Bobby Sherman, teen idol who made fans swoon, dies at 81
Bobby Sherman, a teen idol of the late 1960s and early ’70s who rose to fame on the TV sitcom “Here Come the Brides” and left fans swooning with a spate of hit songs that made him a king of bubblegum pop, has died at 81.
Emily Langer
To teenyboppers who pored over the pages of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines more than half a century ago, Mr. Sherman — with his shaggy mop of hair, crystal-blue eyes and smile as wide as his collar — was a heartthrob of the highest order.
From 1968 to 1970, he co-starred as Jeremy Bolt on “Here Come the Brides,” a Western set in the logging boomtown of Seattle, where logging executives decide to recruit marriageable women to stave off loneliness among the lumberjacks.
Mr. Sherman’s television work launched him to an even more successful music career. Beginning in 1969, he delivered a stream of hits — among them “Little Woman,” “La La La (If I Had You),%252C%25E2%2580%259D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY)” “Easy Come, Easy Go,” “Julie, Do Ya Love Me” and “Cried Like a Baby” — and became known as Bubblegum Bobby, a reference to the high-spirited, youth-oriented musical genre called bubblegum pop.
For a memorable if brief stretch of time, he was seemingly everywhere, not only on television and radio, but on posters, T-shirts, cereal cartons, lunch boxes and most anywhere else his boyish visage could be displayed and gazed upon by his admirers.
Such was their ardor that after one musical performance, Mr. Sherman told the Los Angeles Times, he rode away in a hearse as fans trailed a decoy limo.
Mr. Sherman burst onto the scene at 21 after being discovered in a manner that most aspiring stars and starlets could only dream of. The son of a milkman, he had grown up in Hollywood and was trying without success to break into show business when a date invited him to a cast party for the soon-to-be released 1965 biblical epic “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”
The gathering, hosted by actor Sal Mineo at his beach house, had drawn many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Serendipitously, the entertainment at the party included members of Mr. Sherman’s old high school band. They needed a singer and invited him to join them for a number.
With his rendition of “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles, Mr. Sherman caught the attention of movie stars Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda. Along with Mineo, they approached him at the end of the song, Mr. Sherman recalled in a self-titled memoir co-written with Dena Hill.
One of the actors — Mr. Sherman did not recall which one — remarked to him: “You’re very good. Who’s handling you?” Mr. Sherman was so inexperienced that he did not understand the question. The answer, in any case, was that there was no manager, agent or other professional “handling” his as yet nonexistent career.
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Sherman received a phone call from an agent. He became a house singer on the variety show “Shindig!” and began making appearances on programs such as “The Monkees.”
He acted in a single episode in 1971 of “The Partridge Family,” a popular ABC sitcom about a fictional musical band, and was featured in a short-lived spin-off, “Getting Together,” also on ABC.
“Getting Together” struggled to compete with “All in the Family,” which aired on CBS in the same time slot, and was discontinued in 1972 after only a few months on the air. Mr. Sherman’s time as a star, too, had essentially reached its end.
Years later, he conceded that he was not entirely sorry to make his exit from the screen and stage. He had come to see his career as “a conglomerate of fast-thinking and wheeler-dealer kinds of people,” he told The Washington Post, “capitalizing” on the excitement of his teen fans.
Robert Cabot Sherman Jr. was born on July 22, 1943, in Santa Monica, California. His father and mother were 17 and 15, respectively, when they married. In his teens, Mr. Sherman would sometimes help his father make milk deliveries, rising at 3 a.m. to begin the route.
Mr. Sherman had an affinity for music from a young age. He sang and learned to play the trumpet and drums, among other instruments, discovering in music a way to overcome his shyness.
His experience playing in a high school band fueled his hopes for a future in entertainment, which he continued to nurture while working for a Navy supplier and studying psychology at a community college.
Mr. Sherman made guest appearances on TV programs including “Mod Squad,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Frasier,” and he had a recurring role on the 1986 sitcom “Sanchez of Bel Air” on the USA Network.
But after marrying and having two children, he devoted his professional life mainly to emergency medicine. He became interested in the field, he said, after taking a Red Cross class to learn how to care for his sons if they were injured.
Mr. Sherman received his certification as an EMT and delivered at least five babies, among other acts as a medic. He joined the Los Angeles Police Department and instructed police academy trainees in first aid and CPR, becoming in the course of his work a sworn police officer and the department’s chief medical training officer. He also founded a volunteer EMT foundation.
Mr. Sherman’s first marriage, to Patti Carnel, ended in divorce. They had two sons, Christopher and Tyler, but a complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Sherman and Poublon founded the Brigitte and Bobby Sherman Children’s Foundation, providing educational and nutritional services in Ghana.
Mr. Sherman remained the object of affection among millions who had seen him on television or listened to his music in the 1960s and ’70s. Even Marge Simpson, the mother on the animated sitcom “The Simpsons,” confesses that she had been smitten with Bubblegum Bobby in her youth.
In a last act onstage, he joined Peter Noone, formerly of “Herman’s Hermits,” and Davy Jones, of the 1960s pop band the Monkees, on a nostalgia-soaked “Teen Idols” tour in the 1990s.
Mr. Sherman found fans everywhere he went — even on emergency runs as an EMT.
One day, “we were working on a hemorrhaging woman who had passed out,” Mr. Sherman told the Los Angeles Times. “Her husband kept staring at me. Finally he said, ‘Look, honey, it’s Bobby Sherman!’”
The woman quickly came to and exclaimed, “Oh great, I must look a mess!”
“I told her not to worry, she looked fine,” Mr. Sherman recounted. He then signed an autograph before the ambulance whisked her away.
