WONDERLAND • The Ultimate Wonder Woman Site

Like so many eager newcomers to Hollywood-Lynda got an offer she couldn't refuse...

Looking out over Los Angeles' beautiful Benedict Canyon from her luxurious$850,000 home, which she shares with husband/ manager Ron Samuels, it was hard for Lynda Carter even to imagine back to that time when show business was, in a very real sense, her meal ticket, when almost any role was acceptable because it kept her working. No, it was no shame to have been a hard-working young actress, eager to get a break in the big time in Hollywood. Yet now, as Lynda remembered back, she did feel that one of the roles she had done at that time, when she was only a young hopeful, was indeed cause for shame because it was in a film that the new Lynda who has spoken of her newly avowed religious faith ... experiencing the joy of becoming a born again Christian-would openly reject because of its emphasis on sex and violence. The shame she felt for years over accepting the role caused her so much distress that she was reluctant to talk about it. It remained her own secret, but has caused her such anxiety that recently, in a newspaper interview, she decided to relieve herself of the burden of guilt by talking about it openly and candidly.

The role, that of a gangster's moll in the film Billie Joe And The Outlaw, was one of the small parts Lynda got when she went to Hollywood. She was a smalltown girl who had been raised, in Arizona, to have strict moral values. But in choosing show business as a career, it was obvious from the outset that there would soon be a head-on collision. With all the best intentions in the world, Lynda, nevertheless, was subverted by what she now calls the "Beverly Hills syndrome." Like many young actresses, Lynda had her head turned by the glitter of Hollywood. "For a time," she explains, "all my values were badly distorted. This is the insidiousness of Beverly Hills and the industry. It pretends to be friendly but it isn't."

Part of that friendliness, obviously, appeared in the form of a film role, which to a fledgling actress seemed like a Thanksgiving-dinner to a starving person. With some persuasion, the naive Lynda was cast in the role. The film was filled with semi-nudity and violence-it was just the-sort of script Lynda wouldn't even consider nowadays, but back then, before she fully realized what she was agreeing to, she found herself playing the part. "I was alone, vulnerable at the time," she now explains her decision, though she realizes that that hardly justifies her choice. "It's something I did," she concludes, "and it's something I learned a big lesson from."

In revealing her long closely guarded secret, a weight was lifted off Lynda; yet, in fact, her tale is one that could be told by thousands of other actresses. Jaclyn Smith and Lindsay Wagner, in fact, two of Ron Samuel's clients, have their own stories to relate of casting couches and offers of off-color roles. The plain truth is that when beautiful young women come to Hollywood to get their start in films, casting directors assume, and usually rightly so, that they're desperate and will jump at any role. All too often the young women discover, after having signed on the dotted line of a contract, that the role calls for nude or semi-nude scenes. The parts aren't offered to more established actresses because they've already attained a certain amount of leverage and can afford to reject any part they find unsuitable.

But Lynda blew into Hollywood with high hopes and a lot of naiveté to boot. It wasn't that she was so completely new to show business. From the time she could walk and talk, in fact, Lynda was singing in kid shows. And by the time she was fifteen, she was singing at the Pizza Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona, on weekends for $25. She had large and very definite ambitions from the beginning. She knew that she wanted "not really to be a movie star, but a television star." But working also helped lighten the financial situation at home. Lynda's parents divorced about the time she turned fifteen, and the money she made performing in local spots eased the family's money problems.

As soon as Lynda graduated high school, she went out on the road with a rock group called The Garfin Gathering. The next four years took her all across the country, even to Las Vegas, where, at 19, she played the lounge at the Sahara Hotel. "My name was on the marquee in iddy-biddy letters," she remembers. "But I snapped pictures of it anyway."

Lynda was in show business, all right, but it wasn't quite what she had envisioned for herself, and, in a very real, sense, it went against the grain." I couldn't stand living in cheap hotels, and not having a home," she explains. After a while the touring really wore her down. "One day I woke up in some town in Ohio-by that time they all looked alike. And I thought, here I am, twenty years old, and I've been on the road four years. I couldn't see myself at forty still on the road. I quit."

Lynda's mom encouraged her to come back home to enter a beauty pageant. As it turned out, it was the Miss World contest, and Lynda got to be Miss U.S.A. It was right from the pageant that Lynda decided to head for Hollywood. Being a beauty contest winner undoubtedly convinced Mr. Casting Director that Lynda wouldn't mind displaying a little of her fantastic physique for the cameras. But obviously he had Lynda all wrong. She did the role, but it made her very uneasy. For despite the fact that Lynda has perhaps one of the most beautiful faces and bodies around, she is really a rather shy, ingenuous woman.

"Pure in thought and deed for two thousand years-that's me," jokes Lynda about the Wonder Woman character she's made so popular, yet in some ways the description really does suit her. In the early days in Hollywood, Lynda found out just how tough a town it could be. And she saw that she was perhaps too vulnerable and too gullible-after all, wasn't that how she got herself hooked into a film like Billie Joe And The Outlaw? "I'm too vulnerable for my own good," she explains. "I am destroyed if I find out that someone doesn't like me or is saying nasty things about me. Yet that is the nature of this business."

Lynda found herself in a town with an overabundance of barracuda§. Her vulnerability, her openness and her gullibility were severe handicaps until a very special man came into her life and offered to provide a buffer for Lynda against the harsh realities of show business. His name is, of course, Ron Samuels. And it's a well-known fact that his and Lynda's relationship began as a professional one. With all of Ron's clients he plays the protector; he deals with all those nasty things-like negative publicity, over-zealous interviewers-leaving his clients to be creative and unhampered in perfecting their craft.

The fact that Ron hovers over his clients like a guardian angel has led to accusations that he's manipulative, but Lynda counters, "If Ron is overprotective, it is because he deals with those things that I don't want to handle ... I make my own creative decisions. Ron makes the business choices."

Of course, since their professional relationship became a personal one sanctified by their wedding over a year and a half ago-they've been jointly sponsoring decision-making in their personal life together. At the beginning of last year, for instance, they both reaffirmed their religious faith, Lynda through the Church, Ron through his Judaism. "My life really started last Christmas," Lynda proclaims excitedly, "when I gave myself to the Lord. I had all the fame I could want. My career as a dancer, singer and actress was all that I could ask for. My marriage was working.

"Yet I felt a yearning and emptiness. I just wasn't feeling fulfilled." Around Christmas time, Lynda says she came to a "spiritual crossroads. The Lord came into my life and changed everything.

"The Lord has given me feelings and a sense of doing what's right," she continues. "I'm a different person." A person who has won God's forgiveness by experiencing the true joy of believing in Him even more fully.

Along with that belief in what's right and good came Lynda's anxiety about those early days, caught up in the "Beverly Hills syndrome." Perhaps she feels that her revelation will help some other young actress just starting out who might fall into the same trap and find herself in a film that's sexually exploiting. Lynda's wish to help others has further helped her win God's forgiveness.

At any rate, for the new Lynda, making a mistake like that again would be virtually impossible. Despite the fact that she takes great pride in her beautiful body, exercising every day, she does not believe in exploiting her physical assets. That's precisely why, when given the opportunity to perform in a nightclub act at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, even though they had a phenomenal budget for costumes, Lynda opted for modesty. The outfits boast lots of sequins but hardly showcase her attributes. "I'm determined to make it on my talent," she reaffirms, "not my bosom. Singing is something I've been doing all my life, and I want people to know it."

With that in mind as a rule of thumb, any young actress could brave the pitfalls of Hollywood Babylon. Lynda Carter is a lady who has learned the hard way, through experience, that money is not the be all and end all of life, that integrity and self-respect count a lot more. In making her heartrending confession about a film appearance that embarrassed her for so long, she's contributed to her sense of self-worth. It's a lesson that one day Lynda and Ron will be able to teach their own child and they are planning to have a baby as soon as Lynda finishes with Wonder Woman-so she or he won't have to learn it the hard way.