Take another look at that woman on the picket line in front of the engineering school at Northwestern University in Evanston. The one holding the poster with the picture of the helpless little monkey. Does she look vaguely familiar?
Look again at the blue eyes, the sculpted cheekbones, the turned-up nose. That`s actress Robyn Douglass. The love interest in the film ”Breaking Away.” The woman behind the beard in the made-for-TV movie ”Her Life as a Man.” The police lieutenant in the CBS television series ”Houston Knights.” But Douglass hasn`t acted since 1988 when she made ”Home Room News” for the Disney Channel on cable TV.
That`s when a midlife crisis hit her hard.
”I just like said, `major change in raison d`etre.` I had spent 13 years on the road, living the fast life, shooting in L.A., going to parties. I had gone farther than I ever thought I`d go-in terms of fame, money. And I said to myself, `Now what?` It`s like you`re standing at the top of Mt. Everest and you say, `That`s it?` ”
Acting obviously wasn`t it for Douglass, who lives on the North Shore with actor Joel Cory, 53. So she decided to devote herself to her first love: animals. She became ”a spokesperson for the right of all living creatures to exist without unnecessary suffering” and enlisted in the animal-rights movement, a small but increasingly visible coalition of groups that lobbies against everything from wearing furs to eating veal, from hunting deer to using animals in biomedical research.
Louis Sullivan, U.S. secretary of health and human services, recently branded animal-rights activists who interfere with medical research as
”terrorists.” Animal research, he declared, ”has saved millions of human lives.” Sullivan`s statement reflects a set of values-that humans are more important than animals-to which Douglass does not subscribe.
”That`s not part of my belief system,” she said. ”I`m glad someone is feeding the homeless, because I can`t be in all places at all times. I feel like I`m one of the troops, but my assignment is different. When I`m on the picket line I hear, `You treat animals better than people.` That`s not true. I just have a different calling.”
Today she spends ”90 percent” of her time on her cause. She`s on the picket line in Evanston every Wednesday afternoon during rush hour, like the postman in rain, sleet or snow. She is joined there by a few other placard-wielding members of an organization called Concerned Citizens for Ethical Research, protesting two laboratory experiments, one involving cats, the other monkeys.
She protests the sale of ivory by picketing in front of Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in downtown Chicago. She protests the sale of furs by marching on Michigan Avenue on ”Fur-Free Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving. She donates money, she raises funds.
As a grief therapist, she counsels people who have lost their pets.
As a member of the Hooved Animal Humane Society, she rounds up sick, stray, abused animals.
She even rescues discarded dogs from garbage cans. That`s where she found Peaches, a German shepherd whose ears and tail had been doctored in a cruel attempt to make him look like a Doberman pinscher. Peaches is now one of her personal menagerie of four cats and two dogs.
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Douglass, 38, was sitting at a picnic table at a farm in Woodstock, Ill., the national headquarters of the Hooved Animal Humane Society. She had spent the last few days and nights here, cleaning the mud and manure and stones out of horses` hooves, brushing their coats, digging up bushes.
”Whatever needs to be done,” said the group`s founder and president, Donna Ewing of Woodstock. ”She`s not afraid of hard physical work.” On a recent night, when some of the horses got loose, Douglass, in her nightgown, rounded them up.
On this day she was wearing baggy green pants, a society T-shirt, yellow suspenders, and brown Sporto boots. All the better to climb into the pig pen. She was eating cold sausage pizza, drinking cold coffee, and smoking a cigarette. There was dirt under her fingernails.
In a way, the transition from actress to animal-rights activist was not especially difficult for Douglass, who began her life in show business as an extra on the TV series ”The Streets of San Francisco” and took her name from its star, Michael Douglas. She studied improv, first with The Committee in San Francisco, later with The Second City in Chicago. Success came quickly with
”Breaking Away,” the sleeper hit of 1979.
But she never vigorously pursued a film career. She never even moved to Los Angeles. She met Cory when she was studying with The Second City and preferred living here with him to being there where the deals are made.
In Chicago, she has never had an answering machine. When she`s working in her garden, she doesn`t answer the phone, even though Hollywood may be on the line. She says she was relieved when CBS canceled ”Houston Knights.”
The money wasn`t an incentive. She has made a lot and Cory is a very successful local talent.
”People who work would love to live the way she lives,” Cory said.
But Douglass is proud of edging out Kim Basinger for the female lead in the 1982 movie ”Partners,” with Ryan O`Neal. ”It came down to the wire between us.” She came up in the film business with Basinger, Sigourney Weaver and JoBeth Williams. She lost the role of the mother in ”E.T.” to Dee Wallace after an audition with Steven Spielberg in which she was required to bake chocolate chip cookies.
”I knew from the very beginning that acting was never going to be something I`d give my right arm for,” Douglass said. ”I always said I`d be very lucky if I did one project a year. And there were years when I did four, one after the other, and I turned down more than I took. The chimp movie with Sigourney Weaver (”Gorillas in the Mist”), that was me. But the odds of me getting that kind of role are phenomenally small, maybe one in a trillion. I get offered cops and robbers for a jillion a week and I`m depressed. It`s hard to empathize.
”But I was trying to find the reason I`m on Earth. And now I know. I`m supposed to be an animal-rights spokesperson. And the acting, that was God`s way of saying . . . `I`ve got to prep you before you go in front of audiences. You need to work on your language and your body language before you go in front of the cameras.` When I went on John Callaway on Channel 11, everything I ever learned in 13 years came into play.”
The decision to move from acting to animal rights was not without pain.
”The grief I felt over killing my own career was because I hadn`t put it all together. Disneyland-Hollywood, Gollywood-it`s a pretty strong magnet. I had to say, `I`m not going to do that anymore.` It`s just the last three weeks that I can say, `It`s OK.` ”
Yet the decision is not final. ”I told my agent, `If anything comes into Chicago, call me immediately.` But it`s a needle in a haystack. I`m not going to hold out for it.”
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Douglass` interest in animals began, she says, when she was a little girl. She grew up in Redwood City, Calif., where her father was a doctor. She would bring home wounded animals for him to fix.
”I was about 5 years old and walking home in my Sunday school shoes. My mother said, `Don`t get `em dirty.` I found this duck that had been wounded in the throat by a bullet. I picked him up-I got my shoes filthy-and brought him to my father to save, and he did.
”Am I painting my mother as a witch? She`s not. She just doesn`t identify with the victim. I do. I got that from my father. He`d get a call in the middle of dinner and he`d jump up from the table and be out the door if someone needed him. My mom didn`t grow up with animals. All she saw was my filthy, dirty shoes. But she has permanently put away her fur coats. That`s nice. And she won`t eat veal around me. That`s nice, too.”
In 1980, Douglass sent a $5 check to the Hooved Animal Humane Society. She got a call from Ewing, who knew she was the ”Breaking Away” actress, asking her if she`d like to go out on a call. The group sends inspectors out to investigate reports of cruelty to animals. They see animals that have been neglected, starved and abused.
”We saw some horses that were just skin and bones lying on the ground, and these guys are standing there and laughing,” Douglass said. ”Donna said to me, `Get in the car,` because you have to be real careful what you say to people. You`re on their property. From then on, I`ve been with her. I watched and learned the ropes. I`ve had my share of talking to bad guys and seeing icky stuff. At night, the pictures keep playing in your head.”
Said Ewing: ”I try to keep her away from the cases as much as possible. She`s a little emotional. She`ll overreact, and I don`t want her to get us into trouble. Sometimes she`s a little hard to control. She gets blind with rage when she sees an animal suffering.
”She`s a very sensitive person. I think she`s still trying to find herself. At one point in her life she wanted to be a veterinarian. She`s always wanted to serve, and she prefers to serve animals rather than people. I can`t say that I blame her. But she`s obsessed with it.”
”Some people say the animal-rights people are a little nuts,” Douglass said. ”They think a part of us is missing. My problem is my own negative attitude. There are so many evil people, I feel so hopeless. The little drop in the bucket that I do seems so little. The world is an evil place. I don`t belong here. It seems so futile. For every good person I meet, I meet 10 bad ones. Life is very tough and then you die.”
Douglass says she doesn`t believe that anyone thinks she`s nuts; they just think she has ”a distorted view of reality.”
”When it comes to animals, she`ll lose it,” said Cory, the voice of Pop of Snap, Crackle and Pop, and of the hand in the Hamburger Helper commercials. ”She becomes irrational. She`s stopped the car in the middle of a busy road, risked her life and limb and who knows what, to try to save any kind of animal.”
Asked if he thinks her interest may be a little ”goofy,” he said, ”If there`s anything that seems a little goofy to me, I will certainly keep it to myself.”
”Joel`s not an on-the-battlefront kind of guy,” Douglass said. ”He helps, he donates. But he`d rather go to a fashion show fundraiser. He likes it more social. I like it more front-line.”
The two, who have been together for 13 years, are deciding whether to get married and have children. ”That`s the question for 1990,” Douglass said.
”We`re deciding if we`re mature enough to have them.”
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Life has taken a strange turn for Robyn Douglass, but she says it`s not as strange as it appears.
”If people are given a super ton of money, the best or worst that`s in them is going to come out. The worst is, you get involved with cocaine and drugs. The best is, you pull out the cause you`ve had deep in your heart and wished you had more time for-and that`s how you spend your life.”
