Hollywood – Danny Bonaduce growls and purrs more than he speaks, carrying his tightly wound self as if spring-loaded. And this is on a good day, in a cool, dark soundstage in Hollywood, where he is doing his best impersonation of a game-show host.
He lobbed jokey questions at a trio of contestants about the melodramas of, it turns out, some of his friends and neighbors – Ozzy Osbourne, Courtney Love and Janice Dickinson – looking far more executive than usual in a dark suit. This was Bonaduce as the star of “Starface,” a celebrity-gossip challenge that premiered Tuesday on GSN, a game-show cable channel.
It’s a striking shift from the vodka-guzzling, wrist-slashing, tantrum-throwing train wreck of a man depicted in last fall’s VH1 reality series “Breaking Bonaduce.” The irony of this latest role is lost on no one, least of all Bonaduce.
“This is the weirdest show I’ve ever done,” he said during a break, “by leaps and bounds.”
Actually, weird – or, more specifically, alarming, cringe-inducing self-exploitation – is what Bonaduce does best. Still, after all these years, he’s strangely compelling. He possesses an odd mix of rage, self-
loathing, intellect, even romance that is irresistibly entertaining on the one hand, yet unsettlingly removed from reality on the other.
He may be hosting a game show, but this is, after all, the same guy who punched out Barry “Greg Brady” Williams on a show called “Celebrity Boxing,” who seriously considered goading a poisonous snake into biting him on “The Other Half” and who had the name of a radio-station general manager tattooed on his backside.
Bonaduce is perpetually in comeback mode, like so many other entertainers “in recovery,” rebounding from drugs and alcohol or his own bad judgment. But nothing has stalled his career for long. Show business has an insatiable appetite for self-destruction, and Bonaduce has learned how to make that work in his favor.
“People seem to be willing to give Danny chance after chance,” said his wife and manager, Gretchen Bonaduce. “I think for some reason he just brings that out in people. You want him to succeed.”
As Bonaduce sees it, July was a phenomenal month. He was finding his rhythm on “Starface.” He learned that A&E would be airing his biography later this year. Another TV show he and Gretchen are shopping garnered some interest. High-profile radio offers were starting to roll in.
He’s been sober for about a year, and he and his wife are still in counseling. But, he added, all the therapy hasn’t given him any more self-awareness.
“I would be very comfortable doing some type of show about this crazy, drug-addled guy that flirts and does all this stuff,” he said.
“If you want to do a television show about a guy who does none of that stuff, which currently I do not, I have almost limited knowledge about that guy.”
Bonaduce’s young life is, by now, Hollywood legend. He was world famous by age 12 for his role as the red-haired wiseacre Danny Partridge in the 1970s show “The Partridge Family.”
There were the lean years, spent living out of his car. Ultimately, he landed a deejay gig and turned it into a respectable career.
Today, fans of “Breaking Bonaduce” approach him with their own tales of addiction. Some thank him for making his struggle so public.
Others just chuckle about his reality-show antics as if he were a fictional character in a trumped-up tragedy.Which, in some ways, he is.
“The whole thing is just so weird,” he said. He smiled, in an “aw shucks” way, bringing an incongruous sort of levity to traumas that for another guy might call for round-the-clock monitoring – or, perhaps, an exorcism.
“I take ‘public figure’ in the most literal sense of the word,” Bonaduce said. “And I say this proudly: I am the property of others.
“And I’m currently not the property of enough others.”
