For 20 years on CBS, Miss Kitty Russell poured drinks at the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City and kept a fond eye on Marshal Matt Dillon, and for just as long, fans have wondered what else she did for a living. The honest answer depends on which Gunsmoke you grew up with. On radio, the man who produced the show put it in print: Kitty was a prostitute, and the writers made a point of never saying the word on the air.
Television told it more quietly. The TV series never said it or showed it outright. It introduced Kitty as a saloon girl, made her a part owner of the Long Branch by its second season, and trusted the audience to fill in the rest. Years later, Amanda Blake, the woman who played her, described those early episodes in words that come about as close to a confirmation as anyone ever got.
The show had two long lives. Gunsmoke ran on CBS radio from 1952 to 1961 and on CBS television from 1955 to 1975, all of it springing from producer Norman Macdonnell and writer John Meston. Their heroine was Kathleen “Kitty” Russell, the woman who would one day own the Long Branch. Georgia Ellis gave her a voice on the radio, and on TV, Amanda Blake wore the gowns from 1955 to 1974.
Where Did The Idea Come From?
When Gunsmoke premiered on CBS radio on April 26, 1952, Macdonnell and Meston were after something new: an adult Western, a deliberate break from children’s fare like The Lone Ranger. Their Dodge City had lynchings and drifters, and its lonely marshal was voiced by William Conrad. Into that world walked Georgia Ellis as Kitty, a saloon “hostess” whose job the scripts were careful never to name.
The scripts may have stayed coy, but Macdonnell did not, and he named it himself less than a year into the run. In a March 23, 1953 profile of the show, Time quoted him describing Kitty as “just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while.” Then he went further. “We never say it, but Kitty is a prostitute, plain and simple,” he told the magazine. That line has followed the character ever since, and it is cited in the history of the radio series drawn from John Dunning’s old-time radio encyclopedia.
Researchers have read it the same way. The guide at EBSCO Research Starters says that on radio, “Miss Kitty was clearly a prostitute.” Whatever came later, the radio answer was settled by the producer’s own words.
Why Couldn’t Television Say It?
Moving to television meant living under tighter rules. The National Association of Broadcasters adopted its Television Code in December 1951, and it took effect on March 1, 1952, just weeks before Gunsmoke first hit the radio. One family-values clause, reprinted that year in the trade paper Broadcasting-Telecasting, said that “illicit sex relations are not treated as commendable.”
Macdonnell already knew what a mainstream audience could cost him, and in that same 1953 Time piece he had some fun with what a sponsor might demand. “We’d have to clean the show up,” he said. “Kitty would have to be living with her parents on a sweet little ranch.” He pictured Matt in buckskin, too, swaggering with “his guns blazing.”
Here is the twist. The writer charged with keeping Kitty’s secret had once been a censor himself. Before Gunsmoke, John Meston worked in the CBS “continuity acceptance” department, joining in 1947 to screen programs for profanity and sexual suggestiveness, so he knew to the inch how much a script could imply without saying. He went on to write 196 of the TV episodes, and the early TV seasons leaned heavily on his adapted radio scripts.
What Does The TV Show Actually Show?
The TV version debuted on September 10, 1955, with a 26-year-old Amanda Blake as Kitty. In that first season she works at the Long Branch but does not own it, and what she does after hours is left unsaid.
Then, in “Daddy-O,” a Meston script that aired on June 1, 1957, her place in Dodge City shifts. According to IMDb and the episode guide at TheTVDB, Kitty buys half of Bill Pence’s interest in the saloon, and from that night on she is a businesswoman with her own stake in the place.
Critics kept reading between the lines anyway. When Time surveyed the TV Western boom on March 30, 1959, it observed that Blake’s Kitty was “obviously not selling chocolate bars.” Decades later, in 1982, media historian Rita Parks wrote that the character type “suggests a seductress by implication.”
What Did Amanda Blake Say About Kitty’s Early Days?
Blake herself was refreshingly candid about how much the character had changed. In a 1968 interview with The Durham Sun, recounted by MeTV, she described the early version plainly. “Before that, she was just one of the girls in the saloon and didn’t play any favorites,” she said.
By “before that,” she meant before what she called “about the second half of the season, when she became Matt Dillon’s girl.” And once Kitty became that woman, Blake meant to protect her. “Nobody’s going to tamper with her character,” she said. Exactly what Kitty and Matt were to each other is its own long debate, but on this question the telling detail is that Blake drew a clear line between the early Kitty and the one viewers came to love.
She could laugh about the scripts, too. Kitty was abducted so often that Blake finally complained, “Good lord, I have been kidnapped,” adding, “I’m sick and tired of it.” How she won the part in the first place is a story worth reading on its own, told in how she secured the role of Kitty Russell.
What Do Fans Believe?
With the makers saying so little on screen, fans have built their own theories on top of the evidence. Keep in mind that these are readings of the show, not statements from the people who made it.
The most common theory is that she worked upstairs and then moved up. Many viewers believe the first-season Kitty was a working girl who saved her money and bought into the saloon, which would make “Daddy-O” the moment she went from employee to owner, and possibly to the woman managing the other girls. The show never confirms that last step.
Other fans insist she was only ever a hostess, a dance hall girl paid to keep customers company and drinking, and they point out that nothing on screen shows her doing more. That reading fits the broadcast code neatly. It does not fit Macdonnell’s radio quote, though, so it only works if the TV Kitty is treated as a brand new woman.
A third camp believes it was the show that changed, not Kitty. In this view, the writers kept the radio backstory in mind but stopped referring to it as the audience grew, and Blake’s 1968 comments give this theory the most support of all.
Why Does The Question Still Matter?
Perhaps the question lingers because Gunsmoke never cleaned Kitty up the way Macdonnell once joked a sponsor would. She never did move to that sweet little ranch. Instead she became a saloon owner running her own business in a frontier town, and Blake was proud of exactly that. In an interview with the Kansas City Star, recounted by MeTV, she called Kitty “a tremendously liberated person, probably the first fictional libber.”
Blake played her for 19 seasons, from 1955 to 1974, and came back to Dodge one more time for the 1987 TV movie Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge. She died in 1989 at 60. One star of the series is still with us today, and you can meet them in our look at the surviving cast of Gunsmoke.