|
People Magazine (September
24, 1979) |
When
Bright New Angel Shelley Hack Gives the Dickens
to Jackie or Cheryl, It is a Book
The
locale is Charlie's Angels, not King Arthur's court, but
the arrival of this sophisticated Connecticut Yankee has
proved hardly less dramatic. Since Shelley Hack, 32,
picked up the fallen halo of bumptious Kate Jackson, the
TV show good-naturedly dismissed as the Bod Squad has
experienced chic shock. Suddenly ABC's Charlie's Angels
is threatening to junk the "jiggle." True, the series
opened the season last week with bounteous Cheryl Ladd
stuffed into a bikini, but the prospect for the future
is to emphasize the caste and class of the "Shelley Hack
look."
Explains Angel's co-producer Aaron Spelling, "To just
bring in another 'body' would have been demeaning as
hell. The girls are tired of having the show referred to
as T&A. We've never seen it that way." And he adds,
"Suddenly it is 'in' to be well-dressed. I'd love to see
Charlie's Angels become a fashion plate show." Says
Nolan Miller, the show's fashion designer, "Men watch
the girls. Women watch the clothes. Kate Jackson was the
fly in the ointment. She always wanted to wear jeans,
but Shelley knows how to wear clothes like a model."
Miller likes to pretend each Angel is an oldtime
Hollywood glamor queen: "Shelley's a young Kate
Hepburn—sophisticated, with poise. Cheryl is like Lana
Turner—no hips, full bust. Jackie Smith has real class—a
Gene Tierney type." Each Angel will average eight
costume changes per show this season (except Farrah, who
rated 12 for this year's first guest shot). In pursuit
of such glamor, Charlie's Angels has budgeted $10,000 a
week for clothes, TV's highest wardrobe outlay.
The new direction seems tailor-made for Hack, a 5'7½",
118-pound Smith graduate who still has 18 months to run
on her modeling contract as Revlon's breezy Charlie
girl. Hack's "Tiffany Welles" character ("more New
England, a drier sense of humor") likewise seems a good
fit, although nobody is sure. Her acting is a question
mark, even though she had a starring role in Joe Brooks'
cloying If Ever I See You Again ("a bomb," she admits),
a memorable bit as a vacuous WASP in Annie Hall and the
lead in Death Car on the Freeway (a TV movie airing next
week). In the first few episodes of Angels, Hack has
explained, "My part is minimal because when the scripts
were written they had absolutely no idea who the new
girl would be." Her part will expand as writers get to
know her.
Shelley has proved coolly adept at handling the rumors
that, predictably, greet each new Angel. "No, I did not
grow, cut or dye my hair to look less like Cheryl. We're
different types," she says. "Jackie and Cheryl and I hit
it off immediately. Cheryl is multitalented, very sweet
and funny. So is Jackie—she's close to her family and
very polite." Shelley chain-smokes on the set despite an
attempt to quit, but that's due to the hurry-up-and-wait
nature of TV shooting, not friction. "We're the happiest
we've ever been," coos Cheryl, who has installed an
electric piano in her motor-home dressing room to
distract her from her own cigarette habit. "We even have
lunch together," Jackie adds. "When I see Shelley
cleaning out her motor home, I run and clean out mine.
She appears very organized with everything under
control."
That includes a personal life recently stripped down for
the rigors of 14-hour days. "I don't have time to date.
I'm up at 5 a.m. for hair and makeup at 6. That means
bed at 9:30. It's a question of eating right, pacing
yourself and not getting sick," says Shelley, who likes
to bake rich desserts while only nibbling at her meals.
("She eats fruit while I'm having a Big Mac," moans
Jackie.)
"Shelley doesn't swing or run to discos," says Manhattan
photographer Steen Svensson, whose six-year romance with
her ended 18 months ago. Yet Hack now complains, "The
press is linking me with men I never heard of." That's
because she recently split with author-director Nicholas
(The Seven-Per-Cent Solution) Meyer, 33, although she
denies rumors that their troubles started when he
refused to cast her in his upcoming thriller, Time After
Time. "That story upset me a great deal because the
truth is I was the one who didn't want to do the movie,"
Shelley has said. "After all, our relationship had just
started—what if we broke up in two months? He would have
been stuck with directing me." Hack now says of Meyer,
"He is bright, clever and doesn't have another
girlfriend." She's in a position to know. Though she
calls Meyer her "ex-boyfriend," she's still living in
his bucolic one-story Laurel Canyon home while searching
for her own pad (she's seen 52 so far). She wants "a
garden—a pool isn't necessary—just something in the
hills that reminds me of New England."
Shelley grew up in affluent Greenwich, Conn., the eldest
of six children. She was the shortstop on the family
baseball team that included her father, a Wall Street
financial analyst who died three years ago; her mother,
a former Conover model; Shannon, 29, now director of
regional affiliations for rival NBC; Shawn, 23, who
traveled West this summer to become her sister's
factotum; Torry, 24, an electrical engineer; Lance, 19,
a Princeton sophomore; and Babe, 12, "who wants to be an
Angel."
"It was a real nice upbringing. I wasn't spoiled," says
Shelley. "I was always doing chores, folding diapers,
and we all took care of the next youngest child." The
work went upscale at 14, when a photographer urged her
to try modeling. "I was brought up not to close doors,"
explains Shelley, who eventually landed on the covers of
Glamour and Vogue. "Modeling was a great summer job. It
beat waitressing."
After graduating from the private Greenwich Academy, she
entered Smith College ("When people say 'upper crust' it
sounds so silly—most of the girls there were on
scholarship"). Dismayed to find "Smithies go to bed at
10 p.m.," she escaped her junior year to study
archeology at the University of Sydney in Australia. The
hiatus also involved a trip around the world. "My mother
worried I'd end up in some fleabag hotel in Bangkok,"
grins Shelley, who is fluent in French and Danish (the
latter thanks to ex-boyfriend Svensson). Returning to
Smith ("The same girls were playing bridge right where I
left them"), Hack graduated with a degree in history.
She moved into a third-floor walk-up in Greenwich
Village, signed full-time with the Eileen Ford model
agency and took acting lessons at the Herbert Berghof
Studio. "My father encouraged me to invest my money,"
Shelley remembers. "As far as he was concerned, I was in
business—the business of selling my face." She sank her
earnings into a 244-acre farm in New York's Catskills.
"It's dairy country, not chic," she says. "It's a nice
contrast to put on my barn clothes and go out and
slosh."
Such rustic concerns as smoking fish and putting up
"Shelley's jellies" are now temporarily in the past. "I
wasn't interested in a TV series, but my agent said, 'Go
to L.A. and test for Charlie's Angels,' " Shelley
admits. "I was oblivious to the big 'Scarlett O'Hara'
hunt [for Jackson's replacement]." Though she had seldom
seen the show (her New York apartment has no TV), Hack
caught on quickly. After her screen test, the producers
brought in the other two Angels for a "personality
test," and Hack quipped, "Oh, damn it, I didn't rehearse
my personality this morning." (Both Jackie and Cheryl
telephoned co-producer Aaron Spelling afterward to say,
"We sure like Shelley Hack.")
She was in the shower when she learned she had won the
five-year contract (though for considerably less than
Jackie and Cheryl's reported $20,000 to $30,000 per
episode) over Barbara (The Spy Who Loved Me) Bach and
some 500 other hopefuls. Hack toweled off, set her hair
and wind-dried it with her head out the car window as
she and her agent raced to Spelling's office.
"Maybe the show will make me a star overnight, maybe it
won't," Shelley sums up. "First of all I'm having fun.
Of course it's fluff, but high-grade fluff. You don't
compare Agatha Christie to Tolstoy. It's a great job and
I'm in front of the camera every day." Longer-term plans
will have to wait. "Someone I want has to ask me to
marry him. No one has—not yet," says Shelley. "I have a
ways to go in my career before having kids. There is a
time for everything. I can be an archeologist when I'm
60. But now," adds Charlie's newest, brainiest and
perhaps most determined Angel, "it is time to be an
actress."
-By Martha Smilgis |
