The quiet death of an 81-year-old actor in a modest Malibu home on a cool Sunday morning in January 2010 barely registered with the American public, a final silence that mirrored the strange, half-forgotten career of the man who once rode the Ponderosa. Pernell Roberts, the original Adam Cartwright on the most-watched show in television history, slipped away from pancreatic cancer with no Hollywood procession and no grand memorial, a stark contrast to the industry that had once made him a household name. The few mourners who gathered whispered the same question to one another, wondering if the man they had come to bury had ever regretted his choices, and more pointedly, if he had ever forgiven the figure whose name still made his jaw tighten even in old age.
His widow, Dr. Eleanor Criswell, a respected psychology professor, released a brief statement through the family attorney, Richard Stone, that painted a portrait of a principled man, one who had marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
from Selma to Montgomery and who had fought NBC executives over their racist casting practices on his own show. But what she left unsaid, what no one dared utter that morning, was the truth about why his funeral was so small, a truth rooted in a forty-five-year-old grudge that had cost him everything and that he had carried with him to the very end.
The Hollywood machine, which so often orchestrates lavish public farewells for its stars, had effectively forgotten the man who had refused to play its game. The industry remembers those who play along, but it quietly forgets those who walk away, and Roberts had committed the unforgivable sin of being right too early and then refusing to compromise his principles for the sake of a paycheck. The decision that emptied his funeral and ended his career as a leading man was made in a single moment inside a dressing room on a sound stage in 1965, and the man who pushed him to that breaking point is someone Hollywood still prefers not to name, a figure whose legacy is now forever intertwined with the actor who hated him.
By the spring of that year, Bonanza was a phenomenon unlike anything television had ever seen, having climbed to the number one spot in the Nielsen ratings with roughly sixty million Americans tuning in every Sunday night to watch the Cartwright family. Chevrolet poured money into the show, RCA Victor used it to sell color television sets, and the four leading men were household names in every small town from Maine to California, their faces as familiar as the family next door. Roberts was thirty-six years old, playing the eldest and most educated of the three sons, a deep-voiced Shakespearean actor who had won a 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 Desk Award in 1955 for his off-Broadway performance in Macbeth, and he was miserable.
He was riding a horse around a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 ranch, calling a fifty-year-old man “Pa,” and delivering lines that made him cringe every single Monday morning when the scripts arrived, a profound artistic humiliation for a man who had trained for the classical stage. In an interview that year, he made a comment that would haunt him forever, telling a reporter that being on Bonanza felt like being Isaac Stern sitting in with Lawrence Welk, a comparison between a world-class classical violinist and a polka band leader that dripped with contempt. He was not just unhappy; he was insulted by his own success, and this is where most people misunderstand him, thinking he left because of arrogance or a swollen head, when in reality it was something much deeper and more painful.
He told Washington Post reporter Lawrence Laurent in May of 1963, two full years before he quit, that he found it genuinely silly for three adult men to keep asking their father for permission to do anything, a grown man saying “yes, Pa” and “no, Pa” on cue like a small boy. He went to the producers, and he went again and again to the one man who had created the show, whose signature was on every script, a man named David Dortort, and every time Roberts asked for something better, Dortort said no. The friction between them was real, constant, and deeply personal, and as the producers ignored him and the network executives told him to be grateful, something cold began to grow between the actor and the man who had built the Ponderosa.
What Roberts could no longer ignore was who was missing from the ranch and who was being insulted in their absence, as every week brought guest stars who were white actors playing Mexican bandits with painted-on mustaches and exaggerated accents. White actors played Native American chiefs in red face makeup, grunting through scripts that turned entire cultures into cartoon villains, while Chinese characters existed only to be laughed at and to mangle their English for the audience’s amusement. The actual Chinese-American actor, Victor Sen Yung, who played the family cook Hop Sing, was paid a fraction of what the white stars earned and was given almost nothing to do beyond the stereotype.
Roberts, a southern boy from Waycross, Georgia, who had once taught Sunday school, remembered believing with his whole heart that every person on Earth is equal in the eyes of God, and now he was being paid a fortune to participate in a show that taught millions of children the exact opposite. So he did something almost no Hollywood star of his level had ever done before, showing up at protests and marching for civil rights, including flying east to stand with Dr. King for the March on Washington in 1963.
He walked a picket line in Torrance, California, for fair housing, holding a sign that read “Fair housing for all,” and then came the moment that mattered most in March of 1965, when he answered Dr. King’s call to march from Selma to Montgomery.
A photographer captured him at the City of Saint Jude campsite in Montgomery, standing with the other marchers, a photograph that still exists today in the Alabama Department of Archives and History, and then he flew back to California and stepped back onto the Bonanza set. He looked at the script for next week’s episode, and the man whose office was just down the hall, whose name was on that script, suddenly represented everything Roberts could no longer stomach. When he walked into the production offices in the late spring of 1965, the executives already knew something was wrong, as he had been complaining for years and had even told a Miami newspaper that the experience had become such a mental crusher that he had gone to a doctor for help.
The other three stars had just signed a fresh contract for the upcoming season, with Lorne Greene, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon each agreeing to $10,000 per episode, a guaranteed minimum of $660,000 per actor for 33 episodes plus residuals, which in today’s money is millions and millions of dollars. Walking away from that kind of guaranteed wealth was, by every Hollywood definition, completely insane, but he walked away anyway, after Lorne Greene sat him down for one final conversation. Greene leaned forward and tried to reach the part of Roberts that he believed must still be reasonable, saying that if he stayed with Bonanza, he would make so much money that he could build his own theater and hire Tennessee Williams to write a play for him, having everything he ever dreamed about as an actor on his own terms, but only if he stayed.
It was the most generous version of the offer that Hollywood could possibly make, to stay rich and famous and buy his principles later, but Roberts looked at this older man whom he respected and shook his head, because he could not buy his principles later, they were not for sale at any price. David Dortort was the one man Roberts could not look in the eye anymore, as the creator of Bonanza had heard every complaint and answered almost none of them, filing away the memos about racist scripts and childish dialogue in a drawer. Roberts had asked for grown-up story lines, had asked to let Adam marry and leave the ranch and become a man, but Dortort had refused all of it, and to Roberts, the answer behind every refusal was the same, that the show was making too much money to risk changing anything.
When Roberts finally walked out, he did not slam any doors or give a farewell speech, he simply did not come back, and the writers reacted by writing Adam Cartwright off the ranch, saying he had moved away to sea and then to Australia. But the real punishment was not in the script, it was waiting for him in the years to come, as Hollywood has a long memory, and the wound that opened that spring would never close, with Roberts refusing to speak Dortort’s name with warmth ever again.
The next fourteen years of Roberts’ career are usually described as a blacklist, though he was not officially blacklisted in the way that screenwriters were during the McCarthy era, there was no list with his name on it. What there was, instead, was something almost worse because it had no name and no rules and no end date, as Hollywood simply decided that he was difficult, and once that word attaches to your name in that town, doors close very quietly. He himself described it best in an interview years later, saying that for a long time after he left Bonanza, he was considered too independent, which meant he ended up getting the rejects that other actors could afford to turn down.
He never named the man he believed had whispered that word about him through every executive office in town, but everyone in the family knew who he blamed, as the whispers had a source and the source had an office on the Bonanza lot. But he did not sit around feeling sorry for himself, he did not give angry interviews about how Hollywood had wronged him, and he did not write a bitter memoir, he just went back to the thing he had always loved most, which was the stage. He toured the country in Camelot, playing King Arthur in Kansas City and Pittsburgh, and he played Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, The Music Man, and Petruchio in Kiss Me, Kate, going to Broadway in 1967 for a musical called Mata Hari.
He starred opposite the legendary Ingrid Bergman in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion in 1972, played Rhett Butler in a musical version of Gone with the Wind in 1973, and picked up a Joseph Jefferson Award nomination at the Ivanhoe Theater in Chicago that same year, while also taking every television guest role that came his way because he refused to be too proud to work. He appeared in more than sixty different shows during those so-called blacklist years, including Mission: Impossible, The Wild, Wild West, Mannix, Marcus Welby, M. D.
, Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, The Odd Couple, Ironside, and The Big Valley, working constantly but never at the level he had once known. His son, Jonathan Christopher Roberts, who had been born in 1951, was killed in a motorcycle accident on the 29th of April in 1989 at the age of 37, when Pernell was 60, a loss that must have felt devastating after everything else he had given up. He had walked away from millions of dollars in 1965, walked away from fame and the easy life, and now the one piece of his life that had nothing to do with Hollywood was suddenly gone too, but somehow, even then, he never became bitter.
Because by that point, something extraordinary had already happened, as Hollywood, in its strange and reluctant way, had given him one last chance, and he had taken it.
In the late summer of 1979, after a decade and a half of theater tours and small television parts, Roberts received a phone call that changed everything one more time, as CBS was developing a new medical 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 called Trapper John, M. D. The producers needed someone who could play a brilliant, witty, slightly arrogant surgeon at San Francisco Memorial Hospital, and they had two other actors in mind, Wayne Rogers and John Forsythe, both established stars with no Bonanza baggage attached.
But Roberts read for the part, and when he walked out of the room, the producers knew they had found their man, with the show premiering on the 23rd of September in 1979 and running for seven straight seasons. He earned an Emmy nomination in 1981, and he had become a star all over again, this time on his own terms in a role written for an adult on a network that was not NBC, a vindication that must have tasted incredible. The fact that this comeback happened on CBS, a full network away from the people who had run Bonanza, was not a small detail to him, it was a quiet revenge that lasted seven years.
But the moment from this chapter that has stayed with me the longest has nothing to do with the show, happening in November of 1980 in the middle of his triumphant return, and almost nobody talks about it.
Victor Sen Yung, the Chinese-American actor who had played Hop Sing on Bonanza for fourteen years, died alone in his small North Hollywood home from accidental natural gas poisoning, with a leaking oven filling the house with fumes, and his body was not discovered until the 9th of November. He had been struggling financially and had been largely forgotten by the industry that had once paid him to bow and shuffle and provide comic relief, and when the funeral was arranged, almost nobody from Bonanza came forward to help. Almost nobody asked who would pay for the service, and almost nobody from the production team that had grown rich off that show volunteered to speak about the man who had stood beside the Cartwrights for so many years, but one person did.
Roberts paid for the entire funeral out of his own pocket, and then he stood up at the service and delivered the eulogy for Victor Sen Yung himself, a small, quiet act that tells you who a person really is when nobody is watching. Adam Cartwright stood up and buried Hop Sing, the man who had spent six years arguing with David Dortort about how minorities were treated on the show, personally honoring the actor whom the show had used and discarded, doing it without a press release or a magazine profile. He did it because it was the right thing to do and because nobody else was going to do it, and this single moment tells you more about Pernell Roberts than any contract he ever signed or any interview he ever gave.
He had not walked away from Bonanza because he hated the show, he had walked away because he loved the people the show was failing, and fifteen years later, when one of those people died alone and broke, he made sure that man’s last journey was paid for in full.
He had a way of signing letters in the final years of his life, writing his name as “Pernell, the last one, Roberts,” a small joke at first because his father had been Pernell senior and he was Pernell junior, but over time the phrase took on a heavier meaning. He really was the last one, as by the time he died in 2010, Dan Blocker had been gone for thirty-eight years, taken by a sudden pulmonary embolism after gallbladder surgery on the 13th of May in 1972 at just 43 years old. Lorne Greene had been gone for twenty-three years, taken by respiratory complications on the 11th of September in 1987 following ulcer surgery, and Michael Landon had been gone for nineteen years, taken by the same pancreatic cancer that would eventually take Roberts himself on the 1st of July in 1991.
And then there was David Dortort, the man Roberts had never forgiven, the creator of Bonanza, the one whose office had been the source of every script he hated and every decision he opposed, and who outlived Roberts by exactly eight months, dying in September of 2010 at 93 years old. Late in his life, Dortort sat down for a long oral history with the Television Academy Foundation, speaking for hours about every actor and every storyline, and when the interviewer reached the subject of Roberts, his tone softened in a way that surprised everyone in the room. He admitted that he had been too hard on Roberts, that he had not appreciated him at the time, and that he knew Roberts was good but had never realized just how good, saying quietly, “None better, none better.”
That confession came forty years too late, as Roberts never heard it from his lips, and the two men never sat across from one another in a quiet room and made their peace, with the grudge that had started over a single script in 1965 lasting until both of them were in the ground.
Roberts married four times across his long life, with his first wife Vera Mourey becoming a respected professor of theater history at Hunter College, his second wife Judith Lebrec having walked beside him at Selma, and his third marriage to Karyn Nac ending in 1996. In 1997, he married Dr. Eleanor Criswell, a brilliant humanistic psychologist who had taught at Sonoma State University for decades and who survived him by fourteen years until her own death in September of 2024, never selling his story or writing a tell-all book.
She just protected the quiet dignity of the man she had loved, the same way he had protected his own dignity all those years before, and here is the truth about him that we forget too easily in a world that rewards loudness. He never recanted, he never apologized for leaving, and he never came back on a talk show to tell America that he had been wrong about Bonanza or that David had been right all along. In an interview late in life, he was asked once again about his decision, and he reportedly said that he had not enjoyed Bonanza but that he had never said all the harsh things people had quoted him saying over the years, even in his old age protecting the truth from being twisted into something simpler.
He was a man who chose the harder road in 1965 and walked it for forty-five years without ever once turning back, marching at Selma when most actors would not even march into a producer’s office, and paying for a forgotten friend’s funeral when nobody else would. He took the smaller jobs when the bigger ones would have required him to be a smaller person, and when he died on that quiet Sunday in Malibu, the world did not give him a parade because the world had never quite figured out what to do with a man who refused to be bought and who refused to forgive the one man he believed had stolen the show he could have loved. Pernell, the last one, Roberts, that was how he signed his name, and in the end, that was exactly what he was, the final confession behind the man he never forgave.
