Kate Jackson in red, white and blue (toenails, T-shirt and jeans) sits in her squash court-size Malibu living room surrounded by her Utrillo, her Picasso, her Chagall, and contemplates her new life as a non-perfectionist.
“I’m at a point now,” says the one-time “Charlie’s Angel,” “where I can just enjoy life. I take work seriously but I don’t take myself too seriously. Work hard, be smart and remember there’s no such thing as perfection.” In her new mood, settled into a happy third marriage, she’s even contemplating motherhood.
With a TV movie about to air (“Adrift,” 8 p.m. Tuesday on CBS-Ch. 2) and a series pilot about to shoot (“Arly Hanks,” also CBS), Jackson is back big in the TV business, her 1987-89 bout with breast cancer a thing of the distant past. “If your attitude is positive,” she says, “everything in your life will lead you down a good path. The difference in me from before is that now I don’t sweat the small stuff.
“I’m cured. That’s not Pollyanna talking. I know it in my mind and I feel it in my body. Early detection with a mammogram was the key for me. But not to live life 100 percent because you might die-well, guess what! We’re all going to die. You need to do what John Irving wrote in `The Hotel New Hampshire’: `Keep on passing the open windows’ “-and don’t jump out.
Applying her super-positive attitude to “Adrift,” she says, “It’s an all-round adventure. When I read the script, I couldn’t stop turning the pages. And I loved being in New Zealand for six weeks making it, even though the water was incredibly cold and we worked from before dawn to 9 or 10 at night.”
“Adrift” is a small-craft-warning story in the “Dead Calm” or “And the Sea Will Tell” mode. Jackson and Kenneth Welsh are a couple seeking to patch up a rocky time in their marriage by sailing around the world. “We come upon a boat that’s survived a storm but is now becalmed, and we nurse the man and woman who are aboard back to health. But as it turns out, we should have left them.
“I felt the work was a step up for me. I didn’t have to ask some of the questions I sometimes need to. At one point, I had to go below to-how can I say this without giving anything away?-to check something out. Do I really need to check this? I asked the director. No. Did I hear a door slam? No. Is this where I go below to scare the audience? Right! There’s my motivation!”
Jackson is talking now in her native Alabama twang to stay ready for a possible pickup of her CBS pilot. “Arly Hanks” is an ensemble piece with an ensemble of just one so far, “but the people on the list for the other parts are exciting,” she says.
“I play a woman in New York whose husband runs off with a foot model, and I go back to Arkansas and become the sheriff of a small town. I guess Arkansas is the hip state now. I told the producer I’d do the show purely as a social-climbing thing!”
Jokes aside, Jackson is looking for “Arly Hanks” to appeal to viewers of “Northern Exposure” and “Picket Fences.” “The characters aren’t caricatures. It isn’t the ’80s anymore. The audience in the ’90s is more sophisticated. Since `Twin Peaks,’ they don’t want to see the same old show with different window-dressing. Maybe there are people who would still like to watch `Scarecrow and Mrs. King’ (Jackson’s 1983-87 hit series) and I’m one of ’em. But I don’t want to do it. I want to take chances now.”
If the series doesn’t work, as her “Baby Boom” didn’t in 1988, Jackson says she won’t weep bitter tears. “Work isn’t life or death,” she noted. “I’ve become real aware of that. A TV series is part of life, not the other way around.”
At 44, after spending years as the favorite aunt of all the kids she knows, Jackson is determined to become a mother. Since she married Tom Hart, her third husband, in 1991, she’s been non-custodial stepmother to Hart’s 9-year-old son, Sean.
She says, “I had a miscarriage last year. I was real disappointed. I’m still able to have children, but if it turns out that I don’t, we will adopt. I have no problem with adopting-God knows, there are enough children in the world who need parents. So what if I’ll be a little old to have little ones around?”
Jackson recounts her route to thinking of maternity: “In my 20s, I didn’t think about it. In my 30s, I said, `I’ll think about that later.’ Yet I also always thought I’d probably have kids. It was about six years ago when I realized it had become time to start thinking about it. I wasn’t married at the time and I thought right then about adopting. My first reaction was that adoption wasn’t what I had pictured. After a while I reached the conclusion that it would be great.”
Some of the kids Jackson enjoys being aunt to belong to her old “Charlie’s Angels” co-stars, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett. “We see each other every three or four months. We make dinner at one another’s house. We each make some special thing and bring it.
“We’ve always had a real bond, the kind you get when you come to work together at 6 a.m. and spend all day every day together. If you read those hairbrush stories in the rag newspapers-well, we never threw any hairbrushes.
” `Charlie’s Angels’ was so light that if you threw it up in the air, it would take a week to come down. A lot of people saw it and said, `What is this mindless drivel?’ We said, `You’re right, but we’re three real women here doing it. We’re leads of a one-hour TV show, and you can’t see that every day.’
“The show gave us a chance, as `The Bionic Woman’ gave Lindsay Wagner a chance. I don’t know what you thought of `Laverne and Shirley,’ but look at Penny Marshall now. People who didn’t get it, didn’t get it. We weren’t the characters, we were women in control of our own lives, getting the last laugh on everyone who didn’t understand.”
Jackson has indeed become a staple, with many TV movies and one memorable film, “Making Love,” to her credit. “It was never about big houses and fast cars,” she says of her career. “It’s about having the passion to do things. I imagine I’ll go to school to learn documentary filmmaking. It’s about self-expression.” A newspaper ad for a screenwriting class is lying on a table in her living room.
“If I stick around long enough,” she predicts, “when I’m 70, I’ll get some great character part where I have to smoke a lot and I’ll get an Academy Award nomination.”
