Bad Guy Always Got Just Desserts in Films : Villain: Pierce Lyden was a scoundrel in Western movies but he paid the price. He estimates he died more than 300 times on the silver screen.

Pierce Lyden robbed trains and banks throughout the West, pillaging and causing mayhem in every town he passed through--even though there was a camera right there filming his misdeeds every time.

Lyden, 85, was one of the preeminent movie and TV villains of his time. During his long and illustrious career, he was run out of too many towns to remember. He estimates that he must have died more than 300 times--stabbed, shot, strung up from trees, torn apart by runaway horses and trampled by herds of stampeding cattle.

“In the old days, the bad man always paid for the crime,” Lyden said. “It showed children that crime does not pay.”

Lyden--tall and husky, with a mustache--personified the consummate villain for over 30 years in more than 300 Grade B movies, serials and TV shows set in the Old West. Last year he was given a Golden Boot award by the Motion Picture and Television Fund for his career acting in Westerns.

Lyden was not born a bad man. The son of a Nebraska rancher, he was bitten by the acting bug as a student at the University of Nebraska in the 1920s and left college for a career on the stage, where he often played romantic leads.

When talking pictures came into ascendancy in the late 1920s, Lyden headed out to California. But he soon discovered that the town had about as many romantic leads as it could use.

“My leading man career was cut short. They had one Clark Gable and they didn’t need two. . . . I just couldn’t get the parts. I would apply for leading man roles but no luck,” Lyden recalled. “I starved to death for two years and then I decided to get to work.”

And getting to work meant turning to the popular, low-budget Western films that Lyden had previously avoided, fearing being typecast.

“Once you’re a bad guy, you have no chance to be good,” Lyden explained. “But it was very easy to get a job. I was born on a ranch, I knew how to handle horses, guns, ropes and how to ride. I always did my own stunts.”

At first, Lyden would hang out with other would-be cowboys at “Gower Gulch,” a Hollywood corner where producers and casting scouts would come when they needed to cast a Western.

But once Lyden’s name got around, typecasting kicked in and he had steady work, earning several hundred dollars a week playing the heavy.

Lyden says he can’t even remember the first Western in which he played a role. He only knows he must have done something bad to somebody or something. And he played his role so well, he was asked to come back and fight another day in another Western and another and another--all in all, some 300 plus movies, serials and TV shows with such famous actors as Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Wild Bill Elliott and once, memorably, with John Wayne in the Western classic “Red River,” in which Lyden played a scout for a wagon train.

“I had a nice part but most of it ended up on the cutting room floor,” he said.

Although there seemed to be no turning back from his chosen path, Lyden said he enjoyed being a successful movie villain.

“You could always work and you didn’t have to look perfect,” he laughed. “I could chew up the scenery and have a lot of fun.”

But the fun ended when television took over. Work became more difficult to obtain and it paid less than the silver screen. In addition, Lyden was in his 50s and found that it was getting harder and harder to get thrown from a horse and wake up the next morning without feeling the effects.

After doing several episodes of the TV Western “Cheyenne,” Lyden left the acting business in 1962, going on to become a property manager for a traveling ice show before retiring in 1973 to a house in the Old Towne section of Orange.

Yet slowing down didn’t come easy to Lyden. He has written five books about his career and spends much of his time attending Western film nostalgia festivals, enjoying the adulation he receives from fans, many of whom are nearing retirement themselves.

“They were little children when I was making movies and they always remember what the bad guy did. They hissed and threw paper at the screen,” Lyden said. “They were the real fans, the little children. Their mothers would give them a nickel to go to the movies and they would stay all day.”*O.C. AND THE MOVIES

Hollywood comes to Orange County Focus pages. B2, B3