Sleeping with John Stamos, getting high on Whip-its and changing the Olsen twins' diapers: New book reveals Bob Saget's bad behavior behind-the-scenes on Full House and the childhood tragedies that drove him into comedy
- The straight-laced Full House father to Ashley and Mary Kate Olsen reveals the behind-the-scenes secrets of the hit TV show in his new memoir Dirty Daddy
- Saget would often get scolded for his antics, reveals a drunken night in Vegas where he ended up in bed with John Stamos and the moment he got 'high' on set with Whip-its
- Behind the laughter, he reveals the tragic series of deaths in his family - and bullying - that inspired him to live a life of laughter
- Also reveals how his wife and baby miraculously survived after almost dying in childbirth
Danny Tanner a Dirty Daddy? Well, yeah.
To millions of fans he was the straight-laced single father of Michelle and bestie to Uncle Jesse on Full House. But behind the scenes he admits that he was not only wildly inappropriate on the set — he also he slept in the same bed with heartthrob John Stamos.
Saget lifts the lid off the behind-the-scenes secrets of the show - and his life - in his new memoir, Dirty Daddy, published Tuesday by Harper Collins.
Full House: The cast of the wildly successful show, which was on the air for eight years, included (clockwise from bottom left) Jodie Sweetin, one of the two Olsen twins, Bob Saget, John Stamos, Dave Coulier and Candace Cameron
Oh Daddy! Bob Saget played the loving but uptight dad Danny Tanner on the long-running TV series Full House. Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen shared the role of Michelle on the hit comedy
The comic admits that he couldn’t keep his edgy - some might say sick - sense of humor at bay.
'I’d release my demons for a little while onstage', and was often scolded by producers and parents of the kids for his childish antics on the hit show that ran for eight years from 1987 to 1995.
Saget confides he had the disagreeable task of changing the Olsen twins’ diapers more than once.
‘Cameras were rolling and one of the young ladies had made a poop, which had to be removed or we would have been holding a child with a smashed-poo-filled diaper for a long scene. A very long scene if you’re smelling poo the whole time,’ Saget writes.
Once, Saget tossed a cup of coffee onto a wall of high voltage lighting switches that could have burst into flames on the set.
He drew male private parts on the scripts in meetings with producers and writers and showed them to Stamos and Dave Coulier, who played his other bestie Joey on the show, like a fifth grader.
When the twins weren’t on the set, Saget rehearsed with a four-foot-tall rubber doll and liked to make sexual gestures with it to evoke laughter from the crew.
He didn’t realize the cameras were turned on in the schoolroom, the dressings rooms, offices on the lot. He was summoned to the producer’s office for (another) scolding.
Ashley later told Saget that she and Mary-Kate knew when laughter was over something inappropriate. They just didn’t know what it was.
‘I couldn’t help it. The whole show for me was like a beautiful Jekyll and Hyde experience’, Saget writes. ‘Being silly helped us survive a super-clean-cut show that at first mostly got panned but then in retrospect became part of family-television humor’.
Cut ups: Saget and Stamos were constandly clowning around on the set. But the jokesters went full tilt in Las Vegas when Saget got so drunk they ended up sleeping together
Coulier was famous for his huge gas explosions, writes Saget. He’d look at Saget and say, ‘You’d kill yourself if I wasn’t here’. Then he’d loudly fart right after saying his character’s tagline, ‘Cut it out’.
‘The set was evacuated and always smelled.
One day, when the kids on the show - Jodi Sweetin and Candace Cameron along with the Olsens - were taking a long time shooting their scenes, the three guys raided the prop room refrigerator and inhaled the nitrous oxide in the six cans of Reddi-whip whipped cream they discovered inside.
Saget had tried nitrous oxide back in 1980, he said in the form of Whip-its and got a real buzz which is what inspired him to go for it this time.
The cream was meant for Michelle’s birthday cake scene.
‘We were laughing, paranoid to be doing something so dumb’, he writes. ‘I guess we got high, don’t think so though. It was hard to tell…’
Hello Dolly! Saget's mom Dolly had her share of heartache. She lost twins soon after their birth. But Bob was born a year later - to the day! He's kept her smiling ever since
Butcher's boy: Saget's father Ben was his hero. He worked his way up from a supermarket butcher to the company's vice president of meat. Saget says his father, who passed away in 2007, spoke to him like he was his beer-drinking buddy.
The outspoken stand-up comic is full of tales on and off the set, like the time he went to Las Vegas with Stamos to see an Elvis impersonator.
Saget recalls he got so drunk that Stamos ‘ended up literally taking off my shoes, cutting up my room-service steak and feeding me so I wouldn’t yack.’
'One of his sisters even stopped by to check on us. Then he put me to bed. He went to bed soon after. Next to me', he writes. 'When I woke up the following day I realized ... I had just slept with John Stamos'
The two are still close. 'Such a great friend. And such an amazing human being. So many good stories about him. Most of them involve mirrors and the fact that he always has Greek yogurt dripping out of his mouth'.
The comedian went on to be the charming wisecracking host of America’s Funniest Home Videos, and his antics included wearing a wireless mic into the men’s room.
The audience heard it all.
Saget confesses that he was a serial liar throughout childhood, perjuring himself from age nine on. He was a 'mischievous little bastard shoplifting toy guns, candy, setting small fires.' Just a nerdy kid and horny teenager who had his sexual awakening at ten reading Playboy.
By age 15: ‘I was overweight, with zits, and my signature look at the time was a late-seventies comb-over and welding-size bling-y PhotoGray glasses’.
An uber-nerd, he was not considered cool but a self-described troubled, lonely teen with few friends. Classmates called him Saget the Faggot and that hurt his feelings.
Raising the roof: There antics galore on the iconic show both on and off the set. Saget played a widower with three daughters
His father, Ben, worked his way up from supermarket butcher to the company’s vice president of meat, smoked six packs of Camel cigarettes a day and had two massive heart attacks when Saget was six.
Ben Saget talked to his son like he was his beer-drinking buddy when he was in his teens and Bob joined his dad on road trips to visit supermarket meat departments.
His father was Bob’s childhood hero and influenced his son with his own sick and weird humor to deal with all the hardship and death in the family. That laid the groundwork for Bob using comedy to escape pain.
Although his dad lived until he was 89, someone in Saget’s family or those close to him seemed to die every two years. He lost his two sisters, four uncles, and many friends.
With so many close relatives dropping dead throughout his youth, death became an obsession with the comedian.‘I can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to it than just cutting to black’, he writes. He never thought he’d live past his fifties.
His mother, Dolly, lost twins seven and eight days respectively after their birth on May 17, 1954 from a dysentery infestation at a Philadelphia hospital. Precisely two years later, on May 17, 1957, Bob was born.
‘Is that an astrologer’s wet dream or what’? he writes. The journey of a soul through different incarnations made sense to him at the time.
Saget lost his two older sisters, Andi to a brain aneurysm at age 34 and Gay at age 47 in 1993 to the rare autoimmune rheumatic disease, scleroderma.
‘What my family went through – all the tragedy and all the pain, both before and after I was born – is what created and fostered that crucial/survival gene, which revealed itself most markedly in my father and in me. It was this part of my DNA that allowed me to lose two of the most important people in my life and push even harder to pursue a career in making people laugh’.
But that didn’t happen overnight.
'I was so depressed for so many years over trying to become a working comedian that my sense of self-worth would plummet’. His iconic comic heroes helped pull him out of that depression and into the standup spotlight.
Comedian Don Rickles became a father figure to Bob when Ben Saget died. George Carlin was a hero because his work taught Bob to follow one’s own voice, no matter the cost. Succeeding as a comic was about being a survivor and Carlin was prolific.
Rodney Dangerfield taught him, ‘Just go straight ahead and keep going’, ‘Go like a tank’. Rodney swore by pot and on it but Saget writes he gave up weed after his early twenties. He did try cocaine in the early eighties but not for long.
Feeding the laughs: Bob was very close to his parents, but he was a troubled lonely teen with few friends. He says he used comedy to escape the pain as he was growing up
Family ties: Bob shares a night out in Beverly Hills with daughter Aubrey, ex-wife Michelle Gheltchi, daughter Jenny and mom Dolly. He and Michelle divorced in 1997
Tales out of school: Saget doesn't hold back in his memoir Dirty Daddy, published by Harper Collins. He says he often released his demons on the Full House set
Bob had sex for the first time at age 17 and married the girl, Sherri Kramer in 1982. In 1987, she was pregnant with their first child. Having a difficult labor, doctors decided a C-section was necessary.
When they administered the epidural, the meds did not go into the spinal column but into her bloodstream.
She flat-lined and a code blue was called. Doctors frantically pounded on her chest restoring her heartbeat and then inserted catheters to remove the IV fluids that almost drowned her.
A nurse told Bob that his wife had no brain activity. ‘After a nightmare of harrowing proportions, a miracle had occurred’, he writes.
Mama and baby came home after six days. ‘We had been through hell and back. My wife and I would never be the same’. They had two more daughters and divorced in 1997 after 15 years of marriage.
At 42 years old, ‘I was a cliché. A divorced guy wanting to do anything but deal with his own life’. He was a good father, good at his work but drinking too much.
Driving home one night on Sunset Boulevard from a Westwood bar to Malibu, he was newly single and drunk with a comedian buddy who had passed out.
Bob blacked out and drove up the curb on Sunset just east of the 405 freeway. They both woke up in that instant and realized the car was on both left wheels for a couple of seconds. ‘Holy f***, I could’ve flipped us’.
He was lucky to be alive after such a close call with death and got himself together enough to drive home. But he didn’t quit drinking and was stopped by a cop for speeding on the
Pacific Coast Highway and told not to be caught again. He was stopped one more time before terminating his reckless drunk-driving period.
Saget is not in a romantic relationship right now and thinks he needs a female clone of himself. He confesses he thinks about relationships all the time and is fascinated by people who can make it all work. But he is most comfortable in front of an audience and in front of or behind a camera.
- Dirty Daddy, by Bob Saget (published by HarperCollins) is out tomorrow. To order a copy, click here
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He is just trying to pull a Lindsey, saying that he slept with John Stamos. If John was dead, he'd roll over and over in his grave.
Sick guy, and no argument about his having plenty of reasons, but never understood the appeal he evidently had. Sometimes sickness evokes sympathy; in this instance, at least from me, it doesn't and never did. There was always an undercurrent of . . . well . . . dirtiness. When the exterior is gleaming pure to a fare-thee-well, look out.
That being said, he's a terrible comedian who stands on stage spouting obscenities rather than actual jokes.
Was curious so checked out his stand up... Wow, it is like the opposite of funny. It truly a cringeworthy experience and nothing but fould language. He is so awjward and artificial in his delivery and the material is flat out NOT funny. I think people just laugh as the atmosphere calls for it, or maybe they were fans of this ridiculous show he was in. He really is just not a very talented person, and comes off as not a very likable person at that, and is is bizarre that he has had as much success as he has had when so many more talented people have come no where near his success. In fact, there is a story now about JOhn Pinette who died and he is about a million times more talented and likable but was not half as successful.. this guy's success is a real mystery.
Wonder who awarded him a funny badge in the first place. He is not, nor ever has been, remotely funny. Suspect this will not be a bestseller ...
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jessiejo, detroit, United States, 30 minutes ago
May 17, 1954........then May 17, 1957....DM states "precisely two years apart". I just don't get why there are so many blatant, elementary school type errors in these articles.