The lights were bright, and the room was quiet, except for the soft hum of the camera.
I was sitting there, looking at a stack of old production stills the producer had brought in for the interview.
There was one of me in the dirndl, standing next to Bob near the coffee pot in the barracks.
It’s funny how a piece of clothing can pull you right back into a specific Tuesday in 1968.
Someone in the back of the room, maybe an assistant or a fan who’d been allowed in, asked a question that made me stop.
They wanted to know if the fans ever actually believed I was Hilda, the innocent secretary, rather than Sigrid, the woman who went home with the star of the show every night.
I had to laugh because people really did have a hard time separating the two.
To them, Bob was Hogan, the cleverest man in the world, and I was just the girl who brought him the documents from Klink’s office.
Being married to him while playing that role created some of the most bizarre public situations you could imagine.
We were on a promotional tour once, I think it was in Chicago, and the energy was just electric.
People were lining up for blocks just to see “The Colonel” in person.
We were trying to grab a quiet dinner at this very upscale place, but of course, quiet was a relative term when you were with Bob Crane.
He loved the attention, he loved the fans, and he was always “on.”
A gentleman walked up to our table, looking very serious and a bit nervous.
He didn’t look at me at first; his eyes were locked on Bob.
He leaned over the table and whispered something that changed the whole evening.
The man looked Bob dead in the eye and said, “Colonel, I don’t mean to overstep, but does your wife know you’re out with this girl?”
There was this dead silence for a heartbeat.
I remember looking at Bob, and I could see that little twinkle in his eye, the one he used whenever Hogan was about to pull a fast one on Schultz.
He didn’t correct the man. He didn’t say, “Sir, this is Sigrid, she’s my wife.”
Instead, he put his fork down, wiped his mouth with the napkin very slowly, and leaned in like he was sharing a state secret from the Stalag.
“Keep it down, pal,” Bob whispered, loud enough for the people at the next table to hear. “If she finds out, the whole operation is blown.”
The fan looked at me with this mix of pity and fascination.
He genuinely thought he had caught the most famous man on television in a scandalous moment with a random blonde.
I decided to play along, mostly because once Bob started a bit, you either jumped on the train or you got left at the station.
I put on the Hilda voice—that soft, slightly breathless tone I used on the show—and I asked the man if he thought the Colonel was in trouble.
The poor guy started stuttering, trying to explain that he was a loyal viewer and just wanted to look out for “the Mrs.”
By this point, our publicist, who was sitting across from us, was turning a very interesting shade of purple trying not to scream with laughter.
The man started giving me advice on how to find a nice, stable man who wasn’t so high-profile and dangerous.
He was effectively trying to rescue me from my own husband, right in front of my husband.
Bob was loving every second of it. He started asking the man for tips on how to keep me a secret.
“You think I should get her a different hat?” Bob asked him. “Maybe a wig?”
The fan was nodding seriously, really leaning into the role of a co-conspirator in a Hollywood affair.
This went on for nearly ten minutes.
The staff of the restaurant were starting to gather around because they knew who we were, and they couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
Finally, Bob couldn’t keep the straight face anymore.
He reached over, took his hand, and showed the man my wedding ring, which was quite hard to miss if you were actually looking.
The man looked at the ring, looked at me, looked back at Bob, and the color just drained from his face.
He realized he had just spent ten minutes telling a man’s wife that she was too much trouble and advising the husband on how to cheat more effectively.
He didn’t even say goodbye; he just turned and walked out of the restaurant as fast as his legs would carry him.
We laughed until we were literally crying.
That was the thing about working on Hogan’s Heroes and being part of that world.
The show was so popular, and the characters were so well-defined, that the public felt they owned a piece of our lives.
They wanted the drama, they wanted the intrigue, and sometimes they just wanted to be part of the crew.
On set, it was much the same. We had this running gag afterward where the crew would pretend to warn Bob about me.
Every time I walked into a scene to hand him a message, the director would shout, “Careful, Bob, she looks like the type who’ll tell your wife!”
It became this shorthand for any time things got too serious during a long day of filming.
I remember the next day on set, Bob told the whole story to Richard Dawson and Larry Hovis.
Richard immediately started doing an impression of the fan, making him sound even more desperate and confused.
For the rest of the week, every time I had to walk past the barracks, someone would hiss, “Does she know, Colonel?”
It became a tradition. Even the guest stars would get pulled into it without knowing why.
They’d see the whole cast dissolving into giggles during a serious briefing scene and have no idea that it all went back to a confused man in a Chicago steakhouse.
It made the set feel like a family home rather than a workplace.
We were all in on the joke, and the joke was usually on us.
That’s the secret to why the show worked as well as it did.
We weren’t just playing at being a team; we actually enjoyed the chaos of it all.
Bob always said that if you aren’t having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
And believe me, we were doing it very, very right.
Looking back, I realize how lucky we were to have a job where the biggest occupational hazard was laughing too hard.
Sometimes the best parts of the show were the scenes the cameras never caught.
Have you ever been mistaken for someone else in the most awkward way possible?
