Victoria Principal: She can be tough or purring as the occasion demands, but the darling of “Dallas” is astrangely fearful woman.
People Magazine May 23, 1983, By: Jeff Jarvis and David Wallace:
Victoria Principal, The "Dallas" Star Is A Strangely Fearful Woman.Sometimes you want to kick Pam Ewing. The woman is simply too sweet to survive in the company of her oily in-laws. She’s 90 percent quivering jelly. Finally, though, that other 10 percent is emerging; Pam is getting touch. She slapped J.R. and told him to “shut up and stay out of my life.” Husband Bobby began following in J.R.’s fetid footsteps (as Sue Ellen put it: “He has a new mistress, Pam – Ewing Oil”), so Pam left. “Our marriage just doesn’t work anymore,” she said, “and I want a divorce.” That, says Victoria Principal, has been “a long time coming.” In this season’s fiery finish, the Ewings’ tawdry Tara, Southfork, went up in flames (shades of “Dynasty”) with J.R., Sue Ellen and their son trapped inside. Next season, the stage seems set for J.R. actually to become a good guy, for Bobby to end up in flagrante “Dallas” with Pam’s sister, and for Pam finally to go all the way with Mark Grayson (“Your favorite stud,” J.R. calls him). It will be, says Victoria, “a major change in Pam and the show.”
Victoria, on the other hand, has always been tough – 90 percent of her at least. “I love the deal-making,” she says. In 1978 she hard-bargained her way onto CBS’ “Dallas” for a reported $25,000 a show (now at least doubled, by most estimates). Last October she renewed her contract to flog Jhirmack shampoos with a new $1 million- plus salary (“the second largest endorsement contract ever,” she claims –reportedly second only to Lauren Bacall’s High-Point Coffee deal). And Principal personally called the editor of Simon & Schuster to sell her first book, “The Body Principal,” which will be published this fall.
Unlike Pam, Victoria has played around. She dumped financier Bernie Cornfeld when he allegedly tried to strangle her; she dated Frank Sinatra; she watched her affair with Andy Gibb end in a fight over drugs. At 33, she’s sexy, self-assured, earthy and outrageous. She posed for May’s “Harper’s Bazaar” and “wore the best thing possible”: nothing. “There are many ways to say I love you,” says a joke-gift button she sports. “F*****g is the fastest.” This is the 90 percent of Victoria that Hollywood and the public know.
But the rest of her is a cautious, even frightened woman. She has built a fortress off Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon. “You bet I’m paranoid!” She says. Rattled by threatening calls, letters and a confrontation four years ago with three youths in her garage (she talked them out of trouble), Victoria now protects herself with a half-dozen alarm systems and two attack dogs, China and Dyla. “My Dobermans have been trained” – her tiny voice grows quiet – “to kill…. I give them bones once a week so they won’t lose their taste for blood.” She bricked over windows against paparazzi; she bought a Porsche with a sunroof instead of a convertible because “somebody could grab me out of it.”
Victoria gives a tour of the home she bought in 1978, showing where her new 12-by-16-foot gym will go, the framed cover-girl pictures of herself, the video recorders (she watches “Dallas” but never tapes it, “absolutely not – I don’t want to end up an old lady rerunning tapes of my shows”), and a jar of X-rated fortune cookies (she opens one – “Marriage has ruined many a good love affair” – and laughs). Then come her pride and joy: “Let me show you my bulletproof bathroom.”
Her luxurious loo’s earthtone-brown walls, floors and ceiling are armored in steel. “It totally protects me,” she says. Its skylight has bars (“I’m going to hang some plants to soften it a bit”); its’ one window is hot-wired, so “by the time anyone gets this far, they’ll be fried.” Next to her john is a red phone that “will always work even if the lines to the house are cut… Wouldn’t it be awful to be shot on the toilet?” she wonders with a laugh – not a hearty one.
Victoria is equally protective of her past. She hates her image as a man-hunter (as another of her buttons puts it: “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere”). “No one who ever dated me has ever said an unkind thing about me,” she exclaims. “I’ve probably had fewer relationships than many in my 33 years, but no one will ever believe it.” Since 1978 she’s dated only three men. The first was Chris Skinner, an aspiring actor seven years her junior. After three dates, they married. After 10 months, they divorced. Her 75-hour-a-week job was too much for him.
Then she met Andy Gibb, now 25, on “The John Davidson Show.” Andy had told PEOPLE that he watched “Dallas” just to see Victoria, so she went on the program to surprise him. They soon lived and worked together. Careers never conflicted. “Absolutely not,” Victoria says. “I did some of my best work because of Andy.” He taught her to sing for a single: “All I Have To Do Is Dream.” His albums still litter Victoria’s dream house. Andy does not.
They broke up last spring when “I said for him to choose between me and the problem.” It was drugs. “I am adamant about drugs. If I would end my relationship…” She wipes away a tear. The press castigated her, but Victoria says they got it wrong – the breakup didn’t lead to his problems; it was the other way around. “To come forward and say what really happened would have been a terrible breach of our relationship,” she says now. “Andy is eternally dear to me.”
In the middle of her “emotional divorce” from Andy, Victoria fell in love with Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Harry Glassman, 39. He too was going through a divorce. Glassman and his almost-ex, Jane, have been arguing over property, including a ring that Jane claims Harry bought for Victoria. Victoria “swore on a Bible” in a deposition that he bought her no ring, but she later bought herself one with a 3.89 carat diamond. The price: “It was 33rd birthday and I felt the numbers should be appropriate” (add four zeroes).
Harry is troubled with his fame-by-association. “One of the things about the relationship with Victoria I’ve grown to resent,” he says, “is the lack of privacy.” Victoria treasures him. “With Harry,” she says, “I feel completely fulfilled. I’m just wild about Harry.” She’s also crazy about his children, Andrew, 15, and Brooke, 13, “You can’t have two parents turn out two wonderful children like that unless they are very nice people,’ she says.
But mention a marriage date and Victoria turns coy. “Yea, I’ve been reading a lot of “Modern Bride” because I believe in the institution of marriage and always being well- dressed,” she chortles. “But if I were going to get married, the only man in the world I would get married to is Harry.” Ask her whether she’ll ever be a mother and she says: “I believe in having babies when you’re wed. But at the moment I’m not planning on having a baby and I’m not planning on getting married. But someday…”
Victoria has approached her career the same way she is now approaching the altar: carefully. After growing up an Air Force brat in Japan and Georgia and points in between, after acting and modeling in New York and Europe, she moved to L.A. in 1971 and made “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean” with Paul Newman. Suddenly, she recalls, “People started inviting me to parties. I thought these people really like me but I found out I was only a hot meal ticket.” Her next film, “The Naked Ape (made by Playboy Magazine),” “went into the toilet and so did my telephone number.” She never again wanted to feel the pain of failure. "“ wanted to be successful simply because I didn't’ want to get hurt," ”she says. "“ began to get hard. I became very protective of myself.” Then, in 1975, “halfway through “Vigiante Force,” I realized I was so unhappy I didn’t want to live.”
She left acting to become an agent, where “I was being treated for what I could say or do as opposed to how I looked.” Concentrating on her brains, not beauty, she headed for law school. On the way, she stopped off on “Fantasy Island” to earn her tuition and “I never did make it to law school.”
Then, at age 28, came “Dallas.” Today, it seems, Victoria is about as rich in real life as she is on the show. She’s careful with her money, too. She rents out her walled, guarded retreat in Palm Springs, “so it actually pays for itself.” She owns some office real estate and has built a home in Atlanta for her parents, retired Air Force Master Sgt. Victor Principale and his wife, Ree veal. Victoria is about to become national chairman of the Arthritis Foundation “as a love letter to my parents.” Her father suffers from arthritis and her mother from LUPUS, a related disease (and Victoria says she’s beginning to suffer trace symptoms of both).
She has fame, money, love and a sense of humor. There’s one thing more: beauty. Victoria works hard to keep it. Even better, she makes money from it – on “Dallas,” in her book, selling shampoo, and as the visible spokesman for Jack LaLanne, Vic Tanny and other health clubs until Jaclyn Smith started replacing her a few months ago. Even if her psyche’s a little soft, Victoria makes sure the same won’t apply to her body or bank account.
THE BEAUTY AND THE BEACH: VICTORIA’S SUMMER SHAPE-UP HINTS FROM HER BOOK “THE BODY PRINCIPAL”
“I realized in my late 20s that something was happening to my body,” Victoria says. “It was going south. I was in my kitchen one day and a girlfriend was over and said, ‘What’s that on the back of your leg?’ It was my ass.” So Principal developed beauty hints to “resculpture” her body. She is including them in her book, “The Body Principal,” and she has already signed to do another book, “The Beauty Principal.” Here are some of Victoria’s summer fitness tips:
ON WATER: The most important thing is continually flushing out the system by drinking a lot of water, or drinking any liquid that doesn’t have additives or preservatives and can prove to be a natural diuretic – like corn husks boiled in water. I drink it with a little lemon, just a little touch because I don’t believe too much citrus is good for anyone. In the summer, it’s important to have the moisture inside you, not to just keep applying it from the outside. It keeps your organs running properly.
ON SUNLIGHT: Keeping your skin moisturized in the sun but, even more important, block your skin from harmful ultraviolet rays. That’s the purpose of sunscreens.
ON FOOD: I’m against canned foods. I’m against foods with preservatives. I think melons are a good idea. You’ve got to get your stomach accustomed to accepting less food. If you’re going to be outdoors in the heat, then take a break at noon and eat things that will help keep your body stabilized, like a cool, lightly seasoned gazpacho soup and a light tuna or chicken salad for protein. When I’m on vacation, I allow myself things I never ordinarily eat, like chocolate. I’m not a big chocolate eater, but that is what comes to mind because so many people ask me if they can ever eat chocolate again. I say, “Not very often.” But you never should deny yourself something the rest of your life, unless it’s going to hurt you.
ON EXERCISE: I believe in exercise all year round. Summer is the perfect time to get even more. Walk instead of drive. But women shouldn’t jog too much. You’ll break down the facial muscles and the pectoral muscles (the ones that hold up your breasts). Doctors and plastic surgeons are seeing that more and more. Women who jog a lot are having to get facelifts earlier in life.
ON HAIR: It’s really important to protect your hair during the summer, especially if you use color (she does).
ON SUMMER SEX: I don’t think one should restrict oneself ever.