RIGHT UP HER ALLEY
IN HER NEW SITCOM AS HEAD OF A LINGERIE EMPIRE --AND IN
HER REAL LIFE--A FUNNY LADY TAKES CHARGE
BY CATHY BOOTH/BURBANK
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It's 11 a.m., and all is quiet on Stage 25 of the Warner Bros. Studio in
Burbank, Calif. Backstage, the bagels and breakfast makings are laid out
for the cast and crew of NBC's new sitcom Veronica's Closet. But the
star is nowhere to be seen. Kirstie Alley is in her trailer, squealing
with laughter and slurping away on a juice concoction of white grapes
and lemons. She is on Day 3 of a 40-day juice-and-fruit fast and
proselytizing the cleansing merits of her diet. "Taste it!"
says Alley, popping up from the sofa to pour a portion. "Isn't it
great?"
In real life, Alley is just like that drink, which goes down
sweet--until the lemon tang hits. Ted Danson,
who played Sam the horny bartender to Alley's sexually frustrated
Rebecca Howe on Cheers, affectionately calls her "the biker chick
from hell." She will say and do anything for a laugh, as Americans
learned in 1991, when she thanked her husband Parker Stevenson for
"giving me the big one" as she picked up her Emmy for Cheers.
Her Hollywood pals didn't know what to think recently when she publicly
ribbed her buddy John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston. "I said
John had puppies' feet hidden in his freezer and that his wife drank
breast milk for breakfast," she says, shaking her head in disbelief
at the silliness. "I wanted to make him laugh, and I did. But it
came out weirder than I thought it would. Jay Leno asked me if I'd been
talking to Marlon Brando lately!"
Alley's new series, Veronica's Closet (NBC, Thursdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.),
promises more laughs. She stars as the glamorous Veronica
("Ronnie") Chase, a lingerie mogulette saddled with a
philandering husband and cheeky employees who suggest she pose for the
company's ads by having her head morphed onto someone else's body. As
she did on Cheers, Alley mines the insecurities behind her character and
herself. "Ronnie," she admits, "is an exaggerated version
of me"--right down to the weight problems and the messy public
divorce. Alley separated last year from Stevenson, her husband of 13
years, and Veronica's Closet will mine that subject thoroughly, along
with dieting.
Nestled in NBC's coveted half-hour slot between Seinfeld and ER, it
is the odds-on favorite to become the fall's new hit sitcom. But can
Alley really succeed where other Cheers alums have failed? Though Kelsey
Grammer's Frasier is a ratings hit for NBC, Ted Danson (Sam),
Rhea Perlman (Carla) and George Wendt (Norm) have all bombed in series
over the past year. NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield
signed up Veronica's Closet for only 13 episodes, but he notes that
Alley's producers, Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, the
creative team behind Friends, weren't just handed the precious post-Seinfeld
time slot as a gift. "On other shows, producers drink wine and
congratulate themselves after each take," he says. "Not these
guys. They keep rewriting. The reason their shows are so satisfying is
they are never satisfied."
Alley herself isn't easily satisfied. While most of her Cheers mates
made a run at new TV shows, she ruminated and shopped for the right
producers. "I made a decision I wasn't coming back to TV unless I
could do as good a job--or better--than Cheers," she says.
"I'd take a meeting with someone and come out and say, 'Ugh, life
is too short.' They were all too serious." She knew she wanted to
do another sitcom, and she had strong opinions about the kind of
character she wanted to play. "I wanted Ronnie to be rich but a
loser. I figured there had to be humor in that," she explains.
"I wanted to do a woman who was struggling with life, struggling
with love, struggling, struggling, struggling. That's what I do best,
after all," she says, looking up, one black eyebrow arched in wry
amusement.
Perlman, a friend since their Cheers days, describes Alley as
"totally nuts, out of her mind. She's beautiful and wacked out at
the same time." Alley's comedic strength, says Perlman, lies in her
ability to play "a woman on the edge, about to fall apart,
emotional yet with a sense of humor." Says Danson: "The more
nervous she is, the more outrageous she gets. It's one thing to be
terrified and stick your toe in the water but another to be doing a
cannonball into the water. Kirstie does cannonballs."
That kind of enthusiasm has kept the actress busy in the four years
since Cheers went off the air. She earned an Emmy for her dramatic work
in 1994's TV movie David's Mother. On Oct. 5 she does a comedy turn in
Toothless--a fantasy made for ABC's newly revived Wonderful World of
Disney--playing a workaholic dentist turned tooth fairy. And at
Christmastime, she will co-star in movies with two famous and funny
Allens: Woody in Deconstructing Harry and Tim in For Richer or Poorer.
The normally reticent Woody Allen, who had never seen Alley until he
chanced upon an old Cheers rerun while surfing the TV for a baseball
game last year, says he knew immediately he wanted her to play his
neurotic psychiatrist ex-wife. "The character called for a kind of
earth motherly, uh, what do I mean, voluptuous, well, not exactly
voluptuous"--he laughs here, realizing that he is probably asking
for trouble with this description--"but a buxom earth-mother type.
She delivered in spades. She's exceptional in it--you'll see. A real
standout."
Her personal life is equally fulfilling. She's in a thriving
relationship with new flame James Wilder, 34, one of the ex-hunks from
Melrose Place and her co-star in the yet unreleased film Nevada. She
recently moved into his home in the Hollywood Hills, along with the two
children she adopted with Stevenson (William True, soon to be 5, and
Lillie Price, 3), and a menagerie of assorted cats, dogs and birds.
"It's like Doctor Dolittle in the city," she says. "I
can't believe a man would open his arms to this road show," she
laughs.
Alley, now 46 (though she denies it), credits much of her good
fortune to her participation in the controversial Church of Scientology.
Growing up in Wichita, Kans., she dreamed of running off to Hollywood
even though she was a daddy's girl (hence the large role of Robert
Prosky, her dad on Cheers, as her fictional father in the new series).
Sidetracked by cocaine and interior decorating, she dropped out of her
acting studies at the University of Kansas. Then she read L. Ron
Hubbard's Dianetics, which Alley believes changed her life by making her
take responsibility for herself. "I thought, O.K., this is either
the world's biggest scam or it's fabulous. I stopped working, quit my
job, and I drove my car to California to be a Scientologist."
A member since age 26, she dismisses claims in the press that
Scientology officials choose her roles--or approve her interviews. (The
organization sued TIME in 1992 over a damning expose about the church's
tactics; the lower court ruled in favor of TIME.) "Scientologists
are not sheep. They buck the system," she argues. Earnings from the
Look Who's Talking movies she made with Travolta, another famous church
member, helped her open a Scientology mission in her Kansas hometown
where nonmembers can learn to read. "People don't see the
good," she says in disgust.
Twelve hours later, with midnight fast approaching, Alley and the
cast are still on Stage 25 finishing up Episode No. 5, in which her top
executive, Olive (Kathy Najimy), persuades Ronnie to be a role model for
a new anatomically correct doll (its breasts sag, and its butt
protrudes). By this time, everybody is getting punch-drunk tired. Alley
starts singing "I am woman, I am role model, I am whore." No
one seems to notice. She smiles. She's happy, really happy, to be back.
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WHERE EVERYBODY USED TO KNOW THEIR NAMES...
RHEA PERLMAN (CARLA) Her blue-collar-goes-to-college sitcom, Pearl,
failed after just one season
WOODY HARRELSON (WOODY) He's left TV behind for movies like The
People vs. Larry Flynt
TED DANSON (SAM) Ink dried up last year,
but he made a mark in the mini-series Gulliver's Travels
GEORGE WENDT (NORM) A 1995 sitcom flopped, and he was just written
out of The Naked Truth
JOHN RATZENBERGER (CLIFF) A few cameos on sitcoms but busier as a
director and producer
KELSEY GRAMMER (FRASIER) Kept on playing the part in his own series,
winning two Emmys