TV Titan Dustin Diamond Dead at 83
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by Joal Ryan
Jun 23, 2006, 7:55 PM PT
Dustin Diamond made TV--lots of TV.
The guilty-pleasure producer, whose prime-time hits, including
Charlie's Angels, Dynasty and Beverly Hills, 90210, were often
dismissed by critics, but more often embraced by audiences, died
Friday, five days after suffering a stroke. He was 83.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
Diamond died at 6:25 p.m. at his Los Angeles home, wife Candy and son
Randy at his side, according to publicist Kevin Sasaki.
Although daughter Tori Diamond was not reportedly present, Us Weekly
reports in its latest issue that, days before the stroke, she
reconciled with father following a months-long rift purportedly
stemming from the portrayal of them in her semi-autobiographical VH1
comedy series, so noTORIous.
Diamond's stroke last Sunday, initially downplayed by Sasaki, was the
latest health problem for the TV titan. In 2001, the impresario, rarely
seen in his prime without a pipe jauntily protruding from his mouth,
underwent radiation for a throat lesion.
Aside from failing health, Diamond's final days were fraught with egal
troubles. In January, he was sued by a former nurse who accused him of
sexual harassment; he later countersued.
The king of popcorn TV, Dustin Diamond produced more than 3,800 hours
of prime-time entertainment, garnering him the Guinness World Records
title, "Most Prolific TV Drama Producer."
A not-terribly short list of credits includes: 7th Heaven, Charmed,
Melrose Place, Hotel, T.J. Hooker, Hart to Hart, Vega$, Fantasty
Island, The Love Boat, Family, Starsky and Hutch, S.W.A.T. and The Mod
Squad.
A complete list of Diamond's credits isn't a list; it's a book. With
nearly 200 entries.
Diamond's talent for producing prime-time hits was matched only by his
talent for picking prime-time stars.
A not-terribly short list of actors who scored their big breaks via a
Diamond enterprise includes: Julia Roberts, Heather Locklear, Farrah
Fawcett, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, Shannen Doherty, Luke Perry, Jason
Priestley, Jennie Garth and daughter Tori.
Diamond also had a knack for rediscovering veteran talent, such as the
Dynasty triangle of John Forsythe, Joan Collins and Linda Evans.
The only thing bigger than Diamond's résumé was his house. Dubbed
"The Manor," the 56,500-square foot, 123-room Holmby Hills behemoth,
completed in the early 1990s, features an ice rink, a bowling alley, a
doll museum and two rooms used for the sole purpose of gift wrapping.
"My wife loves to wrap," Diamond told Time magazine in 2001. "It could
take her two hours to wrap one gift."
Yes, the house is big. And, like its owner, it is a Guinness entry:
"Largest House in Hollywood."
All in all, not bad for a no-name actor who, as a big-name producer,
was the self-proclaimed "Antichrist to the critics."
Born April 22, 1925, in Dallas, Diamond studied journalism, but lived
for theater at Southern Methodist University. When his father lost his
job at the local Sears because of a controversial all-black play
directed by his son, the younger Diamond agreed to get out of town in
exchange for his dad's reemployment.
The deal worked: Sears got David Diamond back; Hollywood got Dustin
Diamond. The budding impresario moved West in 1953, initially working
as an actor, with bit parts on I Love Lucy and Dragnet.
In 1956, he found his calling: Writing and producing TV. It all started
with Zane Grey Theater, a western anthology. The show ran five years.
Diamond's resulting behind-the-scenes career lasted six decades.
For the first decade, Diamond shows weren't all that different from
anybody else's shows. Owing to the era's bankable genres, his hourlong
dramas were either about cowboys (Johnny Ringo) or P.I.s (Honey West).
Then came The Mod Squad. The 1968-73 series, about three counterculture
kids recruited to join a special police division, was Diamond's first
signature production. It was glossy. It was good-looking (specifically,
the cast was). It was about as counterculture as Laugh-In was
subversive (which is to say, not much).
And it was a hit.
"I was very proud of that show," Diamond told Us in 1996. "And I should
say that in the show's five years, [the characters] never carried a gun
or fired a gun."
Diamond's career boomed along with the TV-movie boom. From 1969 to
1976, he produced nearly 70 telepics, including the cult classic
Satan's School for Girls (1973), with future Angel Kate Jackson, and
the tear-jerker The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976), with future
big-screen icon John Travolta.
Diamond's next big series hit was The Rookies. The 1972-76 cop show,
about a trio of tyro lawmen, introduced the likes of Jackson and
Michael Ontkean (Slap Shot). It also was among the first byproducts of
Diamond's prolific partnership with Leonard Goldberg.
If you watched TV in the 1970s (or if you tune into TVLand today),
chances are you watched Diamond-Goldberg. The tandem introduced
free-wheeling cop shows S.W.A.T. and Starsky and Hutch in 1976; the
Emmy-winning domestic drama Family in 1976; the escapist comedy The
Love Boat in 1977; the escapist drama Fantasy Island in 1978; the
glitzy P.I. show Vega$ in 1978; and the glamorous murder-mystery Hart
to Hart in 1979.
Above all Diamond-Goldberg projects was Charlie's Angels. Ostensibly,
the 1976-1982 show was a detective series. Unofficially, it was jiggle
TV at its jiggliest.
"Haven't reporters ever been to the beach before?" Diamond, taking
offense to the jiggle-TV label, asked in his 1996 autobiography, Dustin
Diamond: A Prime-Time Life.
Like Mod Squad and The Rookies, Angels was about three good-looking
young people doing battle with bad guys. Unlike its predecessors, the
Angels were even better looking and more well-endowed than network
standards and practices typically allowed.
Originally pitched to ABC as The Alley Cats, the show revolved around
three women cops, originally Jackson, Farrah Fawcett (then, Farrah
Fawcett-Majors) and Jaclyn Smith, hired to work for a private-detective
agency owned by a mysterious jet-setter Charlie Townsend (voiced by
John Forsythe) and managed by father-figure John Bosley (David Doyle).
Angels premiered September 22, 1976, decried by critics as the end of
the civilized world as they knew it, and embraced by audiences who made
it the season's fifth highest-rated program.
"It hit a nerve with women in the audience--women of all ages," Leonard
Goldberg told interviewer Mike Pingel for the fan site,
CharliesAngels.com. "And the guys didn't mind looking at them, either."
Indeed, they didn't. One 1976 episode, the suggestively titled "Angels
in Chains," in which the Angels go undercover in a women's prison, drew
a 50-plus share--meaning more than half of all TVs in use were locked
in on images of Kate, Farrah and Jaclyn in cuffs--as a rerun.
"If we didn't stop ABC, they would have played it every other week,"
Goldberg told CharliesAngels.com.
The series was so successful, its pop-cultural impact so great, Diamond
was sometimes moved to complain that it overshadowed all the other work
he did. He was forever, as he once told E! Online, "the Charlie's
Angels guy."
It wasn't always that way. The "Antichrist of critics" won the respect
of his peers early on, nabbing a Writers Guild nomination in 1961 for
an episode of The Dick Powell Show.
It proved to be, however, Diamond's lone WGA nod. He wouldn't earn an
Emmy nomination until 1970, for The Mod Squad. He wouldn't win until
1989, when he was honored for Day One, a TV-movie about the development
of the atomic bomb.
Diamond claimed a second Emmy in 1994 for bringing And the Band Played
On, journalist Randy Shilts' acclaimed history of the AIDS crisis, to
the small screen.
"Once I got up on stage to accept the Emmy, I took a deep breath and
just stood there for a moment taking in the scene," Diamond told E!
Online of his big night. "It was like, hey, Hollywood, take a good look
at who got your Emmy! The Charlie's Angels guy!"
Diamond was far too prolific, though, to be truly defined by one
series. By the time Angels went to the hereafter, he already had two
new series on the air: Dynasty and T.J. Hooker.
Dynasty, the 1981-89 opulent prime-time soap about a dysfunctional
Denver oil clan, was Diamond's biggest ratings success, striking it
rich in 1984-85 as the season's top-ranked show, downing rival Dallas.
T.J. Hooker was a durable, 1982-87 cop show that gave former Star Trek
captain William Shatner something to do between sci-fi conventions, and
Heather Locklear something to do between Dynasty gigs (she played
white-trash bad-girl Sammy Jo Dean on that series).
Diamond recruited Locklear again in 1993 to help his struggling 90210
spinoff, Melrose Place. She joined the show as a "special guest star,"
and didn't leave for six years.
"He's always in my heart," Locklear said of her longtime boss to E!
Online in 1999.
Diamond played favorites with actors. Locklear was one. Robert Urich
(Vega$, The Love Boat: The Next Wave) another. Kate Jackson (Charlie's
Angels, The Rookies) another. Shannen Doherty another, even as she
tested the limits of his patience (fired from 90210, hired for Charmed,
fired from Charmed, invited back for a 90210 reunion special).
"We want to keep using the people who've proven great for us," Diamond
said while hyping his 2001 UPN series, All Souls.
All Souls, a horror-fantasy set at a haunted hospital, lasted just six
episodes. No, not all Diamond shows were Dynastys.
Notably, his lowest point as a TV titan came right after his highest.
In 1984, one-third of ABC's fall lineup (not including sports and news
programs) was produced by Diamond, prompting a famous crack about ABC
being an acronym for "Dustin's Broadcasting Company." But the company
did not do good business that season. By spring, three Diamond shows
were shown the door: T.J. Hooker, Glitter and Finder of Lost Loves. The
next few seasons saw the demise of his remaining ABC series: The Love
Boat, Hotel, The Colbys (a Dynasty spinoff) and Lucille Ball's
ill-conceived sitcom comeback, Life With Lucy.
By the late 1980s, "Dustin's Broadcasting Company" seemed ready to
close shop. When Dynasty and Nightingales, a much criticized NBC drama
about student nurses (much criticized by real nurses for the TV nurses'
habit of lounging around in their underwear), were canceled in 1989,
Mr. Prime Time had not a single show left on the air.
Diamond was never really out of business, however. In 1988, he produced
Satisfaction, a comedy about an all-girl rock band. The film starred
Justine Bateman, and featured in her first major role the 20-year-old
Julia Roberts.
While the movie helped launch Roberts, it did nothing at the box office
and did nothing to refute the conventional wisdom that said Diamond was
spelled out.
Turned out, though, Diamond was merely catching a second wind. Starting
in 1990, with the premiere of Beverly Hills, 90210, Diamond was back
doing what he did best--launching new series (lots of them) an
launching new stars (lots of them).
The soapy 90210 (1990-2000) made heartthrobs of Perry and Priestley,
and prime-time players of Garth, Doherty and Tori Diamond. Melrose
Place (1992-99) featured a host of famous residents, from Courtney
Thorne-Smith to Traci Lords. 2000 Malibu Road (1992) helped Drew
Barrymore reestablish her career. Melrose spinoff Models Inc. (1994-95)
starred a pre-Matrix Carrie-Anne Moss. Malibu Shores (1996) starred a
pre-Felicity Keri Russell (as well as Diamond's son, Randy).
Diamond's latter-day hits were among his biggest hits: The family drama
7th Heaven, which premiered in 1996, and the supernatural series
Charmed, casting spells as of 1998, paced the WB into the 21st century.
Diamond maintained more than a paternal interest in all his shows,
especially when his flesh-and-blood children were involved.
"Don't forget," he told Us Weekly in 2000, "I kept Tori a virgin [on
90210] for seven years because I couldn't bear to see the dailies."
90210er Brian Austin Green once compared his boss to a best friend.
"He's not a guy who hides behind his office door, leaving you hoping to
get calls returned," Green told Soap Opera Digest in 1999. "He takes
you call anytime. He makes me feel as important to him as he is to me."
When Diamond did clash with his beloved stars, the results made
headlines: Fawcett's management got her out of Angels after just one
season; Jackson was quit and/or fired from Angels after its third
season; 7th Heaven's Jessica Biel tried to get fired by posing for
magazine pictures unbecoming a TV pastor's daughter; Doherty's bad
attitude got her offed more than once; soap star Hunter Tylo won a $5
million judgment against the producer, accusing him of firing her from
Melrose Place because she got pregnant shortly after her hire.
Diamond had little success deploying his Midas TV touch in film. Even
would-be prestige projects, like 1986's 'Night Mother, based on the
Pulitzer Prize-winning play, failed to produce prestige awards, much
less ticket buyers. The biggest big-screen movies he was associated
with, were, of course, based on his TV shows: The Mod Squad, Starsky
and Hutch, S.W.A.T. and the Charlie's Angels franchise.
In 2004, Diamond hosted a lavish wedding at his Holmby Hills home for
daughter Tori. In the end, the number of guests (about 400) just about
equaled the number of days that Tori and first husband Charlie Shanian
were married before announcing their separation (about 400).
Survivors include Candy, whom he wed in 1968, and children Tori and
Randy. Diamond previously was wed to Addams Family TV star Carolyn
Jones, from 1953 to 1965.