For some time now, the MeTV network has been airing episodes of vintage Westerns every weekday morning, under the umbrella title of “The Good Guys at Sunrise.” Most of these series come from the late ’50s-early ’60s, when television sets across America were bursting with the sounds of galloping hoofbeats and roaring six-guns. They include one of the best-remembered of all, Wanted: Dead or Alive, featuring Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall, whose weapon of choice was a deadly sawed-off carbine, carried in a custom holster.
Wanted: Dead or Alive debuted over the CBS network on September 6, 1958 – only six days before the national release of The Blob, a horror movie that featured young McQueen in the title role. Although The Blob became a big hit, it wasn’t exactly a major-studio, big-time production; I can’t imagine that too many people who saw it – or watched Wanted Dead or Alive, for that matter – came away convinced that Steve McQueen would one day be an iconic movie star.
However, that’s exactly what happened. And McQueen’s drive toward big-screen stardom brings us to the subject of this month’s column, an Oklahoma native named Wright King.
Born in Okmulgee on January 11, 1923, King graduated from high school in Mount Vernon, Illinois, winning a scholarship to the St. Louis School of Theater. Following graduation, he joined the Navy, serving for three years in the South Pacific. In King’s Hollywood Reporter obituary, writer Mike Barnes noted that the actor “was on a ship headed for Japan when World War II was declared over.”
After getting his honorable discharge, according to Barnes, “King hitchhiked from Mount Vernon to New York City and got a job playing Aladdin for eight months – at $35 a week – in a national theater production that catered to children. Later, he worked for the Yiddish Art Theatre.”
King also continued studying drama at both the Actors Studio and the American Theatre Wing. Ultimately, he appeared in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, playing the young man who collects newspaper-subscription money – and a kiss – from Blanche DuBois. His performance earned a call from famed director Elia Kazan, who offered him the role in the upcoming movie version of Streetcar. Barnes quotes King in the obituary: “I never wanted to be a movie star, but I sure wanted to be in that movie.”
He may not have wanted to be a television star, either, but in the early ’50s he sure found plenty of work in that nascent medium. According to a syndicated piece in the Jefferson City [Missouri] Post-Tribune, “King entered television, and in the next five years chalked up a record of more than 250 live [TV] performances in New York.” Along the way, he appeared in the medium’s first science-fiction series, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, and, during the 1953-54 season, starred in another otherworldly program, Johnny Jupiter. Scott Mackay, writing for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, called Johnny Jupiter “a satirical delight,” adding, “Its leading character is a 25-year-old clerk in a small-town general store named Ernest P. Duckweather (played by Wright King), who has made contact with Jupiter through TV and is forever asking the super-civilized Jupiterians for help with problems.” A mixture of human performers and hand puppets, the show “has been described,” wrote Mackay, “as one long, good-natured spoofing of our own ways, customs and habits.”
King’s early identification with science-fiction and fantasy would show up again in the early ’60s, when he starred in two well-remembered episodes of The Twilight Zone, “Shadow Play” and “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville.” Also, in 1968, he’d play Dr. Galen, the chimpanzee medico who saves the life of Charlton Heston’s character George Taylor in the original Planet of the Apes.
For all of that, however, he’s probably best-known for his roles in a plethora of Western movies and television shows. In an interview with Tom and Jim Goldrup for their multi-book series The Encyclopedia of Feature Players of Hollywood, King credited his Oklahoma upbringing for the work he got in that genre.
“I thanked God for my earlier horseback riding on the farm,” he said, “and that old Okie accent I could drag up on a moment’s notice.”
His numerous supporting roles in both TV and big-screen Westerns included multiple appearances on Wanted: Dead or Alive. And while he played a couple of other characters, his most noteworthy work on the show lies in his portrayal of Jason Nichols, a deputy sheriff turned bounty hunter. Beginning with the January 30, 1960 episode – the middle of the popular show’s second season – Wright would play the character nine times, more or less consecutively, as a second lead to Steve McQueen’s Josh Randall.
In an interview published online July 8, 2014, on the Rusty White’s Film World site, King explained to White how he snagged the recurrent role.
“He [McQueen] was becoming very busy,” King recalled. “I remember one episode in which we had a very dramatic scene. I went up to Steve and asked him if we could take some extra time to practice the scene. We filmed it and it turned out great. Steve then got a film role and was going to leave the show. Steve came up to me and said that the producers wanted me to replace him in the series. They were so impressed by the scene we had done extra rehearsal on that they gave me the job.”
According to an anonymous writer in the Feb 6, 1960 Los Angeles Mirror, “Steve McQueen would like to take things a little easier here while grabbing a little movie loot on the side, so a ‘partner’ is being integrated. Wright King will appear as a lawman who wants to become a bounty hunter.”
And, five days later, the famed Hollywood gossip purveyor Hedda Hopper put this twist on King’s hiring in her column: “Steve McQueen took on Wright King as his bounty hunting sidekick in “Wanted – Dead or Alive.” He’ll run throughout the series and take over when McQueen makes pictures.”
Although King shows a great deal of boyish charisma and a sure-handed approach to his character, it didn’t quite work out that way. McQueen did start his movie career in earnest around that time, beginning a shoot in Mexico on March 1, 1960 for the picture that broke him out, The Magnificent Seven. He would become the first TV star to make a successful transition from the small screen to the big one, paving the way for many, many others.
But Wright King never got the opportunity to step into McQueen’s boots. While Wanted: Dead or Alive ran for a third season before expiring, there were no further appearances of King’s Jason Nichols; Josh Randall once again became a loner. And while it was likely a great disappointment for King not to take over the starring role in the series, he kept right on working in movies, television and on the stage until his 1987 retirement. He died at the age of 95 on November 25, 2018, in the Motion Picture Home at Woodland Hills, California.
King and his wife of 60 years, June Roth King, had three sons. One of them, Meegan King, followed his father into the acting business; he’s appeared onstage as well as in a number of movies and TV episodes. The latter includes a two-year run on the daytime drama Days of Our Lives and a guest appearance on the 1974 television show Planet of the Apes – eight years after his dad had played a pivotal role in the blockbuster movie that inspired the series.
Writer post-script: Thanks once again to Paul McSpadden for bringing another under-celebrated Oklahoma actor to my attention.
