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Dennis Weaver was delivering flowers before Gunsmoke
Before CBS employed him, Aunt Madge got him a job!
It's a tale as old as time: Some soon-to-be-famous person, plucked from obscurity, looking back on humble, inauspicious beginnings. Elvis, as the story goes, was a truck driver before he hit the big time. We love these fables because they point right to us. No matter how far away we are from the top, something could come our way and change the direction of our lives forever. One moment, we could be pushing a beat-up Chevy pickup for Crown Electric in Memphis, the next... We're the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
It's the same reason we're driven to reject nepotism. We don't have that connection to "success," so we lambast anyone who does. How dare they skip the proletarian origin story?
John Lennon said it best: A working class hero is something to be.
Dennis Weaver's early days were nothing if not working class. Gunsmoke made him a recognizable face, but he was working hard before he ever set foot in Dodge City. In his 2001 autobiography, All the World's a Stage, Weaver spoke about what he was up to before he was a star.
"So there I was, without an agent or an acting job— I did have the job my Aunt Madge gave me delivering flowers, paying sixty dollars a week.
"Then I ran into a friend of mine on the street, who said, 'You know, they're doing a series over at CBS called Gunsmoke. You ought to go over there and see if there's anything in it for you.'"
It was rare for an actor to operate without an agent. This might've pointed to Weaver's lack of concrete gigs in that field, as agents are pretty tantamount to scoring jobs. Regardless, this small, word-of-mouth connection led him to an audition that would change his life.
"I went up for an interview and they told me the part paid three hundred dollars an episode, one a week.
"Well, as I said, I was delivering flowers at sixty dollars a week, so three hundred dollars sounded outta sight! Nevertheless, I was a little hesitant, thinking what I could get if I had an agent."
Let that be a lesson to all the flower-delivering thespians out there... Sure, an agent might take a percentage of anything you ever do, but the money might be worth it if they can show up to the negotiation table and squeeze a few bucks more out of the suits.
Before we go, let's hear it for the real hero of this story, Aunt Madge!
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