“We’re cooking now.” “Put that one in the time capsule!” These were among the many superlatives the actor Cameron Mitchell would shout out after another mediocre scene in a ghastly television series entitled Swiss Family Robinson in which he played a sailor marooned on their island. The series was produced by a schlockmeister named Irwin Allen, famous for huge hit films like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. There was nothing, however, to recommend Swiss Family Robinson. It was television at its worst. Conveyor belt cheap, it ran for twenty episodes in the 1975–76 season and hopefully is now and forever lost at sea. I was invited to do a two-episode arc playing Jean LaFitte, the pirate, the lure being a promise of my own series; but a wasted two weeks of my life wearing a false mustache and embarrassingly falling upon my aluminum sword. Cameron had been a good-looking leading man in the 1950s, making his Broadway debut as Happy in Death of a Salesman, doing the film version and starring in first-rate movies with James Cagney, Clark Gable, and Doris Day.
