The story of William Martin “Clu” Gulager’s journey, from tiny Holdenville, Okla., to becoming a star of beloved television series like The Virginian and films like The Killers and The Last Picture Show, would make a rip-snorting good movie itself.
The son of vaudevillian/Broadway actor John Delancy Gulager, who left the stage to become a country judge in Muskogee, Clu (from “clu clu” – the Cherokee name for the house martins who nested in the family home) studied acting with his father in high school before enlisting in the Marine Corps from 1946 to 1948. Gulager (a Danish family name pronounced “Gyew-Lagger”) used the GI Bill to enroll first in Northeastern State College in Oklahoma, then Baylor University, the premiere college theater program in America under the direction of Paul Baker.
Baker’s Baylor Theater was a powerhouse. Its productions were nationally celebrated and appeared on the covers of national magazines, including Life. The cream of Broadway and Hollywood at the time, Charles Laughton, Burgess Meredith, and others eagerly came to Baylor to take part in his groundbreaking theatrical events, including radical reimaginings of Othello and Hamlet.
From Clu’s arrival in 1950, Baker repeatedly cast the young man in some of the theater’s most adventuresome productions. By 1955, Clu had already been featured in Girl Crazy, Measure for Measure, A Cloud of Witnesses, One Touch of Venus (where he met his wife-to-be Miriam), Seventeen, and Goodbye My Fancy. For the production of A Cloud of Witnesses, a drama about the Alamo, Baker cast Clu as one of the leads, Col. William B. Travis.
One of the highlights of their time at Baylor, however, may have been the production of A Different Drummer, by playwright-in-residence Eugene McKinney. The Lariat critic Phil Hardberger, later mayor of San Antonio, called Clu’s performance “notable” and wrote that Miriam’s was “unsurpassed in her performance,” declaring the play was a “masterpiece of writing and acting.”
Baylor graduate (and former Waco mayor) Virginia DuPuy was among those in the audience for one of the performances of A Different Drummer. “When I saw the play,” Virginia told me, “I realized there is something very alive, very real about the work in this theater.” So much so that, as a junior, she quickly changed her major to theater. “Obviously, Clu’s portrayal of the character had a significant impact on my decisions about the direction of my college and ultimate life’s work.”
Others must have agreed with Virginia’s assessment. An abridged version of A Different Drummer was featured on the prestigious CBS television series Omnibus on March 13, 1955. Hosted by the venerable English actor Alistair Cooke, Clu and Miriam were joined by a strong professional cast, including character actor Margaret Hamilton, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz.
In Spring 1956, notables Laughton and Meredith spent two months at Baylor rehearsing student actors for a groundbreaking production of a “Cubist-inspired” Hamlet, with three masked “shadow” Hamlets speaking the lines representing the different aspects of Hamlet’s personality. Hollywood royalty, from Eli Wallach to Charles Heston, flew into Waco to see the productions.
While still a student, Clu was also cast alongside Paul Newman and George Peppard as Danny in the televised drama Bang the Drum Slowly, first broadcasted September 26, 1956, as part of the CBS series The United States Steel Hour. Of the production of Bang the Drum Slowly, the influential New York Times critic John J. O’Connor wrote, “The audience can have no doubt that something special just passed in the night.”
Throughout Miriam and Clu’s time at Baylor, The Lariat regularly featured stories on the young couple, who clearly had become campus-wide celebrities. Miriam, a talented opera-trained vocalist, and Clu performed at most Baylor functions, then increasingly bigger venues across the state. Upon graduation, Both Clu and Miriam remained at Baylor for their graduate degrees in theater.
Clu then earned a scholarship and studied for a time with acclaimed French actor/director Jean-Louis Barrault before moving to Columbia University, where he and Miriam began auditioning for parts in the many live television productions filming in New York City. In later years, Clu called Baker “one of the few geniuses in theater.”
Also impressed by Clu and Miriam’s work was Lariat editor Hal Wingo (’57), who enjoyed an impressive career in journalism, first with Life magazine, then as co-founder of People magazine. Wingo said that he both attended and reviewed Gulager’s productions. “You had only to see him in their performances once to know that he was heads and shoulders above anybody else on the stage,” Wingo recalled. “He just had a native, natural ability to convey.” Later, while working at the San Antonio Light, Wingo said he saw the couple in a touring production of A Cloud of Witnesses at one of the area’s historic missions.
After several small bit parts in television and movies, most notably – Wagon Train and as Mad Dog Coll in the TV series The Untouchables in 1959 – Clu landed the plum role of Billy the Kid with Barry Sullivan as Pat Garrett in the controversial NBC series The Tall Man, which first aired in September 1960. Clu’s real-life experience on a ranch in Oklahoma quickly paid dividends in the first of what would be a long history of roles in Western films and television series. “I was a cowboy in Oklahoma where we raised white-faced cattle,” he once told interviewer Jim Longworth. “The thing that I’m most proud of in my whole life is that, on my watch, not one white-face got away.”
Clu’s youthful good looks and southwestern drawl in The Tall Man drew immediate comparisons with Edd Byrnes’ popular character Kookie on the hit series 77 Sunset Strip. Upon casting Clu, writer/producer Sam Peeples told TV Guide, “He’s exactly what we were looking for, an actor with a flair for the unusual. He lends a certain psychological depth to Billy.” The Tall Man only lasted two seasons, but other roles soon followed.
Despite their increasingly busy schedules, the Gulagers continued to visit Baylor and Waco periodically. In October 1961, Clu was the featured performer at the Heart O’ Texas Fair and Rodeo. Among the thousands present was young Michael Long, now chair of Baylor’s Modern Languages and Cultures department. Long said that Clu, then top-billed for his starring role in The Tall Man, told stories, did various rope tricks, recited lines from his various plays and TV productions, and performed his first single for Capitol Records, “Chiquita Mia” b/w “Billy’s Love Song.” The 45 came with a teenage heartthrob-styled close-up photograph of Clu on the cover of the jacket sleeve.
A year later, Miriam was cast as the lead in the Dallas Theater Center’s production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. The production was so successful that the company toured elsewhere in the state, including a February performance in Waco Hall.
Clu’s next role was his breakthrough part as Deputy Sheriff Emmett Ryker in the hit television series The Virginian, a weekly 90-minute Western drama for NBC, and one of the first to be filmed and broadcast in color. The Virginian debuted in 1962 and ran for nine seasons and enabled Clu to work with some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including Lee J. Cobb, James Drury, Doug McClure, and others. When he left after five seasons, The Virginian was already considered a landmark among TV Westerns.
From there, he was cast as a professional hitman in noted director Don Siegel’s 1964 film noir classic The Killers with Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, and future president Ronald Reagan. Clu’s character was gunned down by Reagan – giving him the dubious distinction of being the only actor Reagan ever killed in his own long film career. In 1969, Gulager was featured as a mechanic in the Paul Newman racing film Winning, and for two seasons as the head of airport security in San Francisco International Airport (1970-71), then as Inspector George Turner in The Streets of San Francisco (1975).
From there, Clu (and Miriam, who was also cast in a number of notable productions throughout her career, including Bound for Glory and TV series such as Barney Miller and Charlie’s Angels) continued to work steadily in Hollywood. One of Clu’s best-known roles was as Abilene in Peter Bogdanovich’s brilliant The Last Picture Show in 1971, where he memorably seduced Cybill Shepherd in a pool hall. He was cast opposite Susan Sarandon in The Other Side of Midnight in 1977 and later featured on the hit primetime soap opera Falcon Crest in 1981. As he got older, Clu kept working as a character actor in episodes of dozens of series, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Knight Rider; Murder, She Wrote; MacGyver; Walker, Texas Ranger; and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
In his later years, Clu found himself primarily cast in horror films, including The Return of the Living Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street 2, both released in 1985, and for his son John’s Feast series of low-budget horror films. One last Waco connection was Clu’s appearance as the McLennan County sheriff in the NBC drama In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco in 1993, along with Miriam and Diane Ayala Goldner, who had married their son John. John and Diane helped Clu found the Clu Gulager Film Acting Workshop in Hollywood, which still continues today.
Miriam died in January 2003 at age 73. They had been married for more than 50 years.
Clu’s final role, appropriately enough, was as a bookstore clerk in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 ode to Tinseltown, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He died of natural causes at his son’s home in Los Angeles on August 5, 2022. He was 93.
Reading interviews with Clu, some dating back to the mid-1950s, he always displays a wry, self-deprecating sense of humor, one liberally sprinkled with wise observations about his craft – and life in general. He was, after all, a second cousin to humorist Will Rogers.
Wingo, who initiated correspondence with Clu during the COVID-19 pandemic, said that their shared time at Baylor made their connection and new friendship stronger. Clu lavishly illustrated his letters with cartoons and artwork and signed them “Clu Clu.”
In their conversations, Wingo also found the legendary actor uncommonly self-effacing and modest. Just as in his interviews, Gulager repeatedly claimed that acting was never easy for him and that he struggled through each production.
Still, as Clu said later in life, what he did was important: “We need to laugh, we need to be scared, we need to hug our girl in the theater.”
Gulager told Wingo that as Miriam was dying of cancer, their conversations often returned to their time at Baylor: “Clu said that he turned to her one day and asked, ‘Miriam, in all the places we’ve been and everything that we’ve done, where have you been happiest?’
And, without a moment’s hesitation, she answered, ‘Where we were at Baylor.’”
