Appreciation: Tam Spiva was a TV writer from the last golden age

He was born in small-town Louisiana soon after Huey Long departed as governor. His hair looked like cotton and he was raised in a majestic white house right out of “Gone With the Wind.” His name could have come from William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren or some other writer who created literature from Southern culture.

But everyone knew my good friend Hubert Tamblyn Spiva Jr. as Tam.

“Hi, buddy,” he would greet me.

Tam was a flourishing writer of TV series in the ’60s and ’70s — most notably for “The Brady Bunch” — before pulling himself together and turning to serious novels. He’d been ill for some time when he died at 84 in his Pacific Palisades home April 30. The plot twist? This was the day his daughter, Danielle Durkin, was to be married, and he was planning to attend — exactly the brand of irony Tam favored in his fiction writing. The wedding went on, as he might have written it, with the bride aware that her father had had a setback but not learning of Tam’s death until afterward.

His TV writing history reads like another lifetime in another galaxy.

“A lovely lady” with three daughters marries a man with three sons; bring on the bell bottoms and high jinks. That was pretty much “The Brady Bunch,” a brawny ABC hit begetting reruns and spinoffs galore, providing a counterpoint to the turbulence of Vietnam, Richard Nixon and rising civil rights tensions. Social issues? Politics? Never heard of ‘em. The cocooned Bradys were congenitally upbeat. At a time when the three major networks were being dragged kicking and screaming toward a new age of relative “relevance,” the old-style Bradys dug their heels in the deepest.

It was Tam who wrote the show’s trilogy “Hawaii Bound,” said to be the favorite of Bradyphiles to this day. You know, the one where the family is vacationing in Oahu and the youngest son finds a tiki idol. The Tiki is merciless, bringing bad luck to everyone who comes in contact with it, a glint of Tam’s fondness for dusky tones even in a clean-scrubbed comedy.

Tam studied at Northwestern and the London School of Film Technique. He loved the theater and had wanted to be an actor, then a playwright. It was actor Robert Reed, Tam’s close friend from college, who prodded him to try L.A. and writing for TV. And it was Reed — playing the Brady patriarch opposite Florence Henderson — who persuaded Tam to join the show as writer and script editor in 1969 after the demise of the CBS series he had been writing for, “Gentle Ben.” Ben was a bear.

It’s still hard reconciling the Tam I knew with the Tam of “The Brady Bunch” and “Gentle Ben,” both antithetical to his later writing and the pockets of mayhem in his life that he described so vividly to friends. As in any commercial medium, doing good work in TV is an endless struggle. And Tam from time to time mentioned his dismay over these obstacles and the shallowness of “The Brady Bunch,” but was also proud of its positive statement about blended families.

I’d been writing about media since the early 1970s and was the Los Angeles Times TV critic when Tam and I met 20 years ago in a UCLA class for wannabe mystery writers. We stayed in close contact through a writing group we formed with some of our other classmates.

By the time I began writing for this paper, Tam was out of TV and pursuing other interests. In an earlier time, we might have been adversaries, as critics and the creative community often are. I was no fan of the vast bulk of entertainment TV at the time Tam was writing; I disliked some of the shows he worked on and I wasn’t timid about expressing my opinions. Indeed, when I was working for the Louisville Times I had received a letter from Henderson complaining (justifiably) about the nastiness of something I had written about “The Brady Bunch.” Tam and I laughed about that many years later.

He was a man for all seasons. He was very smart. He was very funny, and his wit could be nasty. He was a marvelous storyteller with what he called “an imp for the perverse.”

Tam’s love of all animals made him a vegetarian and influenced his decisions to write for “Gentle Ben,” “Flipper” and “Sea Hunt.” Though he and Phyllis, his wife of 32 years, named their beloved dog, Sunny, Tam had a taste for the dark — the only reason I read the Jeff Lindsay books that led to “Dexter” was because Tam gave them a thumbs up.

Tam was well into a coming-of-age novel set in New Orleans when he was sidelined by health issues. I recall a line he had written about his young female protagonist: “She could feel a quivering deep inside her like a tuning fork that hadn’t finished sounding.”

Tam hadn’t finished sounding either, but that’s how life is.

Aloha, buddy.

Rosenberg is a former television critic for the Los Angeles Times.