Bob Denver’s Wife Reveals What He Was Really Like Off-Camera
To millions of Americans, Bob Denver will always be Gilligan, the lovable, bumbling first mate in the red shirt and white sailor hat. But to his wife, Dreama Denver, who shared 30 years of her life with him, the man behind the character was someone quite different. In a recent interview, she opened up about how they met, who Bob really was, and how he came to make peace with the role that defined his career.
A Little Help From His Mother
Their love story began on a stage. Dreama was cast opposite Bob in a theater production, and before rehearsals had even gotten underway, she found an unexpected ally: Bob’s mother.
Mrs. Denver pulled her aside and said, in so many words, “Come here. I’m going to tell you how you’re going to land him.” Dreama was stunned. But Bob’s mother had a plan, complete with pointers. Call him and ask for a ride to the theater. Say your car won’t start.
“Mrs. Denver, I can’t do that,” Dreama told her.
“Yes, you can,” his mother insisted.
So Dreama took some of the advice, without telling any lies. She never claimed her car wouldn’t start when it would. But she did tell Bob she’d love a ride, so they could run lines together on the way.
It worked. From the moment they shook hands and said hello, Dreama said, the connection was immediate. It lasted 30 years. “It was the real thing,” she said.
He Was Nothing Like Gilligan
Acting opposite her future husband could have been confusing, but Dreama said she never had trouble separating Bob from Gilligan, because the two were so different.
She remembers one early evening, back when Gilligan’s Island seemed to air after school on every channel, many times a day. They were getting ready to leave for the theater, and an episode came on TV. They sat down to watch, and Dreama kept looking back and forth between the man on the screen and the man sitting beside her. She couldn’t make the two match.
Bob had Gilligan’s sweetness, she said, and there had to be some Gilligan in him somewhere to play the part. But he was highly intelligent and very low-key. He wasn’t a klutz, and he didn’t mess things up all the time. Even his voice was different. When he played Gilligan, he used a higher register. In real life, Bob had a great, deep voice.
From Maynard to Gilligan
Bob genuinely liked Gilligan, Dreama said. He was proud of the role.
Before Gilligan’s Island, he had played Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Dreama calls Maynard the first geek on television. He was the breakout star of that show, much as the Fonz was on Happy Days, and afterward Bob had his choice of scripts.
When producer Sherwood Schwartz offered him the role of Gilligan, Bob loved the premise. Dobie Gillis had been written by Max Shulman, a prolific and highly respected writer, and it was built on verbal comedy. Gilligan’s Island was mostly physical comedy, which Bob loved. He always felt he had the best of both worlds: he got to do great verbal comedy and great physical comedy.
The Weight of Typecasting
But there was a downside. By the time Dreama met Bob, he was 42, and Gilligan’s Island had ended when he was 33. Like any actor, he wanted to stretch and try new things. But he was so strongly identified with Gilligan that it frustrated him, at least at first.
Dreama remembers when that changed. It was around the time they met, in the days when people still wrote letters by hand. Bob began receiving piles of mail from adults who had been children during the show’s original run. Many of them wrote about growing up in painful situations, with an alcoholic parent, an abusive parent, or some other hardship. Gilligan’s Island, they told him, had been their escape after school. It was their safe place.
When email arrived, the messages came even faster. People wrote to thank him for saving them.
Bob was shocked. The show had been meant as a silly little comedy for the 8 o’clock time slot. He never imagined it could have that kind of impact. That was when his feelings changed. If this is all I ever do in my life, he told himself, I did something good. From then on, Dreama said, he embraced Gilligan and was grateful for it.
“Who’s That?”
The show had a remarkable afterlife. It ran in reruns constantly through the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and into the early 2000s, and spawned TV movies along the way. Dreama said she recently read that MeTV is bringing it back.
But eventually, the reruns faded. Dreama remembers the exact moment she realized it. In 2006, the year after Bob died, she went to see the American Idol tour, the year Taylor Hicks won. She was taken backstage for a meet-and-greet and introduced to singer Mandisa as the wife of Bob Denver, the star of Gilligan’s Island.
“Who’s that?” Mandisa asked.
It was the first time Dreama had ever heard anyone say that. “Okay,” she thought. “Now it starts.” Still, she noted, the show had stayed in the public eye for more than 40 years after it first aired in 1964. That’s a very long run.
Every Fan Got Their Moment
Bob was a private person, but Dreama said he was always gracious with fans. There were a few moments he didn’t enjoy, such as fans interrupting him while he was eating. Even then, he stayed kind.
Early in their relationship, he told her something that always stuck with her. It didn’t matter whether someone had walked across the street or flown across the country to meet him. However they got there, this was their moment with Gilligan, and he was not going to take it away from them.
So he took extra time with everyone. If people brought their children, he connected with the kids and let them ask questions. He answered anything people wanted to know, including the old favorite: where did the Howells get all those clothes? At book signings and events, organizers often had to move the line along because Bob spent so much time with each person.
Dreama found that deeply kind. It might not seem like a big deal to someone else, she said, but those fans came hoping for a photo and a chance to ask the question they had wondered about for years. That mattered to him.
The Most Surprising Thing About Bob
Asked what would surprise people most about her husband, Dreama didn’t hesitate: his intelligence.
Bob was very smart and well-read, she said, and that was the part of him that didn’t match Gilligan at all. He could talk to anyone about anything.
He was also endlessly curious, a quality he shared with Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann and was a close friend of Dreama’s for about 45 years. Dreama admits she never felt as curious as the two of them, though she wishes she were, because it was such an appealing trait.
If a repairman came to the house to work on the heat pump, Bob would be outside with him, asking how it worked, what he was doing, and what made him choose that line of work. He was genuinely interested in everyone.
That’s why, Dreama said, he could be completely comfortable anywhere. The couple was invited to the White House twice during the Clinton administration, and Bob was at ease talking with the president. He was just as comfortable chatting with the man selling him paint at Lowe’s.
To the world, he was Gilligan. To the people who knew him, he was a smart, curious, deeply kind man who learned, in the end, that a silly little comedy had given countless children a safe place to land.
