Attack on the Clunes

Poor, poor little rich boy Gordon Clune.

Poor little starving Gordon Clune.

--excerpt from a PBS Net forum about “Frontier House”

The widely seen PBS reality series “Frontier House” captured the many sides of Gordon Clune and his Malibu family. It caught their whining side, complaining side, feuding side and cheating side.

But there’s one side the six-part series, which chronicled the lives of three modern families as they struggled to live as 1883 Montana homesteaders, didn’t catch: their good side. That part, or at least most of it, said Clune, is somewhere on an editing-room floor.

“If we were actors, we wouldn’t have minded being edited so much,” said Clune, who has shaved the beard he sported on TV but has maintained the lean frontier physique that initially caused him so much worry. “But we’re just real people with real feelings and real lives, and if it really didn’t happen the way they portrayed it, well, we’re sensitive about that.”

Certainly, based on the six hours televised, PBS audiences in general have taken a powerful dislike to the Clunes, casting the wealthy clan as the overprivileged Black Hats in an unfolding western drama. Since the show aired earlier this month, viewers have blasted the family on Web sites and in chat rooms and have delivered a bountiful harvest of mean-spirited mail.

“What the heck were the Clunes thinking when they decided to be on the show?” wrote a viewer on the PBS Net forum about the series. “Crying over makeup? Hopefully the sher’f will come and arrest them in a later episode for general stupidity and whining.”

Still smarting from such reactions, Gordon and Adrienne Clune have been reluctant to expose themselves to media scrutiny again, particularly shielding their children, whom they want to return to normal life as much as possible in the wake of national publicity. Nevertheless, the couple recently agreed to talk about the pioneer experiment and their homecoming to modern life over a late breakfast at a coffee shop in their old La Canada neighborhood.

Though they object to what they saw as their cartoonish portrayal, the couple applaud the show overall, primarily for its ambitious educational goal of depicting homesteading life. The Clunes were among the three families who beat out some 5,000 applicants last year to forgo the 21st century and all its comforts for five months of 19th century hardships. No electricity. No Domino’s deliveries. No toilet paper.

The show’s producers were looking for families that displayed a certain hardiness of character, a passion for history and, perhaps most important, a nonchalance about being videotaped day or night. During a two-hour discussion, it became clear the Clunes didn’t leave any of those traits behind in their Montana cabin.

“The whole time I was there, I was pure to being the 1883 guy,” said Gordon, 41, president of a Los Angeles aerospace and defense manufacturing firm. “But to me, there were 1883 laws that were debatable; there were 2001 laws we had to live with, and then there were production rules--and, as far as I was concerned, that was a whole lotta laws and rules.

“We all got major backbone out there,” added Gordon. “I took the [production] rules and crumpled them up, threw them on the floor and said, ‘That’s what I think of your rules.’ Then, our puppy dog started chewing up the rules. Our whole family got defiant, and it was fantastic.”

To some, such provocative statements might only confirm the series accurately portrayed the Clunes. The same Clunes who secretly put box springs in their bed. The same Clunes who once traded baked goods for meat with the outside world. The same Clunes who “liberated” a couple day’s catch of fish--not caught on camera--from a lake outside the homestead boundaries.

And, of course, the same Clunes who helped triple PBS’ normal ratings. Indeed, after the initial airing (PBS has since rerun the program several times), it seemed that from the jogging paths to the office water cooler, conversations frequently turned to the frontier and the three families: the Boston newlyweds, the bickering Tennesseans and the complaining Californians.

One of the Clunes’ main objections was the show’s very un-1883 restrictions on gun use. “We were supposed to give a predator two verbal warnings,” said Gordon, who enrolled his family in gun-safety classes before heading for the frontier. “‘Excuse me, Mr. Coyote, please don’t eat my chicken. Excuse me, Mr. Coyote, please don’t eat my chicken.’ Then, you were supposed to fire a warning shot.... If that’s what I had to do with the gun, then I told them I didn’t want it. I said I’d rather take my chances with an ax.”

Early on in the show when his children were hungry and he had lost so much weight that he thought he was ill, Clune and some of the other men took their videocams and used them to “hunt.” They got close enough to pose with a deer, Clune said, then took their video quarry to the show’s producers to prove they would have been able to kill their own meat had the rules allowed it. They asked for a comparable amount of meat, but their request was denied.

Clune also proposed setting up targets with animal silhouettes. Every two weeks, homesteaders would get one shot. If they hit it, their diet would be augmented with meat. If not, tough luck. “Oh, no,” he recalled the show’s producers saying. “It’d be too much like a game show then.”

Causing almost as much stir as guns and trading for meat was Adrienne’s penchant for cosmetics. Few television reviews neglected to ridicule the 40-year-old homemaker for a mini-crying jag over the makeup ban for a group photo before the families set out.

“Of course I knew I was going to have to live without makeup,” recalled Adrienne, wearing a pink floral dress and a modest amount of makeup for a presentation at a fund-raiser for Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles later that morning. “But this was before we had left for the frontier, and I thought I could wear it. I wouldn’t have cared so much if it was just us out there, but the fact you have a camera crew and you know millions of people are going to be watching you completely bare made a difference.”

But the frontier changed her. Her makeup habit has gone from heavy everyday use to occasional, more subdued applications for public outings. Most days, Adrienne now only puts on tinted sunscreen and Chap Stick. “It was good for me to live without it,” she said. “When you get out there, it’s such a low priority. You’re thinking about survival, and makeup just seems so ludicrous.

“It’s a distraction away from the real you,” she said. “The inner person. When you’ve stripped that away, it’s the beauty within that’s important--the beauty of being content with yourself. I definitely found that out there.”

“Contentment” is not a noun readily associated with the Clunes. For many viewers, such words as “whiners” and “complainers” seem a better fit. There was Gordon complaining about the more than 30 pounds he lost, leaving him looking like an Amish Bee Gee. There was Adrienne complaining about missing her friends and romance. The teenage girls--daughter Aine, 15, and niece Tracy, 15--complained about milking cows, the cold and 1883 fashions. Son Justin, 11, complained about the “endless” task of chopping wood. And even 9-year-old Conor complained that frontier life in general “sucks.”

But the show didn’t make much of the few notable things the family did not complain about: The horse accident in which Conor was thrown from the wagon and Adrienne was nearly trampled. Though the horses may have become unmanageable anyway, a lengthy photo session for the producers featuring the wagon train certainly aggravated the animals, according to the show’s animal handlers.

The whole family had diarrhea for several weeks. They slept on a hardwood floor for three months--with mice. “No matter how many mice the boys caught each night, there would always be three or four new ones by nightfall. They’d run over your hair, your hands and your feet,” said Adrienne. (Gordon made rope beds that got them 14 inches off the floor and solved the problem.)

“[The producers] never wanted to show us as we were,” said Adrienne. “They were after television ratings.”

The show’s executive producer, Beth Hoppe, said the series strove to be both entertaining and educational, but every attempt was made to show the families in a balanced light. For instance, when the Clunes were caught cheating by trading for meat, the show gave Gordon’s side of the story, she said.

“Gordon was a strong character, and he had lots to say,” said Hoppe, who works at Thirteen/WNET in New York and also was the force behind PBS’ “1900 House,” a similar experiment set in Victorian England. “He had his argument for why he did what he did, and we tried to portray that fairly. I think some people agreed with him.”

The Clunes believe an essential part of who they are is their homesteading roots. Gordon lived on his grandparent’s homestead (with no running water) in Manitoba, Canada, until he was 5. Adrienne grew up on a farm in Ireland where her family struggled to make ends meet.

“I thought the series was going to be more of a historical documentary,” said Adrienne, a former history teacher. “I thought it would be something history teachers could take to the classroom, but I don’t see how they could do that unless it was a psychology class.”

Indeed, at times, the series had the backbiting, gossipy air of “Survivor.” The Clunes and the neighboring Glenn family of Tennessee quickly took on a Hatfields-and-McCoys relationship--a dynamic the show’s narration underscored. The Clunes blame the show’s producers for inflaming the situation.

“They would encourage certain things and run over to [Karen Glenn] and say, ‘Guess what they just said!’ and tape her reaction,” said Adrienne. “In fairness to Karen, I don’t think she would have been half as bad if they weren’t trying to stir up trouble between the two families.”

Hoppe denies any such off-camera manipulations occurred. It’s true the production crew became friendly with all the families, but there was no goading them, she said. “They all became a community out there; there was talk among everyone at times,” Hoppe said. “But the production crew didn’t fan the flames of conflict between Gordon and Karen. You can see from Episode 1 there was instantly a lot of tension there.

“If one of them made an allegation on camera, then certainly our director would give the other party an opportunity to respond, but what we did not do as a production team was try to enhance this conflict in any way. I’m very confident about that.”

Readjusting to the 21st century had its own challenges. The family was not only returning to a new century, but also to a newly constructed mansion in Malibu. The Clunes, who slept just feet away from their children on the frontier, came back to a 7,000-square-foot home filled with all the technological conveniences of modern life.

“On the frontier, it was like a big slumber party,” said Adrienne. “It was very intimate sleeping in one big room. We talked and giggled going to sleep every night. Of course, it’s not very private. But when we got back, we all had our separate bedrooms, and we missed the closeness we had.”

Despite the shock of national media exposure, the Clunes said they would do it all again. The family unity, work ethic and living life as their forebears did was a wonderfully enriching experience, they said. As a result, their children and their niece are all more self-confident, self-reliant people.

“Out there we had everything and we had nothing,” said Gordon. “We were at our poorest that anyone can imagine, and we were at our richest.... It’s easy to forget what’s important, but out there it was easy to see. If you’ve got your family, you’ve got everything.”