Erin Gray, Then and Now: an Interview

I had the honor of interviewing model and television star Erin Gray during Dragcon*Con last month. I remember watching Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in the late 1970s, where Gray played Earth Directorate commander Colonel Wilma Deering, and I definitely remember enjoying the 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons, where she played Kate Summers Stratton. If you continue to sleuth around, you will find evidence of Gray's modeling on the cover of a 1969 Sears catalog, in full page Virginia Slims advertisements, and in Bloomingdale's television commercials.

Today, among many other projects and her travels with the Heroes for Hire program, Ms. Gray guest stars as Madeline Twain on Felicia Day's web series The Guild.

Ms. Gray gave GeekMom nearly an hour of her time with an incredibly frank and passionate interview, including accounts of her experiences leaving home at age 17 to travel the world as a model, being a math major at UCLA, having an unrelenting schedule as a working mom with Universal Studios while filming Buck Rogers, her involvement with Haven House in Pasadena, and her current life as a tai chi master celebrating a Taoist life.

When Ms. Gray discussed "the way things were" as a working-mom/actor in the 1970s, she painted such images in her descriptions that you were immediately taken back in time. Her vivid bittersweet accounts of crazy hours filming the same scenes over and over, all-nighters to meet deadlines, and the abuses she took not only at the workplace, but also at home, brought tears to my eyes. With her involvement as a spokeswoman the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, it's appropriate that we are able to feature this interview during Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Life as Colonel Wanda Deering

We started by discussing her first acting roles. I had specifically asked about how she earned the role as Colonel Deering for the Buck Rogers made-for-television movie, which then developed into her continuing the role for the television series for two seasons. She had been modeling for several years when she was asked to be in the 1978 television miniseries Evening at Byzantium alongside Glenn Ford and Shirley Jones. It was at the end of filming this movie that she was asked to audition for Buck Rogers.

I ended up getting a call from the studio on the last day of filming for Evening ... asking if I’d want to test for Buck Rogers. I knew nothing about Buck Rogers, zip, zero, nothing. They didn’t tell me anything, they didn’t give me a script. I came in and they gave me some sides for the test, which are single scenes with dialog. I was supposed to say my lines opposite Gil [Gerard] for the test. I was basically in a bad mood that day.

She goes on to explain her bad mood. "On the last day of the [Evening at Byzantium] shoot I had worked from 6 o'clock at night to 6 o'clock in the morning. And they expected me to show up four hours later to show up all fresh and say my lines and screen test for this part ... that I knew nothing about."

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Gray, since the character they were looking for was the complete opposite of most of the other actresses auditioning.

I came in kind of sullen and all the other female actresses came in bright-eyed and bushy tailed.... I was thinking, "Please let’s get this over with, I’d like to go home and go to bed. Thank you very much." Of course Gil was challenged.... If you meet Gil you'll find he’s quite charming and funny, and he had this sullen woman who he kept trying to make smile. And the more he worked, the more sullen I got and the more in his face I became.... It ended up being the perfect dynamic for the test, and for the character.

I went on to ask about whether her role required any military training, and if she had any role models to help frame her character. Gray pointed out that her getting to play a military-pilot-type character at a time when female officers were just being allowed to fly for the U.S. armed forces was very inspirational to many fans. She found that quite flattering, but she didn't have a role model herself to use. She found other ways to turn Colonel Deering into a strong female heroine.

It was an interesting lesson, because a lot of people didn’t know that I was dealing with domestic violence issues at home. There were two parts to my personality; one part of me was extremely strong, but another part of me was very humble to my husband, very, frightened. My not knowing what was going to happen that day.... There was a lot of emotional tension and a lot of mercurial reaction, so I never knew what I was dealing with. My girlfriend would say to me, "I would come to your house and you were like a geisha girl; you would disappear. But when you were away from your husband you were like this tough, outspoken mountain-climbing chick who takes on the world. What happens when you come home?" Going to work as the Colonel, I expressed it as "wearing the cloak of strength." I would literally wrap myself in what I thought strength was.

On Being a Working Mother on the Set

I next asked Ms. Gray about her experiences as a working mother. Her son was but a preschooler during her time filming Buck Rogers, and she didn't mince words about it being one of the most difficult things in the world: balancing a television acting career with motherhood.

For me, it was extremely difficult. I thought [filming Buck Rogers] would be an eight-hour job, but no: I’d go into makeup at 6:30 a.m. and I’d be leaving at 9 o'clock in the evening. When do I sleep and when do I see my child? When do I just have a normal life? And I have to tell you, the only power I had was that they couldn’t control whether I arrived on time or not. That was the thing. If I wanted to spend an extra 15 minutes with my child in the morning and show up a little bit late for that 6:30 in the morning make up call ... I just took advantage of it.

Even though she appeared as one of the top-billed actresses on the show, in reality she was a "contract player" for Universal Studios, meaning she was supposed to have been hired for just a couple of episodes in a variety of television series. Ms. Gray was expecting a wider variety of roles, things to help build her resume. By being a "contract player," she was only paid $600 per week by Universal Studios for her work on Buck Rogers.

I had this child ... and as a mother I suddenly realized that I don’t want a nanny raising my child, cooing and loving and sharing and talking to him, relating to him ... and my not being able to do that.... That was the most difficult time in my life.

She provided some insight to some positive changes for working mother actresses in the early 1980s, thanks to the cast of CBS's Designing Women.

It wasn’t until the Designing Women [actresses] took control in the studio and they were more empowered. They said, “Nannies are allowed and we need to have a nursery here at the studio and the studio has to pay for it.” Those women made the difference.

How about Silver Spoons?

PERFECT JOB!!! Because Ricky [Schroeder] was in school in the mornings, I didn’t have to come to work till NOON. So I could take my son to school, make him lunch, take my aerobics class, come to work at noon, and then I was only most of the time in scenes with Joel [Higgins], so we would do our couple of rehearsals and I could be back at school picking my son up at 3 o'clock ... and I’d work three hours, pick up my son, go to little leagues, cook dinner ... and so I was able – with Silver Spoons – to blend being and wife and a mother and having a family and being there for my son.

Our conversation turned to discussions about her transition between modeling and film. She had an interesting time transitioning, as she was still being offered modeling opportunities while acting on the Buck Rogers television series. She said things began to get "awkward" when she was starring in a television series, yet was modeling pantsuits in Phoenix. Thanks to a 10-year-long spokeswoman deal with Bloomingdale's, Ms. Gray was able to make the transition between the two careers more financially viable.

Speaking of finances, Ms. Gray had a colorful anecdote about being an incredibly successful model married to a young Army soldier in the late 1960s. This was by far my favorite story during the interview, it was a topic near and dear to my heart: being a military wife in a military town.

I married young.... My husband was stationed at Fort Bragg. I remember going into Sears & Roebuck trying to get a credit card because I wanted to buy a toaster, an iron, and an ironing board ... the basic things to set up a household and they said I couldn’t get a credit card because my husband wasn’t an officer. And I said, “Excuse me ... my husband is not the one getting the credit card, I’m getting the credit card and he has nothing to do with the fact that I’m making over six figures ... that I’m probably making more money than the CEO of this company. And furthermore, I’m on the cover of Sears & Roebuck, I make most of my money through Sears & Roebuck and they're telling me I can’t have a credit card because my husband isn’t an officer??? Get! Out!

My husband ... at the other end of Sears ... heard me from across the store, while I was playing the feral cat.

Now they give women credit cards ... too many credit cards! But my point was ... I was making over six figures! I may have been 19 years old, but does that got to do with anything? I paid my bills. I could vote. I could do anything I wanted to do.... HELLO?? I deserve a credit card! So what if he only made $90 per month? That was his issue [laughing]

Haven House

It's no secret that, for many years, Ms. Gray has been a spokeswoman for Haven House of Pasadena, California. The story of how she first became involved with Haven House is definitely worth sharing. As she described it to me, "It’s the first battered women's shelter ever created in the United States (1964). It was created by four nuns who wanted to come up with a place for women when they had nowhere else to go and it was 2 o'clock in the morning.... The police could bring them to Haven House."

She ended up at Haven House after her divorce from her first husband. After 22 years in a tumultuous marriage, a girlfriend convinced her that she needed some help and it was okay to ask for it.

My girlfriend ended up taking me to Haven House. She said “Shut up! You’re just going someplace and you’re going to thank me later because you need this help.” She brought me to Haven House and these women were SO WONDERFUL. They gave me the understanding about why I was programmed the way I was, what had happened in my relationship, and what tools I needed to recover ... to put myself back together. I was having these panic attacks, I was shattered into a thousand pieces, and I needed to learn how to fix myself and get on with my life ... and didn’t know what to do. They explained to me things, for example, about how since I was abused as a child, my father and stepfather had set me up for this kind of dynamic. That people who had been abused as children create what’s called "muted senses" ... so when you face a bully, you shut down. All your senses shut down. It’s a form of amnesia ... and you cannot allow yourself to feel the pain that you feel. That if you did that you couldn’t exist ... you would fall apart. These women showed me that and explained to me what happened.

It was so great for me. I absorbed the information. I said, “Tell me what books to read. I want to understand this. I want to get better.” They gave me tasks: If I had a panic attack at 3 o'clock in the morning, I was to get up and write in my journal ... with my left hand. That helps reach your subconscious.

Let me tell you – I grabbed onto every little thing I could to deal with this. And I was so grateful to them that I said, “I'm yours. I will raise money for you. I will do whatever I can to pay you back.” I’ve been on the board of directors, either as an adviser or on the board itself for the past 20 years. I go to their events and everybody knows that any pictures taken with me go directly to Haven House. I’ve raised money for 20 years. It’s amazing how ... a little at a time ... it all adds up.

Over the years I started speaking out publicly. Part of my healing process was to share my story of how I got to where I am ... how it can happen to anybody. You could be the wife of a judge, wife of a police officer.... It doesn’t matter. You could be in any economic or financial situation and you could be a victim too. It’s hard for these women to speak out and say “YES, this is an unhealthy relationship!” ... and get out.

Even now, you can see her fundraising and spokeswoman work through her Facebook and Twitter pages. Haven House is a wonderful cause. I personally had the chance to visit a battered women's shelter in Virginia as a teenager (with my Girl Scout troop) and it was a remarkable experience.

Tai Chi and Taoism, Or How a Trigonometry Problem Opened Her Mind

We spent the final part of our time together discussing her Taoism and skills as a tai chi master. I asked about how she first became interested in eastern philosophies and she took us back to her time at UCLA studying mathematics. She was flabbergasted by the enormous sizes of the freshman math classes and couldn't believe that schools thought that people could learn that way. Ms. Gray had offers from modeling agencies to travel to Paris to work with the fall collections and she made a decision while sitting in a 350-person calculus class in an auditorium: "I'm going to Paris!"

But the difficult decision came with a promise.

I made a promise to myself that I would study for the rest of my life! I would read the books that I wanted to read and I would make the library my best friend. And so I went off to Paris, traveled the world, and I would get an education that way too. But I had to give up the math. Math, to me, was a game. You have given things, and you have a path to follow, and if you follow the path you have a prize at the end.

She related the story of an epiphany she had while working on a particularly difficult trigonometry problem.

I had one of my first spiritual moments while doing math. I had a math problem in trig class. It was near midnight and I was still working on it. I was tired and I couldn’t find the answer. And I was determined to find the answer. I wasn’t going to give up. And I took a moment for a break, and I thought to myself, "If I have some milk and cookies, the answer will come to me." So I had my milk and cookies ... then I looked at the problem again: and the answer came into my brain.

And I knew ... I knew that was the answer. So I wrote down the answer, and thought “Okay, if that’s the answer, how to I get to it?” And I backtracked.

I went to class the next day, and all the other students had said to the professor, “Forget all the other questions, teach, what about number 12? Let’s work on that problem." No one in the class had gotten the problem except me. The teacher didn’t know the answer either; he hadn’t worked it out, he had just assigned us those problems. He had no idea what he had assigned us.

So he says, “OK, let’s work it out.” He starts writing and he fills three blackboards ... around the room. Took him the entire hour ... and there was a minute left in the class. So I asked, “Uh, sir, is there another way? I mean, if you have the key, is there...?”

And he said, “Sigh ... young lady, if you think you can show us another way in the last 30 seconds, then go right ahead.” I HATE that condescending attitude from a man. And I remember standing up going “Fine.” With just a few strokes of the blackboard, in three lines, I solved the problem! And I remember the entire class going “Whoa!”

But where did that answer come from? Had I tapped into the universal mind of knowledge? That all that information is there, that if we tune in properly, all the answers are there? Later on in life I started studying all the religions, all things spiritual, everything I could get my hands on. And when I was modeling in New York at Ford Models, they knew to find me at a bookshop way down on Broadway, way in the back in the occult section somewhere. I was looking for answers; I wanted to know why I was put here on this planet, why do I have this body, why do I have to die? What does it mean to have this existence? Is there a God? Is there a universal mind? Does this make sense? This world that we’re living in?

Her first introduction to Taoist thought was by learning about eastern medicine, thanks to one of the trips to China during Richard Nixon's presidency.

I was very fascinated when Richard Nixon went to China. During this time a lead story in The New York Times wasn't about Richard Nixon opening doors to China, it was about this journalist there who ended up having an appendicitis attack over there, having surgery, having acupuncture done on him during post-op recovery, and he went through the surgery talking back to the doctors. He wrote about his amazing recovery. He said we need to learn what the Chinese have been doing for centuries...we need to investigate this preventive approach to medicine.

In other words, the doctor hasn’t been doing his job if you get sick. It’s the doctor’s job to keep you healthy, and when you get sick ... you don’t pay the doctor. Because he didn’t do his job. You only pay the doctor if you stay healthy. This sounded like a GREAT approach – I really liked that. And I wanted to learn more: What is his acupuncture and how does this work?

Note: The New York Times journalist she was talking about was James Reston, and you can read the front-page article Ms. Gray is referencing here.

Ms. Gray saw the amazing effects of acupuncture firsthand through her work with James Garner on The Rockford Files.

James Garner had a bad knee that he had injured doing a stunt. He’s an action figure, so he needs to be able to leap over Pontiacs and such. He had a bad knee, but he didn’t want to take pain killers because he feared being addicted to pain killers and that wasn’t the route he wanted to go. It turned out the only thing that worked for him was acupuncture ... and so he would go off to his acupuncturist and would get “tweaked” and rejuvenated and then he would come back to work. He did this every day. I was fascinated by the fact that he did this, and I said “Show me the way! I want to learn more about acupuncture.”

She began to see an acupuncturist routinely, receiving "tune ups" that would help rejuvenate her mind and body. All the while she was peppering the provider with questions about how the various techniques worked, craving more knowledge. During her time on Silver Spoons, she had a terrible cold. She was in such poor shape, for the first time she was sent home from a set. She visited her acupuncturist, who put a needle in a spot right between her eyebrows. Ms. Gray reported that she felt as though a dam broke, and waves of energy flowed through her body. "All better now," said her provider ... and she went straight back to the set to finish her filming.

A conversation with her acupuncturist led to her discovery of tai chi, which she views as an alternative to the acupuncture itself.

One day [the acupuncturist] said to me, “You know, acting is really dangerous to your health.”

Excuse me? What are you talking about? He explained, “In Chinese thought, every emotion is a line to a specific organ in your body. Anger is attached to your liver. So if you already have a tendency to be angry and you drink a lot, you’re only exasperating it even more. And if fear is a constant emotion in your life, it’s going to affect your kidneys. If it’s loss or grief, it will effect your lungs.”

As a child I had dealt with a lot of loss and grief. I was constantly losing my parents, losing my home, constantly moving around, living with this stranger, that stepfather, or whatever. Loss was a constant thing in my life, and my weak organ was my lungs. I had whooping cough, pneumonia, tuberculosis ... you name it, I had it! And I was used to having 4 to 5 colds per year.

So I’m listening to this doctor.... He said, “Well, for example, in normal life, you have a fight in life, you are angry for a few minutes, and then it’s gone. But as an actress, you have to bring up that rage and do it for 12 hours! Over and over and over again. And eventually that’s going to effect your system as your cortisoid levels are going to shoot up all day long. That’s going to affect your body over time."

But that’s what actors do. And people don’t understand that. Imagine taking these emotions, whether it’s a crying scene or rage ... you have to bring up these emotions and have them simmering ready so when the director says “Action!”, you’re ready! And you have to keep that alive all day long! It really messes you up.

This is why actors have a tendency to have sleeping pills, drugs to pick them up, or alcohol to bring them down. And that’s how actors so easily get into this cycle of using substances to regulate their emotions.

So when I heard of actors like Christian Bale go off at a DP, I totally understand where he came from. When you're playing an intense role like that and you’ve got some guy moving in front of your eye line and doesn’t respect your work as an actor because your body and your emotions are your instrument.... I’m not surprised he didn’t yell at him! Most people don’t understand that.... Most actors don’t understand that.

So that became very interesting to me ... to understand this dynamic. How do I bring balance to myself every day? How do I energize myself and not fall into the traps of alcohol or drugs?

Ms. Gray began studying tai chi with a grand master in Los Angeles, but wanted to continue her other "western" physical fitness endeavors, such as aerobics classes and long distance running. Her routine illnesses continued. In 1993 she was bedridden with pneumonia and that was when, at age 43, she decreed that she would commit herself to tai chi.

I have not been sick for one day since then. That was since 1993. I’ve nursed my husband back to health, I’ve nursed the kids back, I’ve cleaned up the vomit, but I haven’t caught any of it. And to me, tai chi is the answer. Or chi gung, either way. Learning how to get in tune with your field of energy and understand how to create your energy, expand that energy, and move that energy through your body. Coming back to your center, and approaching life from that center-to-line place.... That to me gave me strength and understand and hopefully wisdom to solve life’s problems and challenges.

And also the mind/body/spirit connection in the body. We have three centers: the emotional center, the intellectual center, and the physical body center. Each one of them has its own intelligence, how much better would we be if all three were working in unison?

Not just locked in our head, not just caught in our emotions, not being connected…but if we can connect all of that, open ourselves in a way that we can quiet our mind, and allow the answers in…try not to always solve every problem mentally, but empty the mind so that the universe, or God or the life force can give you the answer. That was what had happened with that math problem, I emptied my mind. There was nothing there, and then the answer came.

When you meditate or pray…both are forms of meditation…you give up control and find the answer and you open yourself to receive God’s gift, the universal force, or whatever that is. I don’t know, but that’s when you allow those inspirations to come up.

She wrapped up our talk commenting about the dichotomy between the peace found in eastern philosophy and today's "go-go-go" society, glued to laptops and tablet devices. Her advice? Don't forget about nature.

I think our biggest loss is getting away from nature. I just sometimes miss mountains and oceans. I feel at peace coming home and just sitting in the grass. I feel a peace, a connectedness. And I realize how small I am in this huge wonderful universe that we have out there.... I realize how fragile I am, yet how connected I am to all of that. I think we’re missing that.

We’re too locked into our computers; we need to get outside more. I know with my son, he was such a hyperactive child...I recognized very early on that there was something wrong with him. He was far too active and I realized the only way I could calm him down is to put him outside. Out of the apartment, to get in that grass and under that tree...he would be calm. I also realized I needed to keep him away from sugars, preservatives, canned foods, frozen foods…everything needed to be fresh and organic.

Ms. Gray has written a book (with Mara Purl) for young aspiring actors titled Act Right: A Manual. She is also working on an upcoming video series about tai chi and chi kung with her husband Richard Hissong. She continues to work on film and serial acting projects, from The Guild to her most recent film, Dreams Awake.

Thank you, Erin Gray, for giving GeekMom the time and insight into your life, both then and now! Congratulations on the wonderful, well-balanced life you now lead, and we look forward to seeing more great things from you!