‘Hollywood Turned Their Backs’: ‘Courtship of Eddie’s Father’ Star Brandon Cruz on Bill Bixby’s Forgotten Legacy

Brandon Cruz has spent much of his life moving away from Hollywood. After finding fame as young Eddie Corbett on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, he endured the challenges that have followed many former child actors, eventually building a life far removed from television. Yet one connection to those years has never faded: his affection for Bill Bixby, the actor who played his father on screen and became an important figure in his life off screen as well.

Today, Cruz finds himself on an unexpected mission. More than three decades after Bixby’s death, he continues to campaign for greater recognition of the actor’s legacy, convinced that Hollywood has forgotten a performer whose influence extended far beyond the shows that made him famous.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I think he’s sadly overlooked. If you think about the talent that he had and what he brought to audiences—if the ultimate goal of Hollywood and television is to reach a vast audience and sell commercials, in his time, no one did it like Bill. He’d go from show to show and they were all high quality. It wasn’t crap. It wasn’t crazy. Bill brought a certain class to it and Bill never did anything that kids couldn’t watch. As crazy as his private life might have been, publicly and professionally, he was pretty much a goodie-goodie.”

Long before he became TV dad Tom Corbett, Bixby had already established himself as one of television’s most versatile performers. Audiences first embraced him on My Favorite Martian, but that was only the beginning of a career that would take him through The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Magician, The Incredible Hulk and Goodnight, Beantown. Just as impressive was his second act behind the camera, where he became a prolific television director, guiding episodes of numerous series, including Blossom. Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Bixby spent decades as a steady and respected presence in the entertainment industry.

BRANDON CRUZ: “Bill gave a lot of people their first break; he brought me on to Courtship of Eddie’s Father and I was untrained. I was just a kid. Lou Ferrigno was just a weight lifter and, yeah, a famous one, but he owes his entire career to Bill and The Incredible Hulk.”

For Cruz, the issue of bringing attention to the actor became personal the moment he discovered that Bixby’s name was missing from the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I was with some friends and they asked me, ‘Where’s Bill?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ We went to one of those kooky stores on the Boulevard that gives you a map of where the stars were. He wasn’t on it. How did Bill not have a star?”

Determined to do something about the situation, Cruz reached out to the late Johnny Grant, the longtime Hollywood booster often referred to as the “Mayor of Hollywood” because of his association with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Walk of Fame ceremonies. It was then that he learned an important detail many fans never realize: stars on the Walk of Fame aren’t simply awarded—they’re paid for. At the time, the cost was about $20,000, a figure well beyond Cruz’s means.

A potential solution seemed to present itself a few years later. When Marvel Studios’ 2008 film The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton and Liv Tyler, went into production, Cruz was approached about allowing footage from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father to be used in connection with the project. During those discussions, the idea of funding a Walk of Fame star for Bixby surfaced as a possible promotional tie-in. Everyone appeared enthusiastic about the proposal, but nothing ultimately came of it.

Undeterred, he again pressed Bixby’s case. The response was discouraging: unless someone was willing to finance the effort themselves, he was told, there was little chance of the actor receiving a star. For Cruz, it was the beginning of a long and often frustrating campaign to secure what he believed was overdue recognition for the man who had meant so much to him and to television audiences.

BRANDON CRUZ: “More time went on and I realized that GoFundMe existed and that people were getting a lot of money raised really quickly to do different things. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to do a memorial for Bill and I want the fans to do it. I don’t want to involve Hollywood.’ I mean, they turned their backs. I had a huge movie studio and their PR people, and they had the money. They spent $20,000 back then on the Hulk invitations to the premiere. It would’ve been nothing for them. But, again, I felt let down by Hollywood.”

“It has been 10 years since I started the campaign. They have raised the price almost every year or every other year since we started. It was at $35,000 and now it’s, I believe, $85,000. I expect it to go up again. It is June, so I believe they are voting, but the last two years, when Bill was eligible, they didn’t vote him in, so I have to wait another year before I can resubmit it. The money’s there to buy him a star if they chose to do it today, but I don’t have a good feeling about it. And the fact that we’re losing people that remember who Bill was is sad. I get talking about it and I get all wound up and emotional because it means so much to me that my friend is honored.”

More innocent days… sort of

Long before he became known as a punk musician, recovery advocate and one-time child star trying to preserve Bill Bixby’s legacy, Brandon Cruz was a five-year-old from Bakersfield, California, who landed one of television’s most recognizable roles. Cast as Eddie Corbett on ABC’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Cruz spent three seasons playing the young son of widowed magazine publisher Tom Corbett, portrayed by Bill Bixby.

Based on the 1963 Glenn Ford film of the same name, the series followed Tom as he attempted to balance single parenthood with his career, while Eddie devoted much of his energy to finding a new wife for his father. Alongside Bixby and Cruz, the cast included Miyoshi Umeki as housekeeper Mrs. Livingston and series creator James Komack as photographer Norman Tinker. Running from 1969 to 1972, the show laid the foundation for a relationship between Cruz and Bixby that would continue long after the cameras stopped rolling.

BRANDON CRUZ: “James Komack was the producer and writer and costar, and directed, but Bill set the tone of what went on on the set. If Bill was happy, everybody was happy, because he was the easiest guy to work with when he was happy, and that was pretty much all the time. He was a very private guy; he didn’t let a lot out. I remember his dad passed away while we were filming, and he walked right on the set. Everybody was really quiet and he looked around and said, ‘Hey, we have a job to do. Let’s do it. If you want to talk to me afterward once we wrap, then we can talk. But right now, let’s work.’ And that’s the way Bill was. Private stuff was for private times.”

As important as the show was, the relationship that developed between Cruz and Bixby didn’t end when filming wrapped each week. Given what Cruz describes as a difficult family life, weekends spent with Bixby became something he genuinely looked forward to.

BRANDON CRUZ: “Bill would take me to his beach house a lot or we would go to Palm Springs or Las Vegas. We’d just hop in a car and drive around. It was just amazing. He really just looked out for everybody. He was a giving, caring professional. Very private, but nobody could ever say a bad word about him. He was the most beloved guy in Hollywood, then he passed and that title basically went to John Ritter.”

One of Cruz’s favorite stories from his years on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father involves an encounter with Elvis Presley that almost didn’t happen. At the time, Bixby had recently appeared opposite the singer in the films Clambake and Speedway, and when Elvis was working elsewhere on the MGM lot, he invited Bixby and his young costar to stop by and say hello.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I don’t know what he was doing there, but he was on another stage. During lunch, I would play cards with the grips and the electricians, who were part of the crew. Bill walks up and says, ‘Hey, Brandon, we’ve got to go.’ I said, ‘I’m playing cards.’ He says, ‘No, we’ve been summoned,’ but I said, ‘I’ve got a good hand and I’m playing cards.’ I just didn’t want to go anywhere. He had to call Elvis and say, ‘The kid’s not budging,’ so Elvis came to meet me. All I remember is this big white jumpsuit, diamond and gold rings on every finger. Big old hand in my face. I shook his hand and that was kind of it. The reason for that is that Bill had told me everybody was the same, so there was no being star-struck. We got to go to the Emmys the year Bill got nominated, and there weren’t that many kids there. I was bored. I didn’t get to watch a lot of TV, because I was busy making it. I knew who some of the people were, and there were definitely celebrities there, but it wasn’t a big deal.”

And then there was Sammy Davis Jr.

The opposite was true when it came to Sammy Davis Jr. making a guest appearance on The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.

BRANDON CRUZ: “Now here’s the thing. Bill knew what he wanted me to be, and why I got the part, was just a normal kid that got along well with him. Sammy came in fresh off a jet from Vegas, and he walked in with a martini and a cigarette, and in a tux with his tie undone. He’s Sammy. He’s just talking and telling stories. He’s sitting in the makeup chair, and I’m sitting next to him, and he’s entertaining, cracking us up, telling everybody stories. My mom and a couple of other people were hanging around, because he was a big deal.”

“I had to go off and do some school. I come back in to do the scene, and Bill always liked to roll the camera during rehearsal, because we might get some good moments. They roll the camera and Sammy has the first line. He starts talking and I just start staring at him, because he’s not Sammy anymore. He has a different voice, different mannerisms. Then I have the next line and I’m just staring at him. I think Bill was directing and he says, ‘Okay, cut. Um, Brandon?’ I was, like, ‘Oh, uh, yeah …’ He goes, ‘Okay, everybody, Brandon just saw acting for the first time. Now let’s do it again.’ In my head, I’m thinking, ‘Well, I’m like all these actors. I’m going to act.’ Sammy does his line, and I came up with some corny voice and Bill is, like, ‘Okay, cut. Uh, Brandon, no acting.’ When we had a talk about it later—I mean years later—I said, ‘When you told me no acting, what exactly were you talking about?’”

“He said, ‘Acting is the art of reacting normally in an abnormal situation. You’ve got the camera, the crew, all these people, but you want to appear normal. Whether the role requires you to be weird or not, you have to be whatever the director and the script and the character are calling for. You were a 7-year-old kid. That’s what we wanted. That’s what we always wanted you to be. We never wanted you to be an actor. We wanted you to be Brandon.’ That’s why when people call me an actor, it’s, like, ‘I don’t think so. I’m a re-actor.’”

“Nothing ever required Bill to be something that he wasn’t. I mean, all of that stuff was within him and it didn’t seem forced. In the case of Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Bill was a single guy, very popular, very famous, number one on the bachelor list in Hollywood, and he portrayed a dad very easily. He was just … believable. I saw him do comedy, like The Apple Dumpling Gang; he did an episode of The Streets of San Francisco where he played a serial killing, cross-dressing nun. We watched it during the weekend at my grandparents’ house. My grandma had just visited the set, and that Monday morning she walked up to Bill and said, ‘Hey, I saw you on Streets of San Francisco.’ He said, ‘Well, thank you, Dorothy,’ and she said, ‘I hated you.’ He smiled and said, ‘That’s good. That’s what I intended. Thank you very much. It’s the best compliment I could get.’

“He was an actor, he knew how to do it, but it didn’t seem out of the question that he could be that crazy guy. He knew how to do it naturally. He wasn’t my dad, but, God, a lot of people thought he was. You know? A whole country and a lot of the world saw that show and really thought that was my dad.”

‘Eddie’ comes to an end

Like many television series of its era, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father eventually saw its audience begin to decline. By the time the show entered its final season, changes were occurring both on television and within the series itself. Looking back, Cruz believes one creative decision in particular altered the show’s original appeal and contributed to its eventual cancellation.

BRANDON CRUZ: “It was getting away from being about me trying to get Bill a wife and our relationship, and then the kooky characters around us, and it turned into the James Komack show. If you watch the last season, it’s a lot less about Bill and I and a lot more about Jimmy. I think because of that, we lost viewers and we were canceled. It was pretty cut and dry.”

Which reminds him of a connection he and Bixby made that lasted until the end of his life.

BRANDON CRUZ: “In 1969 or ’70, Bill forgot my birthday and the next day, he gave me a bicycle. I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, that’s very sweet, but my birthday was yesterday.’ The following January, the day after his birthday, I called him, because it fell on a weekend, and that happened for the next consecutive 20-plus years; we called each other the day after our birthdays to say Happy Birthday. If I didn’t talk to Bill in a year, I would talk to him on his birthday or hear from him the day after my birthday.”

Although The Courtship of Eddie’s Father came to an end in 1972, Cruz’s relationship with Bixby didn’t. The two remained in regular contact, and Brandon has long suspected that Bixby quietly helped open doors for him as he continued working throughout the 1970s. Guest appearances on series such as Kung Fu, Medical Center and Gunsmoke followed, along with a reunion with Bixby on The Incredible Hulk. 

By the mid-1970s, Cruz’s priorities had begun to shift. Although he continued acting and appeared in the 1976 hit film The Bad News Bears, he was becoming increasingly interested in the Southern California lifestyle that surrounded him—surfing, skateboarding and, eventually, drugs. Acting was no longer the center of his world. Even so, when Bixby, who died on November 21, 1993, from complications arising out of prostate cancer, invited him to appear on The Incredible Hulk, Cruz didn’t hesitate.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I guess I can tell this story. I was being driven to the set of The Incredible Hulk by my grandpa, I think. I had some pot on me. I was in Bill’s motor home and pulled it out. I don’t know what I was going to do with it, but somebody started to come in the motor home. I jumped in the bathroom and thought, ‘I’ve got to stash this somewhere.’ I just pulled down the shaving bag that was sitting on the counter, unzipped it and there was some pot and a pipe. I’m like, ‘Oh, perfect, I’ll just stash it in here with this.’ I went to the set, we did the scene and I couldn’t get back to the motor home. Bill did before me.

“A couple of hours later, he walks up to me and goes, ‘Hey, um, did you leave something in my motor home?’ I just looked at him and smiled and he said, ‘It’s better than mine,’ and he walked away. I was, like, ‘Oh, well, Bill’s cool.’ The next day I got back into the motor home and all of my good, green weed was gone, and he had this dirty brown s–t that was just … well, I thought Bill would’ve had better pot, but it turns out I had better pot than Bill.”

Punk rocker

The years following his child-acting career took Cruz in a very different direction. As he grew older, drugs became an increasingly significant part of his life, while music emerged as a new passion. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, he had become deeply involved in Southern California’s punk rock scene, eventually performing with bands such as Dr. Know and later, from 2001 to 2003, the Dead Kennedys.

BRANDON CRUZ: “Surfing and punk rock probably saved my life. I grew up around hippies and bikers and drunks. That was my upbringing. Everybody around me either surfed or was a biker. When I would be booked for appearances while doing Eddie’s Father, I would ride in on a motorcycle with several other almost identically clad people as the guy who drove me in. He was in a certain motorcycle group, and I’ll leave it at that. I lived the Sons of Anarchy life before it was hip. Those were the guys who watched out for me. I was raised by wolves, basically. It was just a pack of kids running around the beach and just did whatever we wanted with no supervision.”

“Then, once I got notoriety and fame and everything, I had to not hang around little kids anymore, so I hung around the teenagers whose attitude was, ‘Who cares who he is? The kid’s cool. He brings us weed. He’ll steal a case of beer from his dad for us if we want. We’re going surfing in Malibu, do you want to go?’ I’m like 10 or 11 years old and it’s, like, ‘Yeah, I want to go.’ There was no, ‘Let me ask my mom,’ because I didn’t know where she was. So I would just go with the older guys.”

As he got older, there did reach a point where he began desiring a bit of normalcy in his life, and to have a regular family (about as far removed from his own as he could get).

BRANDON CRUZ: “I didn’t like the chaos that drugs and alcohol brought, but I just kept doing it until I was 34 years old. When I got married and had a kid, my ex-wife said, ‘You know, if you want us to be around, you have to stop doing what you’re doing, because you’re out of control.’ I got sober. That was 29 years ago and a lot of people helped me out.”

During that time he launched a nonprofit organization—The Brandon Cruz Foundation—which is designed to put people through rehab who can’t afford it.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I’ve been in a punk band since punk rock started and I have a lot in common with the people that I work with. All of it just started when I got sober, because I needed to work. I was pretty much unemployable just doing all my stupid stuff that I did before I got sober; just drinking way too much, doing too many drugs. I started really young; I don’t think I drew a sober breath filming Bad News Bears.”

For years, he has spent much of his time trying to help addicts on their road to recovery, and there’s no question he takes this calling very seriously—in fact, this conversation was interrupted and had to be rescheduled when one of his clients called.

BRANDON CRUZ: “I have to treat it seriously and have. My thinking was, ‘Wow, if I can help these people avoid being a complete wash-out and wipe-out in their lives, then maybe I can do some good.’ Now it’s just what I do. To the detriment of my marriage, I took on a whole new way of recovery and helping people. I had to travel a lot and would be gone most of the time. But I always came home. My kids never went without. My kids had a mom and a dad and had consistency and I had a home. I moved my kids off the beach. They weren’t raised where I was raised, and they weren’t raised the way I was. I produced two of the most amazing, wonderful kids, and my son’s middle name is Bixby. I branded him right away, but they weren’t going to be like me.”

“I seeded the nonprofit with my own personal funding and I want to see it through as well. I just want to give back and I want to help. It’s been over 29 years since I’ve had a drink or a drug and I want other people to have that same chance. I just turned 64. I didn’t expect to see 24 the way I was going, so it’s a pretty good idea that I did this.”