LOS ANGELES — For more than four decades, the story of Larry Wilcox’s departure from “CHiPs” has been told the same tidy way: the actor simply chose to walk away from the hit NBC series to build a production company of his own. That story, according to the man himself, was never entirely true.

In a newly surfaced account laid out in his own words, Wilcox has finally broken his silence on the real reason he left the show that made him famous — and it has almost nothing to do with a career decision. According to Wilcox, he was pushed off “CHiPs” at the demand of his own co-star, Erik Estrada, the same man whose life he had helped save on a studio backlot three years earlier.

The revelation closes a loop that began in late 1981, when Wilcox landed back in Los Angeles from São Paulo, Brazil, where 40,000 screaming fans had packed an airport just to glimpse him. Weeks later, his agent called with a very different kind of news: he would not be asked back for the show’s sixth season.

For decades, the official version held that Wilcox walked away on his own terms. It was a clean, dignified exit, carefully managed and widely believed, repeated in article after article without much question. It just wasn’t entirely true.

By Wilcox’s account, NBC’s own head of entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff, did not want to let him go but felt he had no real choice. Estrada, then locked in a bitter contract standoff with the studio, had made it a condition of his own return that certain people — Wilcox included — be gone before he would agree to come back for season six.

Rather than let the story break as a public firing, Wilcox moved fast. Working with his own publicist and attorney, he placed a favorable interview with a friendly Los Angeles Times writer before anyone else could shape the narrative, meeting the reporter for lunch at one of his favorite French restaurants in the San Fernando Valley to make sure the tone landed exactly right.

“I’m a businessman more than really an actor, I think,” Wilcox said of that decision. It worked exactly as intended. The world came away believing Larry Wilcox had simply chosen to leave “CHiPs” on his own terms.

Almost nobody at the time understood what had actually happened behind that carefully managed exit.

The irony is brutal and, by Wilcox’s own telling, inescapable. On August 6, 1979, during a chase sequence for the show’s third season, Estrada lost control of his motorcycle at speed, was thrown into an oncoming vehicle, and had roughly 600 pounds of bike land directly on his chest. He suffered fractured ribs, a cracked sternum and a punctured lung.

By some accounts, doctors gave him only even odds of surviving.

Wilcox was right there when it happened. Drawing directly on his training as a United States Marine Corps field artillery forward observer in Vietnam, he recognized the specific signs of a collapsing lung, kept Estrada conscious and talking, and stayed with him until emergency medical help arrived. Estrada himself has since credited Wilcox directly with recognizing the collapsed lung and keeping him alive until the helicopter arrived.

That is the detail Wilcox has pointed to since, almost incredulous at how the story eventually turned. He saved his co-star’s life using skills he learned fighting a war. And that same co-star, he says, would go on to leverage that very accident and the lawsuit that followed it to push him off the show entirely.

The roots of the friction ran deep and predated the crash. Wilcox has been candid in later interviews about finding Estrada genuinely difficult in the show’s early years, describing him bluntly as the most egotistical person he had encountered in his career at that point — prone to constant preening, showmanship and a level of self-focus that eventually curdled the entire set’s atmosphere.

The tension became public in its own small way in 1980. When Estrada married that spring, Wilcox wasn’t invited. When Wilcox married his second wife, Hannie Strasser, four months later, he returned the favor and left Estrada off his own guest list.

Two grown men playing television’s most beloved on-screen partnership, quietly refusing to share a wedding reception with each other.

What audiences never saw was how quickly the two leads’ off-screen relationship soured behind the sunny freeway chases that made “CHiPs” a Saturday-night institution. The show had nearly died in its first season, parked in a forgettable Thursday slot with critics largely dismissive and ratings limping along near the bottom of the network’s lineup, before a scheduling gamble moved it to Saturday nights and an entirely different audience found it almost overnight.

Wilcox brought a genuine, lived-in steadiness to Officer Jon Baker that audiences responded to instantly. He performed a great deal of his own motorcycle stunt work and, unlike his co-star, made it through the show’s entire run without a single major injury. What he could not outrun was the off-camera war that would eventually cost him the role.

For years afterward, Wilcox has admitted he carried real unresolved anger about his exit. He has described, with disarming honesty, an ugly, resentful period in which some small, hardened part of him half hoped he would never run into Estrada again — precisely because he wasn’t sure what he might say or do if he did. He has joked darkly about the old country instinct in him that wondered whether a private word behind the barn might teach his former co-star a lesson.

He has since called that instinct exactly what it was: the punk in him talking. A version of himself he is not especially proud of, but also isn’t interested in pretending never existed.

The shift, when it finally came, arrived almost by accident. In a conversation with a producer friend, Sy Sherick, who had witnessed the actual meeting where Estrada pushed for his removal, the subject came back up years later while the two men were discussing a new project together. Wilcox has described the moment that followed with real clarity — a kind of internal reckoning in which he simply asked himself whether staying angry was actually making him happy.

“I’m going to love on this guy,” he decided, in his own words. He meant it literally rather than performatively, choosing deliberately to become genuinely, unconditionally supportive of the same man who had once had him fired — ceding the spotlight whenever Estrada wanted it, showing up for photos, letting old competitive instincts go entirely slack. It wasn’t a strategic olive branch.

By his own account, it was a full, unforced surrender of the grudge itself.

The choice eventually built something real. The two men reunited for a 1998 television movie, “CHiPs ’99,” patched up enough of their old friction to appear warmly together at fan conventions and reunion events in the years since, and Wilcox has spoken about Estrada more recently with a kind of clear-eyed compassion rather than lingering resentment.

He now frames his old co-star’s need for constant attention and control not as simple ego, but as the understandable defense mechanism of a kid from a broken home in East Harlem who had clawed his way to stardom and wasn’t about to let anyone slow him down — Wilcox included. “He was fighting for his life to be the star of the series,” Wilcox has reflected, adding that he doesn’t believe Estrada ever set out to be cruel so much as desperate.

Wilcox has said plainly that he has come to watch Estrada’s whole complicated, colorful career with something closer to genuine affection than judgment, seeing good and bad in him the way he would see it in anyone, and closing the thought more than once with a simple, unadorned blessing for the man rather than a complaint.

The fuller arc of Wilcox’s life is not a straight, tidy line, and the honest version includes real setbacks alongside the redemption. Long before “CHiPs,” he was a kid in Rawlins, Wyoming, one of four children raised by a single mother after his parents’ marriage fell apart. Ranch life in that part of the country doesn’t leave much room for softness, and Wilcox has said outright that growing up around cattle, rodeo work and long, physically demanding days gave him a resilience he would draw on for the rest of his life.

That resilience was tested in ways no teenager should have to imagine. In 1966, his older sister Sharon was murdered in Wyoming. Her husband was tried and acquitted, and was later killed himself in an unrelated bar fight — a brutal, senseless coda to a tragedy that never received any real resolution.

Wilcox rarely discusses it in interviews, but it sits quietly in the background of a life defined again and again by the question of how a person survives loss without being consumed by it.

A year later, in May 1967, facing an active draft notice, 19-year-old Wilcox made a deliberate choice. Rather than wait to be assigned wherever the Army needed bodies, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, reasoning that if he was going to fight, he wanted to do it with what he considered the best outfit in the war.

He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 12th Marine Regiment, as a field artillery forward observer, part of a recon survey team helicoptered into remote mountain positions to calculate exact coordinates for artillery fire support — a job that demanded precision under fire, using not much more than a slide rule and raw nerve to compute distance, range and azimuth for howitzers while the ground around him was actively contested.

He served 13 months in Vietnam’s I Corps region through Dong Ha, Khe Sanh and the brutal chaos of the Tet Offensive, earning five campaign stars and two meritorious promotions along the way, eventually discharged as a staff sergeant. Decades later, reflecting on that chapter, Wilcox described it not as a source of trauma to be buried, but as the proudest role of his life — one he has continued to speak about publicly in support of fellow veterans navigating their own returns home.

That detail matters enormously, because Larry Wilcox did not just serve in Vietnam. He came home knowing firsthand exactly what a punctured lung and a body going into shock actually look like — knowledge that would arrive on a California backlot a decade later in the most unexpected way imaginable.

Acting wasn’t the plan at first. Back in Los Angeles, Wilcox flirted briefly with pre-dentistry courses before deciding, in his own words, that he simply didn’t have the manual dexterity for it — a small, almost funny admission from a man who would go on to spend years performing motorcycle stunts with far more precision than any dental instrument would ever have required. He drifted into odd jobs, including piano tuning, while studying at the Beverly Hills Playhouse under acting teacher Milton Katselas and slowly building a résumé out of commercials and guest spots on shows like “Room 222” and “Hawaii Five-O.”

He beat out roughly 300 other actors for a regular role on a “Lassie” revival in 1972 — a modest but real foothold — and spent the following years chasing bigger opportunities with mixed results, including a genuinely painful near miss when he lost a coveted role in the acclaimed miniseries “Rich Man, Poor Man” to a then-unknown Nick Nolte. The disappointment was sharp enough that he has admitted candidly to carrying real despair over it at the time.

Landing the role of Officer Jon Baker on a new NBC pilot called “CHiPs” in 1977 partly eased the sting of that earlier disappointment — a consolation prize that would go on to eclipse almost everything else on his résumé combined, and would within a matter of seasons put his face on the cover of TV Guide alongside his co-star more times than either of them could have predicted walking onto that first uncertain set.

Life after “CHiPs” wasn’t a straight, tidy line either. Wilcox built a genuine second act as a producer, most notably behind the award-winning “Ray Bradbury Theater,” directed a pair of “CHiPs” episodes himself during the show’s original run, and kept working steadily in guest roles across shows like “Murder, She Wrote” for years afterward.

But in 2010, at 63, Wilcox was caught up in a federal securities fraud investigation, pleading guilty to conspiracy charges tied to a penny stock kickback scheme run through a company he had headed, after unknowingly dealing with undercover FBI agents posing as corrupt pension fund managers. He cooperated with prosecutors, helping identify the roles of others involved, and was sentenced to three years of probation and 500 hours of community service rather than prison time. The presiding judge noted publicly that Wilcox appeared genuinely remorseful and should not be shielded or punished differently because of his celebrity.

It is not the kind of chapter most tribute pieces about a beloved television star tend to include, but leaving it out would flatten a genuinely fuller, more human arc: a decorated combat veteran who reached extraordinary heights, absorbed a bitter professional betrayal, made a serious legal mistake in middle age, and still managed to rebuild a life defined in the years since far more by service than by scandal.

In the decades following “CHiPs,” Wilcox leaned hard into exactly that kind of rebuilding, becoming a visible advocate for fellow veterans, drawing directly on his own combat experience to support programs for returning service members, speaking at events honoring Vietnam veterans specifically, and lending his name to causes aimed at easing the transition home for a generation of soldiers who never got the welcome he felt they deserved.

He also chased an entirely different kind of thrill as an accomplished pilot, race car driver and land-speed record holder at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Married three times — first to Judy Vagner, with whom he had two children, Derek and Heidi; then briefly to Hannie Strasser; and since 1986 to former world-class heptathlete Marlene Harmon, with whom he built the rest of his family — Wilcox has spent his later years quietly proving that a person’s most defining chapter doesn’t have to be the one where the cameras were rolling brightest.

It is a strange, layered legacy for a man best remembered for playing television’s most dependable straight-arrow motorcycle cop. The real Larry Wilcox turned out to be someone who genuinely lived that steadiness rather than simply performed it: the same composure that once kept a wounded artillery unit functioning under fire in Vietnam, the same instinct that kept a dying co-star breathing on a California freeway, and ultimately the same hard-won discipline that let him set down a decades-old grudge against the very man who had once had him quietly erased from the show that made them both famous.

He has never asked audiences to forget the parts of the story that don’t flatter him — the anger he carried, or the mistake that briefly landed him on the wrong side of federal court. What he has asked, in the plainest terms he can manage, is that people understand forgiveness of that scale was never automatic or easy for him. It took years of genuinely sitting with real resentment before he finally chose, on purpose, to let it go rather than simply performing peace for the cameras one more time.

Ask him now why he finally left “CHiPs,” and for the first time the honest answer isn’t a clean story about starting a production company. It is the far messier, far more human truth of a man who got pushed out by the very person he had saved from dying on a studio backlot — and who chose, eventually, deliberately, and without a hint of performance left in it, to love him anyway.