- I straightened my own life out in my own time. Maybe I should have gone to rehab, but I didn't. A little man inside me said it was time to get my life in order.
- [on making $600 a week at Universal Studios] They put makeup on me, and that was the character. I used the back lot as my private little entertainment center.
- [on working on the Donna Douglas project] Believe it or not. I've had a hard time developing financing.
- Most of my memories weren't really while filming, but running around the back lot, going to the laboratory, where they were making all of the monsters for the other movies, in the makeup department, and the special effects department. That's what I enjoyed.
- [on Yvonne De Carlo, who was the last-minute replacement to play Lily Munster] I have to interject something here. I never really thought about this, but can you imagine the difference of The Munsters (1964) opening clip with Fred Gwynne as "Herman Munster" and then Joan Marshall as "Phoebe"? It doesn't have the same impact as Yvonne De Carlo as "Lily". I mean, they really got a good punch with Yvonne De Carlo. I was just sort of substituting for the other kid and I did a pretty good job, but I think that the real slip in the last-minute crew was getting Yvonne De Carlo, major screen star, to play television.
- [on his on- and off-screen chemistry with Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo While they were alive, we saw each other and it was always fun. We certainly had a good time when we worked together.
- [on Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo] They aren't just wonderful people, but they were really good actors and actresses, but they were nice people, as well, they made it fun to go to work with. And being the only kid, having the producers from Leave It to Beaver (1957), prior to that. It was a kid-friendly show.
- [on Yvonne De Carlo] Yvonne De Carlo had a husband who was a stuntman who was hurt, very, very badly [doing a stunt in] How The West Was Won (1962). His name was Bob Morgan. When that happened, [she] dropped into television, because she did The Ten Commandments (1956), she [worked for] Cecil B. DeMille, and when she did "The Munsters" (1965) it was really a step down for her, because she was a movie star. The movie stars didn't do television back then, so she had to become the breadwinner for her household, because her husband was hurt; and I thought she was a very strong woman to do that and she had her hands full [with] these two guys from New York, as they were practical jokers and pranksters. I think the fact that she was a movie star they took great fun in trying to annoy her. But she held her own and [ . . . ] became a strong matriarch of the family; and I think the fact that she was up, against the seven-foot-tall Frankenstein--6'3", Jewish, drafted in cigars--and held her own, so there was a lot about her character.
- [about Yvonne De Carlo's popularity in The Munsters (1964)] Yvonne was great, she was a very strong woman . . . I mean, she was a major movie star, she had literally been dating Howard Hughes and [Egyptian King Farouk] and Alu Khan and Chabi Ran and was gorgeous. By today's standards she [would be] considered a strong broad, and she was a tough chick; the thing was she held her own on that show and she was a very strong, maternal influence, who held everything together and it was a tough role for her, because back then movie stars weren't doing television. She stepped down into TV and made it her own and made it work and held her own, against two bona fide New York TV actors, who tortured her, who really took great joy in tormenting this "poor woman" for a while, and then they respected her, after they found out that she wasn't going anywhere and she was actually an asset, [because] they didn't think she could do comedy, and she did very well, her looks, and once she established herself, everything was great.
- [on his on- and off-screen chemistry with Yvonne De Carlo] Yvonne would be a maternal influence. She'd be a mom because my mom wasn't around, so she'd be a matriarch, not only on the show but when I'd see her outside of the makeup on Mondays and Tuesdays. Once in a while, she'd bring her kids down to the set.
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