Kate Jackson - Back on top again
Title: Kate Jackson: Back On Top Again
Source: Lady’s Circle
Author: Susan Lapinski
Date: February, 1984
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A Happy New Marriage And A TV Hit Show, “Scarecrow And Mrs. King,” Have This Former “Angel” Flying High
It was the middle of the night and Kate Jackson was about to make an exciting discovery. The willowy, dark haired actress, formerly best known as one of Charlie’s TV Angels, was in bed beside her sleeping husband, David. But Kate herself was wide awake, her eyes open and mind racing. And all because of a television script.
The script she was reading had a refreshing twist, because it featured a bright and resourceful homemaker – a single mother of two – who inadvertently gets swept into a strange new world of high adventure and espionage.
The woman, Amanda King, has a chance encounter with a secret agent called, “Scarecrow.” In a tight spot on a mission, Scarecrow desperately picks Amanda out of a crowd to pass on an important package to another agent on a train. Amanda hangs onto the package and subsequently gets drawn into spy service with Scarecrow, a dashing and experienced agent. Although an unlikely duo, they like and respect each other and become a crackerjack team, sipping from adventure to adventure, week after week.
Kate liked the character of Amanda – a gentle yet strong woman who can laugh at herself and learn from her mistakes – from the start. And as she polished off the final lines of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, she knew she was on to something. At two that fateful morning, Kate recalls that, “I was so delighted, I woke up my husband just to share the excitement.
Kate was excited because she’d been looking for a fun-filled, zest new property to throw her acting talents into. “It’s hard to get decent scripts,” she notes. “You get stacks of scripts every week and you read them until your eyeballs want to fall out of your head.” Still, Kate kept reading because, “I really wanted to come back to television where you get up in the morning and go to work.” And her husband of a year and a half, David Greenwald, would be involved, too.
David, 28, had worked in a family business in New York City, importing dry powdered pigments used in the making of paints, plastics and crayons. But after marrying Kate and trying a long-distance relationship, he had quickly decided to come west and work with her in the entertainment field instead. The result is Shoot the Moon Productions, their own company for developing and producing films. David is president and Kate is partner in the company, which is located at the Burbank Studios in California.
David shared Kate’s enthusiasm for the feisty character of Mrs. King. Together, they decided to make it a project of their own production company. And now, a few months into the new television season, Greenwald and Jackson appear to have a hit on their hands.
The national newspaper, USA Today, recently picked Mrs. King as one of the three top series which premiered this fall. Unlike most of the 23 new series which are struggling in the ratings, Scarecrow and Mrs. King is in the top 40 Nielsens. By any measure, it has been a big hit, ranking right up there with Bay City Blues and AfterMASH as one of the season’s best and brightest shows.
For Kate herself, the series has meant playing a character she enjoys portraying. “I am so close to Amanda King. She’s great,” says Kate, who admires Amanda’s spunk and wit and warmth. “She will get right up and walk into a wall and not think a thing about it. I’ve always wanted to incorporate comedy into my work and this is a good opportunity for me.”
It is also a very different turn from her Angel role, in which Kate played the courageous and authoritative Angel leader, Sabrina Duncan. Kate wore her hair straight and swingy as Sabrina, and sported some swingy costumes, too. At most times she was a dauntless comic-strip character rather than a dimensional person with doubts and dears.
As Amanda, she has a softer, curly hair-do, a more demure wardrobe, and a softer, more searching manner. When Amanda isn’t with sons Philip and Jamie on screen, she often talks about them. And she tends to be a mother hen around co-star Bruce Boxleitner, who plays secret agent Lee Stetson, and other people on the show. Instead of Angel –like feats of strength and skill, Amanda more often uses her womanly instincts and ingenuity to foil her foes.
“Amanda couldn’t be more different from Sabrina on Charlie’s Angels,” Kate recently told and interviewer from US Magazine. “I really had to stop and get Amanda’s sense of reality, which is a more normal one – to not have control over every situation the way Sabrina did. She was never really afraid. Amanda has to deal with the things and doesn’t automatically know what is the perfect, right, brave, courageous, true thing to do.”
Perhaps the reason why Kate empathizes so much with Amanda is that she has had to deal with her own share of mistakes as well. Both her career and her personal life have had a number of ups and downs during the actress’s 35 years.
Kate was born the elder of two daughters of a building-materials wholesaler, and grew up in comfortable circumstances in Birmingham, Alabama. She had her own horse, went to private schools, idolized actress Katharine Hepburn, and felt special from a young age. “I never made a conscious decision to be an actress,” she once told McCalls magazine. “But I knew I wasn’t just going to stay in Alabama, go to college, get married and have a family. I just knew that.”
She attended University of Mississippi, majored in history and joined a conservative and posh sorority.
But one day, looking out the window, she saw two sorority sisters, with pearl necklaces at their throats, drive up in a fancy car. In a flash of insight, Kate knew she did not want to be like them.
Within weeks, she had transferred to Birmingham Southern College, where she took her first theater courses. It was the beginning of her road to acting and Kate would never fit into the sheltered world of her sorority sisters again.
She apprenticed in summer stock theater in Vermont, in her first big move away from home. During that one season Kate painted scenery, sold tickets and played ingénue roles. Then she moved to New York, to study at the Academy of Dramatic Arts.
In Manhattan, Kate took odd jobs to support herself and her studies. She sold skis, was an NBC tour guide, and did some modeling. She sometimes left flowers at the door of Katherine Hepburn’s town home as a sign of homage, but always ran away before she was spotted as the donor. Soon after her graduation from the academy in 1971 she got a rosebud for herself – a role as a ghost on the scary daytime soap opera, Dark Shadows.
When the series ended, Kate bought a Chevy Malibu and drove off for California all by herself. She didn’t mind the solitary drive, she told Lady’s Circle: “It wasn’t all scary – just wonderful. Gave me time to collect my thoughts and take stock of myself.”
Hollywood, meanwhile, was ready to take stock of Kate. She was cast in a TV pilot and got a major role in a feature film, Limbo. But the biggest break was winning the role of nurse Jill Danko in the TV series, The Rookies. The series ran for four years, and brought Kate more fan mail than ay other member of the cast.
Her producer on The Rookies was Aaron Spelling, who thought enough of Kate to want to build another entire series around her. Kate herself came up with the concept of three young women, called Angels, whose only contact with their invisible boss is his voice over an intercom.
The winning idea became a reality a year later, and Charlie’s Angels suddenly hit as a TV phenomenon. Its stars were the most photographed and written-about stars on the tube. The overnight hubbub meant that the three actresses were hastily and unkindly categorized by reporters and critics: Kate was the bright one who could act, Jaclyn Smith, the dreamy brunette who had a lot of dramatic learning to do, and Farrah Fawcette-Majors, the blonde bombshell with the hairdo that every teeny-bopper in America wanted to copy.
Kate hated the publicity and painfully weathered the wild storm created by Farrah’s departure from the series. She also experienced a major loss as a result of being an Angel. Originally cast as Dustin Hoffman’s ex-wife in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer, she had to move aside due to a schedule conflict, for Meryl Streep. Her disappointment must have deepened when Streep went on to win an Oscar for the role.
In 1978, in the midst of her three year stint as an Angel, Kate married Stella Steven’s handsome actor son, Andrew. It was the kind of love that had Kate declaring her affection openly. “I love you, Andrew,” she spontaneously shouted at the end of her guest appearance on the Saturday Night Live TV Show, soon after their marriage.
Later, Kate would label the marriage “an expensive mistake.” Six years her junior, Andrew seemed emotionally young at times. There were the added pressures of a two-career family. Hen the two did team up in a TV remake of the old series about ghosts called Topper, the critics pounced and sneered.
She filed for divorce on New Year’s Day, 1981, and the couple split Kate’s considerable earnings, under California’s community property laws. The white colonial Beverly Hills mansion they once had shared went on the market for a little less than a million dollars..
Meanwhile, her post-Angel career wasn’t going anywhere at all. Her most recent movie, Making Love put her in a love triangle in which she lost husband Michael Ontkean to a male lover, played by Harry Hamlin. The critics liked Kate’s work in the picture but Making Love floundered at the box office. On the heels of two other movies of Kate’s that hadn’t taken off, Thunder and Lightning with David Carradine and Dirty Tricks with Elliott Gould, her progress as an actress seemed temporarily stalled.
Enter David Greenwald, whom she met through friends on a trip to New York. After they began a coast-to-coast courtship, Kate assured People magazine that, “I do believe in marriage and the family unit, in having that source of strength,” although, “I’m not ready to make a commitment.” But by May 1, 1982, she was ready enough to say “I do” to Greenwald.
A dark, good-looking man with a trim mustache, Greenwald has been a partner in every way. While he, too, is six years Kate’s junior, no gap in understanding seems to exist between them. Kate has called her new husband “A strong, stabilizing factor.” They share an English country house, complete with tennis court, near Kate’s old home in Benedict Canyon. And their partnership in Shoot the Moon Productions appears to be off to a great beginning with Scarecrow and Mrs. King.
The series is giving Kate an energetic new start in her career and just the kind of challenge she relishes. “I’m one of those people who has to get up in the morning and go to work,” she says. “The most difficult thing for me to do is work four months in a feature film and when it’s over, wake up and try to figure who to have lunch with and where to play tennis.”
Now, with the role of Amanda King, there is the constant challenge of performing on a tight time schedule, yet still keeping the enjoyment of the performance alive and fresh. Her spirited portrayal of Amanda confirms that she is happy to be back at work, doing what she loves.
”If you have fun in front of the camera, the camera will love you more,” says Kate. “I want to grow, and I think this is growth in a good direction.”