Actress Loni Anderson, who became a national sex symbol as WKRP in Cincinnati receptionist Jennifer Marlowe in the late 1970s, was very proud of the sitcom’s legacy.
“It’s lovely to be thought of as one of the best TV comedies,” Anderson told me by phone in 1999, when WKRP was joining Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite nostalgic sitcom lineup nearly two decades after the show’s CBS debut.
“I think it’s timeless. They’re not dated. My sweaters and skirts, and Herb’s suits, are never going out of style,” she said, referring to the loud plaid suits worn by WKRP salesman Herb Tarlek, played by Frank Bonner.
Anderson died Sunday, two days shy of her 80th birthday, in a Los Angeles hospital from a “prolonged” illness, her longtime publicist Cheryl J. Kagan told the Associated Press. She was the fourth cast member to pass, following Gordon Jump (station manager Arthur the “Big Guy” Carlson) in 2003; Bonner in 2021; and Howard Hesseman (spaced out morning DJ Dr. Johnny Fever) in 2022. Creator Hugh Wilson died in 2018.
Wilson rewrote and polished all the episodes of the comedy set in a fictional failing Cincinnati radio station. It only aired four seasons on CBS (1978-82). His believable crazy characters, played by an excellent ensemble cast, and Wilson’s hilarious scripts with their rock music soundtrack, made the show a huge hit in syndicated reruns in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Anderson wasn’t a blonde bombshell before living on the air in WKRP in Cincinnati as the no nonsense receptionist who kept her boss in line. She was a brunette growing up in St. Paul, competing in the Miss Minnesota pageant, and teaching high school art classes before moving to Hollywood and doing guest roles on Barnaby Jones, Bob Newhart and Three’s Company.
At a 2014 WKRP reunion she told Wilson: “I was a serious brunette actor. I wouldn’t be me, if it wasn’t for you.” Overnight she became a major sex symbol with her bathing suit posters.
Going blonde “is why I took off. It was really big for me – being a blonde. It seemed to happen overnight,” said Anderson, who I first met in 1986 on my first TV Critics Association Summer Press Tour.
Anderson fiercely protected her sexy image on the show, according to Gary Sandy, who played program director Andy Travis. When WKRP did a two-part “Filthy Pictures” episode in the second season about an unscrupulous photographer who secretly shot nude photos as Jennifer changed into a bathing suit, the script originally called for Anderson, then 35, to be photographed with Jan Smithers, 30, who played producer Bailey Quarters on the show.
“Loni refused to do the scene if Jan wore a bathing suit, so that’s why I did it,” Sandy told me in 2023 about the March 1980 episodes. Sandy said he was written into the bathing suit scene at the last minute, not giving him any time to tone up his physique. “That’s why I held a beach ball in front of me to hide my chest,” he said.
Shortly before the Nick at Nite exposure in 1999, Anderson said she sat down and watched episodes with her 10-year-old son Quinton Reynolds, whom she shared with actor Burt Reynolds. She met Reynolds making a movie called Stoker Ace in 1983; they were married from 1988 to 1994. (Read more about her tumultuous marriage to Reynolds in People magazine here.)
“Quinton watched them with me and he laughed out loud. So that’s a good sign,” she told me.
Anderson was nominated for two supporting actress Emmy Awards for WKRP (1980, 1981) and three Golden Globes (1980, 1981 and 1982), without any wins. She credited Wilson, a former Atlanta advertising executive who had never been to Cincinnati, for the delightful characters and laugh-out-loud scripts.
“He was so funny,” she said. From the very first table reading in spring 1978, “we knew it was going to be a hit. You just knew it was special. It was an amazing collaborative effort. It just clicked . . .And in rehearsal, we would mushroom into something bigger and better. We built off each other.”
She told me her favorite episodes were:
- “A Date With Jennifer” (January 1979, 10th episode of the first season) in which she goes with nerdy newsman Les Nessman to a banquet to receive his coveted “Silver Sow Award.” That’s the show where Nessman bought a curly hair piece, and tugged it onto his head to Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.”
- “Put Up or Shut Up" (January 1980, 16th show of the second season) in which Jennifer agrees to go on a date with Herb, hoping he’ll chicken out. She said she received fan letters from comedian/Tonight Show creator Steve Allen and actor Jack Lemmon from that episode.
- “Turkey’s Away” (October 1978, seventh episode of the first season), when the station dropped live turkeys over a Cincinnati shopping mall in an ill-conceived Thanksgiving promotion, one of the TV Guide’s “100 Greatest Episodes Of All Time."
“It’s the one that everybody remembers,” Anderson said.
After WKRP, she starred with Lynda Carter in a short-lived detective series called Partners In Crime in 1984, and as a wealthy heiress in the Easy Street sitcom in 1986 with Jack Elam. Her credits include the Nurses sitcom with Wilmington native Stephanie Hodge; A Night at the Roxbury; Melrose Place; All Dogs Go To Heaven; guest shots on Clueless and Sabrina the Teenage Witch; Tori Spelling’s mother in the 2006 So notorious; and biopics playing actresses Jayne Mansfield and Thelma Todd.
Her last role was a 2023 Lifetime TV movie called Ladies of the ‘80s: A Divas Christmas in 2023 with Morgan Fairchild, Donna Mills, Linda Gray and Nicollette Sheridan.
But the world never forgot Jennifer Marlow. Before the Nick at Nite revival in 1999, she was still getting "lots and lots and lots" of WKRP fan mail, 17 years after the show ended production, “from all corners of the globe. It’s thrilling to me. You realize what an impact the show had on people.”
