Gene Barry and the Real Story Behind “Bat Masterson”

TLDR: Bat Masterson ran on NBC from October 1958 to June 1961, producing 108 episodes across three seasons. Gene Barry starred as the derby-hatted, cane-carrying frontier dandy who preferred wit over gunfire.

Barry later starred in Burke’s Law and originated the role of Georges in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway.

The real Bat Masterson ended his life as a New York sports columnist and died at his typewriter in 1921. His final words, written moments before his death, are worth reading.

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By 1959, twenty-six Western series occupied American prime-time television schedules. Nearly all of them featured the same hero: a dust-covered lawman who settled disputes with a six-shooter and a hard stare.

Then NBC introduced a man in a pin-striped suit, a polished derby hat, and an elegant gold-tipped cane.

He preferred philosophical quips and tactical leverage to gunplay. He was, deliberately and specifically, not like anyone else on the frontier.

The Show and the Creative Gamble Behind It

Bat Masterson premiered on NBC on October 8, 1958, produced by Ziv Television Productions under executive producer Frederick W. Ziv. The creative strategy was deliberate: rather than compete directly with Gunsmoke and Have Gun Will Travel on their own terms, Ziv Television subverted the genre entirely.

Their Masterson was an urbane anti-hero who brought Eastern sophistication to the lawless West.

The derby hat and gold-knobbed cane were not affectations. They were the show’s entire thesis. Traditional Western heroes drew their identity from the holstered revolver.

This Masterson used his cane as a defensive weapon, a lever, or a psychological tool to de-escalate violence.

The producers added a hidden sword inside the cane for dramatic effect, a Hollywood invention that nonetheless perfectly captured the character’s intelligence-over-force philosophy.

The show’s identity was further cemented by its theme song, composed by David Rose under a pseudonym due to licensing restrictions, performed by Bill Lee of the Mellomen.

The opening lyrics instantly popularized the image of the man who “wore a cane and derby hat.”

The series ran for three seasons and 108 episodes, with its final broadcast on June 1, 1961. It never broke into the Nielsen top 25, partly because NBC moved it to a different time slot each season, preventing the stable audience accumulation that sustained competitors like Gunsmoke.

By 1961, an industry-wide purge of Western programming ended the show along with many of its contemporaries.

Gene Barry: Broadway Roots and the Role He Almost Turned Down

Gene Barry was born Eugene Klass on June 14, 1919, in New York City, raised in a Russian-Jewish immigrant household that valued the arts.

He was an exceptional violinist and singer during his youth, earning a scholarship to the Chatham Square School of Music. When he began his professional acting career he chose the surname Barry as a direct tribute to theatrical patriarch John Barrymore.

Before television he was an established Broadway performer. He made his debut in 1942 in a revival of The New Moon and subsequently starred in Rosalinda, The Merry Widow, and Catherine Was Great, where he performed opposite Mae West.

It was during rehearsals for Catherine Was Great that he met his future wife, Betty Claire Kalb.

When Ziv Television founder Fred Ziv approached Barry about playing Bat Masterson, Barry initially declined. He preferred feature film work and had a deep-seated dislike of standard dusty cowboy archetypes.

His personal style was famously refined. He was known to walk the streets of New York looking for acting work dressed in a tailored Chesterfield coat and a homburg hat.

Upon learning that this particular Western hero would wear custom suits, a derby hat, and carry a gold-tipped cane, Barry recognized the theatrical potential immediately and signed on.

He brought a distinct rhythmic musicality, dry humor, and physical grace to the character, transforming what could have been a standard lawman into something considerably more interesting.

Sixty Years of Marriage in Hollywood

In an industry notorious for short-lived marriages, Gene Barry’s personal life was an extraordinary counterpoint. He married Betty Claire Kalb on October 22, 1944, at age 25.

They had met during Broadway rehearsals. Their marriage lasted nearly sixty years until Betty’s death in Los Angeles on January 31, 2003, at the age of 79.

They raised three children together: sons Michael and Frederick, and an adopted daughter.

Barry consistently credited their shared background as young stage actors in New York as the foundation of a mutual respect that insulated their family from the pressures of Hollywood fame.

In a town where that kind of longevity was genuinely rare, sixty years together was its own kind of statement.

Burke’s Law, The Name of the Game, and Broadway at 84

Following Bat Masterson, Barry extended his dapper television persona into two more successful series.

Burke’s Law ran on ABC from 1963 to 1966, with Barry playing Captain Amos Burke, a millionaire police captain who arrived at crime scenes in a Rolls-Royce.

The Name of the Game ran from 1968 to 1971, with Barry playing Glenn Howard, a powerful publishing magnate in an innovative rotating-lead drama format.

His most significant late-career achievement was theatrical. In 1983, Barry originated the role of Georges in La Cage aux Folles on Broadway opposite George Hearn.

The production was a historic cultural milestone, the first major hit Broadway musical centered on a gay relationship. Barry’s performance earned him a 1984 Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical.

When the musical was revived in 2004, Barry was celebrated by Broadway critics and historians for his pioneering original work. He was 84 years old at the time of the revival.

The theater community’s tribute to him at that age, for work he had done two decades earlier, said something about the lasting quality of what he had brought to that stage.

In 1990 and 1991, Barry reprised his role as Bat Masterson twice on television. The second occasion was The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, a nostalgic cross-franchise reunion that brought Barry back as Masterson alongside Hugh O’Brian as Wyatt Earp, Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick, and Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie.

It was a genuine golden-age Western reunion that gave that generation of television actors a public farewell.

Gene Barry died on December 9, 2009, at age 90, at Sunrise Senior Living in Woodland Hills, California.

His children subsequently filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the facility, alleging that Barry, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease, suffered an unmonitored fall on December 5 that resulted in fractured ribs, a hip injury, and a subdural hematoma.

The lawsuit alleged the facility failed to notify a physician or his family of the fall. He was buried beside Betty at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City.

The Real Bat Masterson Was Even More Interesting Than the Show

The historical Bartholomew Masterson was born on November 26, 1853, in Henryville, Quebec, Canada. Throughout his entire life he deliberately concealed his Canadian birth, claiming to have been born in Illinois.

The concealment was practical: as a foreign national who was never naturalized, Masterson illegally voted, ran for public office, and served as a county sheriff and federal officer for decades. His citizenship status was a fiction he maintained until his death.

The cane was real, but its origin had nothing to do with fashion. In 1876 in Sweetwater, Texas, Masterson became involved in a confrontation with a cavalry sergeant named Melvin King over a Texas saloon girl named Mollie Brennan.

King opened fire. Brennan was killed in the crossfire. Masterson was shot severely in the pelvis and groin.

As he fell, he returned fire and killed King. The pelvic wound was debilitating enough to require a walking cane for the rest of his life. Rather than hide the limitation, he leaned into it, selecting expensive, ornate silver- and gold-knobbed canes that became central to his personal mystique.

Frontier mythology credited him with killing upwards of 26 men. The actual number was considerably lower.

The exaggerated body count originated from a practical joke played on a naive East Coast journalist in Colorado in 1893, and Masterson occasionally let the dangerous reputation stand because it offered him protection in volatile border towns.

When forced to testify under oath during a 1913 libel lawsuit, with future Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo serving as his legal counsel, Masterson testified that he had killed “about three” men during his years on the frontier.

His friendship with Wyatt Earp was the real-life partnership the television show was prevented from depicting by corporate competition. Earp recruited Masterson as his deputy in Dodge City.

The two worked together to manage the lawless cattle town. When Earp’s associate Doc Holliday was arrested in Denver and faced extradition to Arizona, Earp called on Masterson.

Despite a personal dislike of Holliday, Masterson rode to Denver immediately, took custody of the man, and orchestrated his safe release purely as a favor.

On television, network executives severely restricted crossover appearances because Hugh O’Brian’s Wyatt Earp was owned by a different production entity. In 108 episodes of Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp appeared exactly once.

The Man Who Died at His Typewriter

The most remarkable chapter of Bat Masterson’s life did not take place on the frontier. In 1902 he relocated permanently to New York City with his wife Emma, and in 1903 he was offered a job as a sports columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph.

For eighteen years, significantly longer than any single occupation he had held in the West, he wrote a column three times a week under the byline W.B. Masterson.

Despite no formal higher education, Masterson possessed a natural, evocative writing style. His column, originally focused on boxing, eventually expanded into social and political commentary.

He condemned the New York Boxing Commission’s ban on interracial bouts as “obnoxious.” He correctly predicted that Prohibition would enrich organized crime.

He described boxing matches in the language of tactical gunfights and brought the same calm authority to a Manhattan press room that he had brought to Dodge City.

During his New York years he befriended a young writer named Damon Runyon, who was so captivated by Masterson’s sharp wit and sartorial elegance that he used him as the direct inspiration for Sky Masterson, the dapper high-stakes Broadway gambler in Guys and Dolls.

On the morning of October 25, 1921, at age 67, Masterson sat at his desk at the Morning Telegraph and completed what would be his final column.

Just after typing his last punctuation mark, he suffered a massive heart attack and slumped over his typewriter.

His final words, published posthumously on October 27, 1921, the day of his funeral, read:

“There are those in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed, for example, that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.”

Over 500 mourners attended his funeral, ranging from Broadway actors and sports promoters to old frontier scouts. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx beneath a headstone inscribed with the words: “Loved by everyone.”

The man who the television show depicted as a perpetual frontier wanderer had spent his last eighteen years writing about boxing in Manhattan.

He died not with a gun in his hand or a cane at his side but with his fingers on a typewriter. It is a better ending than any Hollywood script would have dared to write.