Right Guy—Guy Madison
“I call Guy Madison ‘Tiger,’ ” says his friend Rory Calhoun, “because that’s what he reminds me of—a sleeping tiger. He’s quiet. But all the time he knows what’s going on and how to handle it.”
Rory has known Guy since their beginning days at Selznick studios. Guy calls the six-foot-three dark Irishman “Blackie.” Tiger and Blackie cottoned up to each other from the minute they met. “Maybe,” says Rory, “because we both fell out of a tree on the way to Hollywood. I was a logger and Guy was a telephone lineman. I dropped ’em down; he put ’em up. However it happened, I’m one of the lucky ones. Guy is my friend.”
Rory and his wife, dark-eyed singer Lita Baron, see Guy about every day. He might drop in any time, leave just as suddenly, without explanation. They never ask him questions, he tells them little. All through his unhappiness with his wife, Gail Russell, he never mentioned his troubles, although he knew they knew. They have seen him grim-lipped and silent. And they’ve seen him riotously gay.
Last New Year’s Eve, for instance, when Lita was appearing at Mocambo, it was Guy’s idea to stag it there with Rory and surprise her. That night Guy put on a performance that would do credit to a Parisian boulevardier. Togged out in dinner clothes at a ringside table, he danced, sang, donned paper caps, tooted horns and tossed serpentines around the place. Not until it closed in the small hours did he leave—packing champagne bottles under each arm—to lead a caravan of cars full of friends they’d collected out to Rory’s house to carry on the rest of the night. “And then suddenly he was gone,” remembers Lita. “The champagne bottles were on the floor by the chair where he’d sat. Still unopened. He doesn’t like to drink.” He doesn’t need it to celebrate when he feels like it. Next day while Lita and Rory were recuperating, Guy was out in the valley roping calves for practice.
Guy’s frequent dating of starlet Sheila Connolly has created romance rumors. She shares his love of sports.
Such impetuous sprees do not surprise Guy’s friends, the Calhouns. Nor to them do they presage danger of his succumbing to the soft life. Both Rory and Lita, who share Guy’s passion for archery, camping, hunting and fishing; have been with him where a man’s true mettle gleams through unmistakably, and to them it is inconceivable that Guy could ever put himself in a posture of danger in Hollywood or elsewhere. They’ve had too much proof.
RORY HAS HUNTED in all kinds of rugged country with Guy on expeditions with bow and arrow, stalking dangerous game. “People ask, ‘Haven’t you and Guy ever been in any tight squeezes?’ But I can’t remember many. The reason is that Guy doesn’t let himself get in danger. He’s a deadly, tenacious hunter, but an alert and cautious one. And that’s the way he is in most predicaments—calling his own shots. Nobody’s going to stampede the Tiger and make him lose his head.” The only time Rory ever saw Guy blow his top was, he cheerfully admits, when Rory lost his own good sense. That was during a pig hunt on Catalina Island a few years ago.
But Guy is still playing the field, dates Barbara Warner almost as often . . . and has developed a minor taste for nightlife.
“It’s my boar story,” Rory grins. “Maybe ‘bore’ story is more accurate—I’ve told it so many times. But I like to because it gives such perfect line on the unimpressed and unchangeable way Guy reasons.”
When you hunt this most dangerous of all quarry (and Guy’s favorite game), Rory explained, you’re safest sticking together. It takes only a few seconds for an enraged hog to charge from the brush and rip you to ribbons with his razor sharp tusks. With arrows, as Guy and Rory prefer to do it, it’s twice as risky solo.
As Rory tells it, this time they were stalking up a canyon which suddenly forked. “You take that one and I’ll go up this way,” Guy decided. “Travel fast and I’ll meet you at the top of the mountain. Don’t stop for anything.”
However, on his way up Rory spied what they’d both been looking for and instead of hiking back for Guy to back him he waded in, let fly and bagged a beauty with his first arrow. Meanwhile Madison had toiled to the top. When Rory didn’t show he began to worry. When he heard some wild goats go “Ba-a, baa-a,” his anxiety translated that to cry of “Bob! Bob!” (Guy’s real name and what he likes to be called by his friends). With visions of Rory pinned under a furious boar Guy scrambled over ridges, gullies and hills to the other fork only to find his partner grinning widely. He flamed, bawling out Rory for not keeping his word.
“Hunting—or in any situation—Guy calls his own shots, says close pal Rory Calhoun. “Nobody stampedes Guy and makes him lose his head.”
“But look,” exulted Calhoun. “I got one!” and pointed to the tusker at his feet. Guy was impressed but not enough to change his one-track mind. Instead of compliments, blue blazer words singed Rory. “When I say keep going and meet me,” stormed Guy, “I mean it. You want to get killed?”
LIKE THE CALHOUNS, Guy’s other best friend, Howard Hill, knows the stuff Madison’s made of. Howard, a bold-nosed, soft-spoken Alabaman is the most formidable hunter with bow and arrow in the world. He’s skewered everything from rattlesnakes to elephants and if you saw his African game picture, Tembo, you don’t need any more buildup. Howard Hill has known Guy since he was a fourteen-year-old kid roaming the irrigation canals of Bakersfield, California, hunting small game. He has taught Guy everything he knows about expert archery, and like Rory, has been his companion on countless big game hunts. The pair tracked elk
together through the snows of Idaho and Utah last October. As this is written, they are both in Wyoming after antelope. Howard still favors a game leg smashed when Guy veered their hunting jeep too sharply and threw him out. But he wouldn’t let a little thing like that change his admiration for Guy.
“A fine boy and as fine a hunter,” says Hill, bestowing his greatest praise. “I don’t know much about Guy and Hollywood. He doesn’t tell me his personal affairs. I don’t want to know—none of my business. But if you ask me, Guy doesn’t fit in Hollywood. He’s above it. There’s nothing phony about him. He’s straight as—well—an arrow. And if it takes courage or stick-to-itiveness to keep on the trail he wants to travel, he’s got it. Don’t fret about that.”
Guy built 16-foot skiff, “We Go” with . . .
Hill’s favorite tale concerns a tough bargain Guy made—and kept. That time they were after lowly rabbits with two other hunters in the Simi Valley back of Hollywood. Guy’s favorite shot is a jackrabbit he speared once at forty yards from a racing jeep. To him they’re a better test of his archery than any other game. This morning, the four hunters split into teams and made a bargain: The pair who came in that night with the fewest rabbits would skin and draw them all. “I had a pretty good boy named McDermott with me,” recalls Hill. “So we won. But everybody had good hunting. All in all there were 174 rabbits to dress. That’s a lot of rabbits.”
help of brother Wayne (Chad Mallory) . . .
It was such an awesome job that Hill and his partner, dog tired as all were, proposed sleep and the chore in the morning. But along about five o’clock he was wakened by sounds and lantern light. “There were Guy and his partner still at it,” he chuckles. “Been skinning rabbits all night while I slept. Just four were left. I felt right bad about it and reached for those rabbits. But Guy slapped my arm down before I could grab one. ‘No, Sir!’ he barked. ‘This is my job. You’re not going to get to say that you helped!’
“From what I know about Guy he’s made a bargain with himself to stay what he is, movie star or not. If that’s right it’ll sure be kept!”
IT’S EASY ENOUGH to see how Guy Madison got that way if you know his family. Guy grew up in Bakersfield, California, the son of a ranch hand and railroader named Ben Mosely. His parents named him Robert Ozell Mosely and until he was renamed after a cupcake on a Dolly Madison bakery billboard in his unrealistic Hollywood debut, people called him Bob or Mose. His friends and his folks still do.
who goes fishing and hunting with him.
The Moselys’ house is a small, neatly whitewashed adobe on Brundage Lane. All around is country. And Sunday dinner there is a fine country dinner, too—fried chicken and brown gravy, mashed potatoes, watermelon pickles and at the end a mountain of strawberry shortcake with the kind of cream you can’t buy in supermarkets. Most of Bob’s family ring the table—his dad, Ben, mother, Mary Jane, brothers Harold and Wayne and his Grandma Holder, until she died just this past year pushing ninety. They say grace. Both Guy’s grandfathers were Baptist ministers. Both sides of his family are pioneers. They came originally from the Ozark mountains of Missouri. Bob’s dad jolted west in a covered wagon, carrying his own sick father to the sunshine of New Mexico homestead—and_ got burnt out and broke in a drought. He brought his rancher’s daughter bride to California, settled in the rich San Joaquin Valley and worked hard to raise five kids. But money was always scarce and often the family fare was very different from today’s Sunday feasts—just cottontails the boys shot and pinto beans from the back yard garden patch.
Guy was always tongue-tied about himself, but his schoolday pals can tell a lot about him. Like Guy they are an impressively muscled, manly bunch.
They agree that their pal Mose was and always had been nobody’s man but his own, straight down the line. Furthermore, that he was stubborn and unswerving and determined in whatever he tackled—the kind of kid who never came back from a hunt with an empty bag, who always made whatever team he went out for and who could handle any random situation that arose. His chum, Si Santiago, told about the scrap he had over his best girl Betty. Guy was forced into the fracas by a bully boy who fancied the same charmer his exclusive property. At a high school dance he chose Guy and the word got around. So a cavalcade of jalopies rolled out into the fields after midnight, formed a circle of headlights as, stripped to the waist, they settled the argument. It took over an hour and the going was bloody. Bob hadn’t fought much, was younger and slighter than his opponent, locally famous as a murderous mauler. But that night he picked the wrong guy. Bob took Betty home unaided. The bully saw a doctor.
Outside of banging “bad men” for the cameras, Guy Madison hasn’t had a scrap in Hollywood. His temper is taut but kept under control. But he has had his battles of another kind with even more shifty opponents against whom Guy was twice as green as he was for that schoolboy challenge. The brassy, sharpshooting big league of show business that snatched him by his middy-blouse took him years to lick, almost licked Him, although Guy never believed it could. Asked not ago if, in the dismal days when the publicity balloon had popped and he was struggling to learn his business, he ever considered chucking the works and going back to the animal husbandry he’d studied in junior college, commercial fishing or some other-kind of job, he said, “Not for a minute. I knew Id get going here again.
Guy had just as much confidence in his marriage and dogged determination to make it work. Lita Calhoun, for one, believes that is why he won’t talk about his troubles. “Guy thing before,” she says. “He hates to admit this one—if you can call it his failure.” Few people do.
Guy and Gail met when both were in Luther Lester’s dramatic school at Paramount. Their tragic love story is purely a tale of Hollywood, though not the usual kind of married partners who are professional rivals. Rather, Gail’s battle and defeat was with and by herself. “She never really wanted to be an actress,” a friend says. “It was the idea of her mother and the friends who made Gail a high school beauty queen. Sure, she got to be a star but always against the grain. She wasn’t strong enough to meet the emotional drain that demanded. So she cracked up. Guy had even less experience, aptitude and, until recently, success. His struggle was really harder. But he had the nervous equipment and stamina to handle it.”
Guy Madison’s loyal but losing effort to save his marriage, the girl he loved first and truly are well known. These very ordeals, his career flop and his frustrating marriage which made him practically a recluse for four years, are the very things his friends point to as his insurance against spreading himself now that he can. “Nobody,” they point out, “has been through the sobering mill Guy has.”
“What Guy’s after now is security,” believes his pal, Rory Calhoun. “In all departments. He’s saving his emotions just like he’s saving his money—and at that he’s hard to beat.” Rory doesn’t mean Guy is tight—on the contrary, the Calhouns are the first to point out his generosity. Guy’s favorite meals are barbecued wild game and usually the cooking takes place in the Calhoun back yard. Recently a friend surprised them with a new charcoal burner, and teasingly Lita kidded, “What—no electric spit, no hood, no serving table, no set of pottery?” Guy heard her. Next morning he sent them out, to her utter embarrassment.
But what Rory means is that Guy has learned the worth of a dollar the hard way. His income certainly warrants the few extravagances he allows himself but he is taking precautions to see that most of it sticks. He has hired a business manager, incorporated himself once and plans to do it another way soon so he can produce his own pictures. Guy is the only western movie star who doesn’t stable a horse or spend a fortune on high style outfits or own a ranch.
Guy’s greatest extravagances are his own hunting trips, but he’s acutely conscious of their cost. Recently, he toted some wild boar sausage over to his agent, Helen Ainsworth. “I hope you appreciate this. It cost me about $100 a pound.”
In moments of relaxation these days, the ordinarily silent Madison sometime tilts back his lean profile and bursts into | full-throated song. Always it’s the same tune, “I’m Sitting On Top Of The World.”
Frankly, the way Guy renders this upbeat ballad is nothing to send Mitch Miller scurrying west to twist Madison’s arm with a recording contract. In fact, according to one girl who often hears it—Lita Calhoun—Guy’s voice wanders erratically through “six or seven keys” and suggests the tortured howl of a trapped coyote. Just the same, to Guy Madison and all his friends the ditty has an extremely pleasing and timely ring.
Last year, for example, Guy dragged in $100,000 from Hollywood movies and another $60,000 from tv and radio, besides an incipient but swelling trickle of gravy , from commercial tie-ups and novelty doodads. In the same stretch he turned down $5000 a day for personal appearances because he didn’t have time, and rejected twenty studio starring offers for the same reason. This year he’ll make even more money and be even more in demand.
Only recently a national poll summed up Guy Madison’s career status with two superlative accolades: (1) The best western actor in movies and (2) the best western star on TV. His Wild Bill Hickock show was likewise tabbed the Number One western show and The Command is a box-office hit. When Guy sallies forth to meet the people they almost murder him with adulation. Last year scattered metropolitan department stores and theatres almost came apart when crowds stormed in to see Guy. In one city 35,000 fans collected, and each month 18,000 swamp him with admiring missives. One imaginative and confident midwestern girl surprised Guy with this note:
“Dearest Guy:
“I’m expecting you to be my house guest for the month of August. But you’ll have to leave on the 31st. Clark Gable’s coming in September.”
Guy had to decline that invitation, with polite thanks, and presumably so did Clark. But at the same time it handed Madison a jolt. Being bracketed with The King is something even the above evidence hadn’t prepared him for. Yet as he read it, the fact was far more than mere peerage in a girl’s fancy. Guy had already signed to co-star with Clark in The Tall Men, which he’ll make this February as the first job on a new Twentieth Century-Fox contract set to pay Guy around $1,000,000 over the next seven years.
Guy Madison’s fantastic return to undreamed of star heights after a pretty boy publicity inflation a decade ago—and subsequent deflation—is a story that is well known and widely chronicled. Nothing quite like it has ever occurred before in Hollywood’s history. Another story is yet to be told and probably will be in the months to come. In fact, it is already unraveling—and the question it will answer is simply this: What will all this fame, money and Hollywood pressure do to Guy Madison himself? Will it and can it change him and, if so, how?
Only thirty-two last July, Guy’s still a comparative babe in the TV and movie hero game, and it will be a good long time before his curly brown locks fade to silver. He’s twelve pounds lighter than the golden gob who got yanked to public life off a life guard’s lookout at California’s North Island Navy station in 1944. And except for a neck injury suffered in a surf-swamped lifeboat at the same place, which still gives him occasional trouble, there’s nothing wrong with Guy Madison’s whip strong body or his chiseled, slightly ski-snooted profile, either. Moreover, by now Guy is no bewildered male Trilby. He’s learned his stuff the hard, fast-shooting way through radio and TV.
As veteran comic Andy Devine, his Wild Bill Hickock partner croaks, watching Guy pop confidently in and out of scenes like a gopher, “I’ve just about got ‘Bink’ housebroke. Yessir, the boy’s about raised.” That video horse opera shoots a half-hour movie in two fast days; already Guy has made seventy-four without a serious fluff or slip-up, besides three mike-shows a week running into the hundreds. This has made him handy. As Gordon Douglas, his director for Charge At Feather River, sighed, “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to work with Guy. On most sets you’re always having to look around for your actors. But Madison’s always right at your elbow, leaning on the camera, ready to go.” Before Guy went on The Command, he revamped his medical officer part, giving himself a country-boy background to make it believable, pecking out the changes in person on six typewritten sheets.
But the most important lesson Guy has learned about the trade he was plunged into is that in a technical sense he is no Thespian and never will be. Like John Wayne, another graceless gift to Hollywood, Guy has settled wisely on “not acting but reacting”—being himself, Guy Madison, in every part he plays.
While all this professional progress has been developing for Guy Madison, in his private life he has remained a dangling man. Bound by loyalty and devotion to his sick wife, Gail Russell, Guy has dwelt in a state of suspension, unable to enjoy any of the tempting fruits of his success or to make any permanent personal plans. So in an ironic way he has not been tested. But now, just as his money, fame and popularity are stacking up to a peak, Guy has his freedom to do with all of that what he chooses.
Legally, of course, Guy Madison is still married to Gail. But they have not lived together for well over a year now. The divorce which Guy gallantly wanted Gail to seek—after their life together became impossible—has yet to be granted. But it is just a matter of time. Already property settlements have been made, and every detail ironed out. Guy himself has cross-filed for divorce to bring that on-and-off matter to a head. When you ask him if there is any chance of reconciliation, his answer is a flat no. For him the sad affair is finished, although his friends believe he will be tied emotionally to the green-eyed, nervously frail girl for a long time.
After their separation, Guy rallied to help both times Gail found herself in trouble—as a falsely accused meddler in the Chata and John Wayne domestic mess and shortly afterward when she was arrested for drunken driving. He has said that he is not sure he will ever experience love for any woman quite the same as his was—and perhaps still is—for Gail. He has also said it was just as much his fault as hers.
Just the same, the final decision after years of hopeless indecision is for Guy Madison like shedding a suit of constricting armor. And already there are indications that Guy is ready, as he says, to “bust out and live a little.”
In his monastic three-room apartment in Westwood where he has lived for a year with only a bed, chair, dresser, work bench and two television sets, Guy is unrolling plans for a ranch style house and swimming pool on a high Mulholland Drive lot overlooking- Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. It will cost him around $50,000 and the furnishings and décor several thousand more. Construction starts right away.
The pickup truck he used to jolt around Hollywood in has been traded for a sleek, blue Lincoln Capri. He got it on a tie-up discount, but still it cost important money.
The sports clothes, jeans and outing shirts he used to wear have given way to conservative, tailored suits. Recently he ordered six at a crack, and he left for his last trip to New York looking like a Princeton senior in charcoal grey flannel and a black knit tie.
He has joined the swank Lakeside Golf Club. He is having a .375 Magnum rifle expensively custom built for a big game safari in Africa he hopes to make with Howard Hill next March.
He is seen around frequently in places he used to shun, expensive restaurants like LaRue and Romanoff’s, nightclubs like Ciro’s and Mocambo. Recently when nine-teen-year-old Barbara Warner invited him to a Mocambo party given by her father, movie tycoon Jack Warner, after the premiére of King Richard And The Crusaders, Guy not only went, but when his date’s father was delayed, acted as cohost in a smooth and engaging manner.
He is taking out a succession of girls, most frequently Sheila Connolly, an ex-model turned TV and movie actress.
Guy Madison is rapidly becoming a vogue among Hollywood’s more sophisticated circles. Not long ago Eva Gabor discovered Guy at a soirée, gasped, “He’s wonderful!” and quickly paraded him before her international set. Hedda Hopper invariably invites him to her smart parties, which he tells friends, he likes best of all Hollywood shindigs. In turn he takes the gay gadabout to premieres and other top Hollywood affairs. Jaded Tallulah Bankhead’s remark about Guy when she first spied him has been passed around until it’s a mot: “Dahling—you make all the other buckaroos I ever met look like fugitives from Abercrombie and Fitch!” Joan Crawford has maneuvered to know Guy better with a co-starring idea in mind. Sheltered heiress Barbara Warner, smitten when Guy worked at her pop’s studio, boldly asked a friend to arrange an introduction.
But if you asked Guy Madison whether or not he would ever follow in the fancy footsteps of Clark Gable or Gary Cooper and wind up something totally different from what he started as, Guy probably, wouldn’t know what you were talking about. If he did, he wouldn’t know the answer. And if he did know he wouldn’t tell you. Guy is no chatterbox. To a straight question he’ll come back with a straight answer but it’s liable to be little beyond yes or no. On the subjects of hunting, the outdoors, guns and especially bows and arrows Guy can open up a little, but about his intimate affairs, no.
If Guy himself has qualms or apprehensions about any subtle threats to his integrity, he would be the last to voice them. “As long as I’ve known Guy and as close as I’ve been to him,” says Helen Ainsworth, “I’ve yet to hear him complain or explain. And that includes the hungry days when he was borrowing a hundred from me one week and the next week I was borrowing it back.”
There is no indication that Guy is considering marriage or that he has fallen in love again. If you ask him about the first, he comes right back with a question that’s hard to answer: “How can I? I’m not even divorced.” As for the second, nobody knows. He met dark-haired Sheila Connolly at the Pan Pacific Sports Show last spring and she has been his steadiest. But there are others, including Barbara Warner and Eva Gabor. He has also been linked with Joan Diener in New York and Virginia Grey in Hollywood—but both these supposed romances were columnists’ dream-ups.
This, like everything else, can change as other things are changing for Guy. In his next picture, Five Against The House, he’ll drop the true-blue heroics and play a character who gets involved in nasty trouble with the law. Even his friends have advised him against this job but Guy feels it’s time to show he can change his pace. Asked if he was at all worried about the result, he said, “No, I’ve got a good director.”
But no one can dictate how Guy Madison will conduct himself in the day-in-day-out role of a lionized hero which has come his way at last. That’s up to him. Certainly he will change. Change is the basic law of life and if he didn’t grow in some direction he wouldn’t be very bright. The only question is, which way will it be?
So far, no one around Hollywood or scattered parts believes Guy Madison is in any immediate peril. Or, if he is, that he won’t know what to do about it before it’s, too late. But you never can tell. The track ahead he must travel is loaded with red boards flashing danger signals. One who doesn’t think Guy will get derailed is Helen Ainsworth. “Guy has proved,” she says, “that he belongs to himself. He knows what he’s up against and he won’t let it change him.” As evidence that Guy isn’t worried, she brings out a sterling cigarette box he gave her last Christmas. The lid is engraved with Guy’s own handwriting: “With deep appreciation for our friendship,” it reads, “and faith in our continued success.”
Rory Calhoun, still Guy Madison’s chief cheer leader, puts it another way. “Don’t worry about the Tiger,” he scoffs. “Did you ever hear of one really changing his stripes?”
THE END
—BY JACK WADE
It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE DECEMBER 1954
