Getting a Break with WKRP Show but Setbacks Begin
By now Openden had taken a particular interest in finding Seaborn work as an actor, forming a professional relationship that isn’t necessarily commonplace in Hollywood. She offered him a role as a rehearsal “stand-in” for a ten-year-old character on the show WKRP, a popular sit-com on CBS from 1978-82. Initially Seaborn was reluctant to take it, recognizing that people of his short stature can get pigeon-hold solely into stand-in roles. But Openden encouraged him to take the role seriously, as the stand-in role was an opportunity for him to showcase to the directors his ability to act.
So that’s what he did. As Seaborn performed his stand-in role throughout the rehearsals, it didn’t take long for people to take notice. Fellow actors on the show began approaching him, telling him that Hugh Wilson, creator and executive producer of the WKRP series, had even taken notice of Seaborn’s ability. As the shoot for the final episodes of the 1978 season wrapped, Wilson himself finally approached Seaborn, offering to write-in a full-time role for him as a character in the series. Seaborn agreed immediately.
A few months later when it was announced that WKRP was picked up for another season on CBS, Seaborn sent a note to Wilson both congratulating him. The note also, however, was meant to serve as a subtle reminder of Wilson’s offer at the end of the last season. Three weeks later Seaborn was called in to provide input for the character they were writing into the show for him, a rare opportunity in Hollywood.
Then at the script-reading a few weeks later, something unusual happened. In the middle of the script-reading, a technician called out from the rafters of the studio, interrupting the reading when he saw Seaborn. Rushing down the rafters to the table, he presented Seaborn the Polaroid picture of him and Valerie Harper from the set on Rhoda a few years prior.
Looking back now, Seaborn isn’t surprised something like that would happen at Mary Tyler Moore Entertainment.
“Pretty much anybody who was on MTM shows or was connected with that company was really special,” Seaborn said. “Because Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker set that bar of hiring people they wanted around. They wanted it to be a family atmosphere and they strove to make that happen.”
Things were going well for Seaborn up until that point when in 1981, disaster first struck. His paternal grandmother had passed away. Seaborn wasn’t necessarily close with his grandmother, but in passing she had left an estate and trust fund designated in name to Seaborn’s mother, Nora, due to the unpredictable nature of his father’s illness. As part of the trust bestowed to his family were four valuable rings, three of which that had been appraised at $1500. Yet the bank was reluctant to give up the rings despite his family’s entitlement to it.
Coincidentally, at the same time the Screen Actors’ Guild strike and Emmy-award boycott started. When the strike first started, executive producer of WKRP Hugh Wilson had contacted Seaborn (despite union strike restrictions) to tell him that once the strike was over, they would be continuing his character’s role in the series.
But finding himself unemployed in the meantime, Seaborn was in desperate need of money. So he threatened the bank with a lawsuit to exercise his right to entitlement of the rings.
Family Inheritance Problems and Going MIA
It was also at this time Seaborn was first confronted with the publicity of being a Hollywood actor. Before the beginning of the trial, the judge addressed Seaborn directly, “Before we get started, I just want to make it clear that I thought you were very good on television last night.”
Eventually, the bank finally conceded at the trial, requesting that all the beneficiaries of the trust to come to Seattle where the rings were being held so they could close the trust and receive the rings. So Seaborn, his brother Charles, his mother, and father went to Seattle to finalize the deal. But due to his father’s psychomotor epilepsy, it was understood within the Seaborn family that his mother Nora would speak for his father on official matters, particularly given her additional background as a lawyer.
Seaborn had spent the last of his money getting up to Seattle from LA for the deal. Before arriving, he had come to a mutual agreement with his mother and brother that they would divide the rings evenly among themselves. Seaborn intended to appraise and sell his ring to a dealer in Seattle, so he could have enough money to get back to LA and survive until the end of the strike until WKRP could start up again. But after the trust was closed and his brother Charles took possession of the rings, the family deal was suddenly off. Unbeknownst to Seaborn, his mother had instructed Charles not to give Seaborn his ring to ensure that under no circumstances the rings would be sold.
“I had a nervous breakdown,” Seaborn said of the betrayal. “I just never saw that coming from these two people that I survived my dad's illness and attacks with. I trusted them.”
Consequently, Seaborn returned to Portland with his family and became stuck there, unable to get back to LA. He got a job working for a local cable company, writing and producing commercials for them. It wasn’t until three years later, in 1984, that he had finally saved up enough money to make it back to LA. When he arrived, he found out that his apartment and everything in it had been sold at a Sheriff’s auction in the years he had been away.
Luckily, though, he still had a phone book with the names and numbers of the people he had worked with at WKRP, even though the show had by then gone off the air. So he called up one of the show’s writers, Dan Guntzelman, to meet him for a cup of coffee.
“[Guntzelman] goes to me, ‘Where the hell have you been?’” Seaborn explained. “‘In October and November of 1981 we spent weeks looking for you. We had six more episodes written for [your] character and nobody had any idea where you were.”
Having a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity squandered, Seaborn became further devastated by his family’s betrayal over the rings. For while he was stranded in Portland for all those years, he missed WKRP’s return to production after the strike ended.
To make matters worse, by then Mary Tyler Moore Entertainment shut down and shuttered its doors, coinciding with the divorce of Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker. Tinker went on to become Chairman and CEO of NBC Entertainment, taking Seaborn’s agent Lori Openden with him as the Senior Vice President of Talent, a position she would hold for the next 17 years.
“I think it's a good prospect that based on the personal interest [Openden] had taken in my career, that I probably would have had some work on a few NBC shows during that period,” Seaborn reflected.
