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Stopping the Horse. Oates dropped out of the university after three years and took a Greyhound bus to New York City to study acting. He checked coats at "21," tested gags for Beat the Clock, and even washed dishes between minor television roles. When television moved west in the mid-1950s, he borrowed $50 and drove to Hollywood. He worked mostly in westerns, although at first the only way he could stop his horse was by running into a tree. Gradually he moved from "the fifth horse to the horse closest to the camera." By 1962 he was a series regular on Stoney Burke, a TV western with a rodeo setting. "That gave me exposure at last," he says of the experience. "But thank God it was killed after the first season—I might still be with it." He played other kinds of roles as well. "I was the second heavy out of the '39 Ford," he said of his part as a hood in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond.
But Oates never got rave reviews until Blacktop. They were followed by more critical praise for his compassionate portrayal of Arch in The Hired Hand, directed by and starring Peter Fonda. Arch is the man in the middle, caught between a deep friendship with a farmer and a newborn love for the farmer's wife. Oates is totally convincing in the role, struggling within himself and weighing each relationship against his own moral code.
Banshee to Poet. Oates confesses that at one point, the actor's life proved too much for him to handle. "I started hanging out in saloons," he says of all those long treks from one picture location to another. There were plenty of fights. "I'd pick up a beer bottle and clear the table with it." One night back in Hollywood, he chased a fellow up Santa Monica Boulevard "like a raving banshee wielding a knife." His first marriage collapsed when he was 39. Then Oates discovered he had hepatitis. "I had to stop drinking completely, and that saved me, because I began to turn to other things." The other things included writing poetry, playing the guitar, and sailing a 29-ft. sloop, spending weeks alone on the water.
Today, with his second wife Vickery, Oates lives quietly in the Hollywood Hills beside a swimming pool bigger than their tiny three-room house. An American-history buff, he would like to direct a series of films about each decade since 1920; they will show the cultural extremes that can exist in the same era. He is currently writing a scenario for the first one, about a Wyoming farmer who rescues from a plane crash an urbane couple modeled after F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
But Oates will also continue to act in carefully chosen roles. "On the surface he's a scruffy, funky, Okie guy, but he has a quiet thing going underneath that makes him extraordinary as an actor," says Verna Bloom, who played opposite him as the wife in The Hired Hand. Without boasting, Oates acknowledges a mature quality in his own work. "I don't get fan letters from little girls," he says, "but I do get them from doctors, lawyers, writers and professors. You see," he explains thoughtfully, "I try to give whatever I play a morality."