Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,808

This is the grave of Don Adams.

Born in 1923 in Manhattan, Donald Yarmy grew up in a Jewish-Catholic mixed household that had an interesting strategy for dealing with religions and the kids. Basically, Don’s Catholic mother got to raise him that way and his Jewish father got to raise his brother in that faith. There was an older sister too, not sure how they worked that one out. Anyway, Yarmy was a terrible student and he dropped out of high school. He got a job as a theater usher. Then World War II happened. He joined the Marines and was at Guadalcanal. There was later talk that he was wounded there, but that wasn’t true. What did happen is that he contracted the worst complication of malaria there is–blackwater fever, which at the time had a 90 percent fatality rate. Luckily for the future of television comedy, he was one of the 10 percent who survived it. So he spent most of the war in a New Zealand hospital. Rediscovered his lapsed Catholicism too, as one will do in such a scenario. Later, when he recovered enough to do something, he was an instructor for training Marines. Evidently, he was a hell of a marksman.

After the war, the very funny Yarmy tried to go into comedy. He was very good at impressions. But he refused to do dirty comedy (whatever that meant in the mid 40s) and so had trouble keeping jobs at the low level clubs where he could get work. He married a singer named Adelaide Eftanis in 1947. She went by Dell Adams on stage and needing a stage name, he became Don Adams. Part of the reason both of them liked that name is that stage auditions happened in alphabetical order. Someone should have gone with AAAdams like a bail bondsman in the phone book.

For the next several years, both parents worked in and out of show business to raise their young family, which included three daughters. In the end, it was his old friend from childhood Bill Dana who gave him a break. He and Dana had worked together on and off over the years and in the late 50s, Dana was working on The Steve Allen Show. They began to write Adams into the show and he had 11 appearances. That led to more steady work on The Perry Como Show and to a lesser extent on The Jimmy Dean Show (the people who networks gave variety shows to in this period are kind of astounding). Dana himself then got a show in 1963–The Bill Dana Show naturally. Adams was cast as a hotel detective who was a silly idiot, which Adams was good at playing.

The 60s was a good era of spoofs. That period saw all sorts of very serious spy shows on the airwaves, partly a response to the success of the James Bond films. So ABC decided it wanted a spy spoof. They had Mel Brooks and Buck Henry work up the plot of Get Smart. But Adams was not the initial casting choice. The part was written with Tom Poston in mind. I have trouble seeing Poston in this role, but that’s almost certainly because I know him from his much later role in Newhart. But Poston passed and then so did ABC. So Brooks and Henry pitched it to NBC and with Don Adams in the role. With Barbara Feldon cast as his partner, the show took off.

Get Smart is completely ridiculous, but fun. Adams really was perfect in the role. The show lasted five years and for the last it switches to CBS. There were 138 episodes in those seasons. It’s amazing the amount of episodes per season for comedies that network TV required. One reason that comedies from the past don’t really hold up is that there’s just too damn many episodes and it’s almost impossible to keep up the comedy quality for that long. But Get Smart did about as well as any. Some of it was that the spy stuff was just so easy parody because Bond was almost parody itself. As Brooks said about his work on the show, “Do what they did except just stretch it half an inch.” Adams was wonderful in pretending to take himself very seriously in the most ridiculous scenarios and solving crimes in the most absurd ways possible. The iconic bit was Adams’ phone shoe. Plus he got to drive a 65 Sunbeam Tiger around all the time and I am far from a car guy, but that’s a cool car.

Adams received four Emmy nominations for his work on Get Smart and won three times. He also directed 13 episodes.

For those of us in the Gen X world, we know Adams from something else–being the voice for Inspector Gadget, which was one of my favorite cartoons. He had to lean into it because he was completely typecast after that. There were some other shows–The Partners in the early 70s was another idiot show, this time about a detective and it co-starred Dick Van Patten, but it didn’t go anywhere. He hosted a game show in 1975-76 called Don Adams’ Screen Test, which picked out audience members to do their versions of classic Hollywood film scenes. Seems a bit arch but kinda interesting. But none of it succeeded. Neither did his few films. He ended up being a pitchman for a couple of products and then found a second career doing the Inspector Gadget voice work. He continued doing that voice off and on as the character had specials and spinoff series, all the way until 1999.

Adams also needed the work because there was one thing he loved in the world. It wasn’t acting. And it wasn’t his family. It was gambling. He was an absolutely compulsive degenerate gambler. This definitely got in the way of his personal relationships and helped explain the three wives. Despite this–or heck, maybe because of it–people found him incredibly charming and when he died, he was mourned by a lot of Hollywood as a real great.

Adams died in 2005, of a combination of lymphoma and a lung infection. He was 82 years old. Among his eulogists was Jim Beaver, who you know as Ellsworth from Deadwood. He was Adams’ son-in-law, though sadly Adams’ daughter had died of lung cancer despite not being a smoker before her dad died. Don Rickles gave another eulogy. Hopefully, it consisted of insulting everyone in the room.

Don Adams is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with Get Smart, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mel Brooks of course lives and may he continue to as long as he wants. Barbara Feldon also lives. Buck Henry is also in Hollywood, but a different cemetery. So is Leonard Stern, who was executive producer, this time in yet a different cemetery. I need to spend more time in LA, obviously. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.