By Diane Haithman
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Actress Elizabeth Daily, 22, sits in her Hollywood Hills apartment, staring out at the panoramic view of Los Angeles. Her streaky blond hair mingles with the long white coat of her Maltese dog, Brittany, which she cuddles on her lap.
Daily seems surprisingly calm as she talks about the death of actor Jon-Erik Hexum, who accidentally shot himself in the head Oct. 12 with a 44 magnum loaded with blanks on the set of his CBS-TV series, "Cover Up."
Her brown eyes only occasionally fill with tears. "He's my boyfriend," she says simply, in the present tense.
Daily, who dated Hexum for the past 10 months, says her reason for deciding to talk about her relationship with him after a week and a half of silence is anger at eddying speculations that Hexum was mentally unbalanced at the time the shooting occurred.
"I was real hesitant about getting into it, but then I started thinking, it's just not fair that everybody thinks of him as this guy who was so loony he would do something like that," she says hotly.
"Now people will remember him as just this crazy guy who said: 'Let's see if there's one here for me,' or whatever it was he was quoted as saying.
"Nobody knows anything about it. He wasn't loony or anything like that. He was just tired. When you're tired, you don't function well, you know? But he liked it (the job) so much that he didn't want to take time to relax. He'd come home real late and go right to bed, but he couldn't sleep because he knew he'd have to get up early in the morning.
"If he'd had time to just rest up and relax, I think if he'd done the show longer...but he loved what he had so much, he was almost afraid to say how much he enjoyed it, because he was afraid someone would take it away. It was too much, too fast.
"Everybody who knew him---his press agent, his manager---nobody knew him the way I do, the way I've seen him, not as the kind of guy who would put a pistol to his temple and shoot it. It was like he lived and died behind closed doors.
"I think he was just playing around. He was always real macho, he was always such a man---he picks me up over his head because he's strong. He loves to be tough. He loved to show how to flip the gun into the holster; he'd been practicing all these things because of the show. We'd go to the gym and he'd pump up real fast."
"I loved him more than I ever loved anybody, except, of course, my family. I just want to make sure that if I say anything, it's really just to make sure people know what a wonderful person he was, and I have no other intentions besides that. I want people to know the beautiful things about him."
Daily says that, althought she and Hexum each had their own homes, they were always together. His dwelling, a rather ordinary home in Burbank, was much more modest than Daily's hilltop apartment with its spectacular view, which she temporarily is sharing with two other performers.
"He just enjoyed it all so much. It's ironic that it was all taken away from him."