Authors: David Beers
My mother preferred to place her faith in life under filiarchy. She preferred to vent when she felt too much taken for granted—
Damnit to hell!
—and then to laugh this off the next day with Mrs. Williams, the two of them blowing smoke at the dining nook ceiling, passing funny comments on the strangeness of the
respective planets they’d come to inhabit, neither woman willing to say she was marooned.
R
ecently I have learned that two rules governed the crafting of any
Lost in Space
storyline. One was:
Mother must never be in jeopardy.
The other:
Mother and Father must not touch one another.
These guiding principles were related to me by June Lockhart and by Paul Zistupnevich, who was for thirty years the closest assistant to Irwin Allen, creator of
Lost in Space.
Irwin Allen, who also produced
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel
, and, for the big screen,
The Poseidon Adventure
, and who died at the age of seventy-five in 1991, was not a man with elaborate theories about how to speak to the psyches of suburban children of the space age. He was, as Zistupnevich admitted with some exasperation, a man who didn’t much care if his stories made sense at all. But Irwin Allen—or to be more precise, Irwin Allen in concert with network executives—did expect the space family Robinson to adhere faithfully to the simple two rules. Indeed, by Paul Zistupnevich’s recollection, there was but one exception to the rule that
Mother must never be in jeopardy.
That was an episode when “Mother went out to rescue Father when he was floating in space and she managed to get him back.” Other than that, she was to be kept from the center of action out of concern for a young audience who needed to count on Mother always being safely
there
.
And to prevent that safety from being intruded upon by even the first signs of dangerous desire, there was rule number two. June Lockhart told me: “In talking about our characters, Guy Williams (who played the father) and I felt they should be a loving husband and wife. We were very surprised, later in the first year, when word came down from CBS that he was not permitted to touch me at all. Because in the pilot we were very demonstrative and affectionate and there were mother-and-father-kisses
and you felt this was a very viable relationship. The word was that it embarrassed children to see their parents hugging and kissing. Even when it came to him giving me his hand to help me down off the last step as we got off the spaceship, the word was: ‘Don’t touch her!’ ”
Even more than the first rule, this second one Paul Zistupnevich found “kinda kooky,” as did all the cast members. Lockhart said that she and Williams did the best they could with “longing looks,” but it was written that the blue sky marriage of the future was to be all chaste efficiency in the eyes of the children. Zistupnevich, who designed the costumes for
Lost in Space
, dressed tomorrow’s mother in material that did not invite hugs, firefighter’s asbestos. Her clothes “were so stiff you could lean them against the wall and they would not collapse. You didn’t have to worry about bust points or anything. If you shaped them, the shape stayed there.”
Lockhart told me she hadn’t expected such constraints when she took the role. She remembered being thrilled when Allen signed her before any other cast member. “My character was a biophysicist, a well-educated family woman who worked in the space program with her husband, who was an astronaut. It all seemed very legitimate and real to me.” She didn’t balk when the scripts had her playing housewife “sight gags,” the mother who, with a push of a button, rolled forth perfectly prepared dinners from her spaceship kitchen, the mother who fed dirty clothes into the top of a contraption and collected them, clean, folded, and wrapped in cellophane, as they dropped out of the bottom seconds later. Because she was a proudly “professional” actor, Lockhart explained, she didn’t make a fuss when it soon became clear the mother was going to be peripheral to the family saga. Paul Zistupnevich remembered his friend June Lockhart telling him, “Half the time all I do is say ‘Oh, Penny, come home!’ or, ‘Will! Where are you?’ ” That did not leave much for the mother of the future to do that would grab the imagination of a boy like me.
After a while the show abandoned its original theme, “all
that early stuff,” as Lockhart remembered, “of trying to adapt the home and make sense of civilization out there.” After a while Irwin Allen believed he’d found a more compelling device in the tension between little Will, headstrong but resourceful, and the aging scoundrel, Dr. Smith. As played by Jonathan Harris, Dr. Smith was always trying to sell out the Robinsons to an alien if it might mean a getaway for himself. He was spineless and he was clumsy with technology and he was a crybaby whose typical response to a jam of his own making was to snivel, “Oh, woe is me.”
The object of contempt at the center or
Lost in Space
, the ever-lurking threat to the family of the future, was weakness and lack of discipline, the whimpering man, the mincing man, the man who refused to be a Man. Was Dr. Smith coded gay? I asked Lockhart. “You said it, I didn’t,” she answered with a smile in her voice. “You watch the show now,” she added, “and you see they put him in drag, they did everything they could. But the mother and father weren’t allowed to touch! You know?”
I remember, as a ten-year-old boy, feeling disgust and revulsion for Dr. Smith whenever he was on the screen. I remember wanting Will to just slap him. Was the idea, I asked June Lockhart, that, for the family of the future to survive in space, they had to exert extreme self-control, be ultrarational?
“I think so. The irrationality was taken care of by the character of Dr. Smith.”
T
here were visits to the Gianninis’, and there were glimpses of other strange worlds as well, other planets beyond that of my own family’s own. There was the home of two neighbor boys, an eerily quiet house but for the ticking of grandfather clocks, a house full of Old West antiques and, taking up much of the family room, a supremely realistic train set constructed by and for the father, who was a radar engineer. There was the other home at
the end of the cul-de-sac, across from the Gianninis’, a house without children. The man was an older Lockheed worker of rank lower than my father, I knew, and he did not want children on his lawn or anywhere near his house, even when a tennis ball landed there. His wife smiled at us and expected smiles back as if her husband was not an ogre. Once a year she threw a birthday party for her two poodles, inviting all the children on the cul-de-sac to come inside her garage and perform little song-and-dance acts and then to eat cake and ice cream off a long plywood table-top her husband, nowhere to be seen, had assembled for the event.
There was a planet I found most unnerving, the world inhabited by my school chum John O’Meara, who lived in a slightly cheaper subdivision next to mine. Like me, he was the oldest child (of six) and like me he was an altar boy and a boy who liked to wrestle in the grass. His mother was a sweet woman who always seemed glad to see me, but her house was dark and cluttered with piles of laundry and always smelled powerfully of urine because several of her children wet the bed every night. John’s backyard seemed mean, too much cracked cement and clothesline, so going to his house usually meant spending a lot of time in a vacant lot nearby looking for old car parts in the weeds.
I remember the O’Mearas’ living room coffee table, though, for the books that lay jumbled upon it, strange literature that John said his father brought home. One paperback was full of terrible prognostications by a man named Criswell. Someday soon people would suffer from “Automatic Atomic Disease” and their bowels would open up and pour onto the ground. Someday soon people would eat frozen human flesh like Popsicles, Criswell said, his crazy ideas accompanied by gruesome pen-and-ink illustrations. There was something wrong about paying good money for a trashy book like this, I knew. And in the same stack I would find more reading that would never be found in my house, a book that straightforwardly illustrated the facts of sex. There were naked people coupling in a book on John O’Meara’s coffee
table, a book his father
encouraged
him to read, John said, a book I was
free
to look at while Mrs. O’Meara made us peanut butter sandwiches in the kitchen.
From the day I met him, I did not know what to make of Mr. O’Meara, a burly man with an unmistakable dent in the upper-left-hand corner of his high, bald forehead. He took me once, with John and other O’Meara children, to an ear-blasting car race at Laguna Seca and I enjoyed it although I sensed my own father would consider the spectacle somehow debasing. Other than that, John and I did not see each other on weekends; his father, John would say, wanted him. Finally one Saturday when I was maybe eleven or twelve, I had grown restless on my planet and called John up and invited myself over to his. John met me at the door and suggested we get on our bikes and go, but then we heard his father call his name from the backyard. Mr. O’Meara was sitting at a patio table, a small, white round one with tiny rusty cracks in it, an umbrella opened overhead to make a bit of shade in the heat. A couple of neighbor men were there with him, a lot of aluminum beer cans spread before them.
“C’mere, I told ya. Right now!” Mr. O’Meara barked, and I thought that John showed an odd lack of haste in stepping through the dark house and passing through the sliding screen door and presenting himself to his father. There were no more words, just a quick punch from Mr. O’Meara that split John’s lip, the lip gushing blood immediately, John turning away with tears but no crying. John met me where I’d drifted after him, a spot at the dim center of the house, and he turned me back toward the door. “Fuckin’ drunken asshole,” he said. “You’d better go.”
I remember looking down the hallway toward the bedrooms and seeing Mrs. O’Meara throwing some more sheets onto the pile of sheets that made her house a throat-gagging house no matter how often she washed the latest pile. John was finding a paper towel for his lip and Mr. O’Meara had turned his big dented skull back toward his friends, and there were dirty dishes on the drainboard as always at the O’Mearas’, and there were jumbles of paper and weird books on every other horizontal surface
as always at the O’Mearas’. I remember sensing, then, the presence of the monster my parents must have most feared, the encroaching Mess in life that would doom a family, would wreck its controls if vigilance was not maintained. For a fleeting moment, I understood the daily struggle to pass the sweeper, to fold the diapers, to keep a green lawn, to fix every appliance at one’s own workbench, to denounce the crass “hucksters” on TV and their dangerous appeals to our weaker natures. I understood why my parents often treated a small thing as if it were a crack in the space hull, as if we were in imminent danger of crashing.
After that Saturday at the O’Mearas’, I never visited John’s planet again.
I
rwin Allen “was an orphan at the age of, I think, ten or twelve and he was raised by his cousin’s parents and so he never knew what it was like to have family ties,” according to Paul Zistupnevich. He cited this as the cause for why
Lost in Space
, in his opinion, fell short of its potential as family fare. “I’ve always said Irwin didn’t know what a family relationship was. That’s why in all his things you never saw a tremendous love story. He didn’t know what love was all about. He really was afraid of love. He was afraid of family relationships or expressing love. It was all due to the fact that he was an orphan.”
“The reason
Lost in Space
was so successful,” Allen’s former right-hand man continued, “is that it centered
around
the family. But our biggest problem is that we had too many monsters infiltrate into the thing. That was because of Irwin Allen. Irwin Allen’s span of attention was not too great. If the interest waned in the show, you either blew someone up or put them on fire or put them in jeopardy. That was basically his formula. Excitement. He didn’t care if it made any sense, he just threw it in.”
On the set of
Lost in Space
, as Zistupnevich recalled, other forces threatened the integrity of the Robinson family. “Well, I won’t use names but we had an assistant director who wanted
Penny to be a little sex bomb. Oh God, he was always trying. He just thought she should be more curvaceous and of course the problem was that she was supposed to be the young juvenile interest of the thing and so we had to, instead of make her look sexy, play her down. At the time we started out she was about twelve and by the time we finished, in her teens. This assistant director wanted to have her neckline emphasized, the bust and whatnot. We used to have to hit him over the head! And poor little Penny, she felt a little uncomfortable.”
In the end, what killed
Lost in Space
was the Mess of life sneaking up and pulling its plug. Ratings were good and CBS was set to renew, as June Lockhart remembered, but when it came time to propose the outlines for the fourth year’s string of episodes, Irwin Allen’s flighty ego and short attention span prevented him from coming up with any. “All right, just drop it,” the powers in New York decided, according to June Lockhart, and the Robinson family was left to die in space the year I turned twelve.
M
other must never be in jeopardy.
Mother and Father must not touch.
When interest wanes, blow up something.
A strange subtext for the favorite program of a boy nearing his teens as the second half of the sixties built up revolutionary (sexual and political) steam. The wonder to me is not that a man like Irwin Allen would think it up, but that I, who was anything but an unloved orphan, would eat it up. Even in the last year, when I felt too old for such childishness, I guiltily watched every episode.
My generation has made a science of revisiting the TV shows we watched as kids—of “deconstructing” them, as the grown-up academics say. Postmodern critics hold that these shows can never be taken at silly face value because they were a welter of messages onto which each watcher overlaid his or her
own meanings. A University of Wisconsin feminist scholar named Lynn Spigel, for example, makes the argument that the “fantastic sitcoms” of the era, from
Bewitched
to
I Dream of Jeannie
to
The Addams Family
, can be read as subversive challenges to the ideal of the nuclear family in the suburb. Samantha was the one with the brains and the powers; Jeannie lived unmarried with the astronaut; the Addams Family was an extended family who unmasked the neighbors’ loathing of the “other.” I find Spigel convincing and I like to imagine a frustrated suburban woman or girl deriving a private solace, even a radicalization, from such patently low-brow television. Political gold, spun from “tripe.”