright lies, and it is true that Ronald Reagan, a B-movie star, credited his California breakthrough as a politician with his nightly hosting of a long-forgotten series regularly featuring Western tropes. But for me, the TV Western set me on a Left-wing trail.

It was not realized at the time, and largely forgotten now, that many of their writers were blacklisted in Hollywood by the anti-Communist purges. They often worked under pseudonyms and were attractive to producers because they came cheap. Some wrote for the British series The Adventures of Robin Hood – an outlaw who robs the rich to give to the poor, what’s not to like? – but most scraped a living on Westerns.

Behind the shoot-em dead finales were often plotlines which focused on the evils which still dominate American and wider Western society – racism born out of slavery, corruption, political fraud, and the rape of the environment. The baddies were crooked lawman, bankers, unscrupulous business moguls, cheats and snake oil salesmen who preyed on the poor and vulnerable.

A prime example of that was Rawhide which ran for eight seasons until 1965, racking up 217 black and white episodes. Although it is now best known for the casting of Clint Eastwood before the Dollar films, it remains one of the best of the genre due to top-notch scripts which, unusually, often highlighted the down side of the frontier life, from bank closures which robbed cowboys of their pay and the closing of the open range by corrupt cattle barons to dodgy law enforcement officers and the plight of “soiled doves” and Civil War widows.

One episode featured an ex-soldier who had become dangerously addicted to morphine, another a Mexican drover who faced racial abuse despite his obvious talents, and another a bogus quarantine for anthrax. A recurring theme was the shame felt by trail crew at being on the losing, Confederate side during the war between the states. In that sense, Rawhide pre-dated the elegiac, end-of-an-era movie Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and other big-screen directors in the 1960s and 1970s.   

The series was produced and sometimes directed by Charles Marquis Warren, who also produced early episodes of its long-running rival Gunsmoke. Gradually, Eastwood’s scout Rowdy Yates began to become more popular than trail boss Gil Favor, played by Eric Fleming, but in the early series’ Fleming dominated.as the tough but fair war veteran handling his own demons while taking the herd to market through storms, floods, droughts, St Elmo’s Fire, famine and attacks from rustlers and bandits. 

Fleming’s life would have seemed too far-fetched for a TV plot. The Californian was born with a club foot and aged 11 tried to shoot his abusive father dead – the gun jammed - and moved to Chicago where he mixed with low-level gangsters, one of whom shot and hospitalised him. He returned to his now-divorced mother and during the Second World War served as a Seabee in a naval construction battalion. He smashed his forehead, face and jaw trying to lift a 200-pound weight and underwent extensive plastic surgery.

He worked construction as a carpenter at Paramount Studios while taking acting classes. That led to stage plays and bit parts in TV shows and low-budget horror films, including the cult classic Queen of Outer Space. Warren spotted something in Fleming’s six-foot-plus frame and cast him in Rawhide. In its eighth and final season, Fleming left after a disagreement with producers worried that it had fallen from sixth to 44th place in the TV ratings, and Eastwood’s character finally became trail boss.

Fleming bounced back as a suave spy in the Doris Day comedy The Glass-Bottomed Boat and guest-starred several times in the top-rated TV Western Bonanza, playing a sadistic peace officer and then a Mormon rancher suffering religious persecution. Fleming signed on to star in one of the first TV movies, High Jungle, intended for cinema distribution in Europe where Eastwood’s Man With No Name had become iconic. Six weeks into the 1966 location shoot in Peru, Fleming was swept from a canoe into a river torrent and drowned. Fleming remains the only Hollywood cowboy star called Eric. 

Of course, the glorification of gun culture sits uneasily in the wake of modern school massacres, but Colt handguns were called ‘Equalisers’ and ‘Peacemakers’ not just as marketing ploys but reflected reality in early frontier towns and mining camps.

Other aspects also sit uneasily with today’s “woke” sensibilities. Women were often “tamed” but they tended to be snobbish, spoilt Easterners and TV Westerns were replete with strong, intelligent women such as Barbara Stanwick’s matriarch in The Big Valley. Racial stereotypes were largely absent – blacks and Hispanics were acknowledged as excellent cowboys and it tended to be whites who played the cooks, comical characters and town drunks. Indians – it is OK again to call them that – rarely impinged and when they did were seen as either brave enemies or loyal allies.   

I’m not saying that TV Westerns made me a socialist, but they helped that process.

The fascination continues. After more than 50 years as a newspaper journalist – 40 of them as a House of Commons lobby correspondent – and as a former deputy editor of Tribune magazine, I now write non-fiction forgotten histories of the USA. Yee-haw!

*** Ian Hernon’s latest book, America’s Forgotten Wars, is published by Amberley.