“Love Boat”  became a household phrase throughout the world after the success of the TV series she created.

During the mid-80s, I wrote for the very popular show. It was either in the top ten or top twenty of TV shows with major Neilson ratings.

The premise  used elements of “Oh Suzanna” — a 50s TV series where actress Gale Storm played a cruise director — combined with an earlier show Aaron Spelling had produced called “Love American Style.” The added difference was the running shipboard staff along with having the major story be dramatic and not a comedy.

Ms. Saunders tell all book created a fantasy background for the show. “Something beautiful happens on a ship that doesn’t occur at a resort, on an airplane, or at a hotel.  Perhaps is has something to do with the movement of the ship. People let down their protective walls and become playful. They smile and talk to strangers. It is as though you are at a private party and it’s proper to introduce one’s self. A cruise ship also works its magic on married couples who “fall in love all over again,” according to Saunders.

She certainly should be credited with turning a sagging 1970s industry into what we know today.  Saunders and the TV show changed how cruise ships were perceived and run.

I knew a lot about ships but that experience had little relevance in writing for THE LOVE BOAT.  Writing was mainly about telling a dramatic story, set aboard the cruise ship, with the characters not having much interaction with the staff.

I’d sailed on over thirty ships and liners with my parents, aunt and grandmother in the late 50s to early-70s. But by the time I was doing THE LOVE BOAT in the 80s it had been over ten years since I was aboard a ship.

The vessels I had sailed on were quite formal and a Captain Stubing was not greeting you in the entrance hall. The officers I met were not traveling with their wives or kids. In fact, children were seated in a separate dining room and didn’t eat with their parents. Most of the personnel went to sea to get away from their families.

I have sailed six times during the last two years on Celebrity, Princess Cruises and Holland American. This was the first time I’d been aboard a ship since the 70s and obviously everything changed.

Much of it for the better and a lot that is worse… People didn’t graze on a 24 hour basis at buffets and the passengers were much more formal.

I’m holding the life preserver with a group of my aunt and her friends. We’re sailing in the early 60s from New York to Copenhagen aboard the Swedish American Lines deluxe Kungsholm. A graduation gift. Not many people would dress like this to sail away today. There was no casual dress for dinner. It was coat and tie the first and last nights… and black tie every other night. And you didn’t rent them on board. The passengers owned them and they had steamer trunks. Forty years ago when I sailed on the Kungsholm for my first trans-Atlantic crossing — we went directly from New York to Copenhagen via the Orkney Islands. North Atlantic liner voyages didn’t make pit stops.

It was Ms. Saunders who was responsible for securing a cruise line to be used in connection with the TV show.  The producers wanted to shoot part of the show aboard a cruise ship sailing out of Los Angeles.

The number of companies were slim.  Ms Saunders was asked by the producers to go after Princess Cruises.  The famed cruise line had started in 1965. The PRINCESS PATRICIA, their first ship (launched in 1948), is seen docked in the early evening under the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles Harbor (1965) and is getting ready to set sail for Mexico on the first Princess Cruise.

Stanley MacDonald, Princess Cruise’s founder, chartered the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Alaska coastal liner for cruises from Los Angeles to Alaska during what would have been the ship’s winter lay up. Even without air-conditioning the cruises were a big success and the “Princess Pat” lasted two years before being replaced by newer ships. MacDonald supposedly repainted the ship but you can see the stacks are definitely the CPR logo. He adopted the name Princess Cruises from his first small ship…the Princess Patricia.

By 1976, when Love Boat premiered, Princess Cruises was one of two companies sailing out of Los Angeles.  Pacific Far East Lines (who’d taken over Matson Lines ships) was terminating their passenger service and P&O was providing fewer services.  Saunders was responsible for going to MacDonald and getting the enterprising cruise ship owner of Princess to agree that THE LOVE BOAT could be shot aboard their ships.  The PACIFIC PRINCESS was the ship most identified with the show but other cruise ships were used.  The Princess Cruise connection with THE LOVE BOAT proved to be one of the most advantageous associations in business history.  P&O Lines, when the owned Princess Crusies, said the Saunders inspired tv series had created more than a billion dollars in revenue for the company.

Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, called “THE LOVE BOAT: High Art on the High Seas.” He saw the show as a new, modernistic art form that people watched while doing something elseÑunlike novels or ballet, which demand full attention. Viewers could tune to The Love Boat at any point and follow its plot, which, he noted, “broke down into an algebraic equation.” Thompson recognized that THE LOVE BOAT was a lightweight show, but says, “TV as an art form was at its best when it was at its silliest and frothiest.”

Doug Cramer, LOVE BOAT’s Executive Producer, would grade stories submitted by the writers pitching the show as “A, B or C.” If your story got an “A” you wrote for the show. It had to have a beginning, middle and an end along with being told in twenty to thirty minutes. I only wrote dramatic shows because they were the longest and paid the highest residuals. So much for “High Art on the High Seas.”

This You Tube highlight is a musical montage from THE LOVE BOAT with Ethel Merman, Ann Miller, Carol Channing, Della Reese, Cab Calloway and Van Johnson along with the captain and crew. The fact LOVE BOAT presented entertainment in this manner was a major factor in contemporary cruise ships having large theatres.

Ships I’d sailed on never had shows like this. Ships didn’t even have theatres except to show movies. There were very large ballrooms – cabarets. The orchestras were franchises and usually booked by Lester Lanin. There was dancing every night, a girl singer along with a comic, dance acts, etc.

THE LOVE BOAT obviously influenced the current mega-liners with their enormous showrooms and productions numbers. Having seen the TV show as what cruise ships were supposedly like — the new type of passenger demanded ships have these mini Radio City Music Halls and revues but no major stars.

This You Tube video was produced by young dancers and singers doing revues aboard major cruise liners.  It is far more creative than most of the show produced by the major cruise lines – which are mainly medleys of old Broadway musicals.

What THE LOVE BOAT didn’t have is “Formal Night” on a cruise: “Now passengers schlep in rented tuxes and rented gowns to the dining room. They pass other passengers in cut offs and shorts who have not decided to be a part of what the cruise lines call “formal nights” and are either eating at 24-hour buffets or playing nickle slot machines. The “formal people” pass a ship’s photographer peddling what could be interpreted as “prom photos”.

You are subjected to standing with your husband or wife, family or partner in front of some backdrop depecting a scene found on any postcard.

This is followed by de lousing machine where you wash your hands with an alcohol-based substance so you won’t spread Norwalk-like stomach virus. Then you go into dinner and dine with the “formal” group.

The dining room will probably seat 800 plus passengers. After your meal, instead of going dancing, the “black tie” group heads for a large theatre where they see variety shows. The sad comment is that people no longer mingle with other passengers but are herded around from one of these events to another.

Ted Lange and Andy Warhol in The Love BoatWarhol made a notable appearance on “The Love Boat” wherein a Midwestern wife (Marion Ross) fears Andy Warhol will reveal to her husband (Tom Bosley) her secret past as a Warhol superstar named Marina del Rey.

Since a lot of the writers were gay, the show reached its peak with endless camp during the last two years. The multiple segments I wrote for THE LOVE BOAT included a number of the two-hour specials. Only I never “sailed” beyond the sound stages located at was once Goldwyn Studio in Hollywood.

These over the top dramatic stories I turned out starred waning film stars such as Ann Baxter, Claire Trevor, Alexis Smith and Lana Turner. I knew all these women from afternoon reruns on TV and suspected the closest any of these women had gotten to a ship would have been sailing trans-Atlantic on the QUEEN MARY (the old one), FRANCE or the UNITED STATES. A far cry from what THE LOVE BOAT presented each Saturday night on prime time TV that was less reality than fantasy.

It must have been those “silliest and frothiest” moments over the eight years of the show that translated into the general public just not wanting to stare at an endless parade of celebrities sail away in a writer’s flight of the imagination.

They actually wanted to see themselves in the THE LOVE BOAT — an early form of a true reality show?THE LOVE BOAT clearly strongly influenced cruising as it now exists. P&O, the second owner of Princess Cruises before Carnival took over, in their annual report credited THE LOVE BOAT for being responsible in creating over $250,000,000 of cruise revenue.

THE LOVE BOAT opened the idea of sailing on a cruise to working and middle class people who would think they couldn’t afford the fare for round-trip on a ferryboat. Cruising had been perceived as a travel pastime for the rich and retired. And in many ways it was. The only early dedicated cruise ships were few. Cunard Line’s Caronia was built for world cruising after WW II but still sailed trans-Atlantic during the summer. America’s rich sailed around-the-world… not once… but every year… over and over… like a private club. Matson Line’s LURLINE was the first ship I sailed on. This is the (third) LURLINE arriving in Honolulu sometime in the 60s. On my first trip aboard the (second) LURLINE, I sailed with my parents round-trip from Los Angeles to Hawaii.

That meant five days each way sea, ten days in Honolulu in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on the beach at Waikiki and no ports of call enroute. Inter-island travel then was all by air.

Companies I once sailed with included US Lines, Matson, Pacific Far East, Grace Lines, Delta, Moore-McCormick, Swedish America, Home, Canadian Pacific, Italian, American Export, Orient Lines, Italian Lines to the French Line.

I’d sailed on many of their ships: United States, Empress of Canada, America, Lurline, Homeric, Mariposa, Matsonia, Monterey, President Wilson, Dentledyke, Del Sud, Santa Rosa, Chusan.

I’d sailed on the P&O Canberra around-the-Pacific in the late 60s and the next time I heard of this ship she was doing troop duty during the Falkland War. She was scrapped in India five years ago.

In the 60s I sailed with my parents on the Saturnia. The Italian Line ship was the first to have individual balconies or verandas for their first class staterooms.

By the time I was writing for Love Boat in the early 80s, these great steamship companies and their liners were flying hand me down foreign flags, painted like old whores, scrapped or doing three day cruises to the Bahamas. You couldn’t travel trans-Atlantic except by the QE 2 (only in the summer) and there were no trans-Pacific voyages.

There was no First, Cabin or Tourist Classes. THE LOVE BOAT helped change all that. For the better or…?