Mark Goddard, now a respected School teacher, very kindly consented to this interview which took place in front on his class of students (as a learning experience) at Scituate High School, Boston U.S.A. Mark now speaks about his life, career and his role as pilot daredevil Major Don West.

Interview by Glenn

Glenn: Mark Goddard, thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it very much. Mark, the first time we met was at the Bayside City Expo Centre in Boston where the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Lost in Space was commemorated in front of 30 thousand people. Can you tell me about your feelings on that particular weekend?

Mark: Well, I was overwhelmed by it, I still am. I have a lot of feelings about it. I have some sad feelings about it, seeing everyone from the cast for the first time in twenty-five years and having worked with them for three years.

You know, I would get very close to them. They all went back to California and I'm staying here back East to get on with my life, I'm changing my whole life, my career, and everything. I may never act again, that's kind of sad, you know, but it was good to me. Acting was good to me.

G: On that weekend, with thousands of people wanting to meet you & your fellow co-stars from Lost In Space, can you tell me about the feelings and the comments, that you received from the people?

M: Well, first of all I never realised the extent of the success of Lost In Space until that weekend, when I saw thirty thousand people. You know, people wanting autographs and people being into 'seeing' all of us. The show's been off for many years and so I never really realised how many people loved the show and liked it. It was nice.

G: Did you have a lot of people saying that it's a pleasure to meet you and I grew up with you?

M: Yeah, we had people coming through and getting autographs from all directions. I guess my favourite comments were from women around their mid-thirties that say I was their first crush in life, you know, because I guess when Lost In Space came on they were about five or six years old and Don West was the unmarried one on the show and I guess the girls had a crush on me. Some of them, anyway.

G: You mentioned that you had not seen most of the cast members for a long time, what was it like meeting them once again?

M: Well, everyone was great! It was terrific. That was a moment. I hadn't seen them together for years, because when we finished Lost In Space, I came back to New York and did a Broadway musical.

Afterwards, I stopped acting for about seven years. Then I went to New York and did another Broadway musical with Liza Minnelli, then I did the serials General Hospital and One Life to Live and other shows, in fact from the late seventies to the late eighties I was continually in one show or another.

G: On General Hospital, you worked once again with June Lockhart.
What was the deja'vu like?

M: Yeah, (laughs) well it was fun. June plays the grandmother to Felicia (played by Christina Mallandro) on the show. We didn't have a storyline together in General Hospital, but Frisco (played by Jack Wagner) married Felicia on the show and June was there, and I was there, but we didn't know each other on the show.

So we had this fun thing where we just kind of walked by each other and didn't recognise each other "No, it couldn't be" an inside joke about Lost In Space. And then we danced together at the wedding, so that was kind of nice.

G: Mark, right now I want to take you right back to when you first began your acting career with the very first TV show that you did..... Johnny Ringo.

M: Right. Well, the first series I did was Johnny Ringo in 1959. That was the very first show I did. I went to Califomia and I got into that show right off the bat. it lasted one year and it was produced by Aaron Spelling, who went on to produce Dynasty and all those shows, Mod Squad, shows like that.

I became very friendly with Aaron, and he was practically the best man at my wedding. But Johnny Ringo was my first show and that was really good. I used to do a lot of gun tricks with my Colt .45, you know, stuff like that.

G: Tell me about the character that you played on Johnny Ringo?

M: His name was Cully - that means 'friend' in Carny, or Carnival lingo. Do they have that in Australia?

G: The Australian network have screened the show once, many years ago and it's never been repeated. I don't know what's holding that one up, probably the rights have been lost somewhere. Was it a favourite character?

M: Johnny Ringo is my favourite show, probably yeah, cos it's my first show, and when you do something like that, you're naive to the business and it's really nice. Plus it's great to do a western, you know, it's comfortable. It’s great to ride horses and shoot guns, you're free, which is great.

I went to The Detectives from Johnny Ringo and that was more constricting, I felt. I played a cop in that. I was Lieutenant Chris Ballard and that was more ties, suits, and stuff like that, and it was a different feel completely.

G: The Detectives was a huge world wide television hit, what was Robert Taylor like to work with and how did your role of Chris Ballard come about?

M: Well, when I finished 'Ringo', and I was given the opportunity to do one of three shows and I chose to do The Detectives because of Robert Taylor, because he's such a professional and he was a big star of the fifties and forties, a big, big star.

I knew I could learn a lot from him and I did. He was a great man. He's gone now. I miss him as I do Guy Williams who has passed, and Dick Powell (Powell and Aaron Spelling produced 'Johnny Ringo’ for the company Four Star Television) and people that I knew and loved in Holly wood. A lot of people have passed on.

I mean, I have acted in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, and now, if I do one more show it will be the nineties, so that's five decades that I've acted.

G: Mark, I'm sure there are not too many actors of your calibre to say that! After 'Detectives', there were many guest roles in shows such as The Fugitive, The Beverley Hillbillies, and Many Happy Returns. How did you feel about making your mark in Hollywood, doing all these guest parts after The Detectives?

M: Yeah, in the Sixties, I built up a good reputation in Hollywood. I did a lot of guests (appearances) in all those shows you mentioned, Perry Mason, Fugitives, and Virginians, and all those shows. So I used to get calls to do guest shots on shows, which was really nice.

Now what happens in our business, is as you get older, you get less parts. I was in New York and I had all this experience, all this wealth of talent and experience that I had done. They bring in casting directors who are twenty-one, twenty-two-year-old kids and they don't know the work that I've done.

So I had to go in and read for them, do a cold reading. They didn't know who I was. They don't know who a lot of people are. That's when it gets discouraging, when you put in everything, you know.

That's like asking a ball player to try out every year to make the team - I mean like Larry Bird, he was with the Red Sox or something like that - every year to go out and prove he can hit a home run. How can you do that?

G: It's hard to cope with failure too, every time that you try and try and try and you don't get the part. It must be discouraging.

M: Well, that's going to happen. I understand that. I understand there are times when you have to read, when you have to do things. But I can tell you horror stories about it - every actor out there can, horror stories from people who I've worked with.

I mean, when I was trying to come back as an actor one time, because I had stopped acting for about seven years. I was up for a part and I think it was The FBI.

I had worked with the director, I knew the casting director, I worked with him, I knew where he wanted to show, and they asked me to come in and do a reading. It was one page of dialogue, it was a throwaway part, and they asked me to come in and do a reading. I snuck out and read for it.

And I read, I read very well, and I was right for the part. And they never called... And that is when it gets bad. You see, Hollywood's like this: When you're hot, you're gold. You can be the worst in the world, but they want you like this.

You know, like Roseanne Barr. They grab her and use her. She can get anything. But if all of a sudden they feel she's not hot, they don't want you around. They don't want to know you. A cruel business.

G: A cold potato.

M: You're damn right.

G: In late of 1964, along came the role of Major Don West in Lost in Space. I don't know whether you know Mark, but in Australia, on the TEN network, it has had twenty-four runs in prime time, and it is the most repeated show on Australian television.

M: I didn't know that. I'd be glad to get a buck for each episode they're showing ... One dollar per show.

G: Can you tell us how you got the role of Major Don West with Irwin Allen?

Irwin Allen and I were represented by the same agent. I met Irwin and he chose me for the part. I had done Johnny Ringo, The Detectives, and Many Happy Returns over at MGM so I had a good track record that helped to sell the show.

G: After the pilot was made, did you believe that CBS would go ahead with the series? Because bearing in mind back in those days, space shows were something new and programmes like that just weren't done.

M: Right. We did this in ... 1964. I did the pilot, I got paid well for the pilot. I didn't think it was going to sell. Honestly, I didn't know if I wanted it to sell because I hadn't done a space show, I didn't know what this was all about.

Wearing silver outfits and walking in space, you know, I didn't think anybody would want to watch it. Who wants to watch a show about space? But it worked out.

G: It must have been incredible viewing, watching the very first episodes on television. What was your reaction when you first saw it on the screen?

M: I don't remember, to tell you the truth. It was in black and white and the first night it was on, I didn't really realise anyone would watch the show.

I mean, there were kids watching the show, but I never ran into children, so I didn't think anyone was watching the show. I didn't get any recognition from the show. Today I do. I get more recognition today than when I did the show. Everyone seems to have grown up with this show. It's a cult hit. I mean, it's unbelievable!

G: Do you think you were cast as a rebel in the very beginning, someone to antagonise John Robinson or sometimes to strike up an argument?

M: Yeah maybe. Although after the pilot, I think I was there to develop and work off Dr Smith a lot. People always said to me, "You know, I wish you would hit him once, just give Dr Smith a good punch," you know, they always wanted me to hit Smith.

But he was a very, very, very popular actor, and the people would want to see Don West give him one good swift one, you know that ... of course, I never did! ... And I never felt like doing it.

G: The characters of Dr Smith and the Robot were put aboard the ship at the very last moment. They were revisions to the pilot. Did you know about this when you were off-set, or was it a case of turning up to work and suddenly finding there's new characters in the show?

M: I didn't know what direction the show was going to go. I was there to do my job, learn my lines, and that's what I did. In the entire three years I did a professional job, I didn't miss a day of work and I did my lines directly, and I worked hard, and whatever they told me to do I did.

I never questioned whether the show had gone to Smith, or Guy and June, or whatever. That was not my concern. My concern was to do the best job I could as Don West. That's all I ever cared about.

G: Can you recall the first time you were acting next to the Robot, It must have been very different to anything you had done before.

M: Actually, I do remember one of the very first times. Bobby May who was inside the Robot... this is kind of a funny story, you see the Robot could do anything, he was powerful and strong and Smith was trying to get the Robot to do his bidding to show June and I that he had the Robot in his control, and that he could control the Spaceship. (The episode Mark is recalling is "Island In the Sky" Episode # 3)

Dr. Smith took one of those astronaut helmets, they had one real one and then they had a phoney one made with a very thin shell. Smith put the thin-shelled helmet into the Robot's arms and he said "I will show you how powerful he is, he will crush the helmet",

And the next thing you hear is a loud exhausting sound coming from inside the Robot. He couldn't crush it. (laughs) He didn't have the strength to crush it. That broke everyone up! (laughs)

G: How long was a typical day's shooting?

M: I was on the set from about seven in the morning till about seven at night. We did the show in about six days.

G: Mark, this must be unique for an actor, now you have acted in a Western where you've used a rifle, you've been in The Detectives where you used a police special, then you used laser rifles and pistols in Lost In Space. What did you think of the incredible hardware that was used on the show?

M: Well, the first one of course was a Colt .45 that I used on 'Ringo,' then I used a special .38 as a detective and then I get into space and I was using these lasers and they used to 'draw' the beams in at the end, you know, you shoot and kill a monster or something, zap, and he's gone.

Yeah, it was just pretty good stuff and it was well designed, and it was ahead of its time. It was good. All the stuff - I mean, the spaceship itself, the inside was very well done. They spent money on that show.

We had a good show for that time. John Williams did the music. You know, people go on that Lost In Space was kind of a fantasy, was kind of a silly show, and it may have been, but still again, there were aspects of it that hold up very well.

G: I agree. The technical aspects were incredible. The music that John Williams designed, the incidental music of the show was very stirring and the show looks terrific today.

M: Pretty good, considering it was 1965. Yeah, we were on air a year before Star Trek so I guess we were the first well done space show.

G: Do you think that's a reason for the success of the show, the fact that the technical aspects and the special effects were seen for the very first time on a prime time television show?

M: Yeah, yeah. It had a lot to do with its success. It was good stuff. There were monsters and giants, and split screen stuff. They do it all now, but in those days we didn't have a lot of that. The Chariot and all that, the special effects, the earthquakes and the storms, all that was good.

G: Incidentally, did you ever get to drive the Chariot on location?

M: No! No. They did all the location stuff with others. Some other actors put on our outfits and you saw them from a distance, so you couldn't tell whether it was us or not. I never drove the chariot. I mean, in the show I drove the Chariot but not for real. It was like a tractor....... mmm, I don't know, I could have.

G:   Maybe it was just a matter of driving it in and out of the studio...

M:   Yeah, You know, I don't know where all that stuff came from, we had a spaceship about this big, you know (Mark gestures with his hands) and all of a sudden we were taking out Chariots, force-field gear, and all these washing machines.  I don't know where we kept it all.

G: It's incredible just reflecting on that, the Jupiter II had everything! It had machines that would make potato chips out of whole potatoes, you had a sonic washer that would clean, wash and wrap all your clothing, and the Space Pod was there...

M: Oh, the Space Pod? Right. We used yeah. That would get us from the spaceship down to some planet.

G: It was remarkably like the lunar module that NASA used to land the first men on the Moon.

M: Right. It was, we also had the jet backpacks that Guy and I used, from Bell Laboratories which was pretty advanced in 1965, and we really could fly around with these units on our back. Like this. (Mark demonstrates his point to his class.) Have you guys seen those things? You put a jet pack on your back and "swoosh!" You operate it from here. (Mark demonstrates with his hands where the controls were on the flying belt.) For real.

G: It's called the "Flying Belt" in LIS, and yes, it was real. In fact, the pilot episode credits the "Bell Rocket Belt" courtesy of Textron's Bell Aerosystems Company so it's real stuff.

M: Yeah it sure was.

G: How did you feel about the costumes on the show?

M: I didn’t like the turtleneck, but I liked the one with the brown and yellow collar. I liked collars, but I don’t like turtlenecks, so I wasn’t comfortable in the turtleneck with the grey outfit in the first season.

In the first outfits, when we first went out into space, what I call the silver lame, you know, they were colourful. They looked pretty good.

G: I believe it was very hard to move in the silver suits, because they couldn’t yet make the synthetic material that we have today & subsequently it was like cardboard to wear.

M: It was, we couldn’t sit down, we had set chairs that stood up & we would stand between takes. They were like cardboard.

G: Is it true that you had a motorcycle accident on the very first day of shooting ...

M: No, two days before shooting was scheduled to start on the serial, I had a bad motorcycle accident and I took the skin off the side of my body. So they had to make my suit larger. Also my gloves were larger because I had a cast. So I was in a lot of pain for the first part of the show.

G: One of Lost In Space's most famous photographs has you and the cast next to the astrogator and it shows your right leg enstreched straight out.

M: I remember that. Yeah, that was pretty painful.

G: Mark, we have touched upon this before, but it must be flattering to you today when ladies approach you saying that "I had the biggest crush on you!"

M: Yes, they say "I really had the biggest crush on you." and I say, "What not anymore? What happened to it?" (laughs)

G: The character of Major Don West was a honest one and you added a dramatic sense to the serial. Now every time that you argued with Dr Smith, you were going to hit him, what would have happened, do you think if you had of hit him?

M: They wouldn't have had me hit Dr Smith. It was a family show. That's the way they wrote it! We were a family. So the anger I showed toward Smith was just appropriate.

Just good anger, but we didn't have any family violence. We shot monsters and stuff like that, but there wasn't a drop of blood that was shown in that show. It was a family show. It was good.

You see, the thing is that people get into Lost In Space today because it is a family, and today we don't have families to watch anymore. We have a lot of divorces. I'm part of that. I've also had my own divorces in my life. My family is split, you know.

But basically people look back on that and see a family with some values, trying to raise kids right, doing something and we've lost those values in our culture, at least in the United States and I think people are grasping a little bit for that and I think we'll be going back into that, more family life in the nineties. People are looking for that. They want that feeling.

G: Yes, I believe on the show, they had many pluses. One of the pluses was that it was family-orientated. The family looked after each other. A good plus for the show. Maybe that's one of the reasons why it is still so popular today.

M: One of the reasons..... You know Glenn, do you realise that if the family Robinson was sent in to space to colonise another planet, and I was the only outsider, then everybody would be named West. (laughs)

G: Yes, imagine that, the Space Family West (laughs). Mark, did the cast and crew give you a name for the fact that you always crashed the ship from planet to planet.

M: Yes, I was dubbed Crash West by June Lockhart. Because in order to have a show each week, I had to crash on some hostile planet so we could have a show. And they used the same clip every week. You'd see the spaceship going over like this, (Mark gestures with his hands) you know, we're gliding over a rock, and we go - BANG - another crash landing!

Then we all get out like this and we're on a new planet. So I guess I wasn't a very good pilot because . I think I crashed it about twenty-seven times on different planets.

G: With repeats, that would make it five million times now.

M: Yeah, at least.

G: In the first season Mark, if I can take you back, there are very serious episodes, the second season came along and that series of stories seemed to have one foot in science fiction and one foot in super fantasy. Did you ever understand why the show went that way?

M: No. That's the way it went, the way it was supposed to be. You see, my philosophy in life is that everything's perfect. Otherwise I don't think we can exist. You know, everything's perfect. The fact that I'm sitting here now talking to you Glenn, with these kids, like these students here that I care about ...

(At this point the interview is interrupted by a message on the High School's public address system.)

M: Let me explain, we're doing this interview here at Scituate High School in the United States, I love being a teacher, I want to continue to do this, but it was the way it was, that led me here. Life is perfect. The fact that Dr. Smith took over the show, you can't fight that, you've got to go with it. Things are perfect.

You know, it's terrible to think that you might have something go against you in life, but you've got to turn it around and make it work for you.

The fact that it happened, it happened. And that's the way it was supposed to be. Smith and the Robot - we might not have had a successful show if they hadn't gone that way. I don't know. I have no feelings about it. I mean, I don't have any negative feelings about it. I just did my work.

G: What is it like nowadays when you turn on the television and there's Lost In Space, and you look back at it. Do you have a sense of humour about it? Do you laugh at some of the things that you did? There are some very wonderful, funny, scenes....

M: Yes, there was a lot. Yeah, it seemed silly at the time and we used to laugh and break up a lot. I can see shows where I'll say a line, then I'd turn my head away from the camera, because I'd be laughing so hard, you know.

We had different situations each week, once I had to do scenes where I talk to a carrot, and that's kinda silly. How do you talk to a carrot? What do you say to a carrot, you know? Spinach? What? So it was like I'm talking to this guy who looks like a carrot. It was hard to keep a straight face, and I didn't sometimes.

G: There were some good acting parts though. There was one particular episode where you were brandishing a scar on the side of your face and.......

M: That's "The Anti-Matter Man." Yeah! That's my favourite show on Lost in Space, It gave me a chance to do some SP acting, otherwise I didn't have much chance to do a lot of work, but, you know.

G: But you had the ability to stretch your character.

M: A little bit, yeah.

G:   Jonathan Harris tells of a wonderful foot story at his live shows concerning a fan who was impressed with your acting ability. Can you tell us about that?

M: Oh yeah, (laughs) In the first season of the show, this boulder comes down on my little ole foot and crushes my foot. Of course it's a fake rock, but it crushes my foot. So I limped throughout the rest of the show groaning and moaning "Oh God, my ankle, it hurts so bad", Guy (Williams) gave me a splint which I walked around on for most of the show.

So this fan wrote a letter to me who was from Grinelle, Iowa, and he was a big fan of Lost In Space, He was in love with my feet, he wanted the size of my shoe, he wanted a plaster cast made of my foot, he wanted all the tapes of me groaning. He had a foot fetish I guess. (laughs)

Anyway, I brought the letter to June, I think I showed it to Jonathan too, I said "June, read this, wow, he's out of it!" June replied "Well, we'll just have to answer this letter, Mark, in a nice way."

So she said in a reply letter that went something like this... "Dear Mr. Monroe, We are so happy that you admire my remarkable 'feats" on Lost In Space. (laughs) We did this whole letter dealing with feet and foot, I think I even cut out a picture in a magazine of a good looking foot. Anyway I think we ended off the letter telling him I'm foot lose & fancy free.

G:  Did he reply to your letter?

M:  No, I don't think so.

G:  The third season of the show came along, once again in glorious colour, the stories seemed to steer towards original seriousness.  It tended to get back to what the original season was all about.  Was there some sort of regeneration going on to actually get Lost in Space back to the way it was in the beginning?

M: I don't know. I think that we had our run with Dr. Smith and the Robot. I imagine if we had gone into a fourth year, .... yes, it would have gone back to a serious show.

We couldn't keep doing that. We had done Smith and the Robot. It was done. We couldn't do that anymore. We had to look for a new venue after that. We probably would have gone back to a more serious vein as a new way to go, yeah.

G: Did you have a favourite guest star on the show? Daniel J. Travanti recalls being on Lost In Space as one of his best early experiences.

M: Did he really? I don't know. I kind of liked Kurt Russell. He was a kid then when Kurt did a show. I knew his Dad, Bing Russell because I worked with Bing on Johnny Ringo. Bing used to do a lot of Westerns and his son is Kurt Russell, and is doing very well as an actor in Hollywood.

But he was about 13 when he was on the show. A great kid. A good athlete. He played baseball. A good kid. He was my favourite. I also liked Albert Salmi and Warren Oates.

In Part 2 of this interview, Mark talks in depth about Irwin Allen, Marta Kristen, Guy Williams, basketball & Australia.

READ THE NEXT GREAT PART TO THIS INTERESTING INTERVIEW WITH MARK GODDARD.