<Archive Obituaries> Lorne Greene (September 11th 1987)
Bill Schenley
Photo: http://www.triviatribute.com/images4/lornegreene1a.jpg
FROM: The Toronto Star (September 12th 1987) ~
By Ron Base
For 14 years, between 1959 and 1973, Lorne Greene, who died yesterday
at the age of 72, was the quintessential patriarchal figure, embraced
around the world by a quarter of a billion TV viewers who weekly tuned
in to watch Pa Cartwright make things right on the narrow western
landscape that constituted TV's Bonanza.
He was not even Lorne Greene to most of that audience, an audience
that had no idea the world's best known American daddy hailed from
slightly north of the Ponderosa in Canada, trained as a Shakespearean
actor, and during World War II became a Canadian household word, "The
Voice Of Doom," reading the news on CBC Radio.
Heck, when he started the long ride on Bonanza, he could hardly get on
a horse.
But none of that mattered. To the TV viewers, Lorne Greene was Ben
Cartwright, the white haired, sober-sided papa of the Ponderosa in
what became one of the longest running (only Gunsmoke lasted longer)
and most phenomenally successful shows in the history of American TV.
No one questioned too closely the idea of three grown men - Hoss (Dan
Blocker), Little Joe (Michael Landon) and Adam (Pernell Roberts) -
still living with their dad, or wondered too much about how it was Ben
Cartwright could sire three sons from three different wives, none of
whom had survived to tell the tale.
"One of the reasons is love," Mr. Greene told the New York Times, when
asked about Bonanza's popularity. "The Cartwrights happen to be a
family that other families want to be like. Nobody wants to be a
sonofabitch. He wants to be a nice guy. He wants to love and be loved.
The Cartwrights love each other."
For Lorne Greene, the success of Bonanaza was the capstone to an
extraordinarly varied career. "I'm very happy with the things I've
done," he said several years ago. "And very happy with the things I've
attempted."
By the time he came to Bonanza at the age of 44, he already had played
Broadway, the Stratford Festival, appeared in movies and in countless
TV shows.
In addition to reading the CBC news, he had founded Lorne Greene's
Academy of Radio Arts, whose graduates included such broadcast
luminaries as Gordie Tapp and Fred Davis, actors Leslie Nielsen, Cec
Linder and Tom Harvey, CTV president Murray Chercover, and producer
Elsa Franklin.
Mr. Greene, who was to become the world's most famous TV cowboy, was
born in Ottawa to Russian immigrant parents, Daniel and Dora Greene.
His father made orthopedic shoes. The actor later recalled his
childhood as a happy time, and said he based the character of Ben
Cartwright on his father. "I don't know whether I could ever match my
father as a person," he once said, "but as an actor I try to be like
him."
He got his first taste of show business because his mother insisted he
take violin lessons. He preferred baseball. He developed some interest
in acting in high school. But it was at Queen's University in 1932
that he really got bitten by the bug. As a member of the school's
drama guild, he produced, directed and acted in plays and changed his
major from chemical engineering to languages so that he could spend
more time in the theatre.
His father worried that the son who was supposed to become a chemical
engineer had decided to take up acting. Nonetheless, after Mr. Greene
graduated in 1937 with a BA, he headed for New York, where he accepted
a fellowship at the prestigious Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the
Theatre. He also took dance lessons with Martha Graham in order to
improve his ability to move.
He ended up at the CBC in 1939, mostly because there was so little
work for actors. And he had the sort of deep, commanding baritone
voice that was perfect for reading the news. He sounded a lot older
than his 27 years. Three months after he came to the CBC he was
reading the national news.
During the war, listening to Lorne Greene reading the news was as
fundamental as breathing. Canadians anxious to hear the war news could
even listen to his voice pumped into movie theatres over loudspeakers.
And if that didn't happen, chances are you heard him narrating the
National Film Board short that ran before the main feature.
He became known as The Voice of Canada - or, because of the somber
nature of his voice and much of the war news he read, The Voice of
Doom. He was so good at what he did that in 1942 he won an NBC
broadcasting award, the only Canadian so honored.
He joined the army in 1943, although they sent him not east to Europe,
but west to Hollywood where he recorded radio interviews with stars to
help sell war bonds. When he left for Hollywood, his adjutant, he
recalled years later, issued a final order: "Bring me back a sweater
with Lana Turner in it."
After the war, Mr. Greene returned to the CBC, and got his first
professional acting job: playing Captain Ahab in Andrew Allen's radio
production of Moby Dick. He also got into a fight with CBC brass over
his work at the National Film Board. He resigned and went to work at
CKEY, where his salary jumped to $15,000 from the $3,000 he had been
earning at the CBC.
In 1946, it occurred to him that with so many radio stations starting
up across the country, there were no schools to train professional
announcers. So, he founded the Academy of Radio Arts, and eventually
graduated 400 students.
He also sponsored the first TV clinic in Canada, and went on to do the
first TV test broadcast from Exhibition Stadium. He was said to be
earning $50,000 a year in 1952, an astronomical sum in those days.
Lorne Greene also managed to find time to invent a stopwatch that ran
backwards so that radio announcers could see at a glance how much time
they had left. It was a trip to New York to demonstrate the watch to
NBC executives that served as the springboard to the next phase of his
career.
He was walking through Rockefeller Centre when he ran into a fellow
Canadian, producer Fletcher Markle, who had once taught at Mr.
Greene's Academy. Markle was then producing Studio One, a highly
popular and acclaimed anthology series on CBS-TV. Markle took him to
lunch, thought he would be perfect for a couple of Studio One
segments, and hired him.
Mr. Greene's first American TV show was Arietta on which he played a
dying symphony conductor. He was especially convincing as the Thought
Police official in a Studio One adaptation of George Orwell's 1984.
That show led to an offer to play opposite Katherine Cornell in a new
Broadway play, The Prescott Proposals. The Howard Lindsay-Russell
Crouse melodrama ran for 125 performances, and the actor, a trifle
typecast perhaps, played a radio journalist.
He did the Stratford Festival, a couple more Broadway plays that
quickly closed, and made his movie debut with Paul Newman, who was
also making his, in The Silver Chalice as the Apostle Peter.
He went on to play a bad guy in Tight Spot and the prosecuting
attorney in Peyton Place. He also briefly starred in a short-lived
British TV series, Soldier Of Fortune.
Lorne Greene might have gone on for the rest of his career not being
known as much more than a respected character actor who could handle
theatre, movies and TV, and who never seemed to have played someone
who was young. But then he appeared in a TV episode of Wagon Train in
1959. A producer named David Dortort noticed him on the set.
"He was scheduled to play the part of a character who could dominate
Ward Bond (the star of the series)," Dortort recalled years later.
"Now, Bond was not an easy man to dominate . . . Lorne not only
dominated Bond, he made him look by contrast weak, indecisive."
Dortort thought Mr. Greene would be perfect to play the patriarch on a
new western series called Bonanaza he was about to launch. It turned
out he was right, although when the series premiered on the NBC-TV
network Saturday, Sept. 12, 1959, it was not an immediate hit.
For one thing, it was scheduled opposite Perry Mason, then very
popular. For another, the character of Ben Cartwright was much darker
and less likeable, given to uttering lines like, "Fire and brimstone,
stop that fighting!"
But from the beginning the show was shot in color and that probably
saved it.
These were the early days of color TV and RCA, which owned NBC, was
anxious to sell more color sets, and decided to keep the series on the
air. Sales of color sets shot up so dramatically that when the actor
was introduced to General David Sarnoff, chairman of the board of RCA,
Sarnoff said: "Don't tell me who this man is. This man has sold more
RCA sets than anyone else in the company."
Bonanza was moved to Sundays and the Ben Cartwright character, largely
at Mr. Greene's urging, was made much more likeable, and the show
clicked with audiences. For three seasons, between 1964 and 1967, it
was rated the No. 1 show on American network TV. In fact, so strong
was its staying power that over the years it was responsible for
killing off such TV rivals as Judy Garland, Gary Moore and the
Smothers Brothers.
Bonanza made Lorne Greene very rich - he was earning about $20,000 an
episode in the days when 34 shows constituted a season; later the
figure went up to $32,000. It also allowed him to branch out into a
singing career - more talking than singing, actually - and he even had
a couple of hit records, including "Ringo", which was No. 1 on pop
charts for seven straight weeks. He also developed a nightclub act,
and at one point was earning $40,000 a week playing Las Vegas.
By this time he had divorced his first wife of 20 years, Rita Hands, a
psychologist, and married a former actress named Nancy Anne Deale.
There were two children from the first marriage, Charles and Linda,
who are twins. With Nancy, there was a daughter, Gillian.
The actor never gave up his Canadian citizenship, so eyebrows were
raised when he campaigned actively for presidential candidate Hubert
Humphrey. "You see," he argued to reporters, "I pay taxes in the
United States - six figures a year. My daughter is American, so is my
wife. I want to make goddamn sure the right man gets in."
For a while there it looked as though Bonanza might go on forever. But
in TV, the only sure thing is cancellation. Dan Blocker, who played
Hoss, died in 1972, and his loss devastated everyone. Besides, the
world was no longer interested in westerns. TV cop shows were all the
rage. Bonanza was cancelled after 425 episodes in January, 1973.
Mr. Greene was never able to even come close to repeating Bonanza's
success, though he tried a couple of times, once with a police series,
Griff - which he liked to call Grief - and again in 1978 with a
science-fiction adventure, Battlestar Gallactica.
In later years, he probably was best known for his Alpo dog
commercials, and for Lorne Greene's New Wilderness, a series shot in
Toronto and aired to good ratings on CTV and around the world.
He invested successfully in oil, natural gas and real estate, and his
living style reflected his wealth. He kept a stable of racehorses for
years, and at one time he had homes in the Brentwood area of Los
Angeles, near Lake Tahoe, and on Long Island in New York.
Ironically enough, he was going back to the roots of his success when
he became ill. He had agreed to do Bonanza: The Next Generation, a TV
movie based on the old series.
"I've been very fortunate," he once told a reporter on the set of
Klondike Fever, a Canadian movie in which he had a small role. "I've
had a number of turning points in my life. I believe if you take fate
by the hand and say, 'That's where I'm going,' well then, about
halfway there fate takes you, and takes you there."
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Photo: http://www.blogtower.com/_photos/lorne.jpg
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TV Role Lasted 14 Seasons, Made Him A Household Name;
Lorne Greene, 72, 'Bonanza' Star, Dies
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (September 12th 1987) ~
By Hugo Martin, Staff Writer
Lorne Greene, the barrel-chested actor best known for his portrayal of
Ben Cartwright, the strong, stern, immutably ethical yet caring father
in one of America's most popular television series, died Friday
afternoon of respiratory complications.
The star of "Bonanza" was 72 and died at St. John's Hospital and
Health Center in Santa Monica where he had been admitted last month
with a perforated ulcer. He underwent abdominal surgery Aug. 19 and
while recovering developed pneumonia.
Greene's wife and three children were with him when he died, said St.
John's spokeswoman Mary Miller.
The Canadian-born star of one of TV's most successful series, whose
rich baritone voice was once described by a columnist as "surely one
of the finest ever wrought by nature," was a dramatic fixture in his
native land for years before coming into American living rooms on
Sept. 2, 1959, where he was to spend the next 14 seasons as Ben
Cartwright.
And it is as that level-headed patriarch of the Ponderosa for which he
will be always remembered, despite the classical and popular credits
he accumulated as a young actor.
Along with Dan Blocker (Hoss), Michael Landon (Little Joe) and Pernell
Roberts (the short-lived Adam), Greene gathered a following of such
magnitude that even President Lyndon B. Johnson reputedly had enough
respect for "Bonanza's" ratings that he would not schedule a speech
that would clash with the show's 9 p.m. time slot on Sunday nights.
In a 1964 interview, Greene told the New York Post that his
interpretation of the widowed Cartwright raising a clan of three
diverse sons was based on his own father.
"I don't know whether I could ever match my father as a person," he
said, "but as an actor I try to be like him."
He offered the story of a 13-year-old Greene trying to match wits with
his father as an example:
"One day when mother was away, I cut an exam I hadn't studied for and
came home, thinking my father would be at work. But there he was! He
asked me why I'd come home. It was a beautiful sunny day, but the only
reason I could think of was 'to get my umbrella.' He said casually,
'Oh . . . well, maybe you'd better take your rubbers, too, so you
won't get your feet wet.' Then, very subtly, he insisted on giving me
a lift to school, and when we got there he said, 'I'll walk in with
you.' "
Confronted by Notes
Consequently, Greene's father walked him into the principal's office
where a "foot-high pile" of notes Greene had written with his mother's
forged signature awaited them.
"All I remember is my father's eyes saying to me, 'What kind of a
delinquent have I brought into this world?' From that moment on I
became a reformed character," Greene said. "He never mentioned that
incident again and he didn't tell my mother because he knew it would
hurt her."
Greene's father, Daniel, a boot maker, and his mother, Dora, raised
Greene in Ottawa, Canada, as an only child.
In 1932 he enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada,
ostensibly to become a chemical engineer. Greene gravitated toward
drama, an art he had dabbled in in high school. There he joined the
Drama Guild, where he produced, directed and acted in the group's
plays.
After graduation, and after a two-year fellowship with the
Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, the 6-foot 2-inch Greene returned
to Canada but found little or no acting opportunities.
But at the outbreak of World War II, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
was looking for a newscaster with a strong voice to broadcast war
news. Greene fit the position so well that he soon became known as The
Voice of Canada.
Leaves Canada
In an article titled "How I Switched From Shakespeare to Six-Guns,"
written for MacLean's magazine in 1960, Greene noted that "I left
Canada in 1953 because I could find nothing very satisfying about
delivering commercial pitches on camera. I felt the whole atmosphere
of TV in Canada was listless."
During his years as a radio announcer in Canada, Greene had been aware
of the difficulty that announcers had in determining the amount of
time remaining toward the close of the program. His solution was a
stopwatch that ran backwards, reading clockwise from 60 to zero.
Greene was invited to demonstrate his inventive device to an executive
at NBC in New York.
While at Rockefeller Center in 1953, Greene ran into Fletcher Markle,
a man he once worked with in Canada. Markle, the producer of "Studio
One," invited Greene to perform on that top-rated CBS drama program.
Jack Gould of the New York Times said Greene's performance as the
Thought Police official in "Studio One's" adaptation of George
Orwell's "1984," "was superb, alternately friendly, understanding, and
deadly sinister."
After numerous roles on Broadway and in television, including the
Apostle Peter in "The Silver Chalice" and Yellow Jack on NBC's
"Producer's Playhouse," Greene was seen in a guest shot on "Wagon
Train." On the strength of that appearance the producer, David Dorton,
recognized Greene as the authoritative figure he wanted for his new
Western, titled "Bonanza."
Off to a Rocky Start
The series was scheduled opposite the immensely popular "Perry Mason"
series and at first did terribly. "Bonanza" didn't gain ratings
respectability until NBC and the Chevrolet sponsors shifted the
program to Sunday night as a replacement for "The Dinah Shore Chevy
Show."
It zoomed to the top of the ratings, placing No. 1 for three
consecutive seasons starting in 1964.
"A big reason for this show's popularity," Greene said that year, "is
the strength and warmth of the family. The father-son relationship is
the strongest there is. It's been the basis of drama all the way back
to the Bible. Notice, Abraham wasn't told to sacrifice a daughter."
The fatherly image Greene offered Blocker and Landon was not limited
to the screen. He guided and supervised the joint business ventures of
the two younger actors. Using his paternal wisdom, Greene managed to
make them and himself millionaires by 1966. (Pernell Roberts as Adam
asked to leave the show after six years).
In 1964, Greene told a Los Angeles Times reporter: "Some day I may
wind up with indigestion, but you're only here once so I believe in
having as many careers as possible."
And Greene did have many "careers." In one week in 1965 , for example,
he narrated a training film for the U.S. Defense Department, was guest
speaker at a Salvation Army meeting, cut the obligatory ribbon at the
new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and, of course, continued to
reign over the Ponderosa.
Diversified Career
After "Bonanza" went off the air in January, 1973, Greene tried to
diversify his repertoire by playing such roles as a Russian espionage
agent in "Destiny of a Spy," and a grizzled old farmer in the TV
adaptation of Steinbeck's "The Harness."
He could not, however, shake the paternal image he gained in
"Bonanza." Even in the popular series "Battlestar Galactica"
(1978-80), Greene was typecast. As Commander Adamas, he played the
paternal leader of a space-age wagon train, which forever searched the
galaxy for a permanent camp site.
But that series, like his brief private-eye series, "Griff" and the
ill-fated "Code Red," did not match "Bonanza" for its popularity and
was dropped by the networks.
He made a few films, including "Earthquake" and "Tidal Wave," and was
seen in the popular TV mini-series "Roots," "The Moneychangers" and
"The Bastard."
Greene said he would never do another full-time TV series unless he
had some kind of control of the script. With "Lorne Greene's New
Wilderness," a series that dealt with animals and the environment,
Greene got exactly what he wanted: control.
Greene hosted the series and co-produced it with his son Charles, from
1982 until his death. "I feel energetic when I'm working," Greene told
United Press International in 1982. "I do what most people do when
they retire, but I do more. I keep the mind working. I find that the
harder I work, the younger I feel."
Married an Actress
In 1961, Greene married Nancy Deale, an actress and artist he met
while directing one of her plays, bringing to that marriage twins
Belinda Susan and Charles from a former marriage. They became parents
of another son, Edward, in January, 1968.
His caring nature off screen won him numerous honors and awards over
the years, including the Brotherhood Award from the National
Conference of Christians and Jews, and the Award of Valor from the
Mississippi NAACP (for breaking a contract after learning that his
audience was to be segregated). He was named Canada's Man of the Year
in 1965.
He remained busy until the end of his life spending several months
each year in Toronto where the former "Voice of Canada" was now
producing "New Wilderness" for syndication.
"As Red Skelton puts it," Greene said, 'life is divided into three
parts: childhood, middle age and 'Man, you look great.' I think I will
leave it at that."
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Photos: http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/images/Greene_.JPG
http://bonanzaworld.net/bwgallery/gallery/albums/userpics/10005/LG%201937%20(Custom).jpg
http://members.aol.com/earthquakemovie/greene_pub_small_02.jpg
http://www.broadcasting-history.ca/ccf_resources/ccf_resources-bios/ccf_bio_pictures/192.jpg
http://www.teacuerdas.com/images/nostalgia-cosas-postales-bonanza.jpg
(w/'Bonanza' cast)