For Lynn Loring, Real-Life Drama Behind the Scenes : Television: The outspoken former actress, who is the industry’s highest-ranking female executive, is trying to balance her career success against its toll on her personal life.

It was the end of the TV season, and Lynn Loring didn’t want to be a studio executive any longer.

Loring, the child actress who grew up to be president of MGM/UA Television Productions, was not having a good day. Six months into a three-year contract to fill one of Hollywood’s most powerful positions, Loring was announcing her retirement.

“This will probably be my last three years,” Loring said emphatically during a conversation last July. “I’m coming to a time in my life when I’m not finding it to be the fun I thought it would be.

“This is not a golden age for television,” Loring continued, staring pensively into the nearly deserted breakfast room of the Four Seasons Hotel with eyes as round and wide as those of her childhood publicity stills, cigarette smoke framing her face along with her curly russet hair. “The show has gone out of it, and we’re left with the business.

“I never wanted to grow up to be president of a studio.”

But that was July--following a TV season that was about as much fun as a car wreck for Hollywood’s producers. Besides the devastation of the writers strike, the 1988-89season resulted in two casualties for MGM/UA: Its NBC series “Baby Boom” died quickly and “Dream Street,” a youth-oriented, blue-collar drama from “thirtysomething” executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, lasted only a few episodes.

By the time the new season began in September, however, Loring had decided that being president of a major TV studio just might be a decent way to make a living after all.

MGM/UA’s “thirtysomething,” which had walked away with the Emmy Award for outstanding drama in its first season, had just netted 17 Emmy nominations (it went on to win two major Emmys), and Loring had high hopes for the studio’s new ABC drama, “The Young Riders,” a sort of new-age Western about the teen-age riders of the Pony Express. The studio had also just inked a development agreement with Dan Curtis, producer and director of the ABC miniseries “The Winds of War” and its mammoth sequel, “War and Remembrance.”

And Loring--who had vowed to renounce her studio presidency to become an independent producer, or a lawyer, or the president of a network, or an author, or a ski bum--now declared herself back in the game.

“What happens is, at the beginning of the year, you don’t examine yourself,” she said. “At the beginning of the season, when everybody is up and has all these ideas, it’s like having Mounds Bars and Almond Joy and Eskimo Pies--this feast of sugar. By the end of that season, the sugar is starting to wear off, and you have the sugar lows.”

Now at mid-season, MGM/UA has no new crises to deal with, since its shows--”thirtysomething,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Young Riders”--have all been picked up for the remainder of the season. There is little time to enjoy the success, however: Pilots for new shows are being developed.

“In terms of the Top 10 shows, nothing new is really (a hit),” Loring said. “It’s a tough year.” “I guess the basic question none of us can answer is: Why do we do this?”

Loring has become the most highly placed woman executive currently at a Hollywood television studio without ever really figuring that out.

Second in command to MGM/UA Television Productions Chairman and CEO David Gerber, Loring does not carry the same clout in the TV business as former Columbia Pictures’ president Dawn Steel did in the feature-film industry, and Barbara Corday outranked Loring when Corday served as president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Television in the mid-’80s.

Still, at least in terms of title, Loring’s at the top among female TV executives at the studios--and, although Gerber’s the boss, Loring and Gerber make most decisions as a team.

“I don’t look at it as something I’ve accomplished for all womanhood,” she said. “But in my position, I have an obligation to stand up and be counted. I’m not looking to be a spokesperson for women, but I find what I say matters, and that excites me.”

They say life imitates art; in the case of a studio executive, life apparently imitates TV. Loring readily acknowledges that her decision to get off the executive roller coaster--and to get back on again--is part of an annual ritual that mirrors the ups and downs of each TV season.

In one way or another, television has dedicated the pattern for most of Loring’s life.

At age 6, she landed a guest appearance in CBS’ anthology series “Studio One,” which ran from 1948-58. At 7, she became a spokeschild for RCA Victor; her TV commercials won her the moniker “The Junior Set’s Betty Furness.” From 6 to 16, she played Patty on “Search for Tomorrow.”

After years of guest appearances on shows including “Playhouse 90,” “Hallmark Hall of Fame” and “The Defenders,” and study at New York City’s Barnard College, Loring married actor Roy Thinnes in 1968. They divorced in 1984; Loring married attorney Michael Bergman in 1988.

And, aside from occasional guest roles, Loring played housewife and mother until 1979--when Thinnes, disturbed that his wife seemed to be descending into a routine of soap-opera watching and apathy, encouraged her to go back to work. Producer Curtis, for whom Loring had worked as a child, invited her to became casting director for his NBC movie “Raid on Coffeyville” and that network’s “Supertrain,” the 1979 anthology series described in one TV dictionary as “one of the most expensive failures in the history of network television.”

After “Supertrain,” Loring joined Aaron Spelling Productions, a partnership that grew out of a friendship with Spelling developed during her days as an actress. During a week when “I was really depressed and thinking about what my life was going to be,” Loring called Spelling and asked him to help her launch a TV movie based on the book “The Best Little Girl in the World,” about an anorexic teen-ager.

Spelling liked the idea, and took it to ABC. They liked it too. Before making Loring producer of the movie, however, he insisted she get her feet wet by producing a two-hour movie called “Return of the Mod Squad” (husband Thinnes played a role in the movie). After that, Spelling asked Loring to stay with the company as vice president of development and talent, motion pictures and television; she later created a feature-film division for the company, which produced the hit “Mr. Mom.”

Hence Loring’s tendency to respond to TV’s annual schedule as the tide responds to the sun. “By the end of May through the beginning of July, I’m going to be right back into ‘I hate this. I never want to do this again,’ ” Loring said. To put it mildly, Loring tends to be blunt about all of the frustrations of the TV business--including her conflicts with others with whom she has worked. Where the public statements of some studio executives remain as sterile as a press release, Loring ruffles feathers. Big feathers.

Take Spelling’s feathers, for example.

Although quick to credit Spelling for teaching her the TV basics (“I got my B.A. from Spelling, and my master’s degree from Gerber.”), Loring is equally quick to bite back when attacked by her former mentor.

Spelling was recently quoted as criticizing MGM/UA’s “thirtysomething” as “whiny” (hardly the first time anyone has offered that opinion). Loring was quoted as saying that Spelling had abused his immense power by turning out titillating trash like NBC’s short-lived “Nightingales” instead of quality programs. “Speaking as a woman, not as an executive, I find that show offensive,” she said.

Loring winced when reminded of those comments--although she said she would have made them to Spelling’s face. “That’s what I meant about my being too honest,” she said. “The person who was angriest was Gerber. He said: ‘Why was it important for you to go on the record that way? . . . You are the most self-destructive person on the planet!’ ”

Though Aaron Spelling Productions has recently optioned the first screenplay written by Loring’s 21-year-old son, Christopher Thinnes, a UCLA student who also works for “Young Riders” producer Jonas McCord’s Paragon Productions, Loring is still critical of Spelling. She and Spelling parted in 1984 because, she said, she no longer wanted to produce featherweight projects such as the series “Glitter,” “Sizzle” and “Portrait of a Male Model.”

“I decided, what does it mean that I’m taking his paycheck, when I’m producing projects that I don’t have a passion for?” Loring said. “That’s selling out. I wouldn’t sell myself out to get a show on the air, I just wouldn’t.”

Loring says now that she no longer blames Spelling for all of his choices, since many of them were handed down by the networks. “They kept coming to him for more and more ‘Aaron Spelling’ kind of shows, and it was very easy for him to keep doing it. In all fairness to him, he kept trying to push for more uplifting television.” Through his publicist, Spelling declined to respond to Loring’s comments.

Loring also had a few complaints about “Baby Boom” star Kate Jackson. Bad publicity about Jackson’s temperamental behavior dogged that production from the beginning. “She should have lost her SAG card,” Loring said indignantly. “It was the most unprofessional behavior I’ve ever seen.”

Like Spelling, Jackson refused comment, but NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff said: “I would say that at any given time, there is an actor or an actress walking off some set somewhere. That’s, like, standard--when you hear about it, your blood pressure doesn’t even go up one decimal. I can’t comment on the day-to-day--but from where I sit, I didn’t find anything extraordinary about her (Jackson’s) behavior.”

Gerber believes Loring is learning to temper her outspokenness. “I chide her about it--and she laughs, because I’m pretty outspoken myself,” Gerber said. “There is a thin line between being irate and outspoken, and being shrill or blatant. I think, over the years, she has understood that. She did learn a lot from Aaron, and I think she has good feelings about him.”

Loring believes that most producers face the same pressures as Spelling in TV’s increasingly grim economic landscape. She shuddered when recalling that Lee Iacocca recently referred to television shows as nothing more than “window dressing” to sell products. “Is that what I’ve become, window dressing for Chrysler?” she asked bleakly.

“If ‘thirtysomething’ were being launched today, I wonder if the network could afford to take a chance on it?,” Loring continued. “With the advertising dollar getting softer and softer, and people clicking their clickers all the time, would people even tune into that? It gets harder every year. And you can’t make a show if it’s fiscally irresponsible for the company, even if the network wants it.”

Eventually, Loring expects to go into independent production. In the meantime, a reflective Loring has begun trying to balance the pluses of her career success against its toll on her personal life--and is not sure she’s come out ahead. Her first marriage ended, she said, because of her career, and she remains wracked with guilt over time lost with daughter Casey, now 13.

“In 1984, I was divorced and (left) my job with Aaron Spelling within 24 hours,” she said. “It was a wonderful week--a week I’ll never forget and never want to repeat. ‘Mr. Mom’ was in many ways what was going on in my personal life. . . . In the movie, (Michael) Keaton and (Teri) Garr got back together even though her career was going better. In real life, Roy and Lynn split up because of what was going on with her career, and didn’t live happily ever after.

“If you ask, do I balance my life well? Absolutely not.”

New husband Bergman, she said, is more tolerant of her personal--and financial--independence. In sort of a paraphrase of Scarlett O’Hara, Loring declared: “I’ll never ask a man if I can buy six pairs of shoes again!

“What happened (with Thinnes) is that I changed the rules of the marriage well into it, and it was a new package that neither of us had agreed to. I was very fortunate to meet a man who knows this package. And this package is a woman who’s passionate about her work; unfortunately, that’s a major priority of her life.

“There was a time when being Mrs. Roy Thinnes was enough for me. Being in a new marriage, being Mrs. Michael Bergman isn’t enough for me. It’s important for me to be Lynn Loring.”