Rant #1,889: Only the Strong Survive

The death of former child actress Erin Moran over the weekend provides us with another cautionary tale about how fame is so fleeting in Hollywood.

Heck, this has been going on since the days of Jackie Coogan: Hollywood spits out child actors by the bushel full, and Hollywood also often chews them up when they are not so young anymore.

Moran started acting when she was a young girl, and her happy face was on a number of TV shows way before "Happy Days" was a thought in anyone's eye.

But when "Happy Days" came about, her world changed.

As the star of one of the top shows on TV in the early to mid 1970s, Moran became a weekly fixture on television, made scads of money, yet was only in her early teens when the show took off.

Her character--Joanie Cunningham, the younger sister of Richie Cunningham--became so popular at one point that the character was spun off into "Joanie Loves Chaci," probably one of the worst TV spinoffs in history.

Somehow, it lasted one season, but even though it showed a more grown-up Joanie character, I think to the viewing public, Moran was always going to be that smiling, young face,

When "Happy Days" finally ended, Moran evidently was left somewhat directionless. She was no younger a child star, and was now competing with other 20-ish starlets for parts in movies and TV shows.

Just look in your search engine for Erin Moran, and go to photos, and you can see that she did try to change her image.

Her photos became more mature and sexier, she showed a little skin on top (never nude), but at this point, she was becoming the has-been TV child star that we have seen so many of over the years, the Rusty Hamers, the Dana Platos of the world who were what they were, but never could seemingly escape from that picture we had of them as kids.

She worked here and there, but unlike Ron Howard, her co-star on "Happy Days," she could not morph into something else and make it in Hollywood beyond the show.

She kind of faded away from Hollywood, and her reported dive into a non-social type of lifestyle and relative poverty would occasionally bring her back to some type of notoriety, but not of the positive kind.

Evidently, later in her life, she became a hard living woman, abusing herself with smoking and drinking and from the photos I have seen, really did not ease into her later years too gracefully.

Other child stars reached out to her, and Paul Petersen--himself something of a child star reclamation project who headed "A MInor Consideration," an organization whose sole purpose is to make sure that former child stars were handling life after stardom--said this weekend that they did what they could with Moran, but part of the deal is that you have to want to help yourself, and Moran simply didn't accept that.

And after it all, Moran died at 56, as of yet unknown causes.

Many child stars make it just fine in the adult world, certainly Howard, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jerry Mathers, Micky Dolenz, Shelley Fabares, Jennifer Love Hewitt are just a few of these successes--but for every one that makes it, there seems to be others who fall by the wayside, including Gary Coleman, Jay North, and Kim Richards, who somehow just can't get on their feet as adults.

"A Minor Consideration" has certainly helped many move on from one life step to another--it certainly helped North, who was physically, mentally and emotionally abused behind the scenes as the star of "Dennis the Menace" but has since moved on to a nice private life outside of the business after many years of free-fall--but it hits with as many as it misses.

So is the nature of Hollywood, where you are hot one day, yesterday's news the other.

But when it affects a kid, it makes it all the more worse.