No Time for Love - A Talk with Kate Jackson
Title: No Time for Love - A Talk with Kate Jackson
Source: Good Housekeeping
Author: Vernon Scott
Date: October 1985
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Kate Jackson i sone of the most successful actresses in Hollywood - but she has paid a high price for that success. When she was starring as one of Charlie’s Angels, her marriage to actor Andrew Stevens (six years her junior) came apart. And during the course of her current hit series, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, her marriage to businessman David Greenwald (four years younger than she is) also ended in divorce.
Domestic havoc is the price she has paid in the persuit of a career. Demands on her time are truly astonishing. Her company, Shoot the Moon Productions, produces Scarecrow for CBS-TV in conjunction with Warner Bros. So, in addition to starring before the camera, Kate is a creative consultant and executive who plays an important role in script supervision, casting, and all the other elements of production. She is driven to make the show the best of it’s kind on the air - even though that pursiut has meant putting her personal life on hold.
“At this stage of the game, if it’s a question of my work or a personal realtionship, it’s the relationship that suffers,” Kate said the other day. We were talking in the Beverly Hills Hotel where she had moved temporarily to escape tha aftereffects of fumigation at home (her place had been overrun by fleas brought in by her dogs). Kate was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt emblazoned with a pink Mission Secrette, white shorts, long white athletic socks, and tennis shoes, and her dark hair looked as if she’d just returned from a long drive in a convertible.
“Any important relationship with a man right now would put far too many demands on him because my schedule is pretty inflexible. I have to work some sixteen hours a day, and I’ve got to enjoy it. He would have to allow me to.”
For Kate that means a limited social life because her role as Amanda King is demanding on all levels - physically, intellectually, and emotionally. “When my series is in production, I get up atfour thirty every morning and leave for the studio by five,” she said. “I get home between seven and eight in the evening, sometimes later, All I want then is a bite to eat and to go to bed. There isn’t time for anything else. I’m bushed. If I get to bed later than ten o’clock a couple of nights in a row, I don’t feel well and I get grumpy.
“On Saturdays I like to rest and relax, play tennis, and stay at home. I don’t want to go to the big important party. I don’t want to go out to see and be seen. I don’t like that.”
Kate, a native of Birmingham, Ala., is anything but the traditional helpless magnolia blossom of the Old South. Indeed, had she been born a couple of generations earlier, this southern belle might have given Vivien Leigh a run for her money to snag the role of Scarlett O’Harah in Gone with the Wind. Kate is a woman with a strong sense of purpose who knew what she wanted from life even as a teenager.
After high school she studied drama at the University of Mississippi and at Birmingham Southern University, after which she did summer stock at the Stowe Playhouse in Vermont. Following that she studied at New York’s Academy of Dramatic Arts while she earned a living selling skis, modeling, (she claims modeling is “the hardest work in the world”), and working as a tour guide at NBC. She landed a role in the Soap Opera Dark Shadows, playing a ghost, and she recreated the same role in the feature film based on the series - but it did nothing for her career.
Bored with soap operas, Kate drove along to Los Angeles to establish herself in movies an dtelevision. She appeared in a number of unimportant roles on TV shows but was eventually cast as Jill in The Rookies a role she played for four years. In 1976 Aaron Spelling, producer of The Rookies signed Kate to co-star as Sabrina in Charlie’s Angels. She left the show in 1979 after acrimonious disagreements with the producers that ended in the comic, “I quit!” “You can’t quit! You’re fired!” routine.
On the set, Kate can be difficult and temperamental when incompetence surfaces, production falters, or when a principle is at stake. She is strong, vocal and and occasionally demanding. “I suppose I might be intimidating to some men,” she admitted. “However, I don’t want to be. I like to come into a situation feeling everyone is comfortable. And I hope it’s not too hard for people to get to know me. With me, what you see is what you get.”
In years past Kate, 36, dated actors Sam Elliott, Warren Beatty, David Soul, Nick Nolte, and writer-producer Tom Mankiewicz. All are strong, independent men - who would find it impossible to mold their own lives to Kate’s rigid work routine.
“But I need a strong, independent man with self-confidence and a successful career of his own,” Kate said. Where is she going to find him? “I’m sure ‘he’s’ there waiting, and one day I’m going to bump right into him. When I least expect it he’s going to turn around and say, ‘Oh, it’s you isn’t it?”
“I’m not looking for him right now, although I do go through periods when I have really wanted to meet someone. But I’m fairly confident that before too long he’s going to find me. In the meantime I’m doing what I can to become the kind of person worth finding.
“I plan to continue to play Amanda King for another three years. Then I want to take a year off and come back to TV with a half-hour situation-comedy. I’ve wanted to do a sitcom for a long time. Sitcomes are a more relaxing way to have a life - and a family - of your own work and in TV.”
“I’m aware of having only so much time in which to have a family, and I know my biological clock is ticking. But I still have enough time. Once I have that year to myself between series, or while I’m doing the situation comedy, there will be more time to think about a husband an dfamily.”
Kate devoted this year’s spring hiatus to developing a TV drama, which she will produce this fall while continuing in Scarecrow, a schedule almost impossible to meet. She also plays tennis often with professional instructors, every day and most evenings.
“I was a tennis-playing fool, on court six hours a day,” Kate said. “Then I’d eat and play again until eleven at night. I try to do my best at whatever interests me.”
Though Kate is one of the most highly paid actresses in television, her lifestyle is far from lavish. “Money has never been the driving force in my life,” she said. “When I bought a new car recently, I nearly Hollywooded out and bought a Porsche - which I don’t need. But instead I bought a Jeep Wagoneer so my two Siberian huskies, Rocket and Catcher, can go riding along with me. My big extravagance was buying a house with a pool and a tennis court.
“I’m also not a fashion trend-setter. In warm weather I like to go aroun din skirts, shorts and comfortable shoes.”
Kate has done all she can to simplify her life so she can concentrate on work. Her housekeeper, Rosa, keeps the refridgerator stocked and does the cooking. Her secretary, Marianne Parks, takes care of correspondence, appointments, and the hundreds of details that demand time of a major television star.
Kate doesn’t lack for close friends - former Charlie’s Angels’ co-stars jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett, Cher Bono Allman, and Penny Marshall among them. She is enthusiastic about her current co-star, Bruce Boxleitner, and extravagant in her praise of his work. Though she also admires him as a “good guy,” away from the set she rarely sees Boxleitner, whose lifestyle in the San Fernando Valley with his wife and family os different than her’s.
But Kate does maintain close ties to her own family, and she glowed when she discussed her sister, Jennie, and five month old nephew, Jackson Bailey Owens. “My sister is so happy,” she said. “It’s a wonderful to see the changes a baby makes in a marriage. It’s the first time this has happened to someone very close to me and I share in it all. I went to Alabama to be there when my nephew was born.”
Obviously thinking back on some of our preceding conversation. Kate interjected, “I don’t want to sound like a hermit or as if I don’t enjoy male company - I do. I meet men on the tennis courts and I go out to dinner with men friends. It’s just that there’s nothing romantic going on at the moment.”
She grined and let me into one of her little secrets - when she sees an attractive man, she sometimes tells a friend to let him know she’d like to have dinner with him. Kate said it’s less embarrassing than a direct approach. However, she laughed in response to my next question and admitted that so far all of the men her friends have approached for her this way have telephoned her.
But Kate is pleased that when there is no man in her life she can function happily alone. “There doesn’t have to be a man to validate me as a woman. I don’t have to walk into a party on someone’s arm. I can go alone.
“Yet one day I do want it all. A successful career and a family. I know it can be done. When? All in good time.”