Sample of One?

Strangers stop them in restaurants and write them letters, favorable and unfavorable. Reporters hound them for interviews, and they are already being lined up by the talk shows. A publisher has asked them to write their joint autobiography. Pat and Bill Loud, in short, are discovering what it feels like to be TV stars. An American Family, the public broadcasting series in which they are featured, is no Ozzie-and-Harriet confection, but the story of their lives and the lives of their five children--with real laughs, real tears and a real breakup that resulted in their divorce.

The Louds sit in fascination to watch the series unfold each Thursday night. It shows an attractive, upper-middle-income family with five children --three boys and two girls--in Santa Barbara, Calif. Many scenes in the six episodes shown so far have reflected mundane aspects of domestic life, but some have been unusual. Pat has visited Son Lance, 20, who has taken up a homosexual life in New York City; a brushfire has nearly destroyed the family's four-bedroom home; the antagonism between Pat and Bill has become obvious. Bill comes across as a charming gladhander, while Pat seems more withdrawn and unhappy. The children are all different. Lance, for example, looks and acts effeminate, while Kevin, 18, is a typical high school politician.

The Louds are not happy with what they see. "I'm mortally ashamed of some of the things I did in the picture, such as getting drunk in the restaurant," confesses Pat. She and Bill are also angry at Producer Craig Gilbert over the way in which the original 300 hours of film were edited down to twelve one-hour segments. "We let Gilbert and his crew into our house to do a documentary, and they produced a second-rate soap opera," says Bill. "If they filmed 25 normal scenes and five bizarre scenes a day, they picked the five bizarre scenes and only one of the normal ones for the finished piece."

Producer Gilbert vehemently denies this, and he has been so shaken by the furor over the show that last week he went back into psychoanalysis. "It is understandable that the family is confused and hurt," he says, "but it comes partly as the inevitable result of other people seeing them differently than they see themselves. Like all of us, they should be proud of their lives and take responsibility for the good and the bad. They did what they did. There's nothing to be ashamed of." Unlike many of the TV critics who have written about the show, Gilbert sees no failure of communication between the Louds. "They communicate. But they don't communicate about the bad stuff. That's the way we are as a country, and that's what the series is about. We can't ever admit that we have made a mistake."

The Louds' mistakes are all too visible. For seven months they were followed for most of their waking hours by a 16-mm. camera and a two-man crew. The camera went with Bill, who owns a company selling strip-mining equipment, on business deals and even followed Lance on his vacation to Europe. While they all had veto power over private scenes, they rarely exercised it. but instead carried on the most intimate discussions before the camera. Even the scene in which Pat tells Bill that she wants him to move out--he had been seeing other women--is recorded on celluloid. "After some months the crew was like family," explains Pat. "I acted as if they were part of us. I forgot about the camera."

Did she really? Cameraman Alan Raymond speculates that the filming may have served as a catalyst to the divorce, speeding up an inevitable break. "When a camera films things, people think about them more," he maintains. Sometimes, he adds, members of the family used the presence of the camera in their dealings with other members, knowing that the others would usually guard some responses--restraining anger, for example--with the all-seeing eye upon them.

The basic question remains: Why did the Louds, who were not paid a penny for the series, allow such public scrutiny of their lives? "I think there are a lot of American families who would let this happen," says Dr. Thomas Cottle, a psychotherapist at M.I.T. "It is a compulsion of this culture--the compulsion to confess." Dr. Roderick Gorney, a psychologist at U.C.L.A., agrees. "Ten years ago the Louds wouldn't have permitted TV to film intimate details of their domestic life. But the sense of privacy has been very much changed." Asks Bill, a handsome six-footer who amiably acknowledges that he is quite a ham: "What would you have done if someone came to you and said they wanted to spend $1,250,000 on a film about you?" Adds Lance: "The series was the fulfillment of the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just what you are. This is actually the greatest thing I've done to date." Both Lance and Bill were to have another opportunity to display the ham this week when all seven Louds, together with Gilbert, were to appear on the Dick Cavett Show.

Tuning Out. Academic experts are sharply divided on both the merits and authenticity of the series. Anthropologist Margaret Mead finds that the Louds share both the problems and the rewards of many other American families. Boston Psychiatrist Norman Paul sees something more disturbing. "It is not just the Louds being depicted," he maintains. "The series shows how people tune out the guts of their lives. That's going on today in epidemic form."

Columbia Sociologist Herbert Gans insists that the Loud family is merely "a sample of one. All the talk about the show's meaning is ill-founded. It is a single family portrait and nothing more." Adds Irving Louis Horowitz, a sociologist at Rutgers University: "Any family that opens itself up, as the Louds did, has a tendency toward exhibitionism and is already on its way to becoming a nonfamily. The very act of being filmed for public television makes the Louds atypical."

Would the Louds do it again? "Never, I've had it," says Pat, who is still single and lives with four of the children in the house she and Bill shared. Yes, says Bill, a swinging bachelor who has become something of a celebrity both in Santa Barbara and on business trips: "I enjoyed it. I'm happiest when I've got a lot of people around and when people come up and talk to me about it. It's an ego trip, I suppose."

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