Don Adams Of 'Get Smart' Dies

Actor, 82, Was Also Voice Of Inspector Gadget & Tennessee Tuxedo

(CBS/AP)  Smart was prone to spilling things on the desk or person of his boss: the Chief (played by Edward Platt). Smart's apologetic "Sorry about that, chief" also entered the American lexicon.

So did many other lines from the show: "Missed it by that much!" "And loving it!" "The old _______ trick (e.g., the old spy camera in the tomato patch trick)!" and "I asked you not to tell me that!"

Then there was the "Cone of Silence" — still referred to even today by politicians, pundits and others frustrated at getting a lack of answers on any subject.

On "Get Smart," it was a huge plastic gizmo that would descend from the ceiling on command, supposedly to guarantee the secrecy of the conversation. It never worked and the men in the cone (women were not invited into the Cone of Silence), dutifully following orders, unwittingly shouted their secrets to the world while invariably being unable to hear each other.

Don Adams the man, says "Get Smart" co-star Barbara Feldon, was very different from Maxwell Smart the secret agent.

Adams was very intelligent, says Feldon, with an "amazing memory" that allowed him to take an unusual approach to filming.

Instead of learning his lines ahead of time he would have a script assistant read his part to him just once or twice. He invariably got it right but that, she recalls, didn't stop people from placing bets on it.

"He had this prodigious energy, so as an actor working with him it was like being plugged into an electric current," says Feldon. "He would start and a scene would just take off and you were there for the ride. It was great fun acting with him."

"He wrote poetry, he had an interest in history... He had that other side to him that does not come through Maxwell Smart," says Feldon. "Don in person was anything but bumbling."

"Get Smart," which ran from 1965 through 1970, twice won the Emmy for best comedy series with three Emmys for Adams as comedy actor.

The show lived on in syndication and as a cartoon series and in 1980, Adams appeared as Maxwell Smart in a feature film, "The Nude Bomb," about a madman whose bomb destroyed people's clothing. In 1995, Fox revived the series with Smart as chief and 99 as a congresswoman. It lasted seven episodes.

Adams was born Donald James Yarmy in New York City on April 13, 1923, Tufeld said, although some sources say 1926 or '27. The actor's father was a Hungarian Jew who ran a few small restaurants in the Bronx.

As a kid, Adams never cared about being funny. "Sometimes I wonder how I got into comedy at all," he mused, in a 1959 interview. "I did movie star impressions as a kid in high school. Somehow they just got out of hand."

In 1941, he dropped out of school to join the Marines. In Guadalcanal he survived the deadly blackwater fever and was returned to the States to become a drill instructor, acquiring the clipped delivery that served him well as a comedian.

After the war he worked in New York as a commercial artist by day, doing standup comedy in clubs at night, taking the surname of his first wife, Adelaide Adams. His following grew, and soon he was appearing on TV variety shows. Bill Dana, who had helped him develop comedy routines, cast him as his sidekick – the role that led to his big break.

Adams married and divorced three times and had seven children.