Guy Williams, The Man Behind the Mask by Lane Antoinette

Author:Lane, Antoinette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2011-04-08T23:00:00+00:00

Guy taught his son Steve to study the stars through his high powered telescope. Steve saw his first UFO with his dad through this telescope. Photo taken in 1969. (Kathy Gregory Personal Collection; courtesy of Kathy Gregory)

As the end of 1964 was approaching, Guy was hoping to get work. The five shows on Bonanza had been his only work since his return from Europe two years before. Guy knew how to invest wisely, but they had to be careful.

One day Guy got a call to audition for a “space show” for television at Twentieth Century-Fox. It was a pilot about a family whose mission was to colonize a new planet in the year 1997, but their course is averted and they become lost in space. Going from a Western (Bonanza), and what he jokingly called a Southwestern (Zorro), to a space show made no difference to Guy as an actor. “The material was all rather similar,” he said. “It was standard TV subject matter. When they said we have a space show out at 20th Century, I knew that the lot wasn’t too far from my house—but, I wasn’t taken with the script or anything like that.”

Guy went in for the screen test, and it seemed that Irwin Allen had already made up his mind for Guy to play the part of the father on the show. Irwin and his associates rolled the camera and told Guy that while they made conversation with him they wanted him to look to the left and to the right, do some business, and show some emotion. During the takes, Guy lit a cigarette and told them his son keeps him abreast of happenings in science and space. Guy was forty, but he looked younger and John Robinson has an eighteen-year-old daughter, Judy, so he added some gray at his temples for the test to look older. In the first take Irwin Allen is heard off camera asking Guy how old his children are. Guy said Steve was 12. The same questions were asked in each take and each time Steve became older and older until, finally, in the last take everyone offcamera laughed when Guy said, “eighteen.”

“Have you ever worked with June Lockhart?” Allen asked, and, without skipping a beat, Guy said, “Not yet!” and smiled. Everyone laughed.

The next step was waiting for the call. “Guy really needed a job,” said Janice. “But even when he needed money he took risks and did scary things. I remember we were painting the dining room ourselves, because we didn’t want to pay someone to do it, and the phone kept ringing. They were negotiating to hire Guy. Someone would call and say Irwin has made an offer for such and such amount, and Guy would answer, ‘No, I won’t do it for that. I’ll only do the role for x amount.’ Then the agent would call the production people back and tell them what Guy said, then he’d call back and tell Guy what the producers said.

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