Reality-show matriarch of ‘An American Family’
Before “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called “An American Family” with a startling female character named Pat Loud. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank; she plotted her divorce; she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara, California, and all on camera — in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was, ostensibly, not acting at all. She was the first realitytelevision star on the first reality show — and she paid a price for breaking new ground.
Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An “affluent zombie,” one said.
What wife and mother would do such a thing? Newsweek put Loud, her husband, Bill, and their children on its cover with the headline “The Broken Family.” Many others, however, saw her as honest and brave, uninhibited and unconditional in her love for her children.
Pat Loud died Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her family said in a Facebook post. She was 94. She was 47 when the show that made her famous first aired, and she spent much of the rest of her life explaining why she had done it and how it had changed her family. She made few apologies.
She told talk-show host Dick Cavett in no uncertain terms that she had no problem with her son Lance’s homosexuality. She wrote in her autobiography, “Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story” (1974), that, given how she felt that her family had been mistreated after the show aired, “Now we are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame.”
But life went on. Once a homemaker and Junior League volunteer, Loud found new work with Ron Bernstein, a literary agent, and later with fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She moved to New York, then England, before returning to California in the late 1990s to be with Lance after he became sick with HIV in 1987. (He died of complications of hepatitis C in 2001.) She divorced her husband, though they reunited many years later.
By the time she was in her 80s, public perception of her had shifted. Where once she had been seen as an unmitigated self-promoter, now she was a wise, refined matriarch of a genre gone astray.
Speaking of the “Real Housewives” franchise, Loud told The New York Times in 2013: “It just seems like all these beautiful blond girls, all made up, with stem glasses of white Chablis, and they’re all just fighting at dinner somewhere.”
Critics of “An American Family” accused it of being contrived, but the Louds long maintained that they had behaved as normally as they could with cameras constantly trailing them. Craig Gilbert, a producer for WNET, chose the Louds for his subject because the family had lots of children — and because they said yes.
“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” Pat Loud told The Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”
Bill Loud, with whom Pat Loud reunited in 2001 at the request of Lance, died in 2018 at 97.
Pat Loud is survived by Delilah and another daughter, Michele, as well as two sons, Kevin and Grant, according to the family’s Facebook post.