Don't Fall in Love with a Cartwright

Apparently the Ponderosa was one of the biggest fictional ranches in Nevada, yet there was still no room for women




Bonanza, "My Son, My Son"
OB: January 19, 1964, 9 p.m. EST, NBC
I was five days old when this episode was first broadcast.

Throughout the half-century of my personal life, my love life--well, let's just say it, it hasn't often been perfect. The road has been a long, bumpy one, most especially in the last 10-12 years or so.

But if I could take comfort in anything, it's that I wasn't a Cartwright.

My relationships didn't have the typically, truly ugly end of a Cartwright's.  I suppose if I ever hung out with Ben, Hoss, Adam and Little Joe in a bar and we swapped stories, their end of the conversation would be like, "What, another one dumped you for an ex? Wah, wah, wah.  When one of your girlfriends gets an arrow in the back or smallpox, we'll talk."

Don't get me wrong, Bonanza was a lavish, well-written series, one that practically reinvented the western. But when the writers feel a need to keep its male leads single forever, and that show goes on for more than a decade, sooner or later a trope like this one will jump right out at a person. But perhaps it looks so obvious because Bonanza wasn't just any western. It was that rarest of genres, the personal western.  On Gunsmoke we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about Matt Dillon's personal life because he was such a loner; Major Adams of Wagon Train was a workaholic whose personal life would've gotten in the way of his wagon train (to the extent you could have one if you're always leading wagon trains from St. Joseph on west).  Bonanza was every bit about the Cartwrights' personal foibles and heartaches as much as it was about the latest wannabe alpha male who wanted to kick a Cartwright's ass just to show everyone who was in Virginia City that day.

What's interesting is, I was never big on westerns when I was growing up, but I always did watch Bonanza. Maybe it was because the Hayes family TV set stayed on NBC after Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color every Sunday night.  Maybe it was because it was in color, a new thing for television, and westerns, at that point.  Maybe it was because I loved cars so much even at that young age and the show was sponsored by Chevrolet, with the cast even appearing in costume to sell a Chevelle or two at the end of every show. Maybe that was my personal unspoken contract with the Cartwrights: Dixon, we know you're not big on westerns, but hang out with us for an hour and we'll at least show you a car.

But maybe it wasn't even a car. Maybe it was just Ben Cartwright breaking the fourth wall and talking to me. Maybe it was just the fact that the Cartwright boys were so accessible, that Hoss might actually be my friend in the real world. Most western TV heroes were often considerably grumpy at best.  Married men need not apply, and with the rare exceptions like this one (and say, The Rifleman), "family" wasn't a word associated with western shows and characters.

Bonanza arrived in the midst of a big boom in westerns on TV, a tried and true genre that raked in large amounts of money for movie theaters, and was posed to rake in ad money on television once production budgets caught up with television's growth.  It was also a common way to deal in subtext with current day social issues, which Bonanza would do most especially.  What made it different was its choice of writers, men like Anthony Lawrence who admitted up front they weren't comfortable or experienced writing westerns, but were well at home writing about characters and relationships.

The show's premise was also very unusual: Ben Cartwright, a one-time sailor and three-time widower who apparently moved to Virginia City, Nevada early on and built a great deal of wealth for his three sons, each by different wives.  That meant his three sons--the educated and slightly arrogant oldest, Adam; the big, burly but sweet teddy bear, Eric "Hoss"; and the somewhat temperamental Joseph "Little Joe"--could be way different from one another and still show a brotherly bond. We meet them as adults in 1860s Nevada. In the earliest years we often saw them brawling with each other, physically and verbally.  With a father's military background and three grown sons who still lived at home, the Cartwrights would be relatable to the postwar baby-boomer audience who were more used to seeing families on sitcoms and daytime soaps than westerns. And the Cartwrights' wealth fit right in with the prosperous middle class of the 1950s and 1960s that were tuning in.

The show also ushered in something that would be quickly picked up by other westerns, especially the ones on NBC: color.  When Bonanza premiered on NBC in 1959, it was sponsored by the network's parent company, RCA, which used the hour to play up its still-new, still-postwar-status-affirming color TVs.  And as ratings and script quality were shaky during the first season, RCA still had a lavishly produced series on which to show off their product (and show off through their product), so that's how it managed to stay on the air for a second season.  That's when ratings started to rise with the show finishing at #17 for the year.

But the third season changed all of that.  The show got a new time slot--Sundays at 9 Eastern, replacing The Dinah Shore Chevy Show and immediately beginning to pummel its competitors. It also got a new sponsor. As RCA left to co-sponsor Disney, the show inherited Dinah Shore's sponsor, Chevrolet.  Apparently the General Motors carmaker was the go-to blue chip sponsor for lavish budgets whenever needed, like the cross-country location shooting of Route 66 and the special effects of Bewitched.  On Bonanza they helped underwrite the much-needed location and color photography and period sets, props and costumes.

On screen, the biggest changes were with the characters.  At first they seemed to live fiercely by the motto "Shut up and get off our property!" making them knee-jerkedly hostile to outsiders. It was the actor playing the show's patriarch, Lorne Greene, who told the producers that "Get off my property!" wasn't a business plan that made sense, and as wealthy people heavily involved in their community (as they should be), they would quite often welcome guests to the Ponderosa Ranch.  The producers agreed and toned down that vibe.  They also tinkered with the relationship between the three Cartwright brothers, who stopped throwing each other all over the house so much and became more affectionate and protective toward each other.

And ultimately, all of that made the show one of the great runaway hits of the 1960s, crushing competitors like Perry Mason (which once beat the show in another time slot), Judy Garland and Garry Moore. It also made iconic stars out of its four male leads, Lorne Greene (as Ben Cartwright), Pernell Roberts (as Adam), Dan Blocker (as Hoss) and Michael Landon (Little Joe).  Previously the only one who had even the tiniest modicum of being on pop culture radar was Landon. He was the title character in the low-budget "I was a Teenage Werewolf," a movie that became a cult favorite at drive-ins. But once the show took off, the four were in a position to negotiate salaries of the then-unheard-of $10,000 an episode.  Considering the show cranked out more than 30 episodes per season, they were all on track to become millionaires.

Bonanza was very socially conscious.  Despite the show's central family coming from wealth, and bad guys constantly making an issue of it (and even good guys sometimes resenting it), the show actually had a more progressive agenda.  Tolerance of different people was a common theme, for instance, as different episodes throughout the years examined bigotry toward Native-Americans, Asians, Jews, African-Americans and even little people. The TV season in which I was born, season five, actually had an example of both of the last two. It also has episodes dealing with health care for the poor and fundamentalist opposition to it ("Rain from Heaven"), how bureaucracy adversely affects poor Native Americans ("The Toy Soldier"), euthanasia ("The Quality of Mercy") and the pitfalls of military justice and blind authority ("Alias Joe Cartwright"). The rights of the accused, to a fair trial, is an issue that comes up more than once. Other episodes throughout the years would deal with domestic violence, substance abuse, and during the Vietnam era, anti-war themes and the right to protest.

The well-remembered, legendarily-goofy episode, "Hoss and the Leprechauns," is a classic from that season that made me laugh out loud several times. Hoss sees what appears to be a leprechaun, complete with green costume, get chased up a tree by a bear; when Hoss saves him from the bear he runs away, leaving Hoss to find his bag of gold. Hoss is concerned (rightfully) his family and the townspeople will think he's off his nut when he tries to explain that. The "leprechaun" has a similar moment when he tries to tell his fellow "leprechauns" that a "giant" just rescued him from a bear.  This episode actually has a surprisingly sweet, poignant plot twist, in which the "leprechauns" turn out to be vaudeville performers whose leprechaun act is the only profitable work the "little people" can get in the old West. It ends as Hoss gives a touching speech to his fellow Virginia City residents about co-existing with people different from them who want them same things out of their community that they do.

But the theme of "Hoss and the Leprechauns" wasn't necessarily a civil rights stand-in; no, that would come in a more obvious way later in the season with the episode "Enter Thomas Bowers." It was originally broadcast in April 1964, just months before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and more months before Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. William Marshall played Thomas Bowers, a well known singer of Italian opera who gets a chilly reception after being invited to Virginia City to perform. He turns out to be black, and so he's refused service at the cafe and refused a hotel room, then a group of vigilantes start hunting him after word gets out he could be a runaway slave. It's a tough, hard-hitting, uncompromising episode that made General Motors and a couple of NBC affiliates nervous, but it makes its point. It brings up memories of when actresses Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen were treated so badly by Atlanta's hospitality industry when they came to town for the premiere of "Gone With the Wind." We even hear a lengthy explanation of the Dred Scott decision, presented here as a passing indictment of the legal system that worked against black people for such a long time.

But most of the season was on the show's familiar, personal territory, including the Cartwrights' very unfortunate luck with women. The season premiere has Hoss falling head over heels, and getting engaged, to a woman who is apparently (as much as 1963 era television writing can tell us) a sex addict, hoping to "save" her. Over the course of the season, Little Joe will lose Calamity Jane to Doc Holladay (historical figures often popped up on Bonanza, including Jonathan Harris as Charles Dickens), and we'll see the flashback involving Hoss' birth and the death of his mother, Inga. Spoiler alert: she's the one who gets the arrow. Hey, don't get upset with me, NBC actually spoiled it in their original 1963 press release. (Writer Anthony Lawrence would write similar flashbacks for Adam's and Little Joe's mothers, and their own untimely demise.)
It was during this season the show came as close as it ever did to having a regular female love interest. Adam actually had a four-episode romance with a female ranch owner and single mom played by Kathie Browne. A TV Guide article from the last week of January 1964 revealed the producers came up with the idea as an effort to keep an unhappy Pernell Roberts on the show, and if it didn't work, provide a way to write him out, by having him marry her character and move away. Roberts' own idea, in that 1964 world of television: Adam marries a Native American woman who would be portrayed by an African-American actress. NBC politely said no. Browne's character ultimately left the show arm-in-arm with the Cartwrights' cousin Will.

And the episode the week I was born, "My Son, My Son," is about yet another doomed Cartwright romance. This time, it's about a problem son that may or may not be a killer.

As we begin the episode, Ben and his new love, Katherine Saunders (played by Oscar winner Teresa Wright) are very happily riding along the countryside. Ben invites her over for dinner, and as they ride away, Little Joe tells Hoss he might have to get out his blue suit. "Who died?...I only wear it to funerals, and weddings," Hoss replies. (I love the way those two are conflated, like they're letting us know up front not to get too attached to Ben's new girl.)

As Ben and Katherine take in a view of Lake Tahoe from their carriage (Lake Tahoe bordered a large chunk of the Ponderosa, according to the map that catches fire in the opening credits), they give us a quick verbal tour of Katherine's baggage.  She's a widow, and her son went on trial for murder (he claimed self defense) and was acquitted, but left town because he felt no one believed him.  She kept her ranch open in case he ever returned and still loved him. "Is that so wrong?" she asks Ben. "I think it's kind of hard to judge the right from wrong, of love," Ben replies. (I don't think any western character on TV ever discussed the ins and outs of love so much as Ben Cartwright. He's surprisingly sensitive.)

Katherine and Ben arrive at the Ponderosa, where they're met with the show's most cringe-worthy attack on political correctness, Hop Sing the cook. Played broadly by Victor Sen Young, his broken English is clearly meant to be "cute," and unfortunately distracts from the show's otherwise good record on celebrating diversity. Hop Sing only appeared on the show eight or nine times a year; Ray Teal as Sheriff Roy Coffee appeared far more often most years. Hop Sing's presence also underlines another running joke among Bonanza fans: the Ponderosa, a livestock and timber supplier, supposedly has hundreds of workers--even its own army, according to the show's pilot episode--but we never see any of them.

As Ben gets a fire going on the fireplace, the two discuss their relationship and their future, amid the romantic sounds of David Rose's score. Rose proves himself to be very versatile, supplying music ranging from slapstick comical to dramatic action, and here, romance.

"This house just needs a woman's touch," Ben tells Katherine. "Oh, Ben, this is probably the best run household in Nevada! You don't need a woman to help you," she replies on behalf of the writers and showrunner David Dortort. When they ask each other why they never remarried, Ben just says he never met anyone else he wanted to ask, while Katherine mentions her whole world revolving around her desire to be reunited with her son. Ben tells her she shouldn't build her whole existence around that, and she tells Ben she doesn't want to be alone.

Right when she gets that out of her mouth, we meet her son, Eden (Dee Pollock), wading and swimming through a creek to lose the trail of a posse that's hunting him.
At dinner, Ben tells everyone  that he has a big announcement, but before he can get it out of his mouth, Little Joe and Hoss correctly guess it and began celebrating their father's engagement. Adam, who has just returned from town, takes Ben aside and tells him about Eden and the posse; apparently Eden was upset over his former love Linda marrying Frank Miller, and was heard in a bar repeatedly vowing to kill Frank Miller. Later, Frank's brother Carl saw Eden running away from Frank's house, then found Linda shot to death. "He's got the whole town riled up, and they're out looking for blood," Adam tells Ben, then suggests they join the posse so they can get to Eden before a bloodthirsty vigilante like Carl Miller does.

As the Cartwright sons get horses ready to join a posse, Katherine tells Ben she just knows Eden didn't kill Linda.  Ben explains to her about the posse, and about some men who are "pretty riled up" over the whole case, and is noticeably non-committal about Eden's guilt or innocence. When Katherine asks if Ben is going to let Eden be arrested, he pointedly says, "I'll see to it that no harm comes to him. I can't promise any more."

After a commercial break, we see Eden hiding in a creek as a posse goes by. He notices his gun missing from its holster and hides in the lake. Right about that time, one of the searchers finds it and hands it to a delighted Carl Miller. As the Cartwrights arrive, the man who's presumably searching for the killer of his brother's life is expressing snark a whole lot more than grief or anger, referring to Eden as a "wolf cub" and making snide remarks about Ben "holding the widow's hand." "He'll face a jury, not a lynch mob," Ben tells him. "Well, I guess that's according to who finds him first," the apparently sociopathic Miller shoots back.

Miller then tells Ben, he knew Eden better than anyone and treated him like his own son, so, holding up a makeshift noose, asks, "Is this about the right neck size?" Ben's response to that is a quick ass whooping. There's usually one of these per episode. Adam grins from ear to ear. Ben then tells his sons to keep a close eye on Miller, then Ben rides away.

Katherine goes out to the barn, where Eden surprises her. She embraces him and says, "My son, my son!" She tries to assure him he's safe now and Ben will help him, but Eden remains skeptical. Then Ben walks up, gun drawn, and asks Katherine if she's O.K. She says yes, she's happy Eden is back. Eden extends his hand to Ben, who doesn't return the gesture. He tells the two to get back to the house.

As Eden drinks coffee at the Cartwright dining room table, he describes life on a large Texas ranch, then gives his side of the "Linda" story. He says he went over to the house to tell Linda what he thought of her, but she was already dead. And he said he ran because he knew everyone was going to blame him anyway, since the previous trial.

At this point, Hop Sing announces he hears "many, many horses." Ben improvises a quick escape plan: he'll take Eden up near the lake, by foot, and Katherine will bring food and horses later.

Meanwhile, the Cartwrights and the other searchers arrive at the Ponderosa, and Little Joe offers fresh horses. Miller starts demanding to know Ben's whereabouts and starts suggesting he's covering Eden's tracks and hiding him. Adam suggests Miller look for himself but Miller just wants to mouth off. At one point Miller and Adam also get into another fight (which Miller's already had his ass handed to him once that day by the oldest, slowest Cartwright so he must be some kind of masochist), but Hoss stops them.  Adam goes into the house, where he finds Eden's empty gun belt lying on the floor. That's when Katherine admits Ben is taking Eden near the lake. She implores Adam to delay the posse, so he goes outside to push the idea of searching by the river, not by the lake, since Eden couldn't have gotten very far. Miller then starts demanding they search by the lake. But this is where Sheriff Roy Coffee rides up, and reminds Miller and everyone else this will be handled his way and legally. So, they'll be searching near the river.

Near the lake, Eden panics at the idea his mother won't make it with the horses. He and Ben have a long talk about the hunting trips they used to take with Eden's father, who Eden thinks couldn't be satisfied with anything he did, and insists his mother was the only one who cared. Ben says Eden's father just didn't understand him, and "He gave you every chance, until your credit ran out." Eden pleads self-defense in the earlier killing.

Then they hear horses; Katherine brought them, and the food. Eden then asks to go along and starts throwing a fit to get a gun, but Ben wants to take him to a military stockade in Port Churchill, where a mob won't be able to break into the jail and lynch him.

Miller and his man, who've broken off from the posse, see the three ride by, so Miller fires a shot at them. He orders them off the horses, and orders Ben to drop his gun. After sending his man back to get the rest of the posse, he keeps trying to order Eden to step away from his mother. Eden then shouts "You did it, didn't you?  You loved your brother's wife!" As Miller steps closer, Ben jumps him and takes his gun away. Eden then shoots Miller. As Ben gets up, he shoots Ben, too, in the episode's shocking plot twist.

Katherine then points Ben's gun at Eden and tells him to put his own gun down. Eden accuses Ben of "double-crossing us" and asks for a gun. "When I have a gun, people sit up and take notice...they all give me a chance, because they're scared.  Now c'mon, hun, give it here, you don't look right with that thing in your hands." He suggests her coming with him, that they won't shoot if she's there. It makes her ask if that's all anyone means to him, someone to use. He eventually snatches the gun away and she vows he'll have to use it on her. "You think I won't?" he shoots back. She asks, "You did kill her, didn't you?" and he answers by slapping her to the ground. Ben, now with Miller's gun, rises up and calls out to Eden. He fires at Ben, who shoots Eden off his horse. Katherine then screams and cries, throwing herself on Eden's now lifeless body as she weeps.

The final scene finds Katherine, wearing black for mourning, leaving the Ponderosa, with Ben wearing his left arm in a sling. "I understand. Just couldn't work out for us now," Ben tells her, with the implicit understanding that killing your girlfriend's murderous son is a bit of a dealbreaker. Katherine says she'll always love her son, no matter what. She tells Ben she's sorry and goodbye, as she rides away, still alive, but leaving another Cartwright relationship in ruins shrouded by death.

It's a well done, well acted episode, one that many of the show's fans rightfully consider an all-time favorite. But it's also one that still sticks to the old "something bad will happen to a Cartwright woman" trope. Creator and showrunner David Dortort once said in an interview that Ben Cartwright won't be "led around by the nose by anybody," and that his show rejects maternal instincts. But I have to wonder if they really needed to reject them so brutally?

Bonanza finished the 1963-64 season as the 9th most watched show in television, killing The Judy Garland Show on CBS and Arrest and Trial, ABC's Law & Order ancestor, in the process. The following three seasons it was the number one show on television and its competitors were mud--until The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS and its youthful, equally progressive audience, finally put a dent in its ratings.

Despite Lorne Greene's appeals to his financial sense, Pernell Roberts left the show after the 1964-65 season, its first at #1. He cited becoming tired of the role, and the fact Adam and the other sons had to ask "permission" of Ben to do things.

Those ratings would slip by the turn of the decade, until Dan Blocker's sudden death in 1972 coincided with the show's plummet out of the top 30, and its midseason cancellation by NBC in January 1973. Lorne Greene would go on to a few short-lived series, most notably the original Battlestar Galactica; Pernell Roberts had Trapper John, M.D.; but none of them had the post-Bonanza bonanza of Michael Landon (Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven) before his untimely death. It was Landon who once joked that Bonanza had to be canceled because "they ran out of room to bury the women." And on Little House, Landon's character, Charles Ingalls, stayed married for the duration of the series, and both of his daughters, Mary and Laura, were married during its course. It was a reverse Bonanza.

But many feel the real reason Bonanza may have been canceled was because time finally ran out for its very boys' club mentality. The 1972 season premiere, "Forever," actually found Little Joe getting married, finally...only for the bride to end up murdered by a bad guy. I've heard anecdotes of people who swore off the show forever after seeing that one, letting a Cartwright get married, only to take the bride back away. It may have very well lost its female audience forever that night. It may have been the last straw, as times changed for women in the early 1970s. In fact they changed as far back as 1965, when ABC premiered The Big Valley, a show very obviously modeled after--and one-upping, perhaps--Bonanza. This time the head of the family, Lorne Greene's counterpart, is a woman, Victoria Barkley (screen legend Barbara Stanwyck), and one of the adult, stay-at-home siblings is the beautiful but tough Audra (Linda Evans). As soon as America met the Barkleys, the whole idea that women in the mix would kill a family-oriented western, was laid bare as a lie forever.

Bonanza's lack of permanent women, you could argue, reflected like in the 1860s as much as the 1960s, when women were rarely in positions of power and their aspirations were often based on who they could marry. But the show clearly played on how the male writers perceived the modern day sensibilities of their audience. The idea of selecting a mate based on love may even be newer than we're led to believe on Bonanza, for instance. It was likely believed the women in the audience would rather see the Cartwright boys single, but still wanted to see them have something resembling a love life.  But they didn't want to alienate people who might be put off by four men loving them and leaving them.

What really killed all of those women weren't arrows, bullets, now-cured diseases or medieval childbirth, and what really chased off the others wasn't guilt, foiled schemes or revelations of sordid pasts.  No, the true culprit was a common cause in the 1960s that originated in the writers' room: an overdose of testosterone and an allergy to estrogen.

No wonder Chevrolet wanted to sell their trucks on the show so much.

Availability: the show's first six seasons are available on DVD, and select episodes can be streamed in some places. To this day, the show is also a staple in cable reruns.

Next time on this channel: The Dick Van Dyke Show.