Bobby Sherman, teen idol who made fans swoon, dies at 81

Bobby Sherman, a teen idol of the late 1960s and early 70s, has died at 81. Photo / Getty Images

Bobby Sherman, a teen idol of the late 1960s and early 70s who rose to fame on the TV sitcom Here Come the Brides and left fans swooning with a spate of hit songs that made him a king of bubblegum pop, has died at 81.

The Associated Press reported his death, citing an announcement on June 24 by his wife, Brigitte Poublon, which was posted by a friend, John Stamos, on Instagram. Other details were not immediately available. She had shared on Facebook in March that Sherman had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer.

To teenyboppers who pored over the pages of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines more than half a century ago, Sherman – with his shaggy mop of hair, crystal-blue eyes and smile as wide as his collar – was a heart-throb of the highest order.

From 1968 to 1970, he co-starred as Jeremy Bolt on Here Come the Brides, a Western set in the logging boomtown of Seattle, where logging executives decide to recruit marriageable women to stave off loneliness among the lumberjacks.

Sherman’s television work launched him to an even more successful music career. Beginning in 1969, he delivered a stream of hits – among them Little Woman, La La La (If I Had You), Easy Come, Easy Go, Julie, Do Ya Love Me and “Cried Like a Baby” – and became known as Bubblegum Bobby, a reference to the high-spirited, youth-oriented musical genre called bubblegum pop.

For a memorable if brief stretch of time, he was seemingly everywhere, not only on television and radio, but on posters, T-shirts, cereal cartons, lunch boxes and most anywhere else his boyish visage could be displayed and gazed upon by his admirers.

Such was their ardour that after one musical performance, Sherman told the Los Angeles Times, he rode away in a hearse as fans trailed a decoy limo.

Sherman burst on to the scene at 21 after being discovered in a manner that most aspiring stars and starlets could only dream of. The son of a milkman, he had grown up in Hollywood and was trying without success to break into show business when a date invited him to a cast party for the soon-to-be-released 1965 biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.

The gathering, hosted by actor Sal Mineo at his beach house, had drawn many of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Serendipitously, the entertainment at the party included members of Sherman’s old high school band. They needed a singer and invited him to join them for a number.

With his rendition of What’d I Say by Ray Charles, Sherman caught the attention of movie stars Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda. Along with Mineo, they approached him at the end of the song, Sherman recalled in a self-titled memoir co-written with Dena Hill.

One of the actors – Sherman did not recall which one – remarked to him: “You’re very good. Who’s handling you?” Sherman was so inexperienced that he did not understand the question. The answer, in any case, was that there was no manager, agent or other professional “handling” his as yet nonexistent career.

Shortly thereafter, Sherman received a phone call from an agent. He became a house singer on the variety show Shindig! and began making appearances on programmes such as The Monkees.

He acted in a single episode in 1971 of The Partridge Family, a popular ABC sitcom about a fictional musical band, and was featured in a short-lived spin-off, Getting Together, also on ABC.

Getting Together struggled to compete with All in the Family, which aired on CBS in the same time slot, and was discontinued in 1972 after only a few months on the air. Sherman’s time as a star, too, had essentially reached its end.

Years later, he conceded that he was not entirely sorry to make his exit from the screen and stage. He had come to see his career as “a conglomerate of fast-thinking and wheeler-dealer kinds of people,” he told The Washington Post, “capitalising” on the excitement of his teen fans.

Sherman was born Robert Cabot Sherman jnr on July 22, 1943, in Santa Monica, California. His father and mother were 17 and 15, respectively, when they married.