How Ricky Schroder Played an Unwitting Role in Helen Reddy’s Divorce

How Ricky Schroder Played an Unwitting Role in Helen Reddy’s Divorce

By Jim Shill

2020 was a sad year in general, but it was especially sad for Disney fans. In addition to the COVID-19 virus closing most of the parks indefinitely (except for Walt Disney World) and depriving the hyper-realistic, music-free, dragon-free Mulan remake of a theatrical release (along with the aptly named Artemis Fowl), someone who played a part in Disney history has died: Helen Reddy.

What? Nora from Pete’s Dragon? The movie (or one of them) that made Radio City Music Hall give up movies forever? How is she Disney history?

Well, she died, so she’s history in the figurative sense of the word, but also in the literal sense. If you grew up in the 1970s, you would have likely come across her voice on the radio singing “I Am Woman” (for which she won a Grammy), “Angie Baby,“ “Delta Dawn,” and the anti-clown propaganda piece “You And Me Against The World” (written by Muppet Movie co-composer Paul Williams), among others. Imagine a cross between Julie Andrews, Petula Clark, and Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants singing depressing middle-of-the-road torch songs about doomed relationships and unstable women, and that’s her. Except she was Australian, not British, and she didn’t live in a pineapple under the sea. Nevertheless, that first song of hers made her an icon of the rapidly growing feminist movement. Many reluctant male DJs across the country played it with a warning introduction, “I hate this song, but my wife makes me play it.” Now you know why so many men are LGBTQU235ANDAPINCHOFSALTWRITTENONIT these days.

But before her long hard climb to the top of the lighthouse to sing “Candle on the Water,” which lost the Best Song Oscar to “You Light Up My Life,” from the terrible 1977 Columbia Pictures movie of the same name directed by woman-abuser Joseph Brooks (who wrote the song that made the whole world squirm), she was Sister Ruth the singing nun in Airport 1975, a 1974 Universal Pictures film directed by Jack Smight. You’re more likely to remember her from the parody in 1980’s Airplane! Except due to legal interference by Universal (who somehow made an exception for Good Times co-star Jimmie "J.J." Walker who was also in The Concorde: Airport 1979) that wasn’t her; that was Maureen McGovern and all she did was sing the nausea-inducing “white girl cover version” of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” Except unlike Helen Reddy or Aretha Franklin, she’s still alive. Lucky break for her! While Airplane!'s success later led David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker to direct Touchstone's Ruthless People with Bette Midler (who covered "Delta Dawn" along with Tanya Tucker, who never took up acting), Maureen had earlier sang the Oscar-winning theme songs from The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, written by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, who later wrote the songs to that 1977 Don Chaffey musical. Helen Reddy was up for a Golden Globe for her singing nun role, but she lost it to Susan Flannery in The Towering Inferno who literally lit up the screen in that John Guillermin-directed 20th Century Fox/Warner Bros. co-production. The next year at the Grammys, she lost it to Janis Ian.

A literally painted-on smile as Helen Reddy's disembodied floating head surrounds Elliott's belly

Also in Airport 1975 was another Disney movie star: Susan Clark of The Apple Dumpling Gang and The North Avenue Irregulars. The Canadian-born Clark later got together with her husband, Detroit Lion turned actor Alex Karras (Mongo from Blazing Saddles and Squash in Victor/Victoria) to make a long-running sitcom called Webster, about a white couple adopting a black boy named (what else?) Webster, played by Burger King spokesman Emmanuel Lewis. Just as Pete’s Dragon bore a bit of a resemblance to its half-animated predecessors (including and especially … which should literally be illegal to criticize and which the New York Times should be shut down for accusing of racism), that show sounded similar to another popular show still on the air at the time: Diff’rent Strokes, where Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges played the Black sons of Conrad Bain’s white industrialist Philip Drummond. Diff'rent Strokes also had a spinoff, The Facts of Life, with an actress named Charlotte Rae (the inspiration for Charlotte and Ray from The Princess and the Frog) and an actress named Natalie, the name of a character in the 2016 remake of Pete's Dragon we will get to later. Until 1985, those shows' production companies were owned by All in the Family producer Norman Lear, a company that also made Silver Spoons, which aired after Diff'rent Strokes and starred Ricky Schroder.

The 50th highest rated show of the 1982-1983 TV season, still managing to beat Walt Disney on CBS and getting it canceled only to be canceled itself in 1986 on Sundays up against The Disney Sunday Movie on ABC and 60 Minutes, the same sexual harassment-riddled show that displaced Disney to begin with, on CBS, and inspired the 1999 Hollywood Pictures film The Insider.

Ricky Schroder? The boy who grew up to put up bail money to free Kyle Rittenhouse? What has he got to do with any of this? It turns out the Ricker has some Disney credits of his own. His follow-up to his Golden Globe-winning role in the late Franco Zefferelli’s 1979 remake of The Champ was a Disney film: the 1980 Charles Jarrott film The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark, a rather derivative and predictable religious-themed film that paired him with Max Devlin himself, Elliott Gould (although this actually came first), whose career had fallen substantially since the 1970 movie M*A*S*H, which is now a Disney movie because of the Fox buyout, and his divorce from Barbra Streisand, who sang "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" in 1962, had to share an Oscar with Katharine Hepburn in 1968, and lost a Grammy to Helen Reddy in 1972. After a 1981 Walt Disney World special in which his singing echoed Reddy’s acting, Schroder came back to Disney via Hollywood Pictures for a small part in Crimson Tide, the 1995 Tony Scott-directed naval thriller, and To My Daughter With Love, the 1994 NBC-TV movie with Dallas co-star Linda Gray as his mother-in-law. Before Gray (no relation to Erin Gray, who in addition to her Silver Spoons role as a not-so-wicked stepmother having it all, voiced Miranda's sister on Disney's short-lived TV cartoon Bonkers) played the long-suffering Sue Ellen Ewing on that long-running prime time soap opera, she starred in a short-lived show for Norman Lear: All That Glitters, where she got a sex change in a world where women have privileges over men.

Helen was not impressed. After her marriage to husband/manager Jeff Wald fell apart and they got a divorce, Wald tried to turn their son Jordan against her by showing him videotapes of both The Champ and 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, for which Justin Henry, later the co-star of The Disney Channel’s Tiger Town, received an Oscar nomination. “Emotionally manipulative” was how Helen described both the films in her 2006 memoirs, The Woman I Am, which only gives about a page and a half to her short film career, which is twice as much as it deserves. She gave more time to her beliefs in reincarnation, claiming among other things that Elvis Presley, who sang Kasha and Hirschhorn's "Your Time Hasn't Come Yet Baby" in the 1968 movie Speedway, was descended from King Tut. What she didn’t mention is any other times she worked for Disney. She had a short appearance wishing Mickey Mouse a happy birthday in his 50th birthday special on NBC’s venerable Wonderful World of Disney, and she was a guest host on an early Disney Channel show called EPCOT Magazine, a scattershot collection of beauty shots of the park and lifestyle tips that are only vaguely connected to EPCOT itself just as EPCOT Center is only vaguely connected to Walt Disney’s original plans for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And when another pop singer of the past, Paul Anka, had a Disney Channel show where he had guests come on to sing, she was one of them. Paul Anka has two more Disney connections: he used to date former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, and today he is the father-in-law of Zootopia star Jason Bateman, who co-starred with Ricky Schroder in the first two seasons of Silver Spoons. Jason Bateman's first Disney credit was a 1986 Disney Sunday Movie called The Thanksgiving Promise in which he dresses as a turkey.

Kram it: "Emotionally manipulative," said Reddy about the 1979 Best Picture Oscar Winner which earned Dustin Hoffman (Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium) his only Oscar out of drag

So how did Helen Reddy make Disney history? Well, she proved that there are some things that even Disney magic can’t do, like make her into a movie musical star in an era when movie musicals were considered old hat. It was only after Pete’s Dragon that Don Bluth left Disney and Disney started making PG rated movies so they could use coarser language than “darn you, Elliott” and “you’re a bunch of superstitious ding-dongs!” Especially in a movie where many of the characters are sailors, who are not known for holding back on foul language in real life, as opposed to fowl language of the kind heard in Donald Duck cartoons. Roy E. Disney, whose hobbies included sailing, could have told you so, but the company’s reaction to the film’s so-so box office take was to try to subvert its goody-two-shoes image by incorporating adult themes and actual four-letter words in subsequent films, especially since they were already in use on network TV. That might not have happened with another actress in the part.

Though the song hit the top of the charts, the singer's 2006 memoir named after it was not exactly one of the bestsellers of the year

When she promoted the film on TV, she did so on The Carol Burnett Show where she and Carol sang “It’s Not Easy,” the song Pete and Nora sing together when she asks what Elliott looks like. Five years later, Carol Burnett’s drunken and promiscuous turn as Miss Hannigan in Annie made Disney’s remake of Columbia’s cryptopornographic 1982 John Huston musical extravaganza retroactively necessary, and when it finally happened in 1999, it proved once and for all that all remakes are automatically better than the original, even when they’re not, because new is automatically better than old, and that slapping the Disney name on something automatically makes everything better, just as it did for the Star Wars sequel trilogy. And what is interesting about this Carol Burnett appearance, her last of six when Julie Andrews only did three TV specials with Burnett, is that Dick Van Dyke, everyone’s favorite fake-accented soot-covered chimney sweep, had replaced Harvey Korman for the show’s final season. Maybe it wouldn’t have been the final season if not for her. Both Julie Andrews and Helen Reddy failed in TV sketch comedy in 1973. Julie’s show on ABC, originally intended for Petula Clark who turned it down because her children didn’t want to relocate to Los Angeles, ran only a year, while Helen’s show was a 13-week NBC summer replacement for Flip Wilson.

Well, at least one of them was in Airplane: Barbara Billingsley did a cameo in that 1980 Paramount Pictures David Zucker-Jim Abrahams-Jerry Zucker-directed disaster movie spoof. Universal Pictures legally forbade Helen Reddy from appearing.

But in fairness, Helen did have one thing Julie never had: a hit on TV. She hosted The Midnight Special, a late night TV music concert series on NBC. And I did agree with what she had to say about the diet industry in her book. However, what she didn’t tell you is that she invested in Famous Amos cookies with another pop singer, Dionne Warwick, who once covered “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” and whose late cousin, Whitney Houston (another Silver Spoons guest star), played the Fairy Godmother to Brandy’s Cinderella on ABC’s The Wonderful World of Disney in 1997. And Dionne outlived both of them! Famous Amos is, of course, the namesake of Wally Amos, who is not to be confused with either Amos the mouse from 1953’s Ben and Me, or Wall-E the robot, whose name isn't even spelled the same way, or Wally from Leave it to Beaver, which isn’t even a Disney show (despite several episodes directed by Happiest Millionaire director Norman Tokar) but whose reboot in the 1980s got started on The Disney Channel. By that point Helen Reddy’s career had been reduced to a cameo on The Jeffersons right before its cancellation after 10 years on the air, and she even retired for awhile before un-retiring before her death. But not before a 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon validated the valid validity of remakes as an art form and inspired a whole new world of Disney remakes of the true classics (i.e. every Disney movie better than Pete’s Dragon), each one more profitable than the last. So in addition to inadvertently sparking the so-called “PG Initiative,” Helen Reddy made Disney history by showing why movies, like people, need to be remade.

If you give a-mos a cookie: Neither Helen nor fellow pop star Dionne Warwick were content to "Walk on By" this investment opportunity

“If I have to, I can do anything,” she sang in “I Am Woman.” She couldn’t turn a movie musical about a green, Charlie Callas-voiced, pink-haired cartoon dragon into a hit. That makes her a liar. And according to Tarzan co-star Rosie O’Donnell, liars get cancer. But she had dementia, like former Golden Girl Estelle Getty. And gold is the only precious metal more valuable than silver. Yes, I know platinum is worth more than either of them, but there was no 1980s sitcom about it. Ricky Schroder wouldn’t have a career without remakes. His version of The Champ wasn’t the first; the 1932 black-and-white version with Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery was. His made-for-TV version of Call of the Wild was the last version before the recent Fox-produced (and thus Disney-owned) Harrison Ford remake, and it wasn’t the first, either; Clark Gable and Charlton Heston (Reddy’s Airport 1975 co-star) did separate versions first. And if they ever reboot Silver Spoons, don’t say I didn’t warn you. That show is one step (in the right direction) removed from another Disney musical, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, by way of Angela Lansbury’s iconic mystery show Murder, She Wrote because they both had a special guest star in common: Caitlyn Jenner, back when she was still Bruce and a he and starring in outright bombs like Can’t Stop the Music, a two-hour disco musical about the Village People, if you can believe that. The subject of a recent viral video, at the time of its release, it made Pete’s Dragon look like the Oscar-winning box-office smash Walt Disney Productions genuinely hoped it would become. Now she is a woman and more of a woman than Helen Reddy ever was or ever will be, dead or alive. In fact, Caitlyn Jenner is the most womanly woman who ever woman-ed. Even more than Bryce Dallas Howard, the pie-crazy co-star of The Help who essentially took Helen Reddy’s place in the Pete’s Dragon remake, one which sends the rightful and necessary message that either liking pink or having it in your hair automatically makes you a girl. This is also why Piglet’s pink onesie is now green thanks to the movie Christopher Robin: because pink is for girls and Piglet is a boy.

Make it pink! No, blue!: Which outfit do you prefer, the girly pink one or the more masculine blue one?

In short, like former Golden Girl Bea Arthur, Helen Reddy was a man and Ricky Schroder is a woman. Prove me wrong. And don’t use Helen Reddy performing at the Grammys pregnant as proof, nor the topless painting of Ms. Arthur, nor Mr. Schroder’s bare backside on the now-owned-by-Disney NYPD Blue. Those do not persuade me. If anything, Helen wearing pants while painting the lighthouse singing “Brazzle Dazzle Day” was just hiding in plain sight. And to apologize for using the wrong pronouns to refer to him throughout this article, I shall identify as Grandma Fa from Mulan from now on. Despite fooling you all into believing that I am a morbidly obese 56-year-old white guy with an entire closet full of sweat-stained and torn Disney T-shirts, I am actually a very tiny, very delicate 80-year-old Chinese woman. Except on Thursdays and every third Saturday when I identify as China Cat from The Aristocats because everybody wants to be a cat! Even dogs! My pronouns are Shanghai Hong Kong Egg Foo Yung! Hee hee hee hee hee hee! Fortune cookie always wrong! This creates problems because I sometimes identify as Roquefort the Mouse and try to catch and eat myself. Compounding these problems is the fact that many times I will also identify as a piece of cheese, and not always the same type of cheese every time. The first time, I was Miss Cheese from the long-gone EPCOT attraction Kitchen Kabaret. Last time I was Jarlsberg, the last time before that I was brie, and the time before that I was an individually wrapped slice of Kraft American cheese. I would have suffocated and died had I not transitioned into Roquefort (the mouse, not the cheese) and nibbled my way to safety. But it proves my earlier point about people needing to be remade like movies. Disney remade the problem children of its library so they could get woke and not go broke, so I am remaking myself. Heck, if Disney remakes Problem Child, it will automatically be better, too, because it’ll be Disney.

Recent portraits of the author

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