Here’s What Happened to Don Adams Before, During and After ‘Get Smart’: ‘He Was a Very Complicated Man’

Continues Geoffrey, “You cannot be a successful standup comedian unless you have a specific point of view. The rule of thumb among comedians is if the jokes you are telling can be told by anybody else successfully, you’re on the wrong track. We can go to any comedy club or comedy venue today and look at 12 people doing their 10 minutes and hear the same jokes four times. But Don was introduced to a man by the name of Bill Dana, who at the time was a writer working for Steve Allen.”

“Bill,” he says, “happened to be living in a luxurious penthouse — not because it was his, but because he was housesitting for somebody. Don showed up there and thought, ‘Well, well, well, I’ve stepped into something wonderful here; this guy is loaded.’ No, he was just as broke as everybody else or as broke as any comedy writer was in the ‘50s.”

Bill Dana began writing for Don, the two of them wanting to come up with an “attitude” for him. What they locked on to was William Powell from The Thin Man film series. “If you watch The Thin Man,” says Geoffrey, “you would hear him interrogating people and Don would, of course, exaggerate that. So that voice gave him laughs, even if what he was saying wasn’t particularly funny. On top of that, Dana began to come up with catchphrases for him, like ‘Would you believe?’, ‘Missed it by that much,’ ‘Third time I fell for it this week’  — things Dana had written for him that were already part of Don’s nightclub act. Don went to work in Chicago and in the audience was Bob Newhart. He liked Don’s work, wrote material for Don on spec and brought it to him. Bob was an accountant at the time, but felt that he had the funny gene. Don read through the material and told Bob it was funny, but not for him, and that he should keep up the good work.”

“Bob thought nothing more of it,” he continues, “until about two weeks later when he’s watching The Ed Sullivan Show and there’s Don, performing the material that Bob wrote. Bob said, ‘If that son of a bitch can get laughs on The Ed Sullivan Show with my material, so can I!’ And Bob began to perform his own material out of anger at Don Adams for stealing it. Eventually, he confronted him about it, but, you know, success if the best revenge, and Bob became a whole lot more successful than Don.”

In the early 1960s, Bill Dana had created for himself a character that grew out of Steve Allen’s “Man on the Street” interviews when he hosted The Tonight Show. It usually featured Don Knotts or Tom Poston. When Steve moved the show to the West Coast, Tom did not go with it. As a result, they needed a new recurring character and they came up with Jose Jimenez, which turned Bill into a star performer. So much so that he was given his own sitcom, The Bill Dana Show.”

The character became so popular, that Bill played it several times on The Danny Thomas Show, Jose working as a bumbling elevator operator. From there, he moved it over to The Bill Dana Show (1963 to 1965) in which Jose is a bellhop at a posh New York hotel. Don Adams was brought aboard as Byron Glick, the hotel’s bumbling (there’s that word again) hotel detective.  “This was Don’s big, every week sitcom,” Geoffrey points out. “And all of the stuff you see on Get Smart was already there. I don’t mean the plots and the secret agent stuff, but the catchphrases, the delivery, the fumbling through things that somehow comes out right in the end, was created by Bill Dana with Don Adams.”

Just previous to Get Smart, Don signed on to be the voice of animated character Tennessee Tuxedo, which allowed him to build up a huge following among children, which certainly helped with Get Smart.

“So when Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created the show,” Geoffrey states, “Don brought all of this with him. The concepts, the 007-take off — that was Buck and Mel. But, the idiosyncrasies were already there, already part of Don’s comic persona and the show was a fad hit.”

Bill Dana, as it turned out, was insulted, because he felt he was getting ripped off; that Don had brought this character over to Get Smart and didn’t pay him anything for it. Although the show was well cast (with Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 and Edward Platt as The Chief), it was premise heavy with limited plots that could be shot in a studio setting. Part of the solution was to bring in actor Dick Gautier as Hymie the Robot, to, suggests Geoffrey, “Give the show an extra dimension and to keep Don in line, because Dick, bless his heart, was one of the most physically beautiful beings to ever walk the planet and very talented and very funny, and much more of a leading man than Don. I think Dick was there to keep Don in line. If he pulled any crap, they’d just put Dick in, in his place.”

Pointing out that he knew and was friends with many of the people involved, and that his knowledge of the show comes from them, Geoffrey reveals, “The people who worked on Get Smart were grateful for the work and they were grateful for the money, but they felt that Don was a pain in the ass. I don’t know how else to say it, but he was also a principal in the production company. He was part owner, so he didn’t want money to be spent. He was demanding. Sometimes he was demanding of quality, which helped the show. Sometimes he was demanding of attention, which didn’t help the show. Don got involved with the writing, he got involved with the directing.”

“Until the ‘80s,” he continues, “NBC was not known as a great bastion of sitcoms. Unlike their rivals, they did not build evenings of sitcoms. They would place them on with other kinds of shows, which is why most of the sitcoms on NBC failed through the years except for Get Smart. I think in the entire 1960s, the only hit shows they had that were comedies were Hazel, I Dream of Jeannie and Get Smart. After four seasons, NBC had had enough and the show moved to CBS.”

By 1970, the Get Smart fad was over and the show was canceled. But it wasn’t really bad news for Don as he had made a lot of money from the series, he was doing television specials and headlining in Las Vegas. “So Don’s bank account was very healthy, but his career never really had that same fire again,” notes Geoffrey. “There are a lot of people who are very successful in a television series while they’re on it — they are huge television stars — but once the series ends, for some people their star gets tarnished. People point to Lucille Ball, ‘Well, she did three series in a row, all successful, why can’t I?’ Well the answer is, you’re not Lucille Ball. The only other person who did that successfully was Bob Newhart, and he did two of them back to back. Everything else he tried didn’t work, but he had two very successful sitcoms.”

From 1971 to 1972 he co-starred with Bruce Gordon as a pair of “bumbling” (there is definitely a theme here) detectives in The Partners, but it only lasted a single season. His next major gig came in 1975 with 13 episodes of a syndicated series Don Adams’ Screen Test — in which contestants and a celebrity re-enacted scenes from classic movies with the hope that said contestant would win an actual Hollywood screen test. Geoffrey says, “He wasn’t making nearly the money he made on Get Smart for that, but it kept his name out there so that his name had value for commercials and being a guest star on somebody else’s show.”

He appeared in six episodes of The Love Boat as different characters, Fantasy Island and The Fall Guy. There were Get Smart reunions in the form of the theatrical film The Nude Bomb (1980), the TV movie Get Smart, Again! (1989) and a short-lived series simply titled Get Smart, which saw he and Barbara Feldon as Smart and 99, though the focus was on their son (played by Andy Dick). None of them connected with the audience.

In between all of that, he starred in the Canadian sitcom Check It Out! (1985 to 1988), playing the manager of a supermarket; and, more importantly, he was hired to voice the title character of Inspector Gadget (1983 to 1985), reprising the role for TV special Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas (1992) and the show Inspector Gadget’s Field Trip (1996 to 2004). He also voiced the character of Gadget Boy on the series Gadget Boy & Heather (1995 to 1996) and Gadget Boy’s Adventures in History. His final role was voicing the character of Brain the Dog in the live-action Inspector Gadget movie (1999).

“Don and I used to lunch together,” says Geoffrey. “We were sitting together one day talking about Inspector Gadget, which made him a fortune and he was happy to do it, especially because his career had kind of fallen down. Other than doing some intermittent guest shots, there was nothing going on except his nightclub act. And without the cache of being a big television star, he was no longer getting paid the kind of money he was. In any case, we’re sitting there and he said of Inspector Gadget, ‘You know, that’s something I’m proud to have done. I’m glad children like it.’ He thought it was a well-made show. I said, ‘Yeah, but every time I saw it, because I was an adult, I kept waiting for you to go out on a date and say, ‘Go, go Gadget-Penis!’ Well, he just fell on the floor laughing.”

When it comes to Don’s personal life, Geoffrey describes it as more than complicated. For starters, he was married to Adelaide Efantis from 1947 to 1960, Dorothy Bracken from 1960 to 1976, and Judy Luciano from 1977 to 1990. All told, he had seven children, including daughter Cecily Adams (wife of writer and actor Jim Beaver, well known to Supernatural fans), who died of lung cancer in 2004 at the age of 46.

“I don’t know why men like Don get married,” muses Geoffrey, “because he was incapable of being faithful. He was married three times, but faithful to nobody. And the best example I can give you of how his mind works is based on what he told me. I believe it was his wife Dorothy who caught him cheating on her and demanded what many show business wives demand: payment of some kind. And the payment she demanded was a first-class trip around the world. Don played a game of marital Russian roulette, keeping wives and girlfriends happy at the same time. The people he hurt the most with this behavior were his kids and, of course, himself.”

One point that Geoffrey makes is that he himself never had a problem with Don, noting, “He was open. He was funny. He was generous. He was honest. He did nothing to me for which I ever had a reason to be angry. That’s how I saw him. That’s not how other people saw him. That is not how the majority of people saw him. Don, unfortunately, lost his daughter to cancer. When Don went to her funeral, he kind of ticked everybody off, because all he could say from the podium was, ‘I had no idea she had so many friends.’ That was it.”

Don’s brother, Dick Yarmy (also an actor), got cancer and his comedian friends once a week took him out to lunch, with him commenting that those lunches were the things that were keeping him going. When he died, a group of people started Yarmy’s Army, consisting of standup comics, comedy writers and comedy directors. “I’m enormously proud to have been a part of it for many years,” says Geoffrey. “The group’s point was to help people in the business who’d had real careers, not wannabes, who had fallen on hard times, because show business careers are very mercurial. You can work for 30 years and then be out of work for the next 20. Don did have friends, but I will tell you that when he died, his memorial service was held at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills and I don’t think there were 30 people outside of family there.”

He recalls Don Rickles and Bob Newhart came in through a side door after everyone was seated and more or less said that they had been close to him at one time, but hadn’t really spoken to him in years. “Because,” says Geoffrey, “he’d been an a-hole. And with that, they left by the same side door.  Other than his family, and Barbara Feldon, the only person there who had anything nice to say about him was James Caan. They had become very close friends late in Don’s life. It was sad sitting there. When I called the Yarmy’s Army people to let them know that Don had died, one of them was Tom Poston. I said, ‘Tom, I’m bringing you some bad news. Don Adams has died.’ And Tom said to me two words: ‘Don’t care.’ And he hung up on me.”

“Part of the problem is that he wasn’t good to his brother when he was sick,” he continues. “He wasn’t a good father to his children — especially how he treated Cecily — and cheated on his wives. In the years I was with the group, Don never performed and as a group we would get booked to perform. And in some nice places. For charities some times, our own charities other times. Other than expenses, all the money went into a fund to help people. In the 14 years I was actively involved, Don did not perform once. Then Don himself started to get sick.”

Don Adams died on September 25, 2006 from lymphoma and a lung infection at the age of 82. “Don and I literally had 50 or 60 friends in common,” Geoffrey reflects. “Show business friends. Almost none of them came to his memorial service, but I don’t think Barbara Feldon or his family were surprised. They knew who he was. You either accept him with his flaws or you don’t accept him. Because his flaws did not impact me at all, it was no problem with my accepting him. Other people, his flaws did impact them.

“Don was not unlike a lot of comedians of his era: the career was everything,” he adds. “Don believed, like some comedians of his generation, that his income and his stature entitled him to be a player, a gambler, a womanizer and a hedonist. Hedonists don’t make for good husbands or good fathers. Sometimes they don’t even make for good friends.”