Keeping up their wholesome, lighthearted image offscreen was an unwritten part of the job
for any '70s sitcom star… but these TV icons couldn't keep up their end of the bargain.
A sitcom star and teen idol thanks to The Partridge Family, David Cassidy disclosed
his drinking problem at a 2008 fundraiser for The Alcohol and Substance Abuse Prevention
Council of Saratoga County, saying,
"Tonight, I am publicly stating that I am an alcoholic."
"It's very humbling, and it's also humiliating."
Two years later, a Highway Patrol officer in St. Lucie, Florida, arrested Cassidy for
driving under the influence.
He posted bail and ultimately received a sentence of one year of probation and a suspended license.
Cassidy received another DUI in Schodack, New York, in August 2013.
This time, Cassidy's sentence consisted of 50 hours of community service and a $900 fine.
Then in January 2014, police in California arrested Cassidy on suspicion of DUI, for
which he was ordered to enter alcohol rehab and received five years of probation.
That stint in rehab helped Cassidy quit drinking for good, or so he said.
When he almost plunged off a stage during a February 2017 concert, Cassidy blamed dementia,
not alcohol.
Sadly, in November 2017, Cassidy died of liver and kidney failure.
Just before his death, he came clean to a documentary producer, saying,
"I lied about my drinking.
I did this to myself to cover up the sadness and the emptiness."
Fred Berry is a prime example of an actor who became forever associated with one particular
role.
On '70s teen sitcom What's Happening!!, Berry played the beret -and-suspenders-wearing Freddie
Stubbs, a.k.a.
Rerun.
The show went off the air in 1979, and the majority of Berry's post-Rerun roles were
just clones of the character or cameo appearances where he played himself.
But playing Rerun left Berry undone.
In a 1996 interview with People magazine, he confessed,
"I was a millionaire by the time I was 29.
The stress of success got to me.
And I got heavily into drugs and alcohol.
I was empty inside."
A decade-long addiction led to three suicide attempts.
Berry finally got sober in 1985 and later became a Christian minister.
However, his romantic life was also complicated in the wake of his television success.
Before Berry's death in 2003 at age 52, he was married six times to four different women.
He refused to even name estranged wife number six, telling People,
"She's been trying to get her 15 minutes of fame from me off of my name and my career
ever since we got married.
I don't want to give her that pleasure."
On the 1950s-set sitcom Happy Days, Erin Moran played the youngest Cunningham, Joanie, from
the series' first episode in 1974 until the finale in 1984, except for a brief period
from 1982 to 1983 when she starred in the spinoff Joanie Loves Chachi.
"Erin, you went through puberty on national television."
"Yes, I did.
Yes, I did."
After Happy Days ended, Moran struggled to shake her association with the role she'd
played for so long.
She appeared in a handful of episodes of shows like Murder, She Wrote and The Love Boat before
disappearing from screens for 10 years, re-emerging to land a few bit parts in the '90s and 2000s.
But all was not well.
In 2010, Moran lost her home to foreclosure, and police were called to evict the actor
and her husband, Steve Fleischman.
The couple moved in with her mother-in-law in her trailer in Indiana.
But, two years later, the mother-in-law tossed Moran out for partying too much.
At that point, Moran was essentially unhoused, living in motels and surviving off of her
share of a legal settlement awarded to Happy Days actors who'd sued CBS for unpaid merchandise
royalties.
In December 2016, Moran was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, a type of cancer
that left her unable to speak by February 2017.
In April 2017, Moran was found dead in Harrison County, Indiana, at age 56.
Mere months after he hit movie theaters as Kenickie in 1978's Grease, Jeff Conaway was
on the small screen in Taxi.
He earned back-to-back Golden Globe nominations for his work as cabbie Bobby Wheeler but left
the show in 1982.
The following year, Conaway explained his departure to The Daily News Leader, saying,
"Bobby was written into an empty hole.
There was nowhere to go."
"You're one of the biggest actors managers in New York.
And me – a young, talented, yet to be discovered actor in the same cab."
But in 2008, Taxi staff writer Sam Simon told The Howard Stern Show that, in actuality,
Conaway didn't quit — he was fired for, in part, missing an episode taping after he
was found heavily intoxicated in his dressing room.
After Taxi, Conaway starred in the quickly canceled series Wizards and Warriors and Berrenger's,
and made the occasional guest appearance on other shows.
In 2006, he landed his highest-profile gig in ages, competing on VH1's weight loss contest
Celebrity Fit Club.
After an onscreen tirade in the third episode, Conaway left the series to enter a substance
abuse rehab program, but it didn't seem to take.
He threatened the members of Oasis backstage at a concert in 2008, the same year he appeared
on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.
In January 2010, Conaway fell down a flight of stairs and fractured his neck, broke a
hip and arm, and suffered a brain hemorrhage.
After three months in a care center, he was sent home to break his recurrent addiction
to painkillers, but it got the best of him.
In May 2011, Conaway died at age 60, following a medication overdose.
At the age of 33, just as production began on the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore
Show, Mary Tyler Moore was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, requiring consistent injections
of insulin and testing of blood glucose levels.
Over time, people with diabetes can develop complications, and Moore was no exception.
Her third and final husband, Dr. Robert Levine, told JDRF,
"What she was never able to overcome was the vision stealing impact of her diabetic eye
disease.
Over time, it became a great challenge for her to simply walk across a room and avoid
obstacles, or judge changes in grades, or walk downstairs, or be physically active in
low light."
Moore died in 2017, but she experienced profound vision loss beginning years earlier, and kept
it secret.
In fact, the actor was almost totally blind during a Mary Tyler Moore Show cast reunion
on a 2013 episode of Hot in Cleveland.
Levine revealed the truth to People, saying,
"We had to sit her at the table — everyone came to her."
By the time Redd Foxx landed the lead role on Sanford and Son in 1972, he'd been a successful
nightclub comedian for decades and had sold millions of copies of his live stand-up albums.
The hit sitcom significantly added to the comedian's fortune.
At one point he was earning $25,000 per episode, or about $173,000 today, plus a 25% cut of
the profits as a producer over all six seasons.
"Redd, sometimes you're bald, sometimes your hair is red.
No matter how it comes out, you're a beautiful human being.
I wish you luck.
I wish you good things in life.
You deserve them."
However, most of that money quickly disappeared.
In 1983, Foxx declared bankruptcy.
He was financially underwater, facing $1.6 million in unpaid taxes and $800,000 in various
other debts.
Six years later, the IRS alleged that Foxx had neglected to pay taxes on his earnings
from 1983 to 1986 and owed them an additional $755,166.
They issued liens on his property, which included a substantial jewelry collection, all of which
was auctioned off to pay down the bill.
"I hope you weren't giving none of our money to that Reverend Ripoff and his Cadillac fund."
In October 1991, two years after his second debt crisis, Foxx died of a heart attack on
the set of his sitcom The Royal Family.
The comedian was still in tremendous debt at the time of his death, with $3.6 million
still outstanding to the IRS.
Harry Morgan started acting in movies in the 1940s, but he'd eventually be known for his
TV career.
He starred in the long-running '50s sitcom December Bride, the '60s comedy Pete and Gladys,
the late '60s Dragnet reboot, and from 1974 to 1983, as Col. Sherman T. Potter on the
Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H .
"You know, at this point, a lesser man would give up.
Being a lesser man, I do."
His career wound down with some more TV sitcom and drama appearances, but came to a stop
in July 1996, when he was arrested and charged with domestic violence.
Police arrived at the home of 81-year-old Harry Morgan and his 70-year-old wife, Barbara,
in response to a call.
After reportedly hearing a woman's screams, they discovered Barbara Morgan with an injured
foot, a cut by her eye, and bruising on the arm — all of which sent her to the hospital.
Barbara said her husband had been arguing with her at a dinner party before they went
home, where things got physical.
Morgan faced a charge of misdemeanor spousal battery but, after completing a domestic violence
diversion course, the charge was dropped.
Doris Day became a movie star in the late 1940s.
And in 1968, she starred in two of the year's biggest hits, With Six You Get Eggroll and
Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?
That same year, she made the move into TV.
The Doris Day Show show ran well into the 1970s, but its very existence took its star
by surprise.
Day's husband, Martin Melcher, was also her manager.
After Melcher's death in 1968, Day discovered she was on the hook to CBS to star in a weekly
sitcom.
As she put it to OK! in 1996,
"All without anyone ever asking me."
Day may have been able to get out of her obligations, but she was left with so little money after
Melcher's death that she needed the work.
Melcher had given free rein of Day's finances to lawyer Jerome Rosenthal, who embezzled
some and sunk the rest into sketchy land, finance, and energy projects.
After Melcher died, Rosenthal seized even more of Day's fortune.
She sued, and the case was decided in 1974, a year after The Doris Day Show ended.
Day was awarded a payout of $22.8 million, but would receive only a fraction.
Day retired from acting after The Doris Day Show.
She died in 2019 at the age of 97.
On the family band sitcom The Partridge Family, Danny Bonaduce played joke-cracking bass player
Danny Partridge.
Bonaduce turned 15 after the comedy wrapped in 1974, at which point he moved out of his
family's home, became a heavy substance user, and ended up unhoused in Hollywood.
"I lived right behind this dumpster, but I lived in my car.
I had a car.
I did have a possession."
When he woke up each morning, he'd head to Grauman's Chinese Theater.
With The Partridge Family still fresh in the public consciousness, he'd pose for tourists'
photos and sign autographs.
"It was totally embarrassing to be famous and homeless."
Then there was trouble with the law.
In 1991, Bonaduce was arrested after allegedly assaulting and robbing a sex worker in Phoenix.
He was charged with felony flight, aggravated assault, and robbery, but was released on
probation after pleading guilty to a lesser charge.
In the early 1970s, teenage actor Susan Dey was thrust into fame as Laurie Partridge,
on the ABC sitcom The Partridge Family.
After the series ended in 1974, Dey guest starred on numerous TV series, finally launching
a major comeback in 1986 with a thrice-Emmy-nominated role as attorney Grace Van Owen on L.A. Law.
That's when the usually reserved Dey began to open up about her personal life.
As a teenager, and during her time on The Partridge Family, Dey developed anorexia.
Driven to keep her weight down, Dey at one point ate only carrots, causing her skin to
develop an orange hue.
Years later, Dey dealt with alcoholism and found sobriety with the help of Alcoholics
Anonymous.
In a 1993 interview with Parade, she shared,
"After I had been sober a year, I was given a cake at a meeting.
The tabloids ran a big story about it.
I was furious that they had planted an informant in my AA group."
Robin Williams brought his frenetic style of comedy to television in 1978 as zany extraterrestrial
Mork on Mork and Mindy.
During the show's four-year run, Williams became addicted to cocaine in an effort to
self-medicate.
Speaking with People in 1998, he confessed,
"Cocaine for me was a place to hide.
Most people get hyper on coke.
It slowed me down."
He abruptly stopped using cocaine and alcohol in 1982, following the overdose death of his
close friend John Belushi.
At the time, his then-wife became pregnant with their first child.
At the height of his cocaine use, some of Williams' behavior on the set of Mork and
Mindy could be classified as sexual misconduct or even assault.
In David Itzkoff's biography, Robin, co-star Pam Dawber recalled,
"He'd look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden.
And then he'd grab your t— and then run away.
And somehow he could get away with it.
It was the seventies, after all."
"You gonna give me the line?"
"Oh, did I check out?"
Mork and Mindy director Howard Storm corroborated Dawber's statement in Robin, adding:
"He'd be doing a paragraph and in the middle of it he would just turn and grab her ass.
Or grab a breast."
Also in the book, producer Garry Marshall recalled Williams' on-set disrobing habit,
saying,
"He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was
trying to act.
His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush."
A ratings hit in the mid-1970s, Laverne and Shirley remained a top 30 show into the early
1980s, with viewership slipping in its eighth season in 1982-83.
That's when the sitcom lost what had made it so special — the chemistry between actors
Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams.
In fact, they missed the character of Shirley altogether, due to Williams' abrupt departure
from the series.
In 1982, Williams learned she was pregnant.
Laverne and Shirley producers were supportive at first, offering to write the pregnancy
into the show, building a more accommodating shooting schedule to keep Williams healthy,
then writing off her character for 10 episodes.
But Williams claimed that producers refused to pay her for the episodes in which she wouldn't
appear, and that it was all a ruse to get her off the show and make it a starring vehicle
for Marshall.
Williams sued.
The matter was quietly settled, but the actor never appeared on Laverne and Shirley again.
Norman Lear's All in the Family spawned the spinoff Maude, which in turn begat Good Times,
a spinoff about a Black family living in a Chicago housing project that ran from 1974
to 1979.
John Amos played patriarch James Evans for the first three seasons, but the character
was written out in the Season Four opener, when, after taking a high-paying job in Mississippi,
the character dies offscreen in a car accident.
The network's official story was that Amos left the series to pursue a movie career,
but, in reality, he'd been fired.
In a 1976 interview with Jet, Amos admitted,
"Norman Lear called me a month ago and told me my option was not being picked up.
That's the same as being fired."
Amos and Lear had sparred, often because the actor felt his character set a bad example
as a Black man with the inability to keep a job.
When the World War II sitcom Hogan's Heroes concluded its run in 1971, star Bob Crane
moved on to the short-lived The Bob Crane Show and appeared on stage in dinner theaters.
In June 1978, while starring in Beginner's Luck in Scottsdale, Arizona, the 49-year-old
Crane was discovered dead in his apartment with a cord wrapped around his neck.
The Maricopa County Medical Examiner reported that Crane died from multiple blows to the
head with a blunt object.
"Strangely, according to police reports, there was no evidence of a struggle or break-in.
And no sign of the blunt instrument that had struck him."
The investigation exposed the details of Crane's private life.
Publicly perceived as a wholesome married father, Crane had countless extramarital affairs
and recorded the trysts in Polaroids and on video.
His partner in the operation was a video gear salesman named John Carpenter, but Crane had
tired of the arrangement.
Two days before he died, Crane called his son, Robert.
Robert recalled the conversation to Entertainment Weekly, sharing,
"He says, 'I am making changes.
He wanted to lose people like John Carpenter, who had become a pain in the butt.
He wanted a clean slate."
Crane's murder was never solved, but in 1992, Carpenter was charged with the crime.
Prosecutors suggested a missing tripod was used to deliver the fatal blows to Crane.
Carpenter was acquitted for lack of evidence.
Willie Aames got very rich playing goofballs on two popular TV comedies.
In the 1970s, he played teenager Tommy Bradford Jr. on Eight is Enough, and in the '80s, he
played Buddy Lembeck, best friend of Charles in Charge.
But Aames admitted to Entertainment Weekly,
"At the very peak I was making a little over a million dollars a year.
Then suddenly there was no job, no bank account, no wife, no child."
Aames' accountant convinced him to invest his fortune into a coal mine.
The deal soured, and Aames wound up in debt to the IRS for $400,000.
His house went into foreclosure, and he lost everything he had.
Aames' wife left him, taking their daughter with her, which may have led to a suicide
attempt.
Aames remembered the time to ET, saying,
"I gave people a lot of cause for concern and I think they acted on those concerns.
I'm glad they did.
Beyond that, that time period is a blur."
With about $5 to his name and unhoused, Aames lived with friends when possible, but otherwise
resorted to sleeping in public parks and parking garages.