Ricky Nelson The Rise & Fall of a TEEN IDOL

HE STRUGGLED TO FIND HIMSELF AFTER GROWING UP ON THE SET OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE SITCOM

By LOUISE A. BARILE

The eagle hanging over the living room fireplace on the set of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet wasn’t a typical TV prop. It was a duplicate of the one that decorated the fireplace of the Nelson family’s real house in a gated community near Runyon Canyon in LA. “Each day, they’d roll out of bed and go ‘home’ to work,” Gunnar Nelson, one of Ricky Nelson’s sons, tells Closer. “It had to have been surreal.” From 1952 to 1966, Ricky, his older brother, David, and their parents, Ozzie and Harriet, remained America’s first family. “That’s what made the show work — a real family playing a real family on television,” Gunnar says. But what audiences saw on screen was still fiction, and being expected to live up to the perfection…

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Closer Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, January 24, 2022

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