Post by admin on Aug 4, 2005 7:27:13 GMT -5
A day on the Airwolf set
Of Course, Her Plans for a Christmas Party Didn't Pan Out: Friendly Jean Bruce Scott seems almost out of place around the Airwolf set...
AIRWOLF: Ernie, Jeanie and Jan reading through the episode-script for the second-last episode 'Tracks'.
"This is not a cheerful set," a young technician tells me. "Never has been, never will be." We´re on location for Airwolf, that CBS series where Stringfellow Hawke and a band of followers zip around the skies in the world´s most deadly helicopter, demolishing bad guys who have mostly Russian accents. This particular location is sumptuous -- a cliffside mansion with marble facades and a bar and black- lined swimming pool and 180-degree view of greater Los Angeles.
Oddly, every one of the cast of Airwolf is locked up tighter than a drum in his or her motor home. Star Jan-Michael Vincent has been arrested several times recently and is on probation for drunk-driving and disturbing the peace. Members of the cast and crew are already telling stories about his erratic behavior at the beginning of this season. In spite of the bursts of bougainvillea and the lavish catered lunch and the spanking new jeeps that career up and down the winding private driveway to the rented estate, the feeling here is grim and sad, something out of "Bad Day at Black Rock."
I´m here to see what the Airwolf people think of Jean Bruce Scott. She´s the cute little lady with the stick-thin figure and the beguiling face and the straw-blown hair; not Stringfellow Hawke´s romantic interest, how could she be? Her chest, were it a state, would be closer to Rhode Island than Texas; her voice rubs along in a pleasantly scratchy upper-register like somebody´s Suzuki violin lesson. No, Jeannie´s more like the girl who sometimes gets to play on the softball team. IF the shortstop has strep throat, and IF her brother owns a fielder´s glove.
Life is iffy for that kind of girl in Hollywood. Jean Bruce Scott has played a plucky Marine Lieutenant opposite Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I.. She had a long term stint on Days of Our Lives. She was stunningly funny on St. Elsewhere as the demented girl Ed Begley, Jr. married, a ditzy chick strongly into bondage fantasies. So how did a nice girl like Jean bruce Scott end up on a show like Airwolf, stepping our in a high wind from a shack at the end of the tarmac, whinnying, "We were worried about you, String!" as Jan-Michael Vincent grunts back, "Well, yeah..." before the cut to commercial?
Here on location, two guest stars lounge between takes -- David Spielberg, an accomplished veteran, and Ricky Wittman, a pleasant young man with Down´s Syndrome. They play father and son, and the boy calls the actor "father" time after time. The joke wears a little thin. The young man bite´s his "father´s" tie. "Hey!" the actor says mildly, "Easy there."
Alex Cord (Airwolf´s deboniar Michael Archangel) comes out of his motor home to stand in line for lunch. "Jeannie is completely professional," he says. "And she´s more than that. A few weeks ago, I was slightly injured. Well, you know when something like that happens, people call up. They say, ´Is there anything I can do ?´ But Jeannie called up every day. She wanted to shop, run errands, to do anything I needed." Alex Cord thinks. Then he says, "There´s another thing about Jeannie. She knows her lines. She comes prepared. She´s a professional. I like it when people know their lines. When a negative energy starts, it´s easy to get angry." Cord´s courteously unspoken message is that there´s someone on the set who doesn´t come prepared, doesn´t know his lines.
By now it´s lunch time. In the three-car garage of the estate, table have been set up to accomodate the crew. Ernest Borgnine -- Dominic Santini, father-figure to Stringfellow -- is hunkered down over two full plates of food. "Not now, honey. After I eat, OK?" But he disappears after lunch.
I find another technician and talk to him instead. "Jeannie´s done a lot for the show," he says. I´ll tell you why. You won´t find many parties on this set. People keep to themselves. Last Christmas, Jeannie tried to organize a party. Of course THAT didn´t work out, but she went out and found a separate Christmas present for each member of the crew. Thing she made, like needlework or candy, or things we needed. A couple of days after that, Mr. Borgnine gave out some of his wife´s cosmetics and Jan did something, I cant remember what, but she shamed them into it."
By now, it´s close to three hours I´ve spent up here. Vincent is still in his motor home. I knock on Jeannie´s door and ask if I should roust him out, but she says, "Oh, no! He...well, I wouldn´t do that."
So I talk to Jeannie instead.
She´s a child of the military, born to a family who liked driving across the country in three days. Her father, after a stint in the infantry, was put in charge of Army recuritment at various cities in the Middle West. His family would camp out, wherever he was recruiting, for three months at a time. "Our camp became, well, people came to look at our tent. My sister Roxanne and I would tie off the tent stakes with torn sheets. We´d rake around the tent! We´d trench around the tent!"
How old was Jean Bruce Scott when she got this military training? "Oh, that would be when, gee, when I was between the ages of 3 to 7." Then she looks up, worried. "Listen, my father is a teddy bear now. We just gave him a lot of power then."
When Jeannie´s father retired, the family settled down into "mother´s dream house" (in California´s San Gabriel Valley), but Jeannie had severe trouble getting through first grade. "I spoke my own language. Nobody but Roxanne could understand it."
Does she remember any examples? "Only one," she says, blushing. "It would be like -- ´De doody daddy dippies?´ That would be, ´Did you see Roxie´s slippers?´ But once my father noticed it, he spent six hours a day with me the whole summer after first grade. He would put a pencil in my mouth so I´d enunciate correctly. The next fall I went into a gifted class."
By the time she was in high school. Jean Bruce Scott was in the marching band. She was a song leader. The first freshman ever in the Girls League. A varsity gymnast. Working in Costa Mesa -- for, by then they had moved again -- in community theatre. She was 5-feet-7 1/2 and weighed 87 pounds; she was "too busy to eat."
Jeannie entered a beauty pageant and didn´t win, but some of the staff of Teen magazine were there and brought her down to Malibu for a shoot. Someone said, "Should we cover up the freckles?" But later, after Jeannie had met Nina Blanchard of the top modeling agency, Blanchard would reassure her, "Your freckles are worth a million dollars! You´re going to work forever."
After graduation, Jeannie decided to to to New York to try big-time modeling. She stayed about two years, living in a brownstone with an uncle who was a police detective. "As I model, I worked. I did catalogues for Simplicity and McCalls. I worked for Seventeen and Mademoiselle, but I was in the shadow of Patti Hansen. I didn´t get the cover of Seventeen or Glamour. That was my heartbreak then.
In 1975, Jeannie went back to California to try acting. It took a while, but eventually she got a part on Days of Our Lives. She played the double role of Angelique the Nun and Angel the Floozy, opposite Jack Coleman, who turned out to be (pre-Dynasty) the Salem Strangler. "All I wanted was for those two sides of my character´s personality to come back together so she could marry Jake, her boyfriend. I was so tired! I had scenes opposite myself. I did my own makeup, I was memorizing thirty pages of script a day..." She became very ill, fainting everytime she stood up, and finally left the show.
Then came a life of television pilots, auditions against those other girls "who had all the breasts;" her stints on Magnum and St. Elsewhere. "I loved being married to Ed Begley, Jr.," she says wistfully, "but my agent told the producers that I had an offer for a movie. The next week I was written out of the show. They´re very strict that way."
Jeannie says it´s wonderful working with Alex Cord ("He´s a real gentleman.") and Ernest Borgnine ("He´s always prepared and he´s such a kind man.") and not until later do I realize that when I asked about Jan-Michael Vincent, Jeannie diverted me with a story of a husband she had once; she doesn´t want to mention his name because that would invade his privacy, but he was a writer and did very fine work.
Outside, on the set, it´s been three hours since lunch, and there hasn´t been an inch of film shot. Ernest Borgnine comes by and asks, "Oh my goodness! Are YOU still here?" About Jeannie he says, "She came like a pleasant surprise, and, like a pleasant surprise, she stayed. She´s got a wonderful little sparkle. She´s a good professional. She knows her lines and comes prepared. In this day and age, people often learn their lines on the set as they go along..." Does Borgnine enjoy the show? "Sometimes I wonder if I do, really."
Bernie Kowalski, new executive producer of the show, accompanied today by a network adviser, says, "Jeannie will have a bigger part of the show this year. She´s going to be our Sally Ride. She´ll be able to do anything that Jan can do. And she´s going to be prettier this year -- more feminine. We´ve got her new clothes and she looks very nice in them. Don´t you, Jeannie?"
Four and a half hours, and the Vincent mobile home is still quiet. Can´t I just go and knock on the door? Jeannie, Kowalsi, even the network adviser, look apprehensive. It´s finally time for a scene. Vincent emerges, and is whisked up by jeep for a "tag" where he, Borgnine, Alex Cord, Jeannie, the guest star and the boy with Down´s Syndrome sit out on the terrace and discuss the defeat of this segment´s villans. There are several rehersals, and the boy is understandably rambunctious. Vincent shouts at him, "Hey, hey, hey! You listen, and don´t talk." Nobody carries a script but Vincent.
Finally, it´s my turn to talk to the star of Airwolf (who, if you watch the show carefully, has curiously little to do). Vincent takes me into the by-now semi-dark garage where, earlier, the crew had lunch. His breath smells strongly of alcohol. His eyes are startlingly wide. He leans his head on my chest and leaves it there while I interview him.
"What do I think of Jeannie? She´s, ah...she reminds me of me. She´s so honest and innocent. She cared. She wants to do right. I´m a gentleman. I´m a wacko and sometimes I make...YOU GOT A TAPE RECORDER ON YOU?" After thoroughly frisking me, he continues. "She may misunderstand my coldness. My holding back. Ernie´s the award-winner, right? She´s probably as bent as me. We...we needed a girl on the show."
We go back to the waiting group, where tight smiles are the order of the day. Vincent grins at us all and recites, "He wouldn´t sit, he wouldn´t beg, he wouldn´t heel! Such a bad dog! But such a LOVELY puppy!" Then, in an entirely different tone, he says to Jean Bruce Scott, "You got a motor home for YOURSELF this year..."
A few weeks later, Jan-Michael Vincent is arrested outside his Malibu home and charged with battery, specifically with punching a woman, breaking her nose and splitting her lip. There´s concern about whether the show will shut down. Members of the cast and crew begin to recall that last year Vincent kept people waiting on the set for three and four hours on a fairly regular basis; that he was causing problems even then....
When I call Jeannie, all she´ll say is, "I just hope we can all keep our jobs." Isn´t she angry? Doesn´t she want to nail the guy? "Well, he did give me a bad case of strep throat once. I think that´s all I can say."
