In 1957, when classic TV Westerns were all the rage and Gunsmoke reigned supreme, actor Richard Boone presented viewers with hero of the Old West different from any of the others. His name was Paladin, the show was Have Gun Will Travel and Boone gave us a character with heart and compassion who was also a man of action.
Boyd Magers, webmaster at westernclippings.com, offers, “Richard Boone perfectly exemplified the character with the improbable name of Paladin as a cultured, sophisticated, poetry-spouting sensitive intellectual who, nevertheless, hires out his quick gun to anyone with a problem. The carefully chosen name of Paladin means ‘trusted leader as in a medieval prince’ or ‘champion of a cause.’”
Elaborated Richard Boone to the Petaluma Argus-Courier in 1957, “When I put on this outfit, I feel sensational. Such class they had in those days, such elegance. They really knew how to live. He’s also a great character. He has a great sense of humor and is always quoting things, but he’s a real pro. He doesn’t empty his gun trying to hit someone; one bullet does the job. We deliberately set out to create an elegantly deadly character as different as possible from any other Western series. He’s quite a character.”
One could say the same about Richard Boone himself.
Early days of Richard Boone
Born Richard Allen Boone on June 18, 1917 in Los Angeles, he felt the pull towards being an artist — specifically a painter — which went against the wishes of his father, a lawyer.
“At odds with his father on almost every level,” observes Magers, “Richard was sent to a military school where he lasted two and a half years, after which the school deemed it better for him, and them , that he leave. Boone enrolled at Stanford and took pre-law for two years, but majored in drama. With World War II, he became an aviation chief ordinance mate in the South Pacific. When he came back in ’46, he decided acting was for him.”
During the war, he also recognized his own talents as a writer, mostly because he had to more or less leave art behind. “You can’t carry an easel on a torpedo plane, so I wrote,” Richard Boone said in 1970. “Short stories imitating Hemingway and Dos Passos, but I realized my dialogue was poor. So when the war ended, I joined the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, on the GI Bill, to learn to write. I thought I’d get in with actors and see how dialogue was done, then I found I had a talent for acting and away I went.”
Picking up the scenario, Magers adds, “Not a handsome man by Hollywood standards, he nevertheless found work in some 150 live TV shows in New York from ’48 to ’50 based on his craftsmanship and abundant energy.”
He ended up studying acting and dance, and made it to Broadway in a 1948 production of Medea, appearing on stage with Sir John Gielgud and Dame Judith Anderson. He followed that up with a production of Macbeth in 1949, which, as noted, led him live television, where he truly honed his craft.
“In the years, from 1947 to 1950,” he shared to the Times-Advocate, “actors, directors and cameramen were all learning together, pioneering the new medium. The acting was extraordinary, because of its immediacy. The cameras were choreographed with split-second timing, because there were no retakes; we were going out on the air live. It was enormously exciting.”
Hollywood beckons
Making the move to the big screen, Richard Boone made his movie debut in 1951’s Halls of Montezuma, portraying Lieutenant Colonel Gilfillan. Said The Los Angeles Times of the film, “It contains some spectacular battle scenes and some excellent performances. Richard Widmark, in a sympathetic role, is especially good. And so is Richard Boone, 20th Century-Fox’s new discovery. A Los Angeles boy, he’s a veteran of Broadway and 150 television shows. Elia Kazan used Boone to support a girl in a film test. When Darryl Zanuck saw the test, he put Boone under contract.”
Between 1951 and 1954 he appeared in 15 more movies, among them Call me Mister, Man on a Tightrope, The Robe, Siege at Red River and the movie version of TV’s Dragnet. The latter led that film’s writer, James E. Moser, to invite him to star in his new series Medic, which aired between 1954 and 1956 for a total of 59 episodes. It’s credited as being the first medical drama to emphasize realism and actual medical procedures.
And he did, starring in 11 of them between 1955 and 1958. But what’s surprising is the fact that despite the success he was enjoying in film, he signed on to star in another series.
Have Gun Will Travel
Have Gun Will Travel ran from 1957 through 1963 for a total of 225 half-hour episodes. Says Magers of the series’ premise, “Headquartered in the stylish Hotel Carlton in San Francisco, Paladin dressed in formal attire, ate gourmet food, quoted poetry and attended the opera, always escorting a beautiful lady. But, when ‘working,’ he dressed in black, used calling cards with a chess knight emblem, carried a derringer under his belt and wore a black gunbelt with the same chess knight symbol on the holster; the knight symbol being a reference to his character.”
“It’s a chess piece, the most versatile on the board,” Richard Boone explained. “It can move in eight different directions, over obstacles, and it’s always unexpected.”
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