Lauded TV producer Douglas Cramer dies
Douglas S. Cramer, who produced some of the most successful television shows of the 20th century, many — including “The Love Boat” and “Dynasty” — in partnership with Aaron Spelling, and who used his substantial wealth to become a leading art collector, died on Friday at his home on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. He was 89.
His husband, Hubert Bush, said the cause was kidney failure.
Cramer had a long career in television, producing or helping to develop shows including “Peyton Place” in the 1960s, “The Odd Couple” in the 1970s and “Hotel” in the 1980s. In the 1990s he produced a string of television movies based on novels by Danielle Steel.
Today, television producing credits are handed out for a variety of reasons, and those given them often have little direct involvement in the show. But in Cramer’s day the producer was often more like a film director, shaping the cast and look of a series.
“I was very hands-on,” Cramer said in an oral history recorded in 2009 for the Television Academy Foundation. “There was nothing I wasn’t involved with. I worried about every performer, every extra, every piece of clothing.”
Cramer joined forces with Spelling, the most prolific American television producer of the era, in the mid-1970s. “The Love Boat,” which they produced jointly, ran for 250 episodes beginning in 1977 and had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Cramer’s connections and interests — Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.
If that series was a cultural reference point, “Dynasty” was the type of show that helps define a decade. A prime-time soap opera about a rich oil family, the Carrington clan — Blake (John Forsythe), Krystle (Linda Evans), Alexis (Joan Collins) and others — the show ran from 1981 to 1989. It gave a campy gloss to the decade while also occasionally managing to be groundbreaking: It had a prominent gay character and a prominent Black character, both still rare at the time.
“We walk a fine line, just this side of camp,” Cramer told New York magazine in 1985. “Careful calculations are made. We sense that while it might be wonderful for Krystle and Alexis to have a catfight in a koi pond, it would be inappropriate for Joan to smack Linda with a koi.”
That series and others, Spelling, who died in 2006, told The New York Times in 1993, benefited from the distinctive Cramer touch.
“Douglas is a very creative man,” he said. “He has immaculate taste in art direction and wardrobe.”
He also had immaculate taste in art. He amassed a collection that included both known names and upand-coming talents, and he made significant gifts to museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Glenn D. Lowry cited Cramer’s donation of “a superb group of paintings and sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, among others.”
Steve Martin, a fellow art aficionado, recalled gatherings at a ranch Cramer owned in Santa Ynez, California.
“He would host a yearly ‘hoedown,’ with hay rides, buffets, inviting Hollywood’s and the art world’s glitterati,” Martin said by email. “One year, the hoedown centered around the opening of his gigantic, multilevel private museum, stuffed with Lichtenstein, Baselitz (as I recall), Ruscha (as I recall), and dozens of other important artists. All the high-level art mingled with guys and gals dressed in gingham and cowboy hats.”