Diff'rent Strokes

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Diff'rent Strokes

For eight seasons and 189 episodes, Americans tuned in to Diff'rent Strokes, a sitcom chronicling the family life of a wealthy white industrialist who adopts two African American children. The tepid comedy's lengthy television run made many cultural observers wonder if its creators had made a deal with the devil. Certainly the show's trinity of child stars seems to have spent the ensuing years in show business purgatory.

Developed by Norman Lear, the brains behind All in the Family, Diff'rent Strokes began as a well-meaning, if patronizing, look at America's racial and economic divides. Conrad Bain, a veteran of Lear's Maude, was cast as Philip Drummond, the white Daddy Warbucks to black ragamuffins Arnold and Willis Jackson, played by Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges. Stringy Dana Plato rounded out the main cast as Drummond's natural daughter, Kimberly. A succession of brassy housekeepers, vanguarded by Charlotte Rae, commented mordantly on the goings-on.

Conceived as an ensemble, Diff'rent Strokes quickly became a star vehicle for the adorable Coleman, a natural comedic talent relegated to Lilliputian stature by a congenital kidney condition. "What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?," Coleman's Arnold would bellow repeatedly at his older, worldlier sibling. Eventually this interrogative came to be something of a catch phrase, flung promiscuously by Coleman at any of the show's characters and accompanied by a mugging double take. As the years went by, however, Coleman's stunted growth began to take on an eerie, side show quality. Only at the very end of the eight-year run was his character allowed to grow up, "dramatically speaking," date girls, and behave like something other than a mischievous eight-year-old. Coleman was 17 at the time.

Medical oddities aside, Diff'rent Strokes was little more than light entertainment for the home-on-Saturday-night crowd. It did, however, occasionally tackle meaningful subject matter. In one memorable episode, Arnold converted to Judaism after attending a friend's bar mitzvah. Likening the solemn ceremony to a "Jewish Academy Awards," and pleased with his complimentary "yamaha," the diminutive adoptee was dissuaded from his change of faith only after Drummond engineered a visit from Milton Berle as a wisecracking rabbi. Terrified by the prospect of Hebrew School and Jewish dietary obligations, the impressionable tyke opted to forego his opportunity to celebrate "Harmonica."

Not all series installments, however, addressed weighty issues with such rampant insensitivity. Rotund WKRP fixture Gordon Jump played a child molester (all too believably) in one topical episode, while First Lady Nancy Reagan herself dropped by for a memorable 1983 show about drug abuse. The jaded Coleman was non-plussed by the visit from the power-suited astrology enthusiast, who stiffly hugged a group of child actors for the cameras and accepted a pair of Diff'rent Strokes tee-shirts from Conrad Bain before departing in a four-car motorcade. "It was just another show," Coleman shrugged after Reagan's visit. "We didn't talk about much. She came in, did her job, and left."

When the program's three young stars made their exits following Diff'rent Strokes' 1986 cancellation by ABC, they had no way of knowing that a living tabloid hell awaited them. Dana Plato posed nude for Playboy in 1989 to pay off her mounting personal debt, then robbed a Las Vegas video store at gunpoint in 1991 after being turned down for a job cleaning toilets. Her career reached a nadir in 1997 with an appearance in a porno film entitled Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill … and Jill. (Plato died of an accidental drug overdose in 1999.) Todd Bridges was arrested for cocaine possession and later for shooting an accused drug dealer in a crack house. (He was subsequently acquitted of the latter crime.) He later blamed his problems on a cocaine habit dating back to 1982.

Even Gary Coleman, the little pixie with the atrophied kidney, could not escape controversy. In 1989 he sued his real-life adoptive parents and his former business manager, claiming they had stolen more than $1 million from him. Tabloid rumors began to circulate reporting that Coleman had legally changed his name to Andy Shane and asked a female housemate if he could suck her toes. In 1998, the tubby actor, now working as a mall security guard, was himself sued by a Los Angeles bus driver who alleged that he had assaulted her after she asked him for an autograph.

"The world don't move to the beat of just one drum," went the theme to Diff'rent Strokes, the television show. "What might be right for you, may not be right for some." The program's troubled stars seem to have been following a rhythm all their own in their personal lives as well.

—Robert E. Schnakenberg