THICKE’S MANY HATS
Canadian actor did it all
I wrote jokes for Alan Thicke for the two years he hosted the NHL Awards. And considering reports that his death Tuesday from a heart attack came while playing hockey with his son, Carter, it’s ironic to recall these words: “Hockey saved my life.” He said it to me three years ago, after suffering a collapsed lung while playing, yes, hockey with his son, Carter. (Thicke was one of the most active celebrity hockey players in Los Angeles, playing in the North Hollywood League with colleagues including Michael J. Fox and erstwhile MacGyver Richard Dean Anderson.)
“I was playing in a pickup game with Carter, and at the end of the game, he said, ‘Dad, you really sucked today.’”
The star of the ’80s sitcom Growing Pains said, “I didn’t feel quite right, didn’t have my usual energy. So I took a shower, went to the doctor, he gave me a chest X-ray and he said, ‘Your lung has collapsed. You need to go to emergency.’
“It turned out to be a genetic thing that had been exacerbated by getting hit, and I’d just had a trip to Dubai in a pressurized cabin, so you add those up and it’s a perfect storm. They took out, like, five per cent of my lungs.”
“The moral of the story is, ‘You live long enough, and sh-- happens,’” Thicke joked.
Some people might classify that as too much information, but it was in the context of his work for the March of Dimes and a charity event he’d be speaking at.
And Alan Thicke was always strangely casual about personal information. I remember when I started as a TV critic, walking in one day to a scribbled phone message that said, “Alan Thicke wants to talk to you, re: his show cancellation and divorce.”
The divorce was from his thenwife, singer and soap actress Gloria Loring, the mother of their pop-star son, Robin Thicke.
The show cancellation was Thicke of the Night, a late-night talk show that dared target late night-king Johnny Carson in its promotions. (The hubris of the entire event inspired an SCTV sketch called Maudlin of the Night, with Joe Flaherty’s Sammy Maudlin basically retracing Thicke’s footsteps for laughs.)
Few people could have crashed the Hollywood party in flames the way he did and salvaged a career — let alone one that thrived. Apart from Thicke of the Night, the musically minded occasional host of a Canadian talk show made his mark on pop culture writing the theme songs for sitcoms Diff ’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life with his producer partner, Al Burton. Admit it, those theme songs are earworms.
Several years later, we’d cross paths again, when he was cast as Dr. Jason Seaver, the psychologist dad on Growing Pains. He always seemed to me like a guy who — pardon the expression — skated through life. There was an insouciance to his attitude that was oddly Canadian. Talk-show host, theme-song writer, sitcom dad: you want it, you got it.
The last time we spoke, he’d agreed to let reality-TV cameras into his home to capture life with his wife, Tanya Callau, and their son, Carter. At the time it was to be called The Thicke of Things. It ended up being called Unusually Thicke. It lasted 28 episodes.
“We’re aiming between the Kardashians and Larry David. The camera will partly be in my house, we’ll take it far afield to my real activities, and some things we’ll invent.”
Was he concerned about losing his privacy on camera? “The beauty is we’ll have control over it,” he said, “which is more than you can say about a lot of things in life.”
(And it wasn’t even his only dip into reality TV that year. He and Tanya also took part in Celebrity Wife Swap with comic Gilbert Gottfried and his wife Dara.)
I never met anyone who played the showbiz game as well as Thicke. He worked hard to seem not to be taking it seriously.