Army and serving as a radio operator.īack 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. He briefly attended Washington University in St. 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.”īorn on April 13, 1935, Kyle Wesley Waggoner was a wrestler and a high jumper at Kirkwood High School in Missouri. Of course, he pretty much had to because it was Wonder Woman’s job to rescue him.
“Steve tried his best, but he always seemed to get himself into hot water. “He was a real gung-ho kind of guy,” Waggoner said of Trevor in a 2011 interview. (You couldn’t tell that Diana, being an Amazon, had aged at all.) Now Waggoner was playing Steve Trevor Jr., head of a CIA-type crime-fighting agency whose dad had been killed. 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. Waggoner was usually there to play “the handsome guy,” someone for Burnett to drool over.Īnd “If you needed a mounted policeman from Canada,” writer Arnie Kogen said, “Lyle was your man.”Ībout 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.
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. “So she had the big announcer person that she could play off of.” 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. (Producer Joe Hamilton, Burnett’s husband, was searching for a “Rock Hudson type.”)
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.
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