The only person we wanted to beat and never could was David Susskind. He was a terrible pool player, but he was our boss—so we’d always lose. Who needed that trouble?
* * *
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Maxwell Smart needed to be stupid and innocent, but also a noble and heroic character. Don Adams was absolutely perfect in the leading role. I knew I was going to name the main character Max, because at that point I had named all of my main characters Max. The Producers had Max Bialystock. My father’s name was Max, his grandfather’s name was Max, and later I named my youngest son Max. It made sense to use Smart as a second name because of the cliché “get smart.” As in “don’t get too smart,” and “wise up.” Also, everybody was chasing Maxwell Smart. Ergo, Get Smart. And it worked, and it still works.
Max was Secret Agent 86. I came up with using the number 86 because when I worked as a busboy whenever we were out of anything that was ordered, somebody in the kitchen would yell, “Eighty-six on the rye bread; eighty-six on the cream cheese, and eighty-six pickled herring.”
Which was restaurant shorthand for “we’re out of it.” At critical moments in the story, sometimes Max was completely out of brains. So I thought that “86” was an apt number for him.
Max worked for a fictional government spy agency called CONTROL, and its ever-present archenemy was KAOS, an evil organization determined to rule the world. Max had a remarkable lack of insight, but since he was our hero, he would always win—despite his inefficiency. Buck and I saw Max as earnest and innocent. He was noble and he believed in justice. He was incorruptible, so the na?veté worked for him. He was always wrong, but always came out on top. He never played the joke and never shared with the audience that he was aware that what he was doing was funny. It was very real, character-driven comedy.
Buck and I created a lot of signature pieces and gadgets. Spies who would hide in lockers in the bus station. Sunglasses that became binoculars. Cuff links that had mirrors so you could see behind you. The “Inflato-coat,” a trench coat that inflated, lifting the wearer off the ground, as well as a coat with fake arms so that Max could easily escape being restrained.
Like I said before, Buck was absolutely brilliant. He came up with “the Cone of Silence.” The Cone of Silence was a Plexiglas dome that would descend from the ceiling over the Chief and Max to keep their top-secret conversations from being overheard. There was only one small problem with it…they couldn’t hear each other.
I created the shoe-phone that Max used to field calls. One day, every phone in my office started ringing. I took off my shoe and pretended to answer it. I thought the most bizarre place to put a secret telephone would be in the heel of your shoe, and I thought we could have a lot of fun with that. If you got a very important call, you had to stop and take off your shoe. One wrong step and the phone breaks. For years afterward, Don couldn’t eat in restaurants without grateful patrons taking off their shoes and saluting him with them like they were toasting him with wine.
I didn’t realize it, but I might have just created the first cellphone. Had I patented it, I probably would’ve made so much money that I wouldn’t have had to write this book.
A lot of comedy business came from Don Adams. He created “Would You Believe?” which was a sequence of exaggerations that kept getting smaller and smaller.
Maxwell Smart: And I happen to know that at this very minute, seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it, seven?
Mr. Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.
Maxwell Smart: Would you believe six?
Mr. Big: I don’t think so.
Maxwell Smart: How about two cops in a rowboat?
It originally was part of Don Adams’s stage act as a stand-up comedian. His act was based in part on an imitation of William Powell, who was a famous movie star. Powell played Nick Charles, who played against Myrna Loy’s Nora in the successful Thin Man series. Don wrote a routine that was based on the end of every Thin Man movie, where the murder suspects were all gathered in a room and Nick would walk around and sum up the facts and expose the murderer in a very dynamic way. Prior to Get Smart, Don played Byron Glick, the house detective at a New York hotel where Bill Dana played bellhop Jose Jimenez on The Bill Dana Show. The jet energy, the motor behind Get Smart, was Don. He really believed in what he was doing. He was indefatigable.
We were also very lucky to get Barbara Feldon, a former model, to play Max’s partner, the beautiful Agent 99 （we refused to give her a name）。 We cast Barbara early on. She was smart, good-looking, and could handle the subtle comedic material. Barbara and Don liked each other personally from the start. Agent 99 was an important foil. She legitimized Max. She was the wise and common-sensical George Burns to Max’s na?ve Gracie Allen. Agent 99 was the sane one. Very beautiful and very feminine, so you could see why Max would put up with being always corrected by her, which would have been humiliating to a lesser man: