when I was three.
As the Great Depression worsened, we moved in with my Uncle Claude & his family at their farm in Slater, Missouri.
When I was eight, my mother brought me from the farm to live with her and her husband in Indianapolis.
I didn't adjust well to school or my new life, and my stepfather beat me to such an extent that I left home to live on the streets at age nine.
I later returned to my Uncle Claude's farm until I was 12, when my mother asked my uncle for me to be returned to her and her 2nd husband in Los Angeles.
My new stepfather was a prime "son-of-a-bitch" who was not averse to beating my mother and me
I ran away and joined a circus for a short time, then returned to Los Angeles and lived with my mother & stepfather again & resumed my life as a gang member & petty criminal.
I was caught stealing hubcaps by the police and handed over to my stepfather who beat me severely and threw me down a flight of stairs.
I looked up at him and said, "You lay your stinking hands on me again and I swear I'll kill you."
I was then sent to a school for troubled adolescents in Chino Hills, CA.
In 1947, I enlisted in the US Marines, where I saved the lives of five other Marines during an Arctic exercise, pulling them from a tank before it broke through ice into the sea.
In 1952, under the GI Bill, I began studying acting in New York at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse and at HB Studio.
I had minor roles in stage productions and later acted in some B movies.
My breakout role came on television, where I appeared in Dale Robertson's NBC Western series "Tales of Wells Fargo" as Bill Longley.
My next role was as lead actor in another popular TV western.
After starring in many movies, including "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Great Escape," I turned down roles in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Oceans 11," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Driver," "Apocalypse Now," "Dirty Harry," "A Bridge Too Far," "The French Connection," and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
In a segment filmed for The Ed Sullivan Show, I drove Sullivan around a desert area in a dune buggy at high speed.
Afterward, Sullivan said, "That was a 'helluva' ride!"
Who am I?
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