To be a television star is to be America’s sweetheart, a subject of many people’s untiring interest. It’s quite literally a whole different world and that comes with ramifications – some fun surprises and some unwelcome transformations. Television actor Mark Goddard found out firsthand Hollywood bachelor life was nothing but trouble for him.
Goddard was 87 when he died on October 10 from pulmonary fibrosis, leaving behind a celebrated career on television, which saw him star as Chris Ballard in The Detectives and as Major Don West in Lost in Space. But along the way, he was told about the cunning strategizing actors did to raise themselves above the competition; courtships were about networking, not love, and in this lifestyle, relationships were a currency Goddard hated paying in.
Mark Goddard hated the life of a Hollywood bachelor
Just under a month into his venture into Hollywood, Goddard enjoyed a solid landing in Johnny Ringo, which officially put him on the map. He was still a newcomer but he was a newcomer producers wanted to work with, and so Goddard had plenty of options. He ended up choosing The Detective, in which he would appear from ‘60 to ‘62.
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Although casting teams knew they could count on him, he was still a relatively unfamiliar face to audiences; he needed more easy publicity, Goddard was told by his PR team, and so he was advised to date some other celebrities and get caught in the spotlight even when the cameras weren’t rolling. His first arranged date was with Sandra Dee and it began with Goddard feeling incredibly awkward picking her up in a limo without either of them knowing each other.
The experience left a bad taste in Goddard’s mouth
Even more than the awkwardness of an arranged, seemingly hollow date, Goddard hated the manipulative feel of this maneuver.
“I felt like a parasite,” he said in an interview with The Sunday News in 1961. “I’ve never seen Sandra since.” In his view, following through with that date had been a way of using Dee simply to bolster his own fame and Goddard resented every bit of it.
Thanks to the efforts of his PR team, this was not an isolated incident. “I had a different date each time,” he bemoaned. “It was pretty terrible. Hollywood is no place for a bachelor.”
It just so happened that he eventually met the woman he would marry during this whirlwind approach to marriage; he and press agent Marcia Rogers were married from ‘60 to ‘68. He then married television, film, and theatre actress Susan Anspach, and the two similarly stayed together for eight years before Goddard married Evelyn Pezzulich in 1990, and with whom he stayed until the end of his life.