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Date and Issue: Volume 5 / Number 43 / October 24-30, 1981.
To Carter herself, the Lynda-Carter-inHollywood story is clear and happy. She's the young woman who obediently wore that silly Wonder Woman uniform for five years to make her fortune and then gambled her own money to prove she's a gifted singer, a talented actress and "respected in the business."
There's no doubt that her Wonder Woman series was a dizzying financial success, her shows in Las Vegas and concert tours pull in big bucks, and her musical specials for CBS win enthusiastic notices and good ratings. Her first TV movie for CBS also did well, even though CBS didn't seem to mind letting her second one go to NBC.
But Lynda Carter still hasn't brought Hollywood to its feet cheering. Her second musical special, despite those good reviews and an intense advertising campaign in the trade press, failed to win her an Emmy nomination. Husband/manager Ron Samuels says, "We were intensely disappointed."
It might have been the old Hollywood custom of refusing to let anyone out of a stereotype-to some, she'll still be a comic-book character when she's 60. It might also have been that old devil envy. In a business town like Hollywood, you have to expect hurt feelings-however unjustified-when somebody quickly becomes a star and gets to throw around a bit of authority. Says Alan Shane, president of Warner TV, who claims credit for discovering her: "It happens on almost every series. A little girl comes along who's so happy to be allowed on-stage, she can't believe it. But in a year people ask her if she's getting enough money, if her dressing room is big enough.
"Then she becomes a star," Shane says, "but other people on the show aren't stars. The sparks fly. I wish it weren't that way, but it usually is."
With Wonder Woman finally coming to an end, Carter and Samuels decided to change her image with a $200,000 Las Vegas crapshoot. They spent their own money to mount a lavish show built around her singing and dancing at Caesars Palace. There was an impressive Hollywood turnout, with many in the audience obviously looking for laughs. Far bigger stars than she have made fools of themselves on Las Vegas stages.
Carter believes a line In one of the newspaper accounts tells it all: "It said, 'Her room was filled with flowers but, to the critics' surprise, it wasn't a funeral'." Recounting it all in the living room of her new Malibu hideaway, she squashes out a cigarette, sits up straight and asks:
"Why should the critics be surprised? They hadn't seen me sing or dance. How could they decide in advance that I'd flop?" She says that a major magazine was set to display her on the cover at the time of the Vegas show. "Instead they put me on a back page. Why? Because I succeeded. They would have liked the story a lot better if they could have made fun of me."
Veteran Stan Harris, who directed the first TV special, admits, "I figured this would be a cover-up show-that's one where the director has to cover up the fact that the star can't do anything. A lot of other people involved felt the same way, and I'm not even sure Lynda herself was all that confident."
Conducter and arranger Johnny Harris says, "it was a challenge to get the public to accept her, but they did. She's a natural musician; she can do it all-country, rock, ballads:"Carter could almost certainly have a long, solid career simply doing concerts and a few well-spaced musical specials, but she and Samuels always had headier ambitions-theatrical films, a monster album and a series of TV movies to show the world she's a top-flight actress who thinks and cares."
No major theatrical film offers have turned up, and she's still working on songs for the album, but TV movies have been easier, if only because almost any performer with proven drawing power gets to do them. But here again, there's that image problem.
"They don't take me seriously;" Carter says. "They keep bringing me fluff. After Wonder Woman, I could have just kept walking around with less and less on, but it wouldn't have made any sense. Just flirtation and fluff, with a nice wardrobe and a little violence thrown in. Why waste everyone's time even if it gets a 50 share?"
Carter's first TV movie, "The Last Song;" drew 37 percent of the audience, but perhaps a lesser share of the critics. After that, she and Samuels decided to be their own producers and moneymen. Their first effort is "Born To Be Sold" (NBC, Nov. 2), in which she plays a social worker alarmed by the black market In babies. She is determined to do more TV-movies on such serious subjects as toxic-shock syndrome, despite hints from the networks that they'd prefer cleavage and legs and lots of smiles. "That attitude," she says, "makes me mad".
She is definitely not as much at home with a difficult line as with a challenging lyric. One actor says the director stopped the action at one point in a Carter TV-movie and, addressing no one in particular but looking at his star, said, "it would be so much better if we would listen to the other person before we start our own speech."
Not many actors have the nerve, much less the money, to finance their own movies. Carter says, "They try to scare you out of independent production with all these fright stories. What if it rains for 40 days; what if everyone walks out on you; what if, what if ... ?"
Of course, she and her husband are hardly babes in the Hollywood woods. Samuels is known for negotiating what are called "fabulous" deals for such clients as Jaclyn Smith and Lindsay Wagner. He says he raised Carter's take on Wonder Woman from $3500 an episode in the first year to a cozy million a year by the fifth season.
But if they haven't completely conquered Hollywood, neither have they joined it. Carter says: "We aren't part of the Hollywood scene. I don't go to lunch at the Polo Lounge; I haven't been to any of those new restaurants; and we don't have any close friends in the business."
Their best friends are in sports, headed by Carter's closest pal, Chris Evert Lloyd, and Chris's husband John. "We spend about four months a year together;" Carter says, "eithef in Malibu or Palm Springs." They have homes within bicycle distance of each other in Palm Springs, California, where the two women have such exciting adventures as pedaling to the supermarket.
The Samuels ranch is an example of Carter's desire to keep the world at a distance. It's at the end of a dirt road in a secluded area of the Santa Monica mountains, and a visitor bumping along the road suddenly encounters an 18-acre Shangri-La of pastures, sweeping lawns, pool, waterfall, tennis court, corrals and a rambling house faced in native stone.
The Samuel/Carter team reputedly know how to handle money, and Samuels insists it's her doing. "I can make deals and bring It in, but after that it gets boring" Says Carter, "I enjoy the money stuff." Samuels adds that their joint income runs to $3 million a year.
Lynda Jean Carter ("My mother named me Linda because it's Spanish and she is Spanish and Mexican, but I changed it in grade school") was belting out songs in nightclubs with a folk group for $25 a week when she was 15. She joined other singing groups and toured the U.S. for three years, but, she says, "I wouldn't let a daughter go on the road the way my mother let me."
Carter was not a hit as a singer, and she returned to her home town, Phoenix, Arizona, where, for want of anything better, she entered beauty contests. Winning the local competition hands down in 1972, she went on to fulfill a year's duties as Miss World-U.S.A. Having done that grudgingly, she went to Hollywood to take acting lessons. She was soon noticed by Warner TV, on the lookout for a replacement for Cathy Lee Crosby, who did the first "Wonder Woman" TV-movie in 1974. The second, which Carter did in November 1975, followed the original comic strip more closely and eventually evolved into the series.
Carter is bitter about some of her early days: "Everyone tried to discourage me. They said I was too tall, too this, too that. It's easy to forget how hard it was. When I needed encouragement, I never got it."
At 29, she is confident all the best things are still ahead. She might do another series, but not "if it's the kind where I have to carry it alone and work 12 or 14 hours a day. I won't give up my marriage to be on prime-time television." Will she completely shake the Wonder Woman image? "Probably not. It's in reruns every day all over the world."
Lynda Carter looks around her estate, smiles and adds, "I don't mind."
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