I'm reading a book called,
The Last Days of Dead Celebrities. It profiles only the final days of 15 famous people. John Ritter is one of them. I typed out the chapter on John. Pardon my typos.
Here's a link to the book if anyone's interested.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401351980/102-5910536-2480149?v=glance&n=283155
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John Ritter
September 17, 1948 - September 11, 2003
Henry Winkler got out of bed at 6:30 a.m., on Monday, September 8, the day after Warren Zevon died, and proceeded to do what he’d been doing for years. Winkler fed the dogs, exercised, shaved his face, and showered, in that order. By 9 a.m., he was in his car and on his way to work. Winkler, a beloved Hollywood figure with a nice-guy reputation whose 1974 portrayal of Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli on the sitcom “Happy Days” turned him into one of the biggest stars TV ever produced, never fell victim to the seductive sound of his own success. He never needed PR people to spin his image or legal people to keep him out of jail, or even limousine drivers to get him to the set on time.
Usually, when Henry Winker had to be somewhere, all he really had to do was depend on himself and his own innate sense of professional behavior. And that Monday morning was no exception. Winkler left his house in Brentwood and drove over the hill to the Disney Studios in Burbank. But that is where the routine ended because this would be a different kind of week for Henry Winkler. He had been asked to act in someone else’s sitcom for just one episode over a five-day work week, beginning on Monday, with a table reading of that episode’s script.
A table reading is a rather formal affair by sitcom standards, with the actors all sitting behind a large table and facing outward toward the show’s writers, producers, production staff, and assorted representatives from both the network and the studio. Some rehearsing takes place on Monday afternoons, followed by a more rigorous rehearsal schedule and a series of run-throughs on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday, the actors are dealing with the flow of the show, moving from scene to scene and making adjustments to script changes as they come in. The episode then culminates on Friday night with a live taping in front of a live audience.
That is the way the majority of sitcoms work, and Winkler was as familiar with that kind of schedule as anyone in the TV business. But this was a show in its second season, with the relationships between the actors and their characters already clearly defined. That ship, so to speak, had already sailed, and Henry Winkler’s only responsibility was to climb aboard briefly and increase the ship’s speed by a couple of knots.
Winkler was excited driving to Burbank that morning, but he was also a little apprehensive. “This was 8 Simple Rules…for Dating My Teenage Daughter, starring one of Winkler’s best friends in the world, John Ritter. Winkler and Ritter had been beginning and ending each other’s sentences from the day they met at an ABC event in 1978, during the first season of Three’s Company, the TV sitcom that launched Ritter’s career.
‘We were sitting with our backs to each other at the event,” Winkler recalled. I moved my chair and I literally bumped into him. I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and when I realized it was him, I told him how much I liked this particular pratfall he did, and the way he fell out of frame in the Three’s Company promo’. It was just so obvious that he was funny and talented and has this ‘it’.”
In no time at all, Ritter and his first wife, Nancy Morgan, were joining Winkler and his wife, Stacey Weitzman, and Ron Howard and his wife, Cheryl Alley, for regularly scheduled Monday night dinners at any number of trendy Los Angeles restaurants, including Ma Maison, Le Restaurant, Le Dome and Spago. It was a weekly get-together that continued seamlessly for many years, even after Ritter married his second wife, Amy Yasbeck, in 1999.
“We called ourselves “The Monday Marauders” said Winkler, “and we were all the best of friends.”
Winkler and Ritter also figured out ways to act together, as they did in the dramatic TV movie, The Only Way Out. Winkler also directed Ritter in Dolly Parton’s first TV movie, A Smoky Mountain Christmas, and Winkler produced for Showtime the series, Dead Man’s Gun, in which Ritter co-starred.
The two men made countless charitable appearances together on cerebral palsy telethons, and even found time to work side by side in Neil Simon’s play, The Dinner Party, which they performed onstage at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C., and finally in the fall of 2000, at the Music Box Theater on Broadway.
“We just had this incredible rapport, this incredible timing together. It was like shorthand,” said Winkler. “He was one of those guys who could tell the same story hundreds of times, and each time it was as funny as the first time you heard it. I could be rehearsing something with John, and everything was fine, and then all of a sudden he would get something in his mind and he was off. He would go on this comic jag and he would shout off this heat-seeking missile of humor, and you literally couldn’t do anything but sit down and laugh and then try to get your breath back.”
The producers of 8 Simple Rules had called Winkler with an offer to play Ritter’s new boss in the season’s fourth episode. The first three episodes were already in the can. The plot of the fourth episode had the two men becoming immediate enemies, with Winkler’s character not liking a book that Ritter’s character, Paul Hennessy, had previously written. According to the script, Winkler’s character would further infuriate Hennessy with tales of everything he’d written prior to being named boss. Ritter called Winkler a few days before work on the episode commenced and left a message how happy he was his friend had agreed to perform a guest-starring role.
When Winkler arrived at the lot on Monday morning, he took his position at the table with the rest of the cast, including Katey Sagal, who played Ritter’s wife, and their three TV children, played by Kaley Cuoco, Amy Davidson, and Martin Spanjers, and the episode’s other guest star that week, actor/director Peter Bogdanovich, who had signed on to portray one of Paul Hennessy’s rival sports columnists.
Bogdanovich had known Ritter for more than thirty years and had been as close a friend to him as Winkler. Bogdanovich not only directed Ritter in three movies, Nickelodeon, They All Laughed and Noises Off, but Ritter also came close to landing the Timothy Bottoms role in what is arguably Bogdanovich’s most revered movie, The Last Picture Show, starring Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, and Cybill Shepherd.
“John was the only other actor up for Tim Bottom’s part,” said Bogdanovich. “John was so good when read for Picture Show. He was a complete natural. He instantly did what the great stars do: He suspended disbelief. You just believed him.”
When Bogdanovich was offered the small role in 8 Simple Rules, he didn’t even have to think about an answer. “I told the producers that I would do whatever John wanted me to do,” said Bogdanovich. “I said, ‘Just give me the date, and I’ll show up,’ which is what John had done for me on three pictures.”
The two men spoke on the phone a few days before the table read and couldn’t wait to hang out together on the set. “We also talked about doing a picture that I’d written for him, a comedy called Squirrels to the Nuts. John wanted to do it, and we were figuring out a way of doing it, now that he had a hit series.”
Then came the Monday table read. “John was so f’king sweet.” said Bogdanovich. We hadn’t seen each other in a while, and we hugged immediately when he walked in the room. He looked great. He had lost a little weight. I kept telling him to lose weight.”
“I was sitting in my chair when John came in, “ said Winkler. “And whenever John walks into any room he brings his Johnness in with him, this energy that just fills the entire space. We hugged and got down to business.”
But for Winkler getting down to business meant hanging back for a while, and making sure not to let his Henryness escape into the room too quickly. “You have to understand,” he said. “John had created a family on that set. Katey, John and the three kids really did become a family. And Peter and I are the ones who had to walk into this incredible concentrated and well-tuned organization. Everyone was generous and patient with me because I was an interloper. I needed the time to find what was funny, so I tried things a million different ways. And they were all right there for me.”
And they were equally there, of course, for Ritter, whose natural tendency was to make others around him feel better. “He was a naturally funny person, “Sagal later told Larry King on CNN. “He was one of those people that, you know, he can make anything funny. If he’s just having a conversation with you, he’s suddenly funny.”
Sagal went on to tell King that Ritter was the easiest person to be around. “And loving and kind, “ she added, “I mean, truly, like, a joyful person….When I first met John, I thought, ‘Okay so where’s the, you know, where’s the dark side?”
She never found it. “I never saw, like, a bad mood,” she told King. “I’m sure he had them. But he just had such joy for what he was doing. He was so grateful to be doing what he was doing.”
And like his friend Winkler, Ritter was also smart enough not to let his own notoriety overwhelm his work, or his life away from work. Martin Spanjers told Larry King a valuable lesson Ritter taught him when they first started working together on 8 Simple Rules.
“One time,” said Spanjers, “we were at a benefit in Chicago, and John got to speak, and he talked about being a celebrity, and he said, He compared it to being in the sun. Sometimes it feels nice to be in the sun and you get warm and cozy, but then it takes you away from what’s important and isolates you, takes you away from being normal, helping people out, and that’s what John was about, you know? And then he went on to say, ‘When you stay out in the sun too long, you get burned, and as we all know, the sun can kill you.’ is what he said.”
As it happened, Ritter appeared as nervous as Winkler during that Monday table read. “He was nervous because of Henry and Peter.” recalled James Widdoes, director of 8 Simple Rules since its premiere in 2002, who has since added the title of executive producer.
“You can imagine that from my perspective as the director,,” he said, “I absolutely saw both sides. I could see where Henry was coming from, and I could see where John was coming from. John and I had already gone through a season together, so I knew his moves pretty well. He was vested in the show and very vested in being the patriarch of the show. These guys were his friends, and any time he had friends on he wanted them to be great. He wanted the show to be great. And he didn’t want anybody new to cause the show to be out of balance. Not that we were out of balance that week, but John just felt a lot of pressure on himself.”
The show’s original executive producer, Flody Suarez, had a different view of Ritter as the week started, “I didn’t get that he was nervous., “ said Suarez. “I think it was just excitement. He wanted Henry and Peter to come off well and to look good. John enjoyed other people getting the laugh. He likes others to get the laugh, and it translated into nervous energy, I guess I could see that. But I felt it was just excitement.”
“John was incredibly up that week, “ Suarez recalled, “His son Jason was starting production on the CBS drama, Joan of Arcadia. His other son, Tyler, was starting school and playing baseball on the East Coast. His daughter Carly has just come back from studying abroad. And his youngest child, Stella, was turning five on that Thursday. So it was her birthday week. And he has two of his close friends starting on the show. Everyone was excited that Henry and Peter were there, John was like a little boy with a new toy. He was running around introducing his friends to the cast and telling Henry and Peter how amazing the kids on the show had become. He was very proud of those kids on the show, so he talked about the kids on the show, and he told everyone what was going on with his real kids. He was a very proud father.”
There had been no taping of 8 Simple Rules the previous week because of the Labor Day holiday, so this was the first time the cast and crew were together since the show’s last taping on August 29. Widdoes had not been around much for the start of the second season because he was off producing another show, All About The Andersons, for the WB network. Ritter, of course, was aware that his director was doing double duty, and he made sure to leave Widdoes a few “funny and good-natured” phone messages, Widdoes said, just so he could get the point across that 8 Simple Rules was a sure thing and not the kind of show one would want to abandon.
If either man felt any awkwardness about Widdoe’s burgeoning career plans, it was not evident when everyone came together to begin Episode 4. “It was all smiles,” said Widdoes, “Everybody was getting to know everybody else, and in Peter’s case, I don’t think he had every been in a sitcom. He was clearly unfamiliar with the drill.”
“I had done one guest shot on Cybill (Shepherd’s mid-nineties CBS sitcom), which was filmed at an exterior location and cut into her show, and I did do a Moonlighting with Cybill and Bruce Willis,” said Bogdanovich. “But it’s true that I’d never done a sitcom in front of a live audience. I did visit John on the set of Three’s Company during the show’s first season. Cybill and I came down to see him, and they ran it twice straight through without a cut, and he was extraordinary. It was like he was doing a little one-act play, and John loved that because it connects with the theater. He was always better with an audience.”
On Tuesday, September 9, Ritter called Widdoes aside to ask him how his WB show was progressing. “He and I sort of looked at each other, “ Widdoes said, “and John said, ‘Let’s just do this show for the next five years.’ He knew I had been a little scattered, and what he really wanted to know was how I was holding up running back and forth between two studios. But we had been having conversations about the future and John made it clear how much he wanted me to stick around and do 8 Simple Rules for as long as I could. I realize the irony now, but he talked about how he believed that if we could just do 8 Simple Rules for another five years, it could be our farewell to half-hour television. It was a great thought.”
Widdoes and Ritter had many of these little conversations, usually in between takes or during a set-up for a particular shot. “The truth is, we were really enjoying showing up each day and doing this show together,” said Widdoes, “I have always said that one of the great thrills of my professional career was how John would come running across the set in front of the audience, and run up to me, and say, ‘Quick, say this line for me,’ And I’d say the line and John would go running back across the stage, and he would say the line as I had told him. But he’d say it with all the wonderful spin and charm that only John Ritter could put on a line. And, of course, I was always enough of a kid to be so flattered that John would run across the stage and ask me to say a line for him because, to me, he was the best there was. We had that kind of relationship, and were really in full bloom that week.
“And John would also check things out with me,” said Widdoes. “He said to me on that Tuesday, ‘Is Henry okay? Is Peter okay?’
“And I said, ‘Of course, They’re wonderful.’ That was John’s nervousness,” said Widdoes. “He wanted everyone to be comfortable and great, and they were. They were terrific. Peter Bogdanovich was hysterical in that first run-through on Tuesday.”
“I was playing a complete lunatic,” said Bogdanovich. “My character was in love with his boat collection, and I had dialogue like, ‘Don’t anyone touch my ships.’ I was playing it like a complete neurotic and, I thought, a little bit over the top. But they thought it was hysterical.”
On that same day, Suarez told Ritter that the producers and writers on 8 Simple Rules had been discussing the possibility of Ritter’s wife, Amy, coming on the show to perform a guest-starring role. “I asked him if it was okay to ask Amy, and he just lit up, “ said Suarez. “We had this idea about her playing the part of an English teacher that John’s daughter has bumped heads with in school. John’s character would then go in and meet with the teacher, and he’d had a similar experience to that of his daughter. John and Amy would then kind of go at each other, and we all thought that would be great. John loved the idea because this was a guy who loved having the people he cared about on the show.”
Suarez made a note to call executives at ABC on Wednesday to tell them of this plans to contact Yasbeck with an offer. Widdoes remembered leaving for home on Tuesday night thinking that the episode they were working on would be remembered as one of the show’s funniest episodes ever.
On Wednesday, September 10, Widdoes sat at home reading the latest rewrite of the script, complete with the changes that had been entered from the night before. After going through it, he was satisfied that the actors wouldn’t need another formal reading. It was ready for them to start full rehearsals on their scenes.
Work was interrupted briefly Wednesday morning when an assistant brought a phone over to Widdoes and told him the caller was his doctor. Widdoes took the call, and hung up in less than a minute. But Ritter and Katey Sagal had heard the assistant telling Widdoes that the caller was his doctor, and they rushed over to their director to find out whether he was all right.
“The doctor was calling with my results from heart and lung C.A.T. scans,” said Widdoes. “I had been feeling a little funny, and it turns out that I’m fine. I’m absolutely okay. But it was a couple of months before my fiftieth birthday, and I had been going to bed a lot with my heart pounding. I hadn’t experienced anything like that before, and I was concerned. So I went in to see someone, and I had the tests. It turned out to be just stress and anxiety, but I was fine. And that’s what the doctor was telling me on the pone. But I’ll never forget John’s saying, ‘Are you okay?’
“And I said, ‘Yeah. I had this thing, and everything is fine.’”
“And I remember his response,” said Widdoes, “He said, ‘Oh, good. Because, you know, that can be scary.’ There I was, talking to him about my heart on Wednesday, September 10.”
Ritter then helped Bogdanovich with a scene involving a bag of cookies, “I had to come in with these cookies,” said Bogdanovich. “And I was having trouble figuring out the business of how I should do it. At a certain point, I’m supposed to have the cookies in my hand, and then show him. So I had to pull the cookies out of the bag, and I realize that this sounds simple, but you have to walk and talk and do the business at the same time. It’s not that easy, and John said, ‘Here, let me show you,’
“He showed me and it was perfect. I said, ‘Okay, I get it. Thank you.’ “And he said, ‘Well, you’ve done that for me so many times.’
“He showed me exactly what the piece of business was, because he know I’d respond to that since that was the way I worked,” said Bogdanovich. “It was very helpful and very sweet, and we had a lot of laughs.”
Wednesday’s run-through, according to Widdoes, “was all systems go.”
“It truly went well,” he said. “On the writing, producing, and directing side, we all felt the episode was wonderful. You never know what’s going to happen to a show in its second season. We did quite well the first year, and with this episode, we felt were hitting our stride again, and it was exciting.”
“We also had some amazing comedic talents on the set that week,” said Suarez. “It was fun just sitting back and watching John and his friends figure out their rhythms together. It was kind of like a comedy school for the week.”
“John was in every scene, and I was only in a few scenes,” said Winkler, “When I wasn’t in my dressing room doing phone work producing Hollywood Squares, or writing my children’s novels, I was sitting in a director’s chair facing the set, just so I could watch John work.”
During a break, Bogdanovich again brought up the subject of Squirrels to the Nuts, the movie he had wanted to make with Ritter.
“I was saying, ‘Maybe we could do it with you and Cybill,’ and we were talking about how we could orchestrate it,” said Bogdanovich. “John then started to walk away, and I said, ‘Where are you going?’
“He said, ‘I’m going to the doctor.’
“I said, ‘What’s the matter?’
“And he said, ‘There’s some growth on my back, and they have to take it off. No big deal.’ Then he said, ‘I think I’ll have them save it, and then we can give it away for charity.’ He made a joke out of it, and I broke up. Then we hugged, and I said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Thursday, September 11, began on the set with a moment of silence for the victims of the September 11 terrorists attacks in 2001. Ritter, who was not expected on the set until later in the afternoon, was off taping an interview with the Museum of Television & Radio.
Museum officials had been working with ABC to put together a special, The Funniest Families of Television Comedy, that would include tapes and films from their combined libraries with as many new interviews as could be obtained. Ritter was asked to lend his thoughts to the special because of 8 Simple Rules, and the family life it depicted.
The network used only one of Ritter’s soundbites when the special finally aired on July 19, 2004. “I think it’s a very scary time for adults and children now in the twenty-first century,” Ritter said on the morning of September 11, 2003. “And I think it’s very, very comforting and fun to know that TV families are having a rocky road of it, but somehow are staying together as long as the lines of communication are open.”
According to Suarez, the ability to communicate was one of Ritter’s most recognizable gifts. “It was incredible how John treated everyone who walked on that set,” said Suarez. “He would pull me aside on occasion and he would say, ‘Keep an eye on that kid. He’s having a rough time. Or, ‘She’s really talented. She’s not getting a lot of work, and she’s really struggling. Can we bring her back?’ He was thrilled when we put someone from the crew in a scene, someone who really wanted to be an actor and was given an opportunity. John was extremely generous and supportive of them and made sure everything they did looked as good as it could. That was John. He was the kind of person who enjoyed helping people, in their careers and in their personal lives. Not in parental way, but he was always parental about it. He had an amazing gift to communicate with people of every age.”
Widdoes spend most of the morning of September 11 preshooting scenes with the show’s three kids on a school set at the far end of the soundstage. Winkler remembered watching Widdoes shoot a back porch scene with Kaley Cuoco.
“The set was totally alive,” said Winkler. “The entire crew was there. Equipment was being moved around everywhere. It was all very normal.”
“Once we got all the preshooting done” said Widdoes, “I went to lunch.”
“I went to lunch with the kids and their parents,” said Winkler. “Still, all completely normal, warm and wonderful.”
At 1:00 p.m, Ritter returned to the set to film a series of promotional spots with the other regular cast members. “Basically, It was a lot of John goofing around,” said Suarez. “He threw pillows in the middle of a take. He pushed Marty Spanjers off a chair. It was that kind of energy.”
“The network had sent over a packet of promos for us to record.” said Widdoes. “Normally, we just put the information on the teleprompter. The cast reads it, we ship it back to ABC, and then we get on with our day.
“John was always particularly entertaining when we were shooting promos because it gave him a chance to riff.” said Widdoes. “And quite often what you have to say on a promo is kind of stupid, so John was never ashamed to point that out. He would have fun doing promos, I used to constantly joke with him that his hair was not real. And John had this wonderful way of putting his scalp in his hands and moving it back and forth, so it looked like it wasn’t real. That was one of the things we were doing that afternoon, and it was really funny. All you had to do was feed him a cue, or a thought, and he was gone and five minutes later you’re still laughing. And from a director’s standpoint, it was so joyous to watch because all you had to do was throw a morsel at him and the morsel became a banquet.”
Once the promos were finished, Widdoes began the process of “camera blocking,” which consisted of setting up his four cameramen for each scene, and then locking the various shots into place by using stand-ins until the crew was ready for the actors to be called to the set.
Winkler remembered standing off to the side with Ritter, waiting for one of his scenes to start. “They had rewritten some of my lines, so I should have been memorizing what I needed to know,” said Winkler. “But instead John and I got into this conversation about the charity Broadway Cares, and how we raised thirty thousand dollars right from the stage of the Music Box Theater when we were doing The Dinner Party in the fall of 2000.”
“All the Broadway shows were raising money, “said Winkler, “and I heard that people down the street in another play were selling personal items from the stage. And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we are going to do that, we are going to win.’ And so every day for fifty performances, matinees included, John and I took Polaroid pictures with any human being in the audience who was willing to pay twenty dollars a shot. We held auctions from the stage. John was the auctioneer. It was incredible. We sold props. We sold the handkerchief that I used in the play. In the end, I think, we beat Reba McEntire by seventy-five dollars. She had been selling her boots and earrings down the street in Annie Get Your Gun.”
“We were the first straight play to win the competition, and that’s what John and I were talking about at that moment,” said Winkler. “It was just a fantastic part of our time on Broadway. So we were laughing, and were proud that we remembered. And then John said he was going to get some water, and I said, ‘I’m going to go memorize my lines so I don’t stink up the room.’”
Widdoes recalled that he had just finished blocking a second scene when Ritter came up to him. “He said he wasn’t feeling well,” said Widdoes. “He said, ‘I’m feeling a little sick to my stomach. Is it okay if I go upstairs to lie down for a little while?'
“I said, ‘Of course. I’ll just use a stand-in. You just go up and lie down and feel better, and we’ll keep going.’ I wound up finishing blocking the entire show without John,” said Widdoes. “I just kept working on the assumption that he was lying down, and that he would be okay.”
“I remember working on a scene with the other actors, and a dialogue coach was playing John,” said Winkler. “We were all doing these scenes together, and they were terrific. But John wasn’t there. Someone said that he might have some food poisoning, and maybe he was going home early. So we just did the scenes and didn’t think anything of it.”
“Everybody thought he was nauseous and had food poisoning,” said Suarez. “When he asked for space and said he wasn’t feeling well, I think I was surprised because up until that moment it had been such a normal day. We were going to shoot some scenes with Henry and Peter late that afternoon, and we were all looking forward to putting that on tape. I know I was ready to just stand back and marvel at what each of these three guys was going to do with a line, or a joke. And John was the kind of guy who would run over after a take and say, ‘Did you see what he did? Did you see how Henry got the laugh on that?’ It was really fascinating to watch him interact with everybody on that set, but especially with Henry and Peter, guys he respected so much.”
Bogdanovich never actually saw Ritter that day. “My call was a little later than day,” he said. “When I got there, John was already in his dressing room. They said he wasn’t feeling well, and I didn’t want to go in and bother him. I did ask what was wrong with him, and they said he was sick to his stomach. They just told me to wait in my dressing room. So I waited. I think I took a nap. I know I waited quite a long time. I was in there from about two thirty on. They kept waiting, thinking John was going to be all right. Then they dismissed us.”
Winkler went home, as did Bogdanovich and the other cast members. Widdoes stayed only long enough to complete his camera blocking, and then he left. Suarez, however, remained behind. “I was being kept informed about everything going on that day.” he said, “including what was happening to John.”
Ritter’s assistant, Susan Wilcox, knocked on his dressing room door, according to In Touch magazine, and found him in severe pain.
The magazine quoted Ritter repeatedly saying to Wilcox, “It must be something I ate.”
Then, he “suddenly slumped over and fell to the floor,” the magazine reported.
People magazine reported that Ritter was dressed only in his underwear and T-shirt, and was “perspiring heavily, vomiting and suffering chest pains.”
The magazine reported that a studio doctor who was called to Ritter’s dressing room strongly advised him to go to the hospital. Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, where Ritter had been born nearly fifty-five years earlier, was just across the street.
“Ritter changed back into his clothes, got his wallet out of his black Cadillac sedan in the parking lot and was driven to the emergency room by an assistant director,” People reported.
As he was leaving the Disney lot, People quoted Ritter saying to an 8 Simple Rules crew member, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”
“As soon as the decision was made to go take him to St. Joseph’s,” said Suarez, “I closed up the set and then went over to sit with him.”
Ritter’s wife, Amy, who was just a day away from her forty-first birthday, arrived at the hospital, as did Ritter’s oldest son, Jason. Ritter’s oldest daughter, Carly, a senior at Vassar, and his son Tyler, a freshman at The University of Pennsylvania, were both back east at school. Stella, the one child John and Amy had together, was being looked after at home, on her fifth birthday.
Suarez called Widdoes, who was at his home in Beverly Hills, “I was just sitting down to dinner, “Widdoes said, ‘when Flody called to say that the situation with John was not looking very good. Flody said he didn’t think it had anything to do with John’s stomach, and he said he’d stay in touch. I was still sitting at the dinner table talking to my twelve-year old daughter about 9/11, and the two-year anniversary of the attacks, when Flody called again. That’s when I decided to get into the car and go to St. Joe’s.”
Henry Winkler said he received a call from Suarez at approximately 9 p.m., changing the actor’s call time on the set from 11 a.m., to 1 p.m “He said John was going to be late,” said Winkler, “and I said okay. He said nothing beyond that.”
Peter Bogdanovich turned off his phone and retired for the night. “I was exhausted.” he said, “and I wanted to get some sleep for Friday because I knew I’d be taping in front of an audience. So I went to bed early and had no idea what was going on in Burbank.”
In fact, what was going on in Burbank was a frantic attempt on the part of doctors to save John Ritter’s life. Doctors detected a tear in Ritter’s main artery, an “aortic dissection,” in medical terms, and they rushed him into surgery as quickly as they could. But it was too late, and John Ritter died on the operating table just after 10 p.m. What killed Lucille Ball in 1989 had now taken the life of the much younger John Ritter.
Widdoes was just getting off the freeway in Burbank when his wife called his cell phone. “Flody called the house to say John has passed away,” said Widdoes, “so I knew by the time I walked into the hospital. It was so shocking, so unbelievably shocking. He was the sweetest man on earth.”
Suarez also called Winkler, “Stacey and I had just finished watching the news on TV, and I was half falling asleep,” said Winkler. “I picked up the phone and Flody was crying. He said, ‘John is gone.’
And I went, ‘John is gone? John is gone? It was like I couldn’t compute. It was like I couldn’t understand the English language any longer,” said Winkler. “I just kept repeating, ‘John is gone? John is gone?’
“My wife shot out of bed,” said Winkler, and she was saying, ‘What? What? What are you saying?’
“And I said, ‘Flody just said that John died. John passed away. Oh, my God. Oh, my god,’ It was incomprehensible on every level.”
Bogdanovich didn’t find out until the following morning. “People had been leaving me frantic messages, saying, ‘Call me, call me, call me, all night long,' he said. “I spoke to Amy, and she told me what had happened, blow by blow. John had no idea that anything bad was going to happen, because he said to Amy, ‘Don’t tell the children. They’ll just get worried.’ That’s the last thing he said to her.”
Yasbeck was understandably still reeling when she appeared on ABC’s Primetime Thursday just five weeks after her husband’s death. Ritter was ”not sick at all….Nothing,” she told Diane Sawyer. “Complete shock and surprise. Really healthy. Getting in, actually, great shape.”
Yasbeck recounted how her daughter, Stella, reacted as she watched a tribute to her father on TV a few days after his death. “At the end (of the TV segment),” Yasbeck said, “Stella stood up on the bed and she put her arms up in the air, and she said, ‘Drop him’
“And I just, I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I mean, I didn’t get it at first. And she said, ‘I’m talking to heaven. Drop him.’
“And….I said, ’Stella….I know for sure that’s not going to work out.’
“And she said, ‘But what if we never tried, and that’s what would have worked?’….It’s like he’s kind of sent us all off into the world without him.” said Yasbeck.
In September 2004, one year after Ritter’s death, Yasbeck and Ritter’s four children filed a wrongful death and medical malpractice lawsuit against Providence St. Joseph’s Medical Center and the physicians who attended to Ritter after he was brought into the emergency room. Yasbeck’s suit alleges that he husband was misdiagnosed by doctors who first believed the patient was having a heart attack, when in fact he had already suffered a tear in his major coronary artery.
“As a result of the defendants’ negligence,” the lawsuit states, “Mr. Ritter suffered an untimely death….If proper procedures had been followed to diagnose and treat Mr. Ritter’s symptoms, he would be alive and well today.
On November 12, 2004, the hospital filed an answer to the court, denying every claim made by the Ritter family. “
“Defendant further denies,” the court document stated, “that plaintiffs have sustained damage resulting from any wrongful act or omission of defendant or any of its agents or employers.”
Both sides have field numerous motions since then, but the case is still pending. For its part, the hospital continues to maintain a “no comment’ policy on the matter. And all a Ritter family spokesperson will say is that the case remains in litigation.
And like the family, Henry Winkler is sure he’ll never entirely get over the loss of his friend. “It makes me so angry and sad that he’s not here,” said Winkler. “There are times when I think, Oh, my God, I’ve got to call John. And I can’t.”