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What the critters lacked in talent they made up in hard work. They wiggled through more walking lessons than Brigitte Bardot, and rasped themselves raw-handed to perfect the fast draw. Times without number they blasted holes in their own britches, and one of them, while poking his hat brim with a pistol, accidentally shot his own sideburns off. They became the prima donnas of horse opera, and sometimes it seemed as if they would rather pull hair than triggers. "Oh, Hugh O'Brian doesn't matter," Dale Robertson sniffed recently. "He's just a itty-bitty fella." And Hugh O'Brian is disgusted with Audie Murphy. When Hugh offered to bet $500 that he could beat anybody in Hollywood to the draw, War Hero Murphy upped the ante to $2,500 and demanded live ammunition for the test. Hugh did not press the matter. "Most of these fellows are gigantic babies," says a TV director. "They pout, they sulk, they demand attention."
They certainly have been getting it.
The Big Guns:
James Arness (6 ft. 7 in., 235 lbs., 48-36-36), who plays Gunsmoke's Marshal Matt Dillon, is probably the biggest thing ever seen in blue jeans. (One director had to stand him in a hole in order to get his head in the picture.) What horse, short of a Percheron, could carry him for more than a couple of miles? But at his best, Actor Arness manages to behave with a sort of unheroic, splatter-dabs-and-huckydummy homeliness that makes the customers imagine themselves in the West as it really was; and the illusion is further fostered by Heroine Amanda Blake as Kitty, who is "obviously not selling chocolate bars." Arness can shake hands with grandma (Colt .45) almost as fast as the next man, and he wears his pants so tight he can't bend over. Minneapolis-born, wounded at Anzio, he rode with the posse in a few John Wayne westerns. Gunsmoke pays him $2,000 a week for 39 weeks, and on top of that, he says, "I can make $100,000 a year in personal appearances, just working weekends."
Ward Bond (6 ft. 1 in., 225 lbs., 48-41-44), a 55-year-old veteran of more than 150 Hollywood films, is the trail boss of Wagon Train, one of the biggest (60 min.) and costliest ($90,000-$120,000) of TV's saddle-soap operas. Bond shares the billing with a new guest star every week, and with a capable young actor named Robert Horton, who plays a tough scout. On the show, Actor Bond is fatherly one minute, the next he is roaring like a mule with the colic. An extravert's extravert, he has a grin like a Texas river, a mile wide and an inch deep, and a laugh that can shatter a klieg light. He also has guts. When a backing horse broke his hip, Bond bellered for his Scotch and milk (the milk is for his ulcer, he explains, the Scotch for him), was on the set next day.