The Worldwide Lure of "Bonanza"

LOOK Magazine
December 1, 1964
by John Poppy
Look Senior Editor

A COUPLE OF thousand Londoners jostled and pushed their way into the Globe Theatre to hear Hamlet's first words. That, however, was around 1600, before entertainment got efficient. This year, millions of fans over the globe will lounge in front of television sets each week to gaze upon, not Hamlet, but Ben Cartwright and his boys.

The numbers prove one thing: Shakespeare didn't have the National Broadcasting Company behind him. But there is more. If Bonanza's Cartwrights really talk, week in and week out, to as many people as NBC would have us believe, they are the most resounding chorus in the history of human speech. The twanging theme music and unguent voice announcing "Bow-nan-za" echo not only across the United States, but across 49 other countries: Canada. Brazil. The aspiring nations of Africa. (In some villages, a TV set goes up on a tree once a week so everyone can get a look, says a Bonanza official. Believe him?) Yugoslavia, Britain, France, Cyprus, the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the jungles of Thailand, the sheep ranches of Australia, the packed cities of Japan, on every continent in seven languages.

Other series, cowboy and straight, have come and gone, but Bonanza is now in its sixth season, and three Cartwrights have already signed contracts for a possible seventh. It is a classic example of success, depending on how you define the word, in American television. Yet it calls to mind someone's—was it Mark Twain's?—reply to an excited friend's news that finally a telegraph line had been strung all the way from New York to Texas: "Fine. Now, what are you planning to say to Texas?"

What does Bonanza say to all those people? And how did it get the chance? Figuring that the men who make it should know, I headed for Hollywood—specifically, Paramount Studios, where NBC rents space for its champion.

A soundproof door leads from a glaringly sunlit alley into Stage 16, which contains the front yard of the Ponderosa ranch house. There, near the porch, Lorne Greene—Ben Cartwright—was doing a close-up, shaking hands with another actor. The camera was focused on Greene's face.

"Good-bye, Uncle Ben . . . and thanks for all you've done," said the off-camera actor. Ben Cartwright nodded as though trying to swallow a lump in his throat, stared hotly into the lens and whispered, "Remember what I said . . . this will always be your home." The creamy bass voice throbbed like a church organ. He really meant it. Then, suddenly, he lurched and bellowed a laugh. "Cut," said the director. It dawned on me that Greene wasn't shaking hands; he was arm wrestling.

The scene started again, and the off-camera contest grew fierce. Arms pumped as if the two men were sawing wood. "Remember what I said . . . this will always be your home." The voice throbbed again, but the face in the close-up showed no sign of the arm's struggle.

Later, Greene answered a question about his horse-play: "We need that release from tension, to make the pressure bearable." Pressure, or boredom? How does it feel to play the same character for six years? "Oh," he said, "it stays fresh. There's so much to work with in Ben, in the whole situation. You can keep developing, opening up facets . . . not just in different script situations, but in Ben's relationship with his sons. A big reason for this show's popularity is the strength and warmth of the family. The father-son relationship is the strongest there is. It's been the basis of drama all the way back to the Bible. Notice, Abraham wasn't told to sacrifice a daughter." He was called to the telephone. The NBC public relations man at my elbow spoke up: "Now there's a real pro. A gentleman."

One actor sees the show as a "neat little fairy tale."

The next shot was to be a close-up of Adam Cartwright struggling out of a wheelchair. An assistant director called for Pernell Roberts. Without moving from his camp chair, Roberts asked, "Are you absolutely sure you're ready for me?"

"Yes, sir, any time you are."

"Well, let's not wait that long," Roberts said and got up.

"OK, Pernell, look back at Ben"—the director was talking him through the scene—"now down at your legs. Start struggling up . . . cut."

There was a problem. "You're coming up too fast, Pernell. . . . Hold it longer. Show more suffering as you push with your arms."

"Gentlemen," Roberts said, "my legs are damaged, not my arms. I'm supposed to be a big strong man, and there is no reason for me to have trouble doing a little push-up like this. I'll suffer when I'm on my feet, if you don't mind."

"Come on, Pernell," said the director. "We need the shot this way. We don't get in close on you till after you're up. Try it, will you?"

"Anything you say, gentlemen." He began to push with his arms, setting his face in an expression that made me whisper, "My God, what is it?" It was remarkable. Roberts radiated suffering, bravery, strain and a nearly tearful look of hurt—plus something else that might have been pain, or mockery. At length, he heaved himself upright and swayed out of camera range. I relaxed as his face went blank, but he startled me by clearing his throat loudly and loosing a great spit. Right on the porch of his Pa's home.

He capped the gesture by walking over to talk. Up close, Roberts is a dark presence. The black costume and somber mien create a sensation of lights failing at his approach. "I suppose you saw that little disgrace over there," he said. "It's typical."

What was this script about? "I don't know. I don't read them any more. I just get on, ask somebody for the lines and say them. That's all the attention this kind of operation deserves. They have to turn out 34 episodes a season, one every six days, so the idea is to stay on schedule, get the shot, fill the 50 minutes and get on to the next episode. There simply isn't time to stop and inquire about things like dramatic honesty."

The sentimentality of the Cartwright togetherness makes him sick, Roberts said. "Look at the setup of the show. Strange, man. It's a neat little fairy tale. The Ponderosa is a little kingdom of very rich people, with Ben Cartwright as absolute monarch. No women to speak of, three of the four men treated as adolescents. . . . Once in a while, an autograph hunter will tell me Adam is her favorite character, and I can't resist saying, 'Thanks, but don't you think there's something strange about the fact that I'm 36 years old and still tag around after my father asking, What do we do now, Pa?' That shakes them up."

Does he want to hurt the show? "No, I don't want to hurt anybody," he said. "Working here may be all right for some actors. It just isn't for me. It has nothing to do with involving an audience with the great words, the great minds, the great literature of civilization—or with tackling new things or trying to say something important. It isn't acting. It's just a business. You're heard them call it 'The Product,' haven't you?"

Roberts plans to leave Bonanza in early 1965. "If you don't believe you're an aristocrat in your field, you ought to get out. Until I do, I'll just keep walking through."

What would he do if a script featured him heavily, as several will this season? He doesn't want to look bad as an actor, does he?

"Oh, man, that's the real scam, don't you see? You can get up there and put out one tenth of what you're capable of, and they all think it's great. No, I won't try hard. Listen, a few years ago, I wanted to get out so badly that I threatened to break my contract. NBC said, sure, go ahead—if you never want to work again as an actor anywhere. So I went to the producer and said I guessed I'd stay, but that, to preserve my sanity, I would just continue walking through my part. They said, 'We just saw the dailies of what you did yesterday, and they were great. If that's what you call just walking through, fine, boy, fine. Keep it up.'"

A fan sent thanks "for showing me a really good father."

What saddens Roberts most of all is that Bonanza "could be interesting to act in and good to watch if the producers would use all of its possibilities. But they're working within this much space," he said, pinching an inch between thumb and forefinger, "catering to the big audience by playing it safe and trying to avoid offending anyone."

Not so, objects David Dortort, Bonanza's tall, pale, shrewd creator-producer. "This show has guts," he said over a commissary lunch, "which is one reason why people stay with it. We deal with contemporary issues—racial prejudice, mercy killing, problems of conscience from dozens of angles. We also do tender love stories and comedies that show the lighter side of the Old West, of course."

The type of script he buys, however, is less exciting to Dortort than the care he lavishes on it: "Quality is the key to our success." He has answered so many questions about Bonanza that by now his discourse is as neatly polished as his manicure.

"We have a great respect for our responsibilities. We try very hard to do meaningful work. We care. For example, before we begin shooting an episode, I spend at least three whole days going over the finished script—word by word—with that week's director, so that we all know exactly what is expected. Before that, I may have spent weeks, on and off, with the writer. Every word on the show goes through my office. I'm always refining, working constantly to get better material."

Technical detail gets attention too. "Our special color consultant, for instance, is a man who spent a year studying optics, just the working of the eye. No wonder we have the most beautiful color in the business. Even the Japanese admire it."

But, he says with a charming grin, "I was the first television writer in Hollywood to become a producer, so naturally the creative aspects of the show are dearest to me. What do we strive for with all our refining? Clarity. Simplicity is the key to all art. Television deals with a mass audience, so we try to create situations and characters that the audience can quickly understand."

Did he mean you never have any trouble telling the good guys from the bad ones on Bonanza? Apparently, it wasn't that simple, for he went on, "We don't need gimmicks or strange plot twists, because our scripts delve into character, deal with human relationships, which is where the best stories are.

"And," he said, "we try to teach something about human values like faith and hope, so in a sense you could say that most Bonanza scripts are morality plays. When I created the show, I wanted to put a father on television who wasn't a buffoon or an incompetent. Ben Cartwright is a strong, understanding man of wide experience who inspires the warm, vibrant relationships that should exist in a good family. He has authority and wisdom, and we make no apology for that. Lorne gets a lot of letters, like the one that said: 'I'm a misunderstood teenager. Thank you for showing me what a really good father could and should be.'"

The men around Bonanza insist this is a typical fan reaction to the show. But was the teenager writing to Pa Cartwright, or Lorne Greene? Did the fan know? For that matter, did Greene? On the set several days later, we picked up our conversation about the traffic between an actor's internal life and the life of a character he has played for six years.

Greene patterned Ben Cartwright on his own father, "a man who never had to raise his hand—a look was all he needed to make his point. But there's a lot of me in the character," he added. "My appearance, my voice . . . I can't change those things."

Ben was about 65 when the series started. After a long campaign, Greene got Dortort to drop the age closer to his own—near 50. "Acting involves asking yourself, What would I do in this situation? So when I come in at 8 a.m. for work, I don't turn into someone else."

So much for Ben Cartwright being Lorne Greene. What about Lorne Greene turning into Ben Cartwright?

"I can't help being identified with him," Greene said. "So there's a responsibility. I have a sponsor, and I'm employed by the network, so as Ben Cartwright, I can't pop off on some touchy subject in a public appearance and just leave them in the middle. Let me tell you a story that happened to me."

After poor reviews, it became the biggest show on earth

It was Ben Cartwright himself looming over me in those high-heeled boots, about to point up a moral. Only, the eyes darted around more quickly, to check the audience.

"I was in San Francisco over the weekend, and I saw a man on the street wearing a huge Goldwater button. I mean it was huge"—the eyes bugged, and his hand made a ten-inch circle on his chest—"so big that I stopped, stared and said to the man, 'That's pretty ostentatious, isn't it?'

"'Mr. Greene, isn't it?' he asked.

"'Yes.'

"'Am I going to have to go home and tell my congregation to stop watching Bonanza?' he asked.

"'What!' I said, 'Are you a minister, sir? A minister of the cloth, who tends to his flock and tells them what to do both in and outside of religion? I would be ashamed, sir!'"

By now, I was in the minister's shoes. Greene was six inches away, forefinger jabbing, jaw jutting and eyes as hard as marbles. The voice had been gaining power and ashamed, sir! cracked like a cannon blast. I quailed, but wouldn't let myself retreat in front of all those people.

"Well, he backed off," Greene was saying. "But that was a private conversation, so I felt no restriction. On a platform—during a personal appearance, for example—I'd want to be much more discreet. I'm identified with the product."

The product pays. Like the other Bonanza stars, Greene has investments ranging from an Oregon potato-packing plant to Arizona and California real estate (some of it in partnership with Hoss and Little Joe, Dan Blocker and Mike Landon, with whom he shares a business manager). He drives to work in a modest Cadillac, talks with Blocker and Landon more about price-per-square-foot than about scripts, and altogether appears so much the pleasant, efficient tycoon that, as he stood there before me, I began to feel some surprise that he dressed up in a costume and played actor every day.

The Product began in 1959, at 7:30 Saturday evenings. NBC's top management had decided it wanted a big color series (which, incidentally, would help sell the color sets manufactured by NBC's owner, RCA). At their behest, David Dortort expanded one of his pet ideas—the father-and-three-sons situation—into the first big color Western. It was an immediate flop. New York Times critic Jack Gould sighed "disastrous," and another critic saw it as "early-Autry at its most advanced . . . a terrible waste of cash and color." Worst of all, it was competing with Perry Mason on CBS. Ratings were weak.

Did NBC back off and cancel? Not at all. One reason may have been that the network owns the show. Another could be, as Dortort feels, that excellence prevailed. In 1961, the Cartwrights moved into their present Sunday slot and began beating the competition to death. One corollary of the show's survival is that Dortort can claim, "I have given opportunities to more young, beginning writers than any other producer I know of, and I've given more actors their first chance at television. When a creative person is in control, there is more chance for quality."

That is Hollywood lingo. A "creative person" is somehow different from the studio-executive type, it seems—but in Dortort, we find both. A point of pride with Dortort the executive is the esprit de corps of the Bonanza company. Happy workers are efficient workers, which may be why an episode seldom costs NBC more than $150,000—a bargain, considering the returns.

My presence gave the esprit of one member a jolt. Several mornings after our first conversation, Roberts invited me into his dressing room. As often happens, he'd been called for 8 a.m., but wouldn't be used until afternoon, and he was bored. We talked about Shakespeare and Marlowe—Roberts was reading The Jew of Malta—and he appreciated the diversion. When I thanked him for his time as I left for lunch with Mike Landon, he shook his head and said, "On the contrary. Thank you for getting me through the morning."

Does the audience believe only what it wants to believe?

Stepping out of the dressing room, I saw Lorne Greene and figured it was a good chance to make a lunch date for the next day. To my astonishment, he glared coldly and said, "Sure. If you think you really need to talk to me." Of course I did. What did he mean?

"You've been spending so much time with Pernell that we all figured you were here to slam the show. What's the story, anyway?"

The story is, I'm trying to figure out why you're all so famous. It wouldn't be fair to ignore Pernell, would it?

"No, but he makes the whole show look bad. He's so unprofessional. He complains that he's just one quarter of a character. Well, a lot depends on how much character you put in. We've all been together a long time, and we all have our grievances, but we ought to keep them inside the family. I wonder if Pernell treats his parents the way he treats Bonanza. . . . He prefers acting in Shakespeare or something else that's been filtered through three hundred years of great minds. I love it too. But when you do a new show every six days, some things are not possible."

Maybe, I ventured, there's a flaw in the system that demands a new show every six days.

"Look, nobody claims that every script we do is great. If we get eight or ten good ones out of 34 in a year, that's a lot more good theater than there would be without Bonanza."

Later, at lunch with Mike Landon, I asked the basic questions again: What makes the show go? Do people watch it because they like the father-son contact, or because they want to hear the moral, or because they believe in the Cartwrights? Landon is a cheerfully hard-nosed young man, far more engaging than the Little Joe character he plays. He grinned.

"It's just good entertainment. Period. Sure, we have some morality plays, but if we delivered a sermon every week, we'd lose most of our audience. You have to keep up interest with good gimmicks—fast action, comedy, that sort of thing. There's no great psychological undercurrent in the four-man format. Women used to be the big stars, but these days it's men. So Bonanza has four of them in a supermarket setup. You don't have to turn on four different channels to get the father type, the big-lovable-bear type, the handsome, brooding type and me—the good-looking kid who's always in trouble.

"Satisfaction? Well, I put the important things in my life in this order. My family and personal happiness come first. My job—what I'm doing for a living—comes second. Oh, doing a good script is a kick, sure; when one comes along that you can really get your teeth into, it's like dessert. I'd like to go on to more ambitious things, but right now, I hope the series runs a long time. It's security."

"I hate to be crude," I said, "but how much money do you make?"

He wouldn't say. "Let me put it this way. By not signing for a seventh season with the rest of us, Pernell probably gave up half a million dollars in salary, residuals and so on. And he doesn't do personal appearances—like at rodeos and state fairs—which is where a lot of the money is. Did you know, a guy with a department store in Pennsylvania is giving me $3,000 just to show up at a lunch this weekend?"

An audience, he remarked, believes just what it wants to. "When I go out for a personal appearance, I try to visit the hospitals. It may sound hokey, but when a parent writes and says his child is very sick, if I can spend half an hour in the room, that's 30 of the happiest minutes of the child's life. Not because it's me, Mike Landon, the actor. They don't even know what I look like. What they see is what they expect—Little Joe Cartwright from the Ponderosa."

Several days later, an NBC executive leaned across the same table, saying, "Bonanza knocks off everything that runs against it because it's an institution by now. People like familiar things. Anthologies keep failing, but a viewer can be comfortable with a series. He isn't forced to adjust to new personalities and unfamiliar situations every week."

Everyone does the best he can – "under the circumstances."

You know exactly what's going to happen in most Bonanza scripts, and in this uncertain world, such stability is a comfort devoutly to be sought. Dan Blocker, a less childish, more erudite man than the jolly, fat giant he plays, amplified the point.

"Security is one of man's greatest needs. I don't care what else you say," he declared during an interrupted nap on set. He gives other reasons besides familiarity for the show's success. "There's the Cowboy Syndrome," he notes. "The world gets more complex all the time. Some people just naturally seek to retreat and look for simple solutions—look at the Goldwater crowd. If you have a problem with a man in a Western, you just say, 'Draw!'

"We try to do more, but you can't expect too much under the circumstances. Yet we have to stay here and do our best. If Shakespeare were alive, he'd be writing for television, because that's where the theater is today. Theater has always appealed to the mass of people.

"But I don't watch this show. I don't watch any of them, because when a writer puts a lot into building to an emotional moment, and the director, actors and technical people add all they can, and then some jackass breaks in to sell me something, it makes me MAD as hell. Pay TV is the big hope for good theater."

There it was again—the resignation of ". . . under the circumstances." I thought I'd go ask the opinion of a wielder of some of those circumstances. Frequent encounters with Dortort convinced me that he believes he is improving television; he had fallen into the habit of talking almost hypnotically about his hopes, spending more time with me than he could spare from the scramble to get the show on film.

On the way to his office, I came upon the actors joking about calling Lorne "Doctor Greene" because he had received an honorary degree from Missouri Valley College for ". . . bringing wholesome entertainment to a world during times of stress and because the nature of your performances and public image is one of dignity deserving recognition." The others left. Greene's conversation drifted in a direction that made me consider why so many "creative" people in Hollywood are so eager to create only old things—scripts about the triumph of right every 60 minutes, about bad men redeemed by good advice, about how Our Side always wins. They aren't making something solid like canned corned beef or bottle caps; they are manufacturing illusion, and it seems to terrify them. It's all so insubstantial. No one is quite sure why one product works when another fails. No wonder a lot of these persons are bewildered about what they're doing.

"If I were David Dortort," Greene said, "I wouldn't have let you see so much. You're going to hurt the show. . . ." No, no, I said, but he cut me off. "The illusion is everything. Bonanza gives pleasure to millions of people, and it has provided a roof over the heads of all those." He gestured toward the technicians. "If your article damages it by going in too deep, by saying that we're just actors, not really anything like the Cartwright family, you may sow the seeds of the show's death." Without knowing exactly why, he said, people may fall away from it because they have somehow lost their belief in it and Bonanza will be gone. "Being on top is like walking a tightrope. Everybody tries to push you off."

Perhaps that is what he meant by "pressure" in those first remarks, days before, about arm-wrestling.

Dortort was in an arrestingly snappish mood when I asked him about "circumstances."

"Sometimes, I wonder who you have to fight in this business if you want to avoid grinding out clutter and junk like most of the big factories," he said. He pointed to a stack of papers at one corner of his desk—memos from NBC's Broadcast Standards Department. The censors.

"I don't always read them," he said (his smile came back), "but I keep that stack as a reminder of the limitations on us. Now, they're trying to hold down violence. The network wants people wounded when possible, not killed. No more than one punch is supposed to land in a fight sequence. Dead men's eyes must be closed. That sort of thing. We're a nonviolent Western, and I don't like violence for its own sake, but a certain amount of it was part of the Old West, and we need it for the stories we tell."

NBC asked for an "emotional, happy ending," and got it

The network, it develops, can materially alter the stories he tells. For example, an episode called The Wild One touched off a cannonade of memos at Dortort last summer. The original script was about a brute named Lafe who has deserted his wife, Prudence. She finds him out on the range trapping horses with Hoss. Not knowing she is pregnant, he rejects her. She dies in childbirth, despite all that Hoss can do. When Lafe rejects the baby, too, Hoss takes it to the Ponderosa. Lafe repents and comes to see his child three pages before the fade-out: "LAFE: Looks just like his Ma. Sure wish she could see him now. HOSS: Something tells me, Lafe—maybe she can."

An NBC West Coast vice-president was horrified. "The fact that Prudence dies," he wrote Dortort, "shocked me no end. But it wasn't the right kind of shock. It was a private reaction to what I consider an arbitrary decision of the writer. . . ." There is no buildup to the death, he says, and "this becomes doubly painful when . . . Prudence's death does not cause an immediate reaction in the man, but, on the contrary, stiffens his cruel attitude.

"In my opinion, this should be the story of a woman who loved this man, who cannot get away from the fact that she is his wife, no matter how badly he treats her. All the attention of the audience is focused on the question, 'Will she win him over or not?' . . . If Prudence should actually die, then the writer cheats the audience out of the big scene of the man's emotional breakdown and the reconciliation. The way it is now . . . the audience is left with nothing. If ever a story cried out for an emotional, happy ending, this is the one. . . ."

The script was changed. Prudence lived. But Broadcast Standards still hadn't had its say. A two-page memo, one of many, cautioned Dortort against showing Lafe actually striking Hoss at one point, or a horse at another. "Bleeding should not be gory in any way," the memo warns. Eight times, it asks that reference to God be made "reverently" or "prayerfully." Of Prudence's labor pains, the memo says: "We feel that the pain and agony that Prudence endures . . . should not be sensationalized and held to a minimum." In fact, it adds, "the whole scene should be held to a minimum."

Approaching despair the memo tells the 11 executives to whom it is addressed: "This story is subject to rough cut viewing. The above revised script was delivered to this office two (2) days before actual shooting commenced. We cannot be held responsible for problems that arise in revisions such as these, received less than five (5) days prior to shooting. We will do our best, however."

All the men in the Bonanza company, except Pernell Roberts, say they're doing their best—"under the circumstances." As long as they keep life on the Ponderosa good and pure and honest and true (well, almost true), their best will be good enough for millions and millions of viewers around the globe. And if the millions are happy, so are David Dortort and his Cartwrights. END