HOLLAND TAYLOR IMPROVES ANY SERIES SHE'S IN
by SYLVIA LAWLER, The Morning Call

Anytime Holland Taylor turns up in a television series, it's a smart idea to tune in. Not only because she lived with her family in Allentown during her teen years and has been back here many times since, but because Taylor's coppery personality and deft comedy spark the scenery for miles around.

Usually the actress charged with elevating anything she touches (but often annoyingly under-used, look no futher than her role as Kathleen Turner's buddy in the "Romancing the Stone" films), Taylor surfaces in her fifth network series this fall, the Miller-Boyett comedy "Going Places" airing at 9:30 p.m. Fridays on ABC.

Producers Miller and Boyett began their string of hits with "Happy Days," "Laverne and Shirley" and "Mork and Mindy" in the sixties, and with "Going Places" and Gregory Harrison's "Family Man" bring their current tally of shows-on-air this season to six ("Perfect Strangers," "The Hogan Family," "Family Matters" and "Full House" completing the string).

Taylor has worked for them before and the respect is mutual. Already an accomplished stage name at the time of her first series, "Beacon Hill" in 1975, Taylor was given far too little to do in CBS's failed answer to England's "Upstairs, Downstairs." Taylor's best television shot came in 1980-84 when she played Tom Hanks' and Peter Scolari's flamboyant, vengeful boss Ruth Dunbar in the television quasi-classic "Bosom Buddies." In 1985's "Me and Mom" with James Earl Jones, Taylor was used enough but the scripts and direction were more frantic than coherent. In 1987's "Harry" with Alan Arkin, the comedy too often just didn't work.

It was her "Bosom Buddies" bosses, Bob Boyett and Tom Miller, harboring fond admiration for Taylor's elegant professionalism, who came up with the character of Dawn St. Claire for her to play. A chip off the old Ruth Dunbar, St. Claire is foil and nemesis to a bunch of young television writers living on her property. It's a set-up more than one critic has compared to "Three's Company," with Heather Locklear leading the way as chief nubile resident.

Critiqued the magazine Entertainment Weekly: "So far, the series hasn't done much with the TV-show-within-a-TV show that the writers work for -- it's a premise still waiting to happen. The best supporting player by far is Holland Taylor as the show's producer. Taylor, a New York stage actress who graced `Bosom Buddies´ with wit and malice, plays essentially the same role here and does it every bit as well."

Since "Nattica Jackson" on PBS´s "Tales From the Hollywood Hills" two years ago, Taylor´s acting forum has been her first love, the stage. Now, she is phoning from California, calling from her car as she chugs northward on the San Diego freeway back to Los Angeles and the rented digs she calls home when she's on the West Coast.

"My agent said `You can´t be out here without a phone in your car; this is a one-industry town,´" she says. "I´ve been out in L.A. a lot during the past decade and I´ve rented a car until now. But instead I bought this adorable little sportscar, a Miata. It´s the first car I´ve had since I tooled around Allentown in the Austin-Healy Sprite my father (the late Atty. C. Tracy Taylor) gave me when I started to pay attention in school. Twenty-odd years later I finally bought another. I´ll leave it here at the guest quarters in L.A. when I go back to New York."

For the past two years, she's been doing her pal A. J. ("Pete") Gurney's play, "The Cocktail Hour." "We did it at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and in New York for 11 months, but it was created at the Old Globe in San Diego with Jack O'Brien directing so he's an old friend. I'm driving up from The Globe now," she said en route "after seeing his production of `Hamlet´ with George C. Scott´s son Campbell -- who is very gifted -- in an astonishing debut. This is a young Hamlet. We´re used to seeing broken down old f---s but when you see a 20 or 21-year-old boy meet hideous catastrophe, it's very different."

I had forgotten Taylor needs next to no prompting to do something else she does extremely well: talk expansively and merrily. About the new series -- "It's a show very much in formulation. We have four to six young people who mix well, are attractive and fun. It's basically a show biz story with an L.A. setting to play with and the rest is up for grabs. "It's not like `Cheers,´ that was richly thought out going in. This will take some doing. And the time is tricky. It could be sophisticated and verbal like `Cheers´ at 9:30, but it can´t because it´s at the end of a block of young people´s shows on Friday night."

Why another series now? "I take the jobs as they come up. I just spent a long time with a play. I needed to do something not in theater for a few minutes. Bob Boyett (of Miller-Boyett) had not a script nor a strong idea for the show. But I know them to be gentlemen who, as producers, made me feel safe. I'd do anything for them. They might not work it out by the first part of the first season, but they would let me be my best. I knew that and was secure in that. "We're on our sixth one now. We're just making 13 while we wait and see what evolves. I have to think that in the long term, it will work. But in the meantime, you draw on aspects of your comedy-fantasy self."

Is Dawn really Ruth Dunbar? "There's no way I could play a lady executive without being Ruth Dunbar because Ruth Dunbar is sort of Holland Taylor. But `Bosom Buddies´ was 10 years ago. I´m older now. "What´s interesting about Dawn is that she´s a producer in show business of an age where women did not do it all. She has no children, is divorced and lives in the guest house and she interferes in a maternal sort of way. She provides the set-ups so the young people can reveal themselves, gives them the grief that the situations build from. "It's slowly evolving. I wouldn't be a series comedy writer for anything. You have six strangers to write for, learn their rhythms, how they work, what they do best ... Television is different from a movie or play in that it's not just a work of creativity or fun that's in one's life for a set moment. You're a stranger on a visitation into the audience's life in a way that theater does not do at all. The idea is for people to like you enough that they want to tune in, the way a character pops into your mind and you know you want to watch. It almost doesn't matter what they do. `Golden Girls´ is a perfect example. "That´s not true of ground-breaking shows like `Maude,´ where Bea Arthur could be a real actress. Or `Roseanne,´ one of the best shows on television," enthused this Bennington graduate with the patrician air, as she assessed the blue collar comedy and its seamless construction. "Look at the action in that show," she says, "not to mention the writing. All the dialogue is pulled over the honest shape of living in that house, the pouring of the cereal, the doing of something active. It's done brilliantly there ... and in `Thirtysomething.´ And figuring out the traffic and the props (while it´s unfolding) requires rehearsal." Most shows, she said, don´t provide time for that. "Going Places" does rehearse, she said, but not stylistically as do the two mentioned. "It´s in the genre of `Perfect Strangers´ and `Full House´ -- more show and jokes and less slice of life."

Taylor said she was working the night of the Emmys and did not attend what she calls that "strange event." "I'm a very serious person when it comes to plays. I don't believe I've missed a season of doing a play when I was in Nnew York. But in television, which I also do, it's very different. And the Emmy is the perfect revelation of that. TV is a huge world and getting huger by the season what with more cable channels. And you see out here people dying to kiss the hem of someone you've never heard of on television. It just gets bigger and bigger, with vastly more performances to be judged on all channels." Taylor hesitated when she was offered "Bosom Buddies" 10 years ago, then solely a serious actress with designs on being "a great big Broadway star." It was her acting coach and mentor, the legendary Stella Adler "who thought I should get into the swim and stop being only stage-minded. She came to see me the closing night of `The Cocktail Hour´ -- it´s a decade since I´ve been an active student of hers although I put in my program bio that I´m a `once and always student of Stella Adler´ -- and she said `You´re ready to play the great roles.' " Which? I asked. "`Hedda Gabler´ I suppose, being an Ibsen admirer. And I´d like to do S.N. Behrman´s `End of Summer.´ I like plays from that epoch before the backlash to the women´s movement came along to say, as they do now, that women are of no importance except as an adjunct to men."

And she is off and running on another topic. "I had the privilege of meeting Meryl Streep the other night and she told me that the roles she takes are the only one she could take. There aren't that many so she does what's available. These days a woman is a hooker, a wife or a mother; she can't just be a person. I feel those parts are lessening in range, too stricturing. "If you have one female starring role she is either beautiful and sexy, or having a breakdown because she's no longer beautiful and sexy, or the mother of someone who's beautiful and sexy. Women's parts today are not of substance. There's a definite change in terms of materials being done from the days when women were considered a real piece of work ... like Katharine Hepburn. "I suppose it's in reaction to a successful revolution that's changed things forever, or at least for our century. But, I feel that men my age or younger are more attractive than ever, more fun and sensitive. The 30-to-35-year-old men I meet are just delightful. They feel differently. It's the 50-to-60 generation in the movie industry that still thinks `You bleeping women, shut the bleep up.´" "It's (the movement) created a backlash that is good, I supppose ... enlightenment still smarts a lot. But of women directors back then you had Ida Lupino and that was it and the women I meet out here now are fabulous. There's been a good five-year-dearth of them exercising control, but I think that will change.

"You know, when I did `Butley´ (on Broadway with Alan Bates) 15 or more years ago, it was about a man having a breakdown and revolved around all his problems. The New York Times asked in an article `Could this play have been about Mrs. Butley?´ (the far less central role played by Taylor). The Times´ answer was `No,´ meaning that a woman´s problems in quadruplicate would not have been considered fit subjects for serious airing in a play. "If it had, it would have had to be about ... if not their relationship, then their absence of a relationship ... which is not crucial to life. We're experiencing turbulent waters but it will be all to the good, I think."

Taylor is such a superior conversationalist that Jack Paar would have taken her to his talk show couch in the '60s with rapacious verbal intent. I tell her the circuit is missing a bet by not having her on and she says "I'm dying to go on Arsenio. But even more than that with Oprah. She has changed my life. What an extraordinary heart mixed with a cool head. I tune in to see Oprah and I am reassured by her." She told Winfrey so at Tiffany's in Chicago, where both were Christmas shopping last year. "She listened very intently, took it all in. I've never felt so listened to," said Taylor, who says she has a theme idea for for Oprah ... "What it's really like to be an actress, not a star ... someone like myself who's been in the mainstream of American entertainment for 20 years. It involves some emotional rigor; we lead interesting and checkered lives."

As for Arsenio, "I love his affectionate jibes at unconscious or subtle prejudice. He'd be fun to tell about something because like Oprah, he is interested. And a snappy dresser which goes a long way with me." She is now approaching La Cienega Blvd., she tells me, about eight minutes from the place she calls home when she's in California. The drive and call are winding down. "I just hope the show gets very good," she said, "and if not, canceled." She means it. Rather a departed show than a tawdry product hanging out there. "Anyhow, what's important," she says surprisingly, "is to have a good time. I feel that way more and more the older I get. The series is taking time to jell," she said, "and I'm not sure it will jell. "

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