“I just love it here,” Jamie Rose says, as she stands in the Speed Queen lavanderia on the bear Southwest Side of Chicago, her right hand waving in midair. “I love the way the smell of bleach permeates the air.” She takes a deep breath, as if smelling for lingering bleach particles. “Lovely working conditions, don’t you think?”
She laughs.
Outside the lavanderia, curious onlookers from this mostly Hispanic community watch as a film crew and director/series co-producer Robert Vincent O’Neil ready camera angles and props for a scene from the ABC series Lady Blue, in which Rose stars as the title character, a tough Chicago cop. Back inside the coin-operated laundromat, a half-dozen or so neighborhood niños run around playing tag in between the tangerine-orange, lime-green and gold washers and dryers, and the lights and cameras delicately balanced nearby.
Rose moves to a conspicuously large air-conditioned RV parked on Loomis Avenue behind the laundromat—an area where it is rumored the pizza man refuses to deliver because of the high crime rate. Safely inside, she relaxes, protected, if only for the moment, from the dirty streets, the sweltering heat and the pressures of starring for the first time in a television series.
If doesn’t take a CIA operative to penetrate the defenses used by Rose in dealing with the new-found tensions of a major career opportunity. All you have to do is sit back and listen as she attempts to relieve the stress by nervously spewing an endless stream of witticisms.
It’s a relaxation technique she seems to have mastered.
She can’t really playact the brooding, self-exiled image made famous by aging starlets; she isn’t old enough. Nor can she attack the often rude press with a barrage of verbal abuse; it would clash with her otherwise giddy personality. So Rose tries to stay loose, saving all the really good drama for the screen.
“I used to be an actress who made everything a crisis, Rose says. “I would get way up for a scene and then come way down. Now I’m trying not to make it all so up and down, emotionally, and what has happened is my acting has improved.”
Maybe so. Nevertheless, she admits she’s still occasionally moody, spontaneous, sometimes difficult to work with. But what can you expect from someone with flaming red hair and freckles? besides, it wasn’t long ago that Rose experienced a more devastating kind of pressure, when her career stalled after she was dumped from CBS’s highly rated series Falcon Crest. She says she was surprised her character, Victoria Gioberti, didn’t get the boot sooner. “The only kind of storyline she could have was to be in love,” Rose explains, “and she was related to practically every character in the show. Who was she going to go to bed with?”
Falcon Crest creator Earl Hammer agrees that Rose’s character had reached a state of paralysis after two-plus seasons. “We initially cast Jamie because she had a certain coloration the complexion we were looking for,” Hammer explains. “I immediately sensed an offbeat, quirky kind of talent that I liked. She was not your typical Hollywood pretty girl, although she was that, too. She also had a special, giggly quality .”
“In the beginning, Falcon Crest was going to be a sort of family show, and Jamie was extremely useful to us in those first two years,” he adds. “But then the network decided on a more adult show. We eventually married Jamie off and it was a mistake. There wasn’t much else to do with her character.”
A year later, executive producer David Gerber cast Rose as the blood-splattering maverick cop, Katy Malone, in last season’s TV-movie “Lady Blue.” The film finished seventh in the ratings the week it aired and was picked up as a seven-week series, planned to occupy a Thursday night slot on ABC’s fall season until Dynasty II: The Colbys premieres later this month.
Now, Rose must make her little-girl-with-big-gun character believable, if the show is to survive for the long term. And there’s only one way to deal with that kind of burden: by keeping the off-camera script light and cheery. Even Rose will admit that it doesn’t always work.
“It’s great you’re here today,” Rose says to a reporter, as they relax inside her RV, “because when you ask Bob [O’Neil] what I’m like to work with, he’ll say, “She’s wonderful,’ because he’s only been working with me for two days. Ask him in two weeks and he’ll probably say, “That —–!”
Rose laughs.
She is dressed casually in blue jeans, a gray tank top, gray socks and black high-top Reeboks—athletic shoes designed for aerobic dancing, but worn in her case for style and comfort. Or so she says as she impatiently waits for the power to come on in the makeup trailer across the street.
“Great,” she exclaims, except her tone is more like, I can’t believe this is happening. “As soon as I get in the makeup trailer I’m going to have some second AD [assistant director] running over and telling me to hurry up when it’s their fault the power wasn’t on. This kind of stuff bugs me. I don’t like problems. I tend to be a very nervous person, I’m what you would call hyper, and it’s very easy for me to get involved in all this conflict.
So much for the light, cheery script.
At 25, Rose has been in the TV business, off and on, for around 20 years. She was born in New York, but her family moved to California when Jamie was a child. There, she appeared in commercials and episodes of Green Acres and Family Affair before retiring at 13 because she hated the pressures of auditioning. “At first I abandoned the idea of being an actress,” she says. “I didn’t think I would be good enough. I also didn’t want to be judged any more than I was already judging myself.”
But with red hair, freckles, and a father who kept paying her Screen Actors Guild dues, Rose moved from Fresno to Los Angeles at 18 and became self-supporting as an actress within the year, eventually landing her first major television role on Falcon Crest in 1981.
It was four days after purchasing a two-bedroom, two-bath home in Hollywood Hills that Rose learned that she had been dropped from the series. “That was a bit of a readjustment for me,” she recalls. “I was only 23. I wasn’t like I was this seasoned pro.
“That was a very crucial change in my life.” She emphasizes: cruuu-cial. “I had to learn then that you better have some self-esteem because you ain’t going to get it with the consistency of your career.
Fortunately, Rose did not have to sell her newly purchased home. Thanks to her savings and the help of a creative accountant, she and her black Labrador retriever, Fidel, are still living in the same two-bedroom, two-bath home two years later.
Ironically, the same afternoon Rose received word that she would be written out of Falcon Crest, she and James Orr, a writer-director, made plans to have lunch and then visit their mutual accountant. “It was really interesting that James was there for this traumatic moment in my life,” Rose says. They met again accidentally a year later, and now the couple is engaged and planning a wedding next May.
When Rose is not working, she’s usually spending time with Orr, traveling and eating out at nice restaurants, which explains why the kitchen of her two-bedroom home is always so spotless: “I never cook.”
During those two seasons on Falcon Crest, Rose made three movies: the TV-movie “In Love with an Older Woman,” with John Ritter; “Just Before Dawn,” with George Kennedy; and “Shadow Waltz,” an independent feature film. “There was a period [post Falcon Crest] where I really felt like I had no career. I was just thinking the end was in sight. But, you know, even though I didn’t work every day, I was still a successful actress.”
After Falcon Crest, Rose did guests shots in TV series and appeared in two more movies: “Heartbreakers” and Clint Eastwood’s “Tightrope,” in which she plays a hooker who gets murdered in the first five minutes.
She was cast in “Lady Blue” only a week before production began. “I first saw Jamie on the Lindsay Wagner [ABC] series Jessie,” David Gerber recalls. “She played an undercover cop. I noticed her red hair, her Irish face, and I listened to the way she talked, and I thought to myself, “Now there’s a girl you can believe to be an undercover cop.”
“I always had Jamie in mind for this character in Lady Blue, but these [network executives] wanted a big name star” Gerber adds. “So I just brought Jamie in, unannounced, during one of our meetings, and had her read a few scenes. What were they going to say: ‘Hi! How are you? We don’t want you!’ I was ready to shoot the following week.”
Katy Mahoney is described as “one tough chick” by Rose’s co-star Danny Aiello, who plays her boss, chief of detectives Terrance McNichols. Her unquenchable thirst for justice—usually enforced by a .357 Magnum—has earned her the nickname “Dirty Harriet.” “I love that description,” Rose says. “It’s accurate in a lot of ways. My character has certainly got some Dirty Harry in her, but she’s also a woman. She cries, she falls in love. So there are a lot of differences, too. She’s like Wonder Woman, except she’s a little more real.”
For her role, Rose practiced firing a .357 Magnum with the Chicago Police Department, then rented all the “Dirty Harry” movies, drilling herself on Eastwood’s gun moves and clenched-jaw grimaces.
“I had only a week to prepare for the role, and I had never fired or handled a gun before,” she says. “So I went down to the police department and shot for a couple of hours. Luckily, I was good immediately. I’m now very comfortable with a gun. It’s almost like an extension of my arm.” Still, there were skeptics. As one production crew member said during the recent filming in Chicago: “It’s hard to imagine Jamie Rose’s fragile wrist holding a large gun like that.”
After a good hour in the makeup trailer, Rose finally comes blazing back into the lavanderia wearing jeans, a tank top and a gold jacket. The scene she’s about to shoot involved Katy Mahoney walking to the laundromat to question Thomas Riggio (played by Franklyn Alexander), who allegedly has been intimidated by a local gang selling his $200,000 property across the street for $60,000.
During one of a number of takes, Rose fumbles around in her purse for a police badge.
“Why don’t you just keep it in your hand as you walk in?” director O’Neil politely offers.
“Good idea,” Rose responds. “How ‘about I tape it to my face and leave it dangling there?” The show’s star laughs at herself with the rest of the crew.
“In the beginning of my career I needed to get my confidence back up,” she says late that afternoon over a fish and salad lunch. “But I always felt like a star. Not star as in, “Oh, feed me bonbons.” But I always felt like I should have the lead. I have high aspirations. I don’t want to do game shows the rest of my life. I want something more lasting.
“There’s definitely a lot of stuff going on right now that could really turn my head,” she adds thoughtfully. “But I just try to remember how really transitory it all is. Lady Blue could be a hit and it could not. I really can’t take any of it seriously.” With that, Jamie Rose, trying to keep it light and cheerful, gets ready to go back under the gun.
