Interview With The Vamp
Morgan Fairchild transformed herself from a shy Dallas girl to the evil queen of eighties trash TV. Now she’s the dastardly diva of a new daytime soap, and we’re happy to report: The bitch is back!
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Okay, Meryl Streep she was not. But Fairchild was so convincing as a steamy seductress that Donald Wildmon, the Moral Majority’s television critic, called Flamingo Road “the rottenest show on TV.” She later starred as a ruthless but foxy modeling agent in Paper Dolls and then as a foxy but ruthless attorney in Falcon Crest. While it became commonplace for professional women everywhere to roll their eyes at the sight or mention of Fairchild—I remember Dallas women saying she had done nothing but give Dallas blondes a bad name—there were plenty of women who secretly loved watching her. Through her television shows, she also let them try on the spiteful, catfighting personality to see if they liked the fit.
Almost everyone who meets Fairchild away from the camera is shocked that she is not the character she always plays, which is perhaps the ultimate compliment to her talent. Even though she unashamedly poses for photographs in fishnet hose and black bustiers, she is not a vamp constantly on the prowl. She has spent nearly a decade with one beau, silver-haired film producer Mark Seiler. She makes a point of being considerate of others: After dinner, she stops to ask her doorman about his head cold. She doesn’t smoke or drink and she says she has never taken a puff of marijuana. In a comment that is certain to someday land her in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Fairchild leans toward me and says, “I’m about as Baptist as you get in Hollywood.”
In the mid-eighties Fairchild made changes in her public image. She became an AIDS activist and a fundraiser for liberal Dem-ocratic causes. She was so impressive on a Nightline episode about AIDS that the producers invited her back. She says CNN’s Crossfire repeatedly tried to get her to debate Charlton Heston, one of the film industry’s most outspoken conservatives. “I told them I had no desire to participate in celebrity mud wrestling,” she says. Still she continues to have an impact on American politics—or at least her hair does. Three years ago, when the hair-impaired Hillary Clinton was in Los Angeles, it was recommended that she visit the celebrity stylist Cristophe. It so happened that Cristophe had just given Fairchild, his longtime client, a new, shorter haircut—and when the first lady arrived, he decided to give the same cut to her. “Here I was, believing I had this new, dangerous look,” Fairchild says, “and suddenly Hillary’s got it.” She sighs. “So much for danger.”
In the past few years, Fairchild has received favorable press for her amusing guest shots on such network sitcoms as Cybill and Friends. She admits she would love to have her own comedy series, but for now, with The City, Fairchild is playing her signature role, a woman with too much money and too little love. Pat Fili-Krushel, the head of ABC’s daytime division, once said, “When you hear ‘Morgan Fairchild,’ you know what you’re getting. She is a business.” Indeed, ABC basically wrote her a fat check and gave her a dressing room. She brought everything else, including nineteen trunks from Los Angeles filled with her finest size 2 designer outfits, everything from Gucci to Thierry Mugler. “I know I am here to be glamorous,” she says. Although a makeup person and a hair stylist are available to help her primp, she tends to do most of it herself. On the day I’m with her on the set of The City at the ABC studios on West Sixty-sixth Street, she takes two hours to apply makeup and fix her hair, which is back to its longer, feathery length.
“You do this every day before you go on camera?” I ask.
“Well, of course,” she says icily, making me realize I have asked a very stupid question.
By the time she is finished studying herself in the mirror, Fairchild has turned into Sydney Chase—beautiful, distant, and disdainful. She’s in complete control, dependent on no one. She’s about to leave the dressing room, but suddenly she turns to stare again at the mirror. It is as if she can sense the slightest imperfection. She touches a couple of frosted strands and says, “There, now my hair is not too nesty.”
The truth is that The City has yet to make its mark as a great soap opera. Many of the show’s characters were originally seen in another ABC soap opera, Loving, which was set in a small Pennsylvania town. But after years of bad ratings, the producers, in a stroke of either brilliant or deranged inspiration, had a serial killer terrorize the town, knocking off most of the characters. Those who were left moved to a building in the SoHo area of New York, which is owned by—ta-da!—Sydney Chase. According to the impossible-to-follow story line, Sydney was a poor college student in love with a bearded musician, until she was swept away by a media titan named Jared Chase. They married, and then he died, leaving her in charge of the empire. But then it’s discovered that he hasn’t really died, and he comes back to divorce Sydney, and then Sydney learns that her adopted son just might be her real son, who she thought had been stillborn, and so on and so on.
Fairchild clearly loves her new role. After years of playing what she calls “campy, over-the-top eighties bitches,” she says Sydney Chase is the first great television bitch of the nineties. “She’s not one-dimensional, and she’s not pampered by men, which is what characterized all the eighties bitch roles,” Fairchild says. “This character has worked hard and she’s smart and, while she’s maybe not the warmest person on television, she’s got a vulnerable side to her that I think is important.” Fairchild understands this kind of character so thoroughly that she ad-libs during filming. In one episode she was only supposed to smile when her former bearded musician lover, back in bed with her, says, “Nothing can be better than this.” But Fairchild raised her pencil-thin eyebrows and added sardonically, “Oh, no, there’s all these pieces of furniture we haven’t tried yet.” The line was left in. “Believe me, there’s a greatness in what she does,” says Catherine Hickland, another blond actress, who plays Fairchild’s rival on The City. “Every time she walks onto the set, you are drawn to her. You want to see what she’ll do next.”
And here she comes now, in a fire-engine red dress and matching high heels, glancing quickly at her script, tossing it aside, and then taking her place on the set beside the man playing her husband, actor Joel Fabiani. In this scene, they are at a party, swapping insults. He asks her what she wants from him.
“Aside from having you off the planet, not a solitary thing,” she says.
Later, she hands him a drink and tells him he’s lucky that she hasn’t added a cyanide capsule to it. “You think you’ve backed me into a corner, that I’m a little desperate now,” she says to her husband. “And maybe I am. But desperate people can do desperate things.”
These are, without question, some of the worst lines I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m a little embarrassed for Fairchild. Give the woman something better to say, I want to shout. She’s a national treasure. She’s the bitch supreme.
But Fairchild is not finished. After her speech, she lowers her eyelids. An enigmatic Mona Lisa smile plays across her lips. Then she opens her lips slightly and gives the actor…the look.
The actor just stares at her. I stare at her. Beside me, all the stagehands are staring at her. “Tomorrow she’s supposed to scream and throw food,” one of the stagehands whispers to me. “God, I can’t wait to see that.”
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