Robert Wagner: TV's Prime-Time Insurance
He's the small screen version of Cary Grant - even, sometimes, in real life
November 1985
Robert Wagner must have the best legs in the world: long, svelte, enticing limbs, with rounded calves and slightly dimpled knees. They are better than his old friend Betty Grable's ever were, dotted as they are with fetching beauty marks, including one coy black circle under his kneecap. His legs are as tan as his face, their color set off by the pristine, white terry-velour robe he is wearing in his Washington D.C. hotel suite, where he's relaxing off the set of his new TV series, Lime Street.
One of the three phones is ringing. A minion of Elton John's is on the line. Wagner wants some of Elton's music for Lime Street. Into the mouthpiece, he breaks into the classic stripper's theme: da da DA, da da da DA, da da DA, accompanying his humming with a sort of sitting dance, crossing and uncrossing those gorgeous legs in time to the bump and grind.
Now, seeing an actor ham it up would not, under most circumstances, be terribly remarkable. But coming from Robert Wagner, the performance is startling. This person has nothing to do with the elegant Alexander Mundy of It Takes a Thief, the wry Pete Ryan from Switch, the worldly Jonathan Hart of Hart of Hart, or even J.G. Culver, the dashing but domesticated insurance investigator Wagner plays on Lime Street. Nothing to do with any of the smooth personas the fifty-five year old Wagner has so successfully cultivated during his long TV career - or, for that matter, with the tragic widower the world saw after the death of Natalie Wood, in 1981. The suave and charming Robert Wagner one would expect to meet surfaces only later, as he pours Pouilly-Fuisse for the guests in his suite, offers Brie and crackers, lights cigarettes. And according to those who know him, this is the private Robert Wagner. Says his good friend, the novelist Gerald Browne, "In real life, he's more like Cary Grant than Cary Grant himself."
Lime Street co-producer Harry Thomason attributes Wagner's enduring popularity to his "incredible sex appeal. But its not rough and ready allure. Its the champagne kind."
If that's the case, it's domestic bubbly, mass-market effervescence. Like Ralph Lauren's polo-pony insignia, prime time's prime steed offers the possibility of sharing surface elegance with "the regular folks," as Wagner calls them - the loyal Bud drinkers, the A&P shoppers. "I think a lot of people would like to be doing what I'm doing up there," says Wagner. "And for whatever reasons, people think they can imitate me. It's great for me, that kind of Identification."
Life was not always this good. It took time for Wagner to find his niche in the entertainment world. As a studio contract player in the Fifties, he starred in a lot of bombs (although the fans loved his looks). "In those days, I just did what I was told. You'd get your call in the morning: go to this lot, that lot. Sometimes, I didn't know what movie I'd be doing before I got there." Mention the film he considers his worst, 1954's Prince Valiant, and he howls. "That damned wig. With my body stocking and my rubber calves and that wig! All the people from New York acting schools use to sit in the balcony for that one. To throw popcorn!" R.J., as his friends call him, is uncharacteristically slurping his coffee. "Oh I forgot my singing sword! How could I?"
It was the upstarts in TV who gave him a chance to perfect the Wagner image. "In the Sixties, everybody was an antihero. There weren't many parts for a guy like me. I was under contract with Universal. Chairman of the board Lew Wasserman called me into his office and pulled out TV Guide. "This is where you belong' he said. 'You'd be great in this medium.'" And thus was a TV Legend born.
IT TAKES MORE THAN SUCCESS TO CREATE a legend - it takes hard times and sometimes, tragedy. Robert Wagner seems to have lived through more than his share. He is still shaken by the death in a plane crash this summer of thirteen year old Samantha Smith, who played his daughter on Lime Street and was the "pen pal" of the late Soviet president Yuri Andropov. "We all fell in love with her the first day she walked on the set," says the actor, who supported Samantha's mother throughout the ordeal. "She truly had so much to live for. The promise of her talent was, frankly, overwhelming. It's hard to grasp, really, that suddenly someone so dear is gone."
He seems surrounded by reminders of Natalie's death. Earlier in the season, while shooting a scene on the Potomac River, the cast and pilot had to abandon a seaplane and swim the polluted waters to a nearby speedboat. The plane, a lightweight Cessna, turned over and partially capsized.
Wagner observed the mishap from the boat. His stunt double, Greg Barnett, was stepping onto the plane's pontoon when the pilot issued the order to bail out. "The good Lord was watching us," says Wagner. "Thank God they could all swim." He doesn't mention Natalie out loud, He doesn't have to.
"For R.J., Natalie was the grand, grand passion," says Gerald Browne. "I don't think there was anybody else for him. Ever since she died, he has become engrossed with every aspect of the business."
If work really functioned as an antidote to mourning, Wagner would be over his losses in a week. There is, of course, his starring role in Lime Street, which he also co-produces. He considers the show a risk, because "the small domestic moments are as important as the chase scenes. The family scenes are what sold me on the show." (Now, of course, with Smith's death, the show's script will have to be altered; so far, the seven episodes that have been shot since the crash have simply worked around her role in the series.) And Lime Street is just part of a production deal with Columbia Pictures Television that also includes "movies, long-term television, several series, half-hour comedies, everything. Total."
There's more. His associate, Carole Fetner, "reads and reads and reads for me. Soup cans, cereal boxes, anything that might make a good movie." Wagner has already optioned one of Browne's novels, 1973's Hazard, about a love affair complicated by the telepathic powers of the participants. He's talked to another old friend, Elizabeth Taylor, about doing a remake of the 1932 tear-jerker, One Way Passage.And writer Joan Tewksbury has asked him to produce her version of Calvin Tomkins' Living Well is the Best Revenge. The book is about Sara and Gerald Murphy, American expatriates who lived in France, the prototypes for the hero and heroine of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night. "Fitzgerald was their friend," R.J. says about the writer's scathing portrait of the Murphys as Dick and Nicole Diver. "But he was a writer first, I guess."
Still, there has to be more to an emotional recovery than work. Off-screen, Wagner's lifestyle surpasses that of his TV characters, and his five-bedroom ranch-style house in West Los Angeles is often filled with the mighty and the mightier. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, his friends since 1969, when they all starred in Winning, are often dinner guests. "Jill (St. John, his constant companion) usually does the cooking," he says. "We're the guinea pigs for her TV Segments on Good Morning America." Cary and Barbara Grant sometimes drop by. And Wagner had dinner with Fred Astaire "just last week."
When they're back East, Wagner and St. John visit her old flame Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, at their Connecticut retreat. Sir Laurence Olivier has been a good friend since the days he cast Wagner and Natalie Wood in his production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other Legends surface: Wagner's mentor, Spencer Tracy; Clark Gable, the guy who got him his first screen test. "A lot of my old friends, well, they're gone," he says quietly.
But he does have his family. Although there was never any possibility of his own children co-starring in the new series - "They'd crucify me for nepotism" - Wagner says he's recommended the business to his three daughters, twenty-one year old Katie (From his second marriage, to Marion Donen), fifteen-year old Natasha (the product of Natalie's second marriage, to producer Richard Gregson) and his eleven-year old Courtney (his only child with Natalie, from their second marriage to each other).
"You should see Courtney's Madonna," he says. "She puts on Katie's garter belt, gets a flashlight for a mike and belts it out, twirling, dancing, lots of lace. I think all of my kids are going to go into show business. But I want them to develop character first, so that if they act, they can develop characters. Still, it's going to be damn hard, you know, being the daughters of Natalie and me."
Wagner tries to make sure his children are at a safe distance from publicity hounds, keeping them "down on the farm, so to speak," among his four cats, several dogs, Arabian horses, chickens, quail and grouse. "It's good for the girls to have responsibilities. They go to all the concerts - Prince, Boy George, Michael Jackson, all the ambiguous, what do you call it, androgynous singers. But then they come home, and they're responsible for the animals.
"I've even built a pigeon tower," he says. "I love those birds." When they were first dating, Wagner gave Natalie a bracelet with a charm engraved, "Wow, Charlie." They'd picked up the expression from On the Waterfront, in which Marlon Brando tended pigeons to keep thawfulul world froclosingng on him.
Later, somebody tries to tell Wagner that the pain of loss eases with time.
"Good," he says. But his voice cracks, as if he's about to cry.
By Diana Maychick and L. Avon Borgo
