My Heart Belongs to Clint (Part One)

My Heart Belongs to Clint (Part One)

I’ve been gush­ing on and on about James Gan­dolfini. I even said he was the great­est actor ever in the his­tory of television.I admit that I should have qual­i­fied my assess­ment. Gan­dolfini is the great­est actor ever in the his­tory of prime­time television.

Day­time tele­vi­sion? Dif­fer­ent story.

The great­est actor in the his­tory of day­time tele­vi­sion is none other than my very dear friend, Clint Ritchie.¹

Things just haven’t been the same since Clint decided, in Decem­ber 1998, not to renew his con­tract with ABC and left the role of Clint Buchanan that he cre­ated on “One Life to Live” back on Sep­tem­ber 10, 1979.

Clint returned to his sig­na­ture role a few times over the next sev­eral years, but was never will­ing to come out of retire­ment and return to New York City on a reg­u­lar basis.²

Hav­ing been to his beau­ti­ful Happy Horse Ranch here in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia many times, I under­stand. It is like being at sum­mer camp. We have spent some lovely evenings sit­ting on the lawn in front of the main house, enjoy­ing the cool breeze. The only sounds are the occa­sional con­tented whinny from one of his 35 or so con­tented horses (hence the ranch’s name) or the occa­sional bark from one of his sev­eral spoiled dogs. I once asked him, as I stared up through the tall pine trees at the stars, how he brought him­self to get on the plane and head back to the ABC stu­dio in the heart of Man­hat­tan. He got a big smile on his face and said, “They pay me a lot of money and it buys a lot of hay.”

Even­tu­ally, even the pay­check couldn’t lure him over the prop­erty line and back to the Sacra­mento air­port.³

I also naively asked him the first time we vis­ited the ranch, “Why 35 horses?” He looked at me in com­plete seri­ous­ness and responded, “Why not?“⁴

To Clint, pure joy is being able to sit in his house and gaze out any win­dow at a group of well cared-for horses graz­ing in a nearby pas­ture. And that’s pre­cisely what you can do at Happy Horse Ranch.

But I miss the days when Clint used to call my office to tell me how things were going at the stu­dio, share a joke or story he had heard that day, or tell me about some of the tamer prac­ti­cal jokes he and his co-stars, Phil Carey (“Asa”) and Robert S. Woods (“Bo”) played on each other.⁵ He knew, of course, what time the show aired and also pro­vided me in advance with the dates on which the episodes in which he appeared would be shown. So I planned, as much as pos­si­ble, to stay in my office on those days to watch his per­for­mances while eat­ing lunch. It would be down­right sur­real to get inter­rupted by the recep­tion­ist announc­ing, “Janie, Clint’s on the line” at pre­cisely the same moment I was watch­ing him on the tele­vi­sion screen. I used to tell him, “Jeez, I’ve got you in stereo here! And tell wardrobe that brown sport coat looks hor­rid! When are they going to get you a new one?”

There was one day in par­tic­u­lar that I was unable to watch dur­ing lunch. That after­noon, I began get­ting phone calls and e-mails addressed to “The Woman from Lodi”. I was baffled.

When I got home that night and watched the video­tape of that day’s show, I was flab­ber­gasted. Clint Buchanan, in dis­cussing his past love affairs with his lit­tle brother, Bo, men­tioned “that woman out in Lodi, Cal­i­for­nia.” Clint gave an ad-libbed “shout-out” to me and Lodi — to the shock of his co-star, Bob Woods, who kept his com­po­sure because he knew exactly what Bucky (Clint’s nick­name) was up to and why.⁶

When I want to be reminded of Clint’s won­der­ful per­for­mances, I just pull out my exten­sive video­tape col­lec­tion⁷ and watch a cou­ple of episodes.

My favorites — and Clint’s — are from the Buchanan City 1888 sto­ry­line. Clint Ritchie, the real-life cow­boy, got to por­tray Clint Buchanan in an Old West set­ting — and loved it. He even took six of his own horses to the loca­tion shoot in Ari­zona. Clint Buchanan’s horse on the show, “Okie,” was actu­ally Clint’s own “Okie Dokie,” a horse he lit­er­ally res­cued from the dog food fac­tory and nursed back to health. Like “Bunny” (pic­tured above), he lived nearly 30 years and is buried at the Ranch.

Clint should have won many day­time Emmy awards for Best Actor. But he never even sub­mit­ted his name for con­sid­er­a­tion, although his costar col­lected six such awards dur­ing the years that they worked together as one of day­time tv’s all-time great­est super-couples, “Clint and Viki Buchanan”.A num­ber of years ago, Michael Logan wrote TV Guide that some roles should never be recast because the actor who orig­i­nated it embod­ies the char­ac­ter in such a mem­o­rable fashion.So it was and is with the role of Clint Buchanan.

Clint was under con­tract to Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Fox for a few years (with, among oth­ers, Tom Sel­l­eck) and was enjoy­ing a suc­cess­ful career in films and tele­vi­sion when his agent called and sug­gested that he read for the day­time role.⁸ After read­ing the script, he called his agent and told him that if ABC didn’t cast him in the part, they were mak­ing a major mis­take because he saw him­self depicted on the page — “I am this guy!”

For­tu­nately, the ABC cast­ing direc­tor also saw the resem­blance. The char­ac­ter of “Chris Logan,” for which Clint was called to read, was rechris­tened, with Clint’s per­mis­sion, “Clint Buchanan” in recog­ni­tion of the uncanny similarities.

The most strik­ing dif­fer­ence is this: Clint Buchanan is a fam­ily man in love for all time with one woman. Clint Ritchie has remained sin­gle and child­less in large part because he is a self-professed loner who prefers the com­pany of his beloved ani­mals to that of most human beings.

Gan­dolfini may be the great­est actor in the his­tory of prime­time, but my heart has belonged to Clint — Ritchie and Buchanan — since Sep­tem­ber 10, 1979. And always will.

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1. Clint is retired, so I no longer get to watch his hand­some mug on my tele­vi­sion screen on a reg­u­lar basis which explains my “senior moment”.
2. That’s Clint’s very first scene on “One Life to Live” with Lee Pat­ter­son who por­trayed Joe Riley.
3. Have you seen “One Life to Live” in recent years? Who could blame him?
4. The truth is that he set out to breed and sell horses, but then couldn’t bear to part with any of them so they all stayed. Basi­cally, any ani­mal that needs a home finds one at Happy Horse Ranch.
5. Many of them can­not be recounted in polite company!
6. That’s a photo of me with Bob at the ABC stu­dios in New York City in Decem­ber 1998
7. I am slowly con­vert­ing all of my video­tape to DVD, but it is a slow, time-consuming process.
8. Among Clint’s other cred­its are “Pat­ton,” “The Saint Valen­tine Day’s Mas­sacre,” “Ban­dolero,” “A Force of One,” and “Cen­ten­nial” (minis­eries) with leg­ends such as Dean Mar­tin, James Stew­art, George C. Scott, Clint East­wood, and Jack Nicholson.

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