Boy Oh Boyd!

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day we offer up another Irish celebrity. Mr. Stephen Boyd, of Glemgormley, Northern Ireland, appeared in close to fifty feature films, though he is generally best remembered by most folks for only one of them. One of nine children born to a truck driver, he was an unlikely candidate for a career in acting, but it was a craft he felt deep in his soul and one in which he would eventually excel.

While taking on various odd jobs during the day he began working with a semi-professional theatre group at night and on weekends. This eventually led to work with a professional company, The Ulster Theatre Group, with whom he played all sorts of roles over a three-year period. Eventually, he moved to London where he caught the eye of Sir Michael Redgrave and was placed in another theatre company while also doing some acting on BBC radio and television.

20th Century Fox snapped him up in 1956 and gave the lean, ruggedly handsome man a seven-year contract. His first film under that contract was in The Man Who Never Was, a spy film starring Clifton Webb in which Boyd played a Nazi spy. He inherited the part swiftly when the original German actor departed. The following year, he was cast in the harrowing nautical drama Abandon Ship!, which had Tyrone Power deciding who lived and who died in an overcrowded lifeboat.

Also in 1957, Boyd was part of the multi-star cast of Island in the Sun. The film, focusing on interracial love on a British-ruled Caribbean island, counted James Mason, Joan Fontaine, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge and Joan Collins among its players. Boyd was paired with Collins for much of the film and it was not the only time he would costar with a major beauty.

The following year, he played the lover of Brigitte Bardot in The Night Heaven Fell. Boyd complained, though, of attempting to do serious love scenes with her while she contorted her body into whatever position was best for showing off her behind! With her (soon to be ex-) husband Roger Vadim directing, however, it’s not as if his complaints were going to be given much ear time.

Also in 1958, he played a nasty villain in The Bravados, a Gregory Peck revenge western that also had Joan Collins in the cast. He was one of four bad guys pursued by Peck and was in good company as the others were Albert Salmi, Henry Silva and Lee Van Cleef. Accused of raping and killing Peck’s wife, his character claimed innocence, yet wasn’t above taking another young lady captive and pawing her.

1959 proved to be a banner year for Boyd. First up was the awkwardly titled Woman Obsessed. Susan Hayward played a widow with a young son who eventually marries the very rough and crude Boyd and has trouble adjusting to his manner. Hayward had just won her coveted Oscar and it was a good opportunity to be her leading man.

Perhaps less important then, but much fun now, was his next film The Best of Everything. He played the suave, heavy drinking, publishing executive who sweeps Hope Lange off her feet, but threatens to drop her right down again thanks to his hang-ups. She was one of three career girls, the other being Suzy Parker and Diane Baker, who work under the thumb of a fire-breathing Joan Crawford. It was nice for Boyd to appear in tailored grey suits, a contrast to his next, and perhaps greatest, part.

Legendary director William Wyler had seen Boyd’s performance in The Man Who Never Was and liked him so much he decided to cast him as the chief villain in his upcoming (and mammoth!) Biblical epic Ben-Hur. Boyd, whose cleft chin seemed ready-made to support a Roman helmet, took on the role of Messala, the boyhood friend of Judah Ben-Hur (played by Charlton Heston) who eventually turns into his violent enemy. (Unbelievably, one of the early contenders for the role – who was even screen-tested, was none other than Leslie Nielson!)

A grand scale remake of the 1925 silent classic, Ben-Hur had Heston suffering multitudinous hardships including the imprisonment of his family and his own enslavement in the galley of a ship, all at the hands of his boyhood friend Boyd, who now despises him beyond all reason. Boyd wore brown contacts in this film, giving him a different, more menacing look. Much has been written about the dynamic between these characters with many folks believing that the sort of spurned enmity that Boyd displays could only have from that of a former lover. The story goes that Boyd decided to play it that way, and director Wyler knew but didn’t want Heston to be told, lest he would bristle at the notion.

Whatever the case, Boyd gave a blistering portrayal of embittered fury, culminated in a furious chariot race, one of the greatest stunt spectacles of all time. Real horses, real chariots, real people. Despite the ravenous malice between their characters, Heston and Boyd appear to have gotten along quite well personally. Look at these amusing shots of them palling around with a scooter in between takes of the horse race.

For his stellar work in the movie, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Oscar. Astonishingly, he wasn’t even nominated for the Oscar! Nowadays, there’s typically a stifling uniformity amongst the cinema awards shows, with almost all of the same five nominees vying for the prize (and frequently the same ones winning them all.) The year Boyd won the Globe, only one of the five nominees (Robert Vaughn for The Young Philadelphians) was given an Oscar nom. The rest of the names were totally different! In an odd reverse, Heston, who won the Oscar that year, did not win the Golden Globe, though he clearly came out on the better side of things.

Somehow, except for one TV appearance, Boyd was absent from the screen until 1961, thus there was no considerable follow up to the great success of Ben-Hur. He made a film called The Big Gamble, about a man and his wife trying to establish a trucking company on The Ivory Coast. It was a completely different type of character and film than what he had just done. Judging from the publicity photo shown here, he seems to have, um, become enamored of his leading lady Juliette Greco.

He was the original choice to play James Bond in Dr. No, but didn’t accept the role. He did accept the part of Marc Anthony in Cleopatra, but when Elizabeth Taylor’s illness ground the production to a halt, he (and Peter Finch, who had been Julius Caesar) moved on, eventually to be replaced by Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, respectively. Who knows how things would have turned out had Taylor never met Burton, and begun an infamous affair, when filming resumed later.

Boyd was said to have always gone after roles that appealed to him regardless of the money, the prestige or any other trappings. He wanted variety and creative satisfaction more than stardom, so he embraced smaller films such as this one. In fact, he always viewed himself as a character actor and couldn’t understand why the studio kept trying to mold him into a leading man. While he could, and did, carry films, his rough hewn looks lent themselves more to villainous parts or more colorful characters.

In 1962, he made the film Lisa with Dolores Hart. She played a wayward girl, just out of a Nazi concentration camp and on her way to Israel, who finds herself aligned with Boyd. Hart is unable to love compassionate Boyd because of some monstrous experiments done to her while in captivity. The two stars hit it off and became friends, even after Hart left the movie business not long afterwards and became a nun (which she still is to this day.)

A real departure for Boyd came that same year when he played the leading man opposite Doris Day in the circus-themed musical Billy Rose’s Jumbo. (Jumbo was actually an elephant, star attraction at the circus.) A massive extravaganza, he, nonetheless, was not entirely at home in the genre and many viewers cited him as not being up to the task of singing and performing opposite Day (who was the number one box office star at that time.) The film was not much of a success, though he is handsome in it and wears some figure-hugging tights in some of the performance scenes.

After working on the psychiatric-flavored mystery The Third Secret, a film Boyd did for a cut in salary because he liked the part, it was back to the days of togas and breastplates in The Fall of the Roman Empire. Originally conceived as a reunion of El Cid stars Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren, Heston rejected the script and Boyd was chosen to star (after a few others, including Kirk Douglas, passed on it.)

The cast list, even apart from Loren and Boyd, is staggering: Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quayle, Omar Sharif and Mel Ferrer. Plummer, in particular, is terrific as the spoiled Emperor Commodus (a role later assayed by Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator. In fact, both films contain many of the same historical figures.)

One of the last really spectacular epics of that time, there’s a lavish, opulent, yet austere quality to it. The sets are among the greatest ever built for a film of this type. Boyd (saddled with an unfortunate blonde dye job) needed little impetus to generate passion for Loren, who he found to be one of the most striking women in the world, but audiences weren’t interested. The film was a massive flop.

The following year, Boyd, along with Sharif and Mason, made the Mongol adventure film Genghis Khan. Sharif had the title role, but Boyd was given top-billing as Khan’s arch-enemy. (This rendition of the famed conqueror makes Genghis Khan out to be a hero!) This time out, Boyd made no attempt at any sort of dimensional character and was just a flat-out barbaric villain from start to finish.

The next credit on Stephen’s resume is one of the most notorious. He always blamed the failure of The Fall of the Roman Empire for the downturn of his Hollywood career, but this dog certainly couldn’t have helped and surely did even more damage! The Oscar was the story of Frankie Fane, a two-bit hustler who manages to seep into the movie business and who will stop at nothing, stepping on and over everyone in his path, to gain wealth and success, with the ultimate goal being, of course, the title statuette.

Rarely, especially up to 1966, has such a relentlessly unsavory character been the lead role in a Hollywood feature film. For some reason, Boyd, again, played it very one-dimensionally nasty, and, coupled with the innate tackiness of the script and the all-star supporting cast, the result is a hoot-filled, glossy camp classic!

Regular readers here in The Underworld know that I’m a lunatic for movies with lots of stars in them and this one doesn’t disappoint. Just a few of the names to be seen here are Elke Sommer, Milton Berle, Eleanor Parker, Joseph, Cotten, Jill St. John, Edie Adams, Ernest Borgnine, Edith Head, Hedda Hopper and, in practically his sole (thank God!) acting role, Tony Bennett. This film will surely rate its own entry sometime soon (it’s a shame I missed the recent occasion of The Oscars as an occasion to profile it!)

Another notable credit of Boyd’s is the sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage. The innovative movie concerned a team of scientists being shrunk down to microscopic size and inserted into the bloodstream of a man in order to save his life. While inside the man, the vessel they’re in is treated like a virus at times, causing no small amount of distress. The breakout star of this film was Raquel Welch, who had a scene in which the other technicians had to remove dangerous particles from her clingy white wetsuit, though it must be said that Stephen looked nice in his getup as well.
John Huston used Boyd for a very brief role in his doomed epic, The Bible: In the Beginning. The ambitious, but not very successful film, sought to tell key stories from the good book, but wound up a hodgepodge of highlights, some better than others. Boyd, in a rather pointless segue, portrayed King Nimrod, the man who built The Tower of Babel and sought to travel all the way up to heaven (or at least close enough to shoot God with an arrow!) on it. Buried under heavy makeup, one would be hard-pressed to recognize him if they weren’t looking closely.


The next year brought the heist film The Caper of the Golden Bulls. He played a former bank robber living in Spain who is blackmailed into stealing from the Spanish National Bank of Pamplona. His girlfriend in the film was played by pretty Yvette Mimieux (who was everywhere during the 1960s!) For whatever reason, his plan to rob the bank involved him and his team of men to be shirtless, which was fine in his case, but less so for costars such as Vito Scotti.
In Assignment K, he played a toy company owner who is actually a British spy. Enemies kidnap his beautiful girlfriend Camilla Sparv in order to make him reveal the identities of his fellow agents. He then appeared in Shalako, a very different type of western starring Sean Connery and Boyd’s onetime costar Brigitte Bardot. All about a German hunting party in the American west who refuses to heed warnings about the Indians, it contains some memorable imagery and incidents. He plays a no good cowboy who runs off with one of the wives (Honor Blackman), leading to disaster.

Over the next decade, Boyd kept working, but often in lower budget, foreign or more obscure projects. He had an uncredited role in Welch’s revenge western Hannie Caulder and costarred with Jean Seberg in the messy Kill! Occasionally, he would appear in a TV-movie such as The Lives of Jenny Dolan, which starred Shirley Jones as a reporter investigating an assassination.

In 1977, he made something of a comeback, playing a ruthless kidnapper in The Heist. Snatching Stacy Keach's wife, he forces her to strip as he and his goons look on. His looks had notably deteriorated, but his acting talent was still evident. He was in the running for a role in the Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris film The Wild Geese. Unfortunately, while playing golf in California on June 2, 1977, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was one month shy of 46 years of age.

Somehow in attempting to escape the trap of typecasting, Boyd managed to prevent himself from attaining the sort of persona that keeps an actor on top. Some opportunities, such as the Bond role or working on Cleopatra, might have led to a stronger foothold in the cinema, but he really didn’t care to pursue that, preferring to work only in roles that he had a particular interest in. Even if only for his work as Messala, though I’ve enjoyed him in many other things as well, he has earned a place in Poseidon’s Underworld.

It's Comic-al

Devoted divers here in the Underworld know that I sometimes like to pepper my posts with shots of unusual tie-in items such as bubble gum cards, paper dolls, etc… One of my favorite ones to use is the comic book. I was an avid comic collector during my pre-teen and early teen years, but mostly of DC and Marvel superhero titles. Now that I’m older, I find myself becoming intrigued by and amused by the photo cover titles that were based on popular TV shows and movies of their day.

Primarily published by Gold Key and Dell, these books are proving to be highly collectable and very much sought after by folks who either have a fondness for the personalities depicted on the front or for the project involved. The condition of the cover is paramount when determining the value. I’m not sure too many people even give much of a hoot what the inside artwork or story is even like! (As always, you can click on these pics to make them bigger.)

Barbie collectors have the ability to get their hands on some old books that depict their beloved plastic icon living the high life with her boyfriend Ken. These covers also serve as a record of some of the doll’s fashions that were available at that time. Like many of the other covers made at that time – and some featured here – there is a combination of photography and artwork that is simplistic and amusingly endearing somehow. Comic books now are very stylized and busy. These quaint covers are in some ways an oasis of simplicity.

Presumably still after the young female market is this example of a book based on the sitcom Family Affair. Precious and innocent as it is, it’s still a little jarring to see a cover of a prepubescent girl in the bathtub with Uncle Bill sitting on the side! Not a likely subject to be found on a tie-in, comic book or otherwise, these days. For those who don’t know, both of these people died in tragic ways. Brian Keith committed suicide rather than continue to suffer from terminal illness and little Anissa Jones died of a drug overdose while in her teens. She was, in her day, THE cutest child ever to appear on television.

Another girlie book would be this copy of The Flying Nun, featuring Miss Sally Field. Sally had made a splash in the TV series Gidget (all about the misadventures of a fun, quirky teen) the previous year, but overeager network execs cancelled it prematurely. When they realized their error, they foisted her into this show and it ran longer, leaving her with a legacy of preposterousness that took her years to live down.

Appealing more to boys (who might still be unhappy with all the pink!) would be this Mission: Impossible comic. I have always loved these sort of stiff, staged publicity shots. Eventually, they overstayed their welcome and now there’s usually an emphasis on the casual, but many shows offered up these stylistic portraits for a long time. It lent a kind of noble air to the team since, of course, they never appeared posed in this way on the actual series. There’s a post elsewhere on this site regarding the series for those who wish to know more.

Comic books were sometimes made for series that either didn’t last or that are only remembered today by a select group of fans who like a particular star. The Young Lawyers, for example, lasted on season in 1970 and is not a show many people recall, but here is a comic book adaptation with the stars on the cover. Lee J. Cobb, Judy Pace and Zalman King. King would later become a director of erotic films such as Two Moon Juntion, Wild Orchid and a plethora of softcore Red Shoe Diaries cable films.

Medical shows had a spate of immense popularity in the 60s and 70s, and two of the most popular were Ben Casey and Doctor Kildare. These series were in black and white for the bulk of their runs, so photographic comic book covers gave fans a chance to see their medical idols in color. Vince Edwards, the star of Casey, began his career as a nude physique model and a photo or two became unearthed many years after his TV success. It seems a miracle that his hair could fit under a surgical cap! Kildare starred Richard Chamberlain, who was adored by most everyone for his youthful, earnest presence on the series, and I must say he looks pretty dreamy in this shot. Unlike a lot of TV actors, Chamberlain, for a while anyway, was able to parlay his fame into a feature film career. In 2003, he belatedly came out of the closet as a homosexual when he penned his autobiography Shattered Love.

Lloyd Bridges son Jeff won an Oscar for Best Actor the other night. Contemporary audiences might know him best, if at all, as the steel-plated nitwit in the Hot Shots movies, but prior to that he was a popular star of TV, movies and TV movies. Sea Hunt was a successful show about diving (and Jeff, along with his brother Beau, guest-starred on the series while still young.) Here, Lloyd shows off some welcome chest hair, which probably delighted the heck out of little gay boys everywhere.

Star Trek enjoyed only middling popularity when it ran initially. It was in reruns that it caught fire. The photo covers for the comic version provide great opportunity for collectors to get their hands on rare stills of the stars that may not be found anywhere else. After a time, photo covers for this line were stopped and paintings were used instead, as the Enterprise’s adventures continued on long beyond the initial mission, making the photo covers even that much more rare and hard to find.

One funny thing that could occur in the wacky world of photography mixed with art is demonstrated here with these contrasting Bonanza covers. The first shot is of the three Cartwright boys with their father. After Pernell Roberts, as Adam, left the series, someone took the old photo and carefully removed Roberts from it, placing the remaining men against an abstract green background and white fence! Poof! No more Adam Cartwright. Christina Crawford used to complain about stepfathers and other folks disappearing from pictures in the household frames and albums. (“If she doesn’t like you, she can make you disappear…”) I wonder if Roberts could sympathize?

Before Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy starred as The Hardy Boys, the pair of mystery-solving brothers appeared in a Walt Disney version. This vaguely (and unintentionally) homoerotic shot is part of the reason why the duo was skewered mercilessly on South Park. Called “The Hardly Boys,” the mincing, lisping guys would talk about clues until they became aroused, telling one another that their “clues” were pointing a certain way, until they would go off-screen to do God knows what!!

One of TV’s hunks who is somewhat known and admired in the gay community, but who has almost completely slid out of consciousness amongst everyone else is Gardner McKay. One reason for his lack of recognition is because he only worked in the business for about a decade and intentionally left it after only a handful of projects to become a writer, sculptor and photographer. Still, his series Adventures in Paradise has a fond place in many men’s hearts. He won the lead role in the show because he really was able to sail. His dark good looks led him to amass a small cult following that remains to this day.

It would mostly have been grossly inappropriate for a pre-teen or teen boy to possess a muscle physique or fitness model magazine back in the day, but who in their right mind could object to Tarzan? Comic books allowed boys permission to ogle their scantily clad hero with no objections. Gordon Scott was one of the most muscular Tarzan’s in the film series’ history and was used in many covers. Before that, however, the divinely handsome Lex Barker owned the role and was featured time and again. All of Lex’s Tarzan movies were in black and white, so these color photos are a real find for fans of his. Sometimes he was featured looking serious with a few artist details surrounding him. Other times, he was hilariously inserted into fully rendered jungle environments, giving the covers a surreal quality. In all of them, however, he was tanned, toned and very beautiful! You can read more about Lex by clicking on his name in the column to the right.

Movie adaptations were somewhat common, especially if the film had an adventuresome quality or was a western or otherwise had appeal to young male readers. The Pride and the Passion, all about the transporting of a cannon during war in Spain. It featured a truly unusual casting blend that included Cary Grant, Sophia Loren and Frank Sinatra! Frank, in period clothes and fake hair, was featured on the cover while busty Sophia was nowhere to be found.

The Light in the Forest, which had been a popular book before Walt Disney made it into a movie, featured James MacArthur (in an amusingly fluffy Mohawk), shown here with Fess Parker, as a white boy raised by Indians who is eventually returned to his rightful family. (Oddly, the word “The” is left out of the title on this cover.) MacArthur, the adopted son of Helen Hayes was a hunky teen actor who later made a major splash on Hawaii Five-O as Danno, the subject of Jack Lord’s much-quoted line, “Book him, Danno.” Spartacus offered another opportunity for beefcake. Kirk Douglas played the lean, fit slave turned gladiator, forced into the games by bloodthirsty Romans. Again, this particular shot was one that couldn’t be found in many places, especially in those days long before the Internet.

How many comic books out there do you think featured the amazing blue eyes of luscious Paul Newman?! Not too many. One of them is the adaptation of The Left Handed Gun, the story of Billy the Kid. This one not only had the selling point of Paul’s baby blues, but it also had a photo in the bottom right corner of him with his legs spread. Ha! Did Mom and Dad ever wonder why Joey seemed to stare more at the cover than to actually open the comic and read the story inside?

Some people might be surprised to find that a comic book adaptation exists of such a somber and highly regarded western as John Ford’s The Searchers. The book featured a very serious portrait of John Wayne and not much else. The most recent DVD release of the film includes a reproduction of this item in the deluxe, boxed set. Original copies, even in the rough condition shown here (which I have enhanced a little for cosmetic purposes), sell as high as $35.00. That’s quite an appreciation on the original 10-cent cover price, though it did take 50+ years!

Most fun of all, though, is stumbling across a one-shot version of some goofy, obscure movie like this one, The Story of Mankind. Following his success with documentaries, Irwin Allen branched out into films with live actors. In order to secure success, he loaded the picture down with many, many names. However, the shoddy film, which paired bits of elaborate stock footage with inserted new moments filmed in cardboard settings, was an unintentional laugh riot and is frequently listed among the all-time turkeys. A middle-aged Hedy Lamarr portrayed Joan of Arc while Agnes Moorehead overacted as Queen Elizabeth I. Virginia Mayo was quite an unlikely Cleopatra, but she had nothing on the actor cast as Napoleon Bonaparte, Dennis Hopper!! Other stars, from Vincent Price to The Marx Brothers to Ronald Coleman, embarrassed themselves in the same way that others would later when Allen collected them to appear in his hot mess The Swarm.

I don’t own any of these comics, but always enjoy thumbing through them at flea markets or antique shows because you never know what on Earth you’re going to stumble upon.

70s (and 80s) TV Exposure, Volume 4: The Shirt Shortage

Previously, I posted entries on the various ways in which male 70s and 80s TV stars were, um, revealed whether through their open shirts, their tight pants or in Speedos, a swimsuit that hit its zenith during that time. During a visit to another blog, a wonderful one and the first blog I ever read (and the only one I visit regularly) called “Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist,” I was inspired to revisit this topic because of a photo posted there of Dirk Benedict, shirtless with his pants open (not the same photo shown here.)

It jogged my memory that back in the day, it was a pretty standard practice to trot out any and all good-looking male TV stars wearing just a pair of pants or jeans and sometimes (inexplicably!) with them open! This is not a complaint. It just sort of amuses me, especially since many of the photos were aimed at teen girls. In this post, I’ll put forth a few of those types of shots along with some other beefcake in a similar vein. While these photos aren’t specifically from episodes of TV series, the men featured were all in shows at or around the time of their photos and this was part of their publicity.

First up is John Travolta. Before he became the superstar of Grease, Saturday Night Fever (and later, Pulp Fiction) and the bloated object of ridicule in Battlefield Earth and other lesser films, he was the breakout star of a TV series meant to feature Gabe Kaplan. Welcome Back, Kotter was a high school-themed series with a gang of dudes called The Sweathogs and Travolta, as Vinnie Barbarino, was chief among them. Times have certainly changed as John’s pasty, chunky torso would hardly ignite young female fans these days!

One notable last name in the 70s was Cassidy. David Cassidy (son of entertainer Jack Cassidy) became a teen sensation on The Partridge Family, co-starring his step-mother Shirley Jones. While he certainly had his fair share of pinups, some of them shirtless, he really caused a stir when he posed for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and a layout inside in which he revealed his pubic hair! This was part of a move he was attempting to shed his squeaky-clean teen image. His younger half-brother Shaun Cassidy was, for a time, a very hot commodity as well. A bubble gum pop singer, he starred for three seasons on The Hardy Boys, with his face seemingly everywhere, but especially in the lockers or folders of school age girls. While David still tours even now, Shaun has had success moving into the production end of things. (And for what it’s worth, youngest brother Patrick was, in my opinion, far cutest of them all!)

Next up is another guy who was a major heartthrob to the teen set, Greg Evigan. Star of B.J. and the Bear, his costar was a chimpanzee! What’s striking about Greg, and is also, in fact, about several of the stars in this post, is that he had a hairy chest and was neither asked, nor expected to shave it for the purposes of making him seem more accessible to the little girls. At the time he was most popular, I had no interest in him, but over the years, his appeal has rubbed off on me a little more.

CHiPs (an acronym for California Highway Patrol) was a favorite show with plenty of opportunity for beefcake. While Larry Wilcox was a little bit bland, the more flamboyant Erik Estrada was everywhere. His tan uniform pants seemed, literally, twice as snug as anyone else’s on the series. He was photographed countless times without his shirt in publicity pics. To be honest, one of my earliest crushes in life was on the unlikely Robert Pine, who played the somewhat older sergeant in charge of the officers. His son Chris Pine is now a burgeoning star, having played Captain Kirk in the big screen Star Trek redux. When Wilcox left the series, he was replaced by another blond actor, Tom Reilly. But what really set my preteen heart aflutter was that character’s little brother who was introduced soon after. Bruce Penhall, a pro cyclist, was brought on and there seemed nothing in the world cuter than his petite, cute, tan, blonde, blue-eyed self

One young man (who, again, never did it for me, but I do not always serve only myself here!), who also enjoyed a period of intense popularity was Peter Barton. As the lead actor in The Powers of Matthew Star, a science fiction show, he got plenty of face time, and some degree of chest time, in the fan rags. He also came to prominence on The Young and the Restless.

An old character was given new life when the series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century came about. Star Gil Gerard was a hunky, if brawny, type of guy and his chest was exploited on the show as well as in publicity shots. However, by the second season, his weight gain started to become a real issue (and later would become even more significant, threatening his very life, until he intervened and turned things around.)

One of Hollywood’s all-time hunks, macho man Robert Conrad had a TV series called Baa Baa Black Sheep about WWII aviators. He made sure his one piece jumpsuit was tighter than anyone else’s on the show, which makes watching the old episodes somewhat funny now. He also had a highly popular Everready commercial in which he dared the viewer to knock the little battery off his (sometimes bare) shoulder.

When William Shatner returned to series TV with T.J. Hooker, his sidekick was the svelte, dark-haired Adrian Zmed. Zmed was Broadway singer and dancer who had a big role in the unsuccessful Grease 2. Popular while the show was on the air, he had trouble continuing his career when it ended, ultimately taking part in the reality series Confessions of a Teenage Idol, geared towards giving a second chance to male celebs whose shelf life had run its course.

Though the show has long since left the air, the very word McGyver still brings up visions of a man who could take a matchbook, a piece of gum, half a spoon and a nail and break out of a Mexican jail! Star Richard Dean Anderson gained fame for his starring role in the show. Previously featured on Days of Our Lives, he later appeared in several variations of the sci-fi series Stargate starting around 1994, an enterprise that keeps him employed even now.

Trapper John, MD was a medical drama starring Pernell Roberts as the title character. Co-starring was Gregory Harrison as Gonzo Gates, a far more casual and genial doctor than his counterpart. Harrison provided in the opening credits, one of the sexiest shots of that time, a clip of him emerging from a shower. After one season, the shot was cropped to show less of him down below, which was more than a little disappointing! However, producers knew what they had in the hairy hunk and dispersed publicity stills of him with his chest front and center.

The daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless has always yielded a slew of hunks. One of them, in particular, was the dark, muscled, ever-smooth Don Diamont. Though this set of posts traditionally focuses on primetime actors, he fit the bill so much with his undone jeans I just had to include him. I must say, however, that his sinewy, veiny arm gives me the creeps. I like a beefier (or at least less arterial-looking) type of guy myself.

One of the most notorious switcheroos ever to take place in TV Land was the time that original stars of The Dukes of Hazzard, Tom Wopat and John Schneider, walked off the show in a contract dispute and were swiftly replaced by two actors who almost no one had ever heard of before! The guys, Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer were tossed out to the public like so much meat, shirtless and in jeans, as if any brunette and blonde country boy could fill the required places! Public reaction was negative, to say the least, and the original stars were brought back after just 18 episodes.

One of the greatest hunks ever to have lived (and who is profiled here elsewhere, just click on his name to the right) is Jon Erik Hexum. Star of the short-lived series Voyagers, thankfully some of the eras he was transported to required him to be shirtless. Cut down way before his time thanks to an act of carelessness on his part, he left behind a plethora of beautiful images of his amazing face and physique.

Now… Do we know the good-looking and well-packaged young man on the bicycle? An actor featured in two brief television series of the 70s, Sierra and Westside Medical, as well as a few other obscure TV projects, you may be surprised to learn that, at 28, he wrote the play and later successful movie On Golden Pond! Who knew that Ernest Thompson was so hubba hubba?

Thanks, again, to my friend TJB whose site gave me the impetus to post these pictures. Should you wish to visit Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist, a tribute to all things fabulous from the 50s, 60s and beyond, this is the link to the site: http://stirredstraightup.blogspot.com/