How were you and Dunn cast on Wild Wild West as Dr. Loveless and Antoinette?
Michael Garrison, who conceived of Wild Wild West, came
to see the nightclub act at the Duplex --someone took him when he was in New York. He
was told, "You gotta see these kids, they'll blow you away."
When Michael Garrison was watching the show, he said to himself, "Michael Dunn would
make the most extraordinary villain. People have never seen anything like him before,
and he's a fabulous little actor and he's funny as hell."
And, Garrison felt, if Michael Dunn sang on every show, with the girl, it would
be an extraordinary running villain. And so he came backstage and he told us
who he was and he said he was going to do a television show called The Wild
Wild West and we would be called. We thought, "Yeah, yeah, we've
heard all that before" --but he did call us and the show was a fantastic success.
And that's how it started, because he saw the nightclub act.
Did you like Garrison when you met him?
I adored Michael Garrison. He had such a
wonderful vision that no one else could touch. He was creative; he wasn't bound by anything. He
knew exactly what he was doing. I thought The Wild Wild West was way ahead of
its time: It was a little sci-fi, it was a little bit of a James Bond Western,
it just had everything. And special effects and stunts. The stunts
for me were the most miraculous part of it --I used to sit on the set and watch the
stunts.
The fight sequences, you mean.
The fight sequences, and the way the furniture would
break apart! You know, Bob Conrad was originally a stuntman, and so that's where he felt most
comfortable. So a lot of Jim West's stuff was stunts --all these fights and
leaps and how-is-he-gonna-get-out-of-this-predicament? He would do his own
stunts, he prided himself on that! They had the best stuntmen in the
business working on our show, and I was spellbound. I came from Broadway
and off-Broadway and I had never seen stunts. I mean, when I went to see
movies it was to see, you know, Ingrid Bergman [laughs], who the hell went to see
stunts? So I just would sit there and marvel at the fight sequences on
Wild Wild West. They would do it over and over again, and I just found it
fascinating. I also loved the stuntmen, they were just great guys.
So that was a wonderful part of The Wild Wild West. For me as an actress, it
wasn't just "you go, you learn your lines, you weep, you laugh, everybody goes
home," it was very physical. And I loved that, because I had never
thought of that in terms of acting. It was very cinematic. We did a lot of
location shooting, there were a lot of stunts. Michael and I did a lot of our own
stunts, which almost killed us a couple of times! But to learn to be
physical and handle all that is terribly important [in acting], and I didn't
know that then. So The Wild Wild West was magical, just magical!
Do you know anything about Mike Garrison? Do you know how he died?
I know he fell down a flight of stairs in his own home.
It was tragic. Michael was going to have a big party for everyone in
the business who said that he was a bust-out failure and would never make it. It was sort of a
"payback" party [laughs] --it was, like, to rub their noses in his success.
(And the people who loved him and thought he was wonderful, the party was
also for them too.) He had a big new house that he had bought with the money
from the show, and that night, before the party, before the guests arrived, I
guess he was coming down the stairs --but someone who had delivered flowers
had gotten water on the steps. He slipped on the water and cracked his
skull open. And that's how he died. I felt that the show, from that point
on, was never the same, because they never understood what Michael was
doing with it. They didn't really get it.
Robert Conrad and Ross Martin --how did you get along with them?
Oh, I adored them. They were
both very different. Ross' daughter went to Cooper Union, so we had a lot to
talk about. Ross was a real New York guy and certainly knew where I was
coming from. And he was a raconteur --one of the funniest people I had ever
met in my life. He did accents and jokes, and you would just sit there
when we weren't working on the set and laugh 'til you fell off the seat. Bob
Conrad was just the opposite, he was very insecure about his acting ability.
He knew he was a good-looking guy who felt that he was more physical.
I'm sure you've heard all the stories that they were constantly
feuding. Any truth to that?
People said that they hated each other. I never saw that.
Actually, what I saw was that they liked each
other a lot. They both did totally opposite things on the show. It was very
much like the nightclub act I had with Michael: Without me, you wouldn't
have had the whimsy, and without Michael, you wouldn't have had the musicality. In terms of The Wild Wild West, without Ross, you wouldn't
have had that part of it, and without Conrad, you wouldn't have had the
physical, magical part of it with the stunts and all of those wonderful set
pieces. So they both did different things and I think they both liked each
other. They couldn't have been more different as actors, as people, but I
liked them both.
Part of the reason I liked Bob Conrad was because Bob
Conrad adored Michael. He adored him. So that anybody who was with Michael
or working with Michael was treated in kind. He catered to us --he treated us
like royalty. Ross you just simply made friends with, and I loved
Ross. And singing the occasional song on West was Michael Garrison's
idea. He saw the act and he said, "On every one of the shows, you're
gonna sing, that's gonna be your 'thing.'" We worked with Marvin Hamlisch
and a lot of the other people who worked for CBS in the music department at
that time. They would research these old madrigals or old folk songs that
would fit the period --I'm sure they fudged a little [laughs]! And then we
would go in on a soundstage and pre-record them. On the set, I would play
the harpsichord or I would play the lyre or I would play something --an instrument of the time --and Michael and I would sing, but
basically they would loop us into what we did.
How about Richard Kiel, who played Loveless' servant Voltaire?
Oh, Richard is a doll --I adored Richard. When they got Richard and Michael together, it was really a trip.
Richard was a math teacher, a very brilliant guy --just the opposite of what
he looks like. Gentle, quiet, sweet and very, very astute. Michael and
Richard and I would sit for hours having intellectual discussions about books
we'd read and all of that stuff. Richard's wife, a darling lady, would also
come to the set, and we all became very good friends. I just recently
spoke to Richard, and he has the opposite of what Michael had --Richard has
acromegaly, a condition where the bones grow too fast and too far. So he
suffers terribly in terms of his physical walking and stuff like that. He's
had that all his life, but as you get older, it's a disease that
progresses.
Talk about some of your death-defying Wild Wild West
stunts.
At the end of every show we were in, we were supposedly
finished, dead. But if you watch very carefully, you'd see the way we would
have escaped death and lived on to come back on yet another episode. In
"The Night of the Murderous Spring," I was in full Western regalia with
all these little buttons, maybe 40 buttons up to my neck, with a bustle in
the back and everything. Michael and I were escaping James West after some
dastardly thing he did. There's a lake at CBS, at Radford Avenue, and
Michael and I were going to go out onto this lake in a rowboat that was going
to sink. The boat was wired to a pulley and the pulley was going to pull
the boat straight down, very, very slowly, to the bottom of the lake.
They wanted to get a shot of Miguelito and Antoinette going under the water,
and then you would see the bubbles on top of the water and we were supposedly
dead --you never saw us surface. They said to us, "Please, please, whatever
you do, don't panic. Don't let go and come up to the surface very quickly.
You will be soaking wet, and we do not have other costumes. It's the last
shot of the day. Let it be the only shot." We were so dumb, we didn't
request stunt doubles --we were so afraid to make them angry for one minute!
God forbid they should have to dry out the costume!
I'm claustrophobic and Michael knew it. He was a terrific swimmer and he said to
me, "You watch me. As soon as I get the signal, I'll let go, come up to
the surface and you follow." I said, "Michael, I don't think I can do this,
I'm gonna panic. The water's gonna get up to my nose, I'm gonna panic!" He
said [calmly], "You're not gonna panic. You'll just hold on to the side of
the boat. Nothing's gonna happen, it's not that deep, it's only about six
feet deep. And the minute you see me let go, you will then surface and
we'll be fine." "Okay, I'll do it."
Well, we're doing the shot, I'm
going down and I'm thinking, "God, please don't let me panic because they'll
be angry and the costume will be wet." We go all the way down to the bottom
and I see the bubbles, and then I see Michael release. And I think,
"Thank God!" and I let go and my gown was completely caught in the pulleys.
There was no zipper on this dress, it was these tiny little buttons. I could
not get them open. I could not scream. I could not do anything. I thought,
"My God, I'm gonna die! They don't know that I can't come up." But
Michael knew I couldn't come up, 'cause he knew that if anyone was hittin'
that surface first, it was gonna be me [laughs]! He swam down and literally
tore the dress open so that I could get out of it. He just literally tore
it out of the pulleys and tore me out of the dress, so that I could get to
the surface. So I almost died.
That's wild!
Then there was another one ["The Night of the Green Terror"] where at the end of the show,
we were in Michael's burning lab. The whole set was going to be set on fire
and we had to run into a huge hollow log. At this point they knew that they
could tell us anything [laughs] --we were not gonna say, "Could I get hurt?",
"Would you mind using a double?" They knew that if they told us to do
something, we'd do it and we'd make sure they didn't have any problems! This
time they said to us, "You'll run into the log and then you'll hear
knock-knock-knock. When you hear knock-knock-knock, you scurry out the other
end of the log and Michael will follow you. And pleeeease do not panic and
do not come out of that log until you hear the knock-knock-knock, because we
are burning down the entire set and we are not gonna be rebuilding it. Do
you understand?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we understand."
So I look at Michael and I say, "Oh, God, again?" and he says, "Don't worry, we'll be fine. They're not gonna kill
us." They start burning down the set, and it
was fabulous --just to watch it was so wonderful. We get into the log, and
pretty soon the log starts getting awfully smoky. I say to Michael, "Where's
the knock-knock-knock?" and he says, "I--I--I dunno. Did you hear it?" I
say, "Michael, I don't hear it! But I'm telling you, I'm startin' to choke
here." He says, "Well, I don't know what to do!" I say, "Well, I think I do. I think we're gettin' outta here." So I push the door on the other end
of the log --but the heat from the fire has swollen it, and we can't get out
of the log. And I don't know whatever happened to the knock-knock-knock
[laughs] --we never heard the knock-knock-knock! They must have given us the
knock-knock-knock, but we were so hysterical, we didn't hear it! I guess
they figured out what was happening and they had to absolutely drench the set
with water to get us out. But they did get the shot!
What about working with horses and all the other critters they had in the various
episodes?
We worked with tarantulas, and there was one episode, "The
Night of the Raven," where we had the raven --that little shitty raven. I
hated that goddamn bird! In rehearsal, I was feeding the
raven little bits
of paper. The raven kept biting me because it wasn't real food --ravens eat
raw meat. So why didn't you give it real food?
If I fed it real food in the rehearsal, then it wouldn't eat on camera which is when we needed
it to eat. This stinking bird kept biting me, so by the time I got to the
camera I was shaking 'cause I knew what he was gonna do! I knew every time I
held my fingers out, that damn bird was gonna bite! My hands were a mess --I
just couldn't wait to get away from that awful bird! One day Michael was
sleeping in a little chair, he was catching a catnap before we had to be on
camera again. I think I was talking to Ross, over to the side, and the raven
was on its perch with a hood over it, very close to Michael. Either the hood
fell off the raven or the raven shook the hood off, and then someone
flashed a light and the raven got frightened and tumbled off its perch.
Ravens have talons that are unbelievable. It toppled right across Michael's
face, and the talons strafed his face and missed his eye by millimeters! It
was grabbing out to land on something, and just literally it was grabbing
out at his face. It was quite something!
And you had fun on the show despite all this!
It was a marvelous show --I had so much damn fun on that show. It was great.
(continued)
I'm sure you've heard all the stories that they were constantly
feuding. Any truth to that?
How about Richard Kiel, who played Loveless' servant Voltaire?
knock-knock-knock. When you hear knock-knock-knock, you scurry out the other
end of the log and Michael will follow you. And pleeeease do not panic and
do not come out of that log until you hear the knock-knock-knock, because we
are burning down the entire set and we are not gonna be rebuilding it. Do
you understand?" "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we understand."
raven little bits
of paper. The raven kept biting me because it wasn't real food --ravens eat
raw meat.