Quotes

[on the 70s exploitation films he starred in] Then I did a couple of headrollers, and I did them for the money - they paid me a lot of money to do them. I was never a guy who was unhappy on a set. I enjoyed the game, the circus - and I enjoyed the girls. We always had a bunch of fun girls on those movies. The only one I regretted making - I didn't regret The Centerfold Girls (1974) or The Evil (1978), which turned out to be pretty good. But I didn't like Terror Circus (1973) [a.k.a "Barn of the Naked Dead"]. When I got into that I thought, "You've gone too far, my boy." I couldn't imagine my way out of it, though they paid me a lot of bucks. I thought, "Let's not do this again."

[on being known as a Western actor] My career is so long, I have been tagged as everything. You have to slip genres. I was originally the "boy weeping along the river" . . . that's what I call it, the Thomas Wolfe types. I was doing that in New York. And I did 80, 85 Westerns, movies and TV.

[on moving to New York to pursue acting] My father was a Pullman conductor, and he had a guy sneak me onto the train to New York. So, I had $100 and I thought, "That ought to be enough." I'd never had $100 before. So I said, "Hello Broadway!" The greatest thing in the world is ignorance. You know, people should never want to know too much, and I didn't know a thing. And if I'd known - five years later, I thought, "How'd I do that?"

[on how be became an actor] I saw a play when I was, I think, 14 in Jacksonville, Florida. My mother had divorced and moved down there and married another fellow. And they took me to a professional play, a summer stock traveling tent, which I'd never seen before. They were doing "Showboat", and when I saw them all on the stage, I said, "Oh, I'm an actor!" And when I told my mother and stepfather as we walked out to the car afterwards, they looked at each other like [aghast] "Oh my God!"

[on posing nude for Viva magazine] The Centerfold Girls (1974) had no release yet, and the magazine wanted to do something with me. I'd been in a photo in Playboy, just one of many photos. It was nothing. And I said, "Well, I'll do this, and we'll see if this can help get the movie sold" - which it did. And I did it for my ego. I was at the peak of my physical condition. I didn't have any problem with it. They wanted the full Monty and it was a classy woman's magazine. And I gave all the money to Save the Children so I wouldn't profit in any way. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was something. And we had a good time.