Friends, Family Remember TV Host for Laughter, Love

Ray Combs lived to make people laugh.

But in the end, the effervescent comedian, game show host and father of six couldn’t staunch the agonies that coursed through him in his last few days.

Family and friends said goodbye to Combs on Friday at a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners. The 40-year-old son of an Ohio steelworker had parlayed a talent for making people feel good into appearances on “The Tonight Show” and, finally, a six-year stint hosting the syndicated game show “Family Feud.”

A tireless campaigner on behalf of poor children, he served as National Alumni Assn. Chairman of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, a post currently held by actor Denzel Washington. He won the respected organization’s “Outstanding American” award, joining honorees like retired Gen. Colin Powell.

He was the kind of man, his best friend said, who spent $30,000 one Christmas, making sure poor acquaintances were as well treated as family members. He once tarried three hours outside a Chicago hotel greeting fans, making sure to hug each one and sign autographs, Dave Gibb recalled.

But his last days were a nightmare of raging feelings and cries for help. On May 31, he phoned his wife, Debra, from a North Hollywood apartment where he lived when the couple was estranged or he was working round-the-clock. He told her to say goodbye to their children, ages 5 to 17, and made sounds on the phone as if he were swallowing too many tablets of the Valium that had been prescribed to help him sleep.

She called police, who took him to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where he was released the next morning. The next night, he hanged himself with a bedsheet in the psychiatric ward of Glendale Adventist Hospital. He was successful, Glendale police told The Times earlier this week, because a safety bar in a hospital closet failed to give way.

An official cause of death has still not been determined, and Craig Harvey, investigations chief for the Los Angeles County coroner, said Friday that head injuries sustained by Combs earlier in the day might also have played a role.

At the memorial service, mourners overwhelmed the chapel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Glendale. In the unique style of Mormon services, congregants sang hymns in four-part harmony, led by a conductor on the pulpit.

The message, again and again, from friends and clergy was to remember the laughter. And the love.

“We’re gonna make it,” Debra Combs said quietly. Her youngest son, Cody, slept curled at her feet. Her other children ranged across most of a row in the Glendale sanctuary.

He loved you most of all, speakers at the funeral said to her as first one child, then another and then finally the sleep-tousled Cody climbed into her lap. Despite the hard times, they assured her. Despite the anger that overtook him from time to time.

Ray and Debra Combs met in the first grade in Hamilton, Ohio. They began dating in junior high, and married after Combs’ two-year stint as a Mormon missionary, when he was 21.

Deeply religious, they moved to Indiana and joined a Latter-day Saints church there. Raymond III, known in the family as Ray-Ray, was a toddler, and another child was on the way.

Combs sold furniture to make a living. But his passion was show business. He wanted to be the next Johnny Carson, his friend Gibb said at the service. He wasn’t, Gibb said, a very good furniture salesman.

A few years later, while Debra and the children stayed in the Midwest, Ray came to California to seek his dream. First, he landed a job warming up audiences for Johnny Carson productions, a maker of syndicated television shows. That led to appearances on Carson’s show, and finally, in 1988, the job on “Family Feud.”

Combs bought a house on Sonora Avenue in Glendale and the family moved to California.

At times, the marriage was rocky. The couple filed twice for divorce, once in 1989 and then again in 1995. Last year, Debra Combs was granted a restraining order against her husband, whom she said had kicked in the door of the family home and had taken her clothes. He had threatened to hurt his wife on his last day, according to police, who arrested him at the family home and brought him to Glendale Adventist.

But the couple, who friends said fought like siblings but loved like teenagers, reconciled both times they filed for divorce.

He was an incessant worker, sleeping just a few hours a night in order to work on a new TV show, volunteer at the church or participate in charity work.

He signed on with the Boys & Girls Club during his years with “Family Feud.” He had participated in the boys club program as a child in Hamilton--he was even named Boy of the Year by his local chapter--and wanted to give back to the organization he felt had given him his start.

“He helped to reach a million new youth,” Robbie Callaway, senior vice president of the Boys & Girls Clubs and a close friend, said in one of several eulogies Friday.

“He left a little piece of himself with everybody,” Callaway said, his eyes moist as he recalled that Combs once refused a place on Air Force One with George Bush because there wasn’t a seat for Callaway.

In recent years, though, Combs had suffered some career setbacks. Just after he was injured in an auto accident, he was replaced on “Family Feud” by Richard Dawson, who had originated the host’s role when the show began. Then a new game show, “The Love Psychic,” was canceled after a short run. A pair of comedy clubs he owned in Ohio went out of business.

But friends and family said he was on his way back, with a new project in the works and his old boundless energy bubbling up.

He left a message on Gibb’s machine the Friday night before he died saying that he had a new venture in the works.

“This guy was rocking and rolling,” Gibb said, incredulous at the ugly turn the weekend took. “He wasn’t planning to check out. He was making plans for the next week.”

But as the night wore on, Combs made more phone calls from the apartment in North Hollywood, and finally, he called Debra.

The next morning, Debra picked him up at St. Joseph’s. Officials there won’t say why they released him so soon, but Debra Combs suspects he might not have really overdosed.

Maybe the 2 a.m. call was another Ray Combs production, an elaborate show to get her attention, Gibb and Callaway said. Maybe the tragedy at Glendale Adventist was also intended for show, said other friends who don’t want to believe that Combs really intended to die.

He spent most of the hours before his death frantically calling friends and family, Debra and his bishop, from the psychiatric ward. He begged Gibb to get him out.

“Tell them I’m not crazy,” he said.

Those who loved him thought the hospital was the safest place for Combs to be.

“I thought, ‘If he’s got problems, that’s where he needs to be,’ ” said Gibb.

Somewhere in the night, though, the safety net gave way.

Combs hooked up the bedsheets to the closet bar and wrapped them around his neck. An orderly found him dead at 4:10 a.m. Sunday.

At the memorial on Friday, Bishop Roger Hawley urged the family not to agonize over whether they could have helped. Even superhuman efforts, he said, cannot stop someone who is truly bent on suicide. God looks at the spirit more than the mistakes, he said.

“The last time I heard his voice was at 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning as he begged for help,” Hawley said.

“Ray’s life had joys, but it was not without trials.”

Combs will be buried in his hometown of Hamilton on Monday.