Eighty Is Not Enough: One Actor's Journey Through American Entertainment

by Dick van Patten

  But in the wake of Vietnam, things were different. The war left deep divisions in American society and culture, including a diminished respect for the military. The armed forces were seen by some—wrongly in my view—as responsible for the disastrous consequences of a war that cost nearly 50,000 American lives and a great many more permanently injured.

  Those bitter feelings are powerfully presented in Eight Is Enough when Mary reveals that her hostility toward the ROTC has its roots in the loss of a friend in high school—a young man of eighteen, who died in the war before ever having a chance to live his own life. While initially hostile toward Richard and his ROTC recruiting office, Mary nevertheless comes to admire him as a person. In a tender scene, she reveals the tragedy of her high school friend’s death, and Richard and Mary embrace. What they don’t know is that Tom is watching from the window. And he manages to completely mistake the comforting embrace of friends with a budding romance.

  Tom’s misperception creates conflicted feelings causing him to question his own integrity. While he admires Richard, Tom finds himself unable to shake the thought that something is somehow wrong. Trying to explain to Abby, he argues that an interracial relationship between Mary and Richard would have “complications.” But after fumbling for a moment, he reluctantly gets to the heart of the matter: “Abby,” he asks, “am I a bigot?”

  Abby assures him he’s not. And she’s right. His preoccupation with the “complications” his daughter would face in an interracial marriage is motivated by genuine concern for her welfare. It is, he reasons, the general attitude of society that creates these “complications.” But on this, Tom misses the mark. After all, those attitudes only change when individuals take the first steps. The prejudice on that Baltimore train only stops when someone refuses to move to the “colored car.” There is, of course, a risk in being that person, and Tom is not quite willing to have his family assume that danger.

  In the end, Tom learns the truth: Mary and Richard are not romantically involved. In fact, Richard is about to become engaged to a girlfriend back in Berkeley. The revelation is a great relief to Tom. He can barely contain his joy as he admires a photo of Richard’s girlfriend. But the very fact of his relief is a reminder of the distance still to travel before race is no longer creating divisions among us. Even today, and even with a black President, there’s still plenty of room for improvement before we get it right. But I do believe that America, despite its flaws, has brought us closer to realizing that day.

  As we have seen, Eight Is Enough was willing to address thorny social issues, but only to a point. Had Mary and Richard actually embarked on a serious relationship, or even marriage, that would have set the stage for a far deeper exploration of the landscape of interracial relationships. Still, the episode does reflect Bill Blinn’s idea of a family show where the characters, like all people, are flawed. Tom is a good and decent man, but he’s far from perfect. Nor was he ever intended to be. Rather his imperfections help all of us better understand ourselves and that, in my view, is what makes his character so compelling.

  * * *

  Another hot topic of the 1970s was single mothers. In one episode, Tom’s third daughter Susan discovers she’s pregnant just as she’s experiencing serious problems with her marriage. The family crisis brings out the tremendous gulf between father and daughter—a difference very much reflective of attitudes about marriage and fatherhood in the 1970s.

  Tom sees the pregnancy as an opportunity; a chance to heal the marriage. With no small degree of naiveté, he tells Susan that the coming child “changes the whole complexion of the separation. Everything is different now,” he tells her. But for Susan a bad marriage is worse than a fatherless family. In Bruce Shelly’s excellent script, they argue the point:

  Susan: I’m not going to risk the future happiness of my child.

  Tom: Then how come you’re overlooking the fact that children need fathers?

  Susan: Children need love. And Merle and I didn’t have enough of that to keep us together.

  Tom: A child might give you a new reason to find that love.

  Susan: No, Dad, a child is the wrong reason.

  But Tom persists: “Susan, you don’t understand,” he says. “A man feels very differently about a woman who’s going to have his child. Merle might change.” Unconvinced, Susan fires back: “Babies don’t change a bad relationship, they just add more strain.”

  Tom later looks for support from Abby. His daughter, he argues, has a naïve and unrealistic view of marriage. In playing the role, I was reminded of Richard Castellano’s character, Frank, back on Broadway in Lovers and Other Strangers—a man utterly mystified by his son’s dissatisfaction with a marriage that was no longer considered “fun.” For Tom, it all seems ridiculous: “What do they expect? A few minutes of romantic fever earns them happiness forever. Nobody has to change Everybody gets exactly what they want!” To many in Tom Bradford’s generation, that’s not only foolish, but a recipe for dissatisfaction. Unrealistic expectations will only continue to erode the importance of the nuclear family and marginalize every child’s need for a father.

  In the end, Susan and Merle reconcile. With a renewed willingness to compromise, they become hopeful their love will prevail. Eight Is Enough, as I’ve mentioned, was willing to take on the difficult issues, but they usually ended happily. Had the producers opted for something grittier, Susan’s marriage might well have fallen apart. But that would have been a mistake. Eight Is Enough was not an unvarnished examination of marriage. Its great success, in my view, was an ability to raise these important issues, while still retaining that magic of a wholesome, whacky, loving, and ultimately functional American family.

  * * *

  At the Bradford house, there were always lessons to be learned. Perhaps the first rule in raising any family is that there are certain principles that override our individual and often selfish wants and desires. We frequently speak of passing along “values” to our children, and it is my belief that these values are the bedrock of our morality.

  But what happens when the best principles suddenly collide with each other? That’s what takes place in The Devil and Mr. Bradford. There, Tom takes Nicholas to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the local theater. But it’s not the Snow White Tom thinks; not by a long shot. In fact, he quickly finds out that it’s the porno version—and he comes tearing out of the theater, furious and holding his hand over young Nicholas’s eyes.

  At home, Tom mounts the soap box. Enraged about this porno theater in his community, he announces, with great indignation, his intention to write a column denouncing those rascals who’ve brought smut to his town. But so high on his horse, Tom doesn’t see just how far he’s going to fall.

  Tom’s daughter Joanie, played by Laurie Walters—who was actually six months older than Betty Buckley, who played her stepmother—works for a local news station and recounts the incident to her boss, who then insists that she beat her father to the punch. Joanie feels terrible about trying to scoop her dad, and finally she asks him for advice. Being a man of principle, he tells Joanie to go right ahead with the story. His only condition: that she do it right. He doesn’t want to see her put out some superficial, poorly researched piece of sensationalism, the kind of stories he sees all too often on her boss’s television program.

  Following her dad’s advice and her boss’s prodding, Joanie digs deep. She discovers not only the corporation that owns the porno theater, but all of its stockholders. If these people are bringing smut to town, they should be fully exposed—her dad’s principles of journalistic integrity would require nothing less.

  So Joanie glances at the list of these filthy shareholders and nearly falls out of her chair when she recognizes one of the names: Tom Bradford. Her righteous father, the one who demanded she dig deep into the story, is part owner of the porn theater.

  Once she recovers, Joanie brings it to Tom, who is, of course, mortified. Tom then confirms it as his accountant explains that th
ere had been a corporate merger: the company Tom had stock in purchased a smaller company which owns the theater. Tom, of course, had no idea. But that won’t get him off the hook.

  Tom properly decides Joanie should run the story regardless of the damage it may do him: “I can lose my reputation,” he explains, “but I can’t lose my daughter.”

  But when he arrives at the television station, Tom learns that Joanie has quit her job. In her internal battle between journalistic ethics and family loyalty, the family won; Joanie gave up the job she loved rather than be the instrument of her father’s disgrace.

  In the end, Joanie’s boss backs off provided Tom writes the full, unvarnished story in his column. It is a magnanimous gesture from someone whose journalistic principles Tom never respected. Tom agrees. Both he and Joanie have learned that while principles are great, life has a way of complicating things.

  * * *

  One small disappointment of Eight Is Enough is that I never met Tom Braden, whose real life story of raising eight children, recounted in his book, Eight Is Enough, provided the inspiration for the show. Braden actually had a far more exciting life than his television alter ego. Born and raised in Iowa, Braden was an American soldier who worked with the British Army in 1940 during World War II. With a penchant for intelligence work, Braden was later recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, and in 1950 he became a CIA operative managing an international division that focused on promoting anti-communist movements in countries across the world. He was a key member of what was called Operation Mockingbird, an initiative that funneled huge sums of money to CIA partners in foreign countries.

  Braden later revealed the nature of these operations, as well as the enormous power of the CIA. If the Director wanted to reward some foreign politician or journalist, Braden’s team would take a large sum of cash, “hand it to him, and never have to account to anybody.” Braden noted that “there was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war.”

  After leaving the CIA in 1954, Braden opened a newspaper, The Blade Journal, in San Francisco. He became a prominent columnist, for the most part promoting moderately conservative views. In 1966 he lost a bid to be California’s Lieutenant Governor. Later Braden was one of the original hosts of the political program Crossfire with Pat Buchanan. By this time, Braden’s politics had moved somewhat to the left, and he and Buchanan had fierce debates that established the show’s unique format that lasted for years to come. Still, many were not convinced that this former CIA operative was a genuine representative of the show’s liberal point of view. Curiously, it was Timothy Leary, the father-figure of the 1960s psychedelic drug movement, who commented that watching the show was like seeing “the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.”

  Braden published his memoirs titled Eight Is Enough in 1975. Although Braden recounted some of his interesting career exploits, it was primarily a domestic story of the travails of raising eight children. It was that aspect of the book that interested William Blinn, who felt the time was ripe for an old-style family show, but one that addressed some of the dicey issues that had put traditional institutions under attack. Bill convinced the producers at ABC to purchase the rights to Braden’s book.

  Blinn wanted to remain true to the book, but in the end, I’m not sure that was really possible. He did keep the first names of all the children. But the actual similarities between Tom Bradford and the real-life Tom Braden were limited. The resemblance was pretty much just the fact of raising eight children, as well as being a journalist in Northern California—Braden in San Francisco, Tom Bradford in Sacramento. No doubt, Blinn carefully read the various stories Braden wrote about his family life with an eye toward weaving some of Braden’s anecdotes into the television show. But the similarities stopped there as Eight Is Enough took on a life of its own. Blinn created an entirely different character in Tom Bradford, with a wholly different family and history. Eight Is Enough was originally derived from Braden’s book, but Bill Blinn was the show’s true creator.

  There came a time when Fred Silverman tried to arrange a meeting between me and Tom Braden. I was looking forward to it, but Braden backed out. Regrettably, I believe he wasn’t happy with the show. I recall one time hearing that he had said that Dick Van Patten’s not an athlete, whereas he was a real athlete. I have no doubt Braden was an excellent sportsman. He was, in fact, a multifaceted man with many talents. Still, at the time I recall taking some umbrage. After all, I’d spent my whole life involved in athletics. I have two sons who were among the world’s elite athletes, one of whom, Vincent, played at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and held his own—occasionally beating many of the greatest tennis players in the world. And Nels has dedicated his whole life to athletics, teaching tennis, winning national racquetball tournaments and promoting fitness for over thirty years.

  It’s true that some of the touch-football games we played on the show were a bit goofy. And I certainly didn’t look like Johnny Unitas out there. But that was never the point. The games on Eight Is Enough were designed to incorporate life lessons for the children—as well as the parents.

  Tom Braden wrote an exceptional book. In my view he was doubly fortunate that a guy as talented as Bill Blinn took the book and created a tremendously successful television show centered around the family life similar, in some respects, to what Braden enjoyed. Braden’s declining to meet me for a quick promotional session was unfortunate, and his comment about my athletics was petty. But that aside, he was an exceptional man, a patriot who provided the original inspiration for a wonderful television show that made a significant impact on many Americans. That became clear with the amazing moment at Denver’s Invesco Field when the first African-American presidential candidate accepted the Democratic Party nomination before a record 80,000 people and many, many millions more in America and all over the world. And what was the one cultural reference he used in that remarkable speech? Eight Is Enough. In arguably the biggest speech of his career—one that epitomized a massive fervor for change in America—Barack Obama had the whole stadium chanting Tom Braden’s words over and over again: “Eight is enough…Eight is enough….” That didn’t happen because of Braden’s book, but because the book spawned a television show that struck a chord with Americans. There was something in those zany—even unathletic—family games, antics and travails, as well as a family’s caring, respect and love, that made enough of a contribution that a presidential candidate would make a deliberate reference to it. Braden had been a key part of all that. They were his words. Tom Braden has passed on now, but I sincerely hope his family—especially his children—enjoyed that extraordinary moment as much as I did.

  * * *

  While Eight Is Enough was a show extolling family values, things were happening off camera that were not so wholesome. The 1970s was a period when drug usage exploded. It was particularly damaging in Hollywood, where young people had both the time and money to indulge these dangerous appetites. It was also true that the kind of familial discipline promoted on the show, and critical to the development and shaping of moral character, was simply absent in many cases. While I have always rejected extreme positions against child acting, I also recognize that without proper supervision, young actors, especially stars, can have a difficult time resisting the endless temptations that surround them.

  At the time problems of drug abuse began on Eight Is Enough, I was unaware, not just of their extent, but that there was any problem at all. I was simply blind or naïve. Later as the truth came to light, I was genuinely astonished. I suppose if I had noticed a rash of lateness, missed cues, forgotten lines or other behavior affecting the quality of the performances, I might have noticed it. But the truth is that, despite the drug problems, the kids seemed to me to be professional both during rehearsals and in the filming of the shows.

  Now having s
aid that, I also know that some who were not involved with these problems have said the very opposite—that the drug abuse did affect the performances. On the E! True Hollywood documentary, Dianne Kay says: “Drugs will do it. Drugs will change your way of thinking and so it does affect your performance.” She is, of course, entirely correct. Later hearing Willie Aames talk about how many of them showed up for work high on cocaine and other drugs, I have no doubt that all of this did affect them professionally. Perhaps because of my age and the fact that I did have a kind of father-figure relationship with many of them, they tended to hide it from me. If I had known, I really don’t know that I could have changed things, but I certainly would have tried.

  After the show, things came crashing down around some of them. While Willie went on to another successful show, Charles in Charge with Scott Baio, his own descent into addiction brought him to the brink. Willie has publicly described his difficult journey back, including his religious conversion. Today, I’m delighted to know that his life is on a far better path.

  Susan Richardson also fell on hard times. During the show, Susan became pregnant and gained an enormous amount of weight. She began to think the weight gain put her job in jeopardy and started using drugs to lose it. Her difficulties continued after the regular series ended. In 1989, while filming the second and final reunion episode, Susan, then 37, made a disturbing, even bizarre, allegation about being kidnapped and held hostage by filmmakers in Korea. Susan continued to think they were pursuing her. “They had a lot of insurance policies out on me,” she claimed, “and they tried to blow me up in a church.” Skepticism about her story was damaging to her acting career. And later she suffered a nervous breakdown. But Susan recovered, and the last I heard from her she was enjoying her life, working as a caretaker at a retirement home in Pennsylvania.