Kate Jackson - She’s no fly by night angel
Title: SHE’S NO FLY-BY-NIGHT ANGEL: Kate Jackson’s making Scarecrow on quality alone.
Source: TVGuide
Author: Jack Hicks
Date: March 24, 1984
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The pleasure of a drive up Los Angeles’s Benedict Canyon is dampened by one of California’s infrequent downpours. When you reach your destination, it is, fittingly enough, given the weather, an elegant old brick and wood English country-style home. You take in the spiffy little rebuilt Mercedes in the drive, and the twin Alaskan malamutes, oblivious to the rain, sporting about the grounds and the abandoned tennis court.
“Hi! How are you doing?” a throaty voice asks. Kate Jackson, bracing a hot pink visor against the downpour, spirits you on a tour of the half-moved-into premises.
There doesn’t appear to be a cloud on her horizon. After five rocky years since her farewell to Charlie’s Angels in 1979, she is once again starring in a successful TV series, Scarecrow & Mrs. King (CBS, CTV). She has a new home and a shiny new marriage, to 28-year-old New York businessman David Greenwald.
“Up there,” she waves toward a woody crest framed by the dining-room windows, ‘is Ann-Margret and Roger Smith. Back down that way, Jackie Bisset.”
In another voice, it would be shameless name-dropping, but Jackson talks in a warm malty tone, redolent of Alabama, where she was born and spent the first 19 of her 35 years.
“Now, this is the kitchen,” she goes on. “You know, no matter how wealthy or celebrated your friends are, you still end up hanging out in the kitchen - and this is going to be a great kitchen.”
After three tumultuous seasons as “the smart one” on Charlie’s Angels,
Jackson left in an “I-quit-no-you-can’t-you’re-fired” scenario. Shortly before she departed, in “what I hope will be the worst decision I ever make in my life,” she married actor Andrew Stevens two months after meeting him at the beach. What followed were a series of lukewarm film features: “Thunder and Lighting,” “Dirty Tricks” and a 1982 dud, “Making Love.” Her marriage to Stevens soured, and in January 1981, she filed for divorce. She continues to voice public regrets, particularly over the financial settlement. “I felt,” she told Joan Rivers during a Tonight Show appearance, “as if my ex-husband drove up to my bank account with a Brinks truck.”
She was still down in the dumps when she met Greenwald, she says. “I knew him for months before we realized our friendship could develop into something more - if we nurtured it.”
Linked for years with Hollywood’s most eligible men, including Warren Beatty, David Soul and Nick Nolte, Jackson found romantic life taxing. “Somebody would storm into my life - whoosh - and I’d get all wrapped up like a true romantic. Then I’d have to pick up the pieces. With David, I took my time, and I feel like all the pieces are finally in place.”
Jackson and Greenwald tied the knot in May 1982, and, after trying bicoastal marriage for a while, Greenwald moved to Los Angeles, where he is now president of their Shoot The Moon production company. A photograph of the sun-bleached pair, taken by Gina Lollobrigida during their Long Island honeymoon, hangs on a nearby wall.
“Now that picture,” Jackson points to an adjoining photograph of a child in a creamy pinafore, “is me when I was 4. I look at that a lot, wondering what it was like to be little and barefoot and unaware of myself. When I was little in Birmingham, I knew I wanted to be an actress, but I didn’t tell anybody. I even practiced signing my autograph - names like Misty Starlight.”
After a brief stop at the University of Mississippi, she was off to Stowe, Vermont, for summer stock. She went home for a few weeks and told her parents, “I know two people in New York. I’m moving there.”
In 1971, producer Dan Curtis (The Winds of War) signed her in Dark Shadows, the first horror soap opera. “Some of the cast was extremely jealous. I was 20, and things seemed to be coming on a silver platter.”
Jackson took to visiting Katherine Hepburn, her heroine. “When I knew she was out of town, I’d leave her flowers and take off. Friends have offered to introduce us, but I couldn’t do that. It just doesn’t seem. . . well, right.
Television executive Renee Valente, whose discoveries include Burt Reynolds, Jon Voigt, David Soul and Farrah Fawcett, saw Jackson in Dark Shadows and asked to meet her, “I loved that voice of hers,” Valente recalls in her 20th Century-Fox office. “It brought to mind Bankhead, Bacall, Hepburn. But I noticed her eyes, those brown eyes that sparkle with such energy. She had class, energy and a vulnerability that rounded the edges. I told her at once that I thought she could be a major talent if she came to Los Angeles.”
Jackson moved west, and Valente convinced Leonard Goldberg and Aaron Spelling to take notice. They signed her as nurse Jill Danko in The Rookies, and, four years later, for the role of Sabrina Duncan in Charlie’s Angels.
“She brought class and intelligence to Angels,” says Valente. “Sure, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett were very good, but without Kate - I don’t care how much glitter they wrote in - no show. If she was outspoken, she was bright and she was right.”
Jackson agrees. “Yes, I had my say about Charlie’s Angels. Why is that such a big deal? We’re not robots, though some people would like that. I was getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning, pouring my life into it. ‘T and A,’ that’s all anybody wanted to talk about, but I knew we had to have story and character.
I left the show abruptly. The ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ episode was only part of it.” Offered the role before Meryl Streep, Jackson still smarts at the loss. “Every time we had the schedule worked out between Columbia and the producers, something interfered. It was like a juicy carrot dangled for so long. We could have worked it out - we should have.
“Oh, beans. Even if I’d done ‘Kramer,’ I wouldn’t have done ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ or ‘Sophie’s Choice.’ But I’d sure like to have had the chance.”
Happy as Jackson seems, there is a part of her that lingers on the turbulence of her Angel days and her divorce from Stevens, and - some suggest - that part may surface on the set of Scarecrow. Kate Hepburn’s example buoys her up: “I still remember one thing she said: ‘I don’t care what they say about me as long as it isn’t true.’ I live by that,” Jackson says, slapping the couch for emphasis.
“Look. I’m a Type-A personality. I need to get up early every day and I need to work hard. I can make a very good living doing two TV-movies a year and a feature film every three, but I don’t want to live a life in which my big daily decision is where to eat lunch. That’s why I came back to regular TV with Scarecrow. I give all of me to my work, and I want a chance to work at things I like.
“That’s why I can get so distressed and crazy and start yelling and screaming at the studio. ‘We gotta do this or that.’ I’m giving my life to this business. Let’s make it as good as we can.”
There was no yelling or screaming the night before at the studio, but the filming of Scarecrow lumbered along, as Jackson and her costars ground through one scene for almost two hours. The mood at 10 p.m. mirrored the murky gloom outside.
“How’s it look? How are we doing?” Jackson asked of no one in particular, as if the only thing in the world that mattered was this one-minute scene in a Monday-night television series.
Veteran supporting actor Mel Stewart, who plays Billy Melrose, a CIA-like functionary who shepherds Jackson’s character - the wide-eyed Mrs. Amanda King - through the world of intrigue, lit a cigarette wearily. “Whew. That lady is intense. I love working with her - she pulls it out of you. No shtick on this show. From the first, Katie has worked this job. She stays in character, and has a mental toughness about her.”
“Yeah, we ran late last night,” says Jackson. “But we got off the track after the first few shows - too many car chases, helicopters, gimmicks.”
Three weeks after this rainy-day chat, the Scarecrow struggles came to a head. Plagued by delays, script hassles and a general deterioration of working conditions, executive producers Brad Buckner and Eugenia Ross-Lemming left the show. While Jackson did not make the decision to accept their resignations, she owns a good hunk of the fiscal action, and her opinion counts heavily. Juanita Bartlett, producer of The Rockford Files, joined Scarecrow. If she can evoke the complex warmth and humor of Kate Jackson as well as she did with James Garner, the show will surely profit.
“I’m sure some people think of me as a pain, but when you have 13 weeks at best, you can lose an audience like that,” Jackson says, snapping her fingers. “I can’t afford that.”