STORIES

Actress Amanda Blake was best known for playing Miss Kitty on the TV Western Gunsmoke for 19 years, from 1955 to 1974.

I’m Jean Smart.  I remember growing up thinking she was sort of glamorous. I don’t think I realized maybe what she did for a living, but I thought she was beautiful and a terrific actress.  I always thought it would be fun to play a character like Miss Kitty.

The red-headed Miss Kitty started as a saloon hostess at the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City, Kansas, and soon became an owner and the saloon keeper.  The series was set in the 1870s and showed Miss Kitty as a strong single woman who had a close friendship with the lead character, U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, played by James Arness.  There was no explicit romantic relationship between them.  And their only attempt at romance, a dinner in her room, ended when she was called away to tend to work and returned to find him fast asleep on her bed.

In real life, however, Amanda Blake married five times.  Her fourth marriage, to Frank Gilbert, was the longest lasting.  After Gunsmoke ended, she and Gilbert experimented with the breeding of cheetahs in captivity, eventually breeding seven generations of the big cat.  In her last year on Gunsmoke, she shocked the cast and crew by bringing her pet lion cub, Kemo, onto the set on a leash.

Quoted in the Toledo Blade newspaper, Blake recounted that, “We got him up on the bar of the Long Branch Saloon and he posed for the still photographer like a true ham. But we had to ban him from the set when Jim Arness and I started shooting our scenes, because every time Jim would say his lines, Keno would start to roar.”

In addition to Kemo, Amanda’s and Frank’s Phoenix ranch housed two leopards, two racoons, six dogs, seven cats, two horses, a rabbit, some pheasants, and a toucan.  She and others formed the Arizona Animal Welfare League.  She frequently appeared at events in support of the Humane Society, and she was an early funder of PAWS, the Performing Animal Welfare Society, which protects abandoned or abused performing animals such as circus animals and animals performing in film and TV.  She and Frank Gilbert divorced in 1982.

Blake unfortunately developed oral cancer from her heavy cigarette habit, and after being successfully treated for the disease, she often appeared at fundraisers for the American Cancer Society.  Her fifth and final husband was Austin, Texas real estate developer and city councilmember Mark Spaeth, who had supported and courted the gay community during his political life and was rumored to be a closeted gay man.  The marriage lasted less than a year.  Spaeth died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1985, less than one month after filing for divorce.

In 1989, Amanda Blake passed away at age 60.  Initial reports attributed her death to throat cancer, but her doctor reported later that year that she had died of a heart attack due to liver failure and AIDS-related hepatitis known as CMV, or cytomegalovirus.