For a TV show that only ran for five years, Charlie’s Angels packs a punch like a bikini-wearing big-hair-flicking private investigator. Smith, 80, has now written a memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Called Charlie – she is not, you gather, the type of actor to want to distance herself from her defining project. As I read her book, and speak to her over Zoom, she comes across as sensible, hardworking and optimistic.
Also lucky: loving and supportive parents, agents who seem to appear from nowhere and offer her work, an early hit show, a gift for making friends and getting over heartbreak. Even when she was diagnosed with breast cancer more than 20 years ago, terrifying as it was, it was caught early and successfully treated. Her positive outlook seems to extend to the excesses of US TV in the 1970s and 80s (drug use on set only gets a brief mention); her three ex-husbands get off fairly lightly; and any difficulties – her OCD, the men who stalked her at the height of her fame – are not dwelled on.
Smith wanted to be a dancer. By the late 50s, she was attending a dance school in Houston, where she grew up, which was run by Patsy Swayze (mother of Patrick, who would go on to be a successful actor, but was then around seven and, Smith says, “an absolute doll”). She describes an idyllic childhood – happily married parents and a Methodist minister grandfather who was a steady and reassuring presence.
Her dad was a dentist and “gave me my work ethic”; her mother was a “goddess of love – she just made you feel No 1”. Smith recalls: “Whatever I am happened in that secure family they provided for me – morals, ethics, values.” Downtime was spent at the family farm in Texas: “Two hundred acres with the San Marcos river running through it. It was life at its best.” But her childhood was also when her compulsive behaviour started.
She would pray obsessively, thinking it would keep her grandfather safe; later, she would do the same when her two children were born, and she says it still flares up in times of stress. After leaving school, Smith convinced her parents to allow her to go to New York to train as a dancer. Her father insisted she live at the women-only Barbizon hotel, one-time home to Sylvia Plath, Grace Kelly and Joan Didion among many other notable women.
I was in hose and a dress and a pair of heels. And boys could not go above the mezzanine.” It must have been exciting to have been a young dancer in New York in the late 60s? But also a lot more accessible than it is now.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
