On the night of December 30, 1971, 31 year old Pete Duel walked naked into the front room of his home - and blew out his brains. 'Cerebral destruction' were the grim words of the police report that I read in the office of the local coroner. Why did he do it? Why did the star of the highly successful TV series, Alias Smith and Jones, destroy himself in the early hours of that December morning?
It could only happen in Hollywood.
"I don't know why he did it," a publicist friend of Pete's told me. "I couldn't believe it then and it still doesn't seem real." What chance did I stand of trying to find out what brought Pete Duel to sudden death? I was lucky. Through an actor friend, I made contact with Pete's younger brother - 30 year old Geoffrey Deuel. Also an actor, he has the same easy good looks, the same ready smile. We met in a coffee shop on the Sunset Strip. For over an hour he talked to me - reluctantly at first - about Pete.
Their childhood was idyllic. Pete was born in a small country town near Rochester in New York State. His father was a local doctor, his mother a nurse. There had never been any actors in the family. The two brothers were very close. Both adored the country.
"In the summer," said Geoffrey, "we built ourselves a wooden cottage out by a lake." They went camping. They visited the local farms. "We played baseball with dried-up cow dung for balls." Geoffrey looked around at the crowded coffee shop and smiled. "It seems so long ago."
Pete's first ambition, like that of many schoolboys, was to be an airline pilot. But his sight was not good enough. So after local high school he went to St Lawrence University to study the liberal arts.
"He was not really very committed to his studies," said Geoffrey. "A young college guy raising hell with no idea what he wanted to do." But that was where he first got interested in acting. He did some plays at university, and in his second year his parents came up to see him perform in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tatoo. Dr Deuel was impressed. His son was not doing well in his studies so he said to Pete: "Why don't you just quit wasting your time and my money, and go and study this professionally some place?"
Pete auditioned at the American Theatre Wing school in New York - and got in. For two years, from 1959 - 1961, he was a young drama student in that brash, exciting skyscraper city. He got a few jobs in summer stock, road shows, some off-Broadway pieces. Finally, in the spring of 1963, he ended up in California - playing one of the leads in a touring production of a Broadway comedy.
"You could do very well in Hollywood," an actor friend told him. So in the summer of 1963, Pete moved over from new York to the Californian city of dreams. He cut his first name down from Peter to Pete. He changed the spelling of his surname from Deuel to Duel. He wanted to be a success.
"It was an exciting time for Peter," said his brother. "He started going out, trying to land guest roles on various TV series. Eventually, he got a co-starring role in a comedy series, Gidget." It lasted only a year but it was followed by another year-long run in a comedy show, Love on a Rooftop with Judy Carne, the Laugh-In star.
"He liked doing comedy," said Geoffrey. "He was very good at it." But in 1967 the show was canceled and Pete suddenly found himself unemployed.
"He never 'went Hollywood'," Charles Parker, a leading west coast television writer, told me. "He never owned a suit or a tie. He was always just the same as when he first arrived - a nice young guy in denim shirt and faded jeans."
Money was not Pete's worry. He rented a small apartment over a garage for about £25 a month; his car was a little Japanese jeep. But he wanted passionately to work. He was devoted to acting. He had plenty of girlfriends - though usually one at a time. But girls, as such, did not come near to the centre of his being. Acting was his ruling need.
When, in July 1967, Universal, the most successful motion picture studio in Hollywood, offered him an exclusive seven year contract, he accepted it.
"Yes, he got tied up," said Geoffrey Deuel. "A contract means you get paid every week, not per show. It means also that the studio will give you work because they want to build you up."
When Pete Duel signed that contract - which for so many young actors would have been a gateway to Utopia - he started on the road that led to 'cerebral destruction'.
When a major Hollywood company signs up anyone on a long-term contract, it is a business investment. They give the actor exposure in a selection of parts to see which gets the bigger following. Then when the moguls deem the time is right, they put him in a series - as a star. He does very well out of it financially. So do they.
That is what happened to Pete Duel, only he did not do very well out of it in any way other than commercial.
In October 1970, Universal offered Pete the co-starring role, with Ben Murphy, of Hannibal Heyes, in their new western series Alias Smith and Jones. It was not a run-of-the-mill cowboy idea. Hannibal Heyes and his buddy Kid Curry were two reformed outlaws trying to go straight and earn a final reprieve. The characters - based loosely on the Paul Newman-Robert Redford team in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -- were affable, friendly guys who laughed and joked and did not like killing.
Pete had already turned down two previous series. If he said no, the studio moguls would almost certainly put him on suspension -- which meant he would get no money and be unable to work elsewhere. He would rather have gone on doing meaty guest roles in other peoples' series. But, in his brother's words, "He really had no choice." Geoffrey made it clear that he did not want to attack the studios. "That's the way it is; that's the rule of the game. Certain other actors would just love to have a series - they would be on cloud nine."
But that month Pete Duel got himself hopelessly drunk, staggered to his car, drove out onto the sweeping Hollywood roads and collided with another car, almost killing two people. The accident was entirely his fault. Unknown to the world, Pete was an alcoholic.
"Yes, he had a drink problem," said Geoffrey. "Drink can often intensify happy moods and can, very easily, magnify depression. To Peter, drink was an on-and-off thing. He could go for a year without a drink; but when he did things he often did them to an extreme. Often the problem with a romantic and an idealist is that he is too hard on himself."
Romantics and idealists should not try to work in a mass-production factory. That is what a successful Hollywood television studio is today. I saw them making successful series while I was there: Marcus Welby MD, Ironside, and Ben Murphy's new series Griff. An hour-long show is shot in only six days. The actors must get seven to eight minutes film time 'in the can' per day. It is remorseless.
Harold Frizzell was not only Pete Duel's stand-in in Alias Smith and Jones. He was also his closest friend. Next to brother Geoffrey, he probably knew Pete better than anyone else.
"We were thicker than buddies - more like brothers. He was one of the greatest guys you could meet. He was a hard person to understand, but I could read him. He just had so much love that he wanted to spread it. He loved people in general, everybody. His attitude was that people are human beings and entitled to be treated as human beings. He loved kids. He wanted to settle down with a good woman who would look after him and give him kids. He had a girlfriend for the last two years of his life. He met her here at the studios. She was a secretary. He came back home with me to Kentucky and he would call my parents 'Mum' and 'Dad'. He loved his own parents too, and both his Grandmas. The simple things in life were what Pete loved - so simple that most other people would not like them. 'Let's take a walk in the woods,' he would say, and we would sit out all day beside a lake and fish. He was just about the best-liked person who ever worked at Universal studios. He was crazy about ecology and hated pollution. He would not use plastic cups on the set - only glass ones. He would not use anything that would not dissolve and go back into the earth."
Alias Smith and Jones was a great success. Pete became admired and famous among millions of people all over the world. Yet he told a journalist I met over there that the show was 'junk and I hope it gets scrapped'.
Egbert Swackhamer, 'Swack' to his friends, is a leading television film director. He directed Pete many times. I spoke to him on the set at Warner Brothers Studios. He was brutally outspoken: "He had a self-destructive urge, that young man. I have seen it before in actors with a real natural, in-born talent. He was an instinctive actor. Pure gold! Yet he was self-destructive - and self-indulgent. He was into everything - drugs, booze, you name it. He did not spare himself in self-abuse."
In May 1971, while Alias Smith and Jones was still being churned out at the Universal factory, Pete Duel's drunken driving case came up in court. Pete wrote to the judge: 'In recalling my feelings on that night, shame and terror were in my mind. Sitting here eight months later it is very difficult to recreate the events of the accident or even try to find justification for my conduct. But I do want your Honour to know that I am a person basically interested in other people and I would not knowingly harm anyone.'
The probation officer spoke up for Pete. The drunken driving charge was not proceeded with. He was fined £400 for dangerous driving, put on probation for two years and disqualified from driving for two years.
"From then on I became Pete's chauffeur," said Harold Frizzell. "I used to collect him in the morning, bring him to the studios, give him his script for that day - he said it was so much rubbish he couldn't read it except in small daily doses - then work with him all day and collect him at the end and bring him back home."
"This series, any series, is a big fat drag to an actor who has any interest in his work," Pete told Hollywood reporter Cecil Smith in September 1971. "It's the ultimate trap. You slowly lose any artistic thing you may have. It's utterly destructive."
By then, Pete was finally and completely disenchanted with Alias Smith and Jones. "It isn't the work that tires you," he told Smith. "It's that it's all such a dreadful bore it makes you weary, weary." That was not the way the studio moguls would have wanted their star to talk.
"The publicity people used to almost tear their hair out with him," said director Egbert Swackhamer. "He'd come out to a reporter with something like: 'I smoke grass, man don't you?'"
"A successful series is, like Pete said, a trap for an actor who wants to do better things," top television script writer Bernard Slade told me. "It's very seductive. The money is fantastic. Of course, it makes pressures! An actor who wants to expand, to develop, finds himself trapped in a hit. He cannot go on, he has to stay where he is - the character does not develop."
Pete became even more outspokenly bitter about his work. In November 1971 he told Cecil Smith - for publication - "Contractually, I have to do this series - or some other trash."
The end was drawing near. Like any other factory employee, Pete began work at the studios on the latest six-day shooting of an Alias Smith and Jones episode early on the morning of Monday, December 27, 1971, two days after Christmas.
Shooting proceeded as usual. If anything, Pete seemed more relaxed that week. His parents had not managed to get over from New York State to spend Christmas with him, but they were due to arrive that Friday morning, December 31, and spend the weekend in Los Angeles with their two sons. The Christmas tree stood in Pete's front room with his parents' presents wrapped beneath the branches waiting for them.
"I was going to have dinner with the family that weekend," Egbert Swackhamer told me. "Those boys idolised their father. They loved, feared him. I thought he must have been eight feet tall - the way those boys talked about him! I was looking forward to meeting him."
On Thursday December 30 1971, Pete Duel finished work for the day at around 7 pm. An episode of Alias Smith and Jones was being shown on television that evening. Pete had telephoned his girlfriend Diane Ray and asked her to come over to his place. Harold Frizzell drove Pete home and came in to watch the show. Diane was already there and the three settled down to watch TV.
"Pete did not like it," Harold told me. "He said it was rubbish. He did not like the dialogue." Then he switched channels to watch the basketball game. Halfway through, Harold said he was tired and going off home. "All right man, see you in the morning!" said Pete. These were the last words that Harold Frizzell ever heard Pete Duel speak.
Harold assured me that Pete was sober when he left. "He had not been drinking all day long," he says. "He could quit drink whenever he wanted to." Yet at about half past one the following morning - when Dr and Mrs Deuel were flying across the continent to join their sons - a tearful Diane Ray telephoned the Hollywood police. [CJC's Note: While Pete's parents may have been planning to visit him soon, they apparently were not in flight to Los Angeles at the time of his death. In a late 70s TV interview, Pete's sister Pamela Deuel Hart said that they were at an appointment in Rochester when they heard of Pete's death, which leaked to the press before the family was notified.]
Pete was dead.
On arrival at the house Sgt Paul Estrada found the actor lying naked on the floor of his front room under the Christmas tree with his parents' presents spread out all around him. A .38 revolver was lying beside him.
"There was no doubt he had shot himself," Sgt Estrada told me. "It was a contact wound to the head. The angle of the bullet clearly showed he had held the gun to his temple and fired."
Diane told Sgt Estrada and his colleagues that after Harold Frizzell had left, Pete drank heavily. She said she went to bed in the small house's only bedroom. Pete stayed in the front room. About 1.25 am he came into the room, naked, took the gun from a box and left saying,"I'll see you later."
Minutes later, she heard a shot fired in that front room. She rushed in--and there was Pete, his head half blasted away. [CJC's Note: Not that it affects the end result, but this last statement isn't true and may have been added for sensationalism. There were only 2-3 cm entrance and exit wounds on each side of the head.]
Why did Pete do it? "The autopsy showed the guy had three times as much alcohol in his blood as would have got him convicted for drunken driving," Sgt Estrada said. "He was completely smashed! I guess there is a lot of pressure on these stars. I don't know why he wanted out of it --making steady money and all. I suppose it was the drink."
I went to the house where Pete Duel died. I stood in that front room. His landlady has tried for over two years to clean the blood stain off the carpet.
"I knew Pete very well," said the landlady. "I still can't believe he shot himself. He was under pressure - but, by God, so are we all! He was a young boy. He wanted to get out of his series and do some really good work that he thought he was capable of. All right! But why do something like this?"
Harold Frizzell believes to this day that Pete tried to call him shortly before he blew his brains out. "At about 1 am my telephone rang," Harold said. "But I was asleep. By the time I could get to it, it had stopped ringing. The only guy who would have phoned me at that hour would have been Pete. Often in the night when he was lonely and wanted a chat he would phone me and we would talk for hours."
At Universal Studios that Friday morning nothing was allowed to mar the shooting scheduled for that day. Ben Murphy, Pete Duel's co-star, went ahead and worked. The crew turned out. The cameras rolled. Said Pete's publicist friend: "They did all the shots for that week's episode that didn't require Pete."
Did they think they could possibly use that week's episode? Big money was at stake. Next Monday, three days later, it was announced that Roger Davis would take over Pete Duel's part. Wearing the same black hat, black shirt and gilt holster, he would -- with Ben Murphy -- reshoot the previous week's episode and complete the series.
Diane Ray left Hollywood after Pete's death. She now lives in Mexico. A friend of mine met her down in Acapulco a few months ago. He said she is a pleasant, friendly girl working as assistant manageress in a coffee shop. She seems happy. I spoke to her sister and she thought it unlikely that Diane will return to Hollywood.
Harold Frizzell still works at Universal Studios as a stand-in. But he has not found another Pete Duel: "You only meet a guy like that once in a lifetime."
"What I cannot understand," I said to my friends here, " is how on earth Pete Duel could choose that particular moment to kill himself --when his parents, whom he loved so dearly, were at that very moment flying out to see him!"
"But isn't that classic?" replied Bernard Slade. "Isn't that often the way with suicides? They do it in such a way as to deliberately hurt the people they most love. It's as if they want to destroy not only themselves but others whom they love the most."
Geoffrey Deuel did not want to talk to me about his brother's death. I only dragged two words from him about it. But I believe they supply the essential clue : "Accidental suicide." It's a descriptive phrase.
I think it all blew in his mind as he sat there in the front room of his country-style house, a drink in his hand and his girlfriend asleep in his bed behind. What was it all about? What was the use of it all? Perhaps we'll try something, see what happens!
Alias Smith and Jones did not long survive Pete Duel's death. "He was the real star. A lot of the success of the series was due to him," Egbert Swackhamer told me. And so it proved. Despite Universal's hurried recasting and the valiant attempts of Roger Davis to play the part created by someone else, the show ran for only 17 more episodes.
The new version was shown on BBC television. But by popular request they first had to show an extended nine months' run of Pete Duel's Alias Smith and Jones. Explained Mr Robin Scott, Controller of BBC2: "Viewers have made it clear they want to see Duel again."
That gives added irony to Charles Parker's comment on Pete's death: "Perhaps part of it was frustration in his work. He was successful, but he did not really feel a success."
I leave the last word to Geoffrey Deuel:
"Peter felt there were other things he wanted to do. Acting
was not enough in itself. He wanted to do other things for people
that he considered more meaningful - and he wanted to have better
parts! Possibly that was a shame, because he forgot how much happiness
he gave to so many people."
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