Will Hutchins: The Long and Winding and Happy Road of a Sugarfoot
Somewhere in the part of our brains that stores pop culture factoids, whether we want it to or not, we all know performers who were stars for a relatively brief while and then seemed to disappear.
Beyond being invaluable on trivia night at the local pub, these factoids raise a more human question: What exactly happened with this person once the spotlight moved on? Because sometimes the stories end happily and sometimes they don’t.
Will Hutchins goes into the happy column.
Hutchins, who died April 21 at the age of 94, was best known for playing Tom Brewster on the TV Western Sugarfoot from 1957 to 1961. A straight-arrow law student who seemed about as suited for the Wild West as Billy the Kid would have been suited for Pride and Prejudice, Brewster nonetheless applied his erudition — and, okay, his shooting skills — to thwart bad guys for 69 episodes.
He was young, handsome, likeable, good-natured and he could act. Turned out that wasn’t enough to set him up for a career once Tom Brewster rode into the sunset.
He stayed in the acting game for years, starring in two short-lived sitcoms (Hey Landlord and Blondie), and scoring support and guest roles in a couple of dozen TV shows and movies. He did 10 months on Broadway in Never Too Late and he appeared in two Elvis Presley movies, lip-syncing a duet of “Who Needs Money” with Elvis in the immortal Clambake.
As tends to happen in the acting game, though, most of his auditions ended with “Thank you. Next.”
“I got turned down more than a motel bedsheet,” he told syndicated columnist Joan Crosby in 1966.
What never eroded, by all accounts, was his sense of humor, which made his next career seem oddly logical. In 1973 he became an actual clown, touring with a West Coast troupe and then spending three years in Australia as Patches the Clown in the Ashton Family Circus.
That might sound sad. Hutchins’s long-time friend Craig Wichman, a veteran New York actor and founder of Quicksilver Radio Theater, says Hutchins didn’t see it that way.
“He was very proud of Sugarfoot,” Wichman says. “And he once implied to me that maybe he didn’t handle TV stardom perfectly. But I never got the vibe that he was sorry about his acting career ending. He never sounded bitter. It was more like, ‘Okay, I did that. Here’s what’s next!’ ”
Wichman met him, in fact, through another “what’s next.” In 1996 Hutchins began attending the annual Friends of Old-Time Radio (FOTR) conventions, which brought together fans and performers from the golden age of radio drama. Hutchins wasn’t old enough to have done radio drama himself, but he liked and admired it enough that he became a regular attendee from 1998 until the conventions ended in 2010.
He performed in a number of productions there, including The Young Mr. Lincoln and Stagecoach.
“He was a really solid actor,” says Wichman, who was in some of those productions with him, “and he also liked to have fun. Chuck McCann was also in Stagecoach, playing the Duke Wayne role, and Chuck was always [cutting up]. They were rehearsing a scene and once Will got that green light, they both went completely off the reservation. Will started doing things like making horse sounds. The old-time actors were furious, but it was absolutely hilarious.”
When he wasn’t being led astray by Chuck McCann, Wichman adds, Hutchins was known as a generous actor, meaning he never behaved as if he were the only one who mattered. He would listen as well as speak.
“He’d compliment other actors on their work,” says Wichman. “And he was a great raconteur. He’d worked with so many people and he loved to tell stories from those days. Some of which can even be repeated.
“One of his favorites was about James Arness [who played Marshall Matt Dillon on the long-running Gunsmoke, where Hutchins made guest appearances]. Toward the end of Gunsmoke’s run, Arness was on screen a lot less. So they were shooting around 4:30 one afternoon out on location and this limo pulls up with Arness, who’s there to do Matt Dillon’s closing scene. But he keeps blowing his lines, and everyone is wondering what’s going on. Well, all this takes time and pretty soon it’s 5 o’clock, when everyone goes on overtime. Arness looks at the other cast members and winks.”
Unsurprisingly, Hutchins also became a regular for several decades at Western conventions, appearing with fellow stars like Johnny Western, who wrote and sang ”The Ballad of Paladin” for Have Gun Will Travel.
“He loved talking about Sugarfoot,” says Wichman, “and he was especially proud of the episodes where he played the dual role of Tom Brewster and his evil cousin The Canary Kid.”
In 2015, Hutchins gave writer Mel Neuhaus extended episode-by-episode comments on Sugarfoot, sprinkling his dramatic analysis with anecdotes about his fellow performers and directors — like Paul Henreid, who played Victor Laszlo in Casablanca and directed an early 1959 episode of Sugarfoot. Hutchins recounts Henreid saying how exasperating it was to work with Humphrey Bogart right up until the final filmed take, when Bogart would suddenly nail it. Hutchins also notes the episode in which he was issued costume department pants once worn by Bogart.
Just as he savored the bemused side of Tom Brewster, an offbeat Western character more akin to Maverick than Paladin, Hutchins loved humor — droll, cornball, whimsical, whatever — in his own life.
“I always said he was the oldest kid I knew,” says Wichman. “He never lost that exuberance. And remember, he also lived in California during the ’60s and for the rest of his life part of him was still a child of that era. He was a free spirit in the best sense of the term.
“I think he appreciated what he had been given.”
“Sugarfoot, Sugarfoot
Never underestimate a Sugarfoot”
- Sugarfoot theme song, music by Max Steiner, lyrics by Mack David
