Barbara Feldon

The Mind Behind the Feline Gaze

Barbara Feldon didn't start in front of television cameras looking for audience laughs. In 1957, she appeared on the set of the game show The $64,000 Question and answered every question about William Shakespeare's work with surgical precision. She won the big prize.

That money allowed her to step away from hair care product promotions and focus on a career few in the industry saw coming. But her image was tied to an elegance that intimidated NBC executives. Before becoming the most famous spy in the United States, she worked as a haute couture model in New York.

Mel Brooks and Buck Henry saw something different in her for Get Smart. The Agent 99 wasn't born to be Maxwell Smart's comic relief. She was the real brains of the operation. Feldon was nearly two inches taller than her co-star Don Adams. Over the five seasons of filming, she had to walk hunched over or even barefoot so as not to disrupt the visual look of the leading pair.

And it worked.

The series aired from 1965 to 1970. Feldon received two consecutive Emmy nominations for her work in the spy comedy. But television fame has an expiration date, and she accepted it without unnecessary drama.

The White Noise of Fame

After the series ended in 1970, studios tried to typecast her in roles as a sophisticated woman with no real substance. She preferred theater and voice-over work instead. Her voice became a more valuable asset than her own face to major cosmetics corporations. She recorded hundreds of commercials while turning down scripts that merely sought to replicate the success of Get Smart.

In 1975, she appeared in the film Smile under the direction of Michael Ritchie. It was one of her most incisive forays into the satirical cinema of the decade. She played a beauty pageant director with a coldness that critics of the time didn't expect from a TV comedy actress.

But the pace of Hollywood never quite fit with her personal philosophy.

She chose to step away from the spotlight to cultivate a literary side she kept private. In 1995, she returned to play her best-known character in a sequel for the Fox network. The production was a logistical and creative disaster. The series lasted only seven episodes before being cut down by low ratings in prime time.

Solitude as a Manifesto

In 2003, she published a book titled Living Alone and Loving It. It was not a self-help manual full of empty phrases. The text worked as an essay on emotional independence following her divorce from Lucien Verdoux-Feldon and her later relationship with producer Burt Nodella.

She argued that living alone was both a political and a personal choice.

In the late nineties, her on-screen appearances became highly selective. She appeared in a few episodes of Cheers and Mad About You. In these collaborations, she always insisted on strict control over how her scenes were developed. Feldon understood that her presence already belonged to collective memory, and she didn't want to waste that capital on mediocre projects.

Her last credited appearance in a fiction production was a voice role in The Video Guide to Everything in 2006. She has lived in an Upper East Side apartment in New York for decades, with no intention of returning to film sets. The rent on her original apartment in the same neighborhood during the sixties was exactly $150 a month.