Jon-Erik Hexum, the handsome, clean-cut all-American star of Joan Collins' TV movie, Male Model, admits he lives like a slob at home.
"My house is a real pigpen," says Hexum. "I live with four other guys and we're kind of a set of bums. There are beer cans all over the floor.
"It's not that I want the beer cans on the floor---it's just that I don't mind them being there.
"We kick them in the corner now and then. You just have to watch where you're walking at night."
Hexum also has to watch where he lies down at night--because he has no furniture and goes to sleep right on the floor.
"I don't have a bed, and I don't particularly want one," he says. "One guy's got a mattress and that's about it."
The 25 year-old actor (sic--he was 26), due to star in the new fall TV series called Cover Up, says there's a lot of pressure on him from his friends to furnish his house properly.
"People keep telling me to buy at least a coffee table and a couch. But I'm a terrible miser," says Hexum. "It hurts me to look at my checkbook. I can't bring myself to buy a $250 couch.
"Really, I just don't like furniture. Besides, I'm away from the house most of the time---either going to acting classes or going to work."
He adds almost proudly that as bad as his living conditions are, they are a lot better than they used to be.
"I'm way up from where I first started in Hollywood. I lived in a little room, 8 ft. by 12 ft., with two illegal aliens from Mexico who were working as restaurant bus-boys," Hexum recalls.
"There is no particular lifestyle you have to aspire to in order to be a good actor or put out good work. My calling card is my work--not where I live or what I drive."
Hexum credits his miserly ways to the fact that he grew up in poverty.
"My parents were split up, " he says. "My mom supported the family by working two or three jobs, so I grew up with a severe shortage of funds."
But despite struggling to make ends meet, Hexum's mother encouraged him to take on acting as a student at Tenafly High School in New Jersey.
"She did a heck of a lot for me," he says. "She would take me into New York so that I could see a Broadway show, then she would say she was going to visit friends.
"When the show was over, she'd come pick me up and take me home.
"I found out later that she'd go to a coffee shop because she didn't have the money for a second ticket and she was too proud to admit it---even to me.
"But I'm trying to pay her back for all the sacrifices she made for me. I've bought her a house in Los Angeles, and I take her to lots of openings.
"I took her to a fund-raiser recently, and Bette Davis and Gregory Peck were there. She couldn't believe it. These were people she grew up idolizing.
"It's a great kick for me to be able to do things like this for her. She really is the Number One woman in my life."
But apart from his mom, Hexum, who was romantically linked to Joan Collins while making Male Model, says there's no other woman in his life at the moment.
"I don't have a whole lot of time for romance these days," he says.
In his new TV series, which co-stars Jennifer O'Neill, Hexum plays an Army veteran who gets thrown out of the service and becomes a successful male model. He is then recruited by the CIA as an undercover agent, with O'Neill as his boss.
But despite back-to-back TV roles as a male model, Hexum insists that his own modeling career was very brief and insignificant.
"All I ever did were two newspaper ads and two catalogue ads--hardly star stuff," he says.
By the time his new TV series goes on the air, Hexum will also be seen in movie theaters, starring in The Bear, the story of the legendary Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant.