Bonaduce, Tuned In

Danny Bonaduce is talking about former child stars and drugs on KYSR-FM’s (98.7) morning program--two subjects that have cropped up a lot on the new “The Jamie & Danny Show,” and that he knows intimately.

Digressing a few moments from the fast-paced chitchat and repertoire of light, sometimes raunchy fare, Bonaduce notes that whenever something happens to a child star--such as the overdose that took the life last spring of 34-year-old actress Dana Plato (who played Kimberly on “Diff’rent Strokes”)--invariably he gets called to appear on a TV show. After all, memories are long.

He tries to put a light tone to it, because he’s supposed to be funny, but it comes out poignant anyway. He says he hasn’t had a parking ticket in 10 years, but when his own older brother heard the words “child star” and “dead,” he called Danny’s house to make sure it wasn’t him. “And I’ve been 10 years clean!” Bonaduce fairly shouts.

Paired since Sept. 15 with kinetic Jamie White as hosts of the 5-9 a.m. show on Star 98, Bonaduce is still best known as television’s precocious Danny Partridge--the kid with freckles, red hair and impish grin on ABC’s icon 1970s sitcom, “The Partridge Family,” about a fatherless family of six and their traveling rock ‘n’ roll band. And only slightly lesser known for his troubled early adulthood, including a battery of arrests: for possession of cocaine in 1985 in West Hollywood, for drugs again in Florida in 1990, and for punching out a transvestite prostitute in Phoenix a year later.

Now at 40, however, the husky-voiced host wants you to know, in case you haven’t heard, that he’s making it as an adult.

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For nearly 10 years, he says, he’s been free from the drugs that plagued him for more than a decade. He’s happy at home in the Hollywood Hills with Gretchen, his wife of eight years, and their 4-year-old daughter, Isabella. He credits his wife with having “saved my life” against temptations of relapse.

And he’s now thriving in a radio career that has taken him cross-country and back, from Philadelphia in 1988 to Phoenix, back to Philadelphia and on to Chicago, Detroit and New York. And then, last month, here to Los Angeles, as KYSR named him to replace White’s former co-hosts, Frosty Stillwell and Frank Kramer, her partners since 1994 in Denver. The trio moved to KYSR in February 1998.

Despite some friction at the beginning, both Bonaduce and White say they have now bonded. Catch them in studio together, and he entertains at break--doing a little dance, snapping his fingers, wearing a rubber Swiss cheese head.

She was “a little territorial at first,” he says, but he understood, and stood back a bit. “I think it took her about three days to realize, ‘Hey, this is a good idea.’ ”

Part of it had to do with the abruptness of the change. On Tuesday she was working with longtime colleagues Frosty and Frank; the next day they were out and Bonaduce was in. “I wasn’t sure how I would take to Danny,” White says. “But he’s a really, really great guy. He actually cracks me up. He’s very quick-witted. We go so fast--four hours, 700 miles an hour--he moves.”

“We prepare for the show by living our lives,” notes Bonaduce, whose shtick involves a certain hyperbolic spin. “Jamie prepares by being completely out of her mind, by hanging around with people who are equally as insane, and I prepare by going to PTA meetings. So that’s one of the funnier things about it. Because everyone thinks that Danny Bonaduce--they heard all these wild stories, I’m going to be a maniac. And really, I’m like the sensible adult.”

He’s the family man who goes home at night versus White’s blond-haired, great-toothed party-goer, married to an orthopedic surgeon in Denver whom she generally sees only on weekends. White’s weekday pals, male and female, are offstage characters in the show’s ongoing radio play--interspersed with relationship advice for callers.

What Bonaduce says he doesn’t like to talk about on the show--but will if someone else raises the subject--is his former television fame. “If listeners are tuning in for that, hopefully they’ll get over it,” he explains. “There’s no longevity in me telling old stories on the radio.”

Still, he knows it was his ticket in--from his first radio job at WEXG-FM in Philadelphia in 1988 right through to Star 98. As Ken Christensen, vice president and general manager of KYSR, notes: “We like Danny’s star appeal, the familiarity that he has because of his personality and ‘The Partridge Family.’ ”

The TV series, which aired from Sept. 25, 1970, until Aug. 31, 1974--Bonaduce’s 15th birthday--also featured Shirley Jones and her real-life stepson, David Cassidy, who parlayed his popularity on the show to a singing stint that made him a teen idol.

Danny grew up in Woodland Hills, the youngest of four children of Betty and Joseph Bonaduce; his father was a TV comedy writer. He had his first gig, a commercial, at age 4, and at 7 appeared in an episode of “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” that his dad wrote.

As was revealed in a recent E! Entertainment retrospective on “The Partridge Family,” Bonaduce sometimes showed up on the set with welts on his face.

“Whose father didn’t beat ‘em up now and again?” Bonaduce says. “He didn’t burn us with cigarettes. He’s not, like, crazy. But I’ve decided lately that it’s his life, too, and I no longer feel it’s appropriate to want to tell on the guy. . . . He wasn’t a decent guy. But he was brilliant, and that counts for something, too.”

Bonaduce says he began smoking pot on the “Partridge” set at age 12 or 13, and lost his virginity with one of Cassidy’s castoff girlfriends a year or so later. His parents divorced at about that time and, after “Partridge Family” wrapped, Bonaduce took his own apartment; his mother had moved back home to Philadelphia. At a private high school in Encino, he moved on to cocaine and acid.

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He bounced in and out of several community colleges and by 1982 realized he was an addict. “I was getting high with my neighbors and the next thing I knew it had spiraled out of control.”

He blew thousands of dollars on drugs, got some television parts here and there, and hit bottom in 1988. As he said in an anti-drug message on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” recently and repeated on the radio show, his mother found him in a dive motel on Sunset Boulevard, weighing 112 pounds. He tried to avoid her, but she came back, knocked again and said, “I just wanted you to know that I love you . . . because I don’t know if I will see you again. The next time I hear about you, I’ll be reading that you’re dead.” He went into the bathroom to get more drugs and saw for the first time “the picture of a dying man in the mirror.”

So he moved in with his mother and not long thereafter got a guest stint at WEXG, which led to a regular job.

Does he now prefer radio to television? “Whatever feeds my family,” he says with a laugh, adding, on a serious note: “My favorite pastime is to write. So it doesn’t matter which is more popular. It matters which is more fulfilling. I often say television is not a job for grown men. You go to a set, they pick out your clothes for you, they tell you where to stand, what to say, and your chair has your name on it in case you can’t find a place to sit. Whereas on radio, Jamie and I come in in the morning, turn on the mikes and just go. Those are our words and our thoughts and our ideas.”

Nevertheless, he does have other stuff going. He says he has sold a game show to FX with himself as host. He’s developing another game show at MGM and a sitcom with Comedy Central.

He insists he doesn’t know what got him into drugs, blaming neither upbringing nor childhood fame. “I have no idea. Why does anyone get into drugs? A lot of people think, ‘There’s Mommy did this, Daddy did that.’ You know what? I had a lot of time on my hands. I started recreationally, and next thing I know it was the focus of my life. And I have an addictive personality. My motto in life is, ‘If anything is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.’ ”

As for the series that helped bring him where he is today, Bonaduce reflects: “There is not a day, or even an hour, that ‘The Partridge Family’ is not some part of my day. It certainly has mapped out who I’ve become. In the long run, it doesn’t hold any great import for me.”

Then, referring to a movie due to air on ABC on Nov. 13--”Come On Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story,” on which he is now a consultant, but had a hand in writing when he and a buddy first pitched it to Fox five years ago--he adds: “To quote a line from the movie, ‘It was the bus ride of a lifetime.’ ”