7
Memorable Pre-Trek Roles for DeForest Kelley
Jackson DeForest Kelley was the son of the Reverend Ernest Kelley, an itinerant Southern Baptist minister. Born January 20, 1920, DeForest Kelley spent his youth in Northern and Central Georgia, moving from town to town and church to church every few years (and sometimes more often) along with his older brother, his mother, and his stern father, whose fire-and-brimstone sermons often railed against the evils of smoking, drinking, dancing, and moviegoing. Despite his father’s dim view of show business, however, young DeForest—who was blessed with a fine voice—sang not only in the church choir but on WSB, an AM radio station in Atlanta. It was his first taste of stardom. As a teenager, Kelley began to rebel against his father’s strict rule. In 1939, now yearning for a career in theater, he bolted for California, where he moved in with an uncle in Long Beach. Kelley soon joined the Long Beach Community Playhouse, where he quickly rose through the ranks and into leading roles. Along with a handful of other Community Playhouse performers, Kelley also acted in local radio dramas. His assured performances, unique delivery, and chiseled good looks soon attracted the attention of Hollywood talent scouts. Over the next five years, he earned interviews and screen tests with several studios, and in 1942 narrowly missed out on the star-making role of hit man Philip Raven in This Gun for Hire (instead, the part went to another then-unknown, Alan Ladd). Independent producer Walter Wanger was prepared to offer Kelley a contract in 1943, but just when success seemed within reach, World War II intervened. Kelley was drafted.
Appropriately enough, given the actor’s later relations with extraterrestrials, Kelley spent most of his military career in Roswell, New Mexico. Because of his experience in radio, Kelley was assigned to the Army Signal Corps and worked as an air traffic controller at an Air Corps training base. In his off-duty hours, the actor continued to pursue his theatrical ambitions, participating in morale-boosting camp revues and radio programs. He was so impressive in these appearances that in January 1945 he was transferred to the First Motion Picture Unit in Hollywood—also known as Camp Roach, since it was based at the Hal Roach Studios. There, Kelley worked behind the scenes and sometimes on camera making military training films such as How to Act if Captured. More importantly, he rubbed elbows with Hollywood royalty and befriended other rising stars including George Reeves. Kelley—known simply as “De” (pronounced “Dee”) to his friends—was always well liked by his coworkers, who described him as kind and courteous, with a warm sense of humor and talent much larger than his ego. Kelley’s personal life was blissfully uneventful, consumed mostly by evenings at home with his wife Carolyn, a former Community Playhouse costar he married in 1945 and remained devoted to until his death 54 years later. After the war, in February 1946, Kelley finally received the offer he had been waiting for. Paramount—who had chosen Alan Ladd over him for This Gun for Hire—signed Kelley to a modest multiyear contract, which paid $150 per week for the first year, increasing to $200 per week the following year, with forty weeks guaranteed annually. But Kelley’s struggles were far from over. For the next twenty years, stardom remained elusive and financial security tenuous.
Fear in the Night (1947)
Kelley made his motion picture debut, and played his only starring movie role, in this offbeat, low-budget film noir.
The first of five quirky features directed by B-movie screenwriter Maxwell Shane (whose previous writing credits included The Mummy’s Hand [1944]), Fear in the Night features Kelley as mild-mannered bank teller Vincent Grayson, who dreams he has committed a murder and then comes to believe his nightmare may be true. In the dream, he kills someone he doesn’t know in a place he thinks he’s never been. To help solve the mystery, Grayson turns to his brother-in-law Cliff (Paul Kelly), a cop. But as evidence piles up against Grayson (who finds himself in possession of a key and a button, evidence from the crime scene), Cliff suspects his brother-in-law may be using him to establish an insanity defense.
Fear in the Night (not to be confused with a 1972 Hammer Films thriller of the same title) was adapted from a Cornell Woolrich short story. It’s a far-fetched yarn, turning on several unlikely plot devices including a preposterous hypnotism angle. The tale is told in over-the-top fashion by Shane, who tricks out the picture with all sorts of flashy gimmicks (superimposing the dead man’s face on a close-up of Kelley’s eyes, for instance). Despite all the directorial flash, however, the movie’s primary strength is Kelley. He supplies an earnest, at times intense performance far better than this undistinguished vehicle deserves. The actor’s innate likeability shines through, yet he also suggests a capacity for violence that keeps viewers guessing whether or not Grayson could really be the killer. Kelley also provides voice-over narration throughout the film (much of it distorted by heavy reverb, in another distracting style choice by Shane). Viewers will notice that the actor’s Georgia drawl, utilized so effectively in his later Westerns and on Star Trek, is virtually absent here. Kelley had worked hard to eradicate his accent, only to find it useful again later in his career. Shane adapted the same Woolrich story again, with marginally better results, under its original title Nightmare in 1956. That version featured Kevin McCarthy as Grayson and Edward G. Robinson as the brother-in-law cop.
DeForest Kelley (left) thought he was on his way to stardom when he was assigned the lead in the low-budget noir thriller Fear in the Night (1947), opposite Paul Kelly. But this turned out to be his only starring role in a feature film.
Fear in the Night was issued on the bottom half of a double bill and performed well in some markets, but did little to advance Kelley’s prospects. Paramount next assigned Kelley parts in a pair of short subjects and a thankless role in Variety Girl (1947). In that picture (which Kelley despised), he plays one of the characters featured in the framing scenes that link what is essentially a musical-comedy revue built around cameos by headline stars such as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. The studio seemed unsure what to do with Kelley, who showed promise but wasn’t a typical leading man. After loaning him out for appearances in two religious shorts, Paramount dropped him in 1948.
The next nine years were the toughest of Kelley’s career. While he landed a trickle of minor film and television roles, the Kelleys subsisted on Carolyn’s salary as a secretary. The actor was often very effective in his tiny parts. In the Edward G. Robinson melodrama Illegal (1955), Kelley had a small but unforgettable role as an innocent man convicted of, and executed for, the murder of his wife. The actor’s work in this ten-minute sequence, which opens the film, is heart-wrenching. “I didn’t kill her, I loved her!” he pleads with the prison chaplain on his way to the electric chair. But even such outstanding moments failed to earn Kelley larger parts. Also during this period, the future “Bones” McCoy made his first foray into sci-fi with three appearances on Science Fiction Theatre, coincidentally playing doctors in the episodes “Survival in Box Canyon” (1955) and “Y.O.R.D.” (1956).
You Are There! Episode “The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1955) and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)
During these lean years Kelley received much-needed support from another Long Island Community Theatre alum, Barney Girard, then working as casting director for You Are There, a CBS educational series starring newsman Walter Cronkite and featuring reenactments of famous historical events. Cronkite anchored the program, which integrated mock news reports and interviews “from the scene” of events like the destruction of the airship Hindenburg, the Salem witch trials, and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. You Are There began as a radio program in 1947, moved to TV in 1953, and continued until 1957 (and was briefly revived as Saturday morning programming for the 1971–72 season).
Girard helped Kelley land roles in nine You Are There episodes from May 1953 through January 1956, including a pivotal part as Ike Clanton in the “The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” episode broadcast November 6, 1955. It was Kelley’s first appearance as a Western villain, and he was stunningly effective. The actor’s friends and family were taken aback by how frightening their gentle-natured friend seemed as Clanton. More importantly, Kelley’s performance wowed producer Hal Wallis, who watched the show while preparing a big-budget, star-studded feature film version of the story. Almost immediately, Wallis began trying to cast Kelley to play Ike Clanton in The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), directed by John Sturges and costarring Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. But while Wallis twisted the arms of Sturges and casting director Paul Nathan to consider Kelley for the part, Kelley obliviously signed on to appear in the RKO B-Western Tension at Table Rock (1956). By the time Wallis was able to offer the Clanton role to Kelley, Kelley couldn’t accept because the shooting of the Clanton scenes conflicted with the filming of Tension at Table Rock. Instead, Kelley took the small role of Morgan Earp, one of Wyatt’s big brothers, in Gunfight at O.K. Corral.
Left with less than ten minutes of screen time and few lines, Kelley had very little to do in Wallis’s O.K. Corral but did it beautifully. The actor has a brief speech in which Morgan “says his piece” about his younger brother riding with the notorious killer Holliday (Morgan’s against it), but is most impressive simply sitting with Lancaster and John Hudson (playing Virgil Earp) as the Earp brothers brood through the wee hours as their showdown with the Clantons approaches at dawn. Simply sitting in a chair and staring into space, Kelley’s face becomes a portrait of anxiety and determination; you can almost see the gears turning in Morgan’s head as he contemplates the recent murder of his younger brother and his own possible impending demise. Minutes later, Kelley cuts an iconic figure walking, with a six-gun strapped to his hip, to the O.K. Corral alongside Lancaster, Douglas, and Hudson. The actor had discovered his métier.
A dozen years later, Kelley made a third appearance at the O.K. Corral in the Star Trek episode Spectre of the Gun, in which Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Chekov find themselves trapped at the famous gunfight—standing in for the villainous Clantons. The episode was created, in part, as a nod to Kelley’s former fame as a Western villain. Sturges asked Kelley to reprise his role as Morgan Earp in the director’s Hour of the Gun (1967), but Kelley had to decline due to his commitments to Star Trek.
Warlock (1959)
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral opened the floodgates to a steady stream of film and television roles, usually as second-gun-to-the-left badmen. While this wasn’t the career Kelley had envisioned for himself, he nevertheless enjoyed the first flush period of his working life. Carolyn quit her secretarial job to handle her husband’s fan mail and track his residuals. Kelley played a Confederate cavalry officer in the lavish Civil War epic Raintree County (1957, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor), portrayed one of Richard Widmark’s henchmen in Sturges’s The Law and Jake Wade (1957), and appeared on more than a dozen TV series (mostly Westerns) during the two years that followed Gunfight.
Occasionally, these black-hat roles offered Kelley room to demonstrate the wider range of his ability. One such part was Curley Burne, henchman of crooked cattle baron Abe McQuown (Tom Drake) in director Edward Dmytryk’s Warlock. In this unusually morally and psychologically complex Western, merchants from the town of Warlock, Utah, tired of having their stores shot up by McQuown’s rowdy cowboys, and frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the local constabulary, hire gunman Clay Blaisedell (Henry Fonda) to bring order. Blaisedell arrives with his fawning, club-footed man Friday (Anthony Quinn) in tow, but the duo soon run afoul of the local deputy (Richard Widmark) and alienate many of the townsfolk Blaisedell has sworn to protect.
The story, adapted from a novel by Oakley Hall, is told in shades of gray, without clearly defined good guys and bad guys. That includes Curley, a minor but integral character brought to vivid life by Kelley. He emanates a rare blend of charm and menace during an early scene in which Curley taunts Blaisedell about the marshal’s gold-handled Colt pistols, luring the lawman into a barroom gunfight. Curley is outdrawn, but Blaisedell doesn’t fire. “Ooo-wee!” Kelley hoots, seeming more amused than scared by the incident. Curley tips his hat to Blaisedell on his way out of the saloon. Later, he proudly shows Blaisedell wanted posters he’s drawn up, offering a reward for the marshal’s capture. Kelley flashes a broad “Bones” McCoy grin as Curley points out the poster’s “excellent lettering and spelling.” Ultimately, Curley’s dormant sense of honor, reawakened by Blaisedell, leads him to turn the tables on McQuown and force a fair fight between the deputy and his back-shooting boss. These scenes feature Kelley at his best, making his character’s churning emotions apparent through subtle but telling changes in his posture and tone of voice. It’s a fine, authentic performance—one of many in this rich but often overlooked Western epic. Shot in color and Cinemascope with three A-list stars, the costly Warlock wasn’t the smash 20th Century-Fox was hoping for. Perhaps as a result, the picture remains underrated. Kelley always counted it as one of his best movies.
The Virginian Episode “Man of Violence” (1963)
The venerable Virginian ran on NBC for nine seasons, from 1962 to 1971, making it the third-longest-tenured of all TV Westerns, trailing only Gunsmoke (twenty seasons) and Bonanza (fourteen seasons). The Virginian was also the first Western to run in a ninety-minute time slot, making each weekly installment the equivalent of a made-for-TV movie. Kelley appeared on the show twice in 1963, but the first of those episodes, “Man of Violence,” was by far the more memorable for a couple of reasons. “Man of Violence” marked Kelley’s first work with Leonard Nimoy—with Kelley playing a doctor and Nimoy his patient, no less. Perhaps more importantly, the show gave Kelley a meaty supporting role that enabled him to flex his muscles to a greater extent than any of his big-screen parts.
In “Man of Violence,” ranch hand Trampas (Doug McClure) sets out to avenge the murder of his uncle and gets caught up in a scheme to smuggle gold out of Apache territory. Kelley plays Dr. Belden, an alcoholic cavalry surgeon trying to save the life of a man named Wismer (Nimoy), one of the gunmen who murdered Trampas’s uncle. When he learns that Wismer and his partner Judson (William Bryan) have discovered gold, an unscrupulous trader named McGoff (Michael Pate) kills Wismer and steals his treasure map. Trampas joins McGoff on his expedition into Apache territory, telling McGoff he can have the gold, but he (Trampas) wants Judson. Shortly after entering Indian land, however, they find Dr. Belden, drunk and forlorn. Distraught because he thinks his drunken negligence led to Wismer’s death, Belden has decided to commit suicide by letting the Apaches kill him rather than face a court-martial. “Maybe I thought it was the easy way out,” Belden says. “I always take the easy way out.”
Not only is Kelley a very convincing drunk, but he seems genuinely distraught and bitter. Yet, over the course of the adventure, Belden’s spirits rally. He warns Trampas against pursuing the destructive path of hate. When Trampas asks who the doctor ever hated, he replies simply, “Myself.” Eventually the doctor redeems himself, not only learning about Wismer’s true fate but saving Trampas’s life along the way. Kelley is superb throughout, portraying a man whose self-loathing is exceeded only by his devotion to his medical oath. Coincidentally, the teleplay for “Man of Violence” was written by John D. F. Black, who would serve as an associate producer on Star Trek during the show’s first season.
333 Montgomery (1964)
There was at least one producer in Hollywood who believed Kelley was capable of playing something other than the interchangeable Western badmen that constrained his creativity but supplied his meal ticket. That producer was Gene Roddenberry, who gave Kelley the starring role in 333 Montgomery, a failed television pilot that eventually aired as an episode of Alcoa Theatre.
Produced by Columbia’s Screen Gems subsidiary, the prospective series was based on the memoirs of celebrated San Francisco defense attorney Jake Ehrlich and starred Kelley as the crusading Jake Brittin, who agrees to defend Frank Piper (Steve Peck), a philandering lowlife who admits he fired three fatal shots into the husband of his married lover. Based on Piper’s version of events, however, Brittin believes the gunman was lured into the killing by the victim’s wife and is guilty of only manslaughter, not capital murder.
Roddenberry built 333 Montgomery entirely around Kelley; the actor is either on-screen or heard through voice-over narration during every scene. Brittin is a passionate and learned man who quotes the classical poets and is prone to soliloquies (looking out of his office windows, he sees the Bay Bridge to one side and Alcatraz on the other, a dichotomy that to him sums up “the alpha and omega of man’s possibilities”). The crafty attorney employs shameless courtroom theatrics to play on the jury’s sympathy and suckers the police into helping him discover new, exculpatory evidence. Brittin’s closing argument is soaring, flowery, and politically charged—questioning the morality of capital punishment. The jury finds Piper guilty of manslaughter, not murder, saving the man’s life. But afterward, Brittin refuses to shake his client’s hand. Kelley’s performance is slick and confident throughout, brimming with vigor and moral conviction.
Kelley, who traveled to San Francisco and met with Ehrlich to prepare for 333 Montgomery, took this opportunity very seriously, and it shows. Kelley seems energized by the chance to trade in his Stetson for a snap-brim fedora and reestablish himself as a dramatic lead. Interestingly, Jake Brittin in key respects anticipates Leonard McCoy. Although “Bones” would never quote Ovid, both he and Brittin are professional men, passionate about their work and guided by a strong moral compass. In their distinct ways, both try to save lives. Like many of Roddenberry’s early projects, however, 333 Montgomery proved too unorthodox and perhaps too progressive for its era. Perry Mason this wasn’t. Ultimately, network executives decided that audiences weren’t ready for a show about a lawyer who helps admitted killers escape the gas chamber. Although the pilot failed to sell, Roddenberry kept Kelley in mind for future projects.
Apache Uprising (1965)
Of all Kelley’s Western outlaws, none were more reprehensible—or more colorful—than Toby Jack Saunders, the craven, trigger-happy sidewinder he played in Apache Uprising. The film itself isn’t anything special, just one in a string of low-budget oaters that Paramount producer A. C. Lyles made in the 1950s and ’60s with aging Western stars who could be hired on the cheap. The story, adapted by Max Lamb and Harry Sanford from their book Way Station, cobbles together familiar elements from earlier, better pictures like Stagecoach (1939), Broken Arrow, (1950) and Rawhide (1951). Kelley’s performance provides the only real point of interest, but it’s very interesting indeed.
Toby Jack is a belligerent, underhanded, antisocial creep who, despite his status as an underling to primary bad guy Vance Bruckner (John Russell), seems to be the only truly dangerous character in the story. Bruckner hires Toby Jack and a second accomplice to help him rob a stagecoach when it stops at a way station. The trio plot to steal a payroll from the coach and cover their tracks by killing all the witnesses, including the driver (Lon Chaney Jr.), the guard (star Rory Calhoun), all the passengers, and any bystanders at the station. But their planned bloodbath is compromised when the Comanche stage an untimely uprising.
In this shocking scene from Apache Uprising (1965), outlaw Toby Jack Saunders (Kelley) guns down unarmed comedy relief sidekick Arthur Hunnicutt (that’s him on the barroom floor). Toby Jack was the most despicable of Kelley’s many Western villains; he gave Kelley nightmares.
“Killing’s about the easiest thing there is,” Toby Jack says when Bruckner explains the plan. Kelley plays Toby Jack as a seething cauldron of pent-up rage and plain meanness. He’s constantly spoiling for a fight, but loses both of the scraps he gets into—only to try to exact revenge by shooting, stabbing, or clubbing his opponent in the back. In the film’s most shocking moment, he guns down the story’s comedy relief, an unarmed old man played by perpetual sidekick Arthur Hunnicutt. Apache Uprising loses most of its steam when Toby Jack takes an arrow to the chest with fifteen minutes left in the eighty-seven-minute picture. Considered in contrast to the lovable “Bones” McCoy, Kelley’s spellbinding portrayal of Toby Jack Saunders demonstrates the full extent of the actor’s range. One tribute to his work here is that, according to biographer Terry Lee Rioux, of all his Western villains the only one that ever troubled Kelley, that gave him nightmares, was Toby Jack.
Police Story (1965)
In 1965, Roddenberry had two TV series in development. One was Star Trek, the other was Police Story, a crime drama inspired by his tenure with the LAPD. From the outset, the producer had wanted Kelley to play the chief medical officer of his starship. But he also wanted Kelley in a recurring role as the coroner in Police Story, and—at least initially—the crime drama won. The thirty-minute Police Story pilot—which was produced in the same time frame as the second Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”—starred Steve Ihnat as Captain James Paige, who led a team of special detectives who reported directly to the chief of police and handled complex, high-profile cases. The regular cast also featured Rafer Johnson and Grace Lee Whitney. Unlike the other movies and TV shows mentioned in this chapter, which are readily available on DVD or streaming from sites such as Netflix or YouTube, Roddenberry’s Police Story could not be located and seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth. Whatever the show’s merits, however, it failed to sell. When Star Trek was picked up and Police Story was not, Roddenberry quickly moved Kelley (along with Whitney) from one program to the other. Kelley replaced Paul Fix, who had portrayed Dr. Piper in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Along with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, Kelley was about to undertake a role that, for better or worse, would redefine his career.