Dark Secrets Of '70s Sitcom Stars

With its saturated colors, post-hippie-era good vibes, intellectual curiosity, and nonstop jokes, the most popular and enduring sitcoms of the 1970s offered a fake reality that was a bit sunnier, bubblier, and more optimistic than actual life. That's probably why the television comedies of the decade were endlessly repeated on cable TV, local stations, and on streaming services. Those laugh-track-sweetened, dated fashion-dotted programs evoke nostalgia for a certain transformative and transitory time in both entertainment and society. 

But for the actors who made all those classic sitcoms a reality, working on a show was just a job. While on-screen they usually easily solved their less-than-complex problems, off-screen they were regular human beings who didn't have a writing staff. So many stars of 1970s sitcoms faced serious, traumatic, and even tragic turmoil in their personal lives. And they tried to keep those very human things under wraps for as long as possible, to keep alive the illusion or just to avoid embarrassment. Some of the biggest icons of '70s sitcoms struggled with big issues privately.

A definitive example of an actor forever associated with one particular role: Fred Berry. On the 1976-1979 teen sitcom "What's Happening!!" he portrayed the beret-and-suspenders-clad, constantly dancing Freddie Stubbs, a.k.a. Rerun. The actor both accepted and capitalized on his fate to be known always and everywhere as Fred "Rerun" Berry; the majority of his post-"What's Happening!!" roles were reprisals of the character or cameos as himself. Simultaneously, being Rerun left Berry undone. "I was a millionaire by the time I was 29," he told People in 1996. "The stress of success got to me. And I got heavily into drugs and alcohol. I was empty inside." A decade-long addiction also led to three suicide attempts. Berry got sober in 1985 and later became a Christian minister.

His romantic life also grew very complicated in the wake of his television success. Berry (he died in 2003 at age 52) was married a total of six times to four different women, meaning two of his spouses he married twice. He refused to publicly name estranged wife number six. "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," Berry said to People.

Mere months after he hit movie theaters as Kenickie in 1978's "Grease," Jeff Conaway hit the small screen in "Taxi." He earned back-to-back Golden Globe nominations for his work as cabbie Bobby Wheeler but left "Taxi" in 1982. "Bobby was written into an empty hole. There was nowhere to go," Conaway told The Daily News Leader in 1983. In 2008, "Taxi" staff writer Sam Simon told"The Howard Stern Show" (via MarksFriggin) that Conaway didn't actually quit — he was fired. One inciting incident: Conaway missed 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 TV episodes here and there. In 2006, he landed his highest-profile gig in ages, competing on VH1's weight loss contest "Celebrity Fit Club." After an onscreen tirade, Conaway departed the series after three episodes to enter a substance abuse rehabilitation program. 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, Conaway was sent home to break his addiction to painkillers; he'd previously developed a dependency after a back surgery, and he relapsed. In May 2011, Conaway died at age 60, following a medication overdose.

By the time Redd Foxx landed the starring role on "Sanford and Son" in 1972, he'd been a successful nightclub comedian for decades who'd sold millions of copies of his live stand-up albums. His hit NBC sitcom significantly added to the comedian's fortune — at one point during the run of "Sanford and Son," he earned $25,000 per episode (about $173,000 in 2020s money) plus a 25% cut of the profits as a producer for his six-year stint.

A lot of that money disappeared. In 1983, Foxx declared bankruptcy, financially underwater due to $1.6 million in unpaid taxes and $800,000 in other debts. In relation to that matter, Foxx surrendered real estate owned in Los Angeles. Six years later, the Internal Revenue Service alleged that Foxx neglected to pay taxes on his earnings from 1983 to 1986 and issued liens on his property and possessions to collect on a $755,166 debt. Much of Foxx's property, including a substantial jewelry collection, was auctioned off to pay down the bill.

In October 1991, two years after his second major debt crisis, Foxx died of a heart attack on the premises of his sitcom "The Royal Family." The comedian was still in tremendous debt at that point, with $3.6 million still outstanding to the IRS.

The most-watched new series of the 1972-1973 season, and the No. 5 show overall, was "Bridget Loves Bernie." The romantic sitcom examined the day-to-day life and struggles of an interfaith couple — Bridget came from a Roman Catholic family and Bernie was Jewish. Groups representing the American Jewish community took issue with that premise. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Daily News Bulletin, Rabbinical Assembly of America Vice President Rabbi Wolfe Kelman labeled the series, "An insult to some of the most sacred values of both the Jewish and Catholic religions." The Rabbinical Council of Washington called for a boycott and asked the public to send complaint letters to CBS. By February 1973, groups including the Commission on Interfaith Activities of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Union of Orthodox Congregations of America had joined the protest, alleging that the show used harmful stereotypical portrayals of Jewish people and also promoted interfaith marriage. At the end of the TV season, CBS canceled "Bridget Loves Bernie."

"Bridget Loves Bernie" stars Meredith Baxter and David Birney became a couple and were married from 1974 to 1989. For Baxter, the marriage was toxic and physically violent. "It was so sudden and unexpected, I couldn't tell you which hand hit me, or even how hard," she wrote in "Untitled." The actor dealt with the abuse with alcohol, but stopped drinking in 1990.

Working as an actor in film and television since he was a toddler, Ron Howard's first major role came in the 1960 to 1968 sitcom "The Andy Griffith Show," playing Opie Taylor. In the few years after that series ended, Howard appeared in episodes of more than a dozen TV shows, and in 1972 was offered a role in "Love and the Happy Days," an installment of ABC's comedy anthology "Love, American Style" intended to serve as a pilot for a standalone series.

But Howard was hesitant to sign up for another potentially long-running TV series. However, making the show offered his best shot at avoiding getting drafted to fight in the Vietnam War; Howard's draft number was low, meaning he'd likely have to serve if called. He would have preferred to attend USC's film school, into which he was accepted, but that institution had done away with student draft deferments. But getting cast in an ongoing TV series might work. "If your employment was directly related to the employment of 30 or more people, you could get a work deferment," Howard told the Television Academy.

Howard was saved from military service nevertheless when the government eliminated the draft a few months after ABC declined to order a series based on his pilot. But then in 1974, "Love and the Happy Days" morphed into a show after all: "Happy Days."

In the early 1970s, teenage actor Susan Dey was thrust into fame as Laurie Partridge, part of a familial pop-rock band on the ABC sitcom "The Partridge Family." After that series ended in 1974, Partridge popped up for an episode of 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." It was during that era of her career when the usually reserved Dey started to discuss her personal life and history at length.

As a teenager, and during her time on "The Partridge Family," Dey developed the eating disorder anorexia. Driven by the mental illness to keep her weight down, Dey at one point only ate carrots, causing her skin to develop an orange hue. Years later, Dey dealt with alcoholism and found sobriety with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. "After I had been sober a year, I was given a cake at a meeting," she told Parade (via Deseret News) in 1993. "The tabloids ran a big story about it. I was furious that they had planted an informant in my AA group."

A ratings-dominating 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. The sitcom lost what had made it so special — the chemistry between actors Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams in their title characters' shared adventures vanished when Williams abruptly departed the long-running series.

In 1982, Williams learned she was pregnant. "Laverne and Shirley" producers were reportedly very supportive at first, offering to make Shirley pregnant, building a shooting schedule to be more accommodating to the actor's health needs, and then eliminating her character from 10 episodes. Williams, however, 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 permanently to make it a starring vehicle for Marshall. Williams sued, and it was quietly settled without a trial, but the actor never appeared on "Laverne and Shirley" again.

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 performed in dinner theater productions. While starring in "Beginner's Luck" in Scottsdale, Arizona, in June 1978, 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 after receiving multiple strikes to the head with a blunt object.

The murder investigation helped expose the details of Crane's private life. Publicly perceived as a married father of multiple children, Crane reportedly carried on countless extramarital encounters and recorded those trysts on videocassettes and Polaroids. Assisting him in the acquisition, set-up, and execution of his operation was a video gear salesman named John Carpenter. By 1978, Crane had tired of the arrangement. Two days before he died, Crane called his son, Robert. "He says, 'I am making changes,'" the younger Crane told Entertainment Weekly. "He wanted to lose people like John Carpenter, who had become a pain in the butt. He wanted a clean slate." 

Across three separate investigations, Crane's murder was never solved. But in 1992, Carpenter was charged for the crime, with prosecutors suggesting a disappeared tripod could have been the blunt object that delivered the fatal blows to Crane. With a lack of evidence, including inclusive DNA testing of blood found at the scene, Carpenter was acquitted.