Lyle Waggoner obit

Lyle Waggoner, Actor on 'The Carol Burnett Show' and 'Wonder Woman,' Dies at 84

He was not on the list.

He auditioned for 'Batman,' posed as the first centerfold for 'Playgirl' and launched a successful business catering to Hollywood behind the scenes.

Lyle Waggoner, the actor with the leading man looks who spent seven seasons on The Carol Burnett

Show before portraying versions of Steve Trevor a generation apart on Wonder Woman, has died. He was 84.

Waggoner died Tuesday in Westlake, California, after a long illness, his son Jason told The Hollywood Reporter.

The hunky Kansas native famously screen-tested in 1965 to play the Caped Crusader on the 20th Century Fox-ABC series Batman, but the job, of course, went to Adam West. Later, he posed for the centerfold of Playgirl magazine's premiere issue in June 1973.

Waggoner had been on an episode of Gunsmoke and in a couple of forgettable films when he was hired to serve as the announcer on CBS' new The Carol Burnett Show, which went on the air on Sept. 11, 1967. (Producer Joe Hamilton, Burnett's husband, was searching for a "Rock Hudson type.")

Though it seems hard to believe now, Burnett "was afraid to talk to the audience when that show started; she didn't want to have to talk directly to them on camera," Bob Mackie, the costume designer on the iconic sketch-comedy show, revealed in a 2000 interview for the website The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. "So she had the big announcer person that she could play off of."

That would be the 6-foot-3, dark-haired Waggoner, whom Mackie called "a big Ken doll." He eventually was given more to do and played around in skits with Burnett, Harvey Korman and Vicki Lawrence. Waggoner was usually there to play "the handsome guy," someone for Burnett to drool over.

And "If you needed a mounted policeman from Canada," writer Arnie Kogen said, "Lyle was your man."

About a year after walking away from the show in 1974 — to be eventually replaced by frequent guest star Tim Conway — Waggoner landed the role of Major Steve Trevor on ABC's Wonder Woman, starring Lynda Carter as the Amazon princess Diana.

When the series, then set in the 1940s, became too expense to produce, it was shifted into the present day and picked up by CBS. Now Waggoner was playing Steve Trevor Jr., head of a CIA-type crime-fighting agency whose dad had been killed. (You couldn't tell that Diana, being an Amazon, had aged at all.)

"He was a real gung-ho kind of guy," Waggoner said of Trevor in a 2011 interview. "Steve tried his best, but he always seemed to get himself into hot water. Of course, he pretty much had to because it was Wonder Woman's job to rescue him. If there was a scene where he got the drop on the bad guys, sure enough, someone would end up slapping the gun out of his hand and turning the tables on him."

Born on April 13, 1935, Kyle Wesley Waggoner was a wrestler and a high jumper at Kirkwood High School in Missouri. He briefly attended Washington University in St. Louis before enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving as a radio operator.

Back home, as he worked as a door-to-door salesman, customers kept telling him, "You should be an actor." He appeared in a local production of Li'l Abner, came to California and got into "new talent" programs at MGM and then Fox, where Tom Selleck and James Brolin were also beginning their careers.

Waggoner hosted the syndicated quiz show It's Your Bet in the 1970s and appeared as himself on a 1999 episode of That '70s Show.

In 1979, he launched Star Waggons, which rented motor homes for actors, makeup artists, etc. to use on film and TV sets.

"When I was on Wonder Woman, [the producers] gave me a very nice motor home they had rented from some private owner in the Valley," he said in a 2013 interview with Los Angeles magazine. "I said, 'Well, if I had a motor home, would you rent it from me?' I was always entrepreneurial-oriented, trying to find a business to get into. So I went out and bought a motor home and rented it to the production company for the three years that I was on that show."

Three or four years in, Waggoner made a shift to trailers, since motor homes, with their engines and running gear, are more expensive to maintain. "I found a manufacturer and had a prototype of a makeup trailer built," he recalled. "I put it out in the field and boy, they absolutely loved it. We started building trailers in 1988 and selling off the motor homes — I had about 90 — and eventually got rid of all of them."

CNBC reported in February 2016 that Star Waggons had 800 trailers and posted annual revenue of $17 million. Waggoner said a year later that he supplied 30 trailers alone for ABC's Dancing With the Stars.

He married Sharon Kennedy in September 1960, and they had two sons, Beau and Jason.

Filmography

Films

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1966      Swamp Country                Deputy Mel        

1967      Catalina Caper   Angelo Alternate title: Never Steal Anything Wet

1967      Journey to the Center of Time    Alien     

1973      Love Me Deadly                Alex Martin        

1978      Zero to Sixty       Gay Bar Bartender          

1984      Surf II    Chief Boyardie  

1989      Murder Weapon               Dr. Randolph     

1989      Danger USA        Ben        Alternate title: Mind Trap

1990      Gypsy Angels     Preacher             

1990      The Girl I Want Coach   

1990      Dream a Little Evil            Death    Direct-to-video film

1991      Wizards of the Demon Sword      Lord Khoura       

1991      Dead Women in Lingerie               Daddy  

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1966      Gunsmoke          Aikens   Episode: "Wishbone"

1967      Lost in Space      Mechanical Man               Episode: "Deadliest of the Species"

1967–1974          The Carol Burnett Show                 Various Characters          Main cast (182 episodes)

1969      The Governor & J.J.         Garrett Spaulding             Episode: "Romeo and J.J."

1972      Once Upon a Mattress   Sir Studley           TV movie

1973      Marcus Welby, M.D.       Eric Lundgren     Episode: "The Day After Forever"

1973      The Barbara Eden Show                 Barry Michaels Television pilot

1973      Letters from Three Lovers             Sam       TV movie

1975      The New Original Wonder Woman           Major Steve Trevor          TV movie

1976      Maude Jim         Episode: "The Case of the Broken Punch Bowl"

1976–1979          Wonder Woman / The New Adventures of Wonder Woman         Major Steve Trevor (1976–77)

Colonel Steve Trevor Jr. (1977–79)            Main cast (59 episodes)

1977      The Love Boat II                Roger    TV movie

1977      The San Pedro Beach Bums          Jason     Episode: "Love Boat Bums: The Bums Take a Cruise"

1978      Flying High          Gavin     Episode: "Fun Flight"

1979      The Love Boat    Lance Wilson      Episode: "Second Time Around"

1979      Supertrain           Peter Sebastian                 Episode: "A Very Formal Heist"

1979      Time Express      David Lane          Episode: "The Copy-Writer/The Figure Skater"

1979      The Love Boat    Jay Cavanaugh   Episode: "The Scoop"

1980      The Gossip Columnist     Terry Anderson TV movie

1980      The Great American Traffic Jam Wilbur Stokes    TV movie

1980      Happy Days         Bobby Burns       Episode: "Dreams Can Come True"

1980      Fantasy Island    Monty   Episode: "Gigolo"

1980      Charlie's Angels                 Jack Barrows      Episode: "Island Angels"

1981      Bulba     Hampton Fraser                Television pilot

1981      Mork & Mindy   Xerko    Episode: "There's a New Mork in Town"

1981      Fantasy Island    Gilberto DeVincenzo       Episode: "The Perfect Husband"

1982      The Ugily Family               Kenny Bing          Television pilot

1982      The Love Boat    Dr. Tucker Martin             Episode: "A Dress to Remember"

1982      Romance Theatre             Jeremy Episodes: "The Simple Truth" (Parts 1–5)

1983      Fantasy Island    Al            Episode: "No Friends Like Old Friends"

1983      Gun Shy               The Masked Stranger     Episode: "What Do You Mean 'We' Amigo?"

1984      Happy Days         Frederick Hamilton          Episode: "Like Mother, Like Daughter"

1984      Murder, She Wrote         Marty Strindberg              Episode: "Hooray for Homicide"

1985      The Great American Strip-off      Himself - Host   

1986      Hardcastle and McCormick           Dex Falcon          Episode: "If You Could See What I See"

1986      Simon & Simon Don Manning     Episode: "The Last Big Break"

1986      The New Mike Hammer                 Leo Raffle            Episode: "Requiem for Billy"

1987      It's a Living          Marlon Brando / Hector Rodriquez           Episode: "Her Back to the Future"

1990      The Golden Girls               Himself                 Episode: "Mrs. George Devereaux"

1991      Murder, She Wrote         Vic DeMarco      Episode: "Where Have You Gone, Billy Boy?"

1993      Murder, She Wrote         Ben Wright         Episode: "The Big Kill"

1993      Daddy Dearest   Hank      Episode: "Thanks, But No Thanks"

1995      Burke's Law        Reece Robertson              Episode: "Who Killed Mr. Game Show?"

1995      Cybill     Himself                 Episode: "The Cheese Stands Alone"

1996      Ellen      Vic          Episode: "Not So Great Expectations"

1997      Pauly     Master of Ceremonies   Episode: "Life's a Drag"

1998      Alright Already Himself                 Episode: "Again with the Satellite Dish"

1998      The Naked Truth               Himself                 Episode: "Hooked on Heroine"

1999      Love Boat: The Next Wave           Tom Brooks        Episode: "Three Stages of Love"

1999      That '70s Show Himself                 Episode: "Red's Last Day"

2003      Return to the Batcave: The Misadventures of Adam and Burt        Himself - Narrator            TV movie

2003      Living Straight    Robert Cord        TV movie

2005      The War at Home             Jack        Episode: "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do", (final appearance)