It’s been nearly 16 years since John Ritter, the star of such series as Three’s Company, Hooperman, Hearts Afire and 8 Simple Rules, passed away from television complications of aortic dissection, yet the memory of him burns as brightly as ever.
And that’s true whether you’re someone who watched him and gained joy from seeing him on any of those shows, or someone who worked alongside him, sharing laughter and friendship. But when it comes to Richard Kline, who on Three’s Company played Jack Tripper’s best friend, Larry Dallas, he’s someone who could easily fall into both categories.
That becomes obvious when he’s asked what words come to mind when John’s name is brought up. “Oh, boy,” he said, apparently gearing up. “Friend, comedy genius, all around good guy, great father … there’s just too many things that come to mind.”
His voice doesn’t trail off for long, though, before he continues without prompting: “Baseball fan, Beatles fan … huge Beatles fan. As a matter of fact, at his funeral the cabaret singer Amanda McBroom to The Beatles song ‘In My Life.’ Not a dry seat in the house.”
John Ritter: “Good Guy”
One of the phrases Richard used to describe John was “good guy,” and that really does seem to be a common theme: You would be hard-pressed to find anyone that has a bad thing to say about John, and not just because he’s no longer with us.
“The show was called Three’s Company,” says Richard, “but it might as well have been called The John Ritter Show, because, I mean, he drove the physical comedy. He was the star of the show no matter how many blondes came and went. Through the years people who had worked on that show that I may have run into or read in print, said what a friendly set it was. And the reason it was a friendly set is because there was no egomaniac at the top. John was very gracious to everyone on the show, and that really burned his reputation.”
The Calm Among the Chaos
The surprising thing about hearing that is it would seem difficult for an actor to maintain that sort of attitude on the set while behind the scenes chaos was beginning to reign. In particular this was due to contract negotiations with actress Suzanne Somers, who played Chrissy Snow on the series, that would ultimately see her part diminished and then cut out altogether. “That’s a separate issue as far as I’m concerned,” Richard explained.
“That’s an employment issue that had nothing to do with the relationships on or off the set, really. I mean, during the height of the crisis, yeah, of course, it affected the relationships. But John was known for his charity work as well with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation and whatever. He just had this great persona of being a generally outgoing, down-to-earth guy. You never got any sense of massive ego with John. At least not when I was with him.”
Separate But Connected
Three’s Company ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984, after which the cast — as often happens — went their separate ways, despite many of the audiences believing that a bond has been created that will last the rest of the casts’ lives. “For a while there we stayed friends, but, no, not really,” he differs. “But then later — much later, actually — about a year or two before he passed, we sort of reconnected.
I mean, when you’re on a show for eight years, five days a week, you see a lot of that person and they have their own lives. We weren’t with wives and friends at dinner parties. None of that. My last encounter with John was he and I, and his brother, Tom, went to a Dodgers game in August before the September that he passed.
And we had a great time. He also came to see me in a show down in the Pacific Palisades, which I was quite thrilled about. It was a schlepp from Los Angeles down to the Palisades, but he did it. But, overall, we were quite a lot of ‘set pals.'”
What was gratifying to Richard was the fact that despite the years that had passed, John essentially remained true to himself. “Same guy,” he smiled. “He just put on some weight and grew a beard, but other than that, he was the same John. I mean, I visited him on the set of 8 Simple Rules. While I was there, he introduced me to the audience and then he took back to his dressing room, where, oddly enough, he was being visited by Cybill Shepherd and [director] Peter Bogdanovich [with whom he had worked on the feature film They All Laughed]. But he was the same John; just some very funny stuff.”
John’s Connection With the Audience
Throughout his career, John seemed to have connected fairly easily with the audience, which is probably why they felt such pain and a sense of loss when he passed away. “He was just the all-American boy,” Richard offers in explanation for that connection he forged. “The guy you would want, if you were a mother, to marry your daughter.
The guy you would want on your softball team. The guy you’d want to go with if you were into hunting and fishing. Because, physically, if you look at him, he looked like the all-American guy. There was nothing characterful about John. He was a handsome, funny dude. And he emanated goodwill. If you were to look at his resume, I think you’d see that he never played a villain-villain. In Sling Blade it was a total out of the box character that he played, and he was in a lot of romantic movies of the week, but nowhere where he was a killer. Because you couldn’t buy John Ritter as a killer. Or a criminal.”
