Lorne Greene~And Now To The Nugget
TV Guide~September 4, 1965

     'Where Lorne Greene Still Plays Second Fiddle To Ben Cartwright'

     "Welcome to Sparks (East Reno), Nevada", the road sign said.  "City with Promise".  On either side of U.S. 40, three miles east of The Biggest Little City in the World, motel neon illiminated the endless procession of gas stations, all-night used- car lots, and dry-cleaning villages ("In by 9, Out by 12").

     In an automobile graveyard, a pile of slashed and treadless tires rose crazily like a charred, nightmarish Tower of Pisa.  In uneasy entente, a loan company ("$25 to $2500--E-Z Terms"), sagged beside a pawnshop ("We Buy-Sell Wedding Rings"), it did not seem a place to stop.  Highway 40 beckoned: Winnemucca, Elko, the Great Salt Lake.  And then, glowering down on the City with Promise, 30 feet high and 15 feet wide, his presence commanding "Halt", there appeared the beetle-browed face of Lorne Greene.

     It was here at John J. Ascuaga's Nugget ("353 Rooms, 7 Award-Winning Restaurants, Home of the World's Finest Entertainers"), that Greene has chosen to make his initial night-club appearance.

     The night of his opening was just another night at the Nugget, just another Thursday night in Sparks.  Three cowboy's in Levi's boots and straw hats stood around a crap table for 40 minutes, and never once there was more than $17 showing.

     An old woman with her front plate missing pumped a slot machine methodically, a paper cup full of nickels grasped in her hand.  A seam-faced farmer in coveralls asked a bored, keno checker if the rules had changed.  "Haven't played since a carpenter's picnic back in San Mateo in 19 and 37," he said.  Outside one of the restaurants, a lacquered blonde spied the photographs of 22 youths in academic cap and gown--the recipients of the University of Nevada scholarships that John Ascuaga, like so many other casino-owners, awards each year as a public-relations gesture.  "How'd you like to go through U.of N. on a Johnny A Scholarship?", she mused.

     Greene had selected the Nugget with great care.  Already a veteran of the state-fair and rodeo circuit, in demand as a radio personality and with a projected newspaper column ("I see it as a combination of Ann Landers, Will Rogers, and Ben Cartwright", he says of the column), a gold-record singer with his RCA recording of "Ringo", he had just been courted by the glittering bins at Lake Tahoe and on the Las Vegas Strip.  Instead, he had succumbed to the $20,000-a-week blandishment of the Nugget, in the Ponderosa's backyard, some 20 miles north of Virginia City.

     "This is a family-type club," Greene said, "the people here make me feel all icky inside.  Good icky, not bad icky.  They just want to see what Old Ben looks like."

     Buffing Old Ben's image was a covey of local and visiting public-relations men.  "Not a blue line in the show," one said, as he hit a nickel jackpot on the slots.  Another scurried about with a red "Panic" button pinned to his lapel and walkie-talkie with which he kept constant touch with Nugget Central.

     Greene's presence brooded everywhere.  His picture loomed above every bar.  At every table at each of the 7 Award-Winning Restaurants, there stood a color photo reminder that the boss of the Ponderosa was in town.  Open a bureau drawer--Ben Cartwright postcards.  Enter an elevator--an illuminated portrait of Old Ben.  At Trader Dicks, one of the 7 Award-Winners, a bartender promised to mix up some Ponderosa Punch--"Got a kick like a Hoss," he said, guffawing at his mot.

     Greene was greeted upon arrival at the Reno airport by the Sheriff's Posse, a local police detachment whose primary duty seemed less crime detective than celebrity meeting.

     At his first rehearsal in the Circus Room, he paced the stage nervously, testing the acoustics.  "Heigh-ho, the dairy-o, hello, hello, hello."  He was impatient and slightly on edge.  Several times he snapped at a backstage conversation which disturbed his concentration.  He took his routine from the top, cutting and tightening as he went along.  Only once did he argue with the director, Earl Barton: The basso profundo voice of Ben Cartwright has just boomed, "Who threw the outhouse over the cliff?"  "Into the crick, Lorne," Barton corrected.  "Why?"  Greene demanded.  "'Over the cliff sounds too much like death."

     Greene uttered a short sharp expletive.  "Isn't that carrying things a bit too far?"  It was the only time he stepped out of character.

     For the first show, the Circus Room was only slightly more than half-filled.  "The gamblers don't like to eat dinner," a press agent explained assuringly (In fact the midnight show does draw larger crowds in any casino, and Greene's opening was no exception).  The audience seemed an equal cross-sampling from a Sun City-type development for old folks and a Boy Scout Jamboree.

     'Sheriff's Posse and Wives, Too'

     The Sheriff's Posse, in uniform sat down with their wives, and Greene's wife, Nancy, an intense attractive woman in her mid-thirties, watched from the center of the room.  "I've been married three years, five months, and I've stopped counting the days," she said.

     The Circus Room dancers came on first, undulating in their scanties in a little number called "Indian a Go-Go", and were followed by Bertha and Tina, The World's Most Intelligent Elephants, (no contest).

     And then, Ben Cartwright.  Wearing boots and a six-shooter, bandana and vest, segueing immediately into:

I'm an old cowhand,
From TV land
And my dapple gray
Is a Chevrolet...

     "I just wanted you folks that I'm more than 21 inches high," Ben said.  "Just put your feet up on the table and look at me through your toes, like you do at home."  He riffled through a series of one-liners about television ("If that guy who glides through the air lands on the gearshift, it's Hertz!"), and then settled into the Ponderosa and the Old West, a subject on which his views were at least as firmly grounded in reality as, say those of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on Appalachia.

     "Little Joe thought the three R's meant ridin', ropin', and rasslin'.  Hoss?  He got an A in one subject--lunch.  His favorite four-letter word was food.  He got his best marks in geography...Turkey...Sandwich Islands.  There was no free-dirty speech movements in those days.  We didn't even have PTA.  What we did have was P.T.A.H.--Pa Takes A Hand."

     Sun City and the Jamboree loved it, and Greene slipped into second gear.  What he was selling was not Lorne Greene, but Ben Cartwright and the Ponderosa world view.  There was no attempt to get any further away from the image than the south 40.  Yet there was a kind of embarrassing fascination about it.  It was like eavesdropping on a grown man talking to himself.  In costume.  Remember the imaginary playmates of your childhood?  It was as if Greene had never got rid of it.  And now there were, Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe Cartwright and were good for $20,000 a week.

     'He Has Become Ben'

     "When they come to see me," Greene said later, "they expect to see me as they do on TV.  So I allow them to, then transform myself subtly."  What the transformation accomplishes sometimes seems to be the question.  Greene has so completely become Ben Cartwright that he brings to mind Alexander Woollcott's description of an elaborately mannered actor--"Under his thin veneer, there's another thin veneer."  Under the Ben Cartwright exterior lies still another Ben Cartwright exterior.  Every gesture, every response, seems to have been programmed on a computer under Cartwright, Old Ben.

     Ask him a question about something as down-to-earth, as matter-of-fact as syndication, and you still get no-matter-of-fact answer.  Instead tumblers click, lights flash, and a memory drum whirs.  "We're America's No. 2 export," Ben booms jovially, "just ahead of Coca-Cola and right behind foreign aid."  Click, click, click: He said it in the San Francisco Examiner on March 26; click, click, click, he said it in Burbank, California, on April 9, click, click, click, he said it at the Nugget, Sparks, on April 29.  Only he knows how many times he has said it.

     Some erosion of personal identity is, of course, is the toll extracted for playing the same role for so many years.  There is no question that Greene has been asked, no answer he has not given.  But most actors in a successful series either publicly or privately bemoan the attrition of their own personality.  Greene seems to relish it, perhaps understandably.  His own personality, whatever it was, was getting him to no mountaintops; his career, however steady, was a sidetrack to oblivion.  He was respected by his peers, relatively unknown to the public.  Then, in his early forties, along came "Bonanza'--in every sense of the word.  Rewarded for being Ben Cartwright, as he had never been rewarded for Lorne Greene, the man has become a National Institution.

     It is perhaps no wonder, therefore, that even with friends, he inclines to the paternal Cartwright manner.  His huge head thrusts forward, his eyebrows clash, and the mesmerizing voice exudes words in a stream.

     In all his off-camera activities, Greene seems to go out of way to be identified with Ben Cartwright.  Acutely aware of Ben's indomitability, he rebuked a press agent in Sparks, who had put out a release reporting that Greene had thrown out his sacroiliac on stage.  ("A star would be bland if he didn't have a little temperment," said the flack philosophically).

     In Mesa, Arizona, Greene has built a replica of the Ponderosa ranch house, an exact duplicate of the one on the Paramount soundstages even in that it has a staircase leading nowhere (The house is not, as you might think, out by itself on the purple sage, it is part of a development in which Greene has chosen interest).

      Even in his attitude for Pernell Roberts, who has finally whined his way off the show, Greene was always the Daddy Warbucks of the Ponderosa.  "He knew what he was getting into when he signed," Greene said.  "Why not stay, make his million, then build a theater where he can play Tennessee Williams every night?"

     As for Greene, he'll continue to play Old Ben.  It's made him his millions, as he is the second person to tell you.  (His press agent is the first).  Not that Ben is always appreciated in places like Sparks.  At 4 A.M. the night of his opening, two Nugget patrons sat at the automatic blackjack machine.

     "That Lorne Greene is one helluva a performer," one said.

     "No question about it," said the other.  "Merely great."

     "You see his show tonight?"

     "Naw, did you?"

     "Naw."


     ~By John Gregory Dunne