Fred Grandy may be going from Gopher to governor of Iowa, but Bob Denver has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, even though Grandy seemed to sail forever on "The Love Boat," Gopher was only a temporary job for an actor who became a politician. Denver's fateful three-hour tour on the Minnow has turned into a life's work."When I go," he said last week, "they're going to scatter me in Hanalei Bay . . . They can send me over by UPS, and any Hawaiian will do it. Just tell them it's Gilligan's ashes."
That won't happen for some time if Denver has his way. "They found out that people who want to live to be 100 usually do," he said, and he wants to, floating on the enduring popularity of "Gilligan's Island" as he strives to be a Little Buddy to a diverse cast of characters.
He wants to turn his adopted state of West Virginia into an organic farm park. He has a plan to build miniature-golf courses to help the handicapped. And, with no pun intended, he intends to stand up for the rights of smokers until his dying breath.
Last and always - if not quite first, however - there's Gilligan.
"You taught me math in fifth grade," says Vicky West, a teacher from Swarthmore, marching up to Denver's lunch table in Philadelphia. "I tell my students every year that you taught me."
Denver doesn't even blink at the preposterous coincidence that brings a woman 35 years and across the country to bump into a man who worked less than a year as a grammar school teacher and coach, at Corpus Christi School in Pacific Palisades, Calif.
"Well, if you had Maynard and Gilligan teaching you," Denver responds, "you're home free."
If that's true, imagine how free and at home must be the man who actually was Maynard and Gilligan, both of them in the top 10 of TV's fantasy hall of fame.
He doesn't get a nickel from "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," which ran four years and 142 episodes from 1959 to 1963. He played Maynard G. Krebs, an amiable if bedraggled and befuddled beatnik whose entire body started twitching at the mere mention of the word "work."
The comedy was his first real acting job, and who knew about agents and residuals?
Not that he learned a whole lot.
Denver doesn't get a nickel from "Gilligan's Island," either, even though it's one of the greatest rerun successes in the history of television. It has played somewhere in the world for nearly every minute for more than 20 years.
The story goes that when Ted Turner bought the MGM library, he was after two things in particular: "Gone With the Wind" and "Gilligan's Island." "I've heard it's true," says Denver. "I've never met him."
TV was still relatively new in 1964, when Gilligan did his first pratfall. Actors didn't demand gees for reruns, and "Gilligan's Island" lasted only three years, anyway. There are 98 episodes - total. "The fans always tell me, `No, no, no. There's a couple of hundred,"' says Denver, "and I go, `Fine."'
The completely illogical tale of a completely contrived group of castaways was an instant, modest hit on CBS. Its silly, physical humor and lovable characters - especially the always well-intentioned, always unsuccessful Gilligan, the gentlest of buffoons - found a warm spot in mid-'60s America. It wound up among the top 25 shows in the ratings in its first two years, outperformed by such programs as "My Three Sons," "Petticoat Junction" and "The Munsters."
It dropped slightly in its third year but was picked up for a fourth and then canceled arbitrarily, says Denver, by CBS czar William Paley, to make room for his wife's favorite show, "Gunsmoke," which some out-of-the-loop executive had left off the schedule.
You can read all about it in "Gilligan, Maynard & Me," Denver's oversize paperback (Citadel Press), which is the reason he was visiting the Philadelphia area, the ninth stop on a coast-to-coast book-peddling tour. It's full of anecdotes, pictures and episode descriptions, and if it's not exactly Shakespeare, neither was "Gilligan's Island."
Denver makes it clear in the book that the show, crammed with physical gags and, frequently, special effects, was a lot harder than it looked. "It should look really easy, like anybody can do it," he says at lunch. "And then you know it's really hard and very complicated."
But he has no pretensions and doesn't have a whole lot of time for anybody who does. From "Gilligan's Island," that would be Tina Louise.
Denver's memoir has stirred only one controversy and that over a mention of the sexual moanings that emanated from Louise's dressing room. The actress has risen to the bait. She caused a fuss with her denials in the publisher's lobby and continues to pipe up in the public prints and on the airwaves. Denver sticks by his story and is grateful. It sells the book.
It is the ancillary benefits of being Gilligan, such as the opportunity to sell a book, that keep Denver going financially. He always made more money off personal appearances than he ever did from the show, and is still - and probably always and forever will be - in demand.
He is also, by the way, a pretty good comic actor, which is plain to anyone who casts a critical eye upon "Gilligan's Island." He got all the way to Broadway in "Play It Again, Sam," replacing Woody Allen, and was one of the kings of dinner theater in the '70s and early '80s.
He and his wife, Dreama, an actress whom he met in 1977, have their own production of "The Owl and the Pussycat" that they try to take on the road for at least a couple of months a year.
Courtesy of Gilligan, he has a few other things going, one of which is miniature golf. His first course is due to open in Charleston, W. Va., just down the road from his home atop a hill, next year. It will be a Putt-Putt franchise.
"I talked to these guys in North Carolina," says Denver, "and they said, `What's your theme?"'
The North Carolina guys are played with a North Carolina drawl that would have fit any Son of the South who showed up on "Gilligan's Island." (Hey, if wacky inventors, a Japanese soldier, Kurt Russell as a jungle boy, even entire rock groups, could wash ashore and then wash away just as quickly, what's to stop a few good ol' boys?)
"And I said, `Jungles.'
"`Well, now, son, we tried them, and they don't go over too well.'
"And I said, `Well, it's tied into the "Gilligan's Island" theme.'
"`Oh, you're that fella. Well, then, son, it might work. The only thing is, the holes. You got to have them so the people want to play again.'
"I said, `I understand this."'
A hundred Putt-Putt golf courses, with part or all - it's not quite clear - of the proceeds going to charity, is child's play, so to speak, compared with Denver's next brilliant idea: the Saving of West Virginia.
After roaming the country on the theater circuit from a home base in Las Vegas ("I watered the desert. There are seeds in there forever, you know. . . . I had a hose that fired about 50 feet . . . Stuff came up. I never knew what it was"), the Denvers settled near Bluefield, W. Va., where Dreama Denver was reared.
Denver is in love with his wife and in love with her state. And no, it has nothing to do with John Denver, whose hit song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is virtually the West Virginia anthem, and whose real name is Henry John Deutchendorf Jr. and who made Bob Denver's now-grownup children, from other marriages that he doesn't care to talk about, crazy when John Denver changed his name to theirs. ("`Daaaaaaaad, he can't do that, can he?"').
First, says Bob Denver, you shut the borders. "Put the Smokey the Bear guys there, and they say, `This state's a park. It'll cost you $5 to come in."'
Then you make the state synonymous with organic farming. "There's only about 10 million farms in West Virginia that have been lying fallow for 25 years that weren't sprayed with insecticide or pesticide, ever."
He goes on and on, describing a plan by which poor people would be given farms and computers to tell how to work them. And how canning plants would be set up for all the produce, and eventually each farm would have a little guest cottage, and city people would come and vacation there.
We believed when a Mars probe landed on Gilligan's Island and sent back pictures of chicken people (don't ask) to NASA - even though they were really Gilligan, the Skipper, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the professor and Mary Ann. Why not this?
Denver would find peace living self-sufficiently in a self-sufficient state. He worries about government. "Governments in this world since the history of time: You let them take something away from you, they can't stop."