TV Guide - May 14th, 1983   

The Prettiest person in Dynasty was - John James?

That's what Joan Collins thought - and a few other women seem to agree.

John James, John James Anderson, just plain "JJ" to his friends, arches back in his chair and swivels around in the cubbyhole that overlooks a driveway at the old Goldwyn Studios in West Hollywood. When Sam Goldwyn was calling the shots, this would have served him nicely as a broom closet. These days it is this star's dressing room.

"See this?" James tugs at the bill of his blue cap, like one Napoleon would wear if he pitched for the Dodgers. Great gold clusters of braid parenthesize a tarnished silver star, forbiddingly engraved "Deputy Sheriff."

"A cop in Dayton gave me this last summer. This is heat, definite heat in Ohio. You don't mess around with a dude who wears this item. It's amazing what people give you when you're on a TV show. He also gave me his 'Fraternal Order of Police' pin, the one he started out with as a cop.

"But it works both ways. I was in Dayton helping the ABC affiliate there promote the Dayton International Air Show. A hundred and fifty thousand people. This pilot invites me to go up in his 1926 Swallow biplane, and we're swooping over the cornfields and I feel like Lindbergh's little brother - it was wonderful. So we land near the grandstand and the emcee's voice booms out, "Well, here comes the captain now and let's see who he's with. My God! He's with Don James from 'Flamingo Road'! say, Don, how's Morgan Fairchild?" John James slaps his knee with a robust you-should-have-been-there laugh. "I said, 'Morgan's just fine. I'm sure, although I've never met her. And the show, but the way, is 'Dynasty' "

Dynasty is, of course, ABC's juicier-than-though answer to DALLAS, transplanting the Texas plains to the Denver Rockies. James, 27, plays Jeff Colby, the swashbuckling yet vulnerable stud caught up in the shenanigans of two competing oil fortunes linked by marriage (his). His weekly combat with in-laws and outlaws makes Dickens look like Simple Simon.

Consider: this season Jeff Colby's infant son was kidnapped by the family physician; his rich uncle died of a heart attack induced by his father-in-law's first wife after a hospital bedside wedding; his own wife jilted him briefly for her long-lost brother (also kidnapped in infancy) before she took up with her mother's buy friend; his brother-in-law tried to kill him slowly by painting his office walls with poison; his wife then divorced him; he married the butler's daughter but continued to live in his former father-in-law's mansion. It's all very simple: the family that hates together, rates together.

This is pretty heady stuff to James, a kid who grew up in a quiet, upper-class Connecticut suburb where intrigue was a word you looked up in the dictionary.

He got a taste of show business as a toddler. His father, noted radio personality Herb Oscar Anderson (now retired), moved his wife and three children to New Cannan from Chicago in 1961, and young John, at age 4, listened every morning to his dad spinning out the hits on WABC-AM, New York's top-rated megawatt pop tooth grinder. "My dad was knows as the 'Morning Mayor of New York'," he recalls. "So even as a kid I wanted to be part of the action. I'd write these scripts for my brother and sister and pretend living-room shows for my parents and their friends. That was fun until about the eighth grade, when I became 'cool.' After you're cool, nothing is supposed to be fun, so I stopped. I basically majored in recess and alienation until my senior year."

That year, a buddy bet him he couldn't land a part in the high-school production of "Oklahoma!" Six weeks later and 20 bucks richer, James made his stage debut as Jud, the heavy. "It was a real kick. It started me playing around with the equipment in the school's television lab-four cameras, all chromakeyed, the works. I finally had some direction and started applying myself because I knew I had to work something out right away. I was not going to college; I knew I was not cut out to be a corporate vice president of anything. All my friends got accepted at Princeton and Yale, and it blew their minds that I wasn't even interested in applying to college. I saw them after their first semester and they were sucking on pipes: 'Ummm, puff puff, John, lad, you have to do something with your life, you know.' Pipes! Six months before we were digging in wastebaskets for cigarette butts to smoke."

James stuck with the butts, and enrolled in acting school in nearby Westport, on a hunch- "I was the last person in the world you'd have called 'potential actor. But Westport had a good reputation, and I figured why not. All we did was improvisations. The director would say, 'your brother is dead,' and immediately I took it to heart. I knew my brother was dead. I was doing method acting without even knowing it. it came easy to me, the feel for a scene. So I decided to take the next step.

He was accepted at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. he got the proverbial crummy cold-water flat, bought a 10-speed bike for pedaling around town and took odd jobs-parking cars at night, yard work in the suburbs on the weekend- all the while carrying a full academic load. Invited to attend the Academy for a second year, he dropped out six weeks before graduation- "I'd played that scene long enough, and I wanted to get on with my career."

Enter, stage right, Lady Luck in the form of Dolores Sancetta, a gravel-voiced talking agent whose no-nonsense sensibilities melted, the way she tells it, the moment John James entered her office. "He walked in and I said, 'This is perfect.' Before he even said boo, I knew I had to sign him on the spot, and that was the first time I ever felt that way. he had such immediate charisma, such style, such carriage. I mean, such bone structure! The fact he could act, that he'd studied already- gravy, just total gravy. I got him on a soap in no time."

The show was CBS's Search for Tomorrow and James played a college student. "I tried so hard to get the part," says James. "The casting director told me I looked too old- I mean, I'm all of 19 and I'm old already. In fact, I really wasn't right for the role - my father in the show was about as tall as my knees, but she cast me anyway, and I just floating on air. I couldn't believe I was actually getting paid to do this."

The first six months on the show was a rough time - "I didn't know what I was doing. "I'd try to improvise. I'd ad-lib for 10 minutes and the director would say, 'John, I don't know what you just did, but we have to do a retake.' Daytime TV is the Catskills of television. It's sink or swim."

He stayed above water for two and a half years before being written out of the show. "They sent me off to law school, never to be heard from again. Not even a letter home to Mom."

James took up summer stock in a Kansas City production of "Butterflies Are Free." Agent Sancetta showed up one night near the end of the run, big plans on her mind. The two of them were going to California, she said, to meet with producers and casting directors- "You're ready now." And one more thing - Joyce Selznick, the highly esteemed talent coordinator at ABC, was conducting the first ABC talent Search, by invitation only, so first he had to go back to New York to see her.

"It was a cattle call," says James. "Hundreds of people. I took my number and went off and played Space Invaders, pumping the quarters in, pumping up my adrenaline. I went back toward the end of the day- I had one of the last numbers called. I walked in to see Joyce and she looked up and said, 'what are you doing right now?' I said, Not a damn thing',"

"Joyce reacted just as I had," says Sancetta. "You- I must have you."

within a week, James had signed a lucrative "holding deal" with ABC. The network hotshots hadn't decided what they wanted to do with him, but they didn't want him doing it for the competition. He tested for every project ABC could concoct for the next couple of months, when along came a pilot called Oil, so metamorphose into Dynasty. James tested for the part of Steven Colby.

"One day the ABC guy calls me up and says 'John, I have some good news for you.' I told him to hit me with the bad news first. He said I didn't get the part of Steven, but I got the part of Jeff Colby. I said, I know the script - there's no such part. He said: There is now. So I found myself sitting over Saturday-morning breakfast with the show's creators, Esther and Richard Shapiro, hammering out my character actually helping create my character. That's a rare opportunity. Sort of like being your own father."

Pamela Sue Martin plays Jeff Colby's pouty sassbox ex-wife Fallon. The good chemistry between them, she says, makes her perform better. "Everything is so relaxed, it's not even like trying to act; it just, well, it just flows." And on top of everything, he's so handsome, almost . . . . . she's reminded of an incident:

"It was out first show of the season, and the first week is always weird because when you're filming, carious color reprints come out differently. One makeup will look good on the screen and another won't because of the film processing. And of course everybody's very 'looks-conscious' on a show like this since it's so slick and so much money and time is put into making everybody look right. After lots of adjustments in the first week, none of the women were satisfied with the way we looked. Se we all went to the final screening where everything was supposed to have been corrected. It wasn't . The projector stops and there's this silence, and then Joan Collins says, for all to hear, 'I think we all look terrible. The prettiest person in the whole bunch is John James!' She was right."

John Forsythe knows a thing or two about working in a TV series. He started in the '50s as a quite eligible Bachelor Father, and has graduated into the '80s as the slippery paterfamilias of the Blake Carrington empire, on of whose subjects is his former son-in-law, Jeff Colby.

"Does he ask me for advice? Let me put it this way-John and I come from very similar backgrounds, where emotion is not turned on like a fawcet. It's tough to break me down, and it's the same with him. when he started on the show, he had a tendency to be a little on the glib side-glibness is what passes for acting on daytime TV where you have to turn out facile little sausages five days a week. You fall into a lot of very bad tricks. he recognizes that now, I think."

James is sitting at his dressing-room desk, distractedly autographing some 8-by-10 glosses. The portrait is startlingly unflattering for a publicity photo. "Yeah, this looks the way I felt after my, um, New York incident." After moving to California for Dynasty, he says, he was afflicted by loneliness hitters that prompted him to write, direct and star in a private production worthy of the sudsiest daytime drama.

"I was scared. My girl friend was an actress I'd met at school, and she'd already turned me down when I first asked her to marry me. But I decided, damn, I gotta ask her again. I flew to New York and told her to meet me at the information booth at Grand Central Station. I set it up so perfectly, I knew she couldn't turn me down. I'm telling her all these great Neil Simon lines - 'We'll spend out life together, we'll play together, we'll work together . . . . as long as I get top billing.' You know what she said." 'Boy, are you off base. Let's go have a during and talk about it'." He laughs ruefully. "Inside, I'm devastated, this awful pain in my gut. But this is such a sick business, you know. As she was rejecting me I kept telling myself, 'Remember what you're going through now. You'll be able to use it in a scene later on'."

There is a long pause. "I got over it." But the tone is now melancholy, the voice distant, hesitant. He goes on. "I don't strut around the block saying, 'Look at me, the new sex symbol in town.' I don't listen to all the false flattery people lay on you just because you're 'hot' for the moment. I don't go to parties, I don't like the 'Hollywood scene,' whatever that is, and I don't live in a fancy part of town. My best friend is a guy I went to high school with."

He brightens up a bit. "I know I've been lucky so far. I went right from acting school to a steady job. I make a lot of money right now [approximately $20,000 per episode]. But I'm a rookie, and I can't be impressed with what I've done because I know that this could all end tomorrow - when I did 'Search' I saw 50 people get written out of a show. I push myself very hard, because there are so many things I want to do, and not just in this business. I love writing my songs and singing them as much as I love acting. Who says I can't do both? I love flying, and so maybe I'll be a jet pilot too."

For the time being, however, he is quite content to remain in the holding pattern of playing Jeff Colby each week. He likes his part, he insists. A trace of testiness enters his voice when he talks about the critics who dismiss 'Dynasty' as so much mush for the massed.

"I know we're doing a show that's been done before, but for that matter 'Dallas' is nothing new - 'Peyton Place' was done 20 years ago. People in the industry appreciate us. After the final show last season, Warren Beatty called up one of our producers and told him 'Dynasty' was the best regularly scheduled show on television."

The question occurs, then: would John James watch the show if Joe Blow played Jeff Colby? He hesitates and readjusts his "Deputy Sheriff" cap.

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