PRESENT TENSE
FALCON CREST's Indomitable Angela Channing Doesn't Dwell on Her Past
PRESENT TENSE : FALCON CREST's Indomitable Angela Channing Doesn't Dwell on Her Past
Soap Opera Digest April 1988
For Jane Wyman, the past must be a source of great pride … and a pain in the neck. There's the career, the story of hard-won prestige by a Warner Brothers contract-player pegged for years as a light-comedy actress, until Billy Wilder gave her a crack at drama in his Oscar-winning THE LOST WEEKEND. Then, there's her private life, which in its Hollywood heyday was much-publicized, in particular her marriage to and divorce forty years ago from Ronald Reagan, the mane who would be elected president of the United States - twice. Columinists in the town run by Hedda Hopper and Luella Parsons speculated about how the "perfect couple," as Reagan and Wyman were frequently billed, could break up. Jane Wyman didn't have a lot to say about it then and she has nothing to say about it now, though the press is still bugging her for the lowdown on Ronnie.
The marriage is over; the subject, off-limits. Don't even try. Jane Wyman is nothing if not terse and direct. Ask her a question she doesn't want to answer (like the reasons for her conversion to Catholicism) and she'll tell you, "I don't want to get into that. That's nobody's business." As for reading her remarkable like story in her own words one day, don't count on finding WYMAN, JANE under "Author" in the card catalogue of your local library. An autobiography is out of the question. "Never," she says flatly. "My life's an open book. What am I going to do? Put the whole thing on a page again?"
Clearly, Jane Wyman is a practical woman who is too busy in the present to make a big deal about the past. The her and now is FALCON CREST, the television series which is very dear to her, and which has made her, in a career that now spans five decades, on of the most durable and popular American actresses. Between takes on the long running series, Wyman relaxes in Angela Channing's dining room. "This is what we call my office in her," she says, inviting me in. She is wearing one of those tasteful, tailored white wool suits that so become the flinty Angela and I don't know what to expect. For years rumor had it that she and Angela, the malignant matriarch of the Tuscany Valley, were one of the same. While Wyman and Angela may share the same self-possession, the proof that they are two different women is embroidered in white on the back of a lime-green canvas chair in Jane's office. It's the word "Babe" and get away with it.
She is trim with large, warm brown eyes and is almost immediately chummy as she tells the story of how Earl Hamner, creator of THE WALTONS and FALCON CREST, lured her back to work with the role of Angela Channing. "I thought if they ever pointed a camera at me again, I'd faint," she says, with a mock groan. After reading Hamner's script twice, she decided to take the plunge. "You know, I thought I could have some fun with this." And she has, particularly in the last two seasons of the show where Angela's wisecracks ("I wish I'd brought a book," at Richard and Maggie's wedding comes to mind) always hit the bull's eye. She thinks humour is the key to the show's continued successs; without that, "it would be deadly," she insists. You can tell Wyman has a ball playing Angela Channing and she has grown quite fond of the nasty grape queen. "I love Angela," she says. "She's such a bitch. The closes thing I've ever come to doing this kind of part, which isn't anything like this, was Pollyanna," the Disney film in which she played Hayley Mills uptight aunt.
Wyman is right. Angela Channing is certainly a departure for the Academy Award winning actress, whose reputation in films is staked upon the performances she gave as sensitive, vulnerable women in classics like THE YEARLING, MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, JOHNNY BELINDA, and her favourite, THEW BLUE VEIL. "Everything I've done has been both ends of the piano." She quips. She discusses her achievements in film with startling brevity and understatement, still surprised that her career has lasted half a century. That kind of longevity never crossed her mind when she started out at Warner Brothers ("I couldn't understand why they wanted me there," she says); neither did the possibility that plum roles like the deaf mute girl in JOHNNY BELINDA would come her way. Of her Oscar-winner, she says, "That was a tricky one to do because I had to learn the sign language. When we found it, you see, JOHNNY BELINDA was a play. Jerry Wald saw it and he said, 'That is in the wrong medium because when you're in the back of the theater, you can't see the action that goes on in the deaf face.' You had to get the camera going in there to pick up all the little nuances."
It's been a career of happy surprises, like the musical she made with Bing Crosby called HERE COMES THE GROOM, which produced a hit record, "In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening," an Oscar-winner for Best Song in 1951, and her success in producing and starring in THE JANE WYMAN THEATER on television in the fifties. She has worked with an amazing varitey of people from Eve Arden and Ann Sheridan to Gregory Peck, Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich. Sadly, though, many of her friends have passed away; of them she misses Agnes Moorhead, her co-star on BELINDA, THE BLUE VEIL and POLLYANNA, the most. "She was divine," says Wyman. "We made six pictures together," When Jane Wyman's work schedule slowed down in the sixties, she resumed painting landscapes in oil, a hobby she learned to love while filming BELINDA in California's lush Mendocino County.
Getting back into the routine of doing a weekly television series took some effort. "It wasn't easy at first, sweetheart, because I wasn't quite into it," she confides. "It takes a little time to put the dress on, you know what I'm trying to say, and get Angela just the way I wanted her. It took the first season, really, and she became such a popular character in the first couple of years on the show that I had to work extra hard. I had to do double-time because I wanted it to be just right and once you get a hold of a character like that, it's not only a question of the physical stamina, but a lot of the mental strain also. I mean, we've done five scripts in a row and I know exactly where I am in every single script."
Eddie Albert, one of many guest stars to appear on FC in the past year, was stunned to find that they filmed scenes from twelve episodes at once on their annual location shoot in California's Napa Valley. "When I was up there, Janey had stretched out on her desk twelve different scripts and she had to keep her wits about her and learn her lines and be on the ball up at four or five every morning," he says. "This is kind of rough."
Wyman's professionalism is well-known. Her crusty composure on the set is partly getting into character, part professional demeanor, but it sets a tone for the rest of the cast and the crew: no nonsense. Says Jeff Freilich, FALCON CREST'S co-executive producer, who has worked with Wyman for the past two years, "Jane will not put up with laziness or people who simply walk through their jobs, whether it's actors, writers or the crew. She's up at 4am, on the youthfulness with which one might approach their first television series. And this is after doing 175 episodes." The 74-year -old dynamo expects as much as she give, Freilich continues. "I've never been on the set when people didn't give less than 100 percent. It's impossible to get away with less. She came on the set one day and said, 'There are no stars on this show.' The grip is an essential to this show as she is."
Her down-to-earth attitude seems a question of training. Not the type to chew your ear off with easy angst about stardom versus identity versus image minus privacy plus that bank account, Wyman is a proud product of the studio system because it taught her how to act. Coming up through the ranks as she did guaranteed an actor the steady employment necessary to refining his talent. She thinks it would be "great" if the studio system operated today. "It was a marvelous way," Wyman notes. "It gave actors experience and poise and education of the business itself. I feel sorry for some of the kids today who don't have that background. You have to learn this craft. It isn't given to you, she insists. "And once you get a hold of it, why, you can go on and spread your wings and fly from there. But the way it is now, you never know. I mean, you might have a lovely part on this show and then maybe you won't work for along time because there's nothing that they have to hold you together with."
Wyman's understanding of the entertainment business and what wil and won't work with an audience is one of the reasons she is still a star. She wanted to make MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, her gigantic hit about an older woman in love with a younger man (Rock Hudson) when no one else wanted to. On television, she thinks success depends simply on "good storytelling" and an affinity with the character. "We'll just talk about this show because I don't know any other show," she says. "This show has been on seven years. If the people weren't comfortable watching the show in their own homes, we wouldn't be on. If they feel comfortable and they're into all the characters and they know what everybody's doing and whatnot, that means it's a welcome sign out to come on, let's get on with it and get some more. They let you know in a fast hurry if they like it."
FALCON CREST has tried a number of things to keep the Tuscany Valley lively in the past season. In addition to the guest-star roster, there was a clever story year in which Angela hired a demented Hollywood special-effects expert (played wit nerdy glee by Buck Henry) to drive Melissa out of her gourd. Melissa turned the tables on Angela and rigged FALCON CREST's staircase with explosives. Working with them scared Wyman "to death," but she was game nonetheless. "When I was coming down the stairs and they wre exploding on me, I said, 'You're going to have to get this on one take,' and by George, we got one take and it all worked. We have a wonderful special-effects man, Frank Pope. He is to die over. This man is so good and so careful. It was fun."
In the past two seasons, Jeff Freilich decided to show more sides to Angela's character and Jane was all for it. "When we met, every time we came up with a scheme for Angela, she said, 'We've already done that,' " Freilich reports. "The permutations of wickedness run dry unless you choose other facets of her personality to use. In Jane's mind, the more sides of a Villain you show, the more powerful the evil becomes when it comes out." While there's no doubt that Angela is still the meanest woman on television, some of her emotional reactions - like the tears she shed when she learned that Douglas Channing and Jacqueline Perrault has stolen Richard Channing from her at birth and let her believe he was dead, and her taking care of Chao Li when he developed cancer last year - took the audience by surprise and showed Angela as a woman whose family comes first, even if it means keeping them in check with revenge.
Of course, Villainy has its price. Sometimes the audience has taken Angela Channing so seriously that they've attacked Jane Wyman. "I was in a department store," she recalls, "and I was making a purchase of whatever it was and this little lady, I don't think she was bigger than that, and she kicked me so hard, I had a bruise for a week on this leg. She said, 'You know something, I can't stand the way you treat your children. I get so bored I turn it off, I just look at the clothes.' " Wyman rolls her eyes. "Crazy." Her own children have been known to rib her about her television persona. "Maureenie once said to me, 'The way you treat your children. I mean, really mother!' They tease me all the time. Maureen bought me a watch once and said, 'It's not for you. It's for Angela.' It's an attitude they have toward her."
Whatever the audience's attitude toward Jane Wyman, there is one group that will always admire her: the FC crew. When she leaves the set at night, they call out, "Say goodnight, Babe," and when she left the set on the last day of filming for the season, they cheered and gave her a standing ovation. Holding her head high, the star fought back tears. She later told Jeff Freilich that she "did everything she could not to cry." Then she told him she wanted the whole crew back next year.
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