‘North and South’ Rises Again

To its thousands of tourists, the city’s green plasma, San Antonio is The Alamo, Riverwalk, nachos and a new sports arena dubbed “The World’s Biggest Road Kill” because it looks like a dead armadillo with its legs up in the air.

But the red-hot chili queen of a city is also a living museum, another country where the Dead have their own Day, and bus riders pass one of everything on their way to work in the morning.

That spicy variety is what allowed executive producer Mark Wolper to shoot all six hours of John Jakes’ “Heaven and Hell: North and South, Part III” (whew!) in the Big Enchilada last summer.

Originally, Wolper planned to shoot the post-Civil War saga in Charleston, S.C., or St. Louis, but at the urging of location scout Diane Ketchum, who used to live in San Antonio, he scouted the area and found stand-ins for every location, from a circa 1870s Chicago mansion to a rolling Kansas prairie.

“It was hotter than hell down there,” says the shows’s star, James Read. “I just sweated for three months. It’s a miracle there was anything left of me. But you get used to anything. I love Texas. I love the unique heritage that it has. San Antonio is a gorgeous little town. I thought it was amazing we were able to achieve as many looks as we had. It’s a great party town, a 12-month fiesta.”

One of the most expensive ($25 million) and popular miniseries in television history (it had a Nielsen rating of 26; “Roots’ had 45), the original “North and South” kicked off its antebellum tale of two filthy rich clans--the cotton-growing Mains of South Carolina and the iron-working Hazards of Pennsylvania--in November, 1985.

Six months later, “North and South, Book II” filmed back to back with the first miniseries, picked up the steamy epic played out on the battlefields and in the bedrooms of the War Between the States.

The fast-moving finale brings back stand-up Yankee industrialist George Hazard (Read), down-on-her-luck Southern belle Madeline Main (Lesley-Anne Down) and mad-dog serial killer Elkanah Bent (Philip Casnoff with a nasal Georgia accent) to mix it up in and among the ashes.

What it doesn’t bring back is Patrick Swayze as Orry Main, George’s best friend and wartime enemy. At first, a network source says, Swayze agreed to the three-minute cameo, but changed his mind after encountering “creative differences.”

When Jake’s 700-page opus “Heaven and Hell,” the last in his “North and South” trilogy, opens, Swayze’s character is already dead. The TV version re-enacts his slaying, fudging the scene with a Swayze stand-in, fast footwork and a lot of fog.

“They tried to execute it as succinctly and quickly as possible,” Read says. “They’re appealing to both the audience who followed it dutifully and embraced it and those who haven’t seen it. I think some will find it jarring initially, and others aren’t even going to notice.”

“There was sort of the general consensus that Patrick should have come back and done it because it catapulted his career,” says Down, whose love scenes with the actor nudged the envelope of network sex.

“I don’t know whether he should have done it or not. I would have liked him to have done it. I think it would have been a nice continuity, but frankly, it is only one scene at the beginning and he does get killed quickly--so it doesn’t truly matter.”

After the first “North and South” aired, even author Jakes got an avalanche of mail from the star’s smitten fans. “I still get the occasional letter from a 14-year-old Danish girl asking me if I have Patrick Swayze’s address,” he says. “The mail comes from all over Europe.”

“Heaven and Hell” picks up in 1865 where Part II ended. But nearly a decade has passed since its actors last worked on the series. “How can we look like we did 10 years ago?” asks Down, curled up like a cat in her air-conditioned trailer by the San Antonio Botanical Center, which doubled as South Carolina. “It’s very strange looking at yourself back then and what you did. I can’t reproduce what I was back then. None of us can.”

In Parts I and II, Madeline, in love with Orry Main, is married off to bully Justin LaMotte, played by David Carradine with curling lip. Until gorked out on the opium he feeds her, she messes around with Orry on the sly. Once merrily widowed, she becomes Mrs. Main. But with Orry out of the picture in Part III, she and George get that old feeling.

For Read, playing George Hazard again “was just like putting on an old pair of shoes.” Only the sex scene with Down made him nervous. “And I went to Lesley, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ll tell you exactly what to do.’ And she did. And that was fine until I realized that it was her husband (director of photography Don Fauntleroy) standing behind the camera watching every second.”

But apparently Read wasn’t too hung up. According to Wolper, the couple’s “enormously powerful,” fully clothed love scene by a sawmill gave the network jitters. “She’s fully clothed,” Read says. “What about me, pal? That’s the ‘90s for you, right. The girl keeps her clothes on, and it’s the guy who’s in his birthday suit. That’s how times have changed.”

Yes, there were battles with the Standards & Practices watchdogs, Wolper told TV critics. “But we finally resolved what we all felt was powerful enough--but not too powerful--for the audience. And maybe for the foreign version, we’ll have a little hotter scene.”

During I and II, all the action wasn’t on the set. Down was only one of at least 10 cast and crew members who found marriage partners on the nearly yearlong shoot. Read met and married on-screen wife Wendy Kilbourne; Jonathan Frakes, playing Read’s brother, wed series sister-in-law Genie Francis. Read credits it all to mint juleps. Jakes puts it down to historic Charleston’s romantic spell.

“Don was a focus puller’s assistant on Part I, and we started having an affair,” Down says in her down-to-earth way. “We were married to other people, and we had children to other people. We fell in love, really. We divorced our other partners and got married as soon as possible. I feel like I’ve known him all my life.”

When they met, Down was married to film director William Friedkin (“The Exorcist,” “The French Connection”). In 1985, their mudslinging battle for full custody of son Jack was media fodder. But under an agreement reached two years later, the boy spends time with both his mother and his father, now married to studio executive Sherry Lansing.

Down, 39, can come on terribly British, like the Edwardian beauty she played in “Upstairs, Downstairs,” but in real life she’s terribly American--warm, open and unnervingly frank. Like her character, this is an older, more settled Down with a serene, even lovelier countenance.

“Thank God, this Madeline is more mature than the one we left,” she says. “It would have been just awful. I mean, me walking around being vulnerable. It would have sent everybody to the refrigerator. Now, she’s got some oomph, and she’s grown. She is still a victim to some degree but a victim who fights back and wins.”

In the previous sagas, Down floated around in elegant decolletage. (The costuming in both won Emmy nominations.) Despite her hard-scrabble life in the latest miniseries, Madeline goes North, to see Hazard, wearing what the actress calls “cuckoo hats and ridiculous dresses.”

“And frankly, it was wrong,” she says. “I think it would have been visually more interesting to have this poor, dowdy woman go to the North and enter into this incredibly rich world of George Hazard with his wonderful house wearing less gorgeous clothes, but I had to give in to higher powers.”

For the rest of the show, Down is happily shabby. “All the other dresses I wear were made specifically to look incredibly tattered so they washed them and ripped them and dirtied them, which is what she would have looked like.”

Other regulars back are Terri Garber as Ashton, Orry’s twisted sister: Genie Francis as Brett, Orry’s sweet sister; Wendy Kilbourne as Constance, George’s good Irish wife, and Jonathan Frakes as Stanley Hazard, George’s weak but ultimately decent brother.

Newcomers include “Homefront’s” appealing Kyle Chandler as Orry’s cousin Charles; Robert Wagner as Orry’s resentful brother Cooper; Cathy Lee Crosby as Judith, Cooper’s ambivalent wife, and Deborah Rush as Isabel, Stanley Hazard’s conniving spouse.

Guest stars include Peter O’Toole as an itinerant thespian with a great thirst; Rip Torn as a trader friendly with the Native Americans; Chris Burke (“Life Goes On”) as a young man with a child’s mind, and Billy Dee Williams as a charismatic free-born leader.

Unlike Michael Crichton, who hated the screen version of his novel “Rising Sun” and said so, novelist Jakes takes the money and runs.

“All they can do on this television show is adapt my book,” says the writer. “The question is: Is it a good adaptation or a bad adaptation? So I’ve never gotten my dander up over anything that’s been done to my work.”

Critics haven’t always been kind to Jakes’ best-selling books or the TV adaptations. “I have to say this ‘North and South’ is going to be better than the first one and certainly better than the second,” Down says. “I think the story line is tremendous and everybody working on it is older and doing better jobs. Sometimes we turn out to shoot things and we haven’t a script because the rewrites haven’t come in, which has driven some people batty. I’m not one of the batty types. I wing my way through.”

The series has been called everything from “melodrool” to the “Gone with the Wind” of television, but it’s as close as some people ever get to the Civil War and Reconstruction.

“The English spew out history constantly,” Down says. “We have too much, and you have too little. I want my kids to see this. There’s so much history in it, and it’s not boringly told at all. If you’re going to sit down with your kids and watch television, you may as well watch something that will make them ask questions.”

Surprisingly, the series, thought to be too American for foreigners to appreciate, was one of the most successful abroad. “People get reallly, really involved with the story,” Read says. “The response in Berlin was overwhelming. I visited there when it was playing before the Wall came down. And I was struck by the sense that what had happened in Berlin could have happened in the U.S. if the South had won the war. You might literally have had a wall dividing North and South. And these people were living the reality of what might have happened had the tide turned.”

It’s been nine years since the Mains and Hazards first met on a movie set in South Carolina. “As time goes on, I look upon that time with ever-fonder memories,” Read says. “It was truly a special time, personally and professionally. You’re not likely to see many 30-hour epics come by in this new age of TV. It is, in that sense, the last of a breed.”

“Heaven and Hell: North and South, Part III” airs Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 p.m. on ABC.