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Exclusive interview with Rory Calhoun’s Daughter

Rory’s Daughter—Athena Marcus Calhoun
By Henry C. Parke

As his daughter, Athena, will tell you, Rory Calhoun “was tall, dark, and handsome with blue eyes. He was the matinee idol. He may not have been as big as John Wayne, but he was certainly big.” Why did his friends call him Smokey? “Is that because of his smokey eyes, or because he liked to smoke, or because he disappeared like smoke? Maybe all of the above,” she says with a laugh.

Rory had co-starred twice with Marilyn Monroe, in River of No Return and How to Marry a Millionaire, with Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart, and in a string of Westerns had faced down Robert Mitchum, Richard Boone, and Gilbert Roland. When Athena Marcus Calhoun was born in 1959, Rory Calhoun had been a top Hollywood leading man for 15 years and was producing and starring in the series The Texan. In those less media-saturated years, many children of stars had no idea that their parents were famous, “But I always knew. I was living in Hollywood; my mother was an actress, and he was an actor. So of course, I knew.”

Her mother, Vitina Marcus, is from Brooklyn; her parents were from Sicily and Hungary. The beautiful and exotic model and actress was frequently cast as a Gypsy, “native” girl, and especially in TV Westerns like Have Gun Will Travel, Wagon Train, and Rawhide, as an American Indian. “My mother has an olive complexion, and so she didn’t look like the girl next door. I have a picture of her in her Gypsy outfit standing next to Kurt Russell as a little boy in The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters.”

Athena’s parents only shared the screen once, in 1958, “in one television episode, The Schlitz Playhouse: ‘Curfew at Midnight.’” He’s an ex-con whose parole officer would love to throw him back inside; she’s his new girlfriend, but also the sister of a former criminal associate. “She’s about 15 years younger than him, around 20. When I said to her, your acting was really quite good in that, and you were only 20, she said, ‘Well, I took acting lessons back in New York with Lee Strasberg [of the Actor’s Studio].’”

In some ways, her childhood was what you’d expect for a Hollywood kid of the period: she hung out “with Steve McQueen’s kids, and the guy who played Gilligan, Bob Denver, and his children.” In other ways, Athena’s early years were unorthodox even for Hollywood, producing a multifaceted woman. “I have a varied background. My father, of course—oh, what a résumé he has! My mother was a hippie and an actress.”

Instead of the Beverly Hills mansion one expects for celebrity children, Athena, now 65, was brought up by her mother in a different environment. “I was raised in a yoga ashram, the whole yoga philosophy and practice and lifestyle. And then, of course, there was my dancing. I modeled and did film and TV as well. I had been dancing in one of the big production shows here in Las Vegas, Hallelujah, Hollywood! at the MGM Grand hotel. Then I went to Spain, and boom, I was on my dance career, and that was it. I didn’t really pursue acting after that. And the good thing about dancing was that I got to travel around the world, and I had an absolutely fabulous body because of it. So,” she laughs, “that’s a good side.” In Paris, in 1987, she was named the World’s Most Beautiful Showgirl.

“[Then there] was my academic life. I got my bachelor’s in romance languages, and my master’s degree in bilingual education. I taught second and third grade, middle school English, I taught adult education, and English as a second language.”

While Athena was growing up, Rory was often away for long periods in the 1960s. “He was making films in Europe, in the south of Spain.” In 1961 he starred in director Sergio Leone’s first film, The Colossus of Rhodes. Ironically, the man whose films made Clint Eastwood a star directed Rory not in a Spaghetti Western, but a sword-and-sandal picture. “His first wife (singer-actress Lita Baron) was Spanish. He loved Spain, and it’s something that he and I share, because I lived and worked in Europe, and Spain was like my second home.”

Considering Rory’s success, “one would think I’d follow in my parents’ footsteps of acting. But when I was a child, my mother couldn’t get me to go on interviews. Like for Airport (1970), I was up for a part, and I didn’t want to go to the interview. And the producer ended up using his own daughter. Then [Vitina] put me in dance class, and I didn’t want to do that. And I ended up being a dancer and a showgirl.”

Rory was not as encouraging when it came to an acting career for his daughter. Athena recalls with a laugh, “My mother told me, ‘You’ve got to ask your dad for an agent. That’s where you’ve got to start.’ So, I called up my dad, and I asked him for an agent, and he said his agent didn’t have room for anyone else, and that was the end of that.”

Was Rory trying to discourage her from acting? “I don’t know. But I can tell you that, having been married a couple times, all his wives were very possessive of him. And whoever he was married to wasn’t really interested in having any of the other children too involved in his life.”

Surprisingly, this was true even after Rory’s passing. “At the Rose Parade in 2001, they had a section of Western actors on horseback. And if the actors weren’t alive, they had their children represent them. So, I represented him; I was riding alongside Dusty Rogers, Roy Rogers’ son. They asked me what kind of a horse I wanted, and I said, I want a black and white paint. I had quite a horse; my horse was really fighting, chomping at the bit to move forward, and I had to keep holding him back and putting him in line.” After the parade, “[Rory’s] then wife called up the Tournament of Roses and said she had the copyright of his likeness, his image. [I’m] riding his signature horse, and she felt it was infringing on her copyright. I talked to her, and I said, I didn’t even realize it was his favorite horse: some things are just in the DNA. The Rogers family said that I rode really good, and I could ride with them anytime I wanted to; they were so nice.”

Incidentally, it was not her first time on a horse, “When I was 5 or 6, I was riding with my mother and a bunch of Hollywood actors, and when my horse took off with me, Robert Duvall went chasing after me.”

Asked which are her favorites among her father’s films, she says with a laugh, “it’s hard to say which are my favorites. I like anything that he’s in. Even I haven’t seen all of his movies and television episodes; I suppose I could say the same about my mother. River of No Return, and How to Marry a Millionaire. Also, one of his very early ones, The Red House,” the 1947 noir, where he plays Teller, Edward G. Robinson’s henchman, who is impatient to take care of anyone nosing around the red house in the woods.

Rory had a big social life, but he liked to get out of Hollywood, “going hunting and fishing,” often with TV’s Wild Bill Hickok, Guy Madison. “They were very close.”

He had a number of sayings that still amuse Athena. “One of his sayings was, there are some secrets he’ll go to his grave with, about the whole Hollywood scene. Another thing that he would say was, ‘you can’t have an ego in this business, that any publicity is good publicity.’ Another, which I think is absolutely fabulous, is ‘why ruin a good story with the truth?’”

Looking back, what kind of a man was her father, Rory Calhoun? “He was a real man. He was a man’s man. He worked at so many different kinds of physical labor jobs before he became an actor. He was a lumberjack; he was a rock miner. He spent his life acting, and he had a real life. He has a huge body of work. And I think it could be an inspiration for anybody who wants to get into the business, to know that you could do all kinds of different jobs before you actually find an acting job, you know?”

About Henry C. Parke

Henry’s new book, The Greatest Westerns Ever Made, and the People Who Made Them, published by TwoDot, is now available. The Brooklyn-born, L.A.-based writer has contributed articles to the INSP blog since 2016, been Film Editor for True West since 2015, and has written Henry’s “Western Round-up,” the online report on Western film production, since 2010. His screenwriting credits include Speedtrap(1977) and Double Cross (1994). He’s the first writer welcomed into the Western Writers of America for his work in electronic media. He’s done audio commentary on nearly thirty Spaghetti and domestic Westerns.

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