The Man Who Was Told Never to Fix His Eye
You know the face. He was the squinting, sneering outlaw in a hundred westerns, the man in the doorway who made the hero's stomach tighten. Most people could not tell you his name.
It was Jack Elam, and before he was ever a villain, he was a bookkeeper.
The injury that changed his face
William Scott "Jack" Elam was born in Miami, Arizona, in 1920, according to his birth certificate. Other sources give earlier years. In 1931, a fight with another boy badly injured his left eye. It left him blind in that eye and damaged the muscles around it. In a 1974 interview, Elam said it happened at a Boy Scout meeting. Turner Classic Movies reports that he was 11 and that the other boy stabbed him in the eye with a pencil.
An accountant in Hollywood
Elam did not set out to act. He worked as a bookkeeper at a Bank of America branch in Los Angeles, and he also worked as an accountant for Standard Oil and as a manager at the Hotel Bel-Air. During World War II he served two years in the Navy as a supply officer.
Then came the part that surprises people. He became an accountant for Hopalong Cassidy Productions, the company behind William Boyd's hit westerns, and he worked as an independent auditor for Samuel Goldwyn and others. The man who would later play Hollywood's outlaws was checking the books for its studios.
When the good eye failed
Looking at numbers all day was hard on his one good eye. In the late 1940s, the strain damaged his right eye, and he had to leave auditing. He turned to acting, and his first film roles came as a henchman. Soon after, he mentioned to the studio chief Darryl Zanuck that he could have his bad eye fixed. According to the account, Zanuck told him not to. It was his "mystique."
Elam took the advice, and it paid off. Over a career that lasted from the 1940s into the 1990s, he appeared in at least 73 films and 41 television series. Westerns were the heart of it, from Rawhide (1951) to High Noon and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with film noirs like Kansas City Confidential and Kiss Me Deadly along the way. On television, he turned up again and again on Gunsmoke.
The villain who learned to laugh
Then, in the late 1960s, his career took a turn. In Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), he played Snaky, in the famous scene where he traps a fly in the barrel of his gun. The next year he started making comedies. He was Jake in Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), and in Rio Lobo (1970), he played a cranky old man opposite John Wayne. Later came The Cannonball Run in 1981, and he kept working into the 1990s.
The man who had played the scariest face in the West had become one of its funniest.
The last word
He received the Golden Boot Award in 1983 and was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1994. He died on October 20, 2003, at 82, at his home in Ashland, Oregon. He and his second wife, Margaret, had been married for 42 years.
I keep coming back to the advice Zanuck gave him. A studio boss told a man to keep the very thing that made him look different. That one choice turned an accountant into a character actor you could not forget.
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