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There he is, Ted Shackelford of Knots Landing,
zipped into a racing jumpsuit spotted with corporate logos,
slouching against a souped-up Toyota, sending out sudden bursts
of teeth that pass for smiles. He's competing in a celebrity
race at the Long Beach Grand Prix in Southern California, and
Formula One cars rocket past, sounding like nothing less than
the end of the world. A camera crew swarms around him. He is
charming. Bruce Jenner swaggers by, Parker Stevenson, Robert
Hays. Fans curl their fingers through the cyclone fence surrounding
the celebrity compound. Ted Shackelford looks casual and cool
and laid-back -except he's not, he almost never is; he hates
crowds, hates groups, and he's been driving this race (his first
ever) in his head since 5 A.M. A voice from the crowd: "Ted,
hey Ted: when you getting back with Valene?" There it is
again: it's as if they really think he's Gary Ewing, the weak
and prodigal brother in Dallas's Ewing clan who's currently
ditched his dutiful Knots Landing wife Val (Joan Van Ark) for
the predatory Abby Cunningham (Donna Mills). Shackelford barks
out, "Give me a break." He laughs, they laugh, the
swarm moves on. No one really noticed he said it a beat to quickly,
that there was something just a little bit fierce about the
way he deflected the question.
And indeed, there is something dangerously intense lurking
beneath Shackelford's blond good looks and easy manner, something
ominous and restless that doesn't come through right away. In
traffic, he pounds the steering wheel when a bovine driver cuts
off his Volvo. In off-stage moments, people are always walking
up to ask, "Why so glum?" when he's really feeling
perfectly fine, thank you. The neighbors' barking dog and general
living habits drive him stark raving. "Ted's the most unpredictable
person I've ever met," says Jan Laverenz, his wife of seven
years who goes into a self-described "state of shock"
as soon as the race begins. "He's intense even when he's
joking; in fact, it took me two years to even be able to tell
when he was joking and when he was serious. Sometimes I still
can't tell...when he's being really nice to me, that's when
I know I've done something wrong." The race ends, Jan survives,
and Shackelford finishes 13th in a field of 18. Not bad for
a 35-year-old beginner, and he immediately starts talking about
the next chance he'll get to race. He's liked driving fast since
he used to joyride in the family '57 Chevy station wagon in
Tulsa when he was 11, but now he's got the fever. "I don't
really like anything except working, acting. I go crazy when
I'm not working-I don't know what to do with myself. I'm obsessive,
addictive, compulsive. I have trouble relaxing. Racing cars-that
incredible concentration-it's the only thing I've ever found
except acting that I like for the process, not the end result."
Jan breaks in with a good-natured plea that seven years of happy
marriage also might have something to be said for it. But the
point is made. Signing autographs and basking in celebrity,
it's work, something his managers demand of him to win "high
visibility." Going to the gym several times a week, he
hates it: but "if you're in a position where you have to
take your clothes off a lot," the end result is part of
the territory. Shackelford has a much-vaunted interest in environmental
issues and does public-service spots for the Sierra Club, but
he and Jan don't own a tent and don't get out of the house much-a
gracious, Jan-restored 1912 home with two dogs, two cats and
no kids("I couldn't do it, couldn't subject them to me,"
Shackelford says). Straying into the wilds of Hollywood parties
"is work to me. I hate the business of it, the politics
of it...I can count my close friends on one hand, and then there're
only two or three I really trust." He says it with a fake
Bela Lugosi voice, but he's only half-kidding.
It's Shackelford's menacing intensity that got him his break
on Knots Landing. When Dallas creator David Jacobs was looking
for someone to play Gary Ewing, Shackelford was a 30-year-old
actor with little more going for him than some theater, a few
TV-movies and a year in the daytime soaps. What Jacobs says
he saw in Shackelford was a "gentility in his manner, something
aristocratic" that befitted the Ewing brother whom patriarch
Jock Ewing said wasnt "ruthless" enough, the brother
who preferred the ranching part of the family business to the
crude oil, the most sensitive and vulnerable of the three. But
there was something else about him, Jacobs says, "a kind
of anger." Something seething below the surface. "He
was a time bomb-that's what we liked about him." But for
the first three years of the series, the character of Gary Ewing
just kept ticking. Weak and manipulated by women, he often did
little more than stand around looking emasculated. The exceptions
were the episodes when his prodigious drinking bouts would plunge
him into some figurative gutter and the other characters would
rush wildly around the cul-de-sac worrying about him. "I
was a shlub," says Shackelford of Gary. "It was the
same thing in Another World, where I played a man with a lot
of conscience who had two sons the woman character would hold
over him whenever she wanted anything," he explained. "He'd
always just have to sit there and take it. I kept thinking,
'Why can't I just throw her up against a wall?' At least he'd
be expressing himself."
Then last year, when CBS charged Knots Landing with the unenviable
task of filling a time slot opposite Hill Street Blues, the
show's creators did what producer Peter Dunne calls "enlarge
the situations." Knots Landing had always been what TV
people like to call a "what if?" show: of all the
Dallas clones, it alone was set not in an exotic landscape peopled
by oil barons or wine magnates, but in a suburban setting not
too different from the world inhabited by its viewers. "What
if this happened to us?" the audience could say. So the
conflicts were intimate and familiar, small scale. There were
rules of behavior, as in the old-soap operas. It was: How does
Richard's wife cope with his nervous breakdown during her pregnancy?
not: How does she deal with the fact he's just been rubbed out
by gangsters on orders from her brother, who wants to inherit
his yacht? Last season, this changed, and perhaps with the help
of a largely female audience, Knots Landing nearly played Hill
Street to a draw. Gary Ewing, meanwhile, ended the season in
jail suspected of murder, and more and more assumed center stage,
a tragic centerpiece. Though he'd supposedly put a lid on his
alcoholism the year before, he was told he had to hit the bottle
again-with a vengeance-while he continued his torrid affair
with Abby. Shackelford fought that one out with the producers.
Being an actor, he lost. It still rankles him: "It's that
television morality," he says scornfully. "I know
they had Gary drinking again just to punish him for having the
affair."
The son of a successful Tulsa dermatologist, he's the oldest
of five children and the only one who left Oklahoma-one brother
is in commercial real estate, another's a veternarian. He wrestled
and played football against Oklahoma farm boys twice his size,
attended classes with indifference, remembering only the abstract
debating of a religious class as exciting him. Shackelford admires
his father immensely-a powerful, driven and self-made man who
dominated a devout high-Episcopal household. It was a Dr. Spock
home, not too strict, but "You could never show anger.
If you did, it was always, 'Leave the table,' or ' Go to your
room.' No one said, 'OK, you finished" Now tell me what's
wrong'." Shackelford went off to Westminster College in
Missouri, then transferred out, following his girl friend to
the University of Denver. The relationship didn't last. After
graduation in 1969, Shackelford did some community theater,
then went to New York, installing himself in a bare, fifth-floor
walkup in Hell's Kitchen with a Toulouse -Lautrec poster on
the wall. A few commercials, a guest spot on Another World,
a regular slot. He met Jan, and together they went to Hollywood,
not knowing a soul. Shackelford did a couple of TV-movies and
guest spots until Knots Landing came along. Hollywood, of course,
didn't exactly live up to the image of serious acting he'd had,
but it brought a measure of fame and fortune: "If I didn't
have such a big ego," he says, "I'd still be in New
York. Now I'm pessimistic and jaded. They don't call it 'show
art.' It's a business. I guess I see it through a glass darkly."
But there is something else, something else that is part of
this story that comes out painfully,that "frightens"
him to talk about publicly. Ted Shackelford plays the most famous
drunk on television, and through the countless interviews the
questions about his own drinking habits rear up like evil genies
again and again. "I don't drink," he tells them truthfully.
"Alcohol makes me sick." If the questioning persists,
he stonewalls. But in fact Shackelford admits he traveled all
the way to the outer reaches of alcoholism before he yanked
himself back. He hasn't had a drink for several years, and he
doesn't want to go back there. He also doesn't want to talk
about it. "Let's just say this," he says. "I
don't have a drinking problem. I have a living problem."
Now, with Knots Landing on hiatus and the car race over, he's
trying to keep busy. He makes an appearance on an anti-alcohol-abuse
telethon. He does another spot for the Sierra Club in Marin
County, Cal. ("Reagan and Watt are misguided. They think
it's 1883, not 1983"). He's plotting how to race cars again,
leaving Jan quietly horrified. They go out to restaurants every
once in a while. Being recognized in public doesn't bother him
any more. He use to feel uncomfortable when fans congregated
around him. "I'd have great contempt for them, but it was
really my own lack of self-esteem. I thought: If they really
knew me, they'd hate my guts. But I've become philosophical
about it. They'll never know me, but what they see on the screen
is part of me." The person "who knows me better than
anyone on the face of the earth," of course, is Jan. "She's
my best friend. She's very logical. She's the sort of person
who thinks things through-A,B,C,D. I'll go A-D and not know
how I got there." Shackelford also spend much of his down
time in front of the tube-he always has. "A horrible addict."
Jan says. But it's when he's talking about television that he
really begins to glow, when the restlessness channels itself
into pure enthusiasm. He mentions St. Elsewhere-so what if it's
on a different network? "It's the best show on TV,"
he gushes, plunging a cigarette into an ashtray and bolting
to his feet. "There's this scene, and David Birney is performing
one operation and this other woman doctor who's his old lover
is performing another, and they both come out of surgery about
4 in the morning ..." He begins to act out the scene, rushing
around the living room in a frenzy, finally shouting, "They
took this incredible risk and they did it! They pulled it off!
God, it's just so exciting- it was just whoooosh." He slumps
back into his chair, exhausted. "You know?" he says,
"The people who do a series like that, they care about
what they're doing....Television is so powerful. People who
don't use it to do something meaningful, they should be shot.
It really grates on you after a while. But you can't change
it."
Later, showing clips from Knots Landing, he's just as excited
about certain scenes he was able to do last season, like one
where Gary was in detox and Shackelford stayed up all night
the night before, wearing himself down and psyching himself
up. "I know don't agree with what they have Gary doing
all the time, but I'm also greatful they let me do what I did
last year. I did things I never knew I could." This coming
season, script spies say he'll have the chance to do more. The
producers swear they'll make Gary stronger, but they plan to
make the obstacles he faces bigger, too, as the show continues
to "enlarge." They also don't deny they'll never stop
dangling the possibility that Gary might pick up a cocktail
again and slide unceremoniously off the wagon. But wait-will
he get back with Valene? Come on...give him a break.
Copyright KnotsLanding.Net 2003
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