My first day on the set I’m here with Don, your daddy, and I didn’t know spit about him. I had done some television, but I was a theatre baby. They said, ‘Come in and hit your mark,’ and your father saw the consternation. And I went, ‘Hit what mark? Is somebody marked with an X, and I hit them?’ And your daddy came over to me and said, ‘There will be a mark on the floor.’ I said, ‘What kind of mark?’ He said, ‘It’ll be a big X you can see.’ I said, ‘Do I look down?’ He said, ‘Not if you’re smart. You just go for that. You’ll see it, peripherally.’ Of course, that made me nervous as hell. I could tell he was being very kind. And he said under his breath so everybody wouldn’t hear him, ‘We now have a dummy working here with us.’ And he looked at me in that funny-brilliant way, that only he could do. You know, that befuddled look? I just stared, and they were filming. Of course, the directors said, ‘Cut!’ And your father said, ‘I think you’re going to be trouble on this picture.’ Because every time he looked at me, I would laugh. He was so serious about comedy.
The scene where I’m saying goodbye to Limpet—well, that’s a fish, okay?
[They were filming in the studio tank. There was a red ball in the water. The director, Arthur Lubin, told her, ‘Talk to the red ball, because we’ll take the red ball out of the sea and we’ll draw in Limpet the fish.’]
Well, my problem was Don was in a little rowboat over to my right. So he would talk to me—it was his voice. I couldn’t get used to talking to the red ball. My tendency was to turn right and talk to Don all the time. We were on break, and he said, ‘Somebody get a brace for her neck.’ Your father was very quiet on the set. He’d do those asides to me, which I wanted to kill him for! But basically, he was very sincere and earnest about the work. He didn’t have to prove anything. When he was on, he was funny. Don was like nobody else; he was unique and original.
You know, it’s amazing how The Incredible Mr Limpet has lasted all these years. It’s like a cult movie. I remember when it had just been on television. I was getting off the plane in El Paso, and there were some teenagers. They started screaming, ‘There’s Mrs Limpet!’ I said, ‘Kids, you’re all in the will.’ The fact they could recognise me after all those years—I said, ‘I’m gonna adopt you all.’
-Carole Cook in an interview with Don’s daughter, Karen Knotts, as featured in her memoir, Tied Up in Knotts: My Dad and Me (2021)
𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・ 𓆩♡𓆪 𓆩♡𓆪 · ・
In Loving Memory of Carole Cook
(14 JAN 1924 – 11 JAN 2023)
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