For about a year the Richardses lived in Westwood while their new home with a pool was being custom-built on Aqua Verde Drive in the more modest San Fernando Valley side of the exclusive and gated community of Bel-Air. Kathleen decorated the home in blood reds and icy blues.
But life wasn’t as “wonderful” for the Richards family as Adele Avanzino had envisioned. Like the thick smog that often enveloped the Valley, a toxic cloud hovered over the Richardses’ marriage. Kathleen continued to instigate fights with her husband. She constantly berated him for not making more money. “Ken Richards was a very nice man, a gentleman,” Adele notes. “But Kathy had the dominant personality.”
She wanted more and more things, and her clothing obsession spiraled. “She was like Imelda Marcos. Kathleen had dozens and dozens of expensive pairs of shoes,” notes Jane Hallaren. On one occasion Kathleen had an exclusive Beverly Hills furrier drop off for her approval and subsequent purchase by her husband a selection of “very expensive, very, very beautiful” mink and sable coats in different styles. She luxuriated in the furs and modeled them in front of a mirror for hours until she chose the ones she wanted. “My father always tried to please her,” says Diane Richards. “Maybe he tried too hard.”
Big Kathy, who would train her daughters how to snag and marry rich men, offered up the same advice to Diane, who was now at the right age. “I was starting to date, and she told me I should only go out with rich men—lawyers or doctors—men with a lot of money,” she says. “I didn’t agree with that philosophy. What she tried to teach me reinforced my beliefs that she was just after the material things in life. Kathy was behind all my sisters marrying wealthy guys.”
While big Kathy’s twisted lessons in love and marriage grated on Diane, it was her continuing abusive and violent acts that eventually caused the young woman to flee the household permanently in fear for her life.
“She did show affection for her children when they were real little, but then there was a rough side to her,” maintains Diane. “She could be abusive to little Kathy and Kimmy—and she was to me. If she thought they were misbehaving, I saw her pull their hair—I saw her slap. My father would jump in all the time. He couldn’t stand what she was doing.”
One incident especially stands out. The Richardses had an Irish maid who was also the children’s loving nanny. She and Diane got along well, and on one occasion she telephoned Diane to say she knew a nice young man with whom Diane might want to go out. “She was going to set me up on this date with this friend of hers,” says Diane, “and it inflamed Kathleen that Marie, who was this really nice person, was calling me. Kathleen said, ‘You don’t associate with the hired help!’ And she grabbed hold of my hair and started to pull me across the room, and my father just had to pull her off of me.”
The violent denouement came in the kitchen of the Richardses’ home when Kathleen served up a very special treat to her then-twentysomething stepdaughter—a snack consisting of a bun, chopped beef, American cheese, and one other ingredient that only Stephen King could have imagined as part of the recipe.
“Big Kathy just got angry at me one day, so she put a little screw in the cheeseburger she made for me,” says Diane. “She always told me I had pretty teeth and I guess she wanted me to break them. I bit down on it. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt my teeth.”
The incident was the “last straw” both for Diane and Marie, the nanny. “She had witnessed that and that’s why I think she quit her job,” states Diane. “That was just more than she could abide. I was just terrified of my stepmother. I wish I hadn’t been so afraid, but I was. She had a way of staring right through me. When I left that time after the cheeseburger incident, it was for good. It was just a cumulative effect, and I just realized it was too much for me to take anymore. I felt I was going to go under if I didn’t get away.”
She says Kathleen’s action had the same impact on her father. “He was just pulled down further and further and further. He had gotten in so deep and he was not thinking how to get out, or maybe he didn’t think he could get out after a while.”
IN APRIL 1968, having turned thirty, Kathleen had a third pregnancy, and this time it was unplanned by her. With their marriage in tatters, the Richardses decided to go away together for a weekend to see if they could patch things up. They slept together for the first time in many months, and she conceived, and when she found out she was pregnant “she was livid,” a family member says.
Being pregnant, however, didn’t stop her from hitting the bricks again with dreams of seeing one of her daughter’s handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This time, though, she focused on Kim rather than little Kathy. And of her daughters, Kim would be the most famous, career-wise. The child did have enormous acting talent and charisma, far more than little Kathy.
“All the girls had the knack and the ability. They were good around people and around strangers. But Kim was extra special,” observes Kathleen’s sister, Donna. “We used to play games with Kim—let’s make believe—and we’d say make believe you’re this, or you’re that, and she would start acting. And then we’d say, okay, game over. But she’d keep on going. She just had that special talent.”
As she was marketing Kim, Kathleen gave birth to her third daughter, another little doll, whom the Richardses named Kyle, and who looked more like her father than her mother, with a thin, long face and dark hair, unlike her blond, blue-eyed sisters.
It was Ken, not Kathleen, who awoke to handle the 3 A.M. feedings and generally play nursemaid when the girls were babies. Moreover, Kathleen couldn’t and didn’t cook very much, but for some reason she loved to clean and was famous for vacuuming. “She did nothing,” Richards later claimed. Observes Sylvia Richards, his third wife, regarding Kathleen as a mother, “I don’t think she really cared about the kids—except for the money they made.”
Kathleen was working on turning Kim into another Drew Barrymore or Tatum O’Neal, both of whom would have troubled private lives, as would Kim down the road. Like her big half-sister, little Kathy, Kim had the all-American looks and attitude that Hollywood admires—blond bangs, hazel eyes, husky voice, and a bouncy and bubbly personality.
She was about to turn five when a new family sitcom was being readied by a bright, ambitious Brooklyn-born producer, David Gerber, who had an amazing track record as a packager of prime-time series for 20th Century–Fox Television. Around the time big Kathy was shopping her daughter, the entertainment division of the American Broadcasting Company was planning to air Gerber’s independently produced Nanny and the Professor, as white bread as any half-hour of prime-time television could be.
Then the number-three television network, ABC, scheduled the series, mainly because of the viewing public’s interest at the time in anything and everything British—and Nanny starred a pretty, perky English actress. Juliet Mills was the daughter of the actor Sir John Mills and older sister of Disney star Hayley Mills. She had been cast in the part of the nanny, Phoebe Figalilly, who uses her psychic magic to bring calm to a chaotic American family, the Everetts. That, in a nutshell, was the high concept that Gerber had pitched and ABC and the sponsors had bought. The show would be popular, although not a blockbuster.
When Kathleen heard about the casting call, she was virtually first in line with Kim at her side. “It was like a stage-mothers-from-hell convention,” recalls a veteran casting director. “They were elbowing each other out of the way. Hair-pulling and eye-scratching were not out of the question. We looked at hundreds—fucking hundreds—of little girls with sparkling blue eyes and blond hair and brilliant white smiles, and cute mannerisms, and we were tearing our hair out and then Kim Richards and that bitch-on-wheels mother of hers came in and we said, ‘We have a go.’ Whatever magic we were looking for, Kim Richards had it. Plus, I remember the mother had some good connections in town.”
Kim had been well trained by big Kathy. The child had only just learned to read when Kathleen began teaching her how to memorize dialogue, something she’d
also done with little Kathy and would do with Kyle. “To keep it natural, I would just play a game, skipping words, which she’d fill in,” big Kathy explained years later. “I’d do that until she memorized it.”
That might have been a bit of an exaggeration on big Kathy’s part, because Kim had inherited a trait of her father’s—a photographic memory. When Richards was in college he had been accused of cheating, but his professors changed their mind after watching awestruck as he read a chapter of a book and repeated it verbatim. Kim had the same talent.
Kay Rozario, who described herself as a “second mother” to Kim over the years, observes, “She was a kid who took direction and was very precocious, very cute, and that got her by. She’d walk into a room and everybody would stop and listen. She was very bubbly, very up, though not the brightest bulb in the lamp.”
Big Kathy, meanwhile, had become a fearsome figure on the sets where her daughters worked, because she was a diva. Ted Bessell, a Manhasset boy who starred with Marlo Thomas on That Girl and knew Kathy Dugan from the old days, had problems with her on programs he later directed and produced, shows that had either Kim or Kyle in the cast. Jane Hallaren says Bessell described Kathleen as “a horror show” and that he considered her “impossible to deal with as a stage mother.”
Rozario, who had been a part of show business for years with her musical director husband, says that with Nanny, Kim’s career started to fly. “So big Kathy put more emphasis on her. She did it with a lot of love, whether it was misguided or not. Kimmy did very well in those early years and Kathy got a lot of satisfaction out of that. Kim was so dependent on Kathy and that’s the way she wanted it. She controlled all of her daughters, but particularly Kim, who was the big moneymaker.”
Big Kathy also often pitted her daughters against one another. When Kyle eventually began generating more work than Kim and scored a key role at the age of eleven in the 1980 Disney family horror film Watcher in the Woods (starring a bored-to-death Bette Davis), big Kathy heaped praise on Kyle.
“She’d say about Kyle in front of Kim, ‘Well, this is my baby. This is my little sweetheart. Kyle’s working and what are you doing?’” recounts Sylvia Richards. “Big Kathy did this constantly to those kids. I don’t know what she thought—whether she was going to get more production out of them by doing that, or what. But I do know it was devastating to them. Looking back, I don’t know how anybody survived in that family.
“Kim so wanted to please her mom because I don’t think she ever really felt that her mother loved her,” continues Richards. “All of them—little Kathy, Kim, and Kyle—were always trying to please Mama. They knew their father loved them. They didn’t have to prove anything to him. It was absolutely pathetic!”
After the first episode of Nanny aired, Kim Richards received huge national publicity and developed an enormous following. Fans followed what she wore and whom she dated and all the gossip about her that appeared in teen magazines. And there was a lot of it. Of course, it was nothing like the blizzard that would surround Paris years later, of which Kim was said to be hugely envious.
As she moved into her teens, and with more credits under her belt, Kim became a staple of the fanzines. One fashion spread had her at fourteen when she weighed ninety-one pounds and stood just five feet in a “soft velour, long-sleeved maroon top of cotton polyester. About $21.” She was often photographed with other young stars such as Diff’rent Strokes cast members Dana Plato, Todd Bridges, and Gary Coleman.
According to family insiders, little Kathy was “jealous” of Kim’s success and all of the attention and adulation she received both from the public and from their mother because, as one close observer notes, “little Kathy wasn’t making any money for her mother, and Kim was.”
Nanny had a short run of two seasons, and the show’s cast seemed to be jinxed. The TV family’s patriarch, Richard Long, was an alcoholic who died of a heart attack four days before his forty-seventh birthday. Trent Lehman, who had played one of Kim’s two brothers, committed suicide by hanging himself from a belt looped through a chain-link fence behind an elementary school near his North Hollywood apartment.
Kim, who had just turned eighteen, was devastated. “When I heard what had happened I cried…. We were in, like, Teen Beat and Tiger Beat, and all those magazines, and People magazine. It had been like that our whole lives,” she observed on a “Whatever Happened to…” segment on Entertainment Tonight about the mostly has-been cast of Nanny and the Professor.
After Nanny, Kim Richards had recurring roles on such bland, short-lived sitcoms as ABC’s Here We Go Again, starring Dallas star Larry Hagman, and NBC’s Hello, Larry, featuring M*A*S*H costar McLean Stevenson, and she made numerous guest appearances, playing cute-young-girl roles, on popular prime-time series such as CHiPs, Magnum, P.I., Diff’rent Strokes, The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Love Boat. With her clean-cut Abercrombie and Fitch looks, she became a regular on the Walt Disney lot, appearing in more than a dozen TV and feature films. Next to Hayley Mills, she was only the second child actress to be offered a highly lucrative contract with the Disney organization.
Kim had fulfilled big Kathy’s dream. She finally had a box office star in the family.
Kim was working constantly, and the money was rolling in. It seemed like a dream life, according to the fan magazines, but it wasn’t.
For one thing, she never had a real childhood; her days and nights were spent on sound stages and in TV studios. She once told People magazine, “I remember driving home and seeing people in windows having dinner, wishing we were doing that. And I didn’t have a whole lot of friends at school because I wasn’t there enough to make any.”
Most of her acquaintances were other young, ambitious, and troubled actors she met on sets, such as Dana Plato, who would die of a prescription drug overdose, and Todd Bridges, who also would have a drug problem and run-ins with the police. When Kim was fourteen, Plato and Bridges convinced her to sneak into the Magic Mountain amusement park, even though they had celebrity passes. Ashamed, Kim confessed what she had done to big Kathy. “Dana and Todd laughed at me,” she said later, “but I respected my mom and never wanted to let her down.”
Kim thought of her mother far differently than others did. She saw her as her moral compass.
RICHARDS FAMILY INSIDERS contend that big Kathy was out of control, drinking heavily and cheating on her husband.
Richards came face-to-face with her adultery on his return from a business trip. Big Kathy was supposed to meet him at the airport, but she wasn’t there. He took a cab home only to find her in their bed with another man. Not long after, he suffered his first heart attack.
Another of big Kathy’s affairs resulted in a pregnancy, which she confided later to Sylvia Richards. “She told me that she had fallen in love with a car dealer and had gotten pregnant, but that she lost the baby. She told me about him, and how much she loved him, but that he was married.”
Big Kathy also seemed to have a thing for professional athletes. Her husband learned that she and some girlfriends had been sleeping with members of the San Francisco 49ers football team at their training camp.
At a Christmas party, Sylvia Richards was introduced to a basketball player who was a star of the Harlem Globetrotters team. “He was sitting with big Kathy,” recalls Richards. “I came over and she introduced me and out of the blue he said that every time he and Kathy got together they had sex. He said to Kathy, ‘Well, I haven’t been around for a while and I kind of miss being with you.’ I almost fell out of my seat!”
During that time, Kay Rozario was sometimes asked by Kathleen to be her designated driver. “Kathy was a wild, wild lady,” observes Rozario. “I didn’t drink, but sometimes when my husband was on the road I went out with her so I could drive her home to keep her safe because she couldn’t drive—she loved that booze.”
Other times Kim had to pick up her mother, and sometimes she and her sisters were made to perform for big Kathy’s men friends, according to John J
ackson, a former boyfriend of Kim’s and father of one of her four children. “The way she controlled Kim was just unbelievable,” says Jackson. “Kim used to tell me stories of when she was twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old and how she’d drive the family car and go pick up her mom at different bars,” he asserts. “Her mom would have men over all the time on different nights of the week and she’d make Kim perform for them—do her little skits and dance. Her mom would have her basically perform on cue. She was that typical frustrated mother of a child star living through her children.”
Jackson’s assertion is supported by Sylvia Richards, who heard similar stories from the Richards girls, and even from big Kathy herself. “Kathleen was always having men to the house,” she states. “One night she had some black man in her bed and Kim and Kyle went in and Kyle had a fit and ran him off. They didn’t tell their father this stuff was happening because they were too embarrassed.”
Another problem had to do with the enormous income Kim was generating, estimated to be in the seven figures at the height of her career, and how that money was being spent, and by whom.
Around the time Kim started earning star salary, her father’s career was tanking. Richards had lost his job with the discount store chain that had originally brought the family to California, and he had gone through a series of lesser executive positions and gotten into a variety of smalltime business ventures, such as selling plumbing fixtures, albeit gold plumbing fixtures. His daughter, Diane, attributes his career decline and fall to “the instability in his home life with Kathy.”
At that point, according to Adele Avanzino, “Some of the children’s money was going toward things like the family’s living expenses. Ken wasn’t working and I don’t think that made for a happy marriage.”
The money issue resulted in a lot of finger-pointing. A number of close Richards family friends felt the main culprit was Kathleen.
Larry Avanzino’s close friend John McKusker had been involved in some business ventures with Richards in California and considered him “a hell of a nice guy and very talented.” He says, “To the best of my knowledge Kathleen took all the money that Kimmy was making—and Kathy was living off it.”
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