You know, people always ask me if the set of MAS*H was as much of a madhouse as it looked on television.

They see the hijinks of Hawkeye and Trapper and they assume we were all just sitting around in Malibu having the time of our lives while the cameras happened to be rolling.

The truth is, it was often a very grueling, dusty, and incredibly hot place to work.

We were out there at the Fox Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, and when that California sun hit those olive drab tents, the temperature would climb past a hundred degrees before lunch.

But you’re right, the energy was different than any other show I’ve ever worked on.

We had to find ways to keep ourselves from going stir-crazy, especially during those long afternoon stretches when the heat was making everyone a little bit irritable.

I remember sitting in a podcast interview a few years back, and the host asked me about the single funniest day I ever had playing Henry Blake.

I didn’t even have to think about it.

My mind went immediately to a Tuesday in the middle of the second season.

We were filming a scene in Henry’s office, which was basically a plywood set inside a canvas tent that trapped every bit of humidity.

I was supposed to be having a serious, frustrated conversation on the phone with General Hammond while Hawkeye and Trapper stood in the background, being their usual disruptive selves.

Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers were notorious for being the primary instigators of trouble on that set.

They had this unspoken language of mischief that usually involved making me break character.

On this particular day, they seemed unusually quiet during the lighting setup, which should have been my first warning.

They were huddled together near the liquor cabinet prop, whispering like two schoolboys planning to put a frog in the teacher’s desk.

I just figured they were working on a joke for the next scene, so I ignored them and focused on my lines.

The director called for everyone to take their places, and the set went quiet.

I sat down at my desk, adjusted my fishing hat, and waited for the cue.

There was a strange, heavy tension in the air that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

Wayne was looking at me with this very specific, wide-eyed expression of pure innocence.

I took a deep breath, reached for the receiver, and prepared to deliver my first line of the afternoon.

The moment I pulled that heavy black plastic receiver to my face, my entire world changed.

It wasn’t a sound or a movement that did it.

It was a smell.

But calling it a smell is like calling a hurricane a light breeze.

It was an invisible wall of pure, unadulterated rot that hit me right in the nostrils and the back of my throat at the same time.

Now, remember, we are under hot studio lights in a tent that is already a hundred degrees.

I had the phone pressed against my ear and my mouth was inches away from the mouthpiece.

Inside that mouthpiece, Alan and Wayne had carefully packed several pieces of old, oily sardines and a generous portion of Limburger cheese that had been sitting in the sun all morning.

The heat had activated the oils in the fish, creating a localized atmospheric disaster right where I had to breathe.

I felt my stomach do a slow, agonizing flip.

My eyes immediately began to water, not out of emotion, but out of a biological necessity to protect themselves from the fumes.

The director yelled, Action!

I opened my mouth to say, Yes, General, this is Blake, but what came out was a sort of strangled, wet wheeze.

I looked up, and there were Alan and Wayne.

They weren’t even trying to hide it anymore.

Wayne was leaned over, clutching his stomach, his face turning a deep shade of purple from trying to suppress his laughter.

Alan was doing this weird little dance where he was shaking his head and pointing at me, tears streaming down his face.

I tried to be a professional. I really did.

I closed my eyes, held my breath, and tried to deliver the line again.

But as soon as I inhaled through my nose to get the air for the sentence, the sardine-cheese cocktail hit my lungs.

I let out a sound that I can only describe as a dying walrus trying to cough up a harmonica.

The director, who couldn’t smell what I was smelling from his chair, started shouting.

McLean, what is the matter with you? Are you having a stroke?

I couldn’t answer him. I just pointed at the phone and then at the two idiots standing across from me.

At that point, the sound mixer, who was wearing heavy headphones, suddenly ripped them off his head and started gagging.

He had heard my muffled, disgusted reaction in high-definition audio, and apparently, the sound of me nearly losing my lunch was enough to turn his stomach too.

Then, the DP walked over to see why I was making such horrific faces at the props.

He leaned down, took one whiff of the telephone, and literally recoiled like he’d been punched in the jaw.

He yelled, Oh, lord, something died in the communications tent!

The entire crew dropped what they were doing.

Filming stopped dead in its tracks.

The director finally came over, smelled the receiver, and just slumped his shoulders in defeat.

He knew exactly who the culprits were.

He looked at Alan and Wayne, who were now on the floor, literally rolling in the dirt because they were laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe.

The best part was that the sardines had leaked oil into the internal wiring of the prop phone.

We couldn’t just wipe it off.

The prop master had to be called in, and he spent twenty minutes trying to disassemble the phone while wearing a surgical mask.

The smell had permeated the wood of the desk, too.

For the rest of the day, every time I had to sit at that desk, I caught a lingering whiff of the Great Sardine Incident of 1974.

The crew had to bring in industrial fans to try and blow the scent out of the tent, but in that heat, it just moved the smell around.

It became this legendary thing on set where the crew would check my props every morning to make sure they weren’t booby-trapped with perishables.

I tried to get them back later by hiding a raw chicken in the hubcaps of Wayne’s car, but nothing ever topped the sheer, localized biological warfare of that telephone.

It’s moments like that, though, that made the show what it was.

We were playing people under immense pressure in a war zone, and sometimes you just need to put a rotting fish in your friend’s face to keep from losing your mind.

I still can’t look at a can of sardines without my eyes starting to water.

Looking back at it now, do you think you could have kept a straight face if your phone smelled like a dumpster in July?