Both the mining sequence and the Ellsworth-dog conversation were miserable experiences. The mine set was near Frazier Park, some seventy-five miles north of Los Angeles and nearly fifty north of our set at Melody Ranch in Newhall. The day we shot these scenes, it was cold. Frazier Park is up in the low mountains. It was bitter that day, with a brisk, sometimes brutal, wind. There were a great number of atmosphere players who'd been hired to do the shower-inspection sequence, paid extra for the nudity required, but scores of those people quit when they realized they'd have to be doused in cold water in that freezing wind. David, as I recall, coughed up a substantial amount of additional money from his own pocket to persuade a handful of men to stick with the job, and it was those brave souls you see on screen. The wind chill was far below freezing that day. I was swathed in layers and layers of thermal wear and it was still the coldest I have ever been at work. But I wasn't naked under water. To add to the misery, one of the men, a stuntman, not only had to endure the water, but had to run naked across wet, rocky ground and do a forward fall onto the ground when shot. If you look closely at the last close shot of him lying "dead," you can see him shivering. I'd love to say I'd have had the guts to have done something like that, but I cannot imagine ever agreeing to.
The naked guys weren't the only ones shivering. As I said, I was chilled to the core, even in thick clothing. It was all I could do to get my words out without my jaw shaking. To add to the distress, we had to do the scene many more times than usual because the dog was shaking so much he had trouble staying focused on his trainer. Everyone asks me about that dog, and I guess people are charmed by Ellsworth's relationship with it. But I hated doing scenes with the dog, because when you're working with an animal or a kid, it doesn't matter if you're John Freaking Gielgud in your scene, if the dog or cat or baby isn't looking at the right spot, they'll do the scene over and over until it is, and that's the take they'll print, whether you like what you did or not. It was always difficult with that dog, but especially so on that freezing day. It was a great dramatic device having me do monologues to the dog, but I'd have loved to trade soliloquy partners with Ian. His Indian head never shivered or looked in the wrong direction. Plus, I think the dog drank. (I'll have more to say about that little bastard when we get to my last monologue in the series in season three.)
Tim Van Patten directed this episode. It was the first time I'd ever worked with him. I didn't know him previously, but his half-brother Dick Van Patten is a friend of mine, a close buddy of my father-in-law Don Adams, and Tim knew my wife and her family very well. The scene in which Ellsworth proposes to Alma was my first scene to shoot in the episode, and Tim and I discussed my wife Cecily's death not long before. He knew of it, of course, but hadn't made the connection to me. We were talking about that part of my life as they set up lights for the proposal scene, and suddenly Tim said, "Oh, jeez, Ellsworth's wife died, too! How can they make you play this?" During that episode a lot of people expressed their concerns that David and the writers were perhaps being thoughtless or even exploitive by giving me lines to say about losing my wife so soon after it had happened to me in real life. But I said to them, as I've said to everyone, that it was not a burden, indeed it was a blessing. With that glorious scene, I was given a gift few actors get, the possibility of making some small good come from something terrible, of fashioning a tiny silk purse from the most enormous sow's ear. Indeed, when I first read the script, I went to David and said, "I know what you're doing here. Thank you." So much of our work as actors involves imagining how something would feel, or calling up some inexact similarity from life to crudely replicate an emotion. With this scene, I got to play closer to life than with any scene I've ever played before or since, and I consider it the greatest gift I've ever been given as a performer. Until you've been able to shift a tiny portion of some terrible heavy emotion over into the positive column, you may not be able to understand how blessed I felt with that scene.