COVER STORY CAPTION: Jennie Garth Kisses & Tells
- Her 90210 romances
- Jealousy and the feud with Shannen
- How Hollywood 'messes up your head'
Jennie Garth has a little problem. "I have a zit, and it has ruined my day," she says, pointing to her right cheek. "Can you imagine the psychological whirlwind when you are an actress and you have a pimple? It's all anyone looks at. It's the topic of big discussions. It's all I can think about. I can't even remember my lines."
For most people, a blemish is a nuisance that disappears in a few days, but for Garth, this molehill has become a mountain. "It requires extra makeup, special filters, careful lighting, and then the director of photography decrees there is nothing more he can do."
She pauses, reflecting on her misery. "That's when I just want to cry."
Pesky pimple aside, Garth has little to cry about these days. The sleek, blond star of Beverly Hills, 90210 has emerged from the ensemble to become its most seductive siren and one of TV's hottest Generation X stars. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. The megasuccess was slated to go to Shannen Doherty. She was the first breakout star, the one featured in cover story after cover story. But Doherty's troubled act off-camera wore thin and wore producers out. Garth, a team player, inherited center stage. It's the old story of the tortoise beating the hare.
If Doherty acted out the dark side of fame, then Garth is the hope of teenagers across the country who dream of dumping a life of drudgery for a magical destiny in Hollywood. Her signature role - the sensitive, seductive, and tortured Kelly Taylor - tapped into the very essence of teenage angst and brought her a huge cult following. It also brought her some difficult choices about the kind of lifestyle she would pursue.
After flirting with the fast lane, and taking a wilder ride than she had intended, Garth has opted for a stable existence. Last April, she married drummer Dan Clark in a secret and heavily guarded ceremony in Beverly Hills. And she's currently in therapy to deal with the transition from typical teen to 23-year-old millionaire.
Not bad for a once-struggling actress who toiled the shadow of Doherty and watched as that actress rode the fame wave - only to wipe out. What happened to Doherty (currently shooting the film "Mallrats") is seared into Garth's psyche. It's a fate she's determined to avoid.
"There are times when I think she may be tragic," says Garth in her little-girl voice that betrays no malice. "I think there may be something evil inside of her."
Competition on a set is nothing new in Hollywood, and neither are the pitfalls of fame. But Garth has never spoken much about the troubled spots in her private life - until now. "What goes on - the competition, the never-knowing if you can trust anybody - it's the disgusting thing about the business, especially about a series," she says. "And it makes me feel ugly."
She's sitting in the passenger seat of a car, being rushed from photo shoot in Hollywood to the 90210 set in a industrial park on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She's happy today - hours of pampering by a hairstylist and a makeup artist have relaxed her. Always diplomatic in her formal interviews, she is somehow freer on talking on the road.
"Shannen and I were young, and we were both discovering the series and what that meant to all of us. I think the competition was mutual at first. It's sort of inbred." She tried to ignore it, she says. Yet as soon as the producers began to expand the role of Garth's BMW-driving vixen, well, the catfight turned vicious.
"It got very aggravating," says Garth. "It never came to a pushing fight, but at times, we probably wanted to slug each other."
Later, a producer explains just how tough it was for Garth. "Shannen was incredibly mean to Jennie," he says. "The darling Miss Doherty couldn't handle the fact that Jennie was getting better storylines, that we had so much faith in Jennie as an actress. Aaron Spelling and I pushed Jennie into rough storylines because we knew she had the chops to do it. But once that happened, it was the beginning of the end for Shannen and Jennie. Shannen needed to be the star of the show. Jennie is a team player; she's as far away from tempermental as you can get - so to say it was rough on her is to put it mildly."
Doherty is as long gone as her character, Brenda Walsh, who was sent off to an acting school in London at the end of last season. The two women no longer communicate, and Garth has been told by mutual friends that Doherty does not allow the name Jennie Garth to be mentioned in her presence. Says Garth, "It's sad."
This season, 90210 has returned to normal - or normal as any Hollywood series chronicling a tempest of teen hormones can get. That means it's as steamy and emotional off-camera as it is on. For instance, says Garth, one star recently fell in love with a guy whom the rest of the cast disapproved of. "We all sat down and warned her," says Garth, "and when she wouldn't listen, we banned him from the set." Then there are sparks set off by the arrival of the beautiful Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. Hollywood rumormongers whisper that Garth and Thiessen are already mortal enemies.
"Tiffani and I never had a problem," she insists. "I really like Tiffani. She came to my wedding with Brian [Austin-Green]. She's very nice. Sure, competition can rear its ugly head, but you stuff it back down and go on with your day."
It's Green, says Garth, who's having the hardest time on the set with Thiessen. "It's difficult on Brian [who is Thiessen's live-in love]," says Garth. "He's had to struggle because Tiffani is with a different guy in every episode. But they want to stay together, and they want to make it work."
Has Garth ever been tempted into an office romance? "I would never do it that way. Besides," she laughs, "basically, we all hate each other too much to get involved - you know, like love-hate."
A few days later, Garth arrives at a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel after a day of shooting on location at a mansion in the "zip code."
"I'm the antithesis of Kelly," she says. "Just driving through Beverly Hills gives me this weird situation in my spine - it makes me nervous."
It's been an uncomfortable day all around. That old love-hate thing has cropped up behind the scenes with series heartthrob Luke Perry. "We have a dynamic relationship. Either we get along famously or we hate each other's guts," says Garth, sipping her favorite drink, a Coke with a maraschino cherry. "Today it was up and down: 'I hate you.' 'I love you.' 'I hate you.'"
Off-camera, Garth says that Perry is possessive of her attention. "Our relationship is stormy, to say the least," she says. "Luke doesn't like it when I do scenes with Jason [Priestley]. It's that ego thing."
In many ways the actors and the characters on Beverly Hills, 90210 are interchangeable - they live life on the edge, searching for their true selves (this season Kelly joined a cult), occasionally stumbling along the way (Dylan McKay recently fell off the wagon). But it's their sexual exploits that always get them in the most trouble -last season Dylan and Brandon Walsh came to blows over Kelly. This season Kelly loves Brandon and Donna loves Ray, but Brandon kisses Donna and Ray beds Valerie.
And both on-screen and off, they inhabit the smoky world of L.A. nightclubs. It is that dark and dangerous environment that landed some of the other stars on the front pages of the tabloids.
Garth has been tempted.
"I hung out in the fast lane for a while," she says. " I think we can all get caught up in it. But it is so destructive. It certainly is not where I choose to lead my life. I was caught up in it for a weekend here and a weekend there. But it's hard to get up at 6 in the morning when you just got home at 3 A.M. You're still drunk when you go to work. It's terrible."
For a kid from a horse farm outside Urbana, Ill., who became a star at 17, Hollywood was a challenge to her equilibrium in all ways. "She was the only one [on 90210] who had not grown up in this business, and she very quickly found herself in this high profile arena. You would think that she would be the one to go wild," says Randy James, the manager who discovered Garth, then 15, as a state finalist in the Cinderella Scholarship Pageant. He suggested acting classes and by her junior year Garth had dropped out of high school to pack up for Hollywood, chaperoned by her mom.
"Sometimes," she says now, "I feel like I was robbed of my youth. I feel like I am too grown-up. Like I am 50 years old. Like I have to live a little more so I don't feel cheated when I am 50."
But if the cradle was robbed, it was clearly with Garth's permission. Two months after she moved to L.A., her father suffered a major heart attack and underwent four operations in 48 hours. Garth's mom went home for good. On her own, the actress quickly got a small role in Growing Pains and a few TV-movies - and then 90210 came along.
If she had had her way, her private life would have proceeded at the same rapid pace. A chance meeting with Clark, a drummer in a struggling rock band called The Hoodwinks, almost turned Garth into an 18-year-old bride. "I wanted to get married more than he did," she says. "And I think he was probably pressured into asking me to marry him." He asked me [a couple of years ago]. I said yes. Then he waited for a couple of years. He said we were young. He was wiser than me...."
Yes, youth was part of the reason, but there was something else: money. Garth pulls in an estimated $20,000 to $25,000 an episode. That, combined with her movies of the week, earns her more than $1 million a year.
"He was afraid it was too much for him, that I was making so much more money than him," says Garth. "And people were always telling me: 'He's never gonna get a real job.' But it's not like that. He has a job. He works in a drum shop. His career is just beginning. But every couple of months there will be this looming tension, and that's what it's about. It's from him, because he is a man, and thinks he is supposed to make more money."
They sought professional help. "Before we got married, everybody advised us to go into premarital counseling, and so we did that, and it's been wonderful. It's opened up channels of communication and helped us in so many ways. Now, I'm going on my own. That's scary and helpful. It's all so confusing. There are times when all I want to do is crawl into a hole and stay there and not deal with anything."
"I'm just a person who is trying to stay on top," Garth continues, "stay even, stay levelheaded. I'm trying to achieve things in my career and find some normalcy in my life. But Hollywood really messes with your head. It happens to me every day. I have to go home and reassess who I am, put my head back on straight. It's hard. You make so much money. You want to make more. You have so many people around you - manager, agent, publicist, assistant, trainer, housekeeper - it's ridiculous. It's out of control. At least I have somebody at home like Dan, who says, 'OK Jennie, time to come back to Earth.'"
Grown-up problems? You bet. But to balance it, she's getting lots of grown-up attention. As she moves beyond the Beverly Hills blonde into more challenging roles, Garth is tiptoeing into a torrid zone dominated by Sharon Stone. Her last movie of the week, CBS's "Falling For You," found her almost buck naked with Costas Mandylor (Picket Fences) as she tied his hands to a bedpost.
Yet she's smart enough not to let go of Kelly, at least not yet. She has agreed to return to Beverly Hills, 90210 for at least another year, with an increase in pay. Garth also has signed a lucrative contract with ABC to produce and star in movies.
"At first, when she started doing made-for-TV movies, they wanted to pair her with actresses such as Lindsay Wagner or Cheryl Ladd," says James. "She fought against that. She wanted to be a star on her own."
"They used to say 'Jennie who?'" says Garth. "It would hurt so much. I'd have to say, 'From 90210,' and then they would finally recognize me. But no more. That feels really good."
Like her idol, Farrah Fawcett, Garth wants to be taken seriously as an actress. And yet, just like Fawcett, there's that matter of her sexual sizzle.
"I love playing sexy in front of a camera," she says. "You either have to go with it or you just feel inhibited."
So which way does Jennie Garth go?
She laughs. "In real life, I'm pretty shy," she says. "But when there is a camera in front of me, well, I really love it."
"Ian (Zierling, character Steve) was the first one I kissed. We were supposed to kiss in a scene as we came down a staircase. But he wanted to rehearse, so I would be comfortable, right? Ian is so smooth. So he took me into the garage. It was awkward and embarassing, but it worked because it broke the ice."
"I don't remember kissing Grant (Show, character Jake, who spun off to Melrose Place). It must have not been that great."
"He's wonderful. Once you are kissing Luke (Perry, character Dylan), it is all you can think about."
"With Jason (Priestley, character Brandon), it's no big deal. I'm very comfortable. We just jumped in with both feet."
From TV Guide, 4-08-95, p.13.