Growing up during the Great Depression, Leo Vincent Gordon left school in the eighth grade to work in construction and demolition before joining the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal agency. During World War II, he joined the army and served two years, but received an undesirable discharge because he simply did not adapt well to a life of military discipline. Finding himself homeless and drifting to Southern California, he fell into a life of crime just to survive.
His criminal path culminated in 1943 when he and a couple of buddies walked into a local dive intent on pulling a simple stickup. Their luck ran out before they even cleared the door, as an ex-deputy sheriff sitting at the bar drew his revolver and started blasting. Leo pulled his own piece, and chaotic gunfire tore up the entire bar. Leo was hit multiple times, taking at least one slug right to the gut. Most men might have died on that floor, but Leo survived, though the stomach scars he carried later in life proved to fellow actors that he was genuinely tougher than any character he ever played on screen.
Following the shootout, he found himself serving a five-year ticket between San Quentin and Folsom State Prison. While inside, he chose to further his education by reading almost every book in the prison library, though he also earned a reputation as a tough inmate and a troublemaker. When the movie Riot in Cell Block 11 was being filmed at Folsom, the warden initially remembered Gordon as a troublemaker and refused to let the film be shot there, until director Don Siegel convinced him that Gordon posed no real threat.
After getting out of prison in 1948 and working construction, Leo used his GI bill to take acting classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. By 1950, he married Lynn Cartwright, a marriage that lasted fifty years until he passed away. In January 1953, he got into a brutal fight at a bar on the Sunset Strip, resulting in an LAPD arrest and a classic mug shot. Soon after, a Hollywood agent who saw him in a Los Angeles stage production of Darkness at Noon launched his film career by casting him in the Western City of Bad Men.
Gordon eventually became a prolific screenwriter with more than a dozen film credits and nearly 150 scripts total, writing for shows like Maverick, Bonanza, Cheyenne, and twenty-one episodes of Adam-12. In 1953, he was cast in John Wayne’s Western Hondo as Ed Lowe, a detestable husband who deserts his family and tries to shoot Wayne’s character in the back. During the rehearsal for the death scene, John Wayne instructed Gordon to fly backward for a classic dramatic Hollywood reaction. Gordon famously pulled up his shirt to show Wayne his real-life police bullet scars, arguing, “When I got shot, I fell forward.” Director John Farrow stepped in and determined that while falling forward was more realistic, flying backward looked better on camera, so Leo flew backward—a motion he would repeat when shot in the gut in many films to come.
Over a fifty-year period, Gordon appeared in more than 170 movies and TV shows, playing mobsters and cowboy heavies while occasionally taking sympathetic roles just to throw people off. He famously fought actors like Clint Walker, John Wayne, and Skipper Alan Hale Jr., usually losing because the villain always has to lose by the end to give the hero a proper challenge. In 1997, he won the Golden Boot Award for his work in Westerns, where he humorously thanked God for typecasting. In his later years, he even played a good guy warden in a 1987 episode of Moonlighting. Looking back at his wild journey from an armed robber and wounded convict to a respected character actor and television writer, Leo Gordon proved that truth is often stranger—and tougher—than fiction, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that defined the golden age of classic television and westerns.
