TV Star Smith Is Wrongly Assailed

For the last 15 years, Jaclyn Smith has been a major television star. Her movies and miniseries have consistently garnered high ratings and received favorable reviews in newspapers throughout the United States, including the Los Angeles Times.

She is regarded in the entertainment industry as a consummate professional, is highly respected by her fellow actors and is usually at the top of casting lists at not only one or two but all three networks. She also has a reputation for being a kind, unselfish and caring person both professionally and personally.

One never reads in the tabloids that she is a “recovering” whatever, or that she punched her co-stars or producers, or that she’s having extramarital affairs or collagen injections. I have never read of her storming off a set or holding up shooting because there wasn’t any Evian to rinse her hair.

Nor have I heard of her expressing a desire to play Lady Macbeth or to adapt for TV, then direct and star in “Sophie’s Choice Part II: Starting Out Single.”

In fact, Smith has never pretended to be anything other than what she is: a highly successful, talented, enormously likable, beautiful actress. And yet she really bothers Howard Rosenberg (Calendar, Jan. 8) . . . enough to devote over a half-page of sarcastic viciousness bashing her entire career.

It bothers Rosenberg that Smith has not made the same kinds of choices that her former “Charlie’s Angels” co-stars have made--no “Burning Bed”-type movies. It seems to really eat at him that most of the characters she plays seem to be as he puts it: “cool and composed.”

Perhaps Rosenberg feels uncomfortable with cool and composed women. Maybe Rosenberg secretly hoped that if he wrote the meanest article he could possibly think of about Smith, that one day he would hear that it had upset her so much that she would possibly never be cool and composed again. Then he could sleep again at night, knowing that he was the one responsible for making Smith “emotionally hysterical”--apparently the way he thinks a woman should be.

Smith has a definitive quality. That quality made her a star, be it cool and composed or whatever. For men, it’s always seemed to be acceptable, admirable even. I mean, look at Clark Gable’s career, or David Niven or Robert Wagner.

Smith is not the kind of actress you consider for just any role when you’re casting a film. You don’t put her at the top of the list for, let’s say, a street person or bag lady. There is a certain amount of inherent dignity that she has, class, beauty that is hard to hide . . . not unlike a young Audrey Hepburn.

But why anyone, especially someone of Rosenberg’s caliber and reputation, would choose to devote an entire half-page to an elaborate and lengthy hatchet job on someone as decent and inoffensive as Smith is totally beyond my understanding.

Ours is an industry which, sadly, is not lacking an ample supply of pompous, self-serving egomaniacs of dubious talent. If Rosenberg felt it necessary to deflate someone’s balloon on a gloomy Wednesday morning, there are dozens of candidates more deserving of his verbal darts that Smith.

Neither the public nor Rosenberg’s own reputation is well-served by this kind of mean-spirited attack.