Lorne Greene~Patriarch Of The Ponderosa
TV Guide~May 13, 1961

     Lorne Greene holds the key to the horse in "Bonanza"

     A few months back Lorne Greene, who as Bonanza's Ben Cartwright is titular head of TV's most potent family dynasty, was making a personal appearance in an Ohio television station.  When the interviewer, a woman asked young Michael Landon, Greene's traveling companion (who plays Little Joe Cartwright), how he regarded Ben Cartwright as a father, Landon quipped: "Oh, him.  He's not so tough--until you try to get the key to the horse on Saturday night".

     Lorne Greene, is indeed, the man with the key to the horse.  At 46, he is perhaps the most exciting and certainly the most convincing "father" ever to appear in regular series TV.  He is also, it might be added parenthetically, a tremendous man with a dialect joke.  As nearly as every critic has agreed, Bonanza owes its peculiar appeal to the fact that it deals not in rootless drifters of the traditional oater school but in the solid family ties inherent in a typical timber dynasty of the Old West.  At spiritual center of this phenomenon is Greene, the sine qua non of the Ponderosa, the man who proved that father does not necessarily have to be a pompous clown to find acceptance in the topsy-turvey-dom of commercial television.

     Clearly, the resonated Greene (Billy Rose once called him "the man with the built-in-cello"), has special qualifications for the role.  But at first glance they are hard to calculate.  He was the onetime "Voice of Canada" chief newscaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Company and the founder of the Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto.  He chucked all this for acting relatively late in his career.  He decided to try series TV in a kind of desperation move to make his box-office name (which was slight), match the luster of his Broadway acting reputation.

     Moreover, Greene, a Canadian, had no emotional book for America, let alone the American Frontier.  In fact, he had never been on a horse--except once as a boy, on a Percheron.

     As for dynasties, he had none.  Athough his mother was one of 12 children, he was an only child.  His marriage to a Toronto nonprofessional in 1940 produced boy-and-girl twins, now 16, but otherwise ended in failure.  He has never remarried.  His father, far from being the timber-king or cattle-baron type, was a conscientious orthopedic bootmaker.  Lorne himself was not named after anyone in the family, but after Daniel Greene's first customer, a man named Lorne McKenzie.

     Yet, strangely enough if Ben Cartwright had a model, that model is Daniel Greene.  "My father was not a big man", explains the son.  "But he gave the impression of bigness.  He didn't have to punish; all he had to do was look.  He had almost perfect control, never got excited.  Like Ben he thought things through."

     If Greene had a vulnerable spot, it was the tendency to carry the Ben Cartwright role into real life.  Yet this he manages to leaven with humor and grace.  Conversely, the other three actors, Landon, Pernell Roberts and Dan Blocker, who play the Cartwright sons, are apt to fall into the son role despite their best intentions.  "I've seen it happen time and again", says one constant observer on the set.  Without thinking, they'll seek Lorne's advice".

     More often, however, the scene takes another form.  Landon and Blocker, for example, will approach Lorne with a fictitious problem and soon, amid great frowning and furrowing of brow, Greene will be deep in its possible solution.  Usually they will pick an unlikely time--such as the moment when some particular important network brass is visiting the set.  It is then that the ham in Greene takes over.  Suddenly there is a cannon blast of laughter, followed by a broad burlesque of the proceedings as Greene realizes they have been pulling his leg.

     Then comes the punch line--as "the visiting network vice president" turns out to be a kid from the mail office.

     Says one appreciative observer of this oft-repeated scene, "Oh, it gets pretty wild at times.  But never once have I seen Lorne lose his composure.  And he gives as good as he gets".

     Indeed, Greene has been giving pretty good all his life.  Born in Ottawa, he began studying to become a chemical engineer (in deference to his father), and might have become one if not for his French teacher, as the Lisgar Collegiate Institute (a high school) in Ottawa.  This gentleman, impressed with young Lorne's big voice, cast him in a French comedy, "Les Deux Sourds", about a couple of shouting deaf men.

     When he went to Queen's University in Kingston a few years later, it was a matter of weeks before he switched his major from chemical engineering to modern languages (he still speaks French well), and joined the campus Drama Guild.

     After college he went to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse on a fellowship, where he worked with Sanford Meisner and, importantly, he thinks, with the great modern dancer, Martha Graham.  Not that Greene was or is a dancer but--"From her I learned something essential.  Dancing or acting or anything is a matter of control of mind and body.  She related everything to life itself".

     At the outbreak of World War II, he returned to Ottawa thinking to take up his new profession.  But there was no place to act.  He got a $10-a-week job as program supervisor at an ad agency, then in desperation, applied to the CBC for an announcer's job.  When he was ignored, he replied in kind with a thundering ultimatum.  "As a Canadian citizen I demand an audition!" To his own surprise he got it.

     With "the built-in-cello" it took him just three months to become chief newcaster.  Later the "Voice of Canada" gained even more fame in a series of John Grierson (then the top documentary man in Canada) films.  In 1942 he won an NBC radio award for announcing, the only Canadian ever to be so honored.  In 1943, he did a series of 25 radio shows in Hollywood designed to sell War Bonds.  And in 1946, he founded the Academy of Radio Arts, a school for writers, producers and announcers and a project very near and dear to him.

     Indeed, he still might be teaching had it not been for an accident--and an impulse.  In 1953 he came to New York to demonstrate a special watch he designed and had built by Swiss watchmakers for use in his school.  In effect, it was a watch that ran backward so the program aids could tell at a glance how much time was left.  In New York, he encountered an old acquaintance and forner Academy lecturer, Fletcher Markle, who was then producing "Studio One".  Markle took one look and hornswoggled Greene (who needed not much hornswoggling) into playing a dynamic symphony conductor in "Rendezvous".

     Markle explains: "It was that astonishing physical aspect of Lorne's that caught me, that energy with a character all its own".  Later Felix Jackson gave him another part on "Studio One"--Big Brother in Orwell's "1984".  Greene was now hooked, so much that he liquidated, not sold the Academy.  He says: "It was part of me.  I wouldn't sell.  I slept easier that way".

     Greene soon found he had stuck his neck out.  And he got his head chopped off regularly.  Item: In 1953 he landed in the Lindsay-Crouse play about the United Nations.  "The Prescott Proposals, with Katherine Cornell.  The part was fat, but not so the critical acclaim--or the run.

     Item: In 1955 Billy Rose and Joseph L. Mankiewicz tapped him to play opposite Claire Bloom in the new play by Paul Osborn called "Maiden Voyage".  He thought he was set until Miss Bloom impulsively decided to go back to England and Mr. Osborne to put his play back in the trunk for a couple of years.

     Item: In 1957 producer Kermit Bloomgarden had him all but signed to play the powerful role of the father in "Look Homeward, Angel".  At the 11th hour the better-known English actor Hugh Griffith announced his availability.  The play won the Pulitzer Prize--without Lorne Greene.

     This, and several other instances like it, made him decide their was no substitute for a name.  And he resolved to find himself one, the quickest way possible.  TV and its Instant fame seemed made to order.  Thus, when NBC came up with Bonanza and Ben Cartwright, he jumped at the chance.

     One day he may go back to Broadway or into movies.  But meantime he finds being TV's man with the key to the horse certain dividends.

     "There are times when I think we manage to transcend our constant lack of good scripts, proper rehearsal and all the other things that bug a man in the business", he says.  "Then sometimes there are amazingly eloquent fan letters...like the lady from Virginia who wrote: "I like your show because it's the only Western where the girl rides off into the sunset".


     ~Dwight Whitney