Barbara Feldon Articles
Barbara Feldon Really Gets Smart: "The 80's Woman"
On Cable ­ February 1983 - Ralph Tyler

Remebered as TV's Agent 99, Barbara Feldon now makes her mark as a talkshow host on Daytime. Ralph Tyler talks with Feldon about the shift in her career.

Barbara Feldon was trembling. After nearly a year as host of a cable discussion program she had mastered most of the skills of interviewing, but this confrontation was especially challenging. A Right to Life advocate was arguing against abortion and, as Feldon later recalled: "I had to be aggressive although I'm not fond of that kind of confrontation. Still, I felt obliged to mention all sides." In Feldon's view, the two-part discussion, which will be presented Feb. 7 and 10 on her Daytime series "The 80's Woman," "just sizzles with the intensity of the conversation."

For those who remember Barbara Feldon's breezy kookiness as Agent 99 in the TV spy spoof "Get Smart," it may come as a surprise that the actress has surfaced a dozen years later as host of a serious interview program. Her 20-minute segment on Hearst-ABC's Daytime channel is presented at 4 p.m. ET Monday through Friday -- with occasional scheduling exceptions.

She can deal with knotty problems all right, but confronting guests with tough questions does not come easy. "That's something Barbara Walters can do and I cannot do," she says. "She can ask very hard questions of people, including world leaders. I was brought up being told not to offend anybody."

She is speaking in the high-ceilinged living room of her apartment just east of Central Park in Manhattan. Tall windows look out on a wintry garden. At 41, Feldon has retained the slim figure she displayed as a model before her TV career took off. "Get Smart" has been like having a rich uncle, she says. After its five network years ended in fall 1970, it was syndicated in an unusual deal that gave the stars their full original salaries each time it was shown. "There's one more year they haven't played yet," she adds. "Our salaries went up too high that year."

Since her cable show is directed to women, Feldon has given considerable thought to their changed position today. "One thing I've learned on the show is that women don't know how to define themselves anymore," she says. "My grandmother in Flint, Michigan, could have defined herself very clearly. A wife then would never be divorced -- is it 40 percent nowadays? - -and she could depend on being supported all her life in the context of her family and the business of running the house. There was the church and religion. She had spiritual security, emotional security, financial security. She did not have to go out and compete in the world. By and large, she lived more comfortably than women today. Maybe she did not live as fully -- that is a question.

"But grandmother's life is no longer possible," Feldon continues. "Today's woman doesn't have emotional or financial security. She has to go out and compete within a highly materialistic machine -- and because of that she has guilt about both her family and her job -- how do you do both? With the opportunity goes a sense of loss."

Segments of "The 80's Woman" have covered job sharing, palimony, aid for displaced homemakers and other practical supports for women. "Palimony! -- my grandmother would just turn pale at the thought," says Feldon. "But commitment seems like some old-fashioned concept. When you look at the facts and figures, we are no longer living happily ever after. Still, the mythology remains. We did a segment on romance novels. Did you know that Harlequin sells enough books in one day that they -- if stacked up -- would be as tall as the World Trade Center?"

Feldon compares the present period for women to a kaleidoscope that has just been shifted, creating a moment of chaos when the bits of colored glass are dislodged -- "and we are trying to make sense out of the falling pieces."

"There will be some kind of stabilization," she asserts. "From what I have learned on the show, women are struggling very hard on the format. If they are not, they are either far to the right, wanting to go back to a vanished era, or all the way to the left, saying that we shouldn't live with men, that we should have our own society."

Despite her obvious material well-being, Feldon says she shares many of the concerns of the 80's woman. "I've always supported myself," she explains. "I like the sense of knowing exactly where I stand financially, but there is a side of me that longs for a knight in shining armor.

"It's an interesting time, but it's a difficult time. I'm glad I live in it. On the other hand, I also had to struggle with it. I do support myself, I do live alone -- not really by choice. I'd like to have a close relationship. I was married for seven years and divorced a number of years ago. Then I had another relationship for 11 years. It fell apart four years ago, and since then I've been on my own. I'd like to meet a lovely man who shares my interests. On the other hand, I possibly will not. It's part of the hand you're dealt. It's a challenge -- and I'm not atypical."

Asked to name the most interesting guests she has interviewed, Feldon unhesitatingly picks three of the gutsiest. The first is Rita Smith, a black social worker, the sole supporter of her seven children, who fought to reverse the downhill slide of her block in Harlem. "She organized the block," says Feldon, "got rid of the drug pushers, closed deserted buildings and brought businesses in, set up a therapy center for addicts, discovered unfamiliar legal statutes that protect people."

Another was Fran O'Leary, a former prostitute who spent several years in prison for armed robbery. "She's working for the young potential offenders to keep them out of jail," says Feldon. "She's a shockingly bold woman who knows what jail is like -- how the minute the cell door opens your life's on the line."

The third was the foreign correspondent Georgia Anne Geyer, who has covered strife-torn Central America with cool courage. "She's so aware of what's going on in the world," Feldon remarks. "She's a good example of a certain kind of 80's woman doing a job. "

In her interview with Geyer, Feldon draws out the rather stolid journalist by asking: "Were you scared?" "Are you intimidated by the powerful?" "How do you, personally, live with this?" Feldon uses a lot of body language, leans forward in eagerness, covers her mouth in shock. She had early training as a dancer, and it shows.

In another interview, she moves among the awesomely intelligent young women -- and a few young men -- who put out a feminist student magazine called Athena at Stuyvesant High School, a New York City public school restricted to students who get high marks on a rigorous exam. She is there, she explains, "to find out the difference between my generation and yours -- how you see women in society."

"How do you feel about a man taking care of you?" she asks one young woman.

"I would rather take care of myself."

" What is your dream?"

"I want my own research lab."

And she asks a male student if men are prepared to split the household chores?

Yes, he answers, if the partners "don't think it's necessary to vacuum under the rugs."

Feldon, herself, was a teenager in the 50's, when what would now pass for sexism was as commonplace as smokey skies in her hometown of Pittsburgh. After graduating from Carnegie Tech, she got some acting jobs in stock and a Broadway "crawl-on" in "Caligula" (her part kept her horizontally on stage eating grapes). A well-known mannequin of the day, Gillis McGill, discovered her at a party and packed her off to see Kenneth, hairdresser to the beau monde, to have her hair done and then to designer Pauline Trigere, where her fine-boned five-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch frame won her a job modeling for the house.

After learning the ropes, she signed with a modeling agency, which sent her all over the world as a mannequin. She remembers the excitement of being photographed at night for the Paris collections and walking out into Place Pigalle at dawn. TV commercials followed -- until an especially sexy one for Revlon thrust her into the limelight. "It was a unique concept," she recalls, "done very tongue in cheek. That's what made it work. I was lying on a tiger rug talking directly to the camera as though it were a man. I don't think it really sold the product [Top Brass for Men]. Nobody was listening. Everybody thought it was a perfume."

The key line was, "I want a word with all you tigers," spoken with a growl.

Her type of humorous sexiness was just what the producers of "Get Smart" were looking for, and so she was employed for the entire second half of the 60's as an agent for C.O.N.T.R.O.L., the Washington-based intelligence agency dreamed up by writers Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.

"It was a wonderful opportunity for me and I'll be forever grateful to that show," says Feldon. "First of all, it was fun, like going to a playground every day and playing. We would laugh all day." She also counts it as a plus that people liked the character she played, and so are prepared to like her.

Feldon was conspicuous by her absence from "The Nude Bomb," a 1980 feature film that updated "Get Smart" by reviving the Maxwell Smart role of Don Adams and surrounding him with beautiful women in a comedy about a madman whose bombs will strip everybody in the world to the buff. "I wouldn't have played in it," Feldon explains. "They wanted to make an exploitation film. I think it's a shame to do that. 'Get Smart' had its own charm."

She moved East four years ago from Los Angeles to pursue serious acting, after her long romantic liaison broke up and she wanted to change her life. "It had gotten to be too comfortable. I had nice friends, but I didn't feel I was being challenged enough. I wanted to meet people who were outside the business. In Los Angeles, when you're successful in some way, you kind of forget the rest of the world. Here, there are doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, a lot of other worlds. And I wanted to live among people more. I live in this old house with other people. I like going downstairs and saying hello to the doorman next door."

Since "Get Smart," she has made a couple of theatrical films: "Smile," with Bruce Dern, a 1975 satire on a California beauty contest, and "No Deposit, No Return," a 1976 Disney comedy about kids who fake their own kidnapping, with David Niven, Darren McGavin and Don Knotts. She has also appeared in several made-for-TV movies, including two 1979 productions, "Vacation in Hell," about vacationers who stray into the jungle and face terror, opposite Lorne Greene, and "Before and After," which centered on the weight problem of a housewife played by Patty Duke Astin. More recently, she starred with Amanda Plummer in an ABC-TV afternoon special, "The Unforgiveable Secret," about a troubled relationship between mother and daughter.

In 1980, Feldon made her Broadway debut -- if her "crawl-on" is discounted -- opposite Laurence Luckinbill in a Circle in the Square production of "Past Tense," about the disintegration of a 21-year marriage. Last year she toured regional theaters with Eileen Heckart in A.R. Gurney's family drama "What I Did Last Summer." For the pleasure of it, she and a group of fellow actors give readings from authors at a bookstore in her neighborhood.

How did she become the host of "The 80's Woman"? It seems she was recommended to Hearst-ABC by the producer of' $20,000 Pyramid, a TV gameshow on which she was a frequent guest. But before that she had been bitten by the interviewing bug as guest
host for a month on "AM America," the forerunner of ABC's "Good Morning America." "I went crazy," she says. "I loved it. I loved doing the research and talking with really interesting people like Edward Wilson, the social biologist, and Dr. Spock [the pediatrician
and author]. After that I did a magazine format show, 'Special Edition' [on ABC-TV], in which I interviewed people around the country -- but not really in depth."

Feldon prepares carefully for her 20 minutes on Daytime. The guests are pre-interviewed by others, and she has a fairly clear idea before she arrives at the studio what direction she wants the program to take and what information should come out of it. The show is done before a small audience, and there is often a period in which questions for the guests are taken from the spectators.

Now that "The 80's Woman" has had a chance to get across a great deal of information, Feldon says she would like to see it "make more room for the creative woman." She, herself, not only acts but paints, plays the French horn and piano and writes. She also finds time to serve on the board of the National Woman's Caucus, promoting the cause of the Equal Rights Amendment.

For Barbara Feldon, at least, the life of an 80's woman seems much more exciting than the life of a secret agent.

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