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History & Culture — Learning Hub

Miss Kitty's Secret
and What It Cost Her

Last reviewed: September 2026

Amanda Blake played one of television's most beloved characters for 19 years. She died of complications from AIDS in 1989 — and the world was told it was cancer. Her story is about what happens when stigma outruns the truth, and about the women HIV history nearly left out.

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Who She Was The Marriage The Diagnosis The Cover-Up The Truth Women and HIV Her Legacy References
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Who She Was

For nineteen seasons, from 1955 to 1974, Amanda Blake played Miss Kitty Russell — the red-haired, sharp-tongued owner of the Long Branch Saloon on Gunsmoke.[1] It was one of the longest-running roles in American television, on one of the longest-running dramatic series in network history.[2] She was the show's only woman lead, playing one of the first independent, self-sufficient women American audiences saw on a weekly basis.

Off screen, she was just as determined. She ran one of the first successful captive breeding programs for cheetahs in the United States. She helped found what became a major California wildlife sanctuary and testified before Congress on animal welfare. In 1977 she had surgery for oral cancer, recovered, and became a visible supporter of the American Cancer Society afterward.[3]

She was, by any measure, a woman who lived with her eyes open and her head up. That matters, because what happened to her at the end of her life — the hiding, the silence, the cover story — says less about who she was than about the world she was living in.

The Marriage That Changed Everything

On April 28, 1984, Amanda Blake married Mark Edward Spaeth — a Texas businessman, developer, and Austin city councilman ten years her junior. It was her fifth marriage.[4] The relationship became troubled quickly. On April 26, 1985 — two days before their first anniversary — Spaeth filed for divorce, citing "discord or conflict of personalities."[5] The divorce was never finalized before he died.

Mark Spaeth died in May 1985 in Austin, Texas, of AIDS-related pneumonia.[6] Those who knew him described him as openly bisexual — something that, in 1985 Texas, was rarely discussed in public.[7] Before he died, he reportedly told the press he might have acquired a "viral infection" from Blake. That framing was evasive, and it reflected the moment: in the epidemic's early years, the language people used around AIDS was still being built — and it was being built, in much of the country, around blame rather than fact.

Context: 1985

Mark Spaeth died the same year the FDA approved the first HIV antibody blood test.[8] Ryan White was fighting to stay enrolled in his Kokomo, Indiana, school. Rock Hudson had just become the first major celebrity to publicly disclose an AIDS diagnosis, and he died that October.[9] The epidemic was only three or four years into public awareness, and it already carried enormous stigma. For a woman working in Hollywood, disclosure could mean the end of a career.

What We Know About Her Diagnosis

Amanda Blake most likely acquired HIV from Mark Spaeth, according to her physician, Sacramento internist Dr. Lou Nishimura, who confirmed this account after her death.[10] The exact date of her diagnosis was never made public, but Dr. Nishimura said she had shown AIDS-related symptoms for about a year before she died.[11]

She told almost no one. Her agent, Steven Stevens, saw her three weeks before her death. He recalled her last words to him as she left his office: "Get me a job. I want to do another job. I want to meet more people."[12]

"Up to the end," he said, "she wanted to pretend everything was okay."[12]

In 1989, AIDS was still widely and dangerously misunderstood. Public discourse framed it almost entirely as a disease affecting gay men and people who inject drugs. A woman like Amanda Blake — a beloved television actress in her sixties — did not fit the picture most Americans had of who got AIDS. For women living with HIV in the 1980s, that invisibility could be both a shield and a trap.

"Amanda just seemed to accept it."

— Pat Derby, Blake's close friend, quoted in press accounts after the 1989 disclosure[13]

The Cover-Up

Amanda Blake died on August 16, 1989, at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, California. She was 60 years old.[14]

The hospital and her friends immediately issued a statement saying she had died of throat cancer. It wasn't purely invented — she had been a heavy smoker and had gone through oral cancer surgery in 1977. Cancer was a story people could believe. It didn't carry the stigma that AIDS did.

But it wasn't the truth.

Her death certificate listed the immediate cause as cardiopulmonary arrest due to liver failure and cytomegalovirus (CMV) hepatitis — a classic AIDS-defining illness, not something caused by cancer.[15] Dr. Nishimura later said there had been no recurrence of her cancer at all. He had listed AIDS as a cause of death on her certificate, but it was not disclosed publicly at the time.[16]

August 16, 1989

Amanda Blake dies at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento. The public statement says throat cancer.[14]

Late 1989

Blake's will leaves her estate — valued at roughly $400,000 — to the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS). Family members contest the will, arguing she was mentally incompetent when she wrote it.[17]

November 1989

Pat Derby, co-founder of PAWS and one of Blake's closest friends, discloses the true cause of death to the press, worried the will contest would distort the record. Dr. Nishimura confirms it publicly: Amanda Blake died of AIDS-related complications.[18]

November 7, 1989

The Associated Press runs the story nationally: "AIDS Killed 'Miss Kitty.'"[19]

Why the Truth Came Out — and What It Meant

The truth about Amanda Blake's death didn't come out because of a sudden commitment to transparency. It came out because a legal dispute over her estate threatened to distort the record of her final wishes. Pat Derby, who had run the animal welfare organization Blake spent her later years supporting, decided that telling the truth would serve Blake's memory better than staying silent.[18]

That distinction is worth sitting with. The truth came out because of a will contest — not because the country was ready to talk about it, not because the stigma had lifted, not because anyone felt safe saying it out loud. It came out because the alternative, letting a legal fight rewrite her final chapter, was worse.

The disclosure surprised people who had known her well — her agent, her colleagues, fans who had grown up watching Miss Kitty face down trouble in Dodge City with her chin up. The idea that Amanda Blake could have been living with AIDS while she was still signing autographs, still calling her agent for work, still showing up, unsettled the tidy story much of the country had told itself about who AIDS affected.

"Miss Kitty got a raw deal with the AIDS thing. It wasn't even by her doing."

— A fan, reflecting on Amanda Blake's story years later in an online Gunsmoke community

Women and HIV: The Epidemic Nobody Talked About

Amanda Blake is often described as the first well-known Hollywood actress to die of AIDS.[20] That distinction isn't about celebrity mattering more than anyone else's story — it matters because it reveals who the epidemic was allowed to have as a face.

In 1989, women made up a growing but largely invisible share of HIV cases in the United States. Media coverage, government messaging, and public health campaigns had framed AIDS almost entirely as something that happened to gay men and people who inject drugs. Women who acquired HIV through heterosexual sex were nearly absent from that narrative.

That invisibility carried real consequences. The CDC's clinical case definition of AIDS at the time did not include several opportunistic infections that disproportionately affected women, so many women with advanced HIV disease didn't technically qualify for a diagnosis — which meant they were also denied disability benefits and shut out of clinical trials for early treatments. Women were often diagnosed later than men, and, in that era, died faster after diagnosis as a result.

Women like Amanda Blake — middle-aged, heterosexual, not fitting any of the categories the country had stigmatized — simply weren't part of the story America was telling itself about HIV. Some suffered in silence. Some had doctors who quietly protected them with a different story on the record. Many were never counted at all.

Women and HIV Today

Women accounted for about 18–19% of new HIV diagnoses in the United States in 2022, according to the CDC and HIV.gov — down significantly from earlier decades, though still a meaningful share of the epidemic.[21] Black women continue to be disproportionately affected, accounting for roughly 47% of estimated new HIV infections among women that year.[22] Most new diagnoses among women — about 83% — are attributed to heterosexual sex, not the routes of transmission the public most associates with HIV.[21]

In Florida, women's HIV diagnosis rates vary sharply by race: in 2022, the statewide rate among women was 8.5 per 100,000, but 33.7 per 100,000 among Black women — nearly 12 times the rate among white women.[23] Florida has ranked among the states with the highest numbers of new HIV diagnoses overall for years.[24] The invisibility Amanda Blake experienced in 1989 has eased. It has not disappeared.

Who She Really Was — and Why She Deserves to Be Remembered Fully

Amanda Blake spent the final years of her life knowing she was sick, and she kept working anyway — advocating for animals, calling her agent, asking for one more job. She didn't spend those years in public despair. She spent them being who she had always been: someone who showed up.

Most people who remember her at all remember Miss Kitty — the red hair, the Long Branch Saloon, the way she could say with a look what the show's censors wouldn't let her say in words.

But she deserves to be remembered for something else too: as one of the earliest visible examples of heterosexual HIV transmission in America, whether the country was ready to see it or not. As a woman who died before effective treatment existed, carrying a diagnosis that medicine hadn't yet learned to manage and that stigma had decided to make shameful. As someone whose real cause of death was hidden by people who loved her and were trying to protect her from a world that had made the truth too dangerous to tell.

The silence around her death wasn't malicious. It was a survival instinct in a world that wasn't yet safe. That world has changed since 1989 — effective HIV treatment now allows people to live long, healthy lives, and people with an undetectable viral load cannot transmit HIV sexually. But the stigma hasn't fully disappeared. Every time someone shares the truth about their diagnosis — publicly, privately, in a story submitted to a campaign or typed into a form — the world gets a little safer for the next person who needs to do the same.

That is the work. That was always the work. And Amanda Blake, without ever intending to, is part of why it matters.

If you are a woman living with HIV

You are not alone — and your story is part of this history too. Women and HIV have been intertwined since the beginning of the epidemic, even when the world refused to acknowledge it. Resources built specifically for women living with HIV include Positively Aware and The Well Project, which center women's voices and experiences in HIV care.

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References & Sources

Numbered footnotes correspond to superscript markers throughout this article. Click a footnote number to jump to its source; click the ↩ arrow to return to where you were reading.

  1. The New York Times, "Amanda Blake, 60, Saloonkeeper On TV's 'Gunsmoke' for 19 Years," August 18, 1989 — obituary documenting Blake's tenure as Miss Kitty from 1955 to 1974. The Washington Post, "Amanda Blake, 60, Who Played Miss Kitty on Long-Running 'Gunsmoke' Series, Dies," August 18, 1989. nytimes.com — Amanda Blake obituary · washingtonpost.com — Amanda Blake obituary ↩
  2. UPI. "Thursday" (Amanda Blake obituary wire report), Aug. 17, 1989. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/08/17/Thursday/4791619329600/ ↩
  3. The New York Times. "Amanda Blake, 60, Saloonkeeper on TV's 'Gunsmoke' for 19 Years." Aug. 18, 1989. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/18/obituaries/amanda-blake-60-saloonkeeper-on-tv-s-gunsmoke-for-19-years.html ↩
  4. UPI, "'Miss Kitty's' husband files for divorce," April 27, 1985 — Blake and Austin city councilman Mark Spaeth married April 28, 1984; Spaeth filed for divorce two days before their first anniversary. The New York Times, "Amanda Blake Died of AIDS, Doctor Says," November 8, 1989 — identifies Spaeth as Blake's fifth husband, an Austin developer and City Councilman. upi.com — Miss Kitty's husband files for divorce · nytimes.com — Amanda Blake died of AIDS ↩
  5. Texas Obituary Project. "May 27, 1985 – Spaeth, Mark." https://texasobituaryproject.org/053185spaeth.html ↩
  6. AOL/Closer Weekly (syndicated). "This Gunsmoke Star Was Just As Tough in Real Life as 'Miss Kitty.'" https://www.aol.com/gunsmoke-star-just-tough-real-165700783.html ↩
  7. Reddit r/askaustin. "Untold stories of Austin" — local historical account of Mark Spaeth and Amanda Blake in Austin, TX. https://www.reddit.com/r/askaustin/comments/1eyskjd/untold_stories_of_austin/ ↩
  8. HIV.gov. "A Timeline of HIV and AIDS." U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline ↩
  9. HIV.gov. "A Timeline of HIV and AIDS" (Rock Hudson disclosure and death, 1985). https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline ↩
  10. Los Angeles Times. "TV & Video — Nov. 6, 1989: Blake Cause of Death Revealed." https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-06-ca-602-story.html ↩
  11. Deseret News (Associated Press). "AIDS Killed 'Miss Kitty.'" Nov. 7, 1989. https://www.deseret.com/1989/11/7/18831160/aids-killed-miss-kitty/ ↩
  12. Country Thang Daily. "What Happened To Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke's Sassy Miss Kitty?" — quoting agent Steven Stevens. https://www.countrythangdaily.com/what-happened-to-amanda-blake-gunsmoke-sassy-miss-kitty/ ↩
  13. Country Thang Daily. "What Happened To Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke's Sassy Miss Kitty?" — quoting Pat Derby. https://www.countrythangdaily.com/what-happened-to-amanda-blake-gunsmoke-sassy-miss-kitty/ ↩
  14. Austin American-Statesman (Associated Press). "Performer's death was AIDS-related." Nov. 7, 1989, p. A15. https://texasobituaryproject.org/1985/05/AMANDA-BLAKE___Performers_death_was_AIDS-related__Nov_7_1989__pA15.pdf ↩
  15. Austin American-Statesman (Associated Press). "Performer's death was AIDS-related" — death certificate details (cardiopulmonary arrest, liver failure, CMV hepatitis). https://texasobituaryproject.org/1985/05/AMANDA-BLAKE___Performers_death_was_AIDS-related__Nov_7_1989__pA15.pdf ↩
  16. Los Angeles Times. "TV & Video — Nov. 6, 1989: Blake Cause of Death Revealed" — Dr. Lou Nishimura's account of listing AIDS on the death certificate without public disclosure. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-06-ca-602-story.html ↩
  17. Country Thang Daily. "What Happened To Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke's Sassy Miss Kitty?" — will, estate value, and family contest. https://www.countrythangdaily.com/what-happened-to-amanda-blake-gunsmoke-sassy-miss-kitty/ ↩
  18. Country Thang Daily. "What Happened To Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke's Sassy Miss Kitty?" — Pat Derby's decision to disclose the truth ahead of the will contest. https://www.countrythangdaily.com/what-happened-to-amanda-blake-gunsmoke-sassy-miss-kitty/ ↩
  19. Deseret News (Associated Press). "AIDS Killed 'Miss Kitty.'" Nov. 7, 1989 — national AP wire headline and distribution. https://www.deseret.com/1989/11/7/18831160/aids-killed-miss-kitty/ ↩
  20. POZ. "Celebrities With HIV." https://www.poz.com/slideshow/celebrities-with-hiv/16 ↩
  21. KFF. "The Impact of HIV on Women in the United States." Dec. 16, 2024. https://www.kff.org/hiv-aids/the-impact-of-hiv-on-women-in-the-united-states/ ↩
  22. CDC, National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. "CDC Publishes New HIV Surveillance Reports." May 21, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/director-letters/cdc-publishes-new-hiv-surveillance-reports.html ↩
  23. KFF. "Florida Women's Sexual Health Data" — HIV diagnosis rate among women by race/ethnicity, 2022, Florida. https://www.kff.org/interactive/womens-health-profiles/florida/sexual-health/ ↩
  24. Florida Department of Health. "Florida Integrated HIV Prevention and Care Plan." https://www.floridahealth.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/florida-ipc-2022-26.pdf ↩