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I arrive at Dixie Carter's magnificent Hancock Park home just in time to find the glamorous television star finishing her morning jog through the neighborhood. Even glistening in proudly non-designer running togs, Carter glows with spirit and beauty that have enhanced her characters on television, especially her signature Designing Women character, Julia Sugarbaker.
Her stunning looks make it impossible to guess her age, though she quickly pipes up: "I'm 27." At which point she merrily begins reciting one of her favorite ditties:
"I'm 27. There's a song I do.
"Marlon Brando's 73,
So is Peggy Lee
Ronny Reagan's up in years,
So is Nancy;
Poor old dears
But me, I'm 27
Look at me
It's plain to see
I'm 27, over and over and over again."
Carter is a delightful conversationalist whose active mind refuses to stay on one subject. She has so many ideas and thoughts that she warns me I may have to drag her back to the topic at hand.
Though television has been her greatest vehicle, Carter's current topic has nothing to do with that medium. She is busy now thinking about how she will come across in a small theatre playing the legendary actress and teacher Stella Adler in Mark Kemble's play Names, the story of The Group Theatre's principal players and their horrific brush with McCarthy's anti-communist witchhunts of the 1950s. The play performs at the Matrix until August 20.
Carter has little memory of the real events as they unfolded on television and in the papers throughout the dark days of the House UnAmerican Activities inquisition. "I was a little girl. In the middle of the country where I grew up we had no idea that people were suffering. We all believed that bad people were being rooted out. That's what our understanding was. Spies were being found. I am sure that was the way Mr. McCarthy developed his tremendous power. Except on the two coastlines people thought it was to the good."
Carter was fascinated by the play because it does not simply fix the blame on the right wing, but actually poses questions, to both the left and right, about the period. Carter is frustrated over the level of political ugliness in today's society. "We all want to get to the same place, we just have different ideas about how to get there. That's what I think."
It would seem obvious that any play centering around the McCarthy witchhunt would have to be written from a left-wing perspective, but Carter disagrees. "I think it has an intelligent and philosophical bent. I don't think you can codify Mark's mind so easily. I think it is quite apparent that there was a devastation going on. But it would be very boring as a play if he gave us all the answers.
"Elia Kazan, who did name names, is one of the characters. He has a very strong say in his own defense." Even her own character, Stella Adler, is hard to pin down politically. "Stella was known to have said, 'Yes, I'd be happy to be a communist if they'd make me queen.' That's about her participation in this event."
Carter is a bit nervous, but very excited about playing the legendary actress. "I hope you won't see Dixie Carter in this character. I had tapes of her and read about her. I'm afraid I will be disappointing to those who knew her and took classes from her because I won't look like her. I can't fill that part of the character. But I think I can fill the spirit."
But she warns acting students not to look for Stella Adler the teacher in this play. "I studied Stanislavsky when I was young in Memphis so I know it, but this play is about ideas. What was being threatened by the committee was freedom of thought. The acting part of Stella Adler's life fills her character, but is not germane to the play. The play is not so much about acting as much as it is about actors as human beings caught in this maelstrom."
Carter was not in the market for an Equity-waiver play to star in, but this one fascinated her and her husband Hal Holbrook. "I am doing it because my husband became very much a fan of the play. Mark, the playwright, is a friend of ours. Hal read it two years ago and was very excited about it. So when Mark asked me if I was interested I said yes. It is a thoughtful, thought-provoking play. I am doing it because I haven't been presented with as good an acting role since I don't know when. It is a wonderful part. I am honored to be called to play the legendary Stella Adler. I can't imagine an actor who wouldn't want to play this part."
Though she doesn't do a great deal of stage work these days, Carter did recently star in Long Beach CLO's Pal Joey. It was, in fact, the musical theatre that gave Carter her start back in Memphis. Her first professional role was Julie Jordan in Carousel opposite the very young George Hearn as Billy Bigelow. "He was this young and slender fellow, but this voice poured out of him! I got on the pay phone and called my mother and dad. I told them, 'I don't know what they sound like in New York City, but this boy who is playing Billy Bigelow is amazing.' We did several musicals together."
Carter always believed singing would be her destiny. "When I was four I said I would be singing at the Met. I would listen to the radio and peek into it and look at all those tubes and wonder where the little people were hiding in there making that glorious sound. I knew that was my future. I wanted to get in there with them and make those gorgeous sounds."
After some time doing musicals in Memphis she packed for New York, where she met Joe Papp, who cast her in Shakespeare in the Park on her second day in the city. "I had this thick accent and said, 'Ay cayant play Shakespeare, Mr. Papp.' He said, 'You've done musical comedy, you have the size for Shakespeare. You can do it.'"
Papp liked her and would have continued using her, but Carter was still insistent that music was her destiny, so she opted to leave the Public Theatre for Richard Rodgers' fledgling Music Theatre of Lincoln Center. He cast her to understudy the soubrette role in Carousel. "I said, Mr. Rodgers, Julie is my part.' He said, 'No, you're a funny girl.' I should never have gone to Mr. Rodgers because they weren't having nobodies like me doing roles. So I lost time and experience there singing in the chorus for two years."
During her time with Papp, she worked with James Earl Jones and Roscoe Lee Browne, who gave her sage advice for her career. "They told me not to change my name, though my agent told me to. 'Dixie Carter can't play Shakespeare.' Roscoe said, 'If you're good it doesn't matter what your name is. Do you think I would have chosen Roscoe Lee Browne?' I asked where to study acting. They said, 'Don't go anywhere. Do not take classes, just be in things.' That's how they counselled me."
Frustrated with Lincoln Center, Carter took a job with the 1960s Upstairs at the Downstairs Revues. "Madeline Kahn and Lily Tomlin and I were in this revue together." But her future husband Arthur Carter advised her that the show was second rate and that no one would come out of it. Her first mistake was listening to him, her second was to marry him. The marriage didn't work out, but did give her her beloved children. "I quit working in the theatre, married Arthur and had my babies. I thought that was what you were supposed to do." She stopped working for seven years, until her marriage collapsed. "It may be silly to regret, but those were the years I could have worked and carried my babies around with me. It wouldn't have hurt them. I did go back to work and it was very difficult because I was 35. My years of that young beauty were gone, so a movie career was gone. It was very difficult for me to even get an agent. Nobody wanted to mess with me at 35. Too old."
Then, through the help of a remarkable agent-manager named Dale Davis, Carter's fortunes changed. "She believed in me and put me forward. I was frightened and believed I was very old. It is so sad to think you are old in your 30s. Once you hit the 50s you realize that was child's play."
She returned to Joe Papp and starred in Taken in Marriage with an amazing cast that included Meryl Streep, Kathleen Quinlan, and Colleen Dewhurst, who was later replaced by Nancy Marchand. One night in the audience were television producers Bob Boyett and Tom Miller. They fell instantly in love with Dixie Carter. "They asked me to tea and said, 'We will make your name a household word.' I had already done one series in NY and didn't want to leave. But I realized I wasn't going to be able to become independent working in a rat-filled basement in New York, no matter how good the reviews were.
"I didn't know from situation comedy. My girls were allowed to watch one hour of television so they watched Cher or Donnie and Marie. So I didn't know sitcoms. But I was cast in Out of the Blue, which was not a show that went. But Miller and Boyett were such gentlemen, they paid me for the rest of my contract. I am crazy about them. So I was here."
She thought about leaving but did a CBS television movie with Hal Holbrook and her destiny was set. She liked him during the filming, but it was his work on his one-man hit Mark Twain Tonight that clinched him as the most talented man she'd ever seen. "I think it is the best thing I have ever seen on stage, the most mysteriously, magically, brilliantly conceived. This is Hal's 41st year of doing it. Yes siree bobtail. Now he doesn't need as much make-up."
Soon Carter met Linda Bloodworth-Thomason who set her up in the sitcom Filthy Rich with co-star Delta Burke. "In many ways it was better than Designing Women. It was screamingly funny." Though it premiered and played three weeks in first place, the network's shuffling destroyed the show. So Carter left to spend a season on Diff'rent Strokes.
Keeping up her singing, Carter put together a cabaret act. While performing it in San Francisco she got a call from Bloodworth-Thomason, who had used her name and sold Designing Women to CBS. "It was magic. This very high sense of participation. I don't watch the reruns because it is bittersweet. I remember how happy we all were in the beginning. A great sense of pride we all had in each other. We loved being on stage with each other and all had healthy, strong egos, but had great complete enjoyment of each other's level of craft and expertise. We tickled each other to death."
She doesn't say much about the sad downfall of the show. "I am proud of being professional. I have a great disrespect for undisciplined, unprofessional behavior. I try to make very sure that my behavior is up to the mark no matter what the circumstances are. That's how I got through that period of time."
She has not given up on television however. She has plans for a possible sitcom that she will produce. "I am not going to do another series except under certain circumstances. I want to control the quality of the show and the content. I want to make a television show that does not derive its humor from the private parts of a human body, going to the bathroom or taking pot-shots at people. I don't think it is good manners to make fun of other people who get their feelings hurt when they see themselves. I have had many opportunities since Designing Women. But I am not going to go on TV and say vulgar crude things."
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