I have a few e-mails asking if I'm going to write anything about Loni Anderson, who left us recently at the age of 79. I'm afraid I don't have much in the way of Loni Anderson stories and what I have, I told here back in 2014 writing about the show that made her famous, WKRP in Cincinnati…
I was a fan of this program even before it went on the air. Back when I was writing some show or other for Sid and Marty Krofft, we were working on the KTLA lot in Hollywood. Another writer, Lorne Frohman, and I would sometimes sit on a porch there and talk out ideas. One day, we began to notice…
No, let me rephrase that: One day, we couldn't help but notice a stunning blonde lady walking around in what they then called "hot pants." She was obviously an actress and obviously one who wanted to be noticed. Somewhere in some shoebox somewhere, Lorne probably has the negatives of photos we took of each of us with her.
She was Loni Anderson and she told us about this show she was doing on the lot…and invited us to come watch a taping or even just rehearsals so one day, we played hooky from our show and took in a dress rehearsal of theirs. It was the one in which Howard Hesseman's character did a live remote from a stereo store and there was a robbery during the broadcast. Whether the public would think the series was funny or not, I had no idea…but I sure did. (If we'd gone over two weeks later, we could have seen the infamous "Turkeys Away" episode. It's amazing that a show would do its most popular episode as Show 7, I think before they were even on the air.)
Loni was very nice and very sweet and she had that "she's gonna be a big star" aura around her which doesn't, alas, always translate to becoming a big star. In her case though, it did and I felt proud I sensed that was coming before WKRP debuted on CBS and America began to feel the same thing. And that, I'm afraid, is all I have in the way of a Loni Anderson story. I never ran into her again…although I can add that I never heard a bad story about her — and if there had been any, I probably would have heard.
By the way: Among the great things you can find on the Internet are "air checks," which are merely audio recordings of old radio shows, including disc jockeys of the past spinning records of past eras. I enjoy occasionally listening to air checks of the deejays who I listened to back in the sixties and I was delighted to recently find this website where you can hear air checks of Dr. Johnny Fever and Venus Flytrap on WKRP.