Defections, tantrums and personal rivalries make life with ‘Charlie’s Angels’ less than heavenly

The sound stage on the 20th Century Fox lot where Charlie’s Angels is shot is closed to visitors. Especially to the press. Still, word leaks out. Jaclyn Smith, the last surviving Angel, wants to quit after this season, though she would still have a year left on her original five-year contract. The newest Angel, Shelley Hack, is asked how long she could do the series. “Another three hours,” she says, and laughs. It’s a joke, see? Maybe. She is, in the words of a set insider, “scared to death.” The attention she receives, now that she is not just Revlon’s Charlie Girl, has surprised her.

One episode of the new season was shot in St. Thomas, in the Caribbean. “When I got off the plane, there were maybe eight million paparazzi. I looked around for Sophia Loren. It was for me. I couldn’t believe it.”

Cheryl Ladd, in her home overlooking the Sunset Strip, is told that a forthcoming photograph of her in a bikini on the cover of a gossip magazine is not flattering. She is shaken. “Excuse me,” she whispers. “I have to scream.” She walks out of the living room and screams. When she returns, she is crying softly. Others cry in other ways. Aaron Spelling, executive producer and a major owner of the show, with partner Leonard Goldberg (and ABC), speaks of the show’s costs. “It’s an expensive show. We are now over $2 million in debt.”

This is the story of a television series, its genesis, its problems, its future. Charlie’s Angels is the only show on television with three women stars, no men. (The male lead, played expertly by David Doyle, is second-banana stuff.) In that sense, the show blazes new trails. Because the three women, either the original three (Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Jaclyn Smith) or the current three (Smith, Ladd and Hack) are wonderful to look at, some people see the show as sexist. Others see it as just sexy.

Cheryl Ladd says, “If somebody views me as a sex object, something mindless and soulless, that I resent. But if people think I’m sexy, that’s wonderful. If I can help anybody get through puberty, I say good!”  Charlie’s Angels must get an awful lot of people through puberty, judging by the numbers. The show is high up in the Nielsens. The show grew out of a series concept originally titled The Alley Cats. Spelling and Goldberg sold the idea to Fred Silverman, then programming chief at AB, and Silverman suggested that producer-writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts be hired to write the pilot.

In the Goff-Roberts pilot, the three women detectives used no weapons, engaged in no car chases, got their way via cunning, not karate. The pilot, its title changed to Charlie’s Angels, was a huge success. Goff and Roberts prepared six episodes. Spelling and Goldberg wanted changes. The changes, Goff says today, would have destroyed the point of the show. “In essence, what Spelling and Goldberg wanted was more menace, more revolvers, more squealing tires, more jiggle.” Goff and Roberts bowed out.

The show made its debut in September 1976. Kate Jackson was the unacknowledged star; she had served her time, a year with a soap, Dark Shadows; four years in The Rookies, produced by Spelling and Goldberg. There was softspoken, Southern-bred Jaclyn Smith, easily the most beautiful of the Angels, then and now. Director of photography Dick Rawlings Jr. talks today of the camera angles that bring out the best in the Angels- “off-camera left for Cheryl Ladd,” “off-camera right for Shelley Hack,” and any view at all for Jackie Smith. “She is a gorgeous, gorgeous woman, perfect from any angle.”

But it was the third Angel who made the big difference those first few months. Farrah Fawcett is a small, athletic, smiling woman with a mane of tawny hair. Months before the series opened, Farrah exploded on the television screen in a series of tantalizing commercials: for Noxema, for Wella Balsam, for Ultra-Brite. Her physical magnetism turned viewers on.  And Charlie’s Angels was an immediate smash beyond anyone’s expectations. The sound stages on the 20th Century lot became a daily mob scene of rubbernecks. Says Spelling: “Everyone in the world wanted to come over and see the girls. Jack Lemmon, a close and dear friend, brought his children over. I couldn’t say no to Jack Lemmon. It got to the point where we couldn’t shoot.”  Spelling closed the set. No visitors. No press. Nobody. Not even jack Lemmon. It’s been closed since the 17th episode of the first season. Traditionally, sets are not closed because viewers are getting in the way. They are closed to hide problems.

Charlie’s Angels, very soon after the initial euphoria, became riddled with problems of temperament. “On the Richter scale of 0 to 10, I’d give it a 7,” Aaron Spelling says candidly. Others would put the number higher. Still, nobody was prepared for the first 10-point shocker. Before the initial season had finished shooting, Farrah Fawcett-Majors announced she would not be back the next year.

David Doyle, the actor who accompanies the Angels on their escapades, remembers how he felt when he learned of the pending defection.
“Farrah came up to me and said, ‘I hope you won’t feel bad if I don’t come back’.”
Doyle is today 50 years old, with most of his career behind him. He replied: “I won’t, if the show continues to be a success. I can’t promise I won’t if we go down the chute.” Doyle has known adversity. His first wife died in a fall at home when she was 34. His second wife, Ann, a beautiful young woman, has a degenerative eye condition and is going blind.
Doyle phoned his business manager to ask just how much money he had saved and how long it would last. Farrah’s leaving was having a ripple effect.  Not that she left so easily. Spelling and Goldberg took her to court. The case was settled out of court, with Farrah agreeing to make three appearances a year until the original agreement runs out. And instead of the $5,000 an episode she got the first season, she now gets $25,000 (some say $50,000).

Farrah’s leaving triggered two other changes. The first, obviously, was her replacement.  Cheryl Ladd had never seen an episode of Charlie’s Angels when she was called in to be considered for the part. Ladd is a tiny thing, 100 pounds when she’s gone on an Almond Roca candy binge, 28 years old, the mother of a 4-year-old daughter. Cheryl Jean Stoppelmoor Ladd hails from Huron, S.D., where she decided to become an actress when she was 3. Cheryl took dancing lessons when she was 7 and began singing with a band when she was 16 .She drifted to Los Angeles and picked up small acting jobs. In between jobs, she would go into fits of depression “where I’d eat a whole loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter at one sitting.”

She made a movie for Spelling, “Satan’s School for Girls,” and tried out for the part of the older daughter on Family, losing out to Meredith Baxter Birney. When Spelling asked her to test for Farrah’s part, Cheryl got her back up. “Aaron knew my work, certainly. I said, ‘No. You’ve got plenty of film on me’.” She was hired without a test.  A second, less-publicized change may have been equally important. The first year the Angels were on at 10 P.M. The second season the time was changed to 9. Suddenly hordes of new young people joined the audience. Jiggle was definitely out; restraint was in. Taste replaced tease. In the process, some insist, the show became less substantial. And Kate Jackson began to want out.

Jackson had come to hate the show. Then quality of the scripts offended her sensibilities. The grind of a weekly show got to her. By the fourth season she would be entering her eighth consecutive year of weekly television. That will sap a redwood. During the 1978-79 season, Kate was offered a meaty role in the motion picture, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” opposite Dustin Hoffman. But she had to give up the part to Meryl Streep when she was not granted time off from her Angels work to shoot the film. Her resentment grew. Spelling, his Southern courtliness outraged, stopped visiting the set because of “all the cursing and yelling and screaming.” Morale, he says, plummeted. “The only thing that keeps me doing television is that it’s fun. Last year it stopped being fun. It was not a happy set, all the bitching and griping.”

When Jackson asked to be relieved of the remaining time on her contract, Spelling and Goldberg were glad to accommodate her. The story of a fallen Angel. Well, not so fallen. Kate Jackson turned around and signed a $6-million contract with ABC to make a series of movies over the next five years, beginning with “Topper.”

Now Angels is in its fourth season. And there’s a new Angel among us. Jaclyn phones her folks, back in Texas, every night of her life. Her grandfather was a Methodist minister who lived to be 101. “He was the living Bible to me. His life was an example to me." Nothing in that background has equipped her to handle the falsehoods that crop up in stories about her. She is in a rage at a scandal sheet for suggesting that she and her husband are not getting along. “I wanted to sue. But my lawyer told me I’d have to start going to a psychiatrist, so I could prove I’ve been emotionally hurt. I couldn’t do that.” Cheryl Ladd also wanted to sue somebody and did. A porno film recently printed up billboards claiming its star was a “Cheryl Ladd lookalike.” Except the words “Cheryl Ladd” were larger than the word “lookalike” and larger than the name of the film’s actual star. And Shelley Hack, for all her happy sounds, has also learned to protect herself in the clinches. No, she won’t tell you how old she is (32); born and raised (Greenwich, Conn.). She is gun-shy of the press, particularly after a scandal sheet claimed she’d smooched in public with actor Bo Hopkins while on location in the Caribbean.

So these are the angels, how they grew famous and how they’ve grown harried. Now where do they go? What of this season and future seasons?

Spelling says, “We’re going back to our glamour period. Last year we got out of the habit. When you have three ladies on the show and two of them want to wear beautiful gowns and one says, ‘Forget it. I want to wear blue jeans,’ then, by human nature, the other two will wear blue jeans too. They don’t want to look overdressed.”  But it is David Doyle whose conception of the show’s future is most intriguing. "This season is a pivotal year. If Shelley Hack attains the same popularity Cheryl Ladd did after she replaced Farrah, and if the show retains its popularity-maybe stays within the top 15-we may have another Miss America on our hands. You know. ‘Who’s the new Angel this year?’ The whole world will want to see who the new girl is. The show will be a joke, in the mildest sense. Maybe there’ll be an English girl next year, then a German girl. Why not?”

Why not indeed? It is the genre reduced to absurdity. Substance replaced by form. A show without a brain, but with lots of hair. Today, each of the Angels spends two hours every morning in makeup. “If the girls had short hair,” says David Doyle, “the show would save $40,000 a year. At least. The producers say that the Angels’ hair costs $80,000 a year. But that’s what viewers are turning on to see. There’s no way to avoid the damn thing.” Meanwhile, the set remains closed to visitors. How are the new Angels getting along? Says Shelley Hack: “Put your ear to the wall. All you’ll hear is laughter.” Plus the sound of Jackie Smith wanting out. David Doyle feeling that maybe he should move on. And the sounds of three actresses competing.

Yet for all its problems, for all the jangled nerves and fallen Angels and the attention to wardrobe and makeup that drives the cost of each episode over half a million dollars, the Angels provide a welcome throwback to the days when the camera was kind, and entertainment meant escape, foolishness and something lovely to look at. Charlie’s Angels will not wear out your brain. But then it was never intended to.

- By Arnold Hano