CHAPTER 9

Around the time Kim was born, Ken Richards began hunting for a new job, this time on the West Coast.

There are some, like Diane Richards, who believe it was Kathleen, her “very manipulative and demanding” stepmother, who “encouraged” him to find a position in Los Angeles “so she could pursue the children’s acting careers in Hollywood.”

Fortunately, Kathleen’s wish came true. Richards was appointed president of a big discount store chain headquartered in the entertainment capital of the world.

Richards went ahead to make arrangements for a temporary rental home on Veteran Avenue in the lively Westwood section of LA, and the family immediately trekked to sunny La-La Land, Beverly Hillbillies style, traveling across country in a caravan of fancy cars—unlike the TV Clampetts, who piled into a pickup truck. Also making the trip besides Kathleen and the girls were Kathleen’s stepdaughter, Diane, Dodo Dugan, and Adele Avanzino.

En route, Kim fulfilled a lucrative assignment in Philadelphia. Just four months old, she’d been hired to do a commercial for the relatively new disposable diaper, Pampers—a deal that was brokered by Kathleen through contacts of Constance Bannister. Like little Kathy, Kim would do a number of commercials as a baby, including one for Ivory Snow.

“Kathy was thrilled moving to California. I don’t think she left New York with any sorrow,” says Adele. “Ken was going to have a very good position and they were going to have a great house and things were going to be wonderful. And, best of all, Los Angeles was where entertainment was made, and Kathy had big dreams for her kids.”

For about a year the Richardses lived in Westwood while their new home with a pool was being custom-built on Aqua Verde Drive in the more modest San Fernando Valley side of the exclusive and gated community of Bel-Air. Kathleen decorated the home in blood reds and icy blues.

But life wasn’t as “wonderful” for the Richards family as Adele Avanzino had envisioned. Like the thick smog that often enveloped the Valley, a toxic cloud hovered over the Richardses’ marriage. Kathleen continued to instigate fights with her husband. She constantly berated him for not making more money. “Ken Richards was a very nice man, a gentleman,” Adele notes. “But Kathy had the dominant personality.”

She wanted more and more things, and her clothing obsession spiraled. “She was like Imelda Marcos. Kathleen had dozens and dozens of expensive pairs of shoes,” notes Jane Hallaren. On one occasion Kathleen had an exclusive Beverly Hills furrier drop off for her approval and subsequent purchase by her husband a selection of “very expensive, very, very beautiful” mink and sable coats in different styles. She luxuriated in the furs and modeled them in front of a mirror for hours until she chose the ones she wanted. “My father always tried to please her,” says Diane Richards. “Maybe he tried too hard.”

Big Kathy, who would train her daughters how to snag and marry rich men, offered up the same advice to Diane, who was now at the right age. “I was starting to date, and she told me I should only go out with rich men—lawyers or doctors—men with a lot of money,” she says. “I didn’t agree with that philosophy. What she tried to teach me reinforced my beliefs that she was just after the material things in life. Kathy was behind all my sisters marrying wealthy guys.”

While big Kathy’s twisted lessons in love and marriage grated on Diane, it was her continuing abusive and violent acts that eventually caused the young woman to flee the household permanently in fear for her life.

“She did show affection for her children when they were real little, but then there was a rough side to her,” maintains Diane. “She could be abusive to little Kathy and Kimmy—and she was to me. If she thought they were misbehaving, I saw her pull their hair—I saw her slap. My father would jump in all the time. He couldn’t stand what she was doing.”

One incident especially stands out. The Richardses had an Irish maid who was also the children’s loving nanny. She and Diane got along well, and on one occasion she telephoned Diane to say she knew a nice young man with whom Diane might want to go out. “She was going to set me up on this date with this friend of hers,” says Diane, “and it inflamed Kathleen that Marie, who was this really nice person, was calling me. Kathleen said, ‘You don’t associate with the hired help!’ And she grabbed hold of my hair and started to pull me across the room, and my father just had to pull her off of me.”

The violent denouement came in the kitchen of the Richardses’ home when Kathleen served up a very special treat to her then-twentysomething stepdaughter—a snack consisting of a bun, chopped beef, American cheese, and one other ingredient that only Stephen King could have imagined as part of the recipe.

“Big Kathy just got angry at me one day, so she put a little screw in the cheeseburger she made for me,” says Diane. “She always told me I had pretty teeth and I guess she wanted me to break them. I bit down on it. Fortunately, I didn’t hurt my teeth.”

The incident was the “last straw” both for Diane and Marie, the nanny. “She had witnessed that and that’s why I think she quit her job,” states Diane. “That was just more than she could abide. I was just terrified of my stepmother. I wish I hadn’t been so afraid, but I was. She had a way of staring right through me. When I left that time after the cheeseburger incident, it was for good. It was just a cumulative effect, and I just realized it was too much for me to take anymore. I felt I was going to go under if I didn’t get away.”

She says Kathleen’s action had the same impact on her father. “He was just pulled down further and further and further. He had gotten in so deep and he was not thinking how to get out, or maybe he didn’t think he could get out after a while.”

         

IN APRIL 1968, having turned thirty, Kathleen had a third pregnancy, and this time it was unplanned by her. With their marriage in tatters, the Richardses decided to go away together for a weekend to see if they could patch things up. They slept together for the first time in many months, and she conceived, and when she found out she was pregnant “she was livid,” a family member says.

Being pregnant, however, didn’t stop her from hitting the bricks again with dreams of seeing one of her daughter’s handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This time, though, she focused on Kim rather than little Kathy. And of her daughters, Kim would be the most famous, career-wise. The child did have enormous acting talent and charisma, far more than little Kathy.

“All the girls had the knack and the ability. They were good around people and around strangers. But Kim was extra special,” observes Kathleen’s sister, Donna. “We used to play games with Kim—let’s make believe—and we’d say make believe you’re this, or you’re that, and she would start acting. And then we’d say, okay, game over. But she’d keep on going. She just had that special talent.”

As she was marketing Kim, Kathleen gave birth to her third daughter, another little doll, whom the Richardses named Kyle, and who looked more like her father than her mother, with a thin, long face and dark hair, unlike her blond, blue-eyed sisters.

It was Ken, not Kathleen, who awoke to handle the 3 A.M. feedings and generally play nursemaid when the girls were babies. Moreover, Kathleen couldn’t and didn’t cook very much, but for some reason she loved to clean and was famous for vacuuming. “She did nothing,” Richards later claimed. Observes Sylvia Richards, his third wife, regarding Kathleen as a mother, “I don’t think she really cared about the kids—except for the money they made.”

Kathleen was working on turning Kim into another Drew Barrymore or Tatum O’Neal, both of whom would have troubled private lives, as would Kim down the road. Like her big half-sister, little Kathy, Kim had the all-American looks and attitude that Hollywood admires—blond bangs, hazel eyes, husky voice, and a bouncy and bubbly personality.

She was about to turn five when a new family sitcom was being readied by a bright, ambitious Brooklyn-born producer, David Gerber, who had an amazing track record as a packager of prime-time series for 20th Century–Fox Television. Around the time big Kathy was shopping her daughter, the entertainment division of the American Broadcasting Company was planning to air Gerber’s independently produced Nanny and the Professor, as white bread as any half-hour of prime-time television could be.

Then the number-three television network, ABC, scheduled the series, mainly because of the viewing public’s interest at the time in anything and everything British—and Nanny starred a pretty, perky English actress. Juliet Mills was the daughter of the actor Sir John Mills and older sister of Disney star Hayley Mills. She had been cast in the part of the nanny, Phoebe Figalilly, who uses her psychic magic to bring calm to a chaotic American family, the Everetts. That, in a nutshell, was the high concept that Gerber had pitched and ABC and the sponsors had bought. The show would be popular, although not a blockbuster.

When Kathleen heard about the casting call, she was virtually first in line with Kim at her side. “It was like a stage-mothers-from-hell convention,” recalls a veteran casting director. “They were elbowing each other out of the way. Hair-pulling and eye-scratching were not out of the question. We looked at hundreds—fucking hundreds—of little girls with sparkling blue eyes and blond hair and brilliant white smiles, and cute mannerisms, and we were tearing our hair out and then Kim Richards and that bitch-on-wheels mother of hers came in and we said, ‘We have a go.’ Whatever magic we were looking for, Kim Richards had it. Plus, I remember the mother had some good connections in town.”

Kim had been well trained by big Kathy. The child had only just learned to read when Kathleen began teaching her how to memorize dialogue, something she’d also done with little Kathy and would do with Kyle. “To keep it natural, I would just play a game, skipping words, which she’d fill in,” big Kathy explained years later. “I’d do that until she memorized it.”

That might have been a bit of an exaggeration on big Kathy’s part, because Kim had inherited a trait of her father’s—a photographic memory. When Richards was in college he had been accused of cheating, but his professors changed their mind after watching awestruck as he read a chapter of a book and repeated it verbatim. Kim had the same talent.

Kay Rozario, who described herself as a “second mother” to Kim over the years, observes, “She was a kid who took direction and was very precocious, very cute, and that got her by. She’d walk into a room and everybody would stop and listen. She was very bubbly, very up, though not the brightest bulb in the lamp.”

Big Kathy, meanwhile, had become a fearsome figure on the sets where her daughters worked, because she was a diva. Ted Bessell, a Manhasset boy who starred with Marlo Thomas on That Girl and knew Kathy Dugan from the old days, had problems with her on programs he later directed and produced, shows that had either Kim or Kyle in the cast. Jane Hallaren says Bessell described Kathleen as “a horror show” and that he considered her “impossible to deal with as a stage mother.”

Rozario, who had been a part of show business for years with her musical director husband, says that with Nanny, Kim’s career started to fly. “So big Kathy put more emphasis on her. She did it with a lot of love, whether it was misguided or not. Kimmy did very well in those early years and Kathy got a lot of satisfaction out of that. Kim was so dependent on Kathy and that’s the way she wanted it. She controlled all of her daughters, but particularly Kim, who was the big moneymaker.”

Big Kathy also often pitted her daughters against one another. When Kyle eventually began generating more work than Kim and scored a key role at the age of eleven in the 1980 Disney family horror film Watcher in the Woods (starring a bored-to-death Bette Davis), big Kathy heaped praise on Kyle.

“She’d say about Kyle in front of Kim, ‘Well, this is my baby. This is my little sweetheart. Kyle’s working and what are you doing?’” recounts Sylvia Richards. “Big Kathy did this constantly to those kids. I don’t know what she thought—whether she was going to get more production out of them by doing that, or what. But I do know it was devastating to them. Looking back, I don’t know how anybody survived in that family.

“Kim so wanted to please her mom because I don’t think she ever really felt that her mother loved her,” continues Richards. “All of them—little Kathy, Kim, and Kyle—were always trying to please Mama. They knew their father loved them. They didn’t have to prove anything to him. It was absolutely pathetic!”

After the first episode of Nanny aired, Kim Richards received huge national publicity and developed an enormous following. Fans followed what she wore and whom she dated and all the gossip about her that appeared in teen magazines. And there was a lot of it. Of course, it was nothing like the blizzard that would surround Paris years later, of which Kim was said to be hugely envious.

As she moved into her teens, and with more credits under her belt, Kim became a staple of the fanzines. One fashion spread had her at fourteen when she weighed ninety-one pounds and stood just five feet in a “soft velour, long-sleeved maroon top of cotton polyester. About $21.” She was often photographed with other young stars such as Diff’rent Strokes cast members Dana Plato, Todd Bridges, and Gary Coleman.

According to family insiders, little Kathy was “jealous” of Kim’s success and all of the attention and adulation she received both from the public and from their mother because, as one close observer notes, “little Kathy wasn’t making any money for her mother, and Kim was.”

Nanny had a short run of two seasons, and the show’s cast seemed to be jinxed. The TV family’s patriarch, Richard Long, was an alcoholic who died of a heart attack four days before his forty-seventh birthday. Trent Lehman, who had played one of Kim’s two brothers, committed suicide by hanging himself from a belt looped through a chain-link fence behind an elementary school near his North Hollywood apartment.

Kim, who had just turned eighteen, was devastated. “When I heard what had happened I cried…. We were in, like, Teen Beat and Tiger Beat, and all those magazines, and People magazine. It had been like that our whole lives,” she observed on a “Whatever Happened to…” segment on Entertainment Tonight about the mostly has-been cast of Nanny and the Professor.

After Nanny, Kim Richards had recurring roles on such bland, short-lived sitcoms as ABC’s Here We Go Again, starring Dallas star Larry Hagman, and NBC’s Hello, Larry, featuring M*A*S*H costar McLean Stevenson, and she made numerous guest appearances, playing cute-young-girl roles, on popular prime-time series such as CHiPs, Magnum, P.I., Diff’rent Strokes, The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Love Boat. With her clean-cut Abercrombie and Fitch looks, she became a regular on the Walt Disney lot, appearing in more than a dozen TV and feature films. Next to Hayley Mills, she was only the second child actress to be offered a highly lucrative contract with the Disney organization.

Kim had fulfilled big Kathy’s dream. She finally had a box office star in the family.

Kim was working constantly, and the money was rolling in. It seemed like a dream life, according to the fan magazines, but it wasn’t.

For one thing, she never had a real childhood; her days and nights were spent on sound stages and in TV studios. She once told People magazine, “I remember driving home and seeing people in windows having dinner, wishing we were doing that. And I didn’t have a whole lot of friends at school because I wasn’t there enough to make any.”

Most of her acquaintances were other young, ambitious, and troubled actors she met on sets, such as Dana Plato, who would die of a prescription drug overdose, and Todd Bridges, who also would have a drug problem and run-ins with the police. When Kim was fourteen, Plato and Bridges convinced her to sneak into the Magic Mountain amusement park, even though they had celebrity passes. Ashamed, Kim confessed what she had done to big Kathy. “Dana and Todd laughed at me,” she said later, “but I respected my mom and never wanted to let her down.”

Kim thought of her mother far differently than others did. She saw her as her moral compass.

         

RICHARDS FAMILY INSIDERS contend that big Kathy was out of control, drinking heavily and cheating on her husband.

Richards came face-to-face with her adultery on his return from a business trip. Big Kathy was supposed to meet him at the airport, but she wasn’t there. He took a cab home only to find her in their bed with another man. Not long after, he suffered his first heart attack.

Another of big Kathy’s affairs resulted in a pregnancy, which she confided later to Sylvia Richards. “She told me that she had fallen in love with a car dealer and had gotten pregnant, but that she lost the baby. She told me about him, and how much she loved him, but that he was married.”

Big Kathy also seemed to have a thing for professional athletes. Her husband learned that she and some girlfriends had been sleeping with members of the San Francisco 49ers football team at their training camp.

At a Christmas party, Sylvia Richards was introduced to a basketball player who was a star of the Harlem Globetrotters team. “He was sitting with big Kathy,” recalls Richards. “I came over and she introduced me and out of the blue he said that every time he and Kathy got together they had sex. He said to Kathy, ‘Well, I haven’t been around for a while and I kind of miss being with you.’ I almost fell out of my seat!”

During that time, Kay Rozario was sometimes asked by Kathleen to be her designated driver. “Kathy was a wild, wild lady,” observes Rozario. “I didn’t drink, but sometimes when my husband was on the road I went out with her so I could drive her home to keep her safe because she couldn’t drive—she loved that booze.”

Other times Kim had to pick up her mother, and sometimes she and her sisters were made to perform for big Kathy’s men friends, according to John Jackson, a former boyfriend of Kim’s and father of one of her four children. “The way she controlled Kim was just unbelievable,” says Jackson. “Kim used to tell me stories of when she was twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old and how she’d drive the family car and go pick up her mom at different bars,” he asserts. “Her mom would have men over all the time on different nights of the week and she’d make Kim perform for them—do her little skits and dance. Her mom would have her basically perform on cue. She was that typical frustrated mother of a child star living through her children.”

Jackson’s assertion is supported by Sylvia Richards, who heard similar stories from the Richards girls, and even from big Kathy herself. “Kathleen was always having men to the house,” she states. “One night she had some black man in her bed and Kim and Kyle went in and Kyle had a fit and ran him off. They didn’t tell their father this stuff was happening because they were too embarrassed.”

Another problem had to do with the enormous income Kim was generating, estimated to be in the seven figures at the height of her career, and how that money was being spent, and by whom.

Around the time Kim started earning star salary, her father’s career was tanking. Richards had lost his job with the discount store chain that had originally brought the family to California, and he had gone through a series of lesser executive positions and gotten into a variety of smalltime business ventures, such as selling plumbing fixtures, albeit gold plumbing fixtures. His daughter, Diane, attributes his career decline and fall to “the instability in his home life with Kathy.”

At that point, according to Adele Avanzino, “Some of the children’s money was going toward things like the family’s living expenses. Ken wasn’t working and I don’t think that made for a happy marriage.”

The money issue resulted in a lot of finger-pointing. A number of close Richards family friends felt the main culprit was Kathleen.

Larry Avanzino’s close friend John McKusker had been involved in some business ventures with Richards in California and considered him “a hell of a nice guy and very talented.” He says, “To the best of my knowledge Kathleen took all the money that Kimmy was making—and Kathy was living off it.”

Kathleen indicated to her friend Jane Hallaren that she was investing the money in jewels. “She wouldn’t know her way around the stock market if her life depended on it,” she asserts. “But she invested in gems. She had a tremendous amount of gems.”

Others, like Kay Rozario, were aware that Kathy was dipping into the girls’ money pot, but she points out that Kathy probably deserved what she took. “She was Kim’s mother and she taught her everything she knew and that’s who gave Kim her career, and Kathy worked very hard at it. Who’s to say whose money was whose?”

In the Richardses’ home there were recriminations, loud arguments, threats of divorce. Big Kathy had started bad-mouthing Richards to her friends like Jane Hallaren. “Kathy said she hated him, that he was no good, that he couldn’t do anything right, that he was worthless. Kathy had beaten Ken down to nothing. She said, ‘I’m getting rid of him,’ and then ‘I got rid of him,’ in that order. She gave me the impression the girls did not keep up a relationship with their dad.”

By 1970, after six turbulent years, Kathleen claimed she had had enough of Richards and gave him the boot. Along with the money issue, they also were battling over their children’s future in TV and the movies.

An ugly nine-year battle ensued. Ken Richards wound up sleeping alone in the maid’s quarters. “Kathleen wouldn’t give Ken a divorce because he wanted at least 50 percent custody of his daughters, Kim and Kyle, and Kathy wanted full control,” says Sylvia Richards. “At the time Kim was making a lot of money, and Kyle was starting to make money, and this is why Kathy wanted complete custody.”

Ken Richards eventually moved out of the Bel-Air hell house and into an apartment in nearby Encino where, on July 4, 1978, he met Sylvia Benedict, a divorcée, who lived in the same complex with her daughter, Cyndi, and her little boy, Bobby. Richards, who by then had gone into the real estate business in the Valley, pursued Sylvia, and they began living together while his divorce and custody fight continued unabated. Kathleen alone went through a half dozen lawyers.

Kim and Kyle loved their father despite their mother’s efforts to alienate them, and they became close to Sylvia when they visited Richards on weekends. “After Ken and I had gone together for a while, the girls begged their father to marry me—they didn’t want him to lose me,” says Sylvia Richards.

Then Richards faced the toughest battle of all. He had a family history of high blood pressure and heart disease, and in early 1979 he was admitted to Ventura Hospital in critical condition, facing open-heart surgery. His life was on the line.

In order to protect his assets from Kathleen should he not survive the operation, he had given Sylvia power of attorney. “Just before Ken went into the operating room,” recounts Sylvia Richards many years later, “our lawyer called Kathleen’s lawyer and told him that if she didn’t sign the divorce papers before Ken had the surgery, and if Ken didn’t survive, that he would sue her on my behalf and take everything for myself and the children. I don’t think Kathleen, who was in the hospital room, thought Ken was going to live, so when the call came in from her lawyer she literally tore out of the hospital room and finally signed the divorce papers after nine years.”

Their divorce was final on May 17, 1979.

A day after Richards’s successful heart surgery, as Sylvia was sitting vigil in the intensive care unit, praying for his full recovery, little Kathy, who by then was engaged to Rick Hilton, telephoned her. Sylvia, who had come to view little Kathy as a clone of her mother—“in every way”—thought she was calling to wish well the man who had raised her. Instead, she teased and taunted Sylvia. “She told me that her mother had been going to the hospital when I wasn’t there, and that Ken had told her how much he loved her—that he loved her more than me, that he would never stop loving her. She said other things that were very hurtful—and untrue. Little Kathy and big Kathy loved hurting people.”

Sylvia Richards has never forgotten another traumatic incident that occurred in New York on the occasion of Paris’s christening at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. While Kathy and Rick had not invited Sylvia and Ken Richards to the sacred event—Kathy all but ignored the man who had raised her from the age of three—Barron and Marilyn Hilton had generously flown them to New York in their private plane and put them up for a week at the Waldorf. A celebratory dinner after the christening was held with family and friends at a fancy restaurant when Kathy Hilton once again began attacking Sylvia.

“All of a sudden she said in front of everyone, ‘I’d sure like to see you and Mom and Ken go to bed together. I know who would win that game.’ I was so embarrassed I could have died,” states Sylvia. “She was just trying to hurt me by insinuating that her mother was better in bed than I was. Ken was mortified. Kathy’s a very mean person. They are very bizarre people.”

It was shortly after his divorce from big Kathy was final that Richards was hit with another big Kathy shocker. From his attorney he learned that she had illegally sold a piece of valuable land he owned where he planned to build a home. She had forged his signature on the required property sales documents and pocketed the money. “He could have sued her,” says Sylvia Richards, “but he held off because of the girls and was worried about hurting them. Of course, afterwards, Ken said if he had to do it over again he’d have thrown big Kathy’s little tush in jail.”

As part of the divorce settlement, Kathleen received the Bel-Air house—Richards decided to let her have it because he didn’t want to uproot Kim and Kyle. Some years later, however, when big Kathy sold the house, she was supposed to give part of the proceeds to her daughters. According to Sylvia Richards, “They never saw a dime, and Ken kicked himself for letting her have it.”

Ken and Sylvia were married in a small ceremony at a Methodist church in the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura in November 1979. Ken wanted his daughters there, but big Kathy barred them from attending, which devastated Kim and Kyle and deeply hurt their father.

Just days later little Kathy and Rick Hilton had their big wedding in Beverly Hills. Richards demanded an apology from little Kathy for the hurtful things she had said to Sylvia at the hospital after his surgery. She laughed in his face and refused. “She wouldn’t apologize, and we didn’t go to her wedding,” says Sylvia Richards.