Stanley Livingston on the Making of "How the West Was Won"

Stanley Livingston had already been in My Three Sons for a couple of years when an offer came along for a role in the epic How the West Was Won. “That was a treat for me, because I always wanted to be in a Western and I never got cast in one. All of my friends were getting cast on Laramie and Rawhide and Wagon Train and if you were a kid all you wanted to do was be a cowboy back then.”

Stanley Livingston recalls the filming of the epic 
Western  How the West Was Won.  (Courtesy of 

Stanley Livingston)

Stan, then 12, starred alongside George Peppard, Carolyn Jones, Debbie Reynolds, and Eli Wallach in the film’s last segment, directed by Henry Hathaway. “I think the first location we shot was Prescott, Arizona,” says Stan. “From there they drove us to what was the middle of nowhere to me. And it did look like a Wild West set, one of those huge panoramic views.”

How the West Was Won, released in 1963, was different from any other film because it was shot in Cinerama. “The camera they’d normally use can be set away from actors at what I would call a comfortable distance and still get a close-up, but that’s not the case with Cinerama. Those are pretty wide-angle lenses. To get those close-ups sometimes you’re maybe no more than two feet away from the camera, which is bizarre. It needed to be right in your face to get a close-up,” says Stan.

I asked Stan if there was a scene or moment in the making of How the West Was Won that stands out in his memory.

“It was working with the director, Henry Hathaway, that made the movie memorable for everybody,” says Stan. “Henry was a pistol to work for. Until How the West was Won, I had worked with quite a few directors—Jackie Cooper, Leo McCarey —some prominent directors—and some other ones were probably known as well within in the industry. But Henry Hathaway certainly had a pedigree of working in film and Westerns, and he was notorious in the industry. Most of the people I've worked with were just kind of normal directors. They’d talk to you and have normal discussions, but Henry Hathaway was a screamer. Not just to the actors, but at everybody.

“There was a scene we shot with George Peppard and the actor who played my younger brother.  It was right outside of town and looked like it was set up to be a mine. There was a hole in the ground and a derrick with smoke coming out. Eli Wallach and his gang rides up and they have a little confrontation and it he makes it known he’s not only threatening George Peppard but may come back to get his family. But in the process of shooting Henry Hathaway wanted some atmosphere, like wisps of smoke coming out of the hole in the ground, and they had a guy down there manufacturing the smoke. It’s a pot and he had to heat it up and pour oil in to make the smoke. Apparently he was not getting the right amount of smoke for the shoot, and Henry would scream, ‘More smoke! More smoke!’ So he kept pouring oil and Henry was getting madder and madder and his profanity was getting worse and worse.

“The next take Henry Hathaway called for the smoke and this guy must’ve taken the entire pot and with oil and dumped it; he just couldn't stand it. And all the sudden smoke just started coming out of there like nothing you’d ever seen in your life. We couldn't see anything. You couldn't see the camera. You knew the guy did it on purpose, to get even. Everybody stays quiet, and we heard this little voice: ’Ready when you are, Mr. Hathaway.’

“And soon as he said that Henry just fell down laughing. Eli Wallach nearly fell of his horse because they knew they had gotten him. And it’s what he asked for so you know there’s no way he could yell at him again. We couldn't shoot for about five minutes. It took that long for all of the smoke to clear away.”

Stan remembers Hathaway’s anger was directed at him, too.

“He was displeased. He was just screaming at me. That was a little disconcerting. We finally got the scene, and I did what he wanted. He was really happy and put his arm around me and said, “That was great. You did such a good job!” And he wanted to go to lunch with me! This guy wanted to rip my face off, and now he wants to go to lunch?” So I piled into his car and we drove back to Prescott to have lunch. The whole time in the car he was just the coolest guy. He turned into Santa Claus.”

While on their lunch break, Hathaway took Stan into a store and insisted on buying a display case full of rocks—even though it was not for sale. “It looked like it came out of a museum,” Stan recalls. “He paid 200 bucks for this display case—two feet by three feet—lugging it back to the car. He just turned into a changed person toward me. Sure enough, we go back to work and the first thing he starts screaming at me again: ‘you little son-of-a-bitch! Didn’t I tell you. . .?’”

Stanley Livingston tells about pranks on the set of "My Three Sons"

He has worn many hats in Hollywood—writer, editor, cinematographer, director, producer—but Stanley Livingston is forever known as the actor who played Chip on My Three Sons. He starred on that popular TV series from 1960 to 1972. When I asked Stan about how his career in Hollywood began, he said his interest in the performing arts developed in grade school.

My Three Sons in 1965: Stanley Livingston, Don 

Grady, and Barry Livingston. (Courtesy of Stanley

Livingston)

“I started off as an actor on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in the late ‘50s,” says Stan. “I was hired as an extra. For whatever reason on that first job, Ozzie Nelson noticed something in me and said, ‘Hey, I want you to say this line.’ He gave me a line to say, and I guess I said it the way he wanted me to and did it well. I remember when the day was over he came up to my mom and said, ‘We want to have him back; how do we get in touch with your agent?’ Anyway, from that point on I became, I guess, a semi-regular on the show from about 1957 or up to the point I was going to do My Three Sons. On the other side of the Ozzie and Harriet stage they were shooting Mr. Ed, so I would always be over there when they didn’t need me, petting Mr. Ed and giving him something to eat, whatever. There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot for a kid to do on a studio lot.”

In 1959 Stan auditioned for My Three Sons. He was cast immediately, but there was one problem—he had signed a contract with Jackie Cooper a year earlier for a series called Skippy. “The series hadn’t sold,” Stan explains. Cooper graciously freed him from that commitment, paving the way for him to sign the contract for My Three Sons. Meanwhile, Stan’s little brother, Barry Livingston, became his replacement, the “go-to-neighborhood kid,” on Ozzie and Harriet.

Young Stanley Livingston didn’t realize the breadth and depth of the work of Fred MacMurray, who played his father, Steve Douglas. “He was the guy from the Nutty Professor. And I had no idea at that point in my life about Caine Mutiny, The Apartment—the other films. All I knew was he was the big shot and the star of the show.”

Stan, who grew up in Hollywood, remembers feigning illness to stay home so he could watch I Love Lucy. “My favorite character wasn’t Lucy, it was Fred Mertz . . . There was something about him that I liked. And when I found out he was going to be the grandfather on My Three Sons, I was stoked.” But actor William Frawley was not especially fond of children. “For whatever reason, though, he warmed up to me, and I think he could see I idolized him, and we became fast friends. I officially made him my grandfather, we hung out together on the set, and he would take me to baseball games after the show. He was quite a character!”

I asked Stan about working with Don Grady, who played older brother Robbie.

“The first year of the show I didn’t realize Don was that much older than me—he wasn’t very tall.  I thought, This is great, I’m going to have this guy in the schoolroom, and as a really close buddy.

When I said Don always looked younger, Stan agreed. “And so did I. I looked seven when I was ten. You know, I think Don was playing about 13 when he was actually 15 or 16. He just turned 16 when we started shooting. I thought, Wow, this guy’s getting his own car! He was 16, and it was really hard to believe. And then he graduated from high school during the first year.” Stan had no one in the schoolroom until his real-life brother, Barry Livingston, joined the cast of the show as Ernie.

“Don was really interested in his music. And that’s all he did. In between scenes, in his dressing room, he had a little set up where he could compose and write music and seemed to be consumed with that. That was his passion.” Don used earphones to keep from disturbing anyone in the studio. “His dressing room was immediately over our schoolroom. We would always hear his foot tapping to the beat, even though you couldn’t hear the music. We would kind of smile because we knew he was up there doing that.

“We would horse around as kids. Don would always join in. We would play pranks on each other. The stairs going to my dressing room were a straight shot to the door, but Don’s stairs went up, hit a landing, then reversed, went the other way, hit another landing and then went to the door of his dressing room. I remember one time Don was up there on the phone, and Barry and I hatched this plan. We went to the prop man and got a ball of string and snuck up the stairs. At the top we created this cobweb—it went around the railing and down and out and over and all the way down the stairs. We knew that in about 20 or 30 minutes that they would call, ‘Don Grady on the set!’ We were waiting for that. The door opened and he said, ‘I’m going to catch you guys!’ He had to force his way down, snapping these strings all over him.

"Oh, I remember what he did to get even!  He bombarded us one time—we were up in our dressing room—and these dressing rooms, because they were on the inside of a stage, had no roof on them. You could look up and see the ceiling another 30 feet. He collected about 25 or 30 cups—old coffee cups—out of the trash. All of the sudden this bombardment came over, and we were hit by coffee cups. We got even for that one, too.”