Last week, Harriet Nelson, 85, went home once more to her beloved Ozzie, who died 19 years ago. Lying by the window of her seaside house in Laguna Beach, Calif., so that she could gaze out on the ocean, Harriet died of congestive heart failure. At her side were her son David, 57, and Ozzie's brother Donald, 67, and their wives.
For Harriet, life with Ozzie had been filled with a remarkably steadfast measure of love and devotion, considering that it was put on such public display. Beginning in 1944, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet ran for a decade on radio and 14 years on television, making the Nelsons—Ozzie, Harriet and their sons, David and Ricky—the most visible touchstones of American family life as it was imagined, with wondrous simplicity, in mid-20th century. "The show was family," Harriet said in a rare interview three years ago. "We worked every day of the week, and we loved it."
Now only David, a TV producer, remains of the original family. Ozzie died of cancer in 1975 at age 68, and Rick perished at 45 in a 1985 plane crash. Of the extended Nelson family, it is Rick's kids, daughter Tracy and twin sons Matthew and Gunnar, who have carried on the family tradition, with Tracy currently appearing on Fox's Melrose Place and the twins emulating their father as rock stars.
Grandma Harriet was proud that Tracy and the twins were the fourth generation of her family in show business. Born Peggy Lou Snyder in Des Moines, the daughter of a stock theater company director and his actress wife, she took the name Harriet Hilliard to vaudeville. Legend has it that Ozzie spotted her in a movie short with Rudy Vallee and promptly signed her to sing with his band. "Girls used to hang around the bandstand [because] the band leader was the big cheese," Harriet later recalled. "It was Ozzie's idea to have a pretty girl singing duets with him so the boys would have something to look at."
By the early '40s, Ozzie and Harriet were doing songs and patter on radio with comedian Red Skelton. In 1944 they launched their own show on CBS—with stage children. By 1949, though, David and Ricky had badgered Mom and Dad into letting them have a try on the air. "When you heard that pipsqueak voice of Ricky's," Harriet once recalled, "the laughs rolled in from Transylvania. There was no more talk of letting another kid take his job."
So, in the golden age of '50s TV, the Nelsons could boast that they were the only real family on the air. (Even Lucy and Desi hired a child actor to play Little Ricky.) And like all real families, they suffered real tragedies—broken marriages for both David and Rick, Ozzie's and Rick's deaths and finally a brutal custody battle over Rick's youngest son, Sam, involving Rick's widow, Kris, and her brother, actor Mark Harmon. (Harriet worked in the background to maintain peace, and Sam ultimately remained with his mother.)
Otherwise, Harriet spent her last years living quietly in Laguna Beach, visiting with family and friends. In 1989 she made a guest appearance with Tracy, playing a nun on Father Dowling Mysteries. Sometime thereafter, though, she fell downstairs and crushed a vertebra. That and emphysema—she was a lifelong smoker—caused her health to decline rapidly. But she remained, to generations of fans, the idealized American Mom—and a marvelously real matriarch to her family. "She had a wonderful sense of humor," Tracy fondly recalls. "I once asked her, 'What do I say to people who ask me what advice you've given me about show business?' She said, 'That I told you to take your makeup off before you go to bed.' "
MARK GOODMAN
TOM CUNNEFF and LORENZO BENET in Los Angeles
- Contributors:
- Tom Cunneff,
- Lorenzo Benet.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
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