Closer uncovers super-secret intel on the beloved ’60s spy comedy Get Smart.
Barbara Feldon nearly missed it by…that much! “I was almost fired the first week,” the actress best known as Agent 99 on the smash 1965–’70 spy spoof Get Smart tells Closer. “A sponsor who made a deodorant soap worried a commercial I had done for a deodorant six months before the show was made would put in people’s minds that Agent 99 used a roll-on instead of soap. It got right up to within hours of me being removed from my role, and finally the head of the company backed down.”
Sorry about that, chief! That’s just one of the top-secret details Barbara and her cohorts are revealing more than a half-century after the James Bond parody hit the airwaves. It turns out Barbara and Don Adams, who played her love interest Maxwell Smart (code name: Agent 86), “had no chemistry personally,” she says. “He was very nice to me, and I was very nice to him, but we had nothing to say to each other until words were put in our mouths, and then there was instant chemistry between our characters.”
It was only many years later, when Don was no longer distracted with concern over the show’s scripts, that he and Barbara grew close. “We ended up being very sweet friends toward the end of his life,” says Barbara of Don, who died of lymphoma at 82 in 2005.
Don frequently spent time gambling — even when he was on the set! He would bet on when Edward Platt, who played the straight-laced chief of the U.S. intelligence agency Control, would flub his jargon-heavy lines. In his downtime, “he would have celebrity get-togethers for poker night,” Don’s nephew, journalist Alex Burton, tells Closer. “And he liked the [race]track.”
AGENT 99 WAS ALMOST 86’D! DON ADAMS GAMBLED ON SET! HERE’S CLASSIFIED INTEL ON THE ’60S SPY-COM
…AND LOVING IT!
The actor, who earned a Purple Heart after contracting malaria on Guadalcanal during World War II, also gambled when he signed on to play the bumbling secret agent created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. “He told me in the ’80s, ‘I would have liked to play Rhett Butler or Heathcliff, but after Get Smart, everybody said, ‘We can’t put him in a dramatic role with that funny, nasal voice,’ ” Burton shares. “But he loved the show and was thankful for its raging success.”
After five seasons, Get Smart’s novelty had started to wear off, and CBS canceled the show. “I was quite happy because I felt it was time,” says Barbara. “When you do the same character for five years, you’re not really challenging yourself or growing as a performer.” She did get a nice parting gift: a romance with producer Burt Nodella. “He and I fell in love on the show and we were together for 11 years,” Barbara says.
Not everyone was glad when Get Smart ended. “I was very sad because I never had so much fun on any job,” Bernie Kopell, who played evil Siegfried, tells Closer. “We made the world laugh.” — Bruce Fretts, with
reporting by Ilyssa Panitz
“I was actually surprised
when the show became
a hit.”