TV Guide - August 3rd, 1985  

Jack Coleman: "I get sick of walking on eggshells"

The pressures of playing gay on Dynasty sometimes get to Jack Coleman

Jack Coleman is wearing a Princeton t-shirt because Steven Carrington went to Princeton. Jack Coleman, on the other hand, went to Duke University. The two are different: Coleman is an actor and Carrington is the part he plays on Dynasty. Steven Carrington, Jack is careful to explain, is a "fictional character." That might seem obvious, but not to everyone, and the confusion can be embarrassing, although after three years of it, Coleman is nearly used to it. Nearly.

Until recently, Steven Carrington, of the Denver Carringtons, was the only upfront gay (with occassional spells of heterosexual backsliding) on primetime network television. Jack Coleman, of the Easton, Pa., Colemans, is often asked, nonverbally, with speculative glances, and even point-blank out loud, whether he himself, that is if ...

"Was Alan Alda a surgeon in the Korean War?" is one of Coleman's large stock of stock answers. Sometimes the question is sent on a sneakier tangent. "How do you resemble the charater you play?"
"We're the same height," he often answers caustically, although in truth, at a rangy 6-feet-2, he seems taller than the man he plays, but this might be because everyone is smaller on television. Then the highly trained, technically aware actor speaks: "I wouldn't say what Steven says, but he says it the way I would. To get any kind of three-dimensional reality, you have to bring your own reality to it."

Wearing Steven's t-shirt and his own blue sweat pants, Jack Coleman passes a warm L.A. morning at work, one of a large, amiable company of actors, technicians, stuntmen and gold-helmeted extras who busily swarm all over an elegant 42-room estate 20 minutes uphill from Sunset Boulevard. It is the Monaco-like principality of Moldavia in the script ~ the last episode of the season, the "cliffhanger." Coleman and the others just got the last few pages. "They guard them like plutonium," he says with a laugh. Clearly the script's tense events ~ Amanda's marriage to a Moldavian prince, a terrorist attack and many soapy et ceteras ~ are only business as usual to the folks expertly conjuring up the product. The air is of a highly successful theatrical company a little weary of the play that is making them all, in varying degrees, rich.

There are a lot of Moldavian jokes and, under it all, something very like boredom. Inside the main house, the makeup man works his magic on Jack Coleman. The "clown-like" make-up has given his Nordically fair skin a few zits, the 27-year-old actor complains mildly. What he really doesn't like is the body makeup being slathered on his arms for the unlikely Moldavian volleyball game he's about to take part in. Still, his hair is at least coming along, being allowed to "evolve" back to its normal dirty-blond color.

Clothes are important on Dynasty and so is hair. Coleman's hair was originally dyed to match the blonder blond of actor Al Corley, who originated the part, got in a beef with the producers and was fired. Poor Steven Carrington got sent to the South China Sea to wait in soap limbo. When the bandages came off (post oil-rig fire, post plastic surgery), it was Coleman's handsome mug that came out with his hair dyed Corley blond.

Well, the life of an actor. One resists complaining, yet there is a lot to complain about. Anxiety is a given: in Dynasty one can get exiled to the South China Sea at any moment. There are 10 regulars and none of them gets as much to do as they'd like. For the most part, they keep their problems to themselves. "None of us is stupid," says Gordon Thomson, Steven's "evil" brother, Adam. "All of us have our heads screwed on straight."

In the tribe, Jack Coleman is something of a class wit, the guy who comes up with the memorable wisecracks, like when he came late to last season's wrap party and apologized in a loud voice, "Better latent than never.' Poor, tortured Steven, on the other hand, rarely gets a laugh. "Jack's got a world of charm, but unfortunately he hasn't gotten a chance to show it on this series," observes colleague John Forsythe.

If anything can get Coleman's goat, it's the "gay angle" that trots along behind him wherever he goes. "I get sick of walking on eggshells," he says and his face grows deadly serious, as if he's been thinking a lot about some of this stuff and is happy to be getting it off his chest. He looks most like Steven Carrington now ~ the heavy eyebrows accentuating a brooding, hawk-like stare.

Last year during one of Stevn's heterosexual lapses, a gay critic savaged the show for "robbing the Carrington character of his homosexuality." Conservative critics, meanwhile, wanted Steven to get "straight" or disappear. Coleman sympathizes with both sides but says finally, "I say the hell with them all," and his exasperation rises like steam off his usual preppy cool. "The gays aren't trying to convert anyone. Believe what you want and keep it to yourself."

He'd come to Dynasty from a year's run as resident homicidal maniac on Days of Our Lives, and at least there the pro- and anti-homicidal maniac factions had kept quiet. But Steven Carrington, of course, has a much higher profile: "It's such a defensive world we live in," Coleman says. "Everyone has his antenna up." He wouldn't mind if those concerned would put their energies elsewhere and likes to quote Hamlet's admonition to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

He is often uncomfortable with playing the gay aspects of his character, but he tries not to overcompensate in his private life. "I try not to strut around like a macho peacock, saying, 'Here's my girlfriend, see.' But I know it's in the back of people's minds. Mostly I don't worry about it. I'm comfortable enough with my sexuality."

Yet acting is a business and Coleman can't help but worry about the long-term effect the part will have on his career. It is a concern that John Forsythe understands. "It's treacherous ground for an actor of Jack's pronounced heterosexuality to play a gay character," Forsythe says. "It would be different if he were a big star with a well-established identity playing a lot of hairy-chested parts, but Jack's locked in. He has to play it."

Jack himself actively resists equating a long, well-paid run on a highly successful TV show with a stretch in the state pen. "It's hardly a brutal existence," he says, and, as if in illustration of this, goes out to do the volleyball scene on the pretty green lawn that speads behind the "Moldavian palace."

In the Princeton t-shirts are Coleman and John James; across the net are actors Gordon Thomson and Bill Campbell in Yale blue. None of the actors knows what the exact motivation for the Moldavia volleyball game is, but they play anyway, take after take, yelling absurd scores at one another ("340 to 2!"), falling down a lot with hysterical laughter. In the foreground of the shot, Diahann Carroll, hair sprayed into immobility, shares a Dynasty-sober discussion with Ali MacGraw at a white wrought-iron table, the real point of the sequence.

"Why are we playing volleyball in Moldavia?" screams one anguished actor as toy-soldier guards look on. "What else is there to do in Mol-damn-davia?" Jack Coleman asks, leaping nimbly for a ferocious Moldavian spike.

"It's a dream world in which we are paid a lot of money to play. But people take the play very seriously," Jack says later. We are seated outside the cathedral-dim living room of the main house, whle nearby carpenters continue work on the breakaway windows through which Moldavian terrorists will soon be pouring. "This isn't something everyone can do. There are times when they're running out of sunlight and you can't remember your lines. There's a lot of money at stake and a lot of pressure." He remembers vividly his first performance as Steven Carrington. "My first scene was one they'd done with Corley before ~ a flashback in which Steven tells his father he's gay. So I had to do this in front of about a hundred strangers cold. Fortunately, everyone on the show has a sense of humor. They made it a lot easier for me than it might have been."

Coleman is in most things a reasonable and prudent man, the product of an academically aristocratic clan as dedicated to education as the Carringtons are to money. He is the grandson of a Pulitzer Prize winner (Herbert Agar, 1934, history); the son of a retired history professor. He is the youngest of seven children, all college graduates ~ four of them with advanced degrees ~ and the direct descendant of no less than Ben Franklin (he is Ben's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson on his mother's side), a fact that doesn't thrill Coleman a lot. "I think it's a little late to be resting on old Ben's laurels," he says.

Ben, who counseled thrift in all things, would have approved of Coleman's thrifty 1982 Saab on which he has done "every speck of maintenance," and his rented house, which, Coleman notes with a touch of Calvinistic pride, "has no view." Meanwhile, with his Dynasty loot (more than $10,000 an episode, according to his agent), he is having his own house built on an island off the Massachusetts coast.

Coleman's relationship with his own father does not resemble his character's relationship with Blake Carrington. "Blake is far more emotional. My own father is more reserved." Nor has he battled his own parents over his life choices as Steven has. "The only parental pressure I felt was to be educated, to graduate."

Prior to his second year at Duke, Coleman had harbored a boyish hope of playing professional basketball. It was then that he turned to acting, a decision he does not regret. Ever the pragmatist, what he likes about acting is that you can continue in the profession "as long as you can walk and talk."

Of course, progress is another thing. The Hollywood clock continues to tick in hyper-time; and if you're not going forward, you're going backward. His friend John James will spend his summer touring Europe on behalf of a new record contract, after which he'll return to head up the new Dynasty spin-off, Dynasty II: The Colbys. Coleman, meanwhile, has a Love Boat to do during his hiatus. He does not smile as he says this.

Not long ago, at an unusual summit brunch between the actors and writers at Dynasty co-creator Esther Shapiro's home, Coleman voiced the hope that Steven ~ who in addtion to gayness is saddled with incessant goodness ~ might get pushed, Michael Corleone-like, into some darker activities. He also thought it might be interesting for Steven Carrington to have an affair with an older woman.

Supervising producers Robert and Eileen "Mike" Pollock were there and they remember talking to Coleman, but what exactly he suggested has slipped their minds. "Most actors," Robert Pollock says, "want to play Hamlet, but it's what their characters would do that's important."

"Jack tends to be self-effacing and self-critical," says Eileen Pollock. "I remember saying to him, 'You should be proud of the work you're doing.' He said that sometimes he could barely stand to watch himself on the screen, but Jack's an absolutely splendid talent. Not at all common in one so young." Concurs John Forsythe: "I can think of a thousand actors who could play Steven Carrington and none of them as well as Jack."

It is finally time to go change into a suit for the afternoon's wedding scene and Coleman walks down a path behind the big house and past the gardens brilliant with artificial flowers. There are no facilities to shower and the suit will have to go on over all the body makeup he wore for the volleyball sequence. He is feeling sweaty and a little out of sorts, like an actor who has traveled to the provinces and found the amenities disappointing. As usual, though, he is able to laugh himself into a better mood, remembering what a heckler said to him at a recent celebrity tennis tournament: "They couldn't pay me enough to play that part."

Coleman puts his deadly serious, Steven Carrington, brooding-hawk expression in place as he relates his rejoinder:

"Oh yes they could."

By Michael Fessier Jr.

Source: Jeffrey N. Truell

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