John Davidson is the superstar that time forgot. He starred in movies, sang on Broadway, headlined in Vegas, subbed more than 80 times for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” His dimpled smile and enviable mane of hair were inescapable through the 1970s and ’80s — just go to YouTube for the evidence. He’s duetting with Julie Andrews, straight-manning for George Carlin, battling through a talk-show chat with a drunk Ringo. He dated Karen Carpenter, harmonized with Mama Cass, hung out with Kenny Rogers, cut records on the same label as Janis Joplin and Simon & Garfunkel.
The next-big-thing of ’70s TV was the ultimate Hollywood Square, always out of step with the era. At 80, he’s still working on his act — and aiming to please himself.
It takes three flights to get to the airport at La Paz and then a 20-minute drive to reach the marina where John Davidson — the actor, singer, talk-show host, nightclub workhorse and all-around icon of American television’s three-channel glory days — is living on his boat.
I worried that he regretted allowing me to visit.
In January, days before I first planned to come, Davidson emailed because a storm threatened to shut down the harbor. As I tried to rebook my flights, he suggested that we just Zoom. “Wouldn’t this be a much simpler way, definitely less costly and save you all this trouble,” he wrote. After I had boarded Cantante (Spanish for “singer”), the 42-foot trawler he bought sight unseen last year, he came clean about the lingering concerns that had kept him up the previous night awaiting my arrival — that he wouldn’t be entertaining enough.
“You’re going to be stuck on a boat with me,” Davidson said. “What are we going to talk about?”
Seriously, man?
Imagine a Brad Pitt who could also sing, or a Jimmy Fallon who could act, or a Hugh Jackman with his own talk show, back when talk shows were cool. Jackman might be the best parallel, a ruggedly handsome multiplex star who remained at heart a song-and-dance man, craving nothing so much as a live audience.
That was John Davidson in the 1970s. Or could have been.
What is there not to talk about with John Davidson? His is the story of man both built for stardom and an awkward fit for his particular era, a wholesome multihyphenate who broke out in Disney musicals just in time for the advent of “Midnight Cowboy” and recorded smooth orchestral ballads while the girls were screaming for Led Zeppelin.
What were the 1970s really like? Davidson, the preacher’s kid from White Plains, N.Y., who got thrown into the fast lane, can tell us — and he does, in fact, three nights a week during the summer season, in the 44-seat club he opened last year in an old barn in Sandwich, N.H. An evening of songs and stories and nostalgia. He barely breaks even, but “he would do it for nothing,” says his longtime friend, comedian Jim Teter.
“He has to be singing,” Teter says. He once told Davidson: “You would follow a couple of guys into the men’s room with your guitar and say, ‘Hi, fellows! You want to hear some songs?’”
But the ultimate showbiz people-pleaser has another audience he is aiming to satisfy these days, at least during the offseason. It’s why he took stock of a looming birthday last year and explained to his second wife that after 38 years of marriage he would be decamping to a boat in Mexico for the winter, as a solo act.
“I said, f— it,” Davidson recalled. “I’m 80, and I’m going to do what I want.”
Hearing John Davidson cuss is initially jarring. The son of Baptist ministers, he could be counted on during the days of Woodstock and Lenny Bruce to brighten screens with his perfect smile, G-rated jokes and face as smooth as a Roman sculpture. His speaking voice is not one that you’d expect to go blue: dignified, almost regal, a tone that in another era would have made him a radio star. His singing voice is still a booming, polished baritone — supple enough for a tender Everly Brothers song or slide into screwball for Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” but free of the grit or rasp you’ve come to expect with the folk songs he favors these days.
Onstage in Sandwich, he can get randy with a joke but never goes too far, understanding the line between playful and vulgar.
Davidson and I never really established the specifics of our voyage. I envisioned a cross between a boy’s night out and “The Old Man and the Sea.” Battling salty waves. Diving off the deck. Fishing. We’d drink canned beer and smoke cigars.
The Baja peninsula sparked still other associations. Puerto Vallarta is due south, the vacation hot spot whose name was burned onto the brain of every ’70s TV-watching kid as a prime stop for “The Love Boat,” and yes, of course, Davidson punched his ticket on the cheesy, fabulous ABC dramedy hit, appearing as a suntan-lotion exec searching for a special lady to be the company spokeswoman. (His fellow guest stars: Jack Klugman, Telly Savalas and teenage Janet Jackson.)
“It’s just really organic,” says Ja Rule of the pair’s chemistry. “It fits. It works. I think we look like, together on screen, what people would deem as Black excellence.”
In 2002, Ashanti would release her first solo single, “Foolish,” from her self-titled debut album. Containing a prominent sample of DeBarge’s “Stay With Me,” “Foolish” sat at No. 1 on the Hot 100 for 10 weeks, and sold more than 2 million copies.
“I really didn’t understand what all of this success meant,” Ashanti says. “When the numbers were coming in, and we were No. 1 on Billboard, that’s all I knew. I didn’t have anything to compare it to. I would be like, ‘OK, is this a good thing?’ or ‘Oh, I just sold 1 million records, is that a good number?’ I genuinely didn’t know. I think that I was happy. But I couldn’t truly appreciate it, because I didn’t know how amazing it was until a little bit later.”
That album was certified gold in its first week out and earned Ashanti three Grammy nominations, including for new artist.
In the years that followed, Ashanti put her screen skills to the test, starting with the video for 2003’s “Rain on Me.” Enlisting the help of Hype Williams to direct and actor Larenz Tate to co-star, she filmed three versions of the video, one of which was a 10-minute mini-movie depicting Tate as an abusive boyfriend. Their goal was to raise awareness of domestic violence, and a partnership with the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund to help distribute the film, helped give voice to the message.
But it soon became clear that our time on Cantante would be scripted by neither Aaron Spelling nor Hemingway. There would certainly be no fishing. Earlier this year, Davidson caught a tuna with a friend.
“We made the mistake of trying to clean this fish to make two nice filets,” Davidson intoned. “To give to a restaurant owner. And it was the bloodiest mess. And I just looked in the eye of this fish. What the f—? Why did I take this guy’s life? Do I need to do this? And there was blood over the whole boat. I just felt like such an a–h—.”
He has a neighbor here in Mexico. Christine, who lives on the boat in the slip next to his. She moved down from California after her husband died. She remembers Davidson from his TV days and springs onto her sailboat’s deck whenever she hears his motor start. It’s not because she’s in awe. It’s his steering. When the wind is blowing, it can be easy to slide too far to the left. There have been some close calls.
“He’s learning,” Christine says. “He just needs to watch the wind and the tides and which way it blows.”
Thirty years ago, he did just that. It was 1991, and he was turning 50, a midlife crisis point for a performer who had spent more time than most in boyish roles — he starred as Curly in “Oklahoma!” in his 20s, 30s, 40s and even in his 50s — but whose next-big-thing momentum had petered out into hosting gigs on “The Hollywood Squares” and “The $100,000 Pyramid.” “I thought I was going to start drooling soon, that I had no time left,” Davidson says and laughs. That’s when he first hit the high seas, taking his wife, Rhonda, and two of his three children, John Jr., and Ashleigh (his other daughter, Jennifer, skipped the trip) out on his 96-footer, the Principia, a nine-month journey down the coast from Ventura, Calif., through the Panama Canal and up to the Florida Keys.
By the end he was sick of the sea — and ready to get back to work. He sold the boat and opened his own theater in Branson, Mo., the squeaky-clean Vegas of the Ozarks, and, after that, picked up $100,000 a year doing five cruises a year for Royal Caribbean.
The wanderlust kept recurring, in consort with the ever-nagging urge to perform. A few years ago, he hatched a plan to buy an RV so he could drive himself from town to town while on a national tour with “Wicked.” His business manager tried to dissuade him. Rent one first, Rebecca Ryder told him, and see if you like it.
Reference Source: The Washington Post