On April 20, 1963, a seventeen-year-old girl walked down the aisle of St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Los Angeles and married the most famous young man in America. She was already pregnant. Her name was Sharon Kristin Harmon, and she had grown up with every advantage mid-century California could offer.
Her father was a Heisman Trophy winner, her mother a model and actress, and her brother would become one of the most recognizable faces on American television. She attended one of the most exclusive schools in Beverly Hills. She was beautiful, poised, and born into a family that embodied what America considered proof of the system working. From the outside, it looked like the American Dream.
From the inside, as Kristin Nelson herself would say decades later, it was a fairy tale she spent her entire life fighting. First, she tried to become the dream. Then she tried to tell the truth about it. What followed was a twenty-two-year marriage that produced four children and destroyed two people in different ways.
There would be addiction, a custody battle against her own brother, and a New Year’s Eve plane crash that killed her ex-husband. This is the story of Kristin Nelson and the four children who found themselves caught in the wreckage of her life. Kristin was born Sharon Kristin Harmon on June 25, 1945, in Burbank, California. Her father, Tom Harmon, was one of the most celebrated athletes in American sports history.
He won the Heisman Trophy in 1940 as a halfback for the University of Michigan, where his dominance was such that he was known simply as Old 98, the number on his jersey. That same year, he finished second in the Associated Press voting for Athlete of the Year. His wartime service transformed his fame into something more. Tom Harmon was a military pilot in World War II whose plane was shot down twice.
The first time was over South America in April 1943, when he survived a crash in the Venezuelan jungle and walked out after eleven days. The second was over China in November 1943, when Japanese fire brought him down and he survived again. After the war, he became one of California’s most prominent sports broadcasters. Kristin’s mother, Elyse Knox, was an actress and model whose face appeared in films throughout the 1940s.
Between Tom Harmon’s athletic renown and Elyse Knox’s Hollywood career, the Harmon family held a place of high social standing in mid-century California. Kristin had a sister, Kelly Harmon, who became an actress and model and later gained fame as the spokesperson for a popular commercial campaign. She had a brother, Mark Harmon, who would become one of the most prominent actors in American television, playing the lead role in NCIS for eighteen seasons. The siblings were tied to Kristin’s life not as a source of primary support, but as people present at her most public failures.
Kristin attended Marymount High School, an elite Catholic girls’ school in the hills of Los Angeles. Among her classmates was Mia Farrow. The two were close friends, and both would discover in different ways that the polished world they grew up in was not as solid as it appeared. At age twelve, Kristin was in the studio audience of a television show when she met Ricky Nelson for the first time.
She was, as she later described herself, just another twelve-year-old fan. He was seventeen then. Five years later, on Christmas Day 1961, when she was sixteen and he was twenty-one, they began dating. A year after that, they were engaged.
Then she became pregnant. Then she was seventeen and walking toward the altar. She would spend the next fifty-five years facing the consequences of that beginning. To understand the marriage, one must understand who Ricky Nelson really was.
Born Eric Hilliard Nelson on May 8, 1940, in Teaneck, New Jersey, he was the son of bandleader Ozzie Nelson and his singer wife, Harriet Hilliard. The family moved to Hollywood when Ricky was young. In 1944, when Ricky was four, the family began a radio show called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which moved to television in 1952 and ran for fourteen seasons until 1966. The show created something unprecedented: a family that was simultaneously real and fictional, playing fictionalized versions of themselves for nearly two decades before the eyes of America.
Ozzie managed Ricky’s music career with the same controlling instinct he used on the television show, shaping it, packaging it, and ensuring it served the family brand while turning a profit. Ricky Nelson was a genuine musical talent who would later record some of the most respected folk rock and country rock songs of his era, but he was also a product manufactured partially before he was old enough to manufacture anything himself. When Ricky met Kristin Harmon again in 1961, the attraction was real. They dated for a year, became engaged, and then Kristin became pregnant.
They married on April 20, 1963. Ricky was twenty-two. Kristin was seventeen, not yet eighteen, and married with her parents’ consent. Ricky later described the marriage, with honesty that must have been painful to hear, as a forced one.
He took Catholic instruction before the ceremony and signed a pledge to raise their children in the Catholic faith. Kristin joined the cast of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet immediately after the wedding, appearing in an episode titled Rick’s Wedding Ring, becoming overnight another member of one of America’s most beloved entertainment families. Four children were born over eleven years. The first was Tracy Kristine Nelson, born October 25, 1963, six months after the wedding.
She was slightly premature, weighing four pounds one ounce, and she was the child whose impending arrival set the date of her parents’ marriage. As a preschooler, she appeared in the 1968 film Yours, Mine, and Ours alongside Lucille Ball. She later became a professional dancer and successful actress, building her career largely on her own talent rather than her parents’ fame. The second and third children arrived together.
Gunnar Eric Nelson and Matthew Gray Nelson were born as twins on September 20, 1967. Both boys followed their father into music. After Ricky’s death in 1985, when the twins were eighteen, they formed the band Nelson, which achieved major commercial success in 1990 with the album After the Rain and the number one single (Can’t Live) Without Your Love and Affection. The fourth child, Sam Hilliard Nelson, was born August 29, 1974, seven years younger than the twins.
He was born into a family already in crisis. He would later become a singer and songwriter, but his childhood was shaped more than his siblings’ by custody disputes and the instability that marked the final years of his parents’ marriage and the years following his father’s death. The public story of the Nelson marriage was one of television. The private story was something entirely different.
Ricky was a touring musician in an era before organized support systems. He was away from home for long periods, surrounded by the rock and roll environment of the 1960s and 1970s. Reports of infidelity persisted throughout the marriage. By 1975, the marriage was effectively over in every meaningful sense, though the couple continued living in the same house.
When Ricky returned from a tour in 1977, he found that Kristin had moved his belongings to a rental house. In October of that year, Kristin filed for divorce for the first time, seeking support, custody of the four children, and a share of the marital property. The couple briefly reconciled, a pattern common in marriages with this mix of history, children, and financial complications. In April 1980, they purchased a property on Mulholland Drive that had once belonged to Errol Flynn for $750,000, a lavish sum for a couple whose marriage was collapsing and whose finances were deteriorating.
In October 1980, Kristin filed for divorce again, and this time she did not withdraw it. The divorce proceedings were devastating. Kristin wanted Ricky to give up music and focus on acting and family life, while Ricky had no intention of abandoning touring. The dispute over his career, along with financial matters and custody arrangements, produced two years of bitter conflict covered extensively by the California press.
In February 1981, Kristin was granted temporary custody of the four children and monthly support of $3,600. Kristin claimed Ricky was hiding assets. His representatives responded that he was nearly bankrupt, that the lavish lifestyle of their marriage had consumed most of his earnings. The divorce was finalized on December 27, 1982.
Lawyers and accountants took more than a million dollars. Both parties emerged financially worse than they had been. Tracy lived with her father at the Mulholland Drive house during the peak of the marital conflict. The twins moved in with Ricky about three months before his death.
Sam, the youngest and most vulnerable, moved between relatives in a way that showed how fractured the family structure had become. During the divorce battle, his aunt Kelly cared for him, then he spent eighteen months with his maternal grandparents, then moved to live with Mark Harmon and Pam Dawber. Whatever the nature of the marriage, December 31, 1985, ended everything with an ending only death can provide. Ricky Nelson, forty-five years old, was traveling with his band from Guntersville, Alabama, to Dallas, Texas, for a New Year’s Eve performance.
He was flying in a modified DC3 that was reportedly having mechanical problems in the days before the flight. The plane caught fire in the air over Dallas, Texas, and crashed near the town of De Kalb at approximately 5:45 p. m. Everyone aboard died.
Ricky Nelson, his fiancée Helen Blair, and his entire band, seven people in total, were killed. The investigation concluded the fire was caused by a faulty heating system. A malfunctioning heater ignited fuel that had leaked into the cabin. The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report identified the heating system failure as the primary cause.
Kristin Nelson was forty years old when she received the news. The immediate aftermath brought new conflicts. The funeral was, by many accounts, a tense and painful event. Kristin attended knowing her relationship with the Nelson family was complicated.
A physical altercation broke out between Kristin and her daughter Tracy, with accounts describing Kristin throwing Tracy to the ground and using her handbag as a weapon. Kristin sought a share of Ricky’s insurance and estate through his brother David Nelson, who managed the estate. The judge overseeing her claim rejected it. She received nothing from Ricky’s estate beyond what had been agreed in the divorce.
The four children inherited what remained. By 1987, two years after Ricky’s death, Kristin Nelson was in rehabilitation for addiction. She was forty-two years old, a mother of four, and receiving treatment for an addiction that had worsened over more than a decade. At this point, her brother Mark Harmon and his wife Pam Dawber made a decision that fractured the family.
They petitioned a California court for custody of Sam Nelson, then thirteen years old. The petition was based on the claim that Kristin was unable to provide adequate parental care due to her addiction and unstable life. Sam’s psychiatrist testified on the boy’s behalf, describing Sam as depicting his mother as a dragon, not in the sense of power, but of danger and unpredictability. Sam complained that her mood swings were frightening and that she prevented him from spending time with his siblings.
Kristin’s response was complex. She later acknowledged that Mark played a role in getting her into rehabilitation and credited him with saving her life. At the same time, she fought the custody petition fiercely, claiming publicly that Pam Dawber used cocaine. The claim was serious enough that Mark Harmon dropped the custody petition rather than allow it to proceed.
The court granted Kristin custody of Sam, with Mark Harmon receiving visitation rights. Kristin, Mark, and Sam were ordered to undergo family therapy together. Kristin was also ordered to stay 200 yards away from Mark and Pam’s home and Pam’s workplace. In 1988, a year after the custody battle was resolved, Kristin married Mark Tinker, a television producer and director.
The marriage lasted twelve years, ending in divorce in 2000. After that divorce, Kristin moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, in the final chapter of her life, she found what had perhaps been there all along: painting. Kristin had been a painter since age seventeen.
She held her first solo art exhibition in 1967, in the middle of her marriage to Ricky. One of her paintings, titled When the Kennedys Were in the White House, was purchased by Jacqueline Kennedy. In Santa Fe, painting became the focus of her life. Her works were exhibited in galleries and acquired by collectors.
She also wrote and published a book. She lived a quieter, more authentic life than her decades in Los Angeles had allowed. On April 27, 2018, Kristin Nelson died in her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was seventy-two years old.
The cause of death was a heart attack. Her daughter Tracy announced the news on Facebook on May 1, 2018, four days later, describing the death as sudden and unexpected. The reaction was muted compared to what it might have been for a more famous person. By 2018, she was remembered primarily as the ex-wife of Ricky Nelson, the woman married to the teen star of Ozzie and Harriet.
Her own artistic accomplishments were largely unknown to the public. The four children, in a way, are the strongest evidence of what their parents’ marriage produced. Tracy became an actress and professional dancer with a steady career. The twins formed Nelson, achieving a number one hit thirty-two years after their father had topped the same chart with Poor Little Fool in 1958.
Sam became a singer and songwriter, rarely speaking publicly about his childhood. Each of the four built careers of their own. Kristin Nelson spent her life fighting the fantasy that had defined her since she was seventeen. She did not win entirely, but she never stopped fighting.
In the end, she was doing it on her own terms, in her own home, creating work that was entirely her own. She deserved more.