- Welcome back to another segment
of "Behind the Scenes of The Waltons."
Today, I have a special treat.
I am being joined
by Mary McDonough who played Erin Walton,
and Mary and I sat down recently
to talk about all things Waltons.
So here is Part One of that interview.
- So, welcome to my YouTube channel.
- Wait, and it's just like we're in Burbank Studios.
A huge airplane is flying over!
(Erin laughing)
- Oh, I know you were talking earlier about your gardener.
I can never remember what day the gardeners come,
and inevitably, every time I turn on my video,
they're going by in the background and cutting everything.
And I didn't realize there was that much to cut.
- I know.
I just thought it would be better to be outside,
'cause I usually do everything against a blank wall, right?
So, I have a lovely live oak for you here,
the viewer's pleasure.
- Yes!
- So, yeah, I think it's going away now.
- Kami did hers outside too.
And her hair was blowing around.
- Well, it's really hot here in Texas.
So, I have the fans on,
so my hair is gonna blow around
like I'm doing a 1980s photo shoot, but that's okay.
You guys'll get over it.
- It'll be very glamorous.
(Judy chuckling)
So, no, I really appreciate you taking some time out
of your day to come talk with me
and to share some things with all of our viewers,
who...
I'm amazed by all the types of creative questions
people ask me.
(Mary laughing)
- Well, you do such a good job with it.
And you're my sister.
Of course, I would show up anywhere you ask me to go.
- Oh.
Thank you. Thank you.
- Of course.
I mean, and you do such a great job,
and everybody loves these so much,
so I'm just glad to be here,
and I get to be part of it, finally.
- Well, thanks. Yeah.
So, sometime back,
I had someone ask me,
they said, it'll be really cool
if you recapped, sort of all the romances
on the series.
And I immediately thought of you.
I talked a little bit about mine,
but I had so few- - You had-
- But even then I missed some.
- You had romances.
- I, you know, I had a few early on.
- The paratrooper.
Did you talk about the paratrooper?
- Yeah. I mentioned him.
But of course Curt was a huge part of that.
- Yeah.
- And then after, there was David before Curt,
and then after Curt died, then you know, I wasn't-
- Jonesy!
- I wasn't dating anybody.
Then there was finally Jonesy.
- Richard Gilliland. - I know. I know.
- Love, loved Richard Gilliland.
- That was so heart-breaking.
- I know. I know.
- Yeah. Both of our, what is it about us?
Both of our, both of our husbands...
- I always say that Erin always kissed and cried a lot.
So, she always got dumped.
(Mary laughing)
So I dunno what that said about her or me,
but yeah, no.
So, like, so the first romance of course
was in "The Fawn,"
the little boy from school who brought Erin flowers
at the very end, and he was, he was very sweet,
but I was horrified,
absolutely mortified
to have any kind of a love interest at all.
And I was very young.
It made me very nervous.
It was, it was really scary.
And then as I got older,
'cause I didn't get your GW hand-me-down until later.
- I never kissed GW.
Did you know that?
- Oh!
- Yeah! No.
We were so young that we just played ball,
and we went to the Easter...
the dance that...
When I taught him, John Boy taught me to dance,
and then I taught GW to dance.
- You taught him how to dance. That was lovely.
So sweet.
Well, okay.
So, that was later.
And in between that, I had...
I eloped, of course, with Chad,
or Erin eloped.
- You stole Chad from me.
- Stole him from you!
- That was my opinion!
If it hadn't been for you, this is a story of my real life.
It's like, I...
Literally in elementary school,
there was a boy that I liked,
but he liked another girl in the class,
and I said something to her one time.
Oh, the boy wanted to know if she liked him.
And so I asked her, I said,
well he wants to know if you like him.
She goes, "Yes, because I don't want you to have him!"
(Mary gasps)
- Oh! Mean girls!
(Judy laughing)
That's horrible.
Well, and where is she now?
That's what I have to say. - I have no idea.
She's probably, she was gorgeous.
She's probably, like, you know,
a swimsuit model or something, you know?
- No, no, no. Something...
Well, so, yeah.
And you know.
And as we know at the end, you know,
Erin could have given him back to you,
but he wasn't bound to stay on the mountain.
But yes, because he was gonna go off and get nominated
for an Academy Award, so.
(Mary laughing)
So, Michael O'Keefe, yeah.
"The Great Santini."
He, that's what he ended up doing.
And he came to our 40th.
- Ah, the reunion.
- And so that was, like, good to see him.
But of course-
- You had a number of your former beaus at that.
- I did.
And my, and I don't think it's a secret
'cause I put it in my book,
like, my favorite to work with and in person
is Jonathan Frakes, who was Ashley Longworth Jr.
And he was, we just fit.
We had incredible chemistry.
And my biggest regret was that
they didn't wait for him to come back
and do the two-hour episode.
I'm sure all of you out there probably think,
yes, that was a horrible mistake.
(Mary laughing)
And they should have waited for him,
but he was doing a "Hart to Hart" in Hawaii.
So they recast,
and it just wasn't, it was just so difficult,
and we ended up looping most of it.
And they should have just waited for him,
because it didn't make sense, the storyline,
because you wouldn't see, why was Erin torn?
But if it was really Jonathan, you would've understood
because of the past history
and with the whole Paul Northridge kind of thing.
And, and I, I loved kissing Jonathan Frakes.
So I mean, we, we had a thing where the camera
almost knocked us over
because we started kissing,
and we were, we didn't know when we were supposed to stop.
'Cause they panned over to Miss Emily.
- Miss Emily, yeah.
- And she's standing at the right, but we had no idea.
And so they're tapping us like, um, you can stop now.
(Mary laughing)
He's like, oh! Oh!
We were just in character.
- Nobody said "cut."
(Judy laughing)
- Working, working.
Yeah, there was no cut.
So it was very, so Jonathan is great and fun,
and he was wonderful and charming,
and, you know, that's who I always wish
that they had put Erin back with,
that he had gotten his act together and he had come back
to the mountain and the Ashley Longworth thing.
And then I had, like, I had to kiss people all the time.
So, you know, remember when Henry Darrow did the show,
and he played the kind of slimy movie producer
when they came to film the World War II thing?
- Right.
- So he comes up to me, and we're filming,
and says, yeah, isn't it interesting
that we're gonna kiss?
I said, no we're not!
(Mary laughing)
He said, yeah!
You didn't get the revisions?
And I'm such a gullible, you know, person.
And I thought he was joking.
And no! It was rewritten!
He leans over and lays this kiss on her.
I was stunned.
- Wow.
- I was very stunned and shocked.
And then of course, Paul.
There was Paul Northridge.
Morgan, rest in peace.
And, and Morgan and I had fun too.
We had, we had a, we had a good time.
He would just, he teased me all the time,
and it was horrifying too.
All of them were horrifying.
I don't know why.
I think when you have your first kiss,
or your first kisses,
and they're in front of a camera,
in front of a crew of people who've known you
since you, you know, were 10, 11,
and you know, it's just like having
all of your uncles and cousins there watching you
kiss a boy.
It's just wrong.
(Mary laughing)
And I had such terrible,
such a terrible love life in real life,
that doing stuff on the show
was always very challenging for me.
- Hm.
Well, I know that I was always kinda like, oh!
Now who's Mary dating?
Oh. And now she's dating...
I was just always, like, wow.
She just, you just had this,
like, what seemed like the perfect Hollywood love life.
And I was kind like, oh, you know,
I'm just kind of dating regular guys.
- Off camera?
- Yeah.
- Off camera?
- Yeah!
You dated, you dated actors.
I didn't date actors.
- Yeah. That you were smart.
You were smart.
- I know. I went back and forth.
- Never date actors.
- Oh, you think that they're gonna understand,
and yet then it ends up on the rare occasion I did it,
it's like there's this competitiveness
if you're a woman and you're successful,
and your career is more successful than theirs,
then it can be, I found, problematic.
So, but then I'd date regular people,
and I'd be like, well, but they don't understand.
It's like, what do you mean you can't be home by...
You know, what do you mean we can't plan something?
'Cause of course with our life, you couldn't...
So it's like, well, can we go to this thing on...
You know, it's like, I don't know.
I might work late.
- Yep.
I was really smart.
But see, I married someone who is not an actor at all
but very funny.
Who's actually at the window right now.
(Judy and Mary laughing)
- Hi, Don!
Well, we both ultimately married wonderful men.
So happy endings for both of us.
- Yes, we did.
Like normal people, I don't know.
- Yeah. - Yours, yes.
Maybe not mine.
Mine's goofy and silly and wonderful.
But, but yeah.
So, yeah, I dated actors,
but I also had,
and I don't know if I should, like, even say this,
but I used to go everywhere with Jimmy Van Patten.
He was my Hollywood date, and he was perfect,
because he knew more people at the events than I did.
And we were great.
And I, and he wasn't really a date-date.
He was just a really good friend.
And so they, what I did was, I hid my private life
behind my public Jimmy Van Patten dating life.
And so I had my very first love,
and I didn't take him anywhere,
but people kept saying, who are you dating?
Who are you dating?
And so I would bring Jimmy, and he was, it was perfect,
because I really felt that my first love was private.
And I didn't want to share him with everybody.
- I wanna thank Mary for joining me.
And we will be back with more
of that time that we spent together
in another segment very soon.
So thanks for joining us.
And I'll see you next time
for more "Behind the Scenes of The Waltons,"
more "Ask Judy" and more with Mary McDonough.
Thanks for watching.