Veteran Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas has written an excellent obit on Don Adams for the Associated Press, hitting all the key points. One biggie, which others are omitting, is the extent to which Adams' career was molded by Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana, who wrote a lot of Don's early monologues and routines which set his on-screen character and even introduced many of his catch-phrases. Then in 1963, Adams played a bumbling house detective on The Bill Dana Show, a short-lived sitcom set in a hotel, and there was an obvious direct line from that character to Maxwell Smart two years later. Get Smart was not created with him in mind but he was such a perfect fit that everyone assumed otherwise.
Adams was a good comic actor when the material was tailored to the one thing he did well. He made Get Smart work and even members of the crew who detested him personally (there were some) admitted that he could wring every laugh possible out of a joke. After Get Smart though, he appeared in one hastily-cancelled series (The Partners in '71) and an awful lot of unsold pilots. The problem was evident, at least to me as a viewer, around '76 when he starred in a sitcom pilot called Three Times Daley that should have/could have become a series. All it really needed was someone else in the lead role besides Don Adams. It was about three generations — grandfather, father and son — trying to live together in the same house. Adams played the father and he was absolutely blown off the stage by a great character actor named Liam Dunn, who played Grandpa. The trouble was that Adams's part was written for a real human being and he was still playing Maxwell Smart. That was about all he could play. It is not a coincidence that Don's only other successful jobs were voicing cartoon characters — Tennessee Tuxedo and Inspector Gadget. A penguin and a robot…never a human being with any feelings.
He had one other series which almost no one remembers and which is not in any of the obits I've seen. In the early seventies, Adams made the rounds of talk shows and often brought out-takes from Get Smart, mostly of him and Don Rickles. They were hilarious and the reception gave him the idea to do a whole series showing out-takes…or bloopers, as they're sometimes called in a quasi-trademarked way. When he tried to put it together, he discovered that the union contracts made it prohibitive; that he'd have to pay or negotiate with dozens of people for each 30-second clip. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild told him that he technically shouldn't have been airing the Get Smart footage without paying actors, directors, writers, etc. Years later, the union rules were changed in a way that made the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows do-able but at the time, it killed Adams's plan. Trying to figure out a way around it, he came up with the only possible solution: Create new out-takes just for the show! So in 1975, he hosted Don Adams' Screen Test, a kind of talent competition where the idea was to get aspiring actors, pair them in scenes with established stars and then have a lot of things go wrong. It didn't last long because, I suspect, the out-takes just didn't seem real. Which they weren't.
After that and a few more failed pilots, it was mostly Get Smart revivals, commercials and cartoons and the occasional Love Boat voyage for Mr. Adams. The one time I actually spoke to him for any length of time was at the Playboy Mansion, where he seemed to be in semi-permanent residence. We were both Waiting for Hef, which is pretty much the main thing one does at the Playboy Mansion despite what you may have imagined. I had an appointment to discuss a sketch Hefner was going to do on a show I'd written. Adams had just dropped in because he needed to talk with The Man about his marital problems and he seemed so worried, I almost felt like I should offer to let him go ahead of me.
We talked about what I thought was his best comedy album, Don Adams Meets the Roving Reporter, which I don't believe has ever made it as far as CD. We talked about his appearances on The Steve Allen Show where he repeatedly did a sketch playing a lawyer in a courtroom summation scene. ("Your honor, for the last thirty minutes, I have sat and watched as my worthy opponent, the District Attorney, has stood up here and made a complete jackass of himself. Now, it's my turn.") We talked about The Bill Dana Show and about Tennessee Tuxedo and about his brother (a fine character actor named Dick Yarmy) and I think he liked the fact that I never asked him anything about Get Smart. I base that on the fact that someone else later walked into the room and immediately began peppering him with lines from the show and questions about 99's real name and what kind of car he drove in the opening. Adams smiled in that polite, "I have to go through this all the time" way.
Hef finally appeared — pajama-clad, of course — and hurried through his meeting with me so he could get to Don. The last thing Mr. Adams said to me as I was going out and he was coming in was, "Thanks for taking my mind off the end of my marriage."
Fifteen years later, I found myself around him at an autograph show. He was not well — didn't look well, didn't seem to remember a lot and didn't even sound much like Don Adams, the easiest person in the world to impersonate. At one point when he seemed somewhat aware, I said something to him that began with, "You won't remember this, but…" It turned out he didn't remember at all when we'd sat and talked for what must have been at least an hour. Trying to jog his memory a bit, I said, "You were there for some advice from Hefner because your marriage was breaking up."
He paused, thought for a moment and said, "You wouldn't happen to know which wife this was, would you?" I'm pretty sure he meant it as a joke. Even if he didn't, the delivery was vintage Maxwell Smart and comedically perfect.