REMEMBERING TY HARDIN

While wandering around 1880 Town in Midland, South Dakota today, I came across a copy of the famous photo of the Warner Bros.' TV western stars drawing their pistols. What made this one special was that it was autographed by Ty Hardin, who at that point was playing Bronco Layne in a series that had originally been a replacement for Cheyenne, when WB had contract trouble with Clint Walker, and now was rotating through schedule spots with Cheyenne and Will Hutchins' Sugarfoot.

But it reminded me that Hardin died last week, and I wanted to write something then, so it's a good excuse to say a couple of things about him now. One thing I hadn't known was that he was a football player. His obits said he got a scholarship to Blinn Junior College, then attended Dallas Bible Institute before joining the Army. Then he enrolled at Texas A&M and, so the story goes, played for Bear Bryant there. It's hard to check, because he didn't graduate, but the stories I read said he played tight end, in the days before that was a position. He registers no stats as a receiver from 1954-56, when A&M had John David Crow, Bobby Joe Conrad, and Jack Pardee. I did find a picture of him in a football uniform, but I don't know who's it was and he looks younger than a post-Army Ty Hungerford.

What I did know a bit about was how fragile his career was. It resembles, in some ways, Clint Eastwood's early career, except that Hardin made a couple of bad decisions, whereas Clint made a couple of good ones. But they got into TV by luck, more or less. Both were hired originally because of their good looks, as beefcake. Clint was one of the last of Universal's apprentices, and he had been trying to get into acting. Hardin (or Orison Whipple Hungerford, Jr. as he then was named, though Ty was his family nickname) was spotted by a Paramount scout at a costume party (he was a cowboy) and was signed to a contract. He had bit parts in a couple of films, including Last Train To Gun Hill, billed as Ty Hungerford, when, like Clint, he got lucky and landed a TV gig.

Hardin met John Wayne, and  when he tried to get the Ricky Nelson part in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Wayne introduced him to Hawks, who was with William Orr of Warners. Hawks didn't give him the part, but Orr soon bought his contract. Warners changed his name to Hardin, gave him acting lessons, and introduced him into the Cheyenne series as Cheyenne's cousin. He was an instant hit, and Bronco ran for four years. His best film part was in Merrill's Marauders, and it looked like he was on his way. After Warners, he was getting 'exposure' roles in big films like Battle Of The Bulge and PT 109, where he had a blonde goatee, but not yet any serious starring parts.

Then Hardin made a couple of bad decisions. One was to pass on a western role offered by an Italian director, Sergio Leone. He wasn't the only actor to either pass or want too much money, and of course the part eventually went to Clint.  The next one was to pass on the TV show Batman, ironically because he had a comittment to film in Spain, on a  sort of spaghetti western, Hugo Fregonese's Argentinian Savage Pampas.

Hardin played the lead in Riptide, a series that was made in and set in Australia, but was shown in the US. He was in Custer Of The West, and in a weird British circus horror film, Beserk, with Joan Crawford. But his career stalled. He made three disposable spaghetti westerns in 1971, and then worked only intermittently, though he had a part in a TV movie remake of Red River, which starred James Arness and Bruce Boxleitner in the John Wayne and Montgomery Clift roles, but had parts for other old western TV stars like Hardin, Guy Madison, Robert Horton and John Lupton. Hardin was tall and good looking, but unlike Wayne or Eastwood, never really learned to control his image on screen.

Off screen was another story. His third wife was Marlene Schmidt, the East German-born Miss Universe of 1961. Ironically, she went into the film business after they divorced. In all Hardin had eight wives, and ten children. Which may help explain why he had problems with the IRS, which helps explain why he helped found the Arizona Patriots, which sounds like football team but was an anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party type group that evolved into a militia. In 1986 they were raided, and accused of planing to attack a federal office in Utah. Hardin wasn't charged with any crimes, but the group disbanded.

The photo above is not Hardin as a militia leader, but a fan show where he appeared alongside Clint Walker and Will Hutchins, and he was the only one not quite in costume. I find it tremendously nostalgic, especially now, viewing a Wild West town that only moderately appeals to my 13 year old.

Hardin died at 87. It is easy to imagine scenarios in which he was a successful film actor, or a busy TV star. But his other difference from Clint was lacking Clint's study of the business, and his nous for it. Clint's acting and directing careers are actually meshed into his producing career; he became virtually a studio himself; this would have been beyond Hardin. On the other hand, there aren't many people, not even Clint, whose obituaries will say 'he is survived by his eighth wife; his previous seven marriages all ended in divorce.'  And I found, while writing this, a reverse angle of that famous photo, an earlier unused take. Those were the days.

JAMES M CAIN'S COCKTAIL WAITRESS

The reasons why James M. Cain was more successful than Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett during their lifetimes, and the reasons why he is the least read of the three today are connected, and they have to do with morality. This was a point reinforced for me by The Cocktail Waitress, Cain's lost last novel, written in 1975 when he was 83, and tracked down and then edited together from various versions by Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime.

Cain's writing sold more to his contemporary audience partly because it escaped the confines of the genre ghetto of 'mystery' –his stories usually have crime within them (though the killing of Monte Beragon in Mildred Pierce, for example, is something added by the movies), but not detective heroes, so they could play to the somewhat higher-brow audience who looked down on the pulp magazines that spawned Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. More important, though, was the world of steamy, obsessive, noirish sex which Cain's characters inhabited. He wrote material that the highbrow critics hated, but which the middle brow audiences ate up, a form of sexual slumming which inspired a slew of followers, of whom Erskine Caldwell may be the most notable. And though today he's remembered for the films his novels inspired, it's worth noting that it took Hollywood 12 years to work up the gumption to produce a diluted version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Of course, what was hot stuff to my parents' generation, and when I was a kid in the Fifties, is pretty tame nowadays. Which is one of the reasons Cain fell somewhat to the wayside. Another was that, as his late-blooming career went on, his work dealt more and more with his obsessions, and his stories became less and less compulsive.

But what made his stories compulsive is also what made them acceptable in the Thirties and Forties, and what makes them less compelling today. They are underpinned by a powerful sense of morality, a morality which insists that sin, inevitably, be punished, while simultaneously portraying the intoxicating delights it offers before the punishment comes due. Cain's stories are about people caught up by forces they cannot control, forces which will inevitably destroy them. It is a world created by an Old Testament God, and if that makes the original Cain, or Job, or David, the first noir protagonist, so be it. It's not like this is a secret, among Cain's later novels are titles like Sinful Woman and The Root Of His Evil. His God may well have departed the scene; not for nothing did Albert Camus call Cain 'America's greatest writer', but that sense of retribution is never far away, and often his characters see it coming.

Hammett's protagonists resonate with modern audiences because they are almost anti-heroes; they know the world has its sins, that people are corrupted, and they function within that world, partaking of it but never succumbing to it, never letting it take control of them, living by their own code of what demands punishment. Chandler's Marlowe also knows the world is corrupt, but he copes with it like an idealist who's become, as idealists do, a cynic. He constructs a facade of not caring, defined by cracking wise, to protect him from the corruption. What makes Elliott Gould's Marlowe so accurate in Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, the reason by it's generally either loved or hated by Chander fans, is the understanding of this character, which Leigh Brackett and Altman nail perfectly. Their Marlowe is the most accurate depiction of what's REALLY going on underneath the facade, as opposed to the what the readers (and perhaps author) really thinks is going on, since Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides' deconstruction of Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly.

In this sense, The Cocktail Waitress is a veritable cocktail of Cain's Old Testament themes, a small masterpiece of self-deconstruction. Joan Medford, the eponymous waitress, narrates the tale, and when it opens her abusive husband has just died in a drunken car crash, which at least one cop still suspects her of somehow having caused. Her son is in the care of her in-laws, and her sister-in-law Ethel, who can't have children of her own, desperately wants to keep him. Joan is simply trying to make ends meet, but needs to prove she can support herself and her son, so she takes a job as a cocktail waitress at the Garden of Roses. She catches the eye of an older millionaire, Earl K. White III, and of a younger man with big plans, Tom Barclay, who says he drove her home from her husband's funeral, and claims she blew him a kiss when he left.

The set-up is brilliant, and you can see where it's going. Joan is obsessive about making a success, and enough money to get back her son. Her need becomes overwhelming. Earl quickly becomes obsessed with Joan, and offers to marry her, but with a catch—he has a heart condition, and has been told by his doctors that he could never stand the strain of sex. His passion could literally kill him. Joan quickly becomes obsessed with Tom—even though on their first 'date' he takes her to a topless bar cum whorehouse. But her passion is just as dangerous to her need as Earl's is to him. It's like a condensed version of Cain's classic characters and themes rolled into one: Postman crossed with Mildred Pierce crossed with Double Indemnity (you wonder if the character is called Joan in reference to Crawford) with a bit of Cain himself thrown in: he was suffering from angina as he wrote the book, and was 83, (I wondered reading the strip club scene if he'd seen The Graduate and been inspired). Tom is Walter Neff crossed with Beragon, Earl is partly Nick, partly Mr Dietrichson. But the real question is who Joan is, and that's where the beauty of this novel lies.

As you might expect, things get complicated, and then go wrong, and eventually one accident is followed by another death, and coincidence begins to mount. There's a trial scene, and then a vicious twist at the end which clever readers will have seen coming, but which, in terms of Old Testament justice, is cruel and unusual, and which makes clear what Cain has been doing all along: setting us, the readers, up for a fall, just as he did so brilliantly in Postman. But here, he's done it with the female first-person narration (remember, Mildred Pierce is told in third person; Postman in the first by Frank Chambers). Cain's sense of Joan's voice, which seems believable at first, now is revealed to be downright compelling: we have watched the story through her eyes, and we are forced to re-evaluate the entire story, and our own preconceptions and sympathies, as a result. Although we have the sense of impending doom, Joan never shares it, and this creates a wonderful tension, because we, as readers, accept her voice. 

The Cocktail Waitress is not a 'great' novel, and  it will carry less impact to a modern audience unfamiliar with Cain; in fact, judging by some of the reviews it appears that is the case. But its publication at this time makes it a perfect coda to Cain's career; he is remembered now mostly for the movies he inspired. I'd love to see it turned into a film; after all even Mildred Pierce with Kate Winslett was a success (Guy Pearce's Beragon stole that show--though the HBO adaptation did return Lucy Gessler, as Mildred's friend, to a larger role, giving Melissa Leo a chance to shine; there is an equivalent character in The Cocktail Waitress too). The question would be whether you use the late Fifties/early Sixties period (the end of the era of morality: pre-Beatles and the rest) or go contemporary, because we are currently mired in an age that combines both licentiousness and prudery in ways that make the Roaring Twenties/Depression Thirties seem balanced. With the popularity of Mad Men, and copies of it like The Hour, and the success of Mildred Pierce, period might work better; this I think could be the breakthrough role for Jessica Chastain.

There has been huge re-evaluation of Cain in recent years. Postman was picked for the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list; Double Indemnity is one of the AFI's 100 best American films. This novel is a moving reminder of what made Cain so compelling in his time, and what makes him so today. It may not be the place to begin reading him, but once you've started to move beyond the classics, to the more obsessive works (The Butterfly, Galatea, Serenade and Past All Dishonor, for example), it's a good place to see clearly what he's up to, and what he's capable of doing with his writing.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M Cain

Hard Case Crime/Titan Books £16.99 ISBN 9781781160329

This essay will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetrime.co.uk)