Marian Clark

Marian Clark was born in Alameda County, California, in 1912 and was the eldest of three children of Laura Lee (née Bransford) and Albert Lee Clark.[4][lower-alpha 1] Her father, a native of Missouri, had moved to California by 1910 and was working that year as a journalist in San Francisco.[5] Later, Albert moved the short distance to Berkeley, where in 1920 he was serving as city editor of the local newspaper, a position that may have influenced Marian early in life and prompted her later as a young woman to venture into radio journalism as a profession.[6][lower-alpha 2] By 1930, however, her father had relocated the entire family to Oakland; and he had changed careers, working there as an "advertising man" in real estate.[4]

Little is known about Clark's personal or professional life between the 1930 federal census and late 1942, when she enrolled in a 10-week training workshop offered by radio station KNX in Los Angeles.[7] Due to the shortage of "manpower" on the home front in the United States during World War II, new job opportunities were opening to women in a wide variety of fields, including radio broadcasting. Station KNX in Los Angeles provided such opportunities through its "Hollywood Workshop", which offered training and advancement for "girl staff members" at KNX. The station's department heads taught classes to prepare workshop participants for assorted positions available in radio, such as news writers, transcription operators, mailroom clerks, and publicity managers.[7]

In its February 22, 1943 issue, the trade magazine Broadcasting recognized Clark as one of the recent graduates of KNX's Hollywood Workshop.[7] Since the workshop was 10 weeks in length and available only to staff members, Clark must have been working at KNX by at least the final months of 1942. Upon graduation, she and two other female employees were assigned to the station's news bureau as "junior writers". Those assignments were apparently probationary, for Clark was the only writer of the three who became a full-time writer at KNX and distinguished herself as "the first woman member in [the] station's news department", working there for the duration of World War II.[3]

In 1938, KNX Los Angeles had begun serving as an affiliate of CBS Radio and also the broadcast center of that national network's West Coast or "Hollywood" programming.[8][lower-alpha 3] KNX employees therefore had frequent, if not daily, access to CBS regular staff and to the network's operations. Marian Clark's work as a writer in KNX's news department during World War II provided her interaction as well with CBS Radio colleagues. One of them, a secretary for the network, was Kathleen Hite, whom Clark met in 1943.[9]

After the war Hite advanced professionally at CBS Los Angeles and joined the network's production staff, and after several years she became a scriptwriter.[10] She subsequently encouraged Clark to put her own writing talents and radio experience to better use by drafting potential stories and proposing scripts to CBS Radio's nationally broadcast programs. By then, by the early 1950s, Clark had become a paraplegic and was confined to a wheelchair for reasons not disclosed in currently available documentation.[9] Hite, in addition to recognizing Clark's potential, believed some new professional challenges would serve as a form of therapy for her friend and might benefit her health.[11] Once she had given Clark some basic instruction on scriptwriting, Hite introduced her to Norman Macdonnell, a producer and director for popular CBS Radio productions, such as Suspense, Doorway to Life, Escape, and a weekly series he and writer John Meston had recently developed.[12] Their new "adult Western", Gunsmoke, consisted of Old West stories set in the 1870s in southwestern Kansas, principally centered in the rowdy, "hard-drinking" cattle town of Dodge City.[13] First aired on CBS Radio in 1952, Gunsmoke quickly became a highly rated, critically acclaimed series that was broadcast not only on radio but also on television by 1955.

Following her introduction to Macdonnell, Clark began working for CBS, although her early years working as a writer for the network are not fully documented like the stories and scripts she would later create for Gunsmoke. By 1957, however, the quality of her previous work had earned her assignments as a contributing writer for the very popular Western. According to the authoritative 1990 reference Gunsmoke: A Complete History and Analysis of the Legendary Broadcast Series by SuzAnne and Gabor Barabas, Clark's first script, "Jobe's Son", aired as the premiere episode for the radio series' sixth season on Sunday, September 1, 1957.[14] In addition to Gunsmoke's regular cast of voice actors—William Conrad, Parley Baer, Howard McNear, and Georgia Ellis—that episode features Vic Perrin and John Dehner as guest stars in a story about a wayward son's clash with his father.

In the 1957 broadcast of "Jobe's Son", Clark receives no mention in the episode's closing voice credits; instead, her CBS colleague Les Crutchfield is credited for having "specially written" the installment, with John Meston also being mentioned for providing "editorial supervision". Despite the absence of any on-air credit for Clark, CBS and producer Macdonnell were apparently impressed with her work, for the network broadcast 13 more of her scripts in the 1957–1958 season. She finally received her first on-air credit for "Miguel's Daughter", which was broadcast near the end of that season, on August 3, 1958.[15][16] Her final installment for 1957–1958, "The Piano", proved to be one of her more memorable scripts, a story about a delusional former Southern belle who dies defending her most "beloved" possession, an old cherry-wood piano.[17][18] Once again, Clark received no on-air credit for that episode.[18]

The next year, in the radio series' seventh season, Clark became Gunsmoke's primary script contributor, furnishing over half the stories—28 of 53 episodes—broadcast between September 1958 and the end of August 1959.[19] During that season, she also began to receive consistently on-air credits for her writing. She received closing credits too for the 35 scripts she provided over the two remaining seasons of the radio version of Gunsmoke. Her script "Doc's Visitor", which aired on June 11, 1961, was the series' last "freshly written" episode.[20] A rebroadcast of John Meston's 1956 episode "Letter of the Law" aired the following week to end the radio series' nine-year run.[21] In the four seasons she wrote for Gunsmoke on CBS Radio, Clark furnished 77 scripts or almost 20 percent of the series' total catalog of 413 episodes.[22] That individual total is only surpassed by the prodigious output of Gunsmoke co-creator John Meston, who is credited with writing 183 radio episodes, and by the 81 scripts done by Les Crutchfield.[22]

With Hollywood productions of the "Old West" historically dominated by male characters, and in a 1950s television industry dominated by male writers, the wheelchair-bound Clark proved to be a quick study in the Western genre, demonstrating a remarkable ability in her writing to identify with and credibly portray on paper the lives of cattle drovers, buffalo hunters, farmers, the displaced native people of Kansas, as well as the assorted inhabitants of Dodge City in the 1870s.[9] Her storylines for Gunsmoke are quite diverse thematically, although approximately one-quarter of her scripts focus to varying degree on women, dealing with their isolation and physical struggles on prairie homesteads and with the emotional conflicts they faced within the given social structure of the latter nineteenth century.[9] Beyond the usual barroom brawls, shootouts, and stagecoach robberies presented in Hollywood's traditional "Cowboy-and-Indian" features and serials, her scripts reflected Macdonnell and Meston's original intention to present Gunsmoke as an "adult Western".[23] Her writings, as do other early scripts in the series, address directly or within the bounds of the network's contemporary standards and practices such sensitive issues as domestic violence, mental illness, filicide, rape, prostitution, racial and cultural discrimination, and alcoholism.[24]

As was common practice with Gunsmoke episodes written by CBS writers, many of Clark's radio scripts were later adapted for replay on the televised version of the series. Twenty-one of her stories were aired by CBS Television between 1959 and 1963. Nineteen of those were adapted to the "small screen" by the series' co-creator John Meston. For his 30-minute black-and-white teleplays based on Clark's writing and for one of his 60-minute episodes developed from her work, he adjusted some original dialogue and specified needs for set content, surrounding landscapes, livestock, clothing and firearms for cast, and other details required for stories now being presented in a visual format. The two stories by Clark not adapted by Meston—"The Summons" (1962) and "The Cousin" (1963)—were done by her colleague and friend Katherine Hite after the expansion of Gunsmoke's episodes to an hour at the start of televised series' seventh season.[25] Clark's final script for Gunsmoke is "Quint's Indian", which features Burt Reynolds as Quint. That episode, the one adapted by Meston, premiered the month after Clark's death in 1963.[26]

In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, Clark wrote and adapted a few radio scripts and teleplays for CBS series other than Gunsmoke. For the network's radio version of Have Gun—Will Travel, she is credited with adapting Julian Fink's script "Death of a Young Gunfighter" for its original broadcast on March 15, 1959.[27] On television she is also credited as the writer of "Halliday's Club", an episode of the short-lived series Klondike. That installment aired on NBC in December 1960.[28]

In February 1963, Marian Clark died at age 50 in Santa Monica, California, after what a trade magazine obituary only described as a "short illness".[3][9] Her gravesite is located in Oak Hill Cemetery in Red Bluff, California, where her parents are also buried.[29]

The following list of radio and television episodes written by Clark is compiled from Gunsmoke: A Complete History and Analysis of the Legendary Broadcast Series (1990).[24][lower-alpha 4] As done with many of the scripts authored by John Meston, Norman Macdonnell, Les Crutchfield, John Dunkel, Katherine Hite, and other writers for Gunsmoke, 18 of Clark's radio scripts were later adapted and replayed as 30-minute episodes on the televised version of the series.

• Marian Clark at IMDb
• Marian Clark at Find a Grave