For 20 seasons on CBS, Marshal Matt Dillon kept walking through the doors of the Long Branch Saloon, and Kitty Russell kept a glass waiting for him. Viewers took it for granted that the two were in love. Yet the show never let them marry, and by most accounts Matt never so much as kissed Kitty on screen.
So were they a couple? Yes and no. Matt and Kitty were a couple in every way the camera could hint at and in no way the script ever made official, and that was a deliberate choice, one the people who made Gunsmoke explained more than once. The man who played Matt Dillon eventually gave a blunt answer to the one question fans cared about most.
That romance played out over a remarkably long life. After a radio run that began in 1952, Gunsmoke ran on CBS television from 1955 to 1975, with James Arness, who lived from 1923 to 2011, as Marshal Matt Dillon. Opposite him was Amanda Blake, who lived from 1929 to 1989, as Kitty Russell, owner of the Long Branch Saloon.
Blake’s Kitty lasted 19 seasons on TV, from 1955 to 1974, and she came back one last time for the 1987 TV movie Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge.
Where Did Matt And Kitty’s Romance Begin?
It started on the radio. When Gunsmoke debuted on CBS Radio in 1952, writer John Meston and producer Norman Macdonnell built it as a grown-up Western, with William Conrad as the voice of Matt Dillon and Georgia Ellis as Kitty. Kitty became a regular at Matt’s side, though the writers never spelled out what she was to him.
When the show moved to television in 1955, Arness and Blake inherited that unspoken bond and played it with looks, teasing and the occasional hand on an arm. Fans noticed what was missing, and they had a name for it. According to MeTV, viewers and critics took to calling her “Kissless Kitty.”
The nickname raised the obvious question, and Blake heard it every week.
Did Matt Dillon And Miss Kitty Ever Kiss?
She heard it a lot more than once a week, actually. In a 1964 interview with the Fort Lauderdale News, quoted by MeTV, Blake said fans asked her about Matt Dillon 40 to 100 times a week. “I am more encouraged than annoyed by the one question I have to answer more than any other: ‘Aren’t you going to be kissed by Marshal Dillon?'” she said. Her answer was always no.
She had fun with it, too. “Of course, it’s traditional that Western heroes like their horses way better than they do girls,” Blake said. “I can assure you that Marshal Dillon likes me, Kitty Russell, better than he does his horse. I can also assure you that he won’t ever be caught kissing a horse!”
When the famous kiss finally came, it went to someone else. In the 1973 episode “Matt’s Love Story,” a wounded Matt loses his memory and falls for a widow named Mike Yardner, played by Michael Learned. TV columnist Rich Heldenfels wrote in a 2017 Q&A for Shaw Local that Arness later called it Matt’s only onscreen kiss, and Learned herself has described Mike as “the only woman that Matt Dillon ever kissed,” according to INSP. What happened after the cameras stopped is a story of its own, because Arness asked Learned out after their kiss.
Heldenfels did add one caveat in the same column, writing that Kitty “did in fact kiss him once.” He did not name the episode, and other accounts say the pair never kissed at all. Either way, a kiss between them was never something the show built a story around.
So why keep two characters this close, and this far apart, for two decades?
Why Didn’t Matt And Kitty Ever Marry?
Blake explained her reasoning in that same 1964 interview, and she sounded like someone who understood the show as well as anyone. “Romantic love, while not unknown to that time and place, had to be secondary to the protagonist’s struggle to stay alive and do his job,” she said. “For the Marshal to become overly involved in a romance would dilute the drama of his story.” Then came the wistful part: “If viewers want visible romance between Kitty and The Marshal, they’ll have to supply it themselves in their imaginations. As I’ve had to do.”
Arness put the decision squarely on the producers. In James Arness: An Autobiography, published in 2001, he wrote that fans often asked why the relationship “never seemed to progress beyond the air of the romantic between us.” His explanation, as quoted by MeTV, was practical: “That was the producers’ decision, since going a step further would complicate matters and might even lessen the show’s popularity.” He added that “our relationship was downplayed because they thought it was more titillating to leave matters to the viewers’ imagination.”
He said much the same in a 2002 interview for the Television Academy, where, according to INSP, he explained that the producers felt “you could only go so far with it and then you’d have to change the character and nature of the show.” Writer Jim Byrnes, who later wrote the first reunion movie, has said the producers “said they had to keep Matt independent,” according to the same INSP report.
When Blake left the series in 1974, before its 20th and final season, the question seemed closed for good. Then producer John Mantley brought her back.
What Did ‘Gunsmoke: Return To Dodge’ Finally Show?
Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge aired on CBS on September 26, 1987, a dozen years after the series ended, with Byrnes writing and Mantley producing. In the story, a retired Matt is stabbed and brought back to Dodge City, and Kitty hurries home from New Orleans when she hears he may be dying. When Matt pays her a compliment, she shoots right back, “You quit that, cowboy. I’ve got you out from underneath my fingernails, and you’re going to stay out,” as quoted by the review site Once Upon a Time in a Western.
Before it aired, Arness warned the Associated Press not to expect a wedding. “There was always a hint of romance, but it was always offstage,” he said, in remarks republished by MeTV. “The main thing is that Matt and Kitty had a great friendship and strong ties. In the movie, Kitty travels back to Dodge when she learns Matt has been hurt.”
The movie ends with Kitty at a hotel window, watching Matt ride out of town, and it was the last time Blake played her. She died on August 16, 1989, at 60, and the later Gunsmoke movies went on without her. Fans who wanted a clearer answer would have to wait for Arness himself.
Did James Arness Ever Say Matt Loved Kitty?
He did, and he didn’t hedge. In a 2006 interview with The Signal of Santa Clarita, posted on his official website, Arness was asked why Matt never married Miss Kitty in 20 years. “The short answer there is that I think it just would have changed the whole premise of the show,” he said. “The idea was that Matt had this job that he had to do, which was potentially a dangerous job, and you would have had a different show if he had been married and had kids.”
“I think, over the years, everybody realized that Matt and Kitty had a close relationship; they really cared for each other and all,” he went on. The interviewer pressed him. He loved her, though, right? “Oh! There is no question about that,” Arness said. “No, I don’t think there is any question there.”
Arness, who was always happy to share the Gunsmoke spotlight, died five years later, on June 3, 2011, at 88. Near the end of that same interview, he mentioned a pair of mallard ducks that had moved into his backyard pool and refused to leave. He had named them Matt and Miss Kitty.