Lorenzo Lamas

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'MOTHER, I WANT TO BE A STAR - I MEAN AN ACTOR'

Falcon Crest's Lorenzo Lamas hit it big early; learning his craft comes more slowly.

It's 2 P.M., Falcon Crest fans. Do you know where Lorenzo Lamas is?

Of course you do. He's at the mansion (or, at least, the Burbank Studios mockup of same) getting chewed out by Jane Wyman. As the dastardly Lance Cumson, eternally itching for his inheritance, he's just bungled a bit of dirty work. And as his make-believe grandmother, the equally noisome Angie Channing, Miss Wyman is letting him have it.

Something's gone predictably wrong with a payoff to the local health inspector. Action! "Why is it," asks Angie, "everytime I ask you to do something, there's a problem?" "Chase happened to come by," whines Lance. "What could I do?" "You leave too much to chance" hisses Angie. "Grandmother, I'm doing my best," he says, pathetically. "I'm not sure that's good enough, Lance. And...Don't give me that Valentino look!"

Cut. Don't give me that... what? A writer assigned to follow Lamas, familiar with the standard Cumson-Channing repertoire of zingers, draws a blank. Then he thinks: could this be a real-life dressing down? Could the older actress, jealous of the younger, handsome Lamas, be putting the upstart in his place?

In short: could Lamas's life be imitating his prime-time are? Hesitatingly, the writer approaches the formidable Wyman to ask her about it. "Oh, no" she says, her icey stage demeanor melting alarmingly. "That's just a little joke we have between us." In no uncertain terms, she expresses her affection, admiration adn respect for her junior partner. Indeed, these are sentiments expressed often by Lamas's colleagues and co-workers.

No. The pressures on Lamas - a man quite comfortable in his niche as soapy antihero - lie elsewhere. There are dark corners, personal tragedies, a rather strange upbringing.

Two scenes: In his personal publicist's office, one day recently, he's interviewed by a comely blonde "personality" from Canadian television. With only minimal prompting he begins talking about his father's recent death from cancer. "The trauma is something that won't go wawy - ever," he says, as the camera rolls. "It's something I'm resigned to live with for the rest of my life." Another day, on the sunny porch of Lamas's Hollywood home, a less attractive reporter asks him about his recent (somewhat messy) divorce. Lamas turns away, flings a beer bottle down the steep hillside. "She was just he wrong person at the wrong time," he says, in a strained tone. "The same voice that told me to marry her told me to move on."

And so, it seems, for the time being, the workplace has assumed a larger significance in Lorenzo Lamas's life. "This is, I guess, my family," he says one afternoon, on the set, gesturing fondly at the cast and crew members busy churning out Falcon Crest. And if that sounds a bit schmaltzy and un-Lancelike, remember this: Lorenzo, the sone of actor Fernando Lamas and actress Arlene Dahl - was practically born on a TV sound stage.

"It was 24 years ago," recalls Jane Wyman. "Fernando was my guest star on The Jane Wyman Theater. Just before the second act, he got a phone call. He went crazy. 'It is a boy! I go now!'" Wyman laughs. "And that," she says, "was the last I saw of him." With that theatrical beginning, was it any wonder that Lorenzo ended up on a potboiler like Falcon Crest?

Considered a smooth, untemperamental professional - though not exactly a threat to Sir John Gielgud - he's achieved stardom early and easily. Did family connections help? Of course they did. But not every handsome Haollywood offspring makes it big his first time around. Like Lance, young Lamas had his inheritance waiting for him. Unlike his inept alter ego, he has stepped forward briskly, smiled confidently and claimed it.

"Did I ever tell you," says Lorenzo Lamas, "that Esther Williams taught me how to swim?" Lunching at a chic Hollywood restaurant, puffing a cigarette between thoughts, he describes his curious upbringing in the very heart of the Hollywood Fantasy Factory.

When Lorenzo was 6 months old, it was only natural that America's Swimming Sweetheart - a dear friend and costar of his father, MGM's in-house "Latin Lover" - should take him down to the backyard pool for lessons. When Lorenzo was 2, his parents were divorced; Fernando later marrying Williams, and Dahl, filmdom's perpetual "other woman," gaining custody of their son. That was par for the course, too "Both my parents were always working," he says without rancor. "So I was raised by nannies and housekeepers. But that was OK; the time I spent with my parents was quality time."

Recalls Arlene Dahl, speaking from her New York City apartment: "His father was always his idol; he'd pick Lorenzo up on weekends." Sometimes, she says, Lorenzo would help out at the parties she threw for friends like Norma Shearer, Van Johnson and Janet Gaynor. "He kept serving everyone a homemade wine-and-vodka drink we called a glugg. He'd say: 'Why don't you have another one? It's very innocuous'," Dahl laughs.

Fun times. "My father's work? It looked so easy," says Lorenzo. "All I had to do was look into his garage. He had a beautiful Ferrari, a 230 GT 2 plus 2. When he traded it in for his Rolls, I could have killed him. I hadn't had a chance to drive it yet!" Alas, by the mid-'60s the market was drying up for Latin matinee idols and glamorous femme fatales. Fernando Lamas began to direct television shows in addition to acting. Arlene Dahl began a second career as a writer of beauty and astrology books; at the age of 9, Lorenzo moved to New York with her.

"I got to know airplanes very well," says Lamas. In the summer, he'd stay with his father in Hollywood or on location. "In 1968," Lamas remembers, "he was doing a movie called '100 Rifles' in Spain - it also starred Burt Reynolds and Raquel Welch. Burt introduced me to stunt work. I had a bit part as an Indian boy who gets shot down by a Mexican trooper - and then falls off a 30-foot bridge into 10 feet of water." Another vaction thrill: a wrap-party hug from Raquel Welch.

Winters in New York were filled with a different kind of excitement. "He had a slight inferiority complex," says Dahl. "I was a troublemaker," says Lamas. "I liked fireworks and things that went boom in the night." A propensity for placing these explosives in locker rooms and teachers' desk drawers got him kicked out of several private schools and into the Admiral Farragut Academy, a no-nonsense military school in New Jersey.

Oddly enough, the kid from Hollywood help up well under the martial law. "It was all dress blues, M-16s, study hall," recalls Lamas. By the time he graduated he was a standout in several sports, third in command of the corps of cadets and academically successful enough to be admitted to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The plan was for the 17-year old Lamas to take a well-earned year off and then study veterinary medicine at UCSB. But a few spare-time acting courses at Santa Monica City College and roles in several student productions got the family genes a-tingling. "Taking those courses stimulated something that had been dormant in military school. I thought," says Lamas, "I'd give acting a stab."

Some stab. According to Lamas, the next few years were tough ones, filled with part-time jobs (among other things, he worked as a health-club instructor, factory guard and movie-theater ticket taker) and rejections. "Oh, sure, I told the casting directors that I was Fernando Lamas's son. They said, 'Great. Here's the script. You've got five minutes to show us what you can do'."

Things are never that bad, however, for strikingly handsome men with ironclad Hollywood connections. "He came to me," recalls Arlene Dah, "and said: 'Mother, I want to be a star - I mean an actor'. I told him: 'I heard you the first time.' And that year I took him to the Academy Awards." At the awards dinner, says Dahl, Lorenzo was introducted to producer Allan Carr, who subsequently gave him a small part in "Grease".

The years of obscurity, such as they were, passed quickly for Lamas. He mad several unsold pilots, got guest roles on shows like The Hardy Boys and Switch. ("It was being filmed in Santa Barbara. They put me up in a hotel overlooking the ocean, I called up my father and told him, 'This is for me!'") , and, in 1980 did a TV-movie with O.J. Simpson called "Detour to Terror." At that ripe old age of 20, he was featured in a short-lived series called california Fever. "That was real rough," says Lamas, with a twinkle. "The show was filmed at Venice Beach. And we all had our own motor homes." The next year, he got a juicy role on Secrets of Midland Heights and things were not as pleasant. No motor home, for one. "We all knew the show was in trouble. But canceled? One day, I went in to makeup and nobody was there." It seemed nobody had bothered to notify Lamas.

But can he act? That's a matter of some debate; when Falcon Crest made its debut, the TV critic from The Washington Post described Lamas as "that talking two by four." His colleagues are a bit kinder: "He's grown a lot since he started here," says veteran actress Abby Dalton, who plays his mother on the show. One initial problem, she remembers, was the eyelash fluttering "Valentino Look" referred to by Wyman. "But that was because he was terribly nearsighted," says Dalton. Contact lenses - not acting lessons - solved that problem. Then, could Lamas play roles more dimensional than the villainous Lance? "Oh, sure," says Ana-Alicia, who plays his shotgun bride, Melissa. "But right now, I'd say, he's decided it's not the right time to put out the effort to do that."

That effort might be a bit superfluous anyway on the set of Falcon Crest, where Lamas works an average of three or four days a week on a role not exactly noted for its complexity. ("They've done a little more with the character this season," he says, unself-consciously. "They've brought out his emotional side a bit more.")

More important for Falcon Crest's large TV family is that Lamas flaunts neither his good looks nor his parentage. A production company functionary, who reports that Lamas's on-location work schedule includes a generous amount of poolside socializing, says he remains an admirer nonetheless. Adds another: "I guess if you're raised the way he's been you can turn out one of two ways: incredibly rotten, or incredibly polished."

Well, maybe. Lamas, contemplating that statement on his front porch one recent sunny day, sips a beer and shrugs. "Watching my parents and their friends while I was growing up helped me keep my perspective," he says. "Some actors, I learned, get successful very quicly and start to take themselves too seriously. They don't understand that it's not them - it's the character they portray - that the public finds interesting."

What is interesting is that the TV-star sone of movie stars leads a decidedly un-starline off-camera existence. He lives in a smallish A-frame house, down a dirt road deep in the Hollywood hills. His plans for the future, after Falcon Crest winds down? He'd like, he says wistfully, to play "swashbuckling" roles in action-oriented movies.

For relaxation, which he seems to have plenty of time for, he studies the martial arts, plays guitar, rebuilds and drives big Harley-Davidson motorcycles and, with his new bride and former publicist Michele Smith, he is currently remodeling his house. What he doesn't do is travel the Hollywood party circuit.

Inappropriate behaviour for a second generation public figure? Not at all, says Lamas. Smooth answer ready as usual. "I'm a private type of person. To me, the acting is fun - but it's just a business."

A lucrative business. In fact, it's more than that, really. It's the family business. So eat your heart out, Lance Cumson, wherever you are.

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