Paul Michael Glaser Brags: Women Beg Me For It!
It happens all the time . . . if you just happen to be a superstar sex idol! Ask John Travolta, ask Henry Winkler, ask Paul Michael Glaser—ask them exactly what their fans want of them, ask them exactly what their fans, fantasize about them, ask them what their fans literally beg for in their letters!
Just recently one of Screen Stars’ reporters was nearby when mail call was announced on the set of Starsky And Hutch—usually all the fan mail for both Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul is handled by a special office with people from Universal Studios working hand in hand with the boys’ P.R. people. When possible the average of 30,000 fan letters are answered by this staff, with them deciding which letters require a personal response, which are put into a kook file, which are put into a “follow-up” bin and which are shown directly to Paul Michael and David. Usually, most of the letters never get into the hands of the actors—it would take too much time for them to actually get involved with them—but on this particular day, one of the staff members thought Paul Michael would be interested in one of he requests.
As usual, Paul Michael was preoccupied when the letter was handed to him; he had just finished a very intense scene with David Soul and was busy picking apart the interaction between them. At first he held on to the letter and ended up using it as a prop as he was explaining to the director why he felt they should reshoot the scene. From one hand to the other the letter travelled, but Paul Michael never really seemed to know what it was he was holding. Then he flung it onto a table, almost as if it were burning his fingers. His conversation with the director continued going from discussion to argument within a matter of minutes. As usual, Paul Michael ended up making his point and the director scurried over to the crew area to tell them that after they came back from their lunch break, they would be reshooting the scene they had spent hours perfecting all morning—and no one seemed surprised!
The conquering hero smiled and only then seemed to notice the letter lying on the table; he picked it up and casually walked back towards his trailer. Halfway there Paul Michael stopped short and let out a hoot: “Oh my God, here’s another one!” It seems that Paul Michael has been innundated with offers from women and girls—from ages 9 to 90—ranging from “Will you please send me your autograph?” to “I would love to show you how I feel about you. Will you please meet me so we can get it on!” Most of the letters are funny, maybe even pathetic, but this particular one seemed to shock even Paul Michael. As a little group surrounded him, he tried to read some of the less graphic parts, but actually ended up blushing, claiming that he couldn’t believe that anyone could have written such a blatantly sexual letter!
Indeed, it’s letters like this one that make Paul Michael feel his entire life is at the mercy of a double-edged sword. Sure, it’s flattering to be wanted, to have women asking for your autograph, a little snip of hair, a moment conversation—but when they start begging for a sexual encounter, a night spent with him, even his baby, Paul, as any man might, feels that women are just begging for it, begging for his love and attention! It’s disturbing, actually a little scary—when you think about it, and you can be sure Paul Michael has thought about it!
“I don’t look at my mail much now,” he admits. “It’s not that I don’t want to or that I look down upon it, it’s simply a question of time. I don’t have the time. Once you start opening it, it’s like a little Pandora’s box—without the stigma attached, of course. Once you open one letter and then another, you really can’t help but want to answer these people who’ve taken their time to write you. It means something to them. Maybe it’s something about you or the show, but it’s important to them—and it’s important to me. Without them, I wouldn’t be there. And every night I do try to answer one or two. I also occasionally try to answer what obviously represents an incredible effort on someone’s part like a huge Valentine’s Day card, etc. Sometimes, a particularly articulate or nice letter will come through the mail and I will pick up the phone and call them.
“So, I try to make the gesture just so that I can ‘sit’ with myself. It’s a strange position to be in. You want to respond much more, though. When people relate this intensely and intimately to you on the screen, they carry that relationship over to a letter. The same thing happens when they meet you . . .”
However, sometimes when his fans actually meet him, the intimacy and intensity only doubles. A perfect example was when a crowd of about fifty well-wishers crowded back stage on Paul Michael’s last birthday. He was surprised and touched as they sang “Happy Birthday” to him, but somewhat embarrassed when a lady fan called out: “Come over here, Paul. I can give you something better than that for your birthday.”
Naturally Paul Michael tried to ignore the remark, but later claimed: “I had my fantasies about stardom. But it wasn’t like this. Before it happens, you fantasize that you’ll perform, you’ll receive public acclaim, people will recognize you, call out your name and it will be wonderful. What you don’t think about is the responsibility that goes along with it. The ‘job’ doesn’t end when the curtain goes down. It continues out into the street, wherever you go!”
As for being a sex symbol, he adds: “I can’t say how much I thought about it, certainly it was never a motivating factor. But when it happens, it can really inflate your ego, make you very full of yourself, or it can humble you.
“When you come in contact with fans, what they offer is an enormous force of positive energy. You can reject this or you can accept it, and make it work for you. I think it would be very difficult to reject it. Acting is a craft, it’s my work, it’s what I do, what I like to do, how I express my life. And to discover that in the course of doing this, which I would want to do whether anyone recognized me or not, I can also attain this response . . . well, it’s very humbling.
“When people stop me in the street to say they like the show, the gratification I feel is immeasurable. It’s wonderful to have people love you and be touched or moved by you; but it hasn’t gone to my head because by my yardstick, I haven’t done anything earth-shattering to deserve it. That’s my reality.”
The reality is, that like it or not, thousands, not millions of strangers have become a major part of Paul Michael’s life. The flattery, the reinforcement of his manliness, his sex appeal is all very comforting, yet it also builds up a pressure. “There are responsibilities in becoming a star,” claims Paul Michael. “You assume a greater degree of commitment. I often wonder if I would be able to put aside what I’m doing, compromise. I often wonder if I am involved in something of enough importance. It’s pretty spooky.”
And as the pressure cooker builds up, it gets spookier and instead of reinforcement from his fans, Paul Michael claims he has experienced an almost octopus-like sensation from them—some of them seem to want to suck the life from him, to lay upon him all their fantasy needs. And when he reacts negatively, he doesn’t mean to hurt or upset them, but just give himself a little breathing room. He’s sorry if sometimes he’s-rushed by fans, ignoring them in an effort to get somewhere, but he feels that sometimes he has to act that way, that “their reaction is: ‘If he doesn’t want notoriety, then he shouldn’t be a star.’ My feeling is that I have to be left alone at times, just like everyone. I’m human. I get tired, restless, moody. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the situation has pointed out the irony of the golden-apple gift of stardom to Paul Michael—you work hard trying to prove your talent and improve your craft and when you have finally climbed that ladder of success, you find a whole new can of worms to contend with. “It’s easy to start believing the legend—that you don’t make mistakes, that you’re perfect,” Paul Michael says. “One say I stopped, looked in a mirror and said, ‘Hey, that’s me. I do make mistakes.’ It gave me cause to meditate on my own immortality and imperfection.”
And it tended to magnify the intensity of the search Paul Michael started many years ago when he decided to become an actor. Now he can point to his paycheck, his superstar status, his fan mail, the crayoned pictures from children fans that decorate his trailer walls as indications of his ego fulfillment, yet something is missing, something that the 34-year-old actor is determined to find. “People say, ‘You have all this money and fame. Why aren’t you happy?’ ” Paul Michael begins. He stops for a moment and thoughtfully adds: “You can’t be happy having a birthday and a funeral every day of your life and a wedding and Christmas and Chanukah, too. Here comes the Christmas tree into your living room. And the next day the tree starts to die, and you can only wear your presents one at a time, and in the back of your head there’s a whisper, ‘Hype. Hype.’ We build it up because we think Christmas or being a celebrity will fulfill us. Starsky And Hutch and the degree to which I have achieved celebrity status only seem to magnify all the aspects of my life. I lived in a world of poles. There’s no middle anymore. And therein ensues the struggle for balance.”
Perhaps it was his recognition that he had to find the balance in his life that led Paul Michael to make the decision to leave Starsky And Hutch. It’s not that he thinks he’s such a hotshot superstar that he’s going to make a million in feature films in the next six months. Oh no, he’s fully aware of the trap in that area, too. His experience in making Fiddler On The Roof in 1971 left a sour taste in his mouth and, he claims, forced him to rip up his Screen Actors Guild card, declaring: “I worked in that movie with all those people and their ego problems, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is this movies? This sucks!’ So I left.”
The other road he took led him to television and Starsky And Hutch and the realization that something can be good, of top-rate quality, only so long. After that, it slips into drudgery and becomes rote. In an attempt to spice up Starsky And Hutch, Paul Michael even directed a few episodes, but ended up claiming: “Directing series television only points up more painfully the deficiences of series television. If you work in television long enough, you stop acting and learn shorthand. . . . Television is a power media. It’s made for selling soap. No human being can survive in the face of the need, greed and power of the television bureaucracy. I like money just as much as the next human being. I’m scared as hell, but I’m taking the shot anyway. . . . I feel stifled as Starsky. I’ve done enough of that and gotten recognized . . . and now I want to do other things like movies and live theatre.”
Naturally, Paul Michael’s decision didn’t go over too well with the powers-that-be in the Universal Black Tower, and according to them he will not win his lawsuit to get out of his five-year contract with Spelling-Goldberg Productions. The actor’s attorney Robert Dudnik claims: “He is seeking approximately $20,000 in hack pay for overtime on the series, in addition to asking for his release from his contract. We maintain there are two grounds for claiming he is no longer obligated to perform in the series. They are the failure to pay the overtime and that his contract is illegal because it was drawn up by Spelling-Goldberg so as to circumvent Screen Actors Guild agreements.”
Though the lawsuit has thrown a pall over the Starsky And Hutch set and definitely put a strain on Paul Michael’s once-close relationship with co-star David Soul, the dark-haired, blue-eyed actor feels he must proceed with the fight, a fight, he considers, for his very own soul. Paul Michael doesn’t want to see Starsky And Hutch fail, he doesn’t want to see David Soul left high and dry, but he feels he has to leave. And when it comes down to the bottom line, even most of the members of the Starsky And Hutch team understand Paul Michael’s stand—even though they will all be adversely affected if he wins his suit and takes a walk. No one on the Starsky And Hutch set believes that he’s doing it for money; as a matter of fact. Chuckles Hollum, the show’s stand-in, claims: “Paul couldn’t care less about money. Paul still drives around in a four-year-old Mazda. He’s cantankerous, but he’s a truly caring person underneath. He’s got a pass-along personality. He isn’t selfish. He doesn’t want to keep things to himself.”
What he does want is to be his own man, to make his own mistakes and success. He’s flattered by the reaction he’s achieved from Starsky And Hutch, but he’s also dis¬ turbed by it. You see, from now on, when women beg him for it, he wants to be really sure what “it” is—and whether he really has it to give!
THE END
—BY THERESE JOHNS
See ABC’s Starsky And Hutch.
It is a quote. SCREEN STARS MAGAZINE JULY 1977
