Too Pretty for Her Own Good?

By RODERICK MANN

Jan. 9, 1988 12 AM PT

If the measure of an actress’s popularity can be gauged by the number of people who want to get near her, then Jaclyn Smith rates high indeed.

Fans and admirers are forever trying to scale the walls of her Bel-Air home, peering through the hedges or writing letters proposing marriage. It’s got to the point where her Nut File, in which she keeps such letters, is beginning to bulge.

None of this gives her any satisfaction. Nor, surprisingly, does her towering TvQ, which measures performance popularity with television audiences. That, she thinks, merely tends to influence critics negatively.

What satisfaction she does get comes from the fact that, unlike some other more highly praised actresses, she doesn’t have to go looking for work. It comes looking for her.

Next month (Feb. 7 and 9) she will be seen in the four-hour CBS-TV miniseries based on Sidney Sheldon’s best seller, “Windmills of the Gods,” in which she plays a Kansas housewife who is sent to Romania as U.S. ambassador, an appointment that lands her in the midst of political skulduggery.

Millions will probably watch the show, which is produced by Michael Viner and co-stars Robert Wagner. Smith’s TvQ and Sheldon’s reputation virtually ensure that.

But what about the reviews? What can she expect?

When she appeared in Sheldon’s last miniseries, “Rage of Angels,” in which she played a lawyer, some of the reviews were not the kind you want to cut out and paste in the scrapbook.

Said the Hollywood Reporter: “Jennifer (the lawyer) is played by Jaclyn Smith with a remote elegance that renders fastidiously applied makeup as important to the character’s impact as emotional upheaval. . . .” U.S.A. Today said, “She is far too fragile a beauty to be believable in this role. . . .”

Smith thinks it all has to do with the way she looks.

“Even when I don’t wear makeup for a role, as in ‘Florence Nightingale’ (a three-hour NBC movie she did in 1985), the critics see it there,” she said the other day. “Reviewers look at my face and it’s, ‘Oh, yes, “Charlie’s Angels” (in which she got her first break). No depth.’ It’s depressing, because I think I have made progress as an actress. Without being conceited, I think there are some good moments in the things I’ve done.”

It’s a Catch-22 situation. Since the networks don’t want her to play bag ladies, which might earn her some critical plaudits, she winds up looking glamorous and being dismissed by the critics as lightweight.

She was not the first choice for “Windmills of the Gods,” she says. There was talk of going for an older actress. (Smith is 39.) But in the end high TvQ and Smith’s recognizable face won out.

“To know that it’s your face they’re interested in can be disheartening,” she said, “because, as I say, I do think I’ve grown as an actress. But it’s useless to get upset, to wonder, ‘Why won’t they give me credit for trying?’ You make yourself crazy that way.”

But she has, of course, found favor with some of the things she has done in the past. Her best reviews were for her performance in “Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy,” the ABC movie she made six years ago. And the CBS miniseries “George Washington,” in which she played the first President’s secret love, also earned her praise. But it’s the bad reviews she remembers.

Still, she gets lots of work. She had just begun filming the ABC-TV adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s “The Bourne Identity” in Europe, co-starring Richard Chamberlain and directed by Roger Young. (A 10-day hiatus gave her time to come home for the holidays.)

Her sidelines are lucrative too. Her line of sports clothes, selling through K mart, is doing well, she says. And she still does her Max Factor commercials, all of them directed by her husband, British-born director-cinematographer Tony Richmond.

Richmond, with whom she has her own production company, claims that Julie Christie and his wife are the only two actresses who are perfect from any camera angle.

One property they hoped might interest CBS, with whom they have a three-project deal, was “The Road to Tara,” the life of Margaret Mitchell, who wrote “Gone With the Wind.”

“I’m a Southern girl,” said Smith, who was born in Texas. “And I’d be right for Mitchell. And it’s a wonderful story. But CBS said nobody would be interested. Here’s a highly complex woman who wrote one of the best-read books of all time. You’d think that was interesting, wouldn’t you? They said no.”

But if everybody else seems to know who Jaclyn Smith is, her 5-year-old son Gaston is not so sure.

“You know why?” said Smith. “Because I’m a compulsive cleaner. (Before we began talking, she rushed in and adjusted a table and moved the picture frame.) It’s something I inherited from my father. I just can’t help it, I’m a clean freak. And that’s what Gaston sees, me cleaning and tidying all the time.

“So when he was asked by his teacher at school what his mother did, he didn’t even have to think. ‘Oh, she’s a cleaning woman,’ he said.”