Why Is This Woman Smiling?

Tony the Tiger can’t find his costume, but otherwise the grand opening of the Lucky/Sav-On in Covina is going off without a glitch. With her pale complexion, black tailored suit and flaming carrot top, Lucky pitch-model Stephanie Edwards cuts a striking figure under the vivid fluorescent lighting. Flanked by the city’s mayor and some economic-development types as well as a brigade of store managers, branch managers and district managers of the various corporate entities (as with most of the retail world, Lucky supermarkets have mega-fied into Lucky/Sav-Ons with a Bank of America teller counter and ATM thrown in), she introduces each one to the applause of the crisply aproned employees and a human Oreo cookie. Finally, “We cannot control the thundering herd any longer,” Edwards declares. She and the assembled dignitaries cut the blue ribbon. Hundreds of shoppers stream into the pristine market.

I first meet Edwards at a Lucky opening, because she has promised, “those are usually a hoot.” My arrival on the scene coincides with a trail of tough breaks for Edwards, culminating in Albertsons’ announcement this month that it plans to take over the company that owns Lucky. All that is weeks away, unforeseen. On this day, I’m witnessing one of L.A.’s most enduring TV personalities at her most glorious.

In Hollywood and on the Westside, where it’s possible to run into Leonardo DiCaprio at the 7-Eleven, a Stephanie Edwards sighting might not rate terribly high. But this is Covina, and Lucky is her turf. The mayor, Kevin Stapleton, invites her and her husband (not present) to his house for their anniversary (Edwards was married in Covina 23 years ago). As she heads to a table in front of a Russell Stover candy display to sign head shots, the line of fans trails all the way back to the dairy section. A mother points and says to her daughter: “Look. It’s Stephanie Edwards from TV. Do you want to talk to her?” The 8-year-old nods yes. An Arabic woman in a traditional head wrap enters. She sees Edwards and her jaw drops. Singly, in couples and with kids in the cart, shoppers present themselves, young and old, in all the ethnic hues of Southern California suburbia.

Longtime residents recall Edwards’ days as co-anchor of the early ‘70s pioneering TV magazine program, “Ralph Story’s AM.” Others know her as the co-host, with “The Newlywed Game’s” Bob Eubanks, of the Tournament of Roses Parade. Some are fans of “The LIVE Show with Sam and Stephanie,” an interview-talk show still airing at the time of the opening. But mostly they know her as “the Lucky Lady,” after the supermarket chain she’s represented on TV, radio and in personal appearances for more than 17 years. They tell her they love her show, that she’s even more beautiful in person. A man in a postal uniform carrying a six-pack of Coke stops and says, “You’re real.” ’To the max!” she shoots back. At one point, Bob Gelman, who, in the early ‘70s, went by the name “Lobo,” happens in and spots her. He rushes back to his car and presents Edwards with an autographed cassette of “Lobo’s Greatest Hits.” “I’ve been wanting to meet her for a long, long time,” gushes the singer who once recorded “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo.”

Edwards is no cynical corporate shill. The woman sincerely feels a part of the team, unfailingly and unself-consciously referring to Lucky and its parent company, American Stores, as “we.” When I tell her that, yes, I have, in fact, used the Versateller at my neighborhood Lucky, she’s delighted. More impressive, she knows all about it. “It had been a troubled store in that the clientele were very demanding,” she informs me. “But now it’s being managed by exactly the right man for the job.” Although there is a Vons right by her house, Edwards never goes there. “Lucky doesn’t deserve having me seen shopping in Vons,” she says. She only sinned once, she claims, when she forgot to bring muffins to the Presbyterian church she and her husband regularly attend. “I had to run to the nearest market, which was Mayfair,” she confesses. “My whole face flushed . . . like I had been caught in flagrante. The clerks were all smiling. I turned around and said, ‘Please don’t tell.’ ”

And here, acting as the supermarket’s personal emissary, Edwards spreads the Lucky goodwill with unflagging enthusiasm as potential customers file by for 21/2 hours without letup. They give her their names, their mom’s names and those of husbands, wives and neighbors--as many as five or six per shopper--and Edwards graciously complies, writing the requested names on picture after picture, along with a heart and “Thanks, Stephanie.” Even the creepy guy who leans his face right into Edwards’ and whispers “You want to have dinner with me?” doesn’t mar her composure. (“Somebody without any discretion,” she later says. “There’s one at every opening.”) And when someone suggests, “Your arm must get really tired,” she cheerfully replies: “You know what? It never does.”

*

I can’t imagine anyone not liking Stephanie Edwards. She is just sooooo nice. A Sunday school girl from the tiny farming community of Kenyon, Minn., she embodies all those wholesome Minnesota values lampooned in the movie “Fargo” (which, by the way, she says she loved). She’s so solicitous of others that she implores me to not reveal the name of an author whose work she doesn’t like for fear of hurting the woman’s feelings, even though the author in question has sold millions of books. “It’s not that I’m more saintly than anyone else,” she says. “I’m just terribly uncomfortable [criticizing], probably because I feel so sorry for people on the receiving end. In grade school, in our little one-room county schoolhouse, I was the one who got picked on--because I was nice. I was the teacher’s favorite.”

Few who know her fail to mention this quality. “The first time I met her she was concerned about my health,” recalls her “LIVE” co-host, Sam Rubin, during my visit to the set at a moment when the show’s future is beginning to seem uncertain. “I thought, ‘What a nice woman.’ ” Last summer, he says, he and the KTLA brass were kicking around names to fill in the blank of the proposed “LIVE Show with Sam and . . . .” Bucking the talk-show trend of bimbos and brawls, Rubin immediately chose Edwards, who at 54 is 16 years his senior. “We want to have a nice, comfortable show,” he says. “We’re not doing lesbian separatists.” As glib as Edwards is genuine, their repartee often employs Edwards’ squeaky-clean image as a foil for Rubin’s mildly off-color forays. If she comes off schoolmarmish, it’s at least that funny schoolmarm everybody loves.

“Sam can be a naughty boy, which is one of his great talents,” she says, “and I can be the mother figure who says, ‘You can only go so far, sonny.’ “And it kind of works.”

Their executive producer, Tony Lawrence, says Edwards shows rare diligence in talk-show hosts: “She tends to surprise guests with her knowledge. When we have authors on, she’ll read the book the night before. It’s very unusual to find that.”

But the mood behind the scenes at “The LIVE Show” is far from nice and comfortable, since the 11 a.m. time slot pits Edwards and Rubin against talk TV’s Prince of Darkness, Jerry Springer.

“I haven’t hung any pictures in my cubicle,” Edwards says. “I won’t until we’re in our third 13-week cycle.”

That never comes to pass. In July, 26 weeks after hitting the air, “The LIVE Show” is axed due to poor ratings. Even before the show is canceled, Edwards is hit with an even bigger bombshell. Next April, after putting in more than 18 years with Lucky, she will be “out on my keister,” as she puts it--her tone a bit too upbeat given the circumstances.

American Stores is tight-lipped about all things Stephanie. Spokeswoman Judie Decker will say only that “her contract is up for annual renewal.” Edwards, though, is certain it’s over. She says she’s disappointed about falling shy of Virginia Christine’s 21-year record as Mrs. Olsen on the Folger’s commercials. But, she says, “I am nothing if not grateful. Eighteen years working for the same employer is a gift.”

At first, Edwards says she’ll continue to shop at Lucky. Then comes the merger proposal, and with Albertsons likely to receive Federal Trade Commission approval to gobble up American Stores, that loyalty becomes moot. Now, she says, her sympathies are with the people who were set to replace her. “Sylvia has been that marvelous brunet who did the Spanish version, and, frankly, I was hoping she would cross over to the English. She and another actor were set to team up on a series of spots where she is the Lucky customer and he’s Sav-On, and they were talking about being one big, happy family.”

What’s left for Edwards is the Tournament of Roses, and even there she has only two years left on her contract. I ask her how she deals with all this uncertainty. “Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” she says. “In show business, you have to trust that your next job is going to come out of the ether. As far as I’m concerned, the good Lord is still in charge.”

In an ideal world, Edwards’ 26 years in the entertainment business would suffice to feather a nest of affluent celebrity retirement. But things aren’t shaping up that way. “I always thought, just because of the longevity of her career and the fact that Stephanie has never left our consciousness, that she must be a billionaire,” Rubin says. But in the late 1980s, Edwards and husband Murray MacLeod sunk their savings and then some into a real estate fiasco that went belly-up. The couple refused to take the easy bailout of bankruptcy the way some of their venture partners did. “We inherited their indebtedness, and it’s not over yet by a long shot,” Edwards says. “We’re still shoveling hard.”

The couple once owned their own home in Santa Monica and looked forward to having a spare property to sell, but now the MacLeods (outside of show business, Stephanie goes by her married name) rent a modest three-bedroom house north of the freeway in Woodland Hills and despair of ever owning again.

Murray MacLeod, an actor and musician who once composed scores for films and for Aaron Spelling Productions, is now selling coffee smoothie machines to restaurants and other businesses--”Happily! Happily!” Edwards emphasizes--to help the couple stay afloat.

“We laugh about the fact that we moved to Woodland Hills because we are within walking distance of the Motion Picture Company Home and Hospital, which is probably where we’ll live out our days,” Edwards says, referring to the community for indigent show-biz retirees. So, “when people say, ‘What do you do with all your money?’ I just want to scream.”

*

Looking back on her life, Edwards calls herself “uncommonly fortunate.” At age 21, like many pretty girls from the Heartland, Edwards, “in a rare burst of courage,” arrived in L.A., with her first husband. She dreamed of being a successful actress. Instead, she found herself working as a church secretary. Then she was diagnosed with endometriosis, a flaking away of the lining of the uterus. Although the condition is treatable today, back then it required a hysterectomy.

The doctor said, “You’d better try to get pregnant as quickly as possible, or you never will,”’ Edwards recalls. But just that day she had put her husband on a plane for a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. Their marriage ended soon after his return, and by the time she married MacLeod, she had resigned herself to childlessness. “Evidently, we were meant to be very involved in the lives of nieces, nephews and godchildren,” she says. Today, the framed pictures of those children adorn the side table in her living room.

It was during the bleak days following her illness that she found her salvation. Watching TV at a relative’s house, she caught her first glimpse of the man who would have a profound influence on her life, Ralph Story. “I wrote him a letter and said, ‘Mr. Story, do you know of a place in show business where I might fit?” she says. “Basically, I was saying, ‘I’m a great actress, but in the meantime, do you know what I might do to keep bread on the table?’ ” The host of “Ralph Story’s Los Angeles” called her the day he received the letter. The two have been friends ever since.

“It was a very unusual letter,” says Story, now retired and living in Santa Ynez. “It was articulate, lyrical and funny.” When the pretty 22-year-old ingenue walked into his office, Story says, “I took one look at her and wondered who in the hell wrote that letter for her.” He told her to research a story on Hollywood Boulevard. “I was trapping her, really,” he says. “I didn’t think she wrote the letter. And No. 2, I didn’t see her doing any research on Hollywood Boulevard, which is a pretty racy place. What happened is that she did an astonishing job.”

Edwards worked for Story as a research assistant and secretary. When Story moved from KNXT (Channel 2) to KABC-TV to host “Ralph Story’s AM,” he insisted that she be his co-anchor. “In doing 50 years of television and radio, I’ve known beautiful women, smart women and funny women, but I’ve never seen that all together except in Stephanie,” he says.

What should have been her big break came in January 1975. ABC had developed the idea for a network program based on “Ralph Story’s AM” called “AM America” and asked her to be the co-host. “I went kicking and screaming to New York,” she says. “Everybody thinks, ‘This is the woman who’s going to knock Barbara Walters off the air.’ The show was a disaster.”

WABC’s Eyewitness News anchorman Bill Beutel was part of the original line-up, which also included Peter Jennings and Jesse Jackson, and had befriended Edwards during her brief Big Apple sojourn. “She was not very happy,” he recalls. “She was here and Murray was there. And bicoastal arrangements were too painful for her. The very first show that we did, she came dressed in a gray outfit and the producer, not exactly sympathetic to what her mood must have been, raised all sorts of devil with it because she should have been in red, green or orange. And maybe that set the tone.”

By the end of May, the program mired in chaos, Edwards had quit, and Beutel followed a few months later. Eventually, however, “AM America” would be revamped into the hugely successful “Good Morning America,” launching Joan Lunden’s broadcast career, among others. Looking back, the decision to leave haunts Edwards. “Were I in the same circumstance [today], I would plant my feet and you would have to carry me out of there on a pallet,” she says. “Joan Lunden understood that; I did not.”

What Edwards always lacked, according to Story, was confidence. “You’ve got to boost her up,” he says. “In that sense, I think I was very good for her. I either pushed her or gave her the confidence she didn’t have. She didn’t get that in New York.”

She returned to L.A. and shopped herself around at various casting calls but didn’t get much of a boost there either. “I did enough to know that I really loved the business and loved the craft, but I had nothing of the temperament,” she says. “It takes either a real hard crust or that terrible vulnerability that is fascinating.”

She appeared in a few theatrical productions and co-starred on “The Girl With Something Extra,” with John Davidson and Sally Field, “The Hudson Brothers Show,” and two films: “Stand Up and Be Counted” and “Maury,” re-released as “Big Mo.” But her acting triumphs never quite equaled her TV successes. “The problem was that we always had to fend off her basic desire to be an actress,” Story says. “The producer of the show and myself were always the ones who loved Stephanie, and Stephanie always wanted to be somebody else.”

By the early ‘80s, she had contracts with both Lucky and the Tournament of Roses and was appearing on various TV interview shows. Things began to stabilize. Still, behind all that radiant cheer, Edwards was--and still is--engaged in a running battle with a number of lifelong demons. She complains of migraines “so bad, you’d be on the air, lean over, throw up in a bucket and get back up on the panel,” she says. The drug Imitrex now helps to control those. But, she says, “I think I’m going to will my head to science, because I have several migraines a week.”

More shocking, coming from someone with one of the sunniest dispositions on television, is that she suffers from chronic depression, for which she is also on medication. “There are times when you do have to go to bed and pull the covers over your head, and I have done that,” she says. “Where you don’t want to take a shower for four days.”

Her sense of well-being is as tenuous as her career. While allowing herself to be the butt of her own jokes, when the barbs come from others, they cut more deeply. “The last time I was in a gym,” she says, “a lady who must have been 75 looked at me and said, Are you the Lucky Lady?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘You really are out of shape, aren’t you?’ I remember I left, mopped my face, put on my clothes and never went back.”

Edwards has revealed intimate facts about her hysterectomy, depression and even more personal issues not only to me but to the “LIVE Show” audience and in her numerous paid speaking engagements. “Candor and transparency mean a lot to audiences,” she says. “They love to learn that I readily admit that I had a face lift eight years ago.”

In 1988, she says, she was shooting a Lucky commercial and “noticed the execs having some pretty intense conversations in the corner of the stage. So I went over and said, ‘Since I’m the only one on camera, can I presume this is about me?’ They said, ‘We’re having trouble with the lighting.’ ” She understood the euphemism. “I asked, ‘Is it time for me to have a face lift?’ They said, ‘We wouldn’t mind.’ ” She complied, but Lucky eventually phased her out of on-camera work anyway, using her only for voice-overs and radio.

Yet Edwards cannot be enticed into blaming anyone for anything that’s happened to her--except herself. “My biggest pain about where my life is up to this 54th year is those years where I was rebellious,” she says, referring to a youthful hippie fling in Laurel Canyon. Her sins? “I drove a little bug convertible, had a romance with a guy who’s never worked in his life and had no respect for women, moved on to a torrid but brief relationship with a policeman and then came to my senses.”

Slim though the volume of “Stephanie’s Wild Years” is, she laments: “I didn’t give God nearly the credit or respect he deserved, and that hurts me more than anything else.”

*

My final encounter with Stephanie Edwards is also, appropriately, at a Lucky opening. This time, it’s in an urban renewal zone in Culver City, not far from the movie studios. The ribbon-cutting takes place in the parking lot, where the public can also see and hear. While it’s far from a personal disaster, she is upstaged during the ceremony by wisecracking City Councilman Nate Holden.

The autograph line is less robust than in Covina, and mixed in with the adoring fans, there’s a greater percentage of people “without discretion” and the just plain freakish. She endures a large, toothless, salivating woman wearing two pairs of sunglasses who wants to hug her. As Edwards signs autographs, a white-haired woman grabs her from behind, twists her delicate torso 180 degrees and rasps, “I just want to see how pretty you are.”

Another man cuts into line, saying, “My granddaughter would love a photo.” When Edwards gently directs him to the back, he snaps, “Forget it. She doesn’t want it that bad.” After an hour, the line peters out. All the action is outside around the Mountain Dew rock ‘n’ roll Humvee. Edwards smiles gamely through all of it. And when a woman who doesn’t even recognize her asks where she can find the pudding, Edwards replies, “Do you want the boxed pudding or the one already made in the refrigerator?”