The integrity of my Virginian character came from my maternal grandfather, John Crawford, who had come west with a wagon train from Missouri when he was 16 or 17 years old, around 1885.
I was expelled from high school the day before graduation, and since I did not have my records to get into college, I attended New York University, where my dad was a professor for 42 years. No one wants to go to a school where their father is a teacher. But I found that the department of dramatic art at the school of education was right up my alley.
At the end of my junior year, I took a vacation to California to see my mother. I got a contract at MGM in seven days, and that was the start of my career.
After the first year, MGM dropped me. Then I signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Fox gave me three big parts: in Elvis Presley’s first picture, Love Me Tender; in Pat Boone’s first picture, Bernardine; and in the Delmer Daves Western The Last Wagon.
I started doing episodic television, including Gunsmoke, The Rebel and Stagecoach West, when Fox dropped me.
I was raised at a ranch in Oregon. When an actor got an audition for a Western, he’d get asked, “Can you ride a horse?” I’d been riding since I was in diapers. Most of the actors would lie about it, and the posse would ride off in all directions.
When I moved to Texas, around 1975, I really became a horseman. I had a lot of great professional trainers who let me ride their million dollar horses. I started winning cutting horse and reining horse competitions, and doing all sorts of things with horses that I never even thought of when I was doing pictures.
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