Michael Landon~Happiness Is A Slice Of Salami
(and not a thin one, either)
TV Guide~November 11, 1969

     'For Michael Landon Happiness Is A Slice Of Salami' (and not a thin one, either)

     As befits a star on a well-entrenched television series, who takes home a sizable bundle each week, Michael Landon, known to 'Bonanza' fans as Little Joe Cartwright, has all the proper status symbols, including the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and the Aston Martin for toddling about on the freeways.  But his favorite symbol of achievement, a curious touch of abundance to satisfy his childhood dreams, hangs along side the door to his showplace of a home in Encino, out in the San Fernando Valley.  Hanging there in fragrant slendor, tempting the nostrils, tantalizing the taste buds, is a hard salami.

     "Whenever I yearn for salami, it's right there," Mike says proudly.  "And none of the thin little razor cuts I got as a kid, either.  When I want a hunk of salami, I cut myself a man-sized chunk.  Now that, to me is success with a capitol S--for salami!"

     On the day that Landon first cashed his hefty paycheck from 'Bonanza', a decade ago, before fulfilling his longing for his own personal salami, he visited a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood.  "Egg roll," he ordered, "and keep em' coming."  As single-mindedly as a Captain Ahab in pursuit of a gustatorial Moby Dick, he proceeded to gorge himself on egg rolls.  "The waiter thought I was out of my mind," Landon says gleefully.  "They probably still talk in that restaurant about the wild-eyed kid who ate nothing but one egg roll after the other.  Ah, but at last for the first time in my life, I had enough egg roll.  Can most people say the same?"

     The foregoing is very much a part of Mike Landon's lifestyle, with its small touches of the basic to go with the trappings of affluence.  In addition to his 'Bonanza' earnings, reportedly around $14, 000 an episode, Landon's worth is enhanced by investments that reach into manufacturing, ranches, real estate.  He is safe to say, well fixed.  It is also likely that no man of lofty financial standing can claim such a skimpy wardrobe.  Indifferent to clothes, Landon owns only two suits--one gray, the other blue.  He has six shirts and maybe a tie or two.  Mostly he favors boots, jeans and a sweater, with an odd-shaped medallion, an Egyptian symbol of enduring life, loosely hanging around his neck.

     At 33, Landon is still boyish-looking, despite the intrusion in his plentiful brown locks of increasing strands of gray--but not enough for the camera to notice or to need a "helpful dash of color back".  His youthfulness, however, he sees occasionally as a doubtful asset.  "My caddy's wife," says Mike, "still refers to me as 'the litle boy'.  Around the 'Bonanza' set I'm still the kid'."  So far, Landon has directed two 'Bonanza' episodes and, at the start, he says the crew was solicitous and almost overly helpful.  "I think they were surprised that 'the kid' could exercise control," Landon says.  David Dortort, 'Bonanza's' executive producer and creator, concurs with: "The boy has grown into a man and it's a small shock to the people in the crew, who have known Mike for 10 years now."

     "The truth is that Mike is a very good director who knows how to handle actors with a firm rein.  He's also a very good writer and a very good actor.  Mike used to be the kid who lost his temper.  Now, when guest stars get tempermental, Mike's the man who calms them down."  According to Tommy Thompson, an independent-thinking makeup man who has worked on 'Bonanza' for years: "Mike used to be a problem.  A little tempermental, you know.  Usually people in a long-running series tend to become more difficult as the challenge leaves.  But Mike discovered the challenge of writing and he has matured.  Now he's the guy who makes everybody else's jobs easier."  Says 'Bonanza' production manager Kent McCray: "Ten years have changed Mike.  He's matured.  He gives more of himself.  The kid's okay."

     In the last six years, Landon has written 12 'Bonanza' scripts, all of them accepted for filming.  "People aren't just surprised that I write scripts, " says Mike.  "They're surprised I can even write my name."  He drummed his fingers on the table at the Paramount commissary and his expression turned mischievous.  "Now what if I had started out as a writer, see, and then I decided to branch out into acting," Landon began.  "With that kind of switch, going from a writer to actor, would anybody have said, 'Look how Mike Landon is maturing'?"

     Having made a valid point, plainly linked with an undeniable kind of snobbery, Landon smiled broadly: "After my first script, I heard that several writers around town calling another writer who's done a lot of 'Bonanzas'.  'Who wrote that script for Landon?'  they asked him.'  Oh, he wrote it himself, did he?'  Well, then who polished it, put it into shape?'  They were dumbfounded to learn that Mike Landon the kid in the cowboy suit had done it himself, every last word.  And that's part of it, the cowboy-actor stigma, the feeling in this town about guys in Westerns, the assumption that we're all no smarter then our horses.  What if Mike Conners or Marty Landau or Leonard Nimoy or Tony Franciosa has written a script for these shows?  Would anybody be so surprised?"

     Landon, who had never written a word before, set about writing his first script to fill an unexpected void during the 1961-62 season.  Apparently his turn to the typewriter came naturally and instinctively.  "One Friday night when we finished work," Landon recalls, "we were all told to take the next week off.  Some nonsense about not having a suitable script.  Driving home, I kept mulling an idea I had about the Cartwrights being blamed for a bank robbery in another town."  Scrawling out his efforts in pencil on a lined Big Boy tablet, a method he still employs, Landon finished a 60-page script complete with camera angles, by Sunday night.  The next morning an astonished Dortort read the script and on Tuesday filming began.  Looking back on his maiden attempt, Landon shrugs.  "It was a shallow plot thing without much substance, a gimmick show, like too many we do," he says.  Four years passed until he took pencil in hand again.

     Since then, a member of the Screen Writers Guild now, he has churned out scripts with some regularity, undergoing the customary pains of creativity.  "I'll think about the characters for weeks," he says.  "I may lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling for hours.  Then, when it's all straight in my head, I work very fast, getting it down on paper in two days."  Landon expresses the greatest pride of authorship over a script of his called "The Wish", aired last spring, with guest-star Ossie Davis.  In "The Wish", which Landon also directed, Dan Blocker (Hoss) assists a neighboring black family but unwittingly becomes the fumbling and insensitive, if well-intentioned "liberal"-in part the target of Landon's script.  "Mainly, I wanted to get across the idea to whites just why black people are angry and frustrated and I wanted to help cool some of the backlash.  One black writer saw the show and said to me.  'You've gotten so close to what it's like to be black, I could hardy believe it was written by a white man'.  For me that was my Emmy."

     Despite his Western aura, Mike Landon grew up in Collingswood, New Jersey, the son of Eli Maurice Orowitz and Peggy O' Neill.  Orowitz was a publicist known as "Emo" who once lent his initials to a campaign promoting seafood "Eat More Oysters".  His mother performed in musical comedies on Broadway.  Now widowed, she recently left her job as a Yellow Cab dispatcher in Los Angeles to work at a telephone-answering service.

     "Thanks to Mike, he's the greatest son anyone could have.  I have no financial worries," she says.  "So I work at jobs that are fun, interesting and bring me in contact with people."  Mike's sister, known as Victoria King, won a Miss New Jersey contest, which led to a brief fling with show business.

     Born Eugene Maurice Orowitz, Mike was a skinny kid, a left-hander who delevoped a phenomenal skill hurling the javelin.  "The javelin," says Mike, "was my security blanket.  I delighted in seeing the shock on people's faces when they saw such a scrawny guy get such distance."  Weighing a mere 125 pounds, Landon made the best national high-school toss one year-211 feet 7 inches-a feat that caught the attention of the track coach at the University of Southern California.  A scholarship was arranged, sight unseen.  When Landon wandered into his office, the coach blinked.  "Are you sure you're the Eugene Orowitz we sent for?" he demanded.  "Give me a javelin and I'll show you," Landon replied.  So I gave the javelin a good heave and the coach nodded and said, 'OK...you're the right Orowitz.' "

     It was Landon's conviction that his javelin prowess was mystically dependent on the length of his hair.  Several football players, annoyed by his shaggy hair, grabbed him one day and clipped off his hair.  The next day, Landon says, he could barely lift the javelin.  "I kept throwing and throwing, trying to regain my strength, and finally tore the ligament in my arm, and that finisihed my javelin career."  Bitterly disappointed, he left college after his freshman year, in 1955.  He worked at a variety of jobs--process server, blanket salesman, carwasher, glue-melter in a ribbon factory.  When the acting urge struck, he decided to call himself Mike Lane.  "Unfortunately," says Landon, "there was already an actor named Mike Lane and since he was 6-feet-9--he played the giant boxer in 'The Harder They Fall', --I wasn't about to take his name away from him."  Instead he plucked "Michael Landon" from the phone book.  Thereafter he starred in a Hollywood little-theater production of "Tea and Sympathy" and played in the TV dramas of the day, from 'Matinee Theater' to 'Playhouse 90'.  He also starred in a movie he is willing to forget called "I Was A Teenage Werewolf."

     Along came 'Bonanza' and the subsequent charges wrought by 10 productive years.  After a disasterous first marriage, Landon is now married happily to the former Lynn Noe, a divorcee who used to teach modeling.  They have a blithely ecumenical family--his two boys by his first marriage are Jewish, as is Mike himself, his second wife's two daughters by her first marriage are Catholics, and their two children are Protestants.  Although he attends no services of any faith, Mike considers himself vaguely "religious".  He is more inclined to discuss the values of psychiatry, however, although he has never unburdened himself on the couch.  "Once you start knowing yourself," he says, "and knowing your motivations, you're on the right road."  The current boom in favor of astrology in Hollywood leaves him disenchanted.  "Astrology?  It's all a big fake.  It's a form of easy rationalizing.  I've known people who let their lives be ruled by this fakery.  Look, it never fails--when women ask me what sign I am, I always give a different one.  Scorpio or Aquarius or Aries, but no matter what sign I say, they'll always come back with: 'I thought so!'"

     On balance, says Landon, the last 10 years of 'Bonanza' have brought changes for the good.  "They've cut out a lot of the 'Gee, golly, Pa' lines that I used to get.  They don't have me fencing with an umbrella any more and sometimes they even let me ride into Virginia City all by myself."

     Lately, a discouragaing word has descended over the blue skies that blanket the Ponderosa.  Some letter-writers, like the football players who administered the shears on him 15 years ago are distressed by Mike Landon, or Little Joe's, long hair.  "There are people who write in, forgetting that 'Bonanza' is set in the Old West in the 1870's, and they ask is Little Joe some kind of hippie."  Landon shakes his full-thatched head in wonderment.  "They've got to be kidding--Ben Cartwright's son a hippie?"