By Janet Singleton

In his new memoir, Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted former child actor Todd Bridges writes:

“While I was standing there thinking, or doing my best to think¸ with all of the crack that I’d been smoking for the past six days, the neighbors in the house next door came to the window to see what had caused the commotion they had heard. It was a black couple, and they clearly recognized me from TV. They were being really nice to me, especially given that I was standing in front of a drug house that probably kept them up plenty of nights. It was like that in South Central; there would be a drug house, and then the houses all around it would belong to innocent people who were trying to live their lives as best they could in a neighborhood plagued by drugs and the people, like me, who sold them.”

Any consumer of mass media might easily think Todd Bridges is in prison, in the process of going to prison, or just getting out of prison. That idea is supported by the images we have seen of him for the past two decades. Whenever a current or former child actor self-destructs, often the media digs from its archives photos of the classic bad example: Bridges in his early 20s standing in court with lawyer Johnnie Cochran, facing attempted murder charges.

The accusation may be better known than the acquittal he received after a witness testified that Bridges was not present at the scene. Still, before and after he was found not guilty of shooting fellow drug dealer Kenneth “Tex” Clay, the actor’s early history bleakly tumbled out as a scroll of narcotics-related arrests and jail time. He became frozen in the public eye: forever young, forever felonious. Yet, after several stints in rehab, Bridges says he quit the drug-thug life in 1993.

Today Bridges is 44, and it has been 17 years since the former Diff’rent Strokes star has been on the bad side of the barbed wire. Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted is an update. And even a person who finds narcissistic celeb bios routinely loathsome (such as the author of this review) can see value in Bridges’ tale. With writer Sarah Tomlinson’s help, he tells a harrowing story in straightforward unadorned language. True, the chapters could have used sterner editing to cut out points of repetition. The book is not a disciplined entity, but then again neither was Bridges in the old days.

The Un-Adorable Truth

And the former adorable child actor does not try to swim past the un-adorable truth – although, unfortunately, he never dives deep into the implications of his actions, perhaps to avoid drowning in the grief he has caused others and others have caused him.

What keeps the book from being yet another tawdry journal about a delinquent celeb vacillating between the highlife and the lowlife is that Bridges’ experiences are topical and braided though a corner-turning episode in the nation’s history. When he appeared on The Waltons, in the 70s, he became the first black child to have a reoccurring role on a TV show. Early network shows had been as white as the dots of “snow” that sometimes plagued the old Magnavox screens. Bridges was part of a wave of black faces, like Greg Morris on Mission Impossible, that made up the freshman class of modern black Hollywood during the mid-60s through the mid-70s, a period in which television became suddenly integrated.

And great social history nuggets turn up in the book: When the Bridges first required an attorney, his mother thought, because of prevailing stereotypes, a Jewish attorney would be most effective. But she consulted three Jewish lawyers and asked them whom they would choose to represent their own child if he were a celebrity in trouble. All three said Johnnie Cochran.

Years before events necessitated Cochran, Bridges was a little boy who lived a stable middle-class life in a multi-racial neighborhood. His only problem: a common domestic appliance—the hardworking but secretly drunken and violent father. He moved with his family from San Francisco, where he had begun starring in commercials, to LA. There, with the guidance of mother Betty Bridges, who trained and managed her son, the young performer snagged TV roles.

In Southern California, his problems multiplied with success. For the first time, the boy faced racism as random bullies and malcontents used the n-word as their calling card, whether he was performing on tour with other young celebs or out walking through his neighborhood. An agent insinuated himself into the family as a fake father figure and molested 12-year-old Bridges. His dad, envious of his son’s success, took the predator’s side.

The pedophile had “groomed” the young Bridges for the first attack, and LAPD was grooming him, too. His TV roles—which peaked with a co-starring part on Diff’rent Strokes—encouraged a turbo version of standard racial police harassment. Ugly incidents occurred on a regular basis. When the teen star acquired an expensive car, he was accused of theft of his own vehicle. “What’s a n….. like you doing in with a car like this?” rang out as his tormenter’s theme.

After years of enduring police taunts and targeting, Bridges slipped into real trouble. He consumed vast quantities of rock cocaine following the end of Diff’rent Strokes. The psychic subsidies of the crack-cocaine subculture fulfilled the angry and hypersexual longings produced by his childhood traumas. He was in pain and the available avalanche of drugs buried the agony.

Lost Souls of Crack Land

Bridges energetically descended into LA’s crack land, where lost souls cannibalize other lost souls. He partnered with a dealer who ran crack houses that were virtual hell factories. For easy sex and steady business, they deliberately hooked a pitiful parade of young women on crack. Woe to customers of both sexes who could not pay their bills—a lack of cash netted a beating or a forced sex act at gunpoint in front of the other crack heads. When Bridges lost his partner to imprisonment, the resourceful actor easily slid into pimping.

His TV siblings from Diff’rent Strokes did not fare well, either. Dana Plato suffered drug addiction and fatally overdosed in 1999. Gary Coleman’s adulthood has been punctuated by legal battles with his mother and assault charges that stem from domestic and public incidents.

At one point, Bridges was thrown into jail on a notorious floor that housed parent-killing Lyle Menendez; the notorious serial rapist-killer Richard “Night Stalker” Ramirez; and Eddie Nash, suspected of involvement in quadruple bludgeoning deaths dubbed the Wonderland killings.

Bridges was indignant; he felt he was not as bad as such miscreants. He was blind to the practical karma of the situation, however. In his junkie incarnation, intimidation led Bridges’ own loving, loyal, and long-suffering mother to arm herself in case he and his friends tried to break in to get money. His drugs-for-sex racket was based upon predatory strategies. Unlike Ramirez, he did not kill his prey. But, had he, would they have been much worse off? And the cocaine-crack industry he joined dealt mass death and suffering that exists perpetually, like those old images of a jail-bound Bridges. Only drug-spawned misery lacks a parole date, and will reach its ruinous hands into the lives of addicts and their innocent children for generations.

A Gleaming Moment of Redemption

In his late twenties, Bridges internalized the lessons of a 12-set rehab program and discontinued his destructive lifestyle. Unlike white performers who had grappled with drug and assault charges, he was not brought back into Hollywood’s forgiving bosom. The entertainment industry had a long memory about Bridges, but not an accurate one.

In 2001, a gleaming moment of redemption presented itself. Bridges and his brother Jimmy saw a woman’s wheelchair roll into a park lake where she had been fishing. They jumped in and saved the paraplegic’s life.

Bridges says he has led a clean, sober, and non-incarcerated life for 17 years. That is more than most in the far-too-long list of major and minor Hollywood celebrities-gone-wrong that has saturated the media and public consciousness in the last two decades can claim.

Janet Singleton is an award-winning novelist and journalist.