Hearing John Davidson cuss is initially jarring. The son of Baptist ministers, he could be counted on during the days of Woodstock and Lenny Bruce to brighten screens with his perfect smile, G-rated jokes and face as smooth as a Roman sculpture. His speaking voice is not one that you’d expect to go blue: dignified, almost regal, a tone that in another era would have made him a radio star. His singing voice is still a booming, polished baritone — supple enough for a tender Everly Brothers song or slide into screwball for Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah,” but free of the grit or rasp you’ve come to expect with the folk songs he favors these days.
Onstage in Sandwich, he can get randy with a joke but never goes too far, understanding the line between playful and vulgar.
Davidson and I never really established the specifics of our voyage. I envisioned a cross between a boy’s night out and “The Old Man and the Sea.” Battling salty waves. Diving off the deck. Fishing. We’d drink canned beer and smoke cigars.
The Baja peninsula sparked still other associations. Puerto Vallarta is due south, the vacation hot spot whose name was burned onto the brain of every ’70s TV-watching kid as a prime stop for “The Love Boat,” and yes, of course, Davidson punched his ticket on the cheesy, fabulous ABC dramedy hit, appearing as a suntan-lotion exec searching for a special lady to be the company spokeswoman. (His fellow guest stars: Jack Klugman, Telly Savalas and teenage Janet Jackson.)
But it soon became clear that our time on Cantante would be scripted by neither Aaron Spelling nor Hemingway. There would certainly be no fishing. Earlier this year, Davidson caught a tuna with a friend.
“We made the mistake of trying to clean this fish to make two nice filets,” Davidson intoned. “To give to a restaurant owner. And it was the bloodiest mess. And I just looked in the eye of this fish. What the f---? Why did I take this guy’s life? Do I need to do this? And there was blood over the whole boat. I just felt like such an a--h---.”
He has a neighbor here in Mexico. Christine, who lives on the boat in the slip next to his. She moved down from California after her husband died. She remembers Davidson from his TV days and springs onto her sailboat’s deck whenever she hears his motor start. It’s not because she’s in awe. It’s his steering. When the wind is blowing, it can be easy to slide too far to the left. There have been some close calls.
“He’s learning,” Christine says. “He just needs to watch the wind and the tides and which way it blows.”
Thirty years ago, he did just that. It was 1991, and he was turning 50, a midlife crisis point for a performer who had spent more time than most in boyish roles — he starred as Curly in “Oklahoma!” in his 20s, 30s, 40s and even in his 50s — but whose next-big-thing momentum had petered out into hosting gigs on “The Hollywood Squares” and “The $100,000 Pyramid.” “I thought I was going to start drooling soon, that I had no time left,” Davidson says and laughs. That’s when he first hit the high seas, taking his wife, Rhonda, and two of his three children, John Jr., and Ashleigh (his other daughter, Jennifer, skipped the trip) out on his 96-footer, the Principia, a nine-month journey down the coast from Ventura, Calif., through the Panama Canal and up to the Florida Keys.
By the end he was sick of the sea — and ready to get back to work. He sold the boat and opened his own theater in Branson, Mo., the squeaky-clean Vegas of the Ozarks, and, after that, picked up $100,000 a year doing five cruises a year for Royal Caribbean.
The wanderlust kept recurring, in consort with the ever-nagging urge to perform. A few years ago, he hatched a plan to buy an RV so he could drive himself from town to town while on a national tour with “Wicked.” His business manager tried to dissuade him. Rent one first, Rebecca Ryder told him, and see if you like it.
