For four seasons Willie Aames was Tommy Bradford, one of Dick Van Patten’s eight TV kids on Eight Is Enough, and for six more he was Buddy Lembeck, Charles’s lovable sidekick on Charles in Charge. Then the phone stopped ringing. “After Charles in Charge, I couldn’t get arrested,” the actor told Entertainment Tonight, as Parade reported this week. “Nobody wanted to see me. People were like, ‘Love ya, but got enough of ya.'”
Born Albert William Upton on July 15, 1960, in Newport Beach, California, Willie Aames is 66 now. The years since that line went quiet have taken him further from Hollywood than any fan magazine could have guessed. He lost a fortune, a marriage and, for a while, his footing entirely. What finally pulled him back started with a letter he answered as a teenager.
Why Did Willie Aames Feel So Uneasy as a Teen Idol?
Eight Is Enough ran from 1977 to 1981, and Tommy’s face landed in teen magazines right next to Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Aames never felt he belonged there. “I never saw myself as handsome,” he told ET this month, according to Parade. “I never saw myself as talented.”
He called the photo shoots the most embarrassing part, a feeling he also shared on OWN’s Where Are They Now in 2014.
The fan mail weighed on him too. “I used to get thousands of letters and feel guilty, because there was always a picture of a girl and a phone number,” he told Closer Weekly in 2020. At least once he called one back, which turns out to matter a great deal later in this story.
When Charles in Charge ended its run in 1990, alongside Scott Baio and his young co-star Nicole Eggert, Aames was ready for grown-up roles that never came. The teen idol image, he told ET, only made that jump harder. And the money that had once poured in was about to run out.
How Did a Million-Dollar TV Star End Up Sleeping Under Bushes?
“At the very peak I was making a little over a million dollars a year,” Aames told ET’s Kevin Frazier back in 2009. He has spoken openly about the drug and alcohol addiction that ate into those years, and Parade and Globe both note that his money went during that battle.
He got sober, found faith and spent 1995 to 2003 playing the title role in the Christian video series Bibleman, which he left, the Associated Press reported, to spend more time with his family.
The bottom fell out in 2008. Fox News reported in March 2009 that he had declared bankruptcy, had his car repossessed and been asked for a divorce by Maylo McCaslin, his wife of 22 years. “Then suddenly there was no job, no bank account, no wife, no child,” he told ET. “I stayed with friends when I could, slept in parking garages or slept in the park. It was shameful.”
“I was sleeping in the bushes at the Hollywood Bowl at one point, homeless, lost everything,” he told ET this October, as Globe and Yahoo reported.
That Thanksgiving, after 20 years of sobriety, he took a drink and then attempted to take his own life, according to the Fox News account of his interview with Star magazine. When ET asked him about it a year later, he answered quietly. “I gave people a lot of cause for concern and I think they acted on those concerns. I’m glad they did. Beyond that, that time period is a blur.”
By the spring of 2009 he was selling his belongings at a garage sale outside his home in Olathe, Kansas, with a camera crew from VH1’s Broke and Famous filming. So where does a former teen idol go from there?
What Work Did He Find When Hollywood Moved On?
“Nobody gave me a hand up,” he told ET. “I had to sit there and go, ‘Get your [expletive] together. I mean what’s the deal? Nobody is going to do it for you.'” In 2009 he took a construction job and began training as a financial advisor. “You have to find some point that will give you the smallest amount of dignity and self respect back,” he said then.
The detour got stranger and better. “I became your favorite celebrity satellite installer and I learned a trade, and then I went to work on a cruise ship,” he told ET. Starting in 2010 he worked as a cruise director for Regent Seven Seas and Oceania. By late 2015, he was running the entertainment aboard the Viking Star, Frommer’s reported.
He returned to acting in the mid-2010s, including Hallmark’s Picture Perfect Mysteries: Exit Stage Death in 2020. The ships, though, gave him something far bigger than a paycheck.
Who Was the Fan Who Waited 30 Years for Willie Aames?
One of those fan letters had come from a girl named Winnie Hung. “I called back and we became pen pals for 30 years,” he told Closer Weekly. “We never met, and we’d lose track of each other at times.” Years later a message arrived on LinkedIn that read, “Just checking to see if you’re OK,” and she soon became, in his words, “my closest confidante.”
His ship eventually sailed into her city of Vancouver. “When I saw her, I literally could not breathe,” he recalled. “I walked up to her and said, ‘I’m going to marry you.'” They married on March 21, 2014, and their story became the 2022 Hallmark movie Love in the Limelight, starring Alexa and Carlos PenaVega. Aames and Hung were both credited as writers. He told ET’s Nischelle Turner this month that the advice he would give his younger self is to stop worrying about things that come and go.
And as for Tommy Bradford, he once dreamed of a reboot where Tommy had a family of his own. Now he has a better idea. “I could be the grandpa now,” he told ET. “That’s not a bad idea.”
If you or someone you love is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available any time by call or text at 988.
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