Ricky Nelson was only forty-five years old when his private plane crashed into a cow pasture in De Kalb, Texas, on New Year’s Eve 1985. Seven of the nine people aboard were killed, including Ricky. Only the two pilots managed to escape the aircraft before it was consumed by flames. The singer, who had grown up in front of millions of American television viewers as the son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, was returning from a three-stop tour of the southern United States with his band and his fiancée, Helen Blair.
Their last show had been scheduled for Dallas. They never made it. The tragedy marked the end of a life that had been defined by the strange fusion of fiction and reality. Ricky and his older brother David had been introduced to the entertainment industry as small children, the real sons of a real bandleader and his singer wife, who happened to be starring in their own family sitcom.
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet began on radio in 1944, following the home life of Ozzie Nelson and his wife Harriet. For the first four seasons, their sons were too young to appear, so two actors were hired to play David and Ricky. That changed in 1949, when the real boys, aged twelve and eight, joined the radio broadcast themselves. Three years later, in October 1952, the family made the leap to television on ABC, where the series ran for fourteen years.
Viewers watched David and Ricky grow up on screen, and the line between the Nelson family’s performance of itself and their actual private lives became permanently blurred. Ricky was the one who received the most attention. He was often given the lighter, funnier lines, and he grew into a handsome, charming young man with genuine musical talent. When he launched a singing career, he quickly became a heartthrob.
His double-sided debut single, “I’m Walkin’” and “A Teenager’s Romance,” reached number four and number two on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart. Between 1957 and 1973, he placed a total of fifty-three songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and its predecessor charts. His celebrity only deepened when he began dating Sharon Kristin “Kris” Harmon in 1961. She was the daughter of football player Tom Harmon and actress Elise Knox, so she shared his Hollywood upbringing, and both families approved of the match.
They married on April 20, 1963. Kris then joined the television show as Ricky’s fictional wife, further confusing viewers who were already struggling to tell where the sitcom ended and the real family began. The couple had four children: actress Tracy Kristine Nelson, twin sons Gunnar Eric Nelson and Matthew Gray Nelson, who later formed the band Nelson, and Sam Hilliard Nelson. But the marriage was steadily deteriorating.
Kris told people in 1987 that they had become “hippie rock and rollers doing what everyone else was doing those years,” meaning mostly drugs. At first, she said, they were in it together. She tried to fix the marriage by going on the road with him and being involved in the touring lifestyle, but that proved destructive for both of them. She went into therapy and convinced Ricky to join her, but he stopped showing up after a while.
When she tried to tell her family that there was a drug problem and that they all needed help, they denied that anything was wrong. Kris eventually filed for divorce in 1977, beginning a messy legal battle over spousal support, custody, and legal fees that did not finally end until 1982. While she continued fighting her addiction and left her youngest child in the care of her parents, Ricky kept touring, this time with his new fiancée, Helen Blair, at his side. Ricky’s death came just days after Christmas 1985, cutting short the tour and shocking his many fans.
In 1987, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. David Nelson, the older brother and last survivor of the original family, outlived all of them. He survived his father Ozzie, who died from liver cancer in 1975, his mother Harriet, who died of congestive heart failure in 1994, and his youngest brother Ricky. David graduated from Hollywood High School in 1954 and enrolled at the University of South Carolina, where he joined a fraternity.
While his television character went into law, the real David pursued a career as an actor, director, and producer. In the 1960s, he made his directing debut by taking over from his father for roughly a dozen episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He also directed commercials and episodes of other television shows and took acting roles in films such as Peyton Place, The Big Circus, Day of the Outlaw, and The Big Show. Five years after the show ended, Esquire interviewed the Nelson family about the differences between their on-screen and off-screen selves.
David gave the most straightforward answer. He acknowledged that one family was real and the other was not. They kept up the front of a totally problem-free, happy-go-lucky group, he said. There might have been a tremendous battle happening in their home, but if an outsider came in, it was as if a director yelled “roll” and they fell back into their stage roles.
He described it as an awfully big load to carry to be everyone’s fantasy family and wondered how long anyone could go on protecting that image and never letting the outside world in. In 1987, David hosted and narrated Ricky Nelson: A Brother Remembers, a one-hour documentary in which he celebrated his brother’s life. In keeping with his consistently thoughtful nature, David left out the slandering stories about Ricky’s difficulties and focused instead on the life and career his brother had lived. David’s personal life had its own complications.
He married June Blair in 1961, and they had two sons, Daniel Blair and James Eric. The relationship did not last, and they divorced in 1975. That same year, he married Yvonne O’Connor Houston and adopted her three children, John, Eric, and Terry. The couple remained together for thirty-six years and had seven grandchildren.
On January 11, 2011, David Nelson died from complications of colon cancer at his Century City home. He was seventy-four. He was cremated, and unlike his parents and brother, who rest in the family plot at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, David’s ashes were placed in the outdoor Garden of Serenity columbarium at Westwood Memorial Park.
His death brought to an end the story of the Nelson family, the beloved television clan whose private struggles had so often been hidden behind the image of the perfect American family.