Danny's Bonaduce: Rehab Redux

Partridge Family alum Danny Bonaduce recently checked himself into rehab — and that's where he'll be when he isn't co-hosting his L.A. radio show and yet another TV talk show, The Other Half. (Unlike his failed solo talk effort, Danny!, Half's an all-male knockoff of The View, with Dick Clark filling Barbara Walters's heels.) Explains Bonaduce: "I come out to do my job and then I go right back in."

No stranger to rehab, Bonaduce kicked his widely publicized drug habit 10 years ago, managing to plea bargain his way out of jail terms for substance abuse and assault. This time, the troubled celeb got a wake-up call about his persisting drinking problem while on a recent cruise to Spain. "I was eating pie out of the tin and drinking beer at eleven o'clock in the morning," he recalls. "My wife said, 'Are you sure this is how you want to be known? The fat drunk guy on TV?' I said, 'You're right. Let's get back and I'm going to get some help.'

"I had given up alcohol," Bonaduce adds, "but a few years ago, I said, 'I'll be fine with a few beers.' I guess I was wrong. But I knew where to go to get help after spending all that time as a recovering addict."

Colorful if nothing else, Bonaduce likes to refer to his current treatment facility as "Camp Snoopy." During his last stint in rehab — at a place he calls "Chit Chat" — he laughs: "The Catholic priest who was in charge called himself 'Brother Bill, the Drunk Monk.' It was a weird place, but the therapy worked."

Getting help has apparently worked this time around, too. "I've already lost twenty pounds and I'm ready to work on The Other Half," Bonaduce says. "Now that I quit drinking, I just needed something else to do with my time. So I thought, 'Why not a TV show?' There's Dick, me, Mario Lopez and a Harvard-educated doctor. We're going to try to represent the common man's view about a lot of things, including women."