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"I worry about not being a great actor. I'd hate to die young and never have made Grapes of Wrath. Life goes by so fast...I just don't want to miss out on anything."
Jon-Erik Hexum spoke those words two years ago to a Michigan State University interviewer. The 1980 MSU graduate had just debuted in the Voyagers! television series and the ensuing months would bring his career to the threshold of stardom.
Suddenly it all ended.
Yesterday, Doctors removed the 26-year-old New Jersey native from life-support systems at the Beverly Hills Medical Center and moved him to another hospital where his heart, kidneys and corneas were taken for transplant patients. The man known as Jack to his MSU friends, shot himself with a .44-caliber Magnum pistol on the set of his latest television series, Cover Up. The force of the cotton wadding from a blank bullet shattered Hexum's right skull and doctors decided his brain would never recover.
Los Angeles police yesterday said there was no evidence to support earlier reports that Hexum was playing a mock game of Russian roulette. One officer said it appeared that Hexum ws just handling the gun carelessly.
"Here is a guy who finally had the world...and this happens," said Hexum's MSU roommate, Thomas Schultz, who now lives in Fountain Valley, Calif.
Schultz remembers the collegiate actor and football player as a guy who could do anything if he set his mind to it. Schultz and others who knew him on campus describe Hexum as an unpretentious but competitive fellow, anxious to sample the excitements of life.
"Jack in his 26 years has experienced more and done more than most people get to do in a long lifetime," said Bryan Halter, program director of Lansing radio station WJIM-AM. Halter, who had taken a chance and hired Jack to do an overnight radio show, remembered him as a man with a terrific voice and an "overly creative" radio style.
For several months in 1979 Hexum was the guy who spun the disks on the adult contemporary music show. But he couldn't play the program format the way it was supposed to be handled.
"I remember he used to give imaginary traffic reports -- for Lansing in the middle of the night," Halter recalled with a laugh.
Halter said he still has Hexum's last paycheck from five years ago. "He never stopped by to pick it up and I was never sure where to send it." Yet Hexum could have used the money.
Fran Victor Kaplan, a producer on leave from Channel 7's Good Afternoon Detroit, tells of a photographer arriving at Hexum's apartment recently and finding the actor had only one pair of pants. She called him frugal -- he was saving money for his own production company, which he recently formed.
Ms. Kaplan, who put Hexum on the local talk show the day after the airing of the television movie, The Making of a Male Model, a year ago, retained a friendship with the actor. "We adopted him," she said.
She last talked with Hexum three months ago, she said. And Hexum "was real excited about the new show. He had script approval, which included editing. He also was given top billing over co-star Jennifer O'Neill.
Jon-Erik, so named to satisfy two Norwegian grandfathers, began his college career at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland where he studied biomedical engineering. He found that "boring" and left for East Lansing.
At MSU from 1977 to 1980, Hexum was a mustachioed, long-haired football player, who didn't play in any games; an actor, who appeared in a single campus production; and a would-be lawyer, who studied political philosophy.
In the 1982 interview, Hexum recalled his MSU athletic career. He hadn't played high school football but gained 40 pounds through a vigorous weight-lifting program to convince the Spartan coaches to let him on the team.
"I was officially on the team, but I was sitting on the bench all the time," he recalled. "I worried about getting hurt because I wanted to be an actor and certainly didn't want to break my nose or get my teeth knocked out."
As an aspiring actor, however, he was on stage for only one play, the musical comedy Pippin. Hexum portrayed the King.
His roommate, Schultz, said Hexum seldom got overly serious about anything. "He just like to have fun and just enjoyed being around lots of people."
Schultz said that Hexum had many interests but would discard them as quickly as he picked them up.
After graduation, Hexum moved to New York in search of fame. Before the starring role in voyagers came his way, he tended bar and bussed tables to make ends meet and to pay for acting and dance lessons.
Another MSU buddy, Allen Pyc, who now lives in Troy, kept contact with Hexum. "He never changed," said Pyc, who last spoke with the actor last month. "He was always warm-hearted and down-to-earth. He didn't drink. He was very clean cut. But he did like to have fun."
Pyc said that Hexum would mention to him how much he loved to go out with the stunt men when they did their special work in Hollywood.
Detroit television personality Marilyn Turner, who interviewed Hexum six times, said he "really touched us."
She said Glen Larsen, the producer of Cover Up, told her that Hexum was the only person he ever signed to a long-term contract -- that Hexum was going to be the next Clark Gable.
Ms. Turner, deeply impressed by Hexum, called him "one of the few people whom you meet that you could never forget. He was that special...Just one of the nicest young men. And he really didn't have to be."
His friendly, low-key personality also impressed Robert Bao, the MSU Alumni magazine editor who interviewed Hexum for a story in the current issue: "Despite all the glamour of the party scene in Hollywood, this was a guy who was really a home-body."
Last year after his The Making of a Male Model was broadcast as an ABC-TV movie, Hexum explained why he was turning down some roles:
"I'm not going to be trapped into doing things just for the money that I'll have to live down later," said the young man who overcame long-shot odds to make it big in a business that gobbles people up.
"I was a busboy last June and I don't care if I'm a busboy again next June."
News staff writer Eric Freedman and News wire services contributed to this story.
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