(Here's the obit of the "real" mother with some news what WHET the kids. It was a rather odd marriage...)
Joan Braden, 77; mother who inspired 'Eight Is Enough'
By Eric Pace
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
September 2, 1999
Joan Braden, a former State Department official who was a hostess and friend to high-ranking Washington figures and whose eight children inspired the ABC television series "Eight Is Enough," died Monday in Alexandria, Va. She was 77.
The cause was a heart attack, The Associated Press reported. Mrs. Braden collapsed at Sutton Place Gourmet, a food store, and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
Mrs. Braden's husband of more than 50 years, Tom Braden, was owner and publisher from 1954 to 1966 of the former Oceanside Blade-Tribune.
That paper later became the North County Blade-Citizen and merged in 1995 with the Escondido Times Advocate, creating the North County Times.
After selling the newspaper in 1966, Tom Braden ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of California. The Bradens then moved to the Washington area.
For two years beginning in 1976, Mrs. Braden was the State Department's coordinator of consumer affairs and special assistant to the undersecretary for economic affairs. She also had been an aide to Nelson A. Rockefeller and had worked in political campaigns for John and Robert Kennedy.
The 1975 book "Eight Is Enough," by her husband, Tom Braden, tells of their family of eight children. In 1977 the book was adapted as the ABC series, starring Dick Van Patten, which was broadcast by the network until 1981.
In the book, Braden, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate from 1968 to 1986, described his wife's personality: "She's blithe. That's what it is about her, and that is why she is so everlastingly cheerful."
By 1976, when Mrs. Braden took up her State Department posts, her friends included Vice President Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and many other powerful figures who would assemble at the Bradens' large yellow clapboard house in Chevy Chase, Md., a Washington suburb.
According to those who dined there, the food was simple but good, and the furniture pleasant and necessarily childproof. There were always flowers and candles and, if the weather was right, a fireplace ablaze. But it was not those things that made Mrs. Braden's dinner parties special, and her invitations a status symbol.
Rather, it was said in Washington, the main magnet was Mrs. Braden herself, a slight woman (5 feet 5 inches tall, admittedly too thin at 103 pounds) with short auburn hair and a wide smile -- blithe, as her husband said, and everlastingly cheerful.
Mrs. Braden herself wrote a book, "Just Enough Rope: An Intimate Memoir" (1989). Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Maureen Dowd said, "Joan Braden has taken a lot of heat for this book, which has been criticized as a vapid kiss-and-sell by a Washington society hostess with the capital's most notorious 'open' marriage."
"The title refers to the amount of freedom the author has received from her husband," Dowd wrote. "Washington insiders, however, sniff that it also alludes to the fact that she has hanged herself with this 'intimate memoir.' "
"This reviewer does not take such a harsh view," Dowd continued, adding that, after all, how can a book be all bad that features "a shower scene with Nelson Rockefeller, a bedroom scene with Bobby Kennedy, a toe-tingling lunch with Kirk Douglas and an account of Frank Sinatra singing 'High Hopes' without his toupee?"
Mrs. Braden was born Joan Ridley in Indianapolis and was reared in the nearby town of Anderson and in Washington. She received a bachelor's degree in economics from Northwestern University and worked in the Pentagon during World War II.
