Don Adams - Maxwell Smart - Barbara Feldon

Would You NOW Believe ...?

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With some doggone television series lasting longer than many people who are fully adult have been alive, it's a surprise that at one time a show lasting a mere six seasons was considered a phenomenal success. And Get Smart was on the air from 1965 to 1970 before it went into what were then called re-runs. By the time the show ended it had picked up 7 Emmy Awards including three for best actor for the star of the show, Don Adams.¹

Footnote

Strictly speaking, the awards were for the "Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series" for the years, 1967, 1968, and 1969.

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Get Smart proved to be one of the biggest hits on television, and the now iconic theme song and opening scene have been parodied and satirized well after the turn of the Millennium - including on the longest running TV show in history. At the start of each show Max drives up to CONTROL's headquarters in his sports car, enters the building, and proceeds through a series of automatically opening and thunderously closing doors.² After he reaches the end of the corridor he walks into an alley and goes into a telephone booth - an obsolete device now long vanished from the world - and dials a number. Crossing his arms he faces the camera and drops from view. In the actual filming Max simply bent his knees and dropped from sight behind the lower panel of the door.

Footnote

The doors were actually operated by stage hands as they very might well be even today.

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The basic premise of the show is well-known. Maxwell Smart is the bumbling but surprisingly effective Secret Agent 86 working for a United States intelligence division called CONTROL. CONTROL is based in Washington but has branch offices in other states and even in other countries. Its specific purpose is to counter the activities of an international criminal organization called KAOS which was founded in Bucharest in 1904 and had spread throughout the world.

Max's co-agent and regular partner on assignments is Agent 99 who was played by Barbara Feldon. 99 tries to support Max and also to keep him from going too far off tack. We never learn her real name and even after Max and 99 get married and have twins everyone still calls her 99.

There was a minor technical problem with the scenes featuring both 99 and Max. At 5'10" Barbara was an inch taller than Don. This was a time where the hero had to be taller than the heroine and so if it wasn't possible to have Don stand on some kind of elevator Barbara had to slouch or work in her bare feet. She later remarked that she was one of the few actresses who had calluses on her ankles.

The chief of CONTROL was simply known as the Chief and was played by Ed Platt. Ed was a veteran of television (he once hosted a kid's show) and movies (sharp eyed fans of James Dean will pick out Ed as a juvenile officer in Rebel Without a Cause). Because of his serious demeanor and deep voice he found ready employment playing figures of authority, sometimes good guys; sometimes bad guys. But everyone remembers him as the Chief.

The Chief is aware of Max's ability to continually fumble his way to success and so considers him CONTROL's top agent. Not surprisingly we learn that the Chief has ulcers. At one time the Chief was married but in later episodes he's single. He also has a grown niece who visits Washington from time to time, he was a soloist in his college glee club, and his first name is Thaddeus.

One semi-regular guest star mentioned that Ed had a nervous personality and as his lines tended to be complex, sometimes it took some time to film his scenes. In many episodes we see the Chief in his office but in a few times the part takes him outside of CONTROL's headquarters. Some episodes were written specifically for Ed such as "Too Many Chiefs" where he played both the Chief and a look-alike KAOS assassin.

Max is a stickler for detail and for doing things by the book. He often insists that he and the Chief have their discussions in the Cone of Silence, a device intended to keep sounds contained within its radius and which never seems to work properly. Once when the Cone of Silence was lent to the CIA, Max insisted on going into the Closet of Silence where they speak surrounded by coats and get stuck when the door won't open. There was also a portable Cone of Silence which was two Plexiglass spheres that fit over the speakers heads and were connected by a tube. Naturally it ended up getting stuck on the Chief. Then when Max and 99 visited the British division of CONTROL, they used the Umbrella of Silence. For what it's worth none of the Cone of Silence's variants is actually a cone.

Mel Brooks
He and Buck

Get Smart was created by comedy writers Mel Brooks and Buck Henry at the behest of the ABC executives. Two good trivia questions are who was the first James Bond villain on screen (it was Peter Lorre) and who was the first high level KAOS villain on Get Smart. The KAOS bad guy was played by Michael Dunn before he became famous as Miguelito Quixote Loveless, the arch-foe of James West and Artemus Gordon on The Wild Wild West. Michael stood at 3'10" and he played the head of KAOS whose was named Mr. Big.

The pilot - "Mr. Big" - was rejected by the network. Among other reasons the executives gave was that having a criminal played by a "midget" - now considered a pejorative term - was an insult to Americans who loved their criminals. But NBC was contacted and they agreed to produce a season of shows. The last season though was aired on CBS.

The pilot episode was the only time Max came face-to-face with the head of KAOS. More often he encountered lower echelon KAOS's operatives including the Vice President of Public Relations and Terror, Siegfried, played be Bernie Kopell. Siegfried first appeared in one of the better episodes "A Spy for a Spy". Later Siegfried was aided by a large hulking and not too bright agent named Starker (pronounced and often spelled as "Shtarker") played by King Moody. But despite his best efforts Siegfried can never seem to get the upper hand of Max or CONTROL. But neither is he completely defeated.

We learn about Siegfried's background during the series. He and Starker were both in the German army in World War II and were the first two soldiers to get out of El Alamein (Siegfried was first and Starker right behind). One of Siegfried's most common phrases occurs when he is correcting other agents. "Dis ist KAOS!" he shouts, "Vee don't [fill in the action] here!"

KAOS isn't CONTROL's only antagonist and sometimes they have to deal with independent criminal organizations and individuals. The evil business tycoon Ironhand was trying to take over KAOS by business acquisitions. Then there's Leadside, a criminal mastermind who is bound to a wheelchair (except when jogging) and who was a transparent satirical rendering of Raymond Burr starring in the popular police series Ironside. It's never clear if Leadside is a KAOS agent or an independent operator.

Like on all of the television and movie spy agencies, CONTROL supplies its agents with all sorts of gadgets.³ Stacey Keach (Senior) played Carlson who was the head of the design laboratory and whose devices were sometimes accidentally destroyed by Max before they could be used. Another of CONTROL's top scientists was Dr. Steele and was played by Ellen Watson in three episodes. Her cover identity was a chorus girl at the local Golden Rooster Follies Theatre where her laboratory is hidden backstage. Dr. Steele's expertise is finding antidotes for poisons and she manages to save Max's life when a KAOS agent poisons him in "Classification: Dead".

Footnote

For those who wonder if the gadgets were based on real espionage devices, it was sometimes the other way around. Barbara was later told by a CIA agent the CIA would watch various spy series and then try to see if they could actually make the devices work.

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A big surprise is the paucity of the appearances of the favorites. Siegfried appeared in only 14 of the 138 episodes, the same number as ever-suffering "spy-in-the-wall" Agent 13 (David Ketchum). Agent 13 replaced Agent 44 (Victor French) as the agent who ends up hidden in walls, potted plants, steam cabinets, sofas, and airport lockers. In the latter case there's actually two Agent 13's in the episode "The Spy Who Met Himself" and they both argue with Max that he is the REAL 13 and the other is a KAOS imposter. KAOS also created look-alikes of Max and the Chief who infiltrate CONTROL. But after a To Tell the Truth style interrogation, the evil doppelgängers are revealed and worsted.

King Moody was on eight shows, most of them as Starker, and Dick Gautier who played the popular robotic CONTROL agent Hymie was featured six times. Comedian Joey Foreman appeared twice as the famous Hawaiian detective, Harry Hoo (in a rather obvious parody of the fictional detective Charlie Chan), and again in a small uncredited role.

Harry Hoo is generally calm and collected but he has his "Maxwell Smart" moments. On "The Amazing Harry Hoo", he and Max are on the track of a master criminal called the Claw. As they are examining a crime scene in San Francisco, Max and Harry see two cigarettes sitting in an ash tray (this was the time when about 50% of men smoked). So he and Max deduced there were at least two people in the room when the crime was committed. But then on further reflection they realize there could also have been non-smokers present. So eventually they decide there could have been as many as fifty people present as long as two of them were smokers. Then two detectives walk over, pick up their cigarettes, and walk out.

Don's younger brother, Dick Yarmy, had a major part as a KAOS agent named Brady in "The Hot Line". Don's dad, William Yarmy, appeared briefly in a non-speaking role as a prisoner of KAOS in "The Not-So-Great Escape". Yes, Don's real surname was Yarmy and Max mentioned the great pool player "Three Fingers Yarmy" on "The Dead Spy Scrawls".

Some of Don's friends appeared in various capacities. Larry Storch, who knew Don when they were kids and who played the rather devious Corporal Randolph Agarn on F Troop, starred as the Groovy Guru on (what else?) "The Groovy Guru". One of Don's later friends, a fellow named Hugh Hefner, had a non-speaking "cameo" in "The Treasure of C. Errol Madre".

The Chief's primary assistant at headquarters was known only as Larabee and was played by Robert Karvelas who was Don Adams's real life cousin. Larabee is cut from the same mold as Max and the Chief knows that if Max ever leaves, then Larabee would become the #1 field agent. Evidently the Chief had little say in who becomes an agent. As we learn on "Strike While the Agent is Hot", the CONTROL agents are unionized and Max was their chief negotiator.

Don Rickles

Another personal and professional friend, Don Rickles, played one of Max's old army buddies on the two-part episode "The Black Book" and had a cameo in "The King Lives?" That episode also featured Johnny Carson as a royal herald. Johnny recited the long list of titles of Princess Marta, the fiancée of King Charles of Cardonia, only to forget her name. Johnny was also the train conductor on "Aboard the Orient Express", and his brother, Dick, was the director for "How Green Was My Valet".

Joey Bishop played a guard in a Mexican prison on "Viva Smart!" Max offered him $60 to bribe a firing squad but Joey only managed to bribe half of them. Joey returned $27 since he had deducted 10% for booking the deal. Max then delivered Joey's standard "Son-of-a-gun!" line.

Johnny Carson

Son-of-a-gun.

Some of the bit parts were filled by actors who later became successful and even iconic. Ellen Corby ("Grandma" on The Waltons) appeared on "Dear Diary". Tom Bosley (Richie's dad on Happy Days) was a KAOS agent on "The Farkas Fracas", Vic Tayback of Alice fame and who played Krako on the original Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" was on two shows. And in 1966 it was Leonard Nimoy who played Stryker, a low level henchman for a pool hustling KAOS agent called the Shark on "The Dead Spy Scrawls". At the same time Leonard was doffing his shades and putting on his ears to become Science Officer Spock. No, William Shatner (Captain Kirk) never appeared either as friend or foe of Agent 86.

There were plenty of "special guest stars". Carol Burnett was a country singer named Ozark Annie on "One of Our Olives Is Missing" and Broderick Crawford was a most convincing bad guy on "The Treasure of C. Errol Madre". William Schallert (Patty Duke's TV father and Undersecretary Nilz Baris on Star Trek's classic The Trouble with Tribbles) played the part of the retired Chief of CONTROL who returns to duty on "The Return of the Ancient Mariner". Bruce Gordon (Frank Nitti on The Untouchables TV series) is a tough cop on "Don't Look Back" and Harold Gould took the role of the bad guy on "The Island of the Darned". Comedian and sort-of Presidential candidate Pat Paulsen was a turncoat CONTROL agent on "The Mess of Adrian Listenger".

Suave, debonair Caesar Romero played the suave, debonair KAOS agent Kinsey Krispen on The Reluctant Redhead while Victor Buono played a TV director with KAOS connections on "Moonlighting Becomes You". Julie Newmar (Catwoman on the campy 1960's TV series Batman) was a KAOS agent posing as Max and 99's maid on "The Laser Blazer". Even Vincent Price showed up as a KAOS scientist Jarvis Pym on "Is This Trip Necessary?"⁴ Julie, Victor, Vincent, and Caesar all played recurring villains on Batman.

A number of then-famous actors appeared uncredited on cameos. So we saw Steven Allen ("The Mild Ones"), Shelly Berman ("Classification: Dead"), Milton Berle ("Don't Look Back"), Ernest Borgnine ("The Little Black Book-Part 2"), James Caan ("To Sire With Love"), Robert Culp ("Die Spy"), Buddy Hackett ("Maxwell Smart, Private Eye"), Bob Hope ("99 Loses Control"), Danny Thomas ("That Old Gang of Mine"), and both Martin Landau and Phyllis Diller - or at least their photographs - appear in "Pheasant Under Glass".

An unusual appearance was when Bill Dana (whose most famous stand-up routine was as Jose Jimenez) took Max's place on an assignment in "Ice Station Siegfried". The real-life story behind the episode was that Don Adams didn't like the plot since it was an obvious re-doing of the earlier episode "Schwartz's Island" and so handed the role over to Bill. But this episode is notable for having the last appearance of Siegfried and Starker.

Sometimes you'd have guest stars satirizing themselves, or at least their on-screen personae. J. Carrol Naish played an aging Italian mobster in "The Secret of Sam Vittorio". Don and Barbara had dual roles. They were Max and 99, of course, but they also played a Max and 99 look-alike gangster duo named Connie and Floyd (an obvious take-off of the famous Depression era gangsters, Bonnie and Clyde). Playing an Italian was par for Carrol since his dark complexion, wavy hair, and thin mustache had made him renown for taking on "exotic" roles of Italians, Mexicans, Arabs, Hindus, Pacific Islanders, Asians, and even African-Americans. He was a native of New York and his ancestry was Irish.

Barbara Bain of Mission Impossible fame was a sly KAOS agent on "KAOS in CONTROL", and Jamie Farr who played the cross dressing Corporal Maxwell Klinger on MASH appeared on "The Impossible Mission". Soap opera star Marj Dusay was a KAOS beauty on "A Man Called Smart".

As you'd expect some of the era's most reliable character actors made their appearances. These were people viewers would probably recognize but not know their names. You'd see the likes of John Doucette ("The King Lives?", "To Sire With Love"), Len Lesser ("The Spirit Is Willing", "The Decoy", "Satan Place"), Joseph Sirola ("Satan Place", "Bronzefinger"), H. M. Wynant ("And Only Two Ninety-Nine", "Pussycats Galore"), Angelique Pettyjohn ("Pussycats Galore", "Smart Fit the Battle of Jericho"), Vito Scotti ("Mr. Big", "Hello, Columbus - Goodbye, America"), Charles Horvath ("Mr. Big", "Island of the Darned"), Anthony Caruso ("Washington 4, Indians 3"), Joseph Ruskin ("Now You See Him, Now You Don't"), Ben Wright ("School Days"), Ford Rainey ("Weekend Vampire"), Carol Ohmart ("Aboard the Orient Express"), Janine Gray ("Mr. Big"), Robert Ellenstein ("Double Agent"), Kathie Browne (The Not-So-Great Escape - Part 1"), Ralph Moody ("Age Before Duty"), Simon Oakland ("The Day Smart Turned Chicken"), Roy Engel ("The Dead Spy Scrawls"), Jonathan Harris ("How Green Was My Valet"), and many, many more.

One recurring joke was mentioning a lady named Rose. It might be a comment about Max's Aunt Rose or the owner of the hotel managed by Milton Berle on "Don't Look Back". Rose was in fact a real person, Rose Michtom, who made a number of appearances but who with one exception was always uncredited. She was, in fact, the real life aunt of the executive producer Leonard Stern, and so it's easy to think of her inclusion as something of an inside joke. Actually Rose was a bonafide actor with credits going back well before and long after Get Smart.

There is a surprise to students of modern entertainment culture if they review "The Hot Line". Max is tailing a KAOS agent and goes into what he thought was a KAOS bakery. The employee behind the counter who gives Max a hard time was none other than Regis Philbin.

"The Hot Line" was one of the better shows and the KAOS agent-in-charge was played by impressionist John Byner. John's character was named Gorshen, an obvious tribute to fellow impressionist Frank Gorshin. By imitating the then-President Lyndon Johnson on the White House hot line to CONTROL (hence the title), Gorshen put Max in charge and "busted" the Chief to his previous job of Agent Second Class Q (the Chief was an agent before they switched to numbers). Of course, at the end of the show, the plot is revealed and the Chief is once again the Chief. It's also evident that when Max ends up knocking Gorshen out of a window that John was replaced by a stunt double

A notable feature on "The Hot Line" was that Agent Q posed as a singing waiter in a KAOS restaurant where he sang Alouette in a code to alert Max and 99 that there were KAOS agents in the room. Ed Platt's excellent baritone surprised some viewers but he had attended Julliard and later sang with the Paul Whiteman orchestra.

Tom Poston appeared as a Dr. Frankenstein type villain named Dr Zharko on "Shock It to Me" with an Igor-styled assistant named Bruce who was played by Sid Haig. Tom had been Mel and Buck's original choice to play Max when they first pitched the script to ABC, and Mel and Buck wrote the pilot specifically with Tom in mind. But when ABC turned the show down, the NBC executives picked Don. So as they say, Tom missed it by that much

One repeat actor you never saw was June Foray. June was one of the best voice actors in Hollywood and who from 1938 to 2015 voiced characters in nearly 400 television shows and movies. But she's most famous for supplying the vocals of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Nell Fenwick, and Natasha (all on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show), and for Granny, the owner of Tweety Bird on the Warner Brothers Cartoons (she was also Wheezy and Lena Hyena on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). On Get Smart June was heard on four shows including supplying the voice of a KAOS look-alike for 99.

When the yearning for the good old days sparked the nostalgia boom for remakes, it was inevitable that someone would try a revival of Max and the rest. But although the 2008 eponymous movie starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Alan Arkin, and Dwane Johnson was financially sound, it received decidedly mixed reviews. No matter how hard you try, you just can't improve on a classic.

The post-Millennial Get Smart wasn't the first attempt to put Max on the big screen. That came in the 1980 with The Nude Bomb where KAOS has invented a weapon that destroys the clothes of people without injury. No doubt an attempt to capitalize on the loosening censorship for the cinema (although there is no full nudity in the film) and the titillating title (no pun intended), the movie was an absolute bomb - again no intentional punning. It lost money and was thoroughly trashed by critics and fans alike.

Certainly the movie wasn't helped by neither Barbara Feldon or Ed Platt being in the cast (Ed had died in 1974). The show's success had largely been due to the interaction of the individual characters and the specific actors. No one could be a better Chief than Ed Platt and you had to have Agent 99. But in The Nude Bomb even David Ketchum was replaced by Joey Forman as Agent 13.

Fortunately there was some learning from the mistakes and in 1989 a new movie Get Smart Again! returned to the more familiar line-up although necessarily minus Ed Platt. It seems that CONTROL had been disbanded after KAOS had been defeated, but there had been a recent resurgence of the evil organization. So Max is given the task of rebuilding CONTROL and seeking out the old members. The plot is implausible even by the loose standards of Get Smart and much of the show was simply bringing the old characters back for old time's sake.

Nevertheless, the movie was fairly successful and resulted in a new Get Smart series in 1995 with Don and Barbara. The plot, though, focused mostly on Zach (played by Andy Dick) who was one of the twins of Max and 99. Zach is now a CONTROL agent and had clearly inherited his father's - quote - "ability" - unquote. But the experiment was not successful, and the new Get Smart lasted only one season and even then for only seven episodes.

You would think that today the original Get Smart series would be a target for cultural censure in how it characterized both Max's friends and foes. Siegfried and Starker speak with comic-opera German accents, the Claw keeps telling everyone "It's not the Craw, but the Craw", and Harry Hoo's speaking seemed to declare war on all definite and indefinite articles. In "Viva Smart!" General Diablo Pajarito is a South American dictator whose voice makes the Frito Bandito sound like Wendell Phillips ("pajarito" means "little bird" in Spanish) and who handles all problems by firing squads. Arabic culture is represented by Ahmad and Jamal (Peter Mamakos and Vic Tayback) in "Appointment in Sahara" as they speak in stilted English and discuss whether to offer the CONTROL agents traditional bedouin hospitality or cutting their throats, not to mention Prince Sully of Ramat who is a burnoose wearing overeating glutton on "Survival of the Fattest". In "The Man from YENTA" Agent 498 speaks with sing-song delivery in what is supposed to be an urbanized Jewish-American accent even though he's an Israeli agent. But the most glaring example of cultural misrepresentation is in "Washington 4 Indians 3" where scarcely a stereotype is omitted.

But so far no one has tried to shut down Get Smart, probably because it's so obvious that nothing is to be taken seriously. You can find episodes in the various formats. Of course, if you're a real fan, you need to get the whole collection for yourself. But be warned! You might spend hours ignoring your friends and family while staying glued to the television set.

"Barbara Feldon (Agent 99): Why I Did 'Get Smart' In Bare Feet", Jim Clash, Forbes, March 25, 2016.