Texas Monthly Talks

Betty Buckley

Interview by Evan Smith

September 2006

(Page 2 of 2)

Excellent priorities.
Right after I graduated from TCU, I went with Miss America, Debra Barnes, and a group of former state pageant winners on a USO tour to Korea and Japan. We were supposed to go to Vietnam, but some performers were killed right before we went, so it became a trip to all the base hospitals in Japan where all the wounded soldiers were and then on to all of the military bases in South Korea. I was 21. Debra, who was a pianist, was also 21. We were the two oldest girls, and we were taken into all the intensive-care units to meet these young soldiers. It was an eye-opening and sobering and life-forming experience for me. My father had been an Air Force lieutenant colonel and was always an adamant hawk; he completely believed in these things. When I came back, I was a real child of the sixties. Especially after I saw the results of war firsthand, I was like, “Wait a minute. This is bullshit.” And then I didn’t want to pursue anything. I didn’t want to go to New York, because I was depressed by what I had seen.

So what did you do?
I had worked at the Fort Worth Press during college. I did all kinds of stuff—I was the teen editor, the rodeo reporter; I did sports; I did the women’s page; I did news. So I took a job there. Then this agent from New York called to say he had a B. F. Goodrich industrial show coming through Dallas—he invited my mother and me to see it. And they got me up onstage and had me sing kind of spontaneously. The audience went crazy, so they said, “This is great. We’re just going to hire her to pretend she’s a local girl in every city that we go to.” I did it on the weekends. They paid me a lot of money! We went to Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, and Pennsylvania.

When we got to Pennsylvania, the last stop, the agent said, “I’ve got this other industrial show in New York for six weeks. You’ll just come to New York and try it out. If things don’t go well, you can go home.” Again, they were paying me a lot of money, so I couldn’t ignore it. And the paper was like, “Yeah, we’ll hold your job for you—just go!” I got on a train to New York from Pennsylvania and checked into the Barbizon Hotel for Women, and I called the agent. And he said, “You have an audition in fifteen minutes with the American Theater Laboratory downtown. Take your music and go.” And when I got down there, it turned out to be the last day of auditions for the musical 1776. The next morning they offered me a role, and I was in a Broadway show.

And from there you’re launched.
I did that for seven months and then I got Promises, Promises in London. I had an incredible year away.

You’re how old at this point?
Twenty-two, and I was without any real survival skills because I’d been sheltered. When I returned to New York, I went back into 1776 for a while, did an Off-Broadway show after that, started studying acting pretty intensely, and then I did Pippin. I did Pippin for a really long time to pay for my acting classes and my therapy, and from that show I got the film Carrie.

I like the fact that you just dropped “my therapy” right in the middle of that sentence.
Yeah, well, I needed major therapy having come from the background I did. I was conflicted about my right to do what I do—you know, to go ahead and be cool with myself and want what I wanted instead of living life the way I was told I was supposed to.

How did you go from Carrie to Eight Is Enough?
I got a call from Brandon Tartikoff, who was the assistant to Fred Silverman—

Who was running ABC at the time.
—and he said that Diana Hyland, the mother on Eight Is Enough, had died. They were auditioning everyone they could think of for that part, and Tartikoff was convinced that the character I played in Carrie would be the right stepmother figure. They flew me to Hollywood twice and then hired me. Apparently my tests weren’t so hot, but they really thought I was going to be the right person for it.

That’s almost thirty years ago, and yet I bet people still say, “Oh, Eight Is Enough,” when they see you on the street. That may still be one of the best things you are known for.
It wasn’t my particular cup of tea. I was this wannabe serious young actress studying in New York and this serious musician and all that. When they offered it to me, I didn’t think too much about it; I’d never done a TV show, and it sounded like a lot of money to me. Once I got out there, I was in shock. The production company, Lorimar, was a rough group. I wasn’t used to being treated like that.

How so?
I was outspoken. I would let people know when I thought things were not cool. I confronted these guys in Hollywood who thought they were very powerful, and they didn’t like it. As a result of those confrontations, the show got better. They took care of us because I basically forced them. And they should have, because we were making them a fortune. We were a huge hit.

In the end, you got the last laugh. You were really the one big star to emerge from that cast.
At the end of it, someone from Lorimar literally told me, “You think you won the war, don’t you?” And I said, “I’ve helped you make a lot of money. It seems like you should be happy.” He said, “You may have won a few battles, but we will win the war.” He said, “Mark my words: Everywhere you go after this, we will be there first, and we are going to destroy your reputation.” Sure enough, for twelve years, there was this gossip that I was a difficult person.

You seem very pleasant to me.
I’m a good ol’ girl from Texas, and sometimes people misinterpret that Texas thing. I’ve learned to tone it down, but it’s been a drag. It’s the unfortunate aftermath of having gone to the mat with the wrong guys in Hollywood.

It was an experience, right? But it didn’t put you off of Hollywood. You continued to act.
Fortunately, Getting My Act Together caught the eye of Fred Roos, Francis Coppola’s producer in Hollywood, and he recommended me for Tender Mercies. That was incredible. Finally I was working with major, major film artists. And then, right after that, I got Cats.

Do people pick on Cats too much?
Who picks on it? David Letterman? The kind of people who think of it as a punch line are the people who didn’t experience it. Cats is a great show. And that song “Memory” is a gift.

What was being on Oz like? Clearly a very different show from Eight Is Enough.
Oz is my idea of serious TV.

It was a lot more theatrical.
It was more real. I love naturalistic drama. That’s the kind of actor I was trained to be. Oz was one of the greatest jobs I ever had.

I have to tell you, as a regular viewer, that every time I would see you, I kept thinking, “This time they’re going to kill her.”
Me too. I thought they were going to kill me. I’m glad they didn’t.

I can’t help but notice that you have what people regard as a consequential birthday coming up next year.
Oh, yeah.

You often hear the phrase “woman of a certain age” in Hollywood, but you’re continuing to do a lot of important work. Do you feel like you’re being treated fairly by show business in this period of your life?
I always knew that I was going to grow into myself, that my best work would be late in life. And so I feel undaunted by those notions that it’s harder to get work when you’re older, because I’ve always known that it would take my lifetime to grow into who I was, who I was meant to be. So that part is cool with me.

You don’t feel anything approaching sixty.
I just think, “How can this be? I still feel like I’m twelve.”

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