THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
GRIZZLY ADAMS, PART II
You have probably heard of the legendary mountain man we told you about in part one of this tale. But there’s much more of the story to tell—the story of the classic 1970s TV show and the mountain man who portrayed him. (Part I of the story is on page 365.)
BACKGROUND
“They call me Mad Jack, and if there is anybody in these mountains that knows the real story about James Adams, that’d be me. So I’m putting it down in writing just how it happened in hopes of setting the record straight.”
If you’re of a certain age (old), then that introduction should sound familiar. It was the opening narration from The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, a one-hour drama that aired on NBC on Wednesday nights in 1978 and 1979. But the show didn’t really “set the record straight.” That would have been a pretty bad idea for a family show, because the real Adams was a mountain man who killed thousands of wild animals. The TV Grizzly Adams was much kinder and gentler. A lot of that had to with the sensibilities of the 1970s, and a lot of it had to do with the man they hired to portray Adams.
MUSCLE MAN
If anyone was born to play Grizzly Adams, it was Dan Haggerty. As a teenager in the 1950s, he worked at his family’s wild animal attraction in Pound, Wisconsin, where he learned, among other things, how to train bears to do tricks. Like Adams, he had a favorite bear that followed him around. Also like Adams, he left home to make it big in California. His mom had wanted him to be a priest. Instead, he went to live with his dad, a movie technician, in Hollywood.
Young Haggerty grew into a tall man with broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and sandy-blond hair. His good looks and powerful physique landed him small roles in 1964’s Muscle Beach Party (starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello) and 1965’s Girl Happy (starring Elvis Presley). Acting didn’t come as easy, though, and he wasn’t getting any good parts, so he supplemented his income wrangling wild animals for various Disney productions and TV shows. An avid motorcycle rider, Haggerty also worked on the bikes, including the ones that Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson rode, in 1969’s Easy Rider, and he plays a hippie in the film. Because, as Haggerty often joked, “actors don’t like animals leaping on them,” he also found steady work as a stuntman. That’s what he was doing in 1974 when he was plucked to play Grizzly Adams. But this was a much different Adams than the real-life character, and a much different time.
Camels were used as pack animals in Nevada until 1870.
After 150 years of rapid growth and industrialization, by 1970 the United States was a polluted mess. A river caught fire in Cleveland, and a blanket of brown smog was smothering Los Angeles. It got so bad that President Richard Nixon created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With that, the modern environmentalism movement was born. This “back to nature” fad led to popular frontier shows like The Waltons (1971–81) and Little House on the Prairie (1974–83). Hoping to cash in, in 1972 an up-and-coming TV writer and producer named Charles E. Sellier wrote a novel called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Despite the subtitle’s claim that it was “the true story of a man exiled in the wilderness who learns how to survive,” Sellier had no intentions of telling Adams’s true story. His was a sanitized, made-for-TV version that left out all the gory details. Two examples: the real Adams was a failed rancher and failed miner who fled to the woods in part to escape his unpaid debts; Sellier’s Adams was a gentle farmer who was wrongly accused of murder. The real Adams captured his grizzly cub by killing its mother; Sellier’s Adams rescued an orphaned cub from a cliff.
THE MOVIE
As soon as the book was published, Sellier started shopping it to movie studios. He partnered with Patrick Frawley at Sunn Classic Pictures, and they started filming the movie. But the actor they’d hired to play Adams wasn’t working out. Most of the footage was unusable, and the project stalled. Then, while Frawley was looking at some daily footage from another movie they were making called The Snow Tigers, he noticed a burly stuntman with a big beard who was chasing a tiger across a frozen lake and said, “Now that’s Grizzly Adams!” Frawley asked his secretary, Diane, “Do you know that guy?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s my husband.”
Haggerty enthusiastically accepted the role, and they scrapped the existing footage—which had cost $500,000—and used the $185,000 they had left in the budget to film The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams in the mountains outside of Park City, Utah.
The movie opens with Haggerty as Adams heading off into the wilderness, where he finds a grizzly cub he names Ben and befriends an Indian named Nakoma. If you’re a fan of the TV show, watching the movie can be a bit disconcerting because Haggerty’s voice was deemed too “California surfer” by Frawley, and was overdubbed by another actor who doesn’t sound like Haggerty. Nevertheless, the movie outperformed everyone’s expectations, making $45 million domestically and another $20 million overseas. It was the seventh highest-grossing film of 1974—coming in just behind The Godfather Part II—and is still one of the most profitable independent films ever made. When NBC aired the movie in 1976, it drew a huge 45 percent market share. NBC brass wanted a Grizzly Adams TV show, and they wanted Haggerty to play him. For Haggerty, it was a dream come true.
Yams are more closely related to lilies than they are to sweet potatoes.
As one of the characters, Mad Jack, describes Adams at the beginning of each episode, “He had a special kind of way with animals. They’d just come right up to him like he was a natural part of the wilderness.” Haggerty fit that bill perfectly. He was just as comfortable with his wild co-stars as he was with the mountains of Utah where they filmed The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (or Arizona or New Mexico when the weather didn’t cooperate). Unlike the real Grizzly Adams, who killed untold numbers of wild animals, this Adams wouldn’t even eat an animal, much less kill one. “Calm your bones, Ben,” Adams says as the bear pokes his nose into a satchel. “We’ve got to save these berries for Jack’s special blueberry pie. First, the berries go into the fillin’, and then the pies will be fillin’ you. Doesn’t that sound like a dandy idea?” Ben growls in agreement.
Ben was played by a 600-pound female Kodiak bear (a subspecies of the grizzly from Alaska) named Boz (short for Bozo). Haggerty and Boz formed an instant bond, and they remained friends until her death in 1999. Also living at Adams’s cabin are two skunks named Mary Lou and Daniel, a raccoon named Joshua, and a hawk named Hawk. He talks to them like they’re human and, like a western Dr. Doolittle, instinctively knows what they’re trying to tell him.
SUPPORTING PLAYERS
Mad Jack, a roving trader who narrates the show, bears a closer resemblance to the real John Adams, right down to his long white beard, buckskins, and fur cap. Played by veteran character actor Denver Pyle (Uncle Jesse on The Dukes of Hazzard), he often got the laugh lines, especially when bickering with his pack mule, Number 7: “You’d better stop bein’ so ornery, Number 7, or I’m gonna have to go and find me a Number 8!”
Nakoma, a member of an unnamed Indian tribe, is Adams’s “blood brother.” He was played by a stuntman named Don Shanks, who is of Cherokee and Illini descent. During a time when most Native Americans on-screen were either savages or sidekicks, Nakoma was portrayed so realistically that he spoke his own language.
Typical storylines revolved around Adams and his friends helping strangers—a girl lost in the forest, a runaway slave, a down-on-his luck hot-air balloonist. In one episode, Adams saves the life of a young “greenhorn from back East” who turns out to be Teddy Roosevelt. In one of the more dramatic storylines, Ben is accused of stealing fish from the chief of Nakoma’s tribe. Can Adams save his grizzly bear while honoring the ways of the Indians?
Wil Wheaton (Wesley on Star Trek: The Next Generation) auditioned for the role of Ralphie in A Christmas Story.
The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams premiered in January 1977 up against ratings juggernauts Good Times and The Bionic Woman. It performed strongly, bringing in an impressive 32 percent market share. Critics weren’t too impressed with Haggerty’s acting—which did improve somewhat as the show progressed—but viewers loved his “Aw, shucks” demeanor and strong moral compass (two qualities that helped President Jimmy Carter get elected in 1976 after the messiness of the Nixon/Ford years). Haggerty won the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Male Performer in a New Program that year, and (along with Boz/Ben) he became the first person featured on the cover of TV Guide twice in six months. Grizzly Adams took his rightful place on school lunch boxes alongside Star Wars and Happy Days. Part of the show’s appeal, said Haggerty at the time, was that it’s “a change for viewers who are sick of screaming brakes, cars exploding, and fight scenes. Pretty scenery and a couple of guys traipsing through the woods is a relief.”
In season two, Haggerty wanted Adams to get a wife, but his request was denied. The network told him more women would tune in if they thought Adams was an eligible bachelor. Then, for reasons that are still not known, NBC canceled the show, even though it was still bringing in viewers. Haggerty only got to play the character two more times in TV movies, concluding with 1982’s The Capture of Grizzly Adams. If Haggerty had his way, he’d have played Adams for the rest of his life, but that’s not how it worked out.
PEAKS AND VALLEYS
Like Adams, Haggerty was in his mid-30s when he became famous. And, like Adams, he called that time the best two years of his life. But unlike Adams, Haggerty became less famous when he emerged from the wilderness. The only money he made from the show was his weekly salary. He didn’t reap any of the considerable merchandising or rerun profits, and went back to being a struggling actor. (Charles Sellier trademarked the Grizzly Adams brand name and made a fortune off it in merchandising.) In the early 1980s, Haggerty paid the bills by directing animals on movie sets and guest-starring on shows like CHiPs, Charlie’s Angels, and The Love Boat. He hit rock bottom in 1985 when he was arrested in Los Angeles for selling cocaine to undercover cops, and served 90 days in jail. Haggerty became friends with the two officers who ran the sting, though, and tried to maintain a positive outlook after he served his time, saying, “The system’s been good to me.”
Maybe…but adversity was never far off. In 1987 he was in a serious motorcycle accident. While he was recovering, he was charged with tax evasion. Then in 1991, he was in an even worse motorcycle accident, which left him in a coma and required 18 surgeries to heal. (In 2008 his second wife was killed in a similar bike accident.)
First ever submarine: the Drebbel I in 1620. It was an enclosed rowboat.
Though he tried, Haggerty was never able to rekindle the Adams flame, probably because the world had simply moved on. The 1980s brought Ronald Reagan, who famously said, “A tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?” And while shows like Little House and The Waltons did manage to retain a spot in the cultural zeitgeist, for the most part popular entertainment was getting edgier and more cynical. By the 1990s, “Grizzly Adams” had become fully transformed from “patron saint of the animals” to the go-to joke about any man with a burly beard, as evidenced in Happy Gilmore, 30 Rock, Veep, Family Guy, and countless more movies and TV shows.
Unfortunately for Haggerty, whose acting range was limited, that led to a lot of “stunt-casting” in low-budget movies. He shows up in forgettable roles in a number of forgettable movies—as a “loose-cannon mall Santa” in the schlocky horror flick Elves, as a repo man in the action yarn Repo Drake, as an ex-con who gives Rob Schneider horrible advice in the raunchy comedy Big Stan, as a biker in Dead in 5 Heartbeats, and as a lumberjack in Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan. Haggerty’s final performance, as Captain in The Untold Story, premiered in 2019, three years after he died.
But none of Haggerty’s acting parts earned him enough to feed all his wild animals and his family at his sprawling ranch in Malibu Canyon. So later in his life, he supplemented his income with convention appearances and—in true Grizzly Adams fashion—he managed a company that sold log cabins. He also opened a restaurant where he sold his own brand of Cajun barbecue sauce, he sold the only surviving original motorcycle from Easy Rider, and he appeared on a late-night infomercial for hair transplants.
But the thing Haggerty wanted most—a Grizzly Adams revival—never happened. He was diagnosed with spinal cancer in August 2015. His daughter started a GoFundMe campaign to raise the $100,000 required for treatment, but it barely brought in $10,000. Once among the most popular TV stars in America, Dan Haggerty died with little fanfare in January 2016 at the age of 73.
MIXED MESSAGES
Watching The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams today is like watching an idealized version of the 1850s as told by an idealized version of the 1970s. On one hand, the storylines revolved around tolerance, racial harmony, pacifism, and environmentalism. On the other hand, impressionable little kids got to watch a nice man hand-feed wild animals, which we now know is harmful to wildlife. Even worse, kids saw Adams walk right up to large predators and talk to them as if they were human. When Haggerty was later asked about the dangers of his chosen profession, he offered this advice: “Working with a bear, it’s like being married. It has its moments. But anything with teeth and claws, be careful.”
Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman holds the record for playing the same superhero in the most movies: 11.
To see the worst-case scenario of how this mindset can play out, watch the 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, about Timothy Treadwell, described by one critic as a “New Age Grizzly Adams with a video camera.” Treadwell’s attempts to make friends with—and humanize—the grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska ended up getting him and his girlfriend killed.
THE RETURN OF GRIZZLY ADAMS?
Who knows if The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams TV show will see a resurgence in popularity, or if the character will ever be rebooted for modern audiences? That’s happened for other shows of the era, such as Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii 5-0. By the time you’re reading this, Adams may already be back. For now, though, the series is available on DVD. So if you want to be transported back to a simpler time, make yourself some flapjacks and gather your family ’round, because Mad Jack sure has a whopper of a tale to tell ya.
Bonus: If someone tries to tell you that Dan Haggerty was the only actor to lose his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame because of his 1985 cocaine arrest, it’s just an urban legend. It came about because of a typo on Don Haggerty’s star. Don played a lot of cowboys in the 1950s and ’60s, but his name was misprinted as “Dan.” The name was changed from Dan to Don shortly after Haggerty’s arrest, leading to the rumors. In 1994 Dan Haggerty did get a much-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A RANDOM BIT OF FACTINESS
The wooliest sheep on record held 90 pounds of wool.