The Last Cartwright

It's funny how people we never met come to serve as points of reference for us, in ways that people of earlier generations could scarcely imagine. For the first six seasons of the TV Western Bonanza, Pernell Roberts played Adam Cartwright, the oldest of the three sons of the rancher Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene). The show began in 1959 and ran until 1973, by which time the best and most endearing actor in the regular cast, Dan Blocker, had been dead for a year. The show went into syndication, which is where I discovered it; I used to watch an episode every weekday afternoon when I got home from school, for what, in my memory, seems like years. By then, Roberts, who died the other day at 81, was remembered by TV watchers everywhere as the guy who walked away from a hit TV series that had half a dozen years to run and was never to be heard from again. There was a general feeling that he must have thought that he had bigger things waiting for him and that he must have come to regret having gotten the big head and thrown away his day job. My parents used to snicker at the sight of him on the TV, and my mother used to make my dad grunt with pleasure by reading aloud items from such magazines as Rona Barrett's Hollywood that took note of the dwindling nature of his celebrity. Among people like my parents, he inspired the kind of schadenfraude that the names of Shelley Long and David Caruso would later set off in their former fans. It was a response born of a feeling that the love object had sent them a message that he could do a lot better than be paid a king's ransom to entertain them in their homes.

This used to make me feel a little uneasy, because I liked watching Roberts on the show, almost as much as I liked Blocker, and a lot more than I liked Greene or Michael Landon. Even by the standards of series TV of that time, the characters on Bonanza were not exactly fluid; they even wore the same costumes every day, as if even their wardrobes were punched out with a cookie cutter, and if one of them happened to get run over by a wagon or taken captive and put to work by a crazy prospector until his clothes turned to rags, he would not see that as reason enough to experiment with a new look in the next episode. Blocker's Hoss was the reliably good-hearted man-mountain; Landon's Little Joe was the cute one, assured of a center layout in Lisa Simpson's Non-Threatening Boys fan magazine. But Adam seemed to have banked fires smoldering away and something gnawing at him. Unlike the other happy campers on the Ponderosa, he came across as if he were trapped somewhere he didn't care to be doing something he didn't much want to do, but felt that he had to stay there out of family loyalty. He frequently had the air of someone trying to be gracious about being condemned to always being the smartest person in the room. There was something arrogant about him. All of this only helped fuel whatever public perception that Roberts himself must have been a titanic prick, but the fact is, they were the same qualities that, as a kid, I thought made him seem, well, cool. To put it in a way guaranteed to cause both of us maximum embarrassment: Adam Cartwright was my Fonzie.

In fact, what I found appealing, and what my parents found vomit-worthy, about Roberts on Bonanza probably had less to do with his acting than with what, of his actual personality, came through loud and clear. He hadn't actually walked off the show in an egomaniacal huff but decided not to continue with the show after his initial, six-year contract expired, after years of sharing freely, with reporters, his shitty opinion about the show itself and TV in general. ("They take a plot and write it six different ways for six different Sundays. One week its lawyers night, next week it's ranchers night. You change protagonist, but it's the same old plot.") Roberts never returned to the show after he left, but it seems that he was not averse to making the occasional guest appearance; it was his former co-stars who informed the writers that they were looking forward to the richly rewarding experience of never having to trade lines with or ever see his face again. (I've never seen it myself, but I've heard that one night, Blocker and Landon, after enjoying a taste of the grape, shared this information with Johnny Carson and the entire viewing audience of The Tonight Show.) No doubt Roberts genuinely felt creatively retrained, and no doubt he could have handled it all better. But the possibility exists that he was happier, doing plays and guest spots on other people's TV shows, than he was having to do the same dumb stuff, in the same dumb clothes, with the same bunch of folks week after week, and it's a possibility that I'd like to bind to me with hoops of steel. (He did later return to series TV, for seven seasons as the star of the unwatchably drab Trapper John, M.D.; presumably, by that time, his contempt for the repetitive nature of the medium had been worn down by his not unreasonable desire for a retirement fund.

I never got to see Roberts on the stage, and this does not nag at me, the way it sometimes nags at me that I'll never get to see Dan Blocker in the two great movie roles that were his for the asking, Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove (his agent is said to have turned Stanley Kubrick's request that he pass along the script because he was so horrified by its political content) and Roger Wade in The Long Goodbye (which was being prepared for him when he died). In his one noteworthy movie appearance, alongside Randolph Scott in Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959), he isn't that different from he was as Adam; he's super-competent and careful and, yes, arrogant, treating Scott with wary respect but treating his own partner, James Coburn, as if he were primed to hear him ask him again to tell him about the rabbits, George. The main difference is that he's defined there as a likable badman. In most of his TV guest appearances that I've seen, he's a dislikable badman, baleful and sardonic--Adam gone over to the dark side. (He was also, just about invariably, unapologetically bald-domed. I think he might have been the first TV leading man turned TV perennial who insisted on flushing his toupee, which would sort of make the Sean Connery of the Quinn Martin Players. Of course, Telly Savalas never went in for hairpieces in the first place--which makes him Yul Brynner.)

In the end, the open secret to Adam Cartwright's cool was that Roberts, powered by his inability to give a shit what anybody thought about him so long as he was working in this shit medium, took full advantage of every trick that normally makes badmen so much more fun to watch than bland good guys, even though he was supposed to be one of the good guys. He wasn't an antihero in any sense--Adam always did the right thing. But he did it with the style of a baddie, and the only indicator that the show itself might have taken notice of this and been in on the joke was that he was costumed every week in the traditional black garb, complete with black hat, of the Western villain. It was as if the show was daring one of those old coots in the back of the saloon to call him on it. Today, lawyers and doctors and cops on TV routinely act like mustache-twirling sons of bitches, with the understanding that they're the good guys; they're just trying to function in this crazy, dirty world they've been dumped in. Roberts stalked through Bonanza like a reformed sinner doing penance, maybe after Pa had sent him into rehab for tying damsels to railroad tracks, determined to use his heightened powers of sarcasm and Method brooding for good instead of evil. ("Hi, I'm Adam, and I'm too hip for this room." "Hi, Adam!") It wasn't quite like anything I'd seen at the time, and it was cool, however hard Roberts may have been to live with in the prime of his charisma. Let it be noted that he went through four wives. Let it also be noted that Wife No. 2, who acts under the name Judith Roberts, played the sultry-eyed lady across the hall who melts into her bed with Henry in Eraserhead. Coolness-by-association points do count for something.