Hair Raising Tails of the Old West

The trail dust from our last outing in the moviehouse hasn’t even been swept clean before we saddle up again for another ride into the western frontier of American film.

Through the years, in theaters and on the home screen, the presentation of cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, city slickers, saloon girls and schoolmarms - especially the haircuts and hairstyles - reflected the popular fashions of the particular decade of their production. The logic is understandable. Audiences want to relate to larger-than-life characters they can identify with and emulate.

One has only to look at reruns of "Bonanza" to immediately recognize that it was produced in the 1960s. As a note of interest, both Lorne Greene and Pernell Roberts sported toupees, while in 1968, Dan Blocker started wearing a rug to cover his thinning scalp. In fact, on the Ponderosa, besides the horses, only Little Joe (Michael Landon) maintained his own mane. Even the Chinese cook, Hop Sing (Victor Sen Yung) wore an attached queue.

Historically, hairstyles and fashions in dress that were in vogue in Victorian England during the second half of the 19th century were equally popular in the United States. Men preferred their hair short, cut above the ears. A center part was fashionable in the 1870s, although there were, of course, individual preferences in combing - parted just off-center, on the side or brushed straight back. Most males were fond of facial hair of some sort - mustaches, sideburns, mutton-chops, fringe beards, goatees or full beards. There were exceptions who thought that a clean-shaven visage gave them a fastidious, more aesthetic appearance.

As a general rule, a woman who wore her hair down instead of pulled back was not considered a "lady." This was looked upon as a show of immaturity and lack of sophistication. Many female stars in wild west shows, notably Annie Oakley (below left), wore their hair down for performances but would not have appeared that way in public (Miss Oakley, below right). Only young girls wore their tresses down.

That being said, we turn the projector on and screen what we deign to be the Top 10 Most Historically Inaccurate Haircuts in Westerns.

10. The Three Stooges

The Three Stooges, like the Marx Brothers, were a close-knit clan of anarchists beleaguered by and battling with the elite snobbery of sophisticated society. But this trio of undersized vaudevillians of Jewish heritage stood out with their singular, savagely funny but harmlessly over-the-top fracases amongst themselves. The bickering threesome (of which Moe and Larry remained the anchor) were funny at first sight simply on the basis of their diminutive stature and signature haircuts.

Placed in the Old West, they seemed especially out-of-place.

Among the 190 comedy short films the Stooges made, at least nine were set in the West, beginning with 1937’s "Goofs & Saddles," which featured Moe as Wild Bill Hiccup, Curly as Buffalo Billius and Larry as Just Plain Bill. After Shemp stepped in for Curly (who suffered a debilitating stroke), the boys appeared in arguably their funniest Western spoof, "Punchy Cowpunchers" (1950), thanks in no small part to the comedic slapstick skills of Jock Mahoney as the slowwitted, bumbling, guitar-playing cowboy hero Elmer. Mahoney (below) was an expert stuntman and flawlessly executed a series of hilarious pratfalls.

Incidentally, Mahoney (who portrayed Tarzan in two films in the early 1960s) was the stepfather of Sally Field. In the 1978 Burt Reynolds-Sally Field comedy "Hooper," the character of the retired stuntman played by Brian Keith was called "Jocko" as a tribute to Mahoney.

To be fair, Shemp's parted hairstyle would have fit right in back in a frontier cowtown...In 1963, the Stooges - Moe, Larry and Joe "Curly Joe" DeRita - played cowboys-and-Indians one last time (below), in the feature film "The Outlaws Is Coming," directed by Moe’s son-in-law. By this time, Moe and Larry were in their 60s and were just too tuckered out and too fat for these kinds of shenanigans.
Before he joined the Stooges, Curly had sported a healthy head of wavy hair, which he would forever lament having to shave down to the scalp for the sake of the act. Historically, shaved heads were indeed a rare sight in the Old West, which brings us to…

9. Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas (a tie)

Yul Brynner, of Russian-Swiss-Mongolian-Jewish ancestry, first shaved his head for his Broadway musical role in "The King and I" (1951), which he reprised in the 1956 film version. When he starred in "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), his character of hired gunhand Chris (a name as out-of-place in the West as his gleaming, bald pate) was referred to as a Cajun, just to excuse his exotic, indefinable accent. Weary of costar Steve McQueen’s tireless attempts to upstage him, Brynner finally warned the upstart that all he had to do was remove his hat to steal back a scene. Brynner repeated the role in the by-the-numbers sequel "Return of the Seven."

In 1964, Brynner portrayed a dandyish Creole named Jules Gaspard D’Estaing (below) in "Invitation to a Gunfighter," an offbeat western co-written, produced and directed by Richard Wilson, a member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. The impressive supporting cast featured George Segal, Pat Hingle and Strother Martin. Oddly, Brynner appeared with a full head of hair in "Villa Rides," a 1968 saga, costarring Robert Mitchum and Charles Bronson, which had very little to do with actual history. Sam Peckinpah wrote the original screenplay and was set to direct the picture before Brynner had him fired because the director’s vision didn’t match the star’s perspective on how the legendary hero of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 should be depicted.

Telly Savalas cut all his hair off for his role as Pontius Pilate in the all-star 1965 religious epic "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (remember John Wayne as the sympathetic Roman centurion?) and afterward opted to remain completely bald, even in westerns, including "The Scalphunters," "Mackenna’s Gold," "Land Raiders" and the Italian Western "A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die," costarring James Coburn. In 1972, he starred in "Pancho Villa," a low-budget action flick shot in Spain, with Clint Walker and Chuck Connors. (The real Pancho Villa is pictured below right.)

As rare as the sight of a shaved head might have been on the range or in a saloon, one smalltime desperado was known, or appropriately, lesser known, for his lack of hair. Burt Alvord, who witnessed Wyatt Earp’s gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, at the age of 15, was a lawman and tracker turned outlaw, participating in armed robberies throughout Arizona’s Cochise County. Following a number of arrests, incarcerations and escapes, Alvord eventually drifted to South America, where he was last seen working as canal laborer in Panama in 1910. So-called "grass-roots" historian C.L. Sonnichsen once quipped that if Burt (below) would have had a thick, bushy head of hair, he would have been right up there with famous outlaws of the past.
In "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972), starring Robert Redford, actor Stefan Gierasch played a baldheaded mountain man named Del Gue, first seen buried up to his neck (below), the aftermath of an encounter with an unfriendly Indian called Mad Wolf. When Johnson asks why he shaved his head, Del Gue replies, "Mad Wolf figures like every other Injun I know. Says this scalp ain’t fit for no man’s lodge pole. Ain’t the first time I’ve protected my head in such a manner."
Speaking of scalping, the notion that it was European immigrants who taught scalping to Indians became a popular conceit in the counter-cultural 1960s. However, according to James Axtell, who recently retired as a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, there is abundant evidence that Native Americans practiced scalping long before the arrival of European explorers and settlers.

Army scouts of the 19th century Western frontiers often adopted flamboyant outfits of embroidered buckskin and shoulder-length hair as a challenge to the native inhabitants - sort of an "in-your-face" dare to scalpers.

The following is excerpted from the 2002 book Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull: Inventing the Wild West by singer-songwriter-poet-historian-actor-playwright-painter Bobby Bridger: "As did most of the scouts…Buffalo Bill (Cody) (above)wore his hair long. Scouts of the era were civilians conscripted and hired by the Army because of their intimate understanding of Plains Indian people and culture…Cody and other scouts preferred buckskin costumes and wore long hair in deference to native Plains people who preferred not to cut theirs. The Plains Indian custom of wearing long hair…had evolved into a badge that indicated an honorable and dangerous opponent, one who would willingly offer his proud mane to anyone powerful enough to take it in battle. Long hair was the victor’s trophy."

A reporter in an April 1867 edition of the St. Louis Missouri Democrat described the 38-year-old James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickock (above) as "one of the finest examples of that peculiar class known as frontiersman, ranger, hunter, and Indian scout…as handsome a specimen of a man as could be found…hair parted from the center of the forehead and hanging down behind the ears in wavy, silken curls…"

Probably the most famous (or infamous, depending on one’s point of view) long hair was sported by George Armstrong Custer (above), who grew his thin, blond hair to shoulder-length after the Civil War, earning him the nickname "Old Curly."

At some point in his travels, Buffalo Bill became friends with William A. Bell (above), a Scottish immigrant who eventually owned a printing business in Iowa. During their friendship, Bill made a bet with Bell. After placing a large sum of money in a bank (some say as much as $10,000), Buffalo Bill challenged his pal to keep the hair of his son, Leonard Cody Bell (called Cody Bell) uncut until he was 18 years old, after which the younger Bell could claim the money.

Cody Bell kept his end of the bargain. As a young teen, his hair measured 58 inches long. Enrolled in a military academy, he wound his tresses into a bun pinned beneath his uniform cap. Fellow cadets dubbed him the "Daughter of the Regiment." At the age of 17, he was invited by Buffalo Bill to join his Wild West Show, where he played cornet in the sideshow band (above). In 1918, Cody Bell finally cut his hair to join the Army when the U.S. entered World War I.

Pictured above is Leonard Cody Bell as a respectable businessman.

Speaking of long-hairs, we come to the next honoree on our list…

8. David Carradine

For his 1980 take on the James-Younger gang, director Walter Hill ("Broken Trail") scored a casting coup in "The Long Riders" by gathering real-life acting brothers to portray outlaw siblings. James and Stacy Keach played Jesse and Frank James, David, Keith and Robert Carradine were Cole, Jim and Bob Younger, Randy and Dennis Quaid played Clell and Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest appeared as Charlie and Bob Ford (Beau and Jeff Bridges had been asked to portray the Ford brothers, but Jeff didn’t want to be remembered as the coward who shot Jesse James). The film, episodic to a fault, without regard to a tangible timeline, is often emotionally detached but never lacking in thrills in its depiction of the band’s exploits, culminating in the disastrous attempt to rob the bank in Northfield, Minnesota.

James Keach maintained a commanding presence as the group’s leader, ably supported by brother Stacy’s understated performance as Frank, even though both looked nothing like their historical counterparts.

And that brings us to David Carradine, whose out-of-place portrait of Cole, the eldest of the Younger brothers, included a mane of stringy, shoulder-length hair. The real Thomas Coleman Younger was the son of prosperous Missouri farmers who became a Confederate guerilla during the Civil War. It would have been highly unlikely for him to adopt the look of frontier Army scouts. (Pictured below right is a photograph of Cole Younger taken at Minnesota's Stillwater State Penitentiary after his arrest following the Northfield fiasco.)

However, when you’re as cool as David Carradine, directors will cut you some slack. In his 1995 autobiography Endless Highway, Carradine recalled, "That picture was more fun than I can even describe. All we did was ride horses, shoot off guns, hang out with the brothers, and drink moonshine."

7. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas

The oft-filmed tale of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the shoot-out in Tombstone, Arizona, received the overblown, big-budget Hollywood treatment in 1957’s "Gunfight at the OK Corral." The script by best-selling novelist Leon Uris (Exodus) played fast and loose with history. For instance, James Earp, in fact the oldest of the Earp boys, was depicted as "Jimmy," the baby brother who gets gunned down in the streets of Tombstone (James, who had nothing to do with the storied feud, lived to be in his 80s). The actual gunfight, which occurred October 26, 1881, lasted a mere 30 seconds, consisted of the exchange of 34 bullets and resulted in the deaths of three men. On screen, the shoot-out, which took four days to film, clocked in at six minutes. Like every other movie about Wyatt Earp, as pointed out by author George MacDonald Fraser in The Hollywood History of the World, "an attempt is made to give heroic importance to what was, by any standards, a nasty little shooting-scrape."

Beyond the historical shortcomings, the problem with "Gunfight at the OK Corral" is that, as played by broad-shouldered Burt Lancaster, with his clean-shaven face and wavy, 1950s coif, Wyatt Earp (above center) looked a heck of a lot like Burt Lancaster. In the book History Goes to the Movies, writer Joseph Roquemore remarked, "Lancaster’s Earp is unbearably noble." Despite a convincing consumptive cough and a pervasive aura of world-weary fatalism, Kirk Douglas came across as too robust of a presence as the tubercular Doc Holliday (above right) and ended up looking a heck of a lot like Kirk Douglas.

6. Kris Kristofferson

Without a doubt, the saga of Billy the Kid has been presented in more films than that of Wyatt Earp, but the one that merits mention in our moviehouse is the unsettling appearance of shaggy-locked Kris Kristofferson as the notorious outlaw in "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (1973).

According to author Marshall Fine, in Bloody Sam, "Most of the hot young actors of the moment were considered" for the role, including Peter Fonda, Jon Voight, Malcolm McDowell, Marjoe, "even a newcomer named Don Johnson," before director Sam Peckinpah saw a Kris Kristofferson concert and decided he had found his Billy.

Peckinpah had been riding high after the critical acclaim of "The Wild Bunch" and "Straw Dogs" and the box-office popularity of "The Getaway," but by the time he saddled up for "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," he, in Marshall Fine’s words, "ran into a studio head even more ruthless than he was and a studio more than willing to trample his work to get…a product that could be marketed with Peckinpah’s name (if not his vision) attached to it."

The production was further complicated by the director’s alcoholism. In the book If They Move…Kill ‘Em! Peckinpah biographer David Weddle noted, " ‘Pat Garrett’ and all the films that came after it would be plagued by gaps in continuity, sudden lurches in tone, and scenes that were sloppily staged, overwritten, overacted, and sometimes embarrassingly bad…the motor had begun to sputter; the grip on the throttle had slackened." Writer Marshall Fine bluntly called "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" "the film that sent (Peckinpah) into a tailspin…from which his career never recovered."











As for Kris Kristofferson’s styling of Billy the Kid as a rock star of the sagebrush, he was too large (the real Kid was, by all accounts, and in one existing photo, a diminutive proto-punk) and too old. When he was killed, Billy was 21. When he portrayed Billy, Kristofferson was 36.

5. Kiefer Sutherland

The 1988 film "Young Guns" was one more notch in the legend of Billy the Kid, but our beef here is not with Emilio Estevez, who actually captured the physical attributes and behavioral quirks that history recorded about Billy. No, we’re looking at - we can’t help but not look away from - Kiefer Sutherland’s ‘80s shag as "Doc" Scurlock. There really was a Josiah Gordon "Doc" Scurlock (bleow left) who rode with the Kid’s "Regulators," but there is no record of him fancying himself, as portrayed by Sutherland, a tragically romantic poet of the frontier.

And unlike the untimely demise suffered by Sutherland’s "Doc" in an ambush by Pat Garrett in "Young Guns II," Scurlock, in fact, died peacefully at the age of 79.

4. Robert Redford

Without wasting words, Western Films author Brian Garfield described 1969’s "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" thus: "Two luckless outlaws and a good-natured schoolmarm, pursued by a relentless posse after a train robbery, clown their way from Wyoming’s Hole-in-the-Wall to South America, encountering amusing characters in their picaresque adventures."

Regardless of its merit as one of the top-grossing Westerns of all time, as well as one of the most popular, the film, according to Garfield, "doesn’t quite convey the feeling that this really is the Old West of fact or of legend or even of tall tales, it seems merely a modern colorful reshaping with a pair of bemused and essentially pathetic characters" whose "flip banter is in keeping with a Neil Simon play." Roger Ebert observed that the script "is constantly too cute and never gets up the nerve, by God, to admit it’s a Western."

Nothing in the movie seemed more modern than Robert Redford’s anachronistic crop of blown-dry hair as Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, while Paul Newman, in safe Hollywood tradition, looked not unlike Paul Newman as Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy.

Give Newman credit for attempts to alter his screen-idol looks in his starring roles in "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972) and "Buffalo Bill and the Indians" (1976).

3. "Silverado"

We’re sure that "Big Chill" director Lawrence Kasdan fashioned "Silverado" (1985) as an affectionate and spectacular homage to the cinematic mythology created by classic Westerns of the past, instilling it with countless, exciting new takes on practically every cliché a fan of the genre could nostalgically recall, but when it came to convincing hair, the film, supposedly set in 1880, is nothing short of a muss.

A bad hair day, 1880s-style…

2. Joe Namath

"The Last Rebel" (1971) cast Joe Namath as a Confederate soldier who, in the closing days of the Civil War, joins up with fellow Reb Jack Elam and escaped slave Woody Strode to win a fortune playing pool in a frontier brothel!

Namath was, of course, the brash, outspoken quarterback of the New York Jets who led his team to a surprise victory over the favored Baltimore Colts in 1969’s Super Bowl III. He stayed with the Jets until 1976, finishing his career with one season for the LA Rams in 1977. While his statistics were never extraordinary, he was, without dispute, pro football’s first genuine media superstar.

In 1969, he even had his own swinging talk show. Sports writer-broadcaster Dick Schaap, who co-hosted, recalled in 1997 (he died in 2001), "Neither Joe nor I had the slightest idea of what we were doing. We were both total amateurs." Among the guests were Woody Allen, boxer Rocky Graziano and Truman Capote, while Louisa Moritz, one of ‘60s TV’s favorite dumb blondes, made regular appearances as the ditzy "Mail Girl." In 1973, Namath famously wore pantyhose in a Beautymist TV commercial.

He was still playing with the Jets when he halfheartedly dabbled in laid-back film appearances, including "Norwood," which reunited "True Grit" costars Glen Campbell and Kim Darby, "C.C. and Company," with Ann-Margret, and "The Last Rebel," which was shot in Spain and Italy.

" ‘The Last Rebel’ is an Italian Western that looks as it had been made by someone who took a correspondence course," the New York Times noted. "It is dumb and technically dreadful but harmless." The reviewer, who deemed Namath’s acting style "sheepish," observed, "Either Namath seems embarrassed…or else he simply grins, as if in acknowledgment of his great good luck to be making any movie at all. The film was directed by Denys McCoy, who is identified in my publicity material as a nephew of (painter) Andrew Wyeth."

After viewing a rough cut of the film, one studio exec told the producer it was "the worst piece of shit" he had ever seen. The producer tried to compensate for the movie’s shortcomings with a rock soundtrack by Tony Ashton and Jon Lord of Deep Purple fame.

1. James Caan and Harrison Ford

"Journey to Shiloh" (1968) followed the adventures and fates of seven young Texans (they call themselves the Concho County Comanches) who volunteer for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. James Caan, just a couple years or so away from his star-making roles in TV’s "Brian’s Song" and in "The Godfather," portrayed Buck Burnett, the leader of the hapless lads, which also included Michael Sarrazin (a year shy of his breakthrough performance in "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?"), Don Stroud (Clint Eastwood’s punching bag in "Coogan’s Bluff" and "Joe Kidd"), Paul Petersen (one of the original Mousketeers on "The Mickey Mouse Club" and former child star from "The Donna Reed Show"), Michael Burns (another former child actor who appeared in the TV series "Wagon Train"), Jan-Michael Vincent (future star of TV’s "Airwolf") and a young Harrison Ford. Writer Brian Garfield commented in Western Films, "This attempt to make a western with youth appeal (hence the casting of every male ingenue on the lot) has the superficial gloss of one of Universal’s factory-made television movies."

In the book The Blue & the Gray on the Silver Screen, author Roy Kinnard noted, "Filmed at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘Journey to Shiloh’ was obviously intended as an allegorical commentary on that divisive conflict." One critic described the film as "remarkable for its pointless parallels with the Vietnam War," while Variety dismissed it as "a dull, talky and halfheartedly pretentious oater."

Under contract to Universal at the time, James Caan had to accept the studio’s demand that he appear in what he considered a preachy Western, a property he heartily detested. Reportedly, his contempt for the story was so strong and his anger with studio bosses so adamant that on the first day of production, he showed up wearing what was described as a fright wig and spoke his lines so indistinctly that the studio had to have him re-record his dialogue. For whatever reason, eighth-billed Harrison Ford, who was, as well, bound by contract at the time, appeared in a similar rug, not unlike a poor man’s Beatles mop-top.

Until the next time, saddle pals, we'll save a chair for you in the moviehouse barbershop...