Maverick

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

MAVERICK

Dennis Broe

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3916-9 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8143-3917-6 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954157

To Sri, who taught me what it is to work

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Hell Hath No Fury Like a Cowboy Scorned

1. Warping Warner’s Wranglers: Maverick’s Challenge to the Studio Western

2. Riding the Revisionist Range: Maverick’s Challenge to the Adult Western

3. A Dandy in Abilene: Maverick as Flâneur, Situationist, and Beat

4. The Gentle Grafter and Geopolitics: Maverick’s Antiauthoritarian Challenge to the Ethos of the Cold War

Conclusion: Could I Be Wrong? Maverick’s Antiauthoritarian Legacy and the Fate of Resistant TV

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was for me not only a labor of love but also a project in which I learned to love labor. I developed discipline in writing it, and I also learned that no author writes alone. This is to acknowledge all the help I received. I would like to thank my uncle Jerry Broe, who loved the series and would bring his family to our house every week to watch it. His enthusiasm was infectious. For their timely aid in supplying me with TV series and books, I would like to thank Rachel King, the media librarian at Long Island University; Lisa Burwell, the Long Island University interlibrary loan librarian; and Samantha Menard, my researcher and all-around great grad student. To them I must add Bradley Laboe for his technical assistance and comradeship. To write the book is one task; to enjoy writing it is another. This one was enjoyable, and for that and for their continual support in my development as a writer I would like to thank Phoebe, Karl, John, Brian, and Valentin. Always, I must thank Jerry Mundis for his writing wisdom that, as usual, was both efficacious and abundant. Finally, I would like to thank the members of my two writing groups: Judith, Dan, and Matilde, for being the best audience any writer could ever have hoped for, and Larry, Nona, and Pat, for their continued support even in trying times.

Introduction

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Cowboy Scorned

Maverick’s eponymous theme song claimed that Maverick is the legend of the West, but in fact the series was nothing of the sort. In some ways, with its emphasis on the itinerant lifestyle of a gambler, it was not even a Western. If it contained some of the iconographic trappings of the genre—including the mandatory fistfights—it shunned or subverted many of the crucial features, beginning with its outsider hero who was more interested in avoiding trouble than confronting it. As the series bible put it, Maverick, who thrived not on the rigors of the range but in the indolent playground of the saloon hall, was if not outright cowardly at least cautious. The series was the first to introduce to the television Western not only humor but also parody, famously travestying the traditional Western of the day Gunsmoke (1955–75) with the episode Gun-Shy, which featured a buffoonishly rigid sheriff. The parody included a mock-up of the opening gun duel credits of its more prestigious cousin shot through the outsized derriere of the bloated lawman, emphasizing not his power but his inflated girth. Maverick’s mock Matt Dillon, Mort Dooley, was closer to Orson Welles’s gargantuanly blubberous corrupt border official in the previous year’s Touch of Evil (1958) than Gary Cooper’s heroic sod in High Noon (1952).

The humor effected, at least momentarily, a change in the tone of the Western, enabling its audience to laugh at the seriousness of a genre that was intimately bound up with empire building. Introjecting comedy into the Western was also a commercial decision by the fledgling network ABC as a way of taking on its main competitors in Maverick’s Sunday time slot (Jack Benny, Steve Allen, and Ed Sullivan), a gamble that worked, as the series bested all three in its first season and won an Emmy in its second.

The humor, closer to whimsy and satire than the usual television belly-laugh comedy, along with the irreverence and iconoclasm, were the result of a melding of the minds of Maverick’s producer, Roy Huggins, and its star, James Garner. Huggins was an ex-leftie who retained from his radical days a strong antiauthoritarian bent and a sense of capitalism as one big crapshoot or societal poker game in which the odds were most often against the ordinary player but in which there was pleasure to be had in running the table against those stacked odds. Garner’s refusal to take himself seriously, his sense of fun in the life of a drifter where work was devoutly to be avoided, came out of his early life as a vagrant fleeing responsibility and from his equal diligence in never confusing himself with a great actor who is working at his craft. He was instead content simply to project on the small screen his easygoing personality. Garner talked of acting in the entertainment business in the same nonchalant way as that other nonactor, the big-screen natural Robert Mitchum, an original Wild Boy of the Road, a hobo who claimed to have ridden into Hollywood on the rails and that in his Hollywood career of more than forty years he was always just in town between trains (Server, 14).

The Legend of the West.

While working within the rather rigid boundaries of the genre and sometimes appearing more iconoclastic on paper in terms of how it was talked about than in what actually showed up on the small screen, Maverick nevertheless was a series that effected change in three areas. First, the series modified practices in the television industry by innovations in both the formal way a series was structured, with its alternate lead Maverick’s, and in its creative personnel opposing the feudal Hollywood studio system as applied to television, specifically in terms of actors’ contracts and producers’ credits. Second, the series also changed the form and content of its genre, the Western, undercutting its seriousness in a way that questioned the values of the genre and brought the then just emerging revisionist Western from the big screen to television. Finally, Maverick contributed to a larger change in the society as a whole by quietly opening up a countercultural, antiauthoritarian space in the American heartland by way of the American living room.

The book’s four chapters detail four levels on which the series functioned innovatively. Chapter 1 traces how Maverick both conformed to and challenged the policies and mode of production of Warner Bros. and Hollywood in the period that marked the end of the classical studio era in the cinema but featured more regressive forms of that policy applied to television. The chapter details the rigid assembly-line procedure of the studio’s strictly for-profit system and how that rigidity alienated not only creative artists who challenged the precepts of the factory system but also the television sponsors such as Maverick’s Kaiser Aluminum, which was not happy about a cookie-cutter approach that, often due to contract disputes, led to four quasi-identical Mavericks in four seasons.

Chapter 2 describes the show as being a television revisionist Western at a moment that almost anticipated this reversal of the values of the genre in the cinema. Maverick’s run from 1957 to 1962 was sandwiched between the peak years of two conservative Westerns that defined the genre, Gunsmoke (1955–75) and Bonanza (1959–73), both of which Maverick parodied. The gambler Bret Maverick, rather than being a lawman as in the former or a wealthy landowner as in the latter, was a drifter who often ran afoul of the corrupt or rigidly legal McCarthyite sheriffs who frequently inhabited the towns through which he roamed and who were more likely to run him out of town than to see him as a western property owner. This drifter and live-and-let-live ethos reflected an alternative value scheme at the time that was foreign to the Western. The show’s view of the West as a site of speculation and corruption at the peak moment of the Gilded Age linked it to satirical representations of the West by such authors as Mark Twain and Herman Melville and stood in contrast to the standard view of the West as heroic embodiment of the pioneer spirit.

Maverick’s lifestyle—he was constantly on the move in a way that mapped the entire Western landscape and was always looking for the best poker game, that is, a site where he could exercise his own form of creativity, fun, and pleasure—linked him to both a long line of bohemians and the contemporary beats. Chapter 3 explores Maverick’s lineage in the nineteenth century in the flâneur—the Parisian gadabout—and his link, in his aversion to work, to the attack by Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, on the Calvinist ethic in his right to be lazy. Maverick’s staging of creative events, under the name of scams, links him to another Parisian movement, that of the situationists. In the United States the situationists’ ethos was in a different way taken up by the beats, whose lifestyle would be incorporated even more assiduously in a future Huggins series, The Fugitive (1963–67).

The fourth innovative area was an intervention in the cultural climate of the country that cannot but be read as also taking a position on the omnipresent Cold War. The Western, with its violent means of settling arguments, was a crucial site at which to situate a critique of policies of mutually assured destruction that were driving the confrontation. The Mavericks were not particularly proficient with weapons, often settling disputes not through gunfights but through elaborate scams. They also frequently ran afoul of the often overzealous (read: sadistic) or corrupt guardians of the social order in a way that questioned the precepts of armed confrontation at a moment when Cold War tensions were easing. The antiauthoritarian versus law-and-order discourse, outlined in chapter 4, was a decades-long argument between Maverick’s producer Roy Huggins and Dragnet’s (1951–59) McCarthyite creator Jack Webb that was here just taking shape.

Bret Maverick was the quintessential outsider whose morality focused on peace and pleasure in a violent landscape. His efforts frequently went unrewarded and sometimes unacknowledged, as when he describes his mainstream rival in The Saga of Waco Williams: "He did everything a man should not do. But he’s still alive. Looks like he’ll be elected sheriff. I know he’ll end up with the biggest ranch in the territory. And I’m broke. Nobody even knows I’m leaving—or cares. Could I be