Gary Coleman and the curse of Diff’rent Strokes
During his brief, eventful lifetime, the actor Gary Coleman had to contend with the usual fate that anyone who appears in a successful sitcom faces: strangers shouting out his catchphrase from the show Diff’rent Strokes, in this case “What’choo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis!”, to him, or at him, in the street. Yet Coleman, who died in 2010 at the age of 42, had considerably greater things to concern him than lines of dialogue being taken out of context and yelled at him in public.
He was born with a congenital kidney defect, and his growth was perpetually stunted as a result; he never grew beyond four feet eight inches. Despite his success, which came to him when he was talent-spotted by the writer and producer Norman Lear at the age of nine, he led an unhappy life, that saw him embroiled in numerous court cases and being arrested on several occasions.
Then, to top it all off, a new documentary, Gary, suggests that his death was not caused by bleeding to his brain, but instead hints that his former wife, Shannon Price, was in some way complicit, either through neglect or worse. As his former manager Don Mial says in the programme, ‘We were absolutely stumped because there were way too many questions, with no answers.” Interviewed in the documentary, Price denies any involvement in her husband’s death: “I didn’t touch him…nothing happened.”
Coleman’s brief and eventful existence is one that has fascinated millions ever since he first appeared in Diff’rent Strokes in 1978. The show ran for eight seasons, consisting of 189 episodes, and was widely praised for taking an unusual and even edgy premise – that of two black boys from Harlem being adopted by a wealthy white businessman and his daughter – and going far beyond the usual culture-clash comedy expectations as it developed and continued over the next years.
Diff’rent Strokes even pioneered a series of “very special episodes” which dealt with matters such as child sexual abuse and attempted rape – not the usual stuff of cosy primetime viewing. These unavoidably didactic but well-executed specials spoke of a desire on the part of the show’s co-creators Jeff Harris and Bernie Kukoff to produce work that would not only entertain but would also inform and educate.
One two-episode storyline in particular, season five’s The Bicycle Man, depicts the apparently friendly bicycle shop owner Mr Horton as a manipulative paedophile who attempts to molest both Arnold and his friend Dudley. It went considerably further than most family-oriented comedies would have done. Only the omnipresent audience laugh track – which now seems like something out of a Chris Morris satire in its wild incongruity – reminds the viewer that this is supposed to be a sitcom.
It was also a particularly bold stroke to deal with Coleman’s real-life health issues in the context of the programme, beginning with the third season episode Count Your Blessings, in which the character comes to terms with his restricted growth. Harris and Kukoff, deliberately chose to blur the lines between the fictitious character of Arnold Jackson and the real-life Coleman, whose early life seemed to resemble that of Jackson’s in its rapid rags-to-riches trajectory.
Like Jackson, he was adopted, by a fork-lift operator and a nurse, and he spent his childhood undergoing a gruelling series of kidney operations and dialysis that would, understandably, have left a lesser individual feeling embittered and unhappy. By the age of 17, he had no functioning kidney in his body. As Mial put it, “He fundamentally never knew what it was to be fully healthy.” Yet as Coleman said of himself, “Even when I was 5, I was the ‘do or die, never say die,’ the tenacious, ‘I’ll be back’ kind of person.”
Coleman began his acting career with an appearance in the drama series Medical Center, as well as an appearance in a bank advertisement, and when he came to the notice of Lear, he exuded star quality. As his theatrical agent Norman Perulo says in the documentary, “Gary’s parents brought him into the agency – he was only about eight-years-old – and he wore a three piece suit. He had a great laugh, and I knew that he was a tremendous talent.”
After an abortive attempt to cast Coleman in a remake of the popular Hal Roach series The Little Rascals, he was offered the role of Arnold Jackson, and swiftly became one of the most popular child actors in America. He won several awards for his performance, including four People’s Choice Awards, and was soon earning $100,000 an episode. When the show finished in 1986, he should have been both beloved and rich, to say nothing of looking forward to a golden career afterwards.
It was not to be. According to his co-star Todd Bridges, who played Willis and fought his own battles with child sexual abuse and drug addiction, as well as being acquitted in a high-profile court case when he was put on trial for attempted murder, Coleman became an increasingly withdrawn and unhappy presence on set, with his severe health issues and self-consciousness about his perennially childlike appearance contributing to his growing apart from his co-stars.
He may have taken consolation in an estimated $18 million fortune, that would have enabled him to lead whatever life he chose; but he discovered, to his horror, that his adoptive parents and business managers had lost virtually all of his money through unsafe investments. In 1989, he sued those around him for $3.8 million, eventually winning $1.28 million in 1993, but by then he was mired in an unhappy, conflicted existence.
He would always be “the kid from Diff’rent Strokes”, and never found another role that would erase such memories. Even the two popular films he made, 1981’s On The Right Track and 1982’s Jimmy The Kid, only allowed him to play big-screen variants on Arnold; to his frustration, mature parts proved impossible to come by.
Nor was Coleman the only veteran of the Diff’rent Strokes cast who faced tragedy. Although Bridges struggled to overcome his own demons after the show finished, he stopped using drugs in 1993 and has since rebuilt his career, which has included publishing an acclaimed memoir, Killing Willis, in which he discussed the mixed impact that the formative series had on his life. He also saved the life of a paraplegic woman, Stella Kline, in 1998, by rescuing her from a lake after her wheelchair rolled into it. “I was thanking God that he was there and you know, everybody’s been saying nothing but bad stuff about Todd Bridges on the news and in the papers...” she said. “He has a heart of gold.”
The same could not be said for Dana Plato, who played the character of Kimberley Drummond, the adoptive sister of Arnold and Willis. On the show, she was involved with some of its more hard-hitting storylines, involving her near-sexual abuse when her character tried to hitchhike, as well as her character’s struggle with bulimia. However, when she became pregnant at the age of 19 by her rock-star boyfriend, she was written out of the show; teen pregnancy was clearly a step too far, even for Diff’rent Strokes. “She deliberately got pregnant while doing the series,” said Conrad Bain, who played her on-screen father Arthur. “When I spoke to her about it, she was enthusiastic about having done that... [saying that] ‘When I get the baby, I will never be alone again.’”
Unfortunately, without the financial security and steady occupation that the show provided, Plato’s life spiralled into a vortex of chaos. She had a series of short-lived and disastrous romantic entanglements, lost all her money and ended up robbing a Las Vegas video store in February 1991, netting $164. The clerk reported the crime to the police by saying “I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes.”
On that occasion she received five years’ probation, but she was again arrested for forging a prescription for diazepam the following January and was sentenced to a month in prison. The remaining years of her life passed in a blur of prescription drug abuse and poverty; when she died of a drug overdose in 1999, aged 34, there was much discussion as to whether her death was suicide or misadventure. In any case, it was a sad end to a brief, tumultuous life.
Coleman’s own demise was preceded by a similarly tragic decline. Like Bridges and Plato, he faced considerable legal trouble throughout the latter half of his life. At one point, finding acting work hard to come by, he was reduced to working as a security guard, where he was arrested for assault after refusing a fan an autograph, after which they ridiculed his acting ability.
He married Shannon Price in 2007 but they had a tumultuous relationship that saw him being arrested for disorderly conduct later that year; nonetheless, Price was similarly violent towards Coleman, leading one onlooker to describe the relationship as “toxic”. In one court case, she was said to have engaged in other sexual affairs during the marriage, as well as “physically [abusing] Coleman in public, [leading] him around by the hand like a child [and displaying] no physical affection toward him in front of anyone.”
When Coleman fell ill in May 2010, after another punishing bout of dialysis, he was living with Price, albeit in her description as a platonic couple rather than a married one. It was she who turned off his life support after he fell and hit his head followinng a seizure, and although she declares in the documentary that “I would never hurt my husband, ever”, her claims of caring for Coleman have been met with scepticism and outright disbelief by those around her, including interviewees in the new documentary.
Whatever the truth, it remains both strange and sad that one of America’s most popular and good-natured sitcoms should have seen its leading stars embroiled in so much misery long after their 15 minutes of fame elapsed.
