Television
Saintly Bernard
After eight seasons on a hit sitcom, Spring’s Crystal Bernard is spreading her Wings with a country CD—and seeing how far she can push her good girl image.
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Most interesting, though, is how she achieves girl-next-door likability despite her copious good looks. Wings producers quite shrewdly made Helen a former fat girl who shed 68 pounds just in time for the series premiere. Trim for nearly a decade now, she recalls being reviled as “Helen, Helen, the watermelon” by nasty classmates. Likewise, the girl next door on Crystal’s CD is invariably humiliated; not once does she get to jilt anyone or meet the man of her dreams. The message is clear: Crystal feels your pain. And if she’s sexy, she doesn’t throw it in your face like some hayseed vixen. Shania Twain and Lorrie Morgan may dance seductively amid Egyptian pyramids and preen in black catsuits, but in the video for “Have We Forgotten What Love Is” Crystal dons forties garb and flings a laundry basket onto the floor for excitement. “It’s not that I would never show my midriff,” she says. “If it’s appropriate, then I guess I’d go there. But just for the sake of goin’ there, sellin’ somethin’, I don’t think so.”
Crystal learned tasteful presentation from Gaylon, who at nineteen was voted best-dressed girl at Baylor University in Waco; she got her stage ease from her father, Jerry Wayne Bernard, a handsome crooner who at eighteen turned down a movie contract with RKO, became a Southern Baptist evangelist, and eventually cut seventeen gospel albums. Jerry, Gaylon, and their girls—Robyn, Crystal, Scarlett, and Angelique—were a sort of Christian Partridge Family: Whenever school was out, they packed a motor home with amplifiers and instruments and traveled to far-flung churches and crusades, where the family sang and Jerry preached.
The Bernards briefly went mainstream in the late seventies, when singer Bobbie Gentry discovered them at a gospel jubilee in Mississippi and hired Crystal and Robyn to sing backup for her in Las Vegas. Their parents, of course, kept a watchful eye on their behavior. “It was so funny,” Crystal says. “We could play Vegas, but we couldn’t talk on the phone.” Nor were they allowed to have boyfriends. In fact, though she was a perennial cheerleader, Crystal recalls a hapless social life: “After the games, everybody’d go to the pizza parlor and drink beer. I went to the games, cheered, and went straight home.”
A straight-A student, Crystal studied acting at Houston’s Alley Theatre and took correspondence courses to graduate from Spring High School South at age sixteen. A summer’s jaunt to Paris and London inspired her to major in international relations and drama at Baylor. But during one school break, while she was performing with her dad in Santa Ana, California, she announced that she would not be returning to Texas. “I was just too close to Hollywood,” she says. “I thought, ‘Man, I’ll never get out here again.’” A church member who managed a Ramada Inn in Santa Ana let her stay in the hotel’s storage room.
A few days later, the five-foot-two-inch blonde was eating lunch at a coffee shop when she struck up a conversation with a man who turned out to be Peter Terranova, the vice president of talent development and acquisition at Universal Studios. Immediately charmed, Terranova met with her again the following week and subsequently asked modeling mogul Nina Blanchard to see her. “I told him, ‘She’s too short. I don’t want to see her,’” Blanchard says, “but he sent her anyway.” After Crystal was turned away at the door, she ran into the bathroom crying. Later, when no one was looking, she ambushed Blanchard and delivered an impassioned speech about her father, about being a singer, about just knowing she could do something. “She had great bravado,” Blanchard recalls. “I said, ‘Well, you’re a god-damned midget, but I think you’re going to be a star.’” Crystal brought the same energy to her earliest auditions, and within a week she landed a Perrier commercial that aired in Mexico. “I didn’t know enough to realize how hard it was out here,” she says.
It was only a year later that Crystal got her first big break, when word of her singing abilities got back to casting maven Ronny Marshall Hallin, sister of acclaimed TV and movie director Garry Marshall. Ronny, who had previously discovered Robin Williams, recommended Crystal to her brother. “I think she always wanted to make a living rather than bang a tambourine in a tent,” Garry says. “She wanted to become an entertainer.” He helped by hiring her to play K.C., the Cunninghams’ cousin from Texas, during the last two seasons of Happy Days. “She was very, very cute,” he says. “She was not much of an actress yet, but like many of the kids on the show, we gave them a start and let them grow until they learned to act.”
From there, Crystal copped a four-year stint as a straight-laced Southern waitress on the sitcom It’s a Living. “They’d write all those corn pone lines for me, like ‘She’s as silly as a snake on her belly,’” she says. “But I’m like, ‘We don’t talk like that in Texas. We don’t kick poo on the ground.’” Still, it impressed then—NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff enough that in 1989 he urged the producers of the fledgling Wings to give Crystal an audition. Eight seasons later, she and her castmates are about to film their 150th episode, a landmark only six other comedies presently on the air can claim. NBC even wants to renew the show for one more season, though its future is uncertain. “The last thing you want to do is write it till no one wants to watch it anymore,” Crystal says.
Fair enough—but then what will she do? She could take her lead from former Wings castmate and fellow Texan Thomas Haden Church, who gave up his supporting role as Lowell the mechanic for his own show, Ned and Stacey, on the Fox network. Ned and Stacey hasn’t won many viewers, though; and anyway, another sitcom, even a winning one, would be a letdown for Crystal. It is more likely she’ll end up in the movies, just like Wings castmates Weber and Daly and Tony Shalhoub, who’ve all made big splashes lately (in Jeffrey, The Associate, and Big Night respectively). She wants tough roles, she says, and she even anticipates taming her accent: “Not all films can accommodate me.”
But as important as a career in the movies is, it may not be enough. “I think she wants to make it in big-time singing for her dad’s sake,” says Garry Marshall. “I don’t think she’ll ever really be satisfied until she becomes a successful singer.” While precious few TV stars ever do cross over, Crystal is not some screen queen flitting into Nashville on a whim; she has been singing before crowds since she was three. Mindful of the credibility issue, however, she says she wants to work with “all the great greats.” She did that on her CD by getting respected country artist Billy Dean to co-write and sing on “Have We Forgotten What Love Is.” The song’s other backup singer, it should be noted, is Jerry Wayne Bernard.
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