James Arness

I've got a little arthritis that I have to deal with. I was 6 feet 7 when I started, and I've shrunk up a little bit. I'm probably 6-5 or so now. But up here at 82, I feel pretty good. I'm sticking in there.

My first job in TV was hosting this young teen magazine show, and all these high school teenagers showed up from all over Sacramento, California, and they chose four of us to host the show, two boys and two girls. And of the two girls, I was kind of the perky smart one and the other girl was the pretty one.

We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.