After childhood fame — and decades of infamy — Danny Bonaduce finds success and sobriety in Seattle

HOW DID LOVABLE Danny Bonaduce, the cute, redheaded kid from “The Partridge Family,” go on to become the punchline of 1,000 comedians’ jokes? It’s not unusual for a child star to go off the rails in later life, but Bonaduce’s fall from grace was something different: a sort of greatest-hits package of Hollywood mishaps, with drugs, booze and rehab (and back again) earning a virtual season ticket to the pages of The National Enquirer. The memoir he wrote in 2001 was, appropriately, called “Random Acts of Badness.”

Today, Bonaduce is 63; happily married to his wife, Amy; and living in Seattle, where for the past 12 years he has co-hosted a morning talk and music show for classic-rock station KZOK-FM. Though he still has the nimble mind and fast-paced delivery style of his “Partridge Family” days, he was forced to take a brief timeout from the show in 2022, after a mysterious medical issue left him with what he describes as strokelike symptoms. “I’m getting through it,” he says.

Perhaps it’s mildly surprising that Bonaduce ever found himself in Hollywood in the first place. His mother, Betty, and father, Joe, met on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia. Joe hovered around the show business world, but more as a writer than a performer. In fact, he held actors in some disregard. To him they were cattle, or worse, and in late 1963, he decided to pack up his wife and their four kids, including 4-year-old Danny, and move to Los Angeles purely to sell a screenplay. In later years, the only career advice he gave his family was, “Remember, acting is one step below pimping.”

Even so, young Danny soon was going out on auditions, landing jobs on commercials and a couple of episodes of popular sitcoms such as “Bewitched,” where he appeared alongside a chimpanzee. In an early lesson about the vagaries of show business, the chimp bit him on the head.

One day, when actor Richard Chamberlain and Danny were seated across from each other in a Los Angeles diner, Chamberlain heard the young boy precociously quote philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Chamberlain promptly leaned across the booth and told Betty Bonaduce, “Lady, you should get that kid to an agent.” It was a sort of stylized Hollywood scene in itself, a 1960s update on the old tale about teenaged Lana Turner being discovered while buying a soda at a local drugstore.

In due course, 9-year-old Danny was working on an MGM comedy-drama called “The Trouble with Girls.” It wasn’t much as far as movies go, but it starred Elvis Presley. “I remember I had to go to the bathroom, and Elvis let me use the one in his personal trailer,” Bonaduce says now. It was another indelible Hollywood moment. “I couldn’t help but notice that the taps in his sink you pushed open to run the water were gold-plated, and shaped like a woman’s legs. That was different. I like to say that Elvis also gave me a Cadillac when production wrapped, although I should mention that it was a pushcart version, all of about 5 feet long.”

THEN CAME “The Partridge Family.”

It’s not an experience given to every 11-year-old child to make $400 a week (about $3,000 in today’s terms) to star in a hit sitcom, nor to be driven past hundreds of screaming girls every time he reports for work. “I loved being famous,” Bonaduce says. But, this being a morality tale, there was a downside, too. Sometimes those same girls, peering through the windows of the Bonaduces’ car and disappointed at not seeing David Cassidy or Susan Dey, would turn and shout back to their friends, “Never mind; it’s only Danny.”

Of course, it’s one of the truisms of Hollywood life that audiences often confuse an actor with the character he or she depicts on-screen. Danny was playing a version of himself on “The Partridge Family,” but where Danny P. was wholesome, Danny B. already was chugging cocktails and smoking pot. The disconnect wasn’t apparent to fans, who likely assumed the two Dannys were interchangeable.

That wasn’t the only challenge to his life as a television star. On top of everything else, Danny’s parents were divorcing, and sometimes he found it best to live outside of the family home. Then he started to gain weight, and the titles of the shows featuring him began to change from “Danny Gets a Girlfriend” to “Danny Goes on a Diet.” Millions of viewers were watching him grow up in front of them each week.

Another harsh lesson in Hollywood realities occurred when Danny and his mother pulled up at the studio gate one morning in July 1974, just as they had five days a week for most of the past four years. Only this time, instead of smiling and waving them in, the guard on duty looked at them and said, “Go home; ‘The Partridge Family’ doesn’t live here anymore.” Danny wasn’t yet 15, and he was canceled.

BUT THAT WASN’T quite the end of the story. Danny still went out on auditions, and sometimes got a little work, such as a guest spot on an episode of “Fantasy Island.” But more often than not, the part he was playing was that of the burnout. There was drink, and there were drugs. Once, as he was driving to his high school, he turned on the radio and heard the DJ announce that he, Danny, was dead.

“He was a great kid, but not a martyr to humility,” David Cassidy once told me. If you watch “The Partridge Family” closely, you can see a certain chutzpah there that was engaging in a young boy, but might have come across as less attractive in an older actor.

Speaking of school: Danny attended Cal Prep in Encino, California, where his contemporaries included a young singer by the name of Michael Jackson, and Chris Brando, son of “The Godfather” star Marlon Brando. “I went to their house once,” Bonaduce recalls, “and Marlon was sitting there at a table covered by plates of food. It was like the banquet scene out of some Henry VIII biopic. I remember the phone rang, and he had to rummage around somewhere between the mountains of turkey and the bowls of ice cream to find it.”

Years later, a collector offered Bonaduce “crazy money” to part with his high school yearbook. “I didn’t do it,” he says.

For much of the 1980s, Bonaduce became a sort of celebrity without portfolio. Not having saved any money, he spent some of his days sleeping in his car, and his nights in and around the VIP rooms of Hollywood clubs, where he was greeted by lines like, “Weren’t you Danny Partridge?” or, “How did you get to be such a loser?” For much of the decade, he used the ploy of claiming to be “a friend of Mick Jagger” to talk his way past the red velvet rope, until, to his horror, Jagger himself turned up in the same club one night. Jagger didn’t know anything about “The Partridge Family,” but when Bonaduce confessed what he’d done, the Rolling Stones singer just laughed it off. Say what you like about Bonaduce; he always had bags of that winning in-on-the-joke charm to him.

PERHAPS BONADUCE WAS simply easier to love than to admire. There was a low moment in March 1990, when he found himself in a darkened Florida housing project trying to do business with someone he assumed was a drug dealer, but who turned out to be an undercover police officer. Then there were more drugs, and a period when he was under treatment for bipolar disorder and sex addiction. “At the time, I was quite proud of that last diagnosis,” he says.

But it was racing through downtown Phoenix while being chased by numerous police cars and a helicopter that Bonaduce really hit bottom. He’d been cruising around town, and offered a ride to someone he thought was a young female sex worker. It later appeared he had made a mistake about his companion’s gender and, as a result, Bonaduce wound up brawling in the street with the man before screeching off in his souped-up Camaro. Needless to say, he featured in the opening monologue of the next night’s David Letterman show.

By this time, Bonaduce was in his early 30s, and apparently the poster child for the ranks of American child stars who made it big and blew it. But somehow he cleaned up his act. In 1985, a popular Chicago disc jockey named Johnny Brandmeier had interviewed Bonaduce over the phone, fallen for his sharp wit and invited him to appear on his show. The station flew him out from Los Angeles first-class and put him up for the night in a ritzy downtown hotel. (“Their big mistake was not putting any kind of limit on my room-service tab,” Bonaduce notes.) The next day, Brandmeier led him onstage in front of 13,000 fans at a local hockey arena, which was about 12,900 more than Bonaduce had been expecting.

Maybe some of those in attendance had come to scoff, but when Bonaduce sang — or hollered — for them, and then told a few jokes, they cheered him to the rafters. “Aside from certain family moments, meeting Johnny B, as he likes to be called, was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Bonaduce says. “I realized I still had an act.”

I asked Brandmeier about his experiences with Bonaduce. “I saw a headline about him in The National Enquirer,” he says. “So I called him up on the air one morning — I think he was living on a boat somewhere — and he was great, snappy and in on the gag. It’s not given to everyone to be woken up by some guy on a live radio show and immediately start to trade one-liners with him. If you had to sum Danny up, I’d say that he was a mixture of endearing and crazy at the same time. They absolutely loved him in Chicago.”

PERHAPS THAT NIGHT at the hockey arena wasn’t quite the beginning of the end of Bonaduce’s long fall from grace. But at least it was the end of the beginning. We all love a good comeback story, and in March 1991, this one gathered pace with a call from David Cassidy. He was beginning a nationwide concert tour, and he wanted his old “Partridge Family” buddy to go out and tell jokes as his opening act. “It was a challenge,” says Bonaduce. “I’d never done stand-up comedy before, and to make matters worse, David insisted that I do it sober.” Nonetheless, soon they were traveling around the country on a bus again, just like they had on TV in the old days.

“David told me I had to stay away from booze, drugs and women,” Bonaduce reflects. “It was a stretch, because those three things pretty well constituted my whole life at the time. But I did it. The other thing he told me was that if I stayed clean, by the end of the tour, someone would have offered me a job.”

Bonaduce kept up his end of the deal, even if he did relapse on occasion during the next two decades. Cassidy was right about the job, though. Within a few weeks, Bonaduce was acting as the designated wacky partner to a DJ in his native Philadelphia before going on to host his own early morning show in Chicago. He was a natural for radio. It turned out that Bonaduce was not just good at talking, but also had the much rarer gift of knowing how to listen. From there, it was successively on to stations in Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and back to Philadelphia. On the side, he turned out a long article for Esquire with the title “My Life as a Has-Been,” which again proved that he was in on the joke. The article in question was illustrated by a full-page photo of Bonaduce standing by the side of the road holding aloft a tattered cardboard sign. “WILL ACT FOR FOOD,” it read.

As if that wasn’t enough drama in his life, Bonaduce also brought his fighting prowess to the ring in the name of charity. At various times, he traded punches with Donny Osmond and former “Brady Bunch” star Barry Williams, and later fought retired baseball slugger Jose Canseco, who was 100 pounds heavier and nearly a foot taller, to a draw. The six-time All-Star was genuinely impressed by his opponent. “For a guy my size to hit him like that, and he didn’t go down; wow,” Canesco said after the fight. “If he were my size, he probably would have knocked me out of the ring.”

Along the way, Bonaduce twice had married and divorced. The second one in particular made the tabloids (“Danny Gets Hitched on First Date!”); lasted 16 years; and produced two children, Isabella and Dante, now 28 and 22. His marital counseling and other issues featured as a central component of the 2005-06 VH1 series “Breaking Bonaduce,” which was either a refreshingly unfiltered reality show, or the epitome of train-wreck TV, according to taste.

ANOTHER OF THOSE sudden rebounds that constitute the basic fabric of Bonaduce’s career occurred around 2010-11. Actually, there were two such moments. First, and most significantly, he married Amy Railsback, a former substitute teacher turned talent manager, in a beachfront ceremony in Maui, and in short order finally got sober. “She’s my light at the end of a long tunnel,” he says. And then, in the fall of 2011, following a change of format at Bonaduce’s latest radio station in Philadelphia, the couple moved to Seattle. “We both love the area, particularly places like Chinook’s and the Queen Anne Farmers Market, and the occasional hockey game,” Amy says.

After 12 continuous years of co-hosting “The Danny Bonaduce & Sarah Morning Show” on KZOK-FM, it seems as if the boy who once almost permanently lived on a bus finally has found a home.

“I’ve worked with Danny all that time,” says his co-host, the “one-name” Sarah, “and every day delivers the unexpected. He’s brash in the most positive way. You never know what you’re going to hear, but it’s always uniquely Danny. With our morning show, one of the things I love is his honesty. People often ask me what Danny’s really like, and I tell them what you hear is what you get. He’s the same exuberant person on and off the air.”

The show is a compelling mixture of music; banter; wit; occasionally combative views on the social issues of the day; and freewheeling, often experience-based lifestyle advice. Want to know whether you have a substance problem? Ask Bonaduce. Curious about what your spouse might be getting up to on those late nights at the office? He’s your man. “Whatever the problem is, I’ve probably been there,” Bonaduce says, with his distinctive raspy laugh. He’s never cruel or dismissive, and clearly loves what he does. “I have the best job in the world, and I live in the best city in the world,” he tells me. “Even I couldn’t blow that.”

There is a disarming candor to Bonaduce the man and the radio personality, a natural modesty that coexists with the sort of winning self-confidence that caught Richard Chamberlain’s ear in the Hollywood diner nearly 60 years ago. At this point, Bonaduce’s story is both an inspiration and a warning about the rewards and perils of celebrity. It’s also one that answers for all time the question about whether there can be a second act to someone’s life.

When Bonaduce’s old friend David Cassidy passed away in November 2017 at the age of 67, his rueful last words were, “So much wasted time.” Coming from a man who had his own share of professional ups and downs, it was a poignant reminder of the importance of making every day count. The phrase obviously struck a chord with Bonaduce, anyway, because shortly after Cassidy’s death, he went out and had it tattooed across his heart.