“We were just three girls hoping to find an audience, and boy, did we find an audience,” the actress tells PEOPLE of the iconic crime drama
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NEED TO KNOW
- Jaclyn Smith shares how Charlie’s Angels brought instant fame and changed her life overnight
- She reflects on the strong sisterhood she shared with costars Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson
- Smith recalls dealing with fame’s challenges, including stalkers, security concerns and the pressures of public scrutiny
When Charlie’s Angels premiered in 1976, the lives of its stars Jaclyn Smith, Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson changed overnight.
“You knew you weren’t going to go in the grocery store anymore and not be Jaclyn Ellen Smith,” Smith, 80, tells PEOPLE. “We were just three girls hoping to find an audience, and boy, did we find an audience.”
Despite the show’s massive success, Fawcett, who died at age 62 in 2009, left after just one season to pursue more dramatic roles and was replaced by Cheryl Ladd. When Jackson, 77, left after the show’s third season in 1979, she was replaced by Shelley Hack. Hack was replaced the next season by Tanya Roberts.
Though Smith was the only Angel to appear on all five seasons of the show, her bonds with Fawcett and Jackson remained close in the years that followed.
“After the applause, the friendship was still there,” she says. “We all loved one another — there was no competitiveness. That sisterhood was strong.”
Now, in the new memoir I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, out Sept. 8 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, she opens up like never before about what nobody ever saw on TV. Read an exclusive excerpt below.
Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty
I’d been close to extreme fame while working with stars like R.J. and Dennis Weaver. But this was something else. It was fantasyland. Everything was thrown at our feet, all because of the characters we played on TV. While I enjoyed it, I also wondered, Can this really be happening? Do we deserve this? Is it going to last? It was all a bit shocking for a girl from Houston who thought that she was going to end up opening a ballet school for kids. But I guess some things are just meant to be.
From the outside, people see the glamour and riches of fame, and there was plenty of that. But when you’re on the inside, you feel a strange disconnect. You’re still the same person you were before you became a household name. You have the same feelings, the same stresses, the same ups and downs. As a celebrity, you’re constantly judged. You try to fulfill everyone’s expectations, and there is a lot of pressure to that.
Success extracts its price. Fame doesn’t erase vulnerability — it magnifies it. It teaches you how visible your vulnerability truly is. Fame is a bubble that takes away your privacy. But it’s only a trap if you believe that you can’t survive once that bubble pops. To me, fame doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.
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Behind the scenes, in the refuge of our motor homes, we leaned on one another. The set was our sanctuary, the place where friendship took root under the hot lights and long hours. We laughed easily; we worked hard; we trusted each other with our exhaustion, our fears, our private doubts. That trust mattered. It kept us steady when the outside world grew too loud. We were all on the same wild ride, so we each understood what the others were going through. Many of the things that were written about me in the tabloids were outlandish lies, and they bothered me. There were rumors about my social life, like how I was a bigamist with two husbands. According to one rag sheet, I was hiding my out-of-wedlock newborn in my motor home on the set, a particularly upsetting lie to read about myself considering my deep desire to have children.
Some tabloids tried to drum up conflict among the three of us. For example, they liked to perpetuate this idea that we were jealous of each other. Not true. Another rumor was that we fought each other for more screen time. It was just too predictable to try to pit women against each other. The truth was, we fought for each other to have less screen time. One of Aaron’s tenets was that his stars appeared on-screen in every scene. The more popular we became, the more power we had, and we started to demand that one or the other of us didn’t need to be in a certain scene. And then that lucky person could go take a nap. Our decisions were made by committee, and we stood by one another.
Our shoots turned into mob scenes and security became an issue. Aaron hired guards to keep the crowds under control, but occasionally they got unruly. One man climbed over the gate and insisted to the guards that he was my husband. When confronted with the facts — I was no one’s wife — he said that we’d gotten married via telepathy. This same man showed up at my house one day, so I filed a restraining order against him. It wouldn’t be the last.
Kate and Farrah had their share of stalkers too. Whenever we got a piece of fan mail that seemed unhinged, we put it into our “nut file.” One of our nuts had also written a threatening letter to President Jimmy Carter, and in it mentioned his obsession with me. The Secret Service came to the production office and asked for the letter he’d written me so they could analyze it. They also gave me a terrifying warning: “You should be aware that this guy is mentally unstable. You might be in danger.” Thanks for the heads-up.
After that, we had on-set security guards around the clock. Men with real guns were posted outside our motor homes. When we traveled for the show, we were each assigned our own bodyguards. Kate didn’t love the invasion of privacy. Once, when we were on location in Hawaii, she gave her security guards the slip by diving into the ocean.
Excerpted from I ONCE KNEW A GUY NAMED CHARLIE by Jaclyn Smith. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie will be published on Tuesday, Sept. 8.
Read the full article here
