‘Love at First Sight’: Dreama Denver on the Real Man Behind ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Legend Bob Denver (EXCLUSIVE)
The widow of 'Gilligan’s Island' star Bob Denver opens up about their lasting love and legacy
If you’ve spent any time watching the stranded castaways of Gilligan’s Island, have you ever given any thought to what it would be like living in a “confined” space like that with Bob Denver‘s Gilligan? Or, taking an even bigger leap, being in love with him?
That certainly never occurred to young teen Dreama Diane Perry during the show’s original 1964 to 1967 run as she watched the series with her father. When reflecting on that, she laughs, “Even now, it’s so freaky to think about. It’s not like I watched the show thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to marry him.'”
How Dreama Denver met Bob Denver after ‘Gilligan’s Island’
And it wasn’t something that remotely crossed her mind in the late 1970s when Dreama, an actress herself, auditioned for a stage production of Woody Allen’s Play It Again Sam in Florida. “A friend I was visiting said, ‘You’d be great for the part; you should try out for it.’ So, I did and then I asked the producer who was starring in the show and she said, ‘Bob Denver.’ I looked at her for a minute: ‘Gilligan? Seriously? I’m going to have to do love scenes with Gilligan?’ She said, ‘If you want the part, yes.’ Well, I wanted the part.”
That decision quite literally changed her life, as she discovered the moment that Bob walked into rehearsal and they were introduced. Smiles Dreama, “I don’t know what to call it… love at first sight? More like lust at first sight. There was just an immediate attraction when we shook hands and looked at each other and, without saying it out loud, both of us were thinking, ‘There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.’ And we were together for 30 years. It definitely wasn’t one of those 72-day Kardashian marriages.”
Bob Denver’s private life beyond Gilligan: husband, father, hero
The depth of their love certainly comes through as Dreama reflects on their time together. The setting for this exclusive conversation with Woman’s World is Mayberry Days, Mount Airy, North Carolina’s annual celebration of The Andy Griffith Show, on which Bob Denver had appeared in a single episode. Obviously more than enough for fans to celebrate the fact that Dreama was there representing him.
“Bob was wonderful. Of course I would think that,” she laughs, “but he truly was a good human being. I wrote a book called Gilligan’s Dreams, because after he passed away, it was cathartic for me. But I also wanted people to know him, not as Gilligan or Maynard Krebs from Dobbie Gillis (who’s my favorite, by the way).” It should be noted that she has authored a number of different books.
One of the revelations from that book was the fact that Bob was the father of an autistic son. Born in 1984, Colin Denver was diagnosed with severe autism two years later, with Bob immediately putting his career aside. “People,” points out Dreama, “would write to the website back in the early days of the internet, asking, ‘Where did you go? Why aren’t you around anymore?’ They had no idea what he was dealing with.
“People ask me, ‘What was he like at home?’ It’s not like he was falling out of hammocks and getting hit in the head with coconuts. He was exceptionally intelligent and people don’t connect that with Gilligan. I didn’t either at first, but he was so well-read and had such a good heart. He loved his boy and loved me.”
She recalls a time that the three of them traveled to Philadelphia for a program for families of children with autism, for which people attended from all over the world. “We’d go back every four months,” she says. “The first time we went, the conference hall was full. When we returned for the first revisit, it was half-empty. So many men had bailed, telling their wives, ‘We can’t do this.’ Bob wasn’t like that. When we made our vows, we meant every word—for better and for worse. And he lived that. It was lovely to be married to someone like that. Twenty year later, I miss him every day. I just want to make him proud; that’s been my aim since he passed away, to help carry on his legacy and his memory.”
Making peace with his legacy
When Dreama met Bob Denver in 1977, Gilligan’s Island had been off the air for a decade, though reruns were already keeping the show alive in syndication. For Bob, life after the island hadn’t been easy, the character that made him famous confining him in ways few outside the industry could appreciate.
“Bob was only about 32 or 33 when the show went off the air,” points out Dreama. “And all actors want to stretch; they don’t want to be known as just one thing. It was hard for him in the beginning.”
He had gone on to star in the 1968-1970 sitcom The Good Guys with Herb Edelman and Joyce Van Patten, but it was scheduled opposite The Brady Bunch—another Sherwood Schwartz creation—and never found its audience. From there came 1973-1974’s Dusty’s Trail, co-starring F Troop‘s Forrest Tucker, and then the 1975 Saturday morning live action series Far Out Space Nuts. Observes Dreama, “Everything, again, was like Gilligan’s Island on a wagon train or in space. He was playing the cab driver, the buddy character, and I think he railed against it.”
But by the time Dreama came into his life, he had made peace with his peculiar kind of fame, both the good and the bad. “He would get loads of mail—so many letters—and when we finally settled somewhere and the mail could reach us, it was unbelievable,” she recalls. “People would write saying the show saved their lives. Some grew up in alcoholic or abusive homes, and they said when Gilligan’s Island came on, that was their safe place. Their parents would sit them in front of the TV and for that half-hour they could laugh and be happy.”
And those letters seriously impacted him. “He started to realize that this wasn’t just some little show in an eight o’clock time slot,” says Dreama. “It really meant something to people. And he started to go, ‘It’s not bad to have been part of something that meant this much to people.’”
Through everything, he never lost sight of how he wanted to treat those fans who wrote or came to see him. “One thing he told me early on when I met him always stuck with me,” she remembers. “He said, ‘I don’t care if people have to walk across the street from a hotel to see me or if they flew across the country—it doesn’t matter. This is their moment, and I want to make sure they get their moment.’ And he always did. If they had a question, he answered it. If they had kids, he’d stop to talk to them. The little ones used to call him ‘Giggling’ — they couldn’t say ‘Gilligan.’ He was never curt, never short with anyone. I admired that so much.”
‘Island’ reunions
Part of the actor’s coming to terms with his alter ego was his enthusiasm over reprising the role in a trio of Gilligan’s Island reunion movies between 1978 and 1981 as well as a pair of animated series, The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan’s Planet.
Dreama says. “He was real excited about Rescue from Gilligan’s Island, because that was 15 years later, and I was with him for that. It was my first time on a Hollywood soundstage, so that was fun for me, too. You know, he used to tell me, ‘If you want to make something happen in this town, you talk as if it’s already happening.’ He’d be out there saying, ‘Oh yeah, I think there’s going to be a Gilligan movie one day,’ and sure enough, eventually there was.”
The Castaways on Gilligan’s Island didn’t work as well as the first film, but he enjoyed doing it. “He would be the first to admit that the concept didn’t stretch into a two-hour premise,” states Dreama. “It was a half -hour show and you could keep things moving for that, but at two hours it kind of dragged.”
Dreama herself even got pulled into the franchise. “The third one I was in—The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island,” she says proudly. “I got to play Mrs. Howell’s social secretary. My name was Lucinda, and if you wanted to get to her, you had to come through me. I was southern, and it was fun.”
Filming the Globetrotters special was as surreal as it was memorable. “I had no idea what I was doing, but now I look back and go, ‘Wow, those were the original Globetrotters—Goose, Curly, and Meadowlark,” she enthuses. “They were wonderful and so much fun, but the whole movie had things going against it. Jim [Backus] got very sick and couldn’t do it, so they wrote in a new character, Thurston Howell IV, played by David Ruprecht, who did a great job. But they gave the Globetrotters all this acting to do, and they weren’t actors. We girls had to play basketball with them—we didn’t know what we were doing! We were just running around throwing the ball.”
Despite its flaws, she looks back on the experience fondly: “It didn’t do well, but at the same time, it’s almost like a cult classic now—one of those ‘so bad it’s good’ things. It was great fun, though, and it brought Bob so much joy just to be back with everyone again.”
She also witnessed his fascination with animation firsthand. “He really was in awe of it,” she recalls. “When they did Gilligan’s Planet, I went with him. Tina [Louise] would never do those things, so Dawn Wells did both parts—Mary Ann and Ginger. But was really fun. We even went to see the artist drawing Bob’s character, flipping through the pages so we could see him move, and it was fascinating to watch.”
Overcoming financial challenges
Despite the fact that Gilligan’s Island has essentially been on the air since the show debuted in 1964, many believe that Bob Denver and the rest of the cast (Alan Hale Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schaefer, Tina Louse, Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells) were set for life financially. For all the public misconceptions about television riches, the reality was quite different.
“People think if you were on TV as long as he was that you’re a millionaire,” she said. “But there were no residuals for Gilligan’s Island. When Bob started the show, I think he made $750 a week the first season, $1,250 the second and maybe $1,500 the third. His contract even said that regardless of how the show was used into perpetuity, they wouldn’t owe him anything.”
As a result, money was definitely tight for the Denver family, though somehow things worked out. Reflects Dreama, “We lived in a little tract home out in the desert in Las Vegas before the first boom, doing a program with Colin, working with him to try to help him get better. I remember one time the rent was coming due, and we were looking at a bank account that was very scarce. We wondered how we were going to do it that month.”
Then, in one of those uncanny twists of fate, a lifeline appeared. “They called him for a McDonald’s commercial with Buddy Ebsen, Barbara Billingsley, Don Adams — all classic TV stars,” she says. “They filmed it downtown at a McDonald’s they used just for commercials. I remember they paid 10 grand for that, and it was exactly what we needed. It kept us going. So it was always like that. We always had what we needed—maybe not a lot extra, but enough.”
By the time the couple worked together again in 1982’s Scamps, an NBC pilot that never went to series, they were used to Hollywood’s unpredictable rhythms. “It was Bob and me and Dena Dietrich, and nine children—the youngest of which was Joey Lawrence,” Dreama recalls. “Joey went on Johnny Carson to promote the show. Johnny asked, ‘What’s your favorite thing about doing this new show?’ and Joey said, ‘Dreama Denver.’ Johnny had no idea who he was talking about, but it was so cute. I’ve kept that clip all these years.”
Finding purpose after loss
Following Bob’s 2005 passing, Dreama found herself suddenly adrift. “After Bob died, I was lost,” she admits. “I didn’t know what to do, but about five years after he died, I started coming into my own.” What followed was a new chapter built on the same compassion and resilience that had defined her marriage—a period where she redirected her love for Bob and their son into helping others.
“In West Virginia where I live, I started the Honor Flight program,” she explains. “It’s a national program that honors our World War II veterans with free trips to Washington, D.C., to see the memorial. When I started the West Virginia hub back in 2010, we spent a decade taking veterans to D.C., and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. To spend time with them and hear their stories, not from a movie or a history book, but straight from them,was something I’ll always cherish.”
She says the experience changed her: “It was such a privilege to be able to do that and honor them. It gave me something outside myself to focus on. And I learned that when you step outside your own pain to help somebody else, it heals you in ways nothing else can.”
Philanthropy became the foundation of her new identity. “I have a little nonprofit radio station,” she details. “It’s a good station—great music, really eclectic. I had a morning show at one time, and I started a campaign to have ‘Country Roads Take Me Home’ adopted as West Virginia’s official state song. It took two years to get it done. The first year it passed the House but not the Senate. The second year, it passed unanimously. The governor called me and they had me come to the capitol. There were choirs singing the song—it was such a celebration.”
That passion for service and connection helped her navigate years of uncertainty and grief. “I was so scared when Bob died,” she says. “I was left by myself with a 20-year-old special-needs son. I couldn’t make the kind of money he could make, and I was terrified. I really was sent to my knees many times.” But slowly, she began to see her way forward. “What I found through all those things was that when you do something for the greater good, it gets you outside yourself and outside your pain. You can keep going.”
Faith became her anchor. “I give God the glory, truly, because I couldn’t have gotten as far as I have without Him. In the first 10 years after Bob was gone, I didn’t understand that. I gave Bob all the credit. I’d say, ‘He’s looking out for me.’ But then about 10 years in, I looked back and thought, ‘Wow, I can see where God’s hand was in all of this.’”
She’s deeply aware of her blessings. “No, I don’t have a million dollars,” she says, “but I’ve always had what I needed. My son has a roof over his head, and he has incredible caregivers. His main caregiver, David, has been with him for 22 years. That’s unheard of.”
Colin, now 41, continues to make remarkable progress. “My son was in the hospital three times in a matter of months,” Dreama relates, “and miracles have resulted from that. I’ve waited 41 years to be able to sit at a mall food court and have mac and cheese with him. We’ve done that now, several times. We go to parks, state parks, even to the horse corral at Pipestem State Park where he got to pet a horse for the first time in his life. I could cry just talking about it; it’s one miracle after another.”
Inside the upcoming documentary ‘iHeart Bob Denver’
Two decades after losing her husband, Dreama Denver has become the keeper of his story—not just the beloved actor fans remember, but the man behind the red shirt and sailor’s cap. That mission has taken many forms. She founded the Denver Foundation to assist families caring for individuals with special needs, honoring both Bob and their son Colin, and she continues to engage with fans, appearing at events like Mayberry Days—where she’s quick to remind everyone that, despite his short time in Mayberry, Bob was part of that world, too. Although, to be fair, it’s something they’re already well aware of.
And she continues to find new ways to celebrate that legacy. “We’re working on a documentary right now called iHeart Bob Denver,” she points out. “It’s based on my book Gilligan’s Dreams and really tells the story of him as a father and as a husband. For me, his legacy is the man that he was, not the actor. It’s the father and husband who really put everything aside for his family. That’s what he loved most and that’s what he’d want people to remember.”
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