Howard Hesseman, who made a career out of portraying
off-the-wall characters, none more popular than the disc
jockey Johnny Fever on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati,
has died. He was 81.
Hesseman died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
Los Angeles of complications from colon surgery he first
had last summer, his wife, actress and acting teacher
Caroline Ducrocq, told The Hollywood Reporter.
A member of the San Francisco improv group The Committee
and a real-life DJ back in the 1960s, Hesseman also was
known for his stint as out-of-work actor turned history
teacher Charlie Moore on the ABC comedy Head of the
Class. (He quit that show after four seasons to aim for
a movie career.)
And on the ninth and final season of One Day at a Time,
his character, architect Sam Royer, married longtime
divorcee Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin).
In other eccentric turns, Hesseman played hippies in
Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) and on NBC’s Dragnet (he
was billed as Don Sturdy back then); a patient suffering
from writer’s block on The Bob Newhart Show; a
psychiatrist on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; a pimp
opposite Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit (1983); and a
shock rocker in This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
Hesseman received Emmy nominations in 1980 and ’81 for
his work on CBS’ WKRP in Cincinnati, which ran for four
seasons (1978-82). With his shades, moustache and
slouch, he became a countercultural icon.
Veteran TV director Jay Sandrich, who was hired to helm
the WKRP pilot for MTM Enterprises, suggested Hesseman
would be great for Fever after Richard Libertini said he
couldn’t do it at the last minute. The two had just
worked together on the ABC comedy Soap, with Hesseman
playing a prosecutor out to convict Katherine Helmond‘s
Jessica Tate of murder.
“Howard had at one time been a DJ,” Sandrich said in a
2001 interview for the website The Interviews: An Oral
History of Television. “He just stepped in and killed
it. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Hugh Wilson, a former sales executive at a Top 40 radio
station who created WKRP (the fictional station’s call
letters were a pun on “W-crap”), based the rock DJ on “a
guy I knew in Atlanta called Skinny Bobby Harper,” he
once said. “That was funny, because he was the morning
guy, so Skinny had to get up at 4 in the morning to get
in there. But he also loved being in the bars at night.
He was like Fever.
Describing his iconic character in a in a 1979 interview
with The New York Times, Hesseman said: “I think maybe
Johnny smokes a little marijuana, drinks beer and wine,
and maybe a little hard liquor. And on one of those hard
mornings at the station, he might take what for many
years was referred to as a diet pill. But he is a
moderate user of soft drugs, specifically marijuana.”
He was born on Feb. 27, 1940, in Lebanon, Oregon. His
father was an auto-parts salesman and a musician. His
parents divorced when he was 5, and his mom married a
cop.
After graduating from Silverton High School in 1958,
Hesseman spent a couple of years at the University of
Oregon, then was off to San Francisco, where he landed a
gig as a disc jockey for the underground rock station
KMPX. He then latched on with The Committee, where he
took the Don Sturdy stage name.
He told the Times that he spent 90 days in the San
Francisco County Jail in 1963 for selling an ounce of
marijuana (a conviction that was thrown out for
entrapment). And in a 1983 profile in People, he did
admit to conducting “pharmaceutical experiments in
recreational chemistry.”
The Committee once had a long engagement on Sunset
Boulevard in Los Angeles, and he and other troupers made
an appearance in Billy Jack (1971).
In Shampoo (1975), Hesseman played a lazy, boozy
character known as Red Dog, then showed up in The
Sunshine Boys (1975), Silent Movie (1976), The Big Bus
(1976) and The Other Side of Midnight (1977).
In the WKRP pilot, which first aired on Sept. 18, 1978,
his character introduces himself to newly hired program
director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy) as Johnny Caravella.
“I’m also known as Johnny Midnight, Johnny Cool, Johnny
Duke, Johnny Style and Johnny Sunshine,” he says.
Johnny was fired from a Los Angeles station, where he
was making $100,000 a year, for using the word “booger”
on the air. That led him to embark on an odyssey that
led to jobs in Amarillo, Texas; Denver; Boise, Idaho;
Fargo, North Dakota; and then Cincinnati.
With WKRP switching to a Top 40 rock format, he
christened himself Dr. Johnny Fever. After that series
ended, he came back a few times for The New WKRP in
Cincinnati, which had a couple of seasons in
syndication.
Afterward, Hesseman kept busy with appearances in such
films as Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment
(1985), Heat (1986), Gridlock’d (1997), About Schmidt
(2002), The Rocker (2008) and Halloween II (2009).
He also guest-starred as a judge on Boston Legal, a
radio station manager on That ’70s Show, a former drug
dealer on John From Cincinnati and a schoolmaster on
Fresh Off the Boat.
In addition to his wife — they lived together for seven
years before getting married in July 1989 — survivors
include their godchildren Grace, Hamish and Chet.
|
|