Erin Gray’s two-year marketing plan might finally be paying off with her role on Silver Spoons

By Bill Davidson

Three quick scenes illustrate the complex personality of tall, beautiful, 31-year-old Erin Gray, who plays Kate Summers, the elegant leg of the father-son-assistant triad that is the basic structure of the NBC sitcom Silver Spoons.

SCENE ONE: Designer-clad Gray strides into the first cast meeting of the show last year, looking like a cross-blend of Elizabeth Taylor and Veronica Hamel. Even though they remember her as the laser-gun-toting Col. Wilma Deering of NBC’s Buck Rogers series, there are awed gasps from her co-stars, Joel Higgins and Ricky Schroder, the latter then 12 years old. There are further gasps, this time more of worry than admiration, when Gray blithely announces, "You should all realize that I’m a dramatic actress and don’t know a thing about comedy." Higgins, a skilled graduate of comedies and Broadway musicals, first turns ashen, then mumbles gallantly, "Don’t worry. We’ll be supportive. We’ll teach you everything we can."

SCENE TWO: It is a rehearsal for a show later in the ‘82-’83 season. Higgins’ character, Edward Stratton, is trying to impress his son Ricky with a suit crammed with magician’s paraphernalia. Gray pulls on Higgins’ pocket handkerchief, which becomes an endless scarf, at the end of which is a pair of men’s boxer shorts – out of which flies a dove. Higgins begins to react when the boxer shorts appear. Director Jack Shea is satisfied, but Gray triumphantly exclaims to Higgins, "Aha! You violated one of your own principles of comedy. You reacted too soon and gave away the dove gag." They redo the scene. Director Shea is bemused. Despite Gray’s earlier protestations of lack of comedic knowledge, he had directed her in a 1967 ABC summer series called Malibu U, when Gray was only 15. He knows she was very funny in exchanges with Rick Nelson.

SCENE THREE: Gray is off to one side of Silver Spoons’ universal Studios sound stage 43, running through lines with Higgins. As is natural with 13-year-old boys, Ricky and some of his friends are fooling around while the cameras are not rolling. The youngsters are riding their bicycles around the stage and occasionally popping crew members with pea shooters. Gray’s head slowly rises. Without saying a word, her greenish-blue eyes lock on Ricky’s. Ricky’s bike careens to a stop. He says to the other kids, "We’ve got to cut it out, fellers. Erin just gave me the Mom Look." Gray projects the that’s-quite-enough Mom Look with effective proficiency. She practices it often on her own son, Kevan, 7.

Do these occurrences make Gray sound like a contentious woman? She isn’t. She says, "It was my own insecurities that made me say I knew less about comedy than I thought I did – and I really needed all the help I could get."

Is she overbearing toward her co-stars? Joel Higgins says, "No. When she first told us she knew nothing about comedy, my initial reaction in my head was ‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’ But as we worked our way into the show, I realized it only helped me if I helped her. You’ve got to realize that she’s unique in that there are very few truly beautiful women who are willing to make asses of themselves in a comedy show." Young Mr. Schroeder adds, "I love Erin. My own mom’s always on the set, but Erin’s like a second mom to me when we’re working."

Is Gray a strong and determined woman – as indicated in a previous TV GUIDE story when she was in Buck Rogers? "You betcha," says David Duclon, executive producer of Silver Spoons. "She studied calculus at UCLA and she’s got a very smart and devoted husband, Ken Schwartz, who not only is her manager but also is a film-marketing expert. Between the two of them, they’ve practically got a road map that can take her anywhere she wants to go in this business.

It wasn’t always that way with Gray.

The daughter of a businessman and a strikingly attractive 6-foot-2-inch photographer who were divorced when she was 8, Erin was sent to live with her grandmother in Palm Springs, Cal., for three years. Then her mother married and divorced again, with Erin spending her pre-teens in Burlingame and Marin County in suburban San Francisco. She became a model at a very early age when her mother sent her photo to a teen-age clothing manufacturer in St. Louis.

Gray admits she was a confused child. "I was uncertain about myself," she says, "which is why I drifted into proficiency with math. It was easier for me to deal with numbers than with words. Then, too, my life was turned upside down when I fell in love with Ken Schwartz while were both were at Redwood High School and Mom moved to Newport Beach in Southern California just to get me away from him." Mom’s strategy did not work. Erin and Ken were married after he returned from a tour of duty in the Army as a "grunt" during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. She was 18. While he finished his term of enlistment in the military, she continued her now-burgeoning career as a model in TV commercials, fashion magazines and such.

Her West Coast modeling agent was the famous Nina Blanchard, who recommended Gray for her first acting job, the nonmemorable Malibu U series on ABC. As she gained confidence after her union with the strong-willed Schwartz, she became more and more outspoken about the modeling profession, which still was her main source of income. Today Gray says, "I went through a difficult period. I kind of flipped out for a while. I’d do a high-fashion face-cream commercial and then run off to be a frumpy housewife for a J.C. Penney ad. I didn’t know who I was. Finally I resolved that I was all of those people, and that if I’d been able to convince other people of that, I had the potential to be a pretty good actress."

So Gray began to study acting in New York and in Hollywood, and ended up as the last of the apprentice actresses put under contract by Universal Pictures in the late 1970s. She worked in series like The Rockford Files and was cast as one of the stars of the Operation Prim e Time drama "Evening in Byzantium." She says, "I knew there was something wrong during this picture when I climbed up into the cab of a truck to get out of the sun and learned that the truck driver was making three times as much as my $500 a week." Nonetheless, she allowed herself to be cast – at higher wages – as the tough Colonel Deering in the Universal Buck Rogers series.

It was around that time that hu7sband Ken Schwartz took over her career. Says Schwartz, "Erin and I always have been partners in our marriage, so we came up with a plan together. She just was not growing as an actress. In nearly every role, she was a very pretty, tough lady with a gun on her hip or in her handbag. There are lots of very pretty ladies on TV with guns on their hips or in their handbags, but there are few very pretty ladies who can do comedy – at least not since Lucille Ball. So we set out on a two-year plan. Erin went about doing things like Neil Simon’s ‘California Suite’ for no money in a showcase playhouse in Los Angeles; and I devoted myself to convincing the industry that she could be a comedienne."

One day in early ’82, having scored a near miss with Gray for the female lead in NBC’s Love, Sidney, Schwartz walked into the office of Al Burton, then executive vice-president for creative affairs at Embassy Television. The first thing Schwartz noticed was a picture on the wall – a framed TV GUIDE photo of Erin, then 15, as she had appeared in Malibu U. Burton had kept it as a memento of the show. "Of course I knew Erin in that series," Burton told Schwartz. "I produced it. And even as a kid, she was very funny."

"No one else thinks she can be funny," said Schwartz.

"Well, I do," said Burton.

Of such coincidences are careers made in Hollywood. Burton immediately tested Gray for a CBS series called "Century Hill," which never got off the ground. Five days later came Silver Spoons for NBC. It did get off the ground.

After an inauspicious start, Gray rapidly picked up confidence and comedic steam in Silver Spoons. Says executive producer Duclon, "There’s a natural resistance to letting a beautiful woman also be funny, but Erin would allow nothing to stand in her way to make a gag more effective. I’ll never forget one scene she did with Joel Higgins and John Houseman [who has a recurring role as Higgins’ father and Schroder’s grandfather]. She was supposed to run out into a rainstorm after Houseman had infuriated her, and then come back into the house because she had forgotten her car keys. The average beautiful actress would have returned with just a few droplets of water on her, so as not to upset her hairdo and makeup. Not Erin. She came back looking like a drowned rat, her hair hanging down like wet ropes, her makeup and mascara streaked all over her face. And she still looked lovely."

And so, not only did Gray’s role grow, but the show’s entire direction changed. As viewers know, the series started with a unique single-parent situation. The theme basically was about a rich childish father (Edward Stratton, played by Higgins) dealing with an extremely mature child (Schroder). In this one-on-one concept, Gray’s function as Stratton’s secretary, Kate Summers, was little more than being a referee between the child-man and the adult-child.

Not now. The child-man became more of a parental type, and the secretary has graduated to being both a divisional vice-president and Stratton’s lover – aided and abetted by the wise mature child. Don’t be surprised (should the series survive) if a Kate Summers-Edward Stratton marriage is in the scripts somewhere down the line.

And how does Erin Gray react o this unusual transition? It’s hard to tell.

First she says, "I want to go on to do even more physical comedy – the pratfalls, the walking into things, accidentally knocking people down, the whole bit. I guess I would like to be the new Lucy Ball."

Then she says, after ruminating momentarily, "I want to play women who are pioneering in a man’s world, where they have to break the rules and fight against the odds." In fact, she and Schwartz, with Telecom Entertainment, are developing for television the book "Portrait of Myself," by the late Margaret Bourke-White, the pioneering woman photographer.

Then, after another pause, Gray says, "On the other hand, maybe I want Silver Spoons to go on forever because it’s like a vacation for an actress. Since Ricky is a minor, most days we can only work four hours, from 2 to 6 P.M. I love to cook, and I can even get home to our house in Studio City, in the hills above Universal, in plenty of time to put together a whole dinner party for friends.

Come on, Erin. You’re supposed to be a strong and forceful woman. Make up your mind.