Life on a cruise ship is full of dangerous temptations. “There was a disco on every ship, and they’d usually be filled at night. There was a casino,” said Fred Grandy, on the docuseries TV We Love, as reported by Entertainment Weekly. Grandy, who played Gopher, the Love Boat’s purser, admitted that “this is a business where a lot of people use controlled substances in one way, shape, or form.”
For Lauren Tewes, who played cruise director Julie McCoy, cocaine was the controlled substance of choice. After the show’s seventh season, The Love Boat fired Tewes after a public battle with cocaine addiction. While Tewes returned as a guest on a later episode, as well as a couple of made-for-TV movies, her television acting career was essentially over.
Several decades later, Grandy wishes he’d handled Tewes’s dismissal differently. “My one regret about her situation was that I never really came forward and defended and supported her in a way that we should have,” he said. “So there is some regret there, at least as far as I’m concerned.”
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It’s easy to say, “Hey, it was the ‘70s,” but that’s not an inaccurate description of what happened to Tewes. “I wanted to be one of the gang. I am ashamed to say it, but it’s true,” she told TV Guide in 1985, via UPI. “The first time I took cocaine, I had just gotten the job on The Love Boat, and I was on my way to a party. My date said, ‘Let’s do drugs.’ And I said, ‘What the heck?’”
For Tewes, cocaine served as a heady cocktail that offered bravery laced with euphoria. “You think you are fine. You think you are stronger, braver,” she said. “I thought it gave me the courage I missed. It was like going to Oz and asking for courage, but instead, I got cocaine.”
Douglas Cramer, producer of The Love Boat, claims cocaine was only one of the reasons he fired Tewes. “She does not deal with reality,” Cramer said of his fictional cruise director after firing her in 1984. “There were severe problems with Lauren. Not just recently, but for all of the seven years she was with The Love Boat. It was terribly disrupting.”
Tewes told TV We Love that it was the drugs, not bad behavior, that cost her a career. “It was a different time,” she said. “I was a woman, so I was blacklisted for that.”
Grandy didn’t blame sexism, but agreed that “a different time” meant Tewes got a bum deal. “This would’ve been the early ’80s, substance abuse on a set in those days was a punishable offense. It was not a healthcare problem, and it was not understood in the way it is understood now,” Grandy told a crowd at a Love Boat panel last year, according to People. “And to some degree, she was a victim of circumstance at the time because the attention and care and therapy she should have gotten was meted out in the form of discipline.”
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