Rootin’-Tootin’ Reader Actor James Drury Brings Western Author’S Books To Life With His Spirited Readings In Spokane Valley Recording Studio
Age is creeping up on James Drury.
His black hair has long gone gray. He’s still able to mount a horse, as he did during his nine-year run on “The Virginian” television series. But it’s been 29 years since the show was canceled, and Drury’s joints have stiffened noticeably.
His face has more lines than the Colorado River has tributaries.
Yet there’s still that voice. Deep and gruff, it sounds at times as if Drury is gargling rocks. But it’s strong.
Strong enough, certainly, to weather several hours of Drury reading aloud from a Kirby Jonas Western novel.
This is no easy task, even the way Drury does it — sipping bottled water while holed up in a Spokane Valley recording studio. But his need for periodic breaks has less to do with his age than it does with his temperament.
“The biggest problem I have with Kirby’s books is controlling my emotions,” Drury says with a laugh. “I’ll get to the point where I know that I’m going to lose it, that I won’t be able to do the line the way it should be done because I’m too busy crying. So I just go outside and take a moment, get over it.”
Meet James Drury, veteran of the Hollywood wars and cowboy tough guy.
A man unafraid to admit he cries.
Let’s turn the clock back a few months. It’s a late November afternoon, and we’re sitting in an upstairs corner of a massive warehouse set just off East Montgomery. This is the home of Books in Motion, the Spokane-based audiobook company that since 1988 has recorded the works of more than 200 authors.
Many of those authors, such as the duo M&M Lehman, write solely for Books in Motion. Others, mystery writer J.A. Jance prominent among them, have achieved a fair amount of success in the larger book-publishing business.
Kirby Jonas falls somewhere in between. The author of a half-dozen Western-themed novels bearing such titles as “Death of an Eagle” and “Legend of the Tumbleweed,” Jonas is a self-publishing dynamo based out of Pocatello, Idaho. He writes his novels, does the cover art, pays to have them printed and travels - usually dressed in period dress - from cowboy conventions to bookstores, and back, self-marketing his literary wares.
A couple of years ago, while on a promotional tour in Colorado Springs, the 34-year-old Jonas met Garry Challender, owner of Books in Motion. Always on the prowl for new talent to record, Challender was intrigued by Jonas’ willingness to get out and move literary product.
“We were out in the mall and who do we see?” Challender asks. “Here comes Kirby Jonas with his whole garb on.” Other writers were back in their hotels, he says, “but Kirby is there in the bookstores making headway.”
Just that quickly they made a deal for Books in Motion to record Jonas’ novels. The first big question: Who to do the reading?
That’s when fate intervened. And it centered on Jonas meeting his childhood hero.
Who was, it turns out, none other than James Drury.
“When I was 3 years old, he was the first actor I ever remember watching,” says Jonas. He sneaked out of bed as a boy to watch first “The Virginian” and then, after it went off the air, “Gunsmoke.”
Jonas discovered, as he made the rounds of rodeos for research and book-peddling, that he was always just a step behind Drury, a rodeo regular “special guest.”
Around the same time he was meeting Challender, Jonas decided to make a special effort to meet his idol. He and wife Debbie drove from Pocatello to a cowboy gathering in Laughlin, Nev.
Once there, Jonas began talking to a couple of other conventioneers. It wasn’t long before Drury’s name came up. Jonas’ new friends just laughed and told him to turn around.
“And there he was, back-to-back with me,” Jonas recalls.
Jonas ended up giving Drury copies of his books, which Drury took back to his Houston home. He couldn’t help but notice a note where Jonas cited “The Virginian” as one of his early influences.
“I was very flattered, and then I read the book and I was truly, truly moved,” Drury says. And impressed, he adds, “with the quality of the writing, the depth of characters and the way Kirby brings these people to life.”
Maybe it was the personal connection. Maybe it was the way the books captured the cowboy world of Drury’s youth. Whatever, something touched him enough so that he called Jonas the very next day.
“Man, I gotta record this,” he said.
The next step involved putting Drury together with Challender. An audition, then a contract followed. The result, ultimately, was Drury’s coming to Spokane for the recording.
While it may not be the peak of his career, Drury is thankful for the chance.
“Since the ‘70s, I ain’t worked much,” he says.
Don’t misconstrue this. Drury’s not feeling sorry for himself. Considering what he’s accomplished, it would be hard to see his movie-career glass as anything but half full.
Born in Manhattan in 1934 (he turns 66 on April 18), Drury was raised in rural Oregon. Boasting rugged good looks and a cowboy background, he was just the type that MGM loved to put under contract. Beginning with “The Tender Trap” in 1955, he began playing whatever role was offered him.
In the 1956 Lana Turner vehicle “Diana,” for example, he played several characters at once.
“I don’t know if you’ll even see me in `Diana,”’ he says. “I was uncredited, but I had one or two lines. I played one of the soldiers on horseback, and then they put a different beard and mustache on me and had me as a palace guard. Then I did combat with some of the king’s troops.”
From there, he graduated to such other films as “Forbidden Planet” (1956) and the Elvis Presley feature “Love Me Tender” (1956) before taking on “Pollyanna” (1960), the first of several Disney projects.
One of the most memorable: playing circus man Jim Strong in the children’s film “Toby Tyler” (1960).
“I shot the chimpanzee out of the tree,” he says, shaking his head. “I never should have shot that monkey.”
His breakout chance came following Sam Peckinpah’s 1962 Western “Ride the High Country,” which starred the great Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Drury played the villain Billy Hammond.
“That was part of the reason why I got `The Virginian,”’ he says. “Even though Billy Hammond was a heavy, he had elements that they were looking for.”
“They” were the head guys at Universal Television who signed Drury to a contract and then, after an extensive series of auditions, cast him in the prime-time series’ lead role.
“It’s the luck of the draw,” Drury says. “It’s being in the right place at the right time. Universal signed me to a contract, and two weeks later they started testing me as `The Virginian.’ … That’s how things work in Hollywood. They tested me three times, and I had to lose 30 pounds - in a month. And then they let us know the Friday before the Monday that we started to work. Nine years later, we were done.”
Based loosely on Owen Wister’s novel of the same name, “The Virginian” was a 90-minute show that began airing at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday nights on NBC. By its second season, it had risen to No. 17 in the Nielsen ratings, a high that it matched in 1968-69.
By 1971, the show, now struggling, had been retitled “The Men from Shiloh.” And a year later, the cast - which included Doug McClure and, for a time, Lee Majors - was cut loose.
Since then, Drury says, “I’ve worked every chance that I could. I’ve been involved with business and different things in Texas, but it’s very, very difficult to get anywhere as an actor once you’ve done nine years of 90-minute shows. You make kind of an indelible impression.”
He laughs. “Plus which now the people who make decisions in Hollywood don’t know me from a bale of hay,” he says. “Most of them aren’t over 25.”
Drury managed to snare a cameo in a recent TNT remake of “The Virginian,” and a short stint in three early episodes of “Walker, Texas Ranger.”
If he has any disappointment about the way his career has turned out, Drury isn’t admitting to it.
“I don’t regret anything whatsoever,” he says.
Yet sitting in this carpeted corner of Books in Motion’s recording studio, in the presence of people who appreciate what he still has to offer, Drury speaks honestly about the industry that put him in the spotlight longer than most.
“It’s a heartbreak business,” he says. “But it’s all worthwhile if you have a few moments that you can remember. Just a few moments where something worked really right. Where you look back and say, `That couldn’t have been done any better.’ And I’ve got a few of those moments. They can’t take that away from me.”