![]() "I did it because I was her father," he says. "One time I got a call from her, and she wanted me to throw her a wedding in New York." Chuck had never met the groom, had never known the groom existed. "She had a series of boyfriends, maybe a girlfriend or two," Barris says. With some encouragement from Wagman, Della spent time at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., as part of a writing program for those without high school degrees, but that lasted less than three months. Della spent part of the time living with Levy but was often on her own, dwelling with this person or that, checking in with her parents only when she was low on cash. I finally gave up and let her go."įor the next decade, father and daughter had little to no contact. For years I had thrown money at her, tried to get her into therapy, something. Instead, Della dropped out of Beverly Hills High after her sophomore year, then ran away from home with "some guy." Did Barris track her down? Did he spend day and night trying to find her? Did he turn to the FBI? "No," he says. "Westlake was a wonderful school, and maybe it would have rubbed off on her." She asked to be transferred to Beverly Hills High, and her father complied. Della, according to Barris, began running with gangs when she was 14, and hard drug usage soon followed.Īs a freshman she attended the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, but she bristled at the unisex student body and stuffy attitudes. It is a thought that, to this day, devastates him, as the "what ifs" creep into his brain. Yet Della was a troubled soul, and while Barris was busy running his own production company, he admits that he often placed his daughter's needs behind his career. "No one else got that treatment," says Loretta Strickland, Barris' longtime secretary. He loved her enough to include her on several "Gong Show" broadcasts (Della was mortified at her ill-conceived role in "The Gong Show Movie") and would stop any boardroom meeting to take her phone calls. He adored Della throughout her life."ĭella, she recalls, possessed Chuck's feisty demeanor (as well as his nose and chin), and a waywardness that sometimes comes from divorced parents. "I remember the night she was born," says Riki Wagman, Barris' sister and the author of an upcoming novel, "Confessions of an Open Window." "Chuck called me from the hospital in New York, and he was just crying with joy. There was, according to friends and relatives, a great deal of love between father and daughter. The couple divorced 14 years later, and Barris, living in Hollywood at the time, took full custody. 24, 1962, the only child of Chuck and his first wife, Lyn Levy (he has been married three times). "What made her tick?"ĭella Barris was born Dec. "I want to know the mystery of Della," he says. ![]() "I've seen and felt and tasted it all," he says. He has a striking wife, Mary, who is 30 years his junior, and a handful of loyal friends (his closest is Dick Clark, who first met Barris when the two worked for "American Bandstand" more than 40 years ago).įour years ago, he survived a cancer that cost him part of one lung and left him, for a time, with a life-threatening infection and an awe-filled glimpse at mortality. ![]() For now, the project is in the planning stage: How do I do this? Why would I do this? But it is, he swears, his only calling at the end of a long, fruitful existence.īarris has lived everywhere, from Los Angeles to St. Since the completion of his latest memoir, "Bad Grass Never Dies: More Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," which was released in early April, Barris has turned his attention to his fifth book, a biography of Della, who died of a drug overdose July 28, 1998, in Brentwood, Calif. What is Barris these days - what's in his soul - is what tortures him. Promotion, in general, really isn't me anymore." "But the movie promotion wasn't really me. "It was good, because it sold books and reminded people that I now see myself, first and foremost, as a writer," he says. The film's plot turned on Barris' claims to being an undercover CIA assassin (a far-fetched fantasy he once denied in an interview with Connie Chung but now acknowledges with an ambiguous shrug), and its release afforded him a brief return to the spotlight. Two years ago, he briefly returned to the spotlight when a largely ignored memoir he wrote in 1982, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," became a successful motion picture starring George Clooney and Drew Barrymore. ![]() His gray hair is frazzled, a Muppet post-spin cycle, and he does not care what anyone thinks. He wears a pair of wrinkled blue jeans, a black T-shirt and a brown corduroy jacket with one of the pockets sticking out. Surrounded on this day by men in suits and snazzy ties, Barris is out of place. "If that's what I go down being remembered for," he says, "so help me. ![]()
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