Fighting females had been around in the comics for a couple of decades before they finally found their way to TV.
Batman’s female counterpart, Harvey Comics’ Black Cat, had started tossing criminals around in August 1941, for example. And in 1963, Modesty Blaise, a remarkably formidable and self-possessed ex-criminal, began starring in her own British comic strip written by Peter O’Donnell and drawn by Jim Holdaway.
But on American network television, always a socially conservative mass medium, audiences had to wait until 1965 before they found a female who could really fend for herself in an action-adventure show. And that was Honey West, a private detective who sported both martial arts skills and an array of offensive James Bond-like secret gadgets.
“TV’s private eyeful,” played with sassy sparkle by Anne Francis, originally starred in a series of 11 sexy-comic “Shell Scott”-type paperback adventures created and written by Forrest and Gloria Fickling. On TV, the character was introduced in the spring of 1965 in a “back door pilot” through Gene Barry’s Burke’s Law series. She got her own series on ABC that fall.
As for other contemporary female action heroines, April Dancer, the Girl from UNCLE (Stephanie Powers), was portrayed as fairly ineffective in her 1966-57 series (something that didn’t help her appeal), and Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) was confined to elegant “ladylike” kicks when she was introduced in 1967. “Her fights were choreographed carefully to imitate the moves of a Broadway showgirl through the use of a straight kick to her opponent’s face rather than the type of kick a martial artist would use,” observed Frances H. Early and Kathleen Kennedy in Athena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors.
All this American network fussiness about not letting “girls” fight seemed silly, even at the time. That’s one reason why Honey was a welcome, perfumed breeze.
British television was ahead of the curve, though. In 1962, in its second season, the British TV series The Avengers introduced the groundbreaking character of Dr. Catherine “Cathy” Gale (Honor Blackman), a widowed anthropologist from Africa who worked as a museum curator and part-time counterspy.
“Sydney Newman, the show’s creator, decided to cast a woman as (John) Steed’s new primary partner,” noted TV historian David K. Smith. “His inspiration was drawn from a news report from Kenya featuring a woman whose family was being ravaged by terrorists. Cathy Gale was to become the first truly liberated, self-sufficient, fighting female character ever created for television, and way, way ahead of her time.”
Judo-trained and leather-clad, Cathy Gale was a popular sensation, and when Blackman left the series, Diana Rigg replaced her as the equally formidable Emma Peel (i.e., “M. Appeal,” or “male appeal”).
In his book Spy Television, Wesley Alan Britton noted that the Honey West producers “…took note of the pre-Rigg success of Cathy Gale from The Avengers and decided to make a series with Blackman in mind. Blackman’s Pussy Galore fame made her even more attractive, but the actress wasn’t available or interested in the new project. Looking around for a Blackman lookalike, (the producers) found Francis.”
But Honey West wasn’t ready to go quite that far as Mrs. Gale or Mrs. Peel, and bowed to conventional American sensibilities at times. “She was very much a West Coast version of an Avengers girl, although she relied more on looks, charm, and guile than martial arts,” Britton noted. “Unlike her British inspiration, a man invariably bailed West out in the last act.”
Even so, in his book on the character, John C. Fredriksen noted that Honey West was “…the first American TV program with a female lead completely in charge of her job — and herself.”
Honey fought robots and flamethrowers, drove a Cobra sports car, and slinked around with her pet ocelot, Bruce.
“Francis was not only reminiscent of Cathy Gale, but the producers also made even stronger Bond connections by giving her numerous gadgets,” Britton noted. “West had tear-gas earrings, garter belt gas masks, immense sunglasses with two-way radio frames, a walkie-talkie in her compact, and a radio-transmitting lipstick.”
“Anne made it believable,” recalled costume designer Nolan Miller. “You believed that she could kick a six-foot man in the stomach and flip him over her shoulder or something. She studied karate, and she worked very well with the stunt people.”
The TV series won an Emmy nomination, a Golden Globe, and an award from the Mystery Writers of America — and went off the air after a single season. By the time Honey starred in her own single-issue Gold Key comic book, cover-dated September 1966, she was done.
And why? “Ironically, according to Francis, ABC found it cheaper to purchase The Avengers rather than produce a series of its own,” noted Britton.
A decade later, producer Aaron Spelling revived and revised the concept — in triplicate — as the hit series Charlie’s Angels.
Like Emma Peel, Honey was, by the way, another of those heroes who just coincidentally happen to have a melodramatic name that advertises his or her sensational qualities — the Doc Savages, the Mike Hammers, the Peter Gunns. The name of a later TV private detective, Remington Steele, was conceived as a parody of the name “Peter Gunn.”
Here, we had “Honey” for sweetness and allure, and “West” for the direction associated with high adventure on the frontier. Interestingly, Ian Fleming’s “Honey Ryder,” the heroine of Dr. No, suggests identical associations.
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