David Selby Giving Up Safety of ‘Falcon Crest’

Put Ted Turner, William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch together, and add just a touch of Ernie Kovacs, and you might have the character that David Selby has played on “Falcon Crest” for seven years.

Richard Channing is--among other things--larger than life. And that’s just the way Selby wants him.

Never mind that the first thing Selby did when he got the part was to start reading the Wall Street Journal. He decided to play Channing, he says, “with a slight twinkle in the eye.”

Selby plays Channing with the same zest he put into the vampire Quentin in “Dark Shadows” and Michael Tyrone of “Flamingo Road” or Avery Brundage on “The Life and Loves of Avery Brundage.”

Yet you can’t get much farther from these scheming characters than David Selby himself, a sweet-tempered, unassuming Southerner who has always been a dreamer. “I didn’t get into acting to search my psyche,” he says over lunch in Studio City. “I got into it to be swashbuckling and get the girl.”

He may be fearful, but Selby has decided that this will be his last season on “Falcon Crest.” And that’s a brave decision for an actor. There are few jobs in the field that are as steady as a nighttime soap.

“It’s frightening, but at the same time it can be a bit of an adventure,” he says. “I’m honestly ready for it. It doesn’t bother me too much. I’m not sure why. It’s not the fact that I made some money. Money was never the answer for me.”

Selby, 48, and his wife, Chip, have been married 22 years. They have three children.

There are those who say his success in “Falcon Crest” has put him in a strong position, he says, but that “hasn’t occurred to me yet. And it hasn’t occurred to a lot of other people yet--because there’s not a lot of people ringing my bell.

“I know leaving ‘Falcon Crest’ will be hard. But there are other things I want to do.”

With a little coaxing he admits that he’d love to play Ted Turner and Billy Graham, a combination that seems to suit David Selby.