Ken Curtis Background Page

Others say they like him better than Chester. They either love him or they hate him – but 90 percent say they love him.”

There is no question of the reaction to Festus in Gunsmoke’s Dodge City. They love him there – 100 percent. The rest of the cast had become resentful of the attitude of Dennis Weaver, who played Chester. “Why, on his last show, he hardly even limped!” says Amanda Blake, who plays Kitty.

As for Festus himself, where Dennis Weaver said, “After nine years as Chester, I have exhausted all the areas of creativity,” the 48 year old Curtis who has been around show business since 1939, says, “There are so many good actors that are hurtin’, I’m just grateful. I hope Gunsmoke goes on for another 10 years.”

The character was not calculatedly created as a replacement for Chester. Twice Curtis did a similar role in Have Gun – Will Travel, where under the name of Monk he became involved with “Mr. Pala-dine.” Festus Haggen made his first appearance in Gunsmoke in December 1962 in a script by writer Les Crutchfield entitled “Us Haggens.” It was supposed to be only a one-shot , but according to MacDonnell, “He had charm. Later we had him do another and liked him even better.” When Weaver left Gunsmoke to do his own series, Kentucky Jones, on NBC, Festus was moved into the gap.

Although the basic bumpkin humor of Chester and Festus is similar, the characters differ widely. Festus can be “cold and deadly,” says MacDonnell. In one Gunsmoke episode, he killed a man in cold blood for assaulting his cousin. Festus has also been seen kissing a girl, something which would have been unthinkable for Chester – and which, as someone close to the program points out, “is closer than Matt Dillon has gotten to Kitty in 10 years.”

Festus and Chester are probably most alike in their speech. Ken Curtis picked up the accent –which rarely slips into his off-screen speech– as a boy in the dry-lands of southeastern Colorado, where he was born Curtis Gates in a two room prairie cabin on July 2nd 1916. His father was a homesteader and for a time sheriff of Las Animas, Colorado. The family lived in the jail then, and at 10 young Curtis was substitute jailer when his father was out of town.

Ken Curtis’ off-screen life today belies this bucolic background. He and his wife, the former Barbara Ford, daughter of famed movie director John Ford, live at exclusive Toluca Lake. Ken wears heavy shell-rimmed glasses, tailored jackets and slacks, diamond cuff links, alligator shoes, and he drives a thunderbird.

Only the scraggly beard is a clue to the part he plays. He’s 6 feet tall and weighs 180 pounds.

He wanted to be a doctor, but he was so successful as a songwriter in student productions at Colorado College that he left school and headed for Hollywood. There, in 1939, he was assigned as a staff singer for NBC Radio. Later, after a few misadventures, including a stint as a sandhog, he sang briefly with the late Tommy Dorsey, who changed his name from Curtis gates to Ken Curtis. Then, before enlisting in the Army in 1943, he sang with Shep Fields’ band.

After the war he returned to Hollywood. His singing of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” on a radio program with Johnny Mercer got him the co-starring role in a series of Westerns of which he says, “I’d stop in the middle of a gun fight and sing a song.”

From 1947 to 1952, he was a member of the Sons of the Pioneers, a western singing group. It was at this time that he met the girl who was to become his wife. She was then an assistant film editor on one of her father’s pictures, “Wagonmaster,” for which the Sons of the Pioneers sang the musical score. A small part in a later John Ford picture, “The Searchers,” brought into being the character now known as Festus Haggen. Ken’s part was supposed to be a serious one: “I was to be kind of a Ralph Bellamy, but I was kidding around on the set, doing the dry-land dialect. I didn’t even know Mr. Ford was listening. Then when it came time for me to do my lines, he said, 'How would you say that in dry-land?' I did it for him and he said, 'Play it that way.'”

Ken Curtis does not take himself or Festus Haggen too seriously. Concerning acting, he says, “We’re just doing a job, like a bookkeeper in a bank, except people watch us.”

Three times Chester has limped ostensibly for the last time down the dusty street of Dodge City and twice he has come back when other plans for Dennis Weaver failed to materialize. But if Weaver’s new series should prove unsuccessful and he tries returning to Gunsmoke once again, he will find the corral locked, the welcome mat gone. Festus Haggen is there to stay.