Before a single line of dialogue, The Wild Wild West handed you a cartoon. A little animated hero made his way through four corner panels of Western clichés while a brassy theme played, and each panel filled with a still from the hour ahead. The titles came from DePatie-Freleng, the studio behind The Pink Panther cartoons, and they told you right away that this was not going to be an ordinary Western. Creator Michael Garrison had pitched it as “James Bond on horseback,” and he meant it.
The show premiered on CBS on September 17, 1965, and ran four seasons and 104 episodes until April 11, 1969. Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon worked for President Grant and lived aboard a private train pulled by the Inyo, a real 1875 Baldwin locomotive, while the plush parlor car with its hidden gadgets was built on a studio stage. The ratings were still solid when CBS pulled the plug under pressure from Washington over TV violence, and producer Bruce Lansbury later called the show “a sacrificial lamb.” Nearly six decades on, the regulars who made it work have all left us. Here is what became of each of them, in the order we lost them, ending with the last one to go.
Is Michael Dunn Still Alive?
Every hero needs a nemesis, and West had the best one on television. Dr. Miguelito Loveless was a tiny, brilliant madman with a grudge against the whole country, and Michael Dunn played him in 10 episodes across all four seasons. Dunn was born Gary Neil Miller in Shattuck, Oklahoma, in 1934, with a form of dwarfism that bent his spine and ribs. According to his 1973 New York Times obituary, he was “especially bright and unusually talented” and entered the University of Michigan at 15.
He arrived on The Wild Wild West as a genuine star. He earned a Tony nomination for The Ballad of the Sad Café on Broadway and an Oscar nomination for Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools in 1965. “I had done only a couple of bit parts in TV films,” he told The Buffalo News, as MeTV recounted. “Now, thanks to the film, I’m hot.” Producers found their Loveless in his nightclub act, “Michael Dunn and Phoebe,” which he performed with singer Phoebe Dorin. She came along to play Antoinette, Loveless’s companion and musical partner in his evil schemes. Dorin later recalled that Dunn saved her from drowning on the set of “The Night of the Murderous Spring” when her costume caught in the machinery used to sink a boat, as Remind Magazine recounted.
Dunn kept working after the show, including a memorable turn as Alexander in the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” He was in London filming The Abdication with Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann when he died in his sleep at the Cadogan Hotel on August 30, 1973. He was 38. His curved rib cage had restricted his lungs for years, and the strain on his heart finally gave out. He was the first of the show’s regulars to go, and the man who sent West and Gordon into battle against him would follow five years later.
Is Douglas Henderson Still Alive?
Somebody had to give the orders, and from 1966 to 1969 that was Colonel James Richmond, the agents’ Secret Service boss in Washington. Douglas Henderson played him in 10 episodes, usually turning up at the start of an hour with a new assignment and a look that said he knew exactly how much trouble West was about to cause.
Henderson was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on January 14, 1919, and served in the Marine Corps during World War II before working his way up through stock theater in the East. He moved into films in 1952 and had an uncredited part in From Here to Eternity the following year. He also played Colonel Milt in The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra. Most of his career was spent in television, where he became one of those faces viewers knew without quite placing.
Henderson died in Studio City, California, on April 5, 1978. He was 59. Three years later, the show lost the man many fans still consider its secret weapon.
Is Ross Martin Still Alive?
Artemus Gordon could be anyone. The master of disguise could turn up in a single episode as two or three different men, and Ross Martin came to the part with an unusual gift for voices. Born Martin Rosenblatt in Gródek, Poland, on March 22, 1920, he grew up speaking Polish, Yiddish and some Russian before he learned English, and he later added French, Spanish and Italian. He had broken out as the comic sidekick Andamo on Mr. Lucky before CBS paired him with Robert Conrad.
The two men could hardly have been more different, and it worked. “Very sensitive guy,” Conrad said of Martin in an interview with SFGate, as MeTV recounted. “Very theater oriented. I’d go to boxing matches on weekends; he and his wife would go to theater openings.” Then he added the part that mattered: “We had this chemistry.” Martin liked to joke on The Tonight Show that Conrad did his own stunts, and he did his own acting.
His work paid off with an Emmy nomination for the 1968 to 1969 season, according to the Television Academy. That same season nearly cost him his life. He broke his leg, and then on August 17, 1968, he suffered a heart attack that kept him off the train for most of the fall. Martin came back in December to finish the final episodes, and later he reunited with Conrad for The Wild Wild West Revisited in 1979 and More Wild Wild West in 1980. Along the way he played a smooth art critic killer opposite Peter Falk in the Columbo episode “Suitable for Framing,” starred as Charlie Chan in The Return of Charlie Chan and guest-starred on Hawaii Five-O.
On July 3, 1981, Martin collapsed after a game of tennis in Ramona, California, and was pronounced dead of a heart attack at a hospital in nearby Poway. He was 61. The actor who had filled his seat on the train during that 1968 illness would outlive him by 12 years.
Is Charles Aidman Still Alive?
When Martin went down in 1968, the producers needed someone who could hold his own beside Conrad, and they turned to Charles Aidman. He played agent Jeremy Pike in four episodes of the final season, one of several stand-ins who rotated through the partner’s seat while Martin recovered. Alan Hale Jr. of Gilligan’s Island and William Schallert also took turns in the seat.
He was born in Frankfort, Indiana, on January 21, 1925, and served as a gunnery officer in the Navy during World War II. If his face looks familiar, it is because he seemed to be everywhere. He was the vanished astronaut in the original Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened,” and he turned up in Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, M*A*S*H and Little House on the Prairie. Two decades after his first trip into Rod Serling’s world, he became the voice of the 1985 Twilight Zone revival as its narrator. His proudest work may have been onstage, where he adapted Edgar Lee Masters’ poems into the play Spoon River Anthology and wrote its music.
Aidman died of complications from cancer at his home in Beverly Hills on November 7, 1993. He was 68. The Seattle Times obituary called him an “often seen, often heard but little known character actor” with more than 400 television programs to his name. The next loss would be a man whose face was impossible to forget.
Is Richard Kiel Still Alive?
Long before he chased James Bond with a mouthful of steel teeth, Richard Kiel was Voltaire, the silent giant who guarded Dr. Loveless. Standing more than seven feet tall, he loomed over Conrad in three episodes without saying a word, and the sight of the tiny villain giving orders to his enormous bodyguard became one of the show’s signature images. Kiel later came back as a different character in “The Night of the Simian Terror.”
Born in Detroit on September 13, 1939, Kiel found his way to Hollywood and into cult history with the 1962 caveman picture Eegah. His real fame came in 1977, when he played the steel-toothed hit man Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me, and audiences liked him so much that he returned for Moonraker two years later. A new generation met him as Mr. Larson, the golf course heavy in Happy Gilmore, and he voiced the thug Vlad in Disney’s Tangled. He told his own story in the 2002 memoir Making It Big in the Movies.
Kiel died at Saint Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, California, on September 10, 2014, three days before his 75th birthday. He had been hospitalized after breaking his leg, and his son told reporters the exact cause was not known. Bond co-star Roger Moore said he was “totally distraught” at the news, according to Global News. Kiel left his wife, Diane, four children and nine grandchildren, and with him gone, only the star himself remained.
Is Robert Conrad Still Alive?
at a Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters Radio and Television Ceremony Honoring Robert Conrad / Image Collect
James West solved most of his problems with his fists and a well-timed leap, and Robert Conrad did most of that himself. Born Conrad Robert Falk in Chicago on March 1, 1935, he had come to Hollywood in the late 1950s and broken through on Hawaiian Eye, and on the train he insisted on doing his own fights and falls. It nearly killed him. While filming “The Night of the Fugitives” in January 1968, he lost his grip on a chandelier and landed on his head, suffering a concussion that kept him away for weeks. The footage stayed in the episode, and the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame later inducted him for his work on the show.
Conrad never stopped being a tough guy on screen. He played World War II ace Pappy Boyington on Baa Baa Black Sheep from 1976 to 1978 and captained the NBC team on Battle of the Network Stars. He also dared a whole generation with an Eveready battery commercial, balancing a battery on his shoulder and growling “Come on, I dare ya.” Later he made High Mountain Rangers with his sons Shane and Christian, and from 2008 until 2019 he hosted a weekly national radio program, The PM Show with Robert Conrad. You can read our original report on Robert Conrad’s death, and revisit that unforgettable animated intro here.
Conrad died of heart failure in Malibu, California, on February 8, 2020, a few weeks before his 85th birthday. He was 84, the last of the show’s regulars and the one who had taken the hardest falls. “He lived a wonderfully long life and while the family is saddened by his passing, he will live forever in their hearts,” family spokesman Jeff Ballard told NBC News. He left eight children and 18 grandchildren, and his family held a small service on March 1, the day he would have turned 85.
