Bobby Sherman dead: ’60s teen idol from music, TV was 81

Bobby Sherman, the singer and actor whose boyish good looks and sweet if unshowy vocals made him a teen idol in the overlapping worlds of television and pop music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has died. He was 81.

His death was announced Tuesday by wife Brigitte Poublon Sherman via friend John Stamos’ social media.

“It is with the heaviest heart that I share the passing of my beloved husband, Bobby Sherman,” she wrote. “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. Even in his final days, he stayed strong for me. That’s who Bobby was — brave, gentle, and full of light.”

No cause of death was given, nor was a specific date of death.

A textbook heartthrob of the shaggy-haired SoCal variety, Sherman put four singles in the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 in less than a year, starting with “Little Woman,” which peaked at No. 3 in October 1969; after that came “La La La (If I Had You),” which got to No. 9 in January 1970, “Easy Come, Easy Go,” which hit the same position three months later, and “Julie, Do Ya Love Me,” which reached No. 5 in September 1970. The cheerful, catchy tunes — each a certified gold-seller — helped define the bubblegum pop sound that also encompassed the Archies, Tommy Roe and the Ohio Express.

At the same time that he was scaling the charts, Sherman starred on ABC’s “Here Come the Brides,” a western comedy series set shortly after the Civil War in which he played one of the owners of a family logging business determined to find love interests for the company’s lumberjacks. The multimedia exposure drew the adoration of the era’s teenyboppers, who raced to spend their allowance money on T-shirts, lunch boxes and magazines featuring the face of Bubblegum Bobby, as he was known.

“I could have sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and they would have bought it,” he said of his rabid fanbase in a 1989 interview with The Times. “My audience was so young and impressionable, they would buy everything associated with Bobby Sherman.”

Robert Cabot Sherman Jr. was born July 22, 1943, in Santa Monica and grew up in Van Nuys, where he played football at Birmingham High School. When he was a sophomore at Pierce College, Sherman went to a Hollywood party celebrating the premiere of 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and ended up singing with a band that included several guys he’d gone to high school with; among the party’s guests were Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Jane Fonda, whose praise led to a successful audition for Sherman to be a singer on the TV variety show “Shindig!”

In 1967, Sherman made a cameo on “The Monkees” as a teen idol named Frankie Catalina — a not-so-veiled reference to the real-life Frankie Avalon — and in 1971 he appeared in an episode of “The Partridge Family” that set up a short-lived spin-off series called “Getting Together” in which Sherman played a songwriter.

Sherman’s musical career cooled about as quickly as it had heated up. “Together Again,” the last of his 10 entries on the Hot 100, topped out at No. 91 in February 1972. “It was inevitable,” he told The Times, blaming the “oversaturation” of the bubblegum market. He continued acting in TV shows including “The Mod Squad” and “The Love Boat” but later found a second life in public service in the 1980s and ’90s, serving as a volunteer paramedic and teaching first aid to recruits at the Los Angeles Police Department Academy. Sherman became a technical reserve officer for the LAPD and a reserve deputy sheriff for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

Bobby Sherman performs in Beverly Hills in 2015.

(Jason Kempin / Getty Images)

He published a memoir, “Still Remembering You,” in 1996 and toured in 1998 with Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees’ Davy Jones.

In 1993, he told The Times about a recent ride-along he’d been on with fire department medics as they responded to a call in Northridge. “We were working on a hemorrhaging woman who had passed out,” Sherman said. “Her husband kept staring at me. Finally he said, ‘Look, honey, it’s Bobby Sherman!’” The woman came to, Sherman recalled, and “said, ‘Oh great, I must look a mess!’ I told her not to worry, she looked fine.”

Wife Brigitte wrote on Tuesday that as Bobby rested, she “read him fan letters from all over the world — words of love and gratitude that lifted his spirits and reminded him of how deeply he was cherished. He soaked up every word with that familiar sparkle in his eye. And yes, he still found time to crack well-timed jokes — Bobby had a wonderful, wicked sense of humor. It never left him. He could light up a room with a look, a quip, or one of his classic, one-liners.

She added, “He lived with integrity, gave without hesitation, and loved with his whole heart. And though our family feels his loss profoundly, we also feel the warmth of his legacy — his voice, his laughter, his music, his mission. Thank you to every fan who ever sang along, who ever wrote a letter, who ever sent love his way. He felt it.”

In addition to his wife, Sherman is survived by sons Tyler and Christopher and six grandchildren.