Happy Birthday Cheryl Ladd!

Today, it's Cheryl Ladd's birthday. Happy birthday to an underrated actress, sparkling beauty, sultry singer, and first-class Angel!


It's unfortunate that in between the Farrah-mania that erupted in the first season of Charlie's Angels--and led to her leaving to do movies, namely the ultra-bomb Saturn 3--and the later seasons with derided Kate Jackson replacement Shelly Hack and the decidedly awesome method-acting goddess Tanya Roberts in the still not-on-DVD season five, people forget that there was solid work regularly turned in by the steady presences on the show Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd.

Ladd worked long and hard, from seasons two through five, and never wavered. Though Tanya Roberts' gorgeous eyes stole the show in season 5, Ladd did all the heavy lifting - her face sporting some mature woman lines that somehow made her even more gorgeous, Ladd merged into a full formed actor, taking advantage of the 'no one still watching' freedom to do some of her most fully realized work.

Cast as Jill's sister Kris Munroe, Cheryl Ladd was an ideal replacement for Farrah in Season 2, of whom people tend to forget brought sparkling athleticism and sweetness to her iconic Jill Munroe, not just hair and teeth. As her little sister Kris, Ladd tapered the same qualities to a little sister point and wowed in a brown bikini, swimming up and around to jack a gangster's yacht to rescue the kidnapped Charlie in a wow of a Hawaii season two opener. She had a pop album out early in season 3, modeled in the style of the mega-successful Olivia Newton John. She got to do some synergy singing/ plugging on the show. I remember taping it with my my audio cassette player and even though she only sang a few bars of her song "Take a chance on me / love will never be / for chance" I still know it by heart, 30-odd years later.

Another peak Cheryl role came a few decades later, in a film that saw Drew Barrymore being super sexy and seducing TV op-ed newsman and bender enthusiast Tom Skeritt (his sneaky morning vodka pull is straight out of my own life at the time). Cheryl Ladd is the rich, pampered wife upstairs, terminally ill but still achingly gorgeous, a kind of still-breathing REBECCA. Ladd is great in her few scenes, conveying huge amounts of woe and regret at having spent her life in front of a vanity mirror instead of learning a skill or developing a literary passion. In the process she turns what could have been just a marginally above-average Skinemax-ish potboiler into something truly marvelous, digging up surprising gravitas. Once again, however, she's not the first thing people think of on  that show--ever a team player, it's Drew on a tire swing we all recall. I have a burnt-in memory of seeing it on my friend's couch, where I was crashing having left my wife for a girl very much like Drew Barrymore's character. We had just come back from a Monster Convention in PA where I didn't win the Rondo. We drove straight to Saint Mark's and I got a tattoo, and we were breaking up. It was a once-in-a-lifetime midlife crisis kind of day, and POISON IVY turned it into poetry...  

Here she is with Waylon Jennings. Just look into her naturally loving and open eyes as she looks up at this sexy, noble beast of a man. It's enough to make you go country on the spot.

People love to pigeonhole and over the years the original Charlie's Angels has been maligned with accusations of it being mindless T&A, but if you watch these shows now, as an antidote to the super flashy crap of today, these angels are extraordinarily intelligent and skilled. Over their careers they pose as everything from professional ice skaters, race car drivers, circus folk (above), rich illegal baby adopters, poor bumpkins looking to buy bootleg motorcycle parts, and helicopter traffic ladies... of course they've also gone to the less athletic side, posing as masseuses, prostitutes, fashion models, strippers, belly-dancers, and Playboy-ish bunnies (cats instead), but through it all they're always sweet and kind to the nice guys. Figuring out which alleged playboys are all talk by coming onto them and watching them shrink away, they flirt with kindly old men and talk nice to troubled girls; they show you can be capable, badass, wear awesome flare slacks with turtlenecks, and still be warm.

I'm grateful to the show for being on DVD and on cable. I'm grateful to Ladd, for having lived up to the possibilities Kris Munroe embodied, and beyond. So happy birthday, Cheryl! You have helped make this world brighter for we who dwell in darkness. You have seen our slimy, slothful troglodyte hearts, and instead of wincing smiled and forgave our obscene mental trespasses, refused to see anything but the heart of a knight under our monstrous criminal hides. And all the while, your smile has lighted the world, in illumination, and in load.

RIP, Angel Baby...

In all the anguish and rush of celebrity obits of late, it's Farrah who goes under-celebrated. Karl Malden is gone but it was certainly his time; Michael Jackson is gone and perhaps he is happier now that the spotlight is finally out of his eyes. For me, Farrah Fawcett's departure is the true tragedy of the last few weeks.

She was a genuinely mythic goddess, ruling in the final decade where goddesses still commanded archetypal mystique, before videotapes made the remoteness required for such ascendancy completely impossible--the 1970s. You might even say she was the 1970s.

I remember buying her poster when it first showed up at 7-11. It was one of the first posters ever. BUT it scared the shit out of me. Never mind that nipple, take a look at her deranged eyes and anguished smile, like Marlene Dietrich after 30 takes of the same scene with Sternberg (I'm so traumatized I can't even show the poster ). I liked her on Charlie's Angels, as Jill Munroe her fearlessness and athletic prowess made her much more than a pretty face and agile mind. Where angels feared to tread, Farrah charged in. She even scuttled her contract with Aaron Spelling to go the feature film route, where she promptly bombed and fell out of favor, like David Caruso after her. If Saturn 3 (pictured below)--her big sci fi feature co-starring Kirk Douglas--had been better, she might have been a huge movie star. It wasn't her fault it bombed, but that's show biz

Instead she kind of disappeared until returning as a serious dramatic actress in The Burning Bed and The Apostle, a decade or so later. It doesn't matter that she later won respect as a hard-bitten actress capable of drama and flighty comedy (she played the racist wife of Danny Glover in The Cook-Out if you care, and you should). All that matters is that she was a goddes of the 1970s and everyone dug her hair, I mean everyone. All that horrible "pouffy" hair in the 1980s might even have been her fault, in a way, the mutated evolution of her feathery wisps writ large and gaudy on the newly emerged MTV generation. Even the second season of Charlie's Angels fell in. You can suddenly see the Farrah hairdo all over the extras, the bit players, and Jaclyn Smith.

It's a tragedy that we lost her, and a tragedy that her death's been overshadowed by Michael Jackson's. I don't mean any disrespect to Mr. Jackson, who perhaps united more of the world and for longer in his rein than Farrah did or could or probably would ever want to. While Jackson's mythic presence spans his own lifetime since childhood, Farrah's is rooted in a single pop cultural moment, but it's not a race, at least not a race anyone wants to win. In fact we're all walking as slow as we can towards that inevitable credit roll finish line, but now, wherever we're going, we can hope our angel Farrah will be working the reception gate like it's a Honolulu airport, ready to set our nervous hearts at ease with a lei, a flash of a smile and a shake of her golden feathery tresses.

A Tale of Two Sammies: Charlie's Angels & the Sammy Davis Jr. Kidnapping Caper

Angel: "You prefer to go incognito?"
Herbert Brubaker: "Don't you talk no smut, woman, I'm a veteran!"

The very sophisticated and marvelous Sammy Davis Jr. makes a 1978 episode of Charlie's Angels extraordinarily special. The episode to which I refer being found in season two, disc five: "The Kidnapping of Sammy Davis Jr." Thank you very much. But can you dig the split, man? The Jekyll & Hyde split trip this cat's all about? Because tied into a fundraiser Sammy's doing (this all while skirmishing with angels and kidnappers) is a "celebrity look-a-like" contest, with a fake Burt Reynolds, a fake Barbara Streisand, and a... Sammy Davis Jr.! The sheer thinness of all this is stretched to surrealism when Herbert Brubaker III (Davis in platforms) gets mad whenever anyone tells him he looks like Sammy Davis! Why is he at a celebrity look-a-like contest, then? He just wandered into it, baby.

What's cool is how deftly Davis navigates between the two poles. As a white guy reading into it, I'm thinking these baggy pants stereotypes have their purpose in any culture. As an African American artist of widespread white acceptance, a cat like Mr. Davis essentially has to play white better than even a white guy. This results in a hyper-articulateness, since there's perhaps encoded hostility at needing to "become" rather than "be," to enunciate with Poitier-level precision in order to be as diametrically opposed to the soulful "jive talkin" of popular culture stereotype as it's popular to get, and it's only then that he can embody a burlesque of the stereotype as it makes him all the more sophisticated by illuminating the difference, ya dig, baby?

And so Herbert Brubaker III, President of H&B "Boozeterias,"becomes the depository of all Davis' abolished black impersonator-impersonator-isms. Sammy's getting old here--you can see ennui in his eyes; he's still got tons of class, grace and supreme showmanship but there's a glimmer of getting ready to face something, like Johnny Cash in the "Hurt" video. It's time to take some personal inventory, and exorcise some of his personal and political/racial demons. And if you can do it around three lovely ladies, on prime time, so much the better. Boozeterias!

The white mainstream acceptance thing carries lots of baggage: The late 1960s through 1970s was a gala time for the sophisticated (i.e. white-friendly albeit unafraid to examine racial stereotypes) black comic, ala Godfrey Cambridge, and Flip Wilson. On the other end there were "blue" comics like Rudy Ray Moore whose records were aimed largely at black audiences to be played at parties. And there was a consistent pressure within the intellectual black community to not let your "blackness" slip away by adopting too many bourgeois affectations while at the same time not becoming too ghetto so the white man stereotypes you again. And so Davis makes a point that the gorgeous woman waiting for him at home (real life wife Altovise) is "cocoa-brown" (as opposed to his previous wife, the controversially blonde May Britt, or the black wife forced on him by the studio--practically at gunpoint-- in the late 50s, Loray White) and he's sporting his jewelry, but as his Davis self, he's clearly in the groove of the uber-sophisticated cat, forever erasing chunks of homespun heritage on behalf of bourgeois advancement, pulling common perception of African-American culture behind him like a canoe while maintaining a lightness and ease that can seem, at his advancing age, heavier than uranium.

Let's not forget that the Rat Pack refused to play segregated casinos and thus helped abolish segregation in both Atlantic City and Las Vegas. But let's also not forget that Harry Cohn arranged Sammy's real-life kidnapping to scare him off an affair with Kim Novak in the mid 1950s. And while the kidnapping here is pretty nonthreatening all around, it still has a whiff of that incident. Of course the coded-Cohn kidnappers pick up Brubaker by accident and when he tries to tell them who he is, the kidnappers say he's just trying to "weasel out of [his] own kidnapping!" --a hilarious line implying that being kidnapped is some manly rite only the weaselly would try to escape from.

But most of all, Brubaker provides Davis with a real chance to shuck and jive in the style of the Moores and Foxxes rather than sip champagne and make bon mots ala the Cambridges and Wilsons, to tarnish his gloss and get some crazy soft shoe off his chest. For an intellectual artist of Sammy's caliber, a Hyde like Herbert Brubaker III, with his huge blue and white checkered flared pants and white platform shoes (which Davis can't even walk in) must have been some kind of crazy liberation. And most of all, he finds the perfect group of supporters in the lovely angels, and gives a veritable refresher course in the proper etiquette for dealing with three beautiful lady bodyguards who really can't bodyguard worth a damn (they like to jump on the suspect's back like children). As the top quote "don't talk no smut" indicates, this is a land where no bad guy is bad enough to sexually assault, torture, starve, or even intimidate anyone; it's a comfortingly sexless universe filled with attractive symbols that lead nowhere. In this groovy 1970s paradise "the Candy Man" fits like a crazy supersexy glove, just another reminder that once upon a time stars could be sexy without implying sex; could be cool without being empty; hip without being hipster; and nice to each other without being naively sentimental.

PS - SEE ALSO my capsule reviews for each episode of the first three seasons:

CHARLIE'S ANGELS

Season One (1976-77)

Season Two (1977-78)

Season Three (1978-79)

and
Kate Jackson was my Village (3/09)