|
They’ve got a great thing going, these two. You
can hear it in Tyne's infectious laughter – see
it in Georg's warm smile. It echoes and
re-echoes in the joyousness of their beautiful
children. You feel it in the warmth of their
glances, their eager enthusiasm. Georg Stanford
Brown, says the pretty, talented lady who knows
him best,“ improves with age……” And Tyne? “I dug
her from the very beginning” grins the man who
has been her husband for nearly eight years. “I
dug that woman! I was attracted to her, so we
got married.”
Georg is the good-looking actor who plays Terry
Webster in ABCs popular series, The Rookies.
Tyne Daly – daughter of actor James Daly, who
appears in Medical Center – is an actress whose
many outstanding roles in Movie of the Week and
series guest shots are making her face as
familiar to TV audiences as her husband’s is on
his weekly stint!
They’re remarkable phenomenon in Hollywood –
young actors who have found that perfect balance
that keeps twin careers successfully afloat –
family togetherness intact – and a Tinseltown
marriage extraordinarily happy.
We talked with both of them at length, and we
came away with a fresh view of Hollywood
marriage.
Tyne is a wise, capable wife, a full-time
mother, busy homemaker, talented career lady – a
real role-juggler. “I’m very piggy,” she says.
“I’ve got to do it all! If I weren’t a juggler,
I wouldn’t be able to! I want very much to be
married lady – a lady-with-a-man – even in this
day and age. I like that. And I’ve got those
children, whom I would never not have! I mean, I
don’t know about another baby: I΄d like to have
another baby, but not this minute. And Georg
…..” A trace of a grin is already beginning.
“Georg is seriously doubting the whole
question.” She finishes on a wave of laughter.
While we chatted, Tyne clued us in on domestic
issues, delighted us with ΄mother stories΄, and
charmed us completely with her bubbling humor
and candid honesty. We talked about the early
days of their marriage, when she and Georg lived
“in that tiny little apartment in New York. A
railroad flat, six flights up. We had a tub in
the kitchen, with a lid on it that came down… ”
There were ups and downs to the marriage that
began under an apple tree in her Mom’s backyard.
But it continues sturdily, steadily, happily –
through a couple of miscarriages, a pair of
beautiful babies, some good times, some bad
times.
“We’d been students together,” Tyne recalls.
Both were destined to an acting career, though
Tyne – being the child of an actor – was born to
the boards, whereas Georg's background was
definitely in the other direction. Cuban-born,
he emigrated to New York at 7. His father was a
private chauffeur, and Georg, a brilliant boy
whose capabilities out weight his opportunities,
didn’t decide to become an actor until after
he’d roamed the country a bit.
“I was a bum!” he grins.
Handsome, soft-voiced, articulate – a
triple-threat actor, with credits in film,
stage, and television – he is reserved and quiet
in real life, but far less so than before he
knew Tyne! She has made a lot of changes in his
life, not the least of which was making him a
father.
“We may be a dying breed, those of us who like
children” says Tyne. “We both like children.
Babies are the most ΄together΄ beings – they
really are!”
They’re understandably proud of six-year-old
Elizabeth and three-year-old Kathryne, a
brown-eyed, dark-haired pair of real charmers.
“They’re both Daddy’s girls when they want to
be” laughs their mom, “and when they don’t, it’s
΄Don't talk to me! I’m not your friend!΄ ”
“At this moment, Elizabeth wants to be a
painter, an artist, a mother, ad a waitress. I
don’t know how she’ll be all that, but there you
are. Kathryne doesn’t want to be anybody but
Kathryne – she’s still the center of her own
universe.”
Tyne and Georg have hit happy plateaus in their
work schedules – but there has never been a
thought that either would give up his or her
profession, even during the difficult periods.
“It’s hard to sustain two careers in the same
house, especially when both of the careers are
so catch-as-catch-can,” Tyne points out. “There
have been periods of nonwork – maybe six months
– and that’s when it gets hard! You start to
climb the walls. We’ve been tempted to give up
each other, or the children, ” she quips, on
another ripple of laughter, “but never acting.”
The difficult times, luckily, came when they
were “very young and resilient, which you’ve got
to be!” Tyne admits that it “usually works
pretty well. It only gets tough when we’re both
working at the same time, because of the
babies.”
Georg, she reminds me, is “doing all the jobs,
too” - and apparently has never entertained the
idea that he’d rather Tyne didn’t have a career.
They seem so compatible it is hard to believe
Tyne when she says, “We see eye to eye on
practically nothing! We struggle a lot – but we
interest each other…… ”
It’s a “interest” that was practically
instantaneous. “I never really dated, you know,”
Georg points out. “I don’t understand the
principle of dating. I΄d loved many women, had a
lot of relationships – but I was tremendously
attracted to Tyne ….” He still is: “She’s soft
and brown and I love her a lot,” he says, his
brown eyes glowing. “She’s a force in my life, a
very strong force.”
Because he cares so much about his girls, Georg
is typically concerned with his role as father.
“I’m sure I’m not a very good parent,” he says
candidly – though he can spend hours just
watching them at play, and has formed his own
definite guidelines in raising them.
Tyne's approach complements his, but is
completely different. “Georg has private
conferences with the girls – he rough-houses
with them a good deal. I read to them. Cart them
here and there, and we have sort of mutual
conferences. It’s because we’re different
people, I guess. They are individual human
beings and so are we ….
It’s a lifetime adventure we’re all talking and
kids are for life. Like your parents and
siblings. You can’t get rid of them and they
can’t get rid of you. There’s something magic
connected to them. Chosen people – like your
husband or your lover – are different. That’s
somebody you like and are mad for and you say,
΄I'm going to try to co-exist with them΄,
because you’ve got to exist and they’ve got to
exist and you are going to try to exist in
tandem”.
Young as they both were when their babies
arrived, Georg and Tyne took the matter very
seriously. “It was the right thing to do at the
time,” says Tyne. “We were just married – we’d
been living together for two years – and I was
in New York working and he was in Africa on
location. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and
I said, ΄I'm going to go and join Georg on the
Riviera and recover from my first Broadway flop,
which is pretty neat of itself – and I’m going
to have a baby.΄ And my agent said, ΄You're out
of your mind!΄ But it was time for us to have a
baby,” she says happily.
She smiles at the memory. “We were in Nice and
Paris. …. And then we came home – having spent
all the money [her laughter ripples through the
words lightly again], which is terrific! – to
the cold-water flat. And I was pregnant, because
I went there to get pregnant.”
And that, wouldn’t you know it, was one of the
really “low” points in Georg's career. For eight
months, while Tyne was “getting more and more
pregnant,” nothing materialized! Finally Georg
said, “I’m going to take this little piece if
film to the coast and see if I can cash in on
it.”
Tearfully, hopefully, Tyne sent him on his way
and went home to her mom.
“He came out here and in three weeks he had a
movie!” she marvels. “And I had Elizabeth, and
when she was eight days old, we flew out here
together to join him.”
But there were still many high hurdles ahead.
They lived with one uncle or another. “I was a
lady with a baby, and I sort of didn’t care a
lot about a career for the first six months. I
was breast-feeding Elizabeth and very rapidly
setting up house.” And by the time she got back
to her own career, “it was hard to start all
over again. But I’ve been lucky.” She smiles.
Today she’s far more selective about work than
she once could have been. She has done some
outstanding work on television – and continues
to find challenging roles. Larry and The Man Who
Talked to Kids were two movies that she
specially loved. “I just finished doing play
that was very out of character for me. I played
a suicidal hooker!” she says – in the Pulitzer
Prize play of 1971, No Place to Be Somebody.
Tyne is a very positive-type woman – a bright,
aware lady who takes a wise look at her own
world and proceeds on her way – without
cluttering up her mind with a lot of negative
thoughts and ideas. How, I ask, does she react
to Georg's having love scenes before the camera
with other women?
“Well, if they’re good and convincing, I’m very
glad!” she says, immediately launching into a
complimentary account of the “splendid” scenes
he’d had with one young lady in a segment of The
Rookies!
Doesn’t she have any of the normal jealousies?
“Well, not when he’s working!” she shoots back.
“If he spends his whole time at some party
talking to some chick ….” you gather it would be
a different story. But she points out quickly,
“I can’t possibly be every lady of the world to
that man, nor could he possibly be every man to
me! I need other relationships – not necessarily
sexual, but not unnecessarily sexual
relationships. You can’t be all things to all
people.
“Georg was the first man who ever told me that
when I came into a room men paid attention, ”
she says quietly. “I didn’t know it until he
told me……..” She goes back to the original
question. “Jealousy is not a normal state of
affairs,” she declares. It’s like a
contradiction in terms. Jealousy is being a ΄bad
guy΄ - to yourself.
But in today’s precarious world, with marriages
faltering all around them, don’t they worry
about their marriage failing as so many others
have done? Do they talk about it?
“Do we talk about it?” she echoes. “No,we fish
about it!” She laughs.
“I think marriage is work,” says her husband.
“Human relationships are difficult …..” But a
marriage combining two show-business careers
“doesn’t make it any more so,” in his opinion.
“I’ve always loved the life of actors,” he says,
and he’s obviously found just exactly the lady
he wants to share that life with.
“A lot of people I know are working on their
first marriage – instead of their marriage,”
says Tyne sagely. “You know what I mean?”
They are complete opposites in many ways, but
tranquilly, beautifully united in the manner
that matters most. They seem to be totally in
love.
“We’re that too,” smiles Tyne. “That helps!”
Laughter punctuates get quip. “But we’re
individuals too …….”
That, after all, may be the real secret of the
happy marriage of a super pair who live in a
Benedict Canyon home, up a winding private road
that protects them – and their pretty little
daughters – from the turbulent world around
them. Laughter rings from the wooden beams, and
warmth and love radiate from the people who live
in the house – like the warmth that comes from
the big fireplace where they gather, when day is
done, to share the kind of togetherness that's
fast becoming a lost art in today’s living.
By
Anthony Eric
Bowen
Transcribed by Christos Spirou for use on The
Rookies Online:
http://www.therookies.gr
For entertainment purpose only. No profit or
copyright infringement intended.
|
