Bitches, saints or role models, TV's glamour queens ride high
Alexis, daahr-ling. Of course we know that you and Dynasty are simply the last word in TV glamour. But have you noticed the crowd you have attracted lately? That nasty Morgan Fairchild on Paper Dolls makes and breaks the careers of models half her age with the flick of a fingernail and looks smashing while doing it. The women of Dallas have taken a page from your book and hired their own designer to come up with dazzling new outfits to wear around Southfork. Even TV detectives, for heaven's sake, are starting to look like fashion spreads in Vogue. Jennifer O'Neill trots off to swank locations around the world posing as a fashion photographer in Cover Up. Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson play a former debutante and a working-class woman who team up on Partners in Crime, but from the outfits, who can tell which is which?
Glamour is the rage this fall, and prime time is overflowing with ornately dressed, immaculately coiffed leading ladies who glide through fabulous worlds of wealth, power, romance and high-style intrigue. Some of them, such as Fairchild and Dina Merrill in Hot Pursuit, are campy bitches modeled after Joan Collins' conniving Alexis Carrington Colby. Others, like Dynasty's Linda Evans and Dallas' Priscilla Presley, are equally fanciful angels of goodness and nobility. Still others, like this season's spate of high-living private eyes, are just girls who want to have fun. But all of them embody a new ethic of elegance, opulence and artifice unlike anything TV has yet seen.
To be sure, a few down-to-earth, relatively realistic females have gained a foothold in prime time, on such shows as Cagney & Lacey and Kate & Allie. Moreover, several of the season's glitziest newcomers—like ABC's Glitter, which was taken off the air after just three episodes—have been struggling in the ratings. But Collins and her sisters in silk and satin are clearly setting the dominant style of high-gloss femininity, and their ranks are growing. Gina Lollobrigida has joined the cast of Falcon Crest, and Ali MacGraw will appear on Dynasty later this season. Yvette Mimieux will star in a midseason show on NBC called Berrenger's, about a posh New York City department store similar to Bloomingdale's. And Angie Dickinson and Candice Bergen head the cast of Hollywood Wives, an upcoming ABC mini-series based on Jackie Collins' spicy bestseller.
TV's obsession with glamour seems a throwback to the glittery fantasy worlds that Hollywood created in the 1930s, '40s and '50s, then largely abandoned for social relevance and downbeat realism in the '60s and '70s. "I think the public has been starved for glamour for a long time," says Joan Collins, 51, who was a well-traveled but undistinguished movie actress before achieving superstardom on Dynasty (and posing in the nude for Playboy last year). "I grew up watching beautiful actresses like Ava Gardner, Hedy Lamarr and Elizabeth Taylor. Getting away from one's mundane existence into a fantasy world of beautiful clothes, jewels and Rolls-Royces is very appealing."