Bobby Sherman, Teen Idol and ‘Here Come the Brides’ Actor, Dies at 81

Bobby Sherman, Teen Idol and ‘Here Come the Brides’ Actor, Dies at 81

Bobby Sherman, the pop singer and Here Come the Brides actor whose image graced bedroom posters, lunch boxes and fan magazines as a heart-fluttering teen idol of the 1960s, has died. He was 81.

Sherman’s death was announced Tuesday by his second wife, Brigitte Poublon. It was revealed in March that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

“Bobby left this world holding my hand — just as he held up our life with love, courage, and unwavering grace through all 29 beautiful years of marriage. I was his Cinderella, and he was my Prince Charming,” she wrote.

Discovered at a Hollywood cast party when he was 20, Sherman got a big break when he was signed as a regular vocalist for the ABC musical variety show Shindig! in 1964. He spent about 16 months on the program, which showcased the top acts and songs of the day, through January 1966.

The blue-eyed, brown-haired Sherman had made his acting debut as a kidnapped son of a millionaire businessman on a 1965 episode of ABC’s Honey West, then played a singing surfer in the mold of Frankie Avalon on NBC’s The Monkees in 1967 before landing on Here Come the Brides.

Sherman portrayed the youngest of three brothers, the shy, stammering logger Jeremy Bolt, on the 1968-70 Screen Gems/ABC show. A “Western with no guns,” it was loosely based on the Mercer Girls, who were brought to the boom town of Seattle in the 1860s to work as teachers, and inspired by the classic Stanley Donen musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

Sherman’s siblings on the series were played by Robert Brown and future Starsky & Hutch star David Soul, and his character enjoyed a romance with Candy Pruitt (Bridget Hanley). Joan Blondell portrayed Lotte, the saloon owner who looks out for the new women in town.

“We had a lot of Bobby shows,” executive producer Bob Claver said in Jonathan Etter’s 2015 book, Gangway, Lord! The Here Come the Brides Book. “Those were my favorites because I liked the character and all the rest of it. Bobby had a solid core of people that liked him, as they should have. He was an interesting actor.”

With all that television exposure, Sherman’s singing career took off, and he had million-sellers and top-10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 and ’70 with “Little Woman” — which peaked at No. 3 — “La La La (If I Had You),” “Julie, Do Ya Love Me” and “Easy Come, Easy Go.”

It all made for a crazy schedule.

“I’d film five days a week, get on a plane on a Friday night and go someplace for matinee and evening [concerts] Saturday and Sunday, then get on a plane and go back to the studio to start filming again,” he told The Washington Post in 1998. “It was so hectic for three years that I didn’t know what home was.

“I was disoriented — I never knew where I was, always had to be reminded. But, in all honesty, I must say I had the best of times because the concerts were great, the fans were great. It was the proverbial love-in, but it just zapped so much out of me.”

In March 1971, Sherman guest-starred on an episode of ABC’s The Partridge Family that served as a back-door pilot for his new series, Getting Together, in which he played a struggling songwriter. Up against CBS’ All in the Family, it lasted just 14 episodes before being canceled.

More recently, Sherman worked as an emergency medical technician who trained paramedics in CPR and first aid at the Los Angeles Police Academy. He also became a reserve police officer in L.A. and a deputy sheriff in San Bernardino County.

“There’s not a better feeling in the world than when you’re responsible for saving someone’s life,” he said. “It’s real life — you can’t say, ‘Take two.’ It’s now.”

Robert Cabot Sherman Jr. was born in Santa Monica on July 22, 1943, and raised in Van Nuys. His father owned his own milk delivery service, Woodland Hills Dairy, that had him rising at 3:30 a.m. each day to reach his 1,000 customers.

Sherman played guitar, piano, trumpet, trombone, French horn and drums while growing up, practicing in the soundproof room at home that his dad had built for him.

After graduating from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys in 1961, Sherman was studying child psychology at Pierce College when a girlfriend took him to a cast party for The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

He got up and sang with the band, then was approached by actors Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda and Sal Mineo, who said they would like to manage him and jumpstart his career. With Mineo’s help, he recorded a song, then auditioned for Shindig! An hour later, he had an offer for 28 shows.

On Shindig!, Sherman would cover such hits as “I’m Into Something Good,” “Have I the Right” and “She’s Not There,” often accompanied by squeals from the adoring girls in the audience. (It was reported that all that screaming over the years led to Sherman suffering from hearing loss.)

On Here Come the Brides, on which future Brian’s Song screenwriter William Blinn served as head writer, Sherman scored high marks for his acting, especially when it came to his stammering.

“I thought Bobby did a good job with it, he managed a find a balance,” Claver said in Etter’s book. “The worst thing in the world you can give to an audience is, ‘Oh! Is he going to talk long?’ and [have them] be uncomfortable, but he didn’t do that.”

Sherman also appeared on TV shows including The F.B.I., Emergency!, The Mod Squad, Ellery Queen, The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote and Frasier. In 1986, he played a former musician who lives next door to a Latino family led by Reni Santoni in the USA sitcom Sanchez of Bel Air, but that show didn’t last long.

Sherman’s autobiography, Still Remembering You, was published in 1996. Two years later, he returned to the concert stage after 25 years away to take part in a “Teen Idol Tour” with Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits and Davy Jones of The Monkees.

In 1994, Dick Clark asked Sherman what motivated him to become an EMT.

“When my two sons, Christopher and Tyler, were growing up, I had visions of them falling out of trees and off bikes, and I wanted to be prepared for any emergency, so I took first aid and just fell in love with it,” he said. “The more I learned, the more I wanted to know, and the next thing I know I’m an instructor.”

In his spare time, he rode along on rescue calls with fire department paramedics.

“On one call in Northridge, we were working on a hemorrhaging woman who had passed out,” Sherman told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “Her husband kept staring at me. Finally, he said, ‘Look, honey, it’s Bobby Sherman!’ The woman came to with a start. She said, ‘Oh great, I must look a mess!’ I told her not to worry, she looked fine.”

He and Brigitte founded the Brigitte & Bobby Sherman Children’s Foundation in 2011. Survivors also include his sons and six grandchildren.

Sherman was married to Patti Carnel from 1971 until their 1979 divorce. After they split, she married Soul, her ex-husband’s co-star on Here Come the Brides, in 1980; they divorced in 1986.