Blonde Ambitions

The bedroom walls are pink silk, the bed a mauve-draped four-poster from a cheerleader's daydream. Two TV-acting types are trading overwrought lines as the smoky Los Angeles light slips in through lace-trimmed windows.

"I'm leaving you for Cliff," says Afton Cooper to J. R. Ewing, trepidation in her voice. "You can keep all that money and virility—I've found true love."

Now, J. R. is the meanest, most powerful son of a bitch in Texas, and he's pissed. Don't nobody talk to him like that. Besides, Afton's his mistress—rounded, blonde and shrewd, with a form that cries out to be fondled. And she wants to dump him for a simpering, no-account wimp?

"But, Afton, honey," he says with a strange squeak, "I'm tired of my killin' and dastardly ways. You come and sit right here on my lap---" In the middle of the line, this J. R. comes out of character for a second to adjust a frilly bra strap.

No, it's not J. R. Ewing Meets K-Y Jelly. It's a practice scene that will play half a dozen times before Audrey Landers, who plays Afton on Dallas, feels she's got all her inflections right. Then sister Judy (the other half of the sexiest sibling act on television) will toss down the J. R. script and they'll work on a scene from one of her shows. It happens all the time.

There's a long road between kitchen skits at home in New York to weekly TV in Hollywood, but the Landers sisters have made it in less time than it takes to say starlet fever. Older sis Audrey, in fact, (text concluded on page 106) has 11 years of showbiz experience at the age of 23. She sang on Merv Griffin's show at 12, then slid into the soap The Secret Storm a year after that. She played opposite Broadway Joe Namath in The Waverly Wonders, did an entire programing day's worth of commercials, then landed the Afton Cooper role on her 21st birthday. She's the one who told J. R. last season just what he could do with those oil wells.

"Afton's the only woman ever to have dumped J. R.," boasts Audrey. "Nobody in his right mind would tell off J. R. Ewing. But she's an opportunist. She's going to set up all the little plots and subplots going on in Dallas this year. It's exciting."

While Audrey was singing with verve for Merv and splitting a show with Joe, little sister Judy (now 22) decorated walls with her back.

"Audrey's been an actress since I was a little girl," says Judy in a little-girl chirp. "She was the outgoing one. I was the wallflower. I'd go with her to rehearsals and sit in the corner. I would learn every single character's part from beginning to end. Pretty soon, I wanted to be an actress, too."

Keeping an eye on both blondes' ambitions was mother Ruth—former actress as well as manager and guru. When Judy was graduated from high school (a year early) in New York and headed for the City of Angels, Ruth got her an audition for What Really Happened to the Class of '65? Judy became Wanda the Bod for turgidity, not dramaturgy, but she's been working ever since.

Now Audrey emotes every Friday as one of Dallas' sizzling sexpots, and Judy flounces through yet another dizzy-blonde role in the syndicated Madame's Place (which stars a horny-old-bag marionette). Among Audrey's previous roles was that of Betty in a televised version of the Archie comic strip; Judy's characters have had names like Bambi, Bunny, Cookie, Boom-Boom and Stacks, not to mention the robust Wanda. It seems reasonable to suspect that these women owe their success more to T&A than to Stanislavski. Judy, in particular, is open to such criticism, but she bounces back without a jiggle.

"I have a little voice, and I've done three series and many, many other roles playing silly blondes. But I need to be working to be happy. If people think I'm like the characters I play, then that's flattering. In ten years, I'd like to be doing more dramatic roles—one or two movies a year—but I don't want to give up comedy. This role in Madame's Place is really the epitome of the dumb blonde. It's almost spoofing it, and I'm having a great time."

Audrey is more established in her career than her sister is, but even she was initially hit with the T&A tag. "Afton is the first role I've ever played in which I am womanly," she says. "I've always played the typical teenaged, all-American character. But when I first read for Afton, I gave her a flirtatious, naughty quality that wasn't in the script. I think that helped the producers decide I could do more with the character than they had expected. I guess I'm growing up."

"For the first time, through Playboy," Judy chimes in (she really does chime), "I want the world to know who and what we really are. For the people who see me as silly and airheaded—well, I don't think I'll come across that way in Playboy. Most people see me as looking very wholesome. This is a little less wholesome."

Says Audrey, "It's something of an image change for us. It takes us into an area in which we can be a little bit more sophisticated, more seductive and sexy."

But the trip from wholesome to seductive can be arduous—and ticklish, for that matter. To get a wind-blown effect in their pictorial without running up enormous bills (the price of down keeps going up), the girls had some of the feathers glued to their bodies. Audrey recalls that they finished the session about 1:30 in the morning and had to be on the set at six A.M. "No matter how many showers we took, we still had feathers stuck to us."

The Landers sisters have feathered their résumés with so many credits, you've probably seen them more times than you could count. One of Audrey's more challenging jobs was working up affection for one of serial TV's flakiest guys—she played Ralph Malph's girlfriend on Happy Days. She was in a Fantasy Island episode called "Tattoo's Romance," and she was the title. "We played a lot of scenes sitting down but, finally, Tattoo [Hervé Villechaize] realized I was the wrong girl for him." Too tall, for one thing. Audrey's been heavenly in Charlie's Angels, undereducated in Room 222, hugged in B.J. and the Bear and sick in Marcus Welby, M.D. Judy is still remembered as Angie in Vega$ ("Did I do good, Dan?"), but she, too, has guested in dozens of series and months' worth of made-for-TV movies. She has just finished a stint as the quaintly named Stacks in B.J. and the Bear.

Film is the next destination for these two driven young ladies. They've just realized a special ambition, starring together in a feature film titled The Tennessee Stallion. Today, even as Audrey works up a Las Vegas act—she sings her own compositions when not seducing in Dallas—and Judy follows in the tiptoes of Harlow and Holliday, they're polishing their skills for shots at the silver screen. Audrey met Lana Turner, one of her idols, not long ago.

"It was amazing," Audrey says. "I don't even know how to say this, but she told me she's a fan of mine. She was able to bring across in films so many of the values that I believe in—she's a beautiful, sexy woman, but she has retained her sensitivity and her vulnerability."

Should we look for a movie starring Audrey Landers as the sweater girl?

"Well, we've been talking about that. I'd never want to say anything until I knew for sure ... but it would be spectacular."

Judy's part in The Tennessee Stallion is the more pivotal, and now she's starting a singing career. She and Audrey are working on yet another film project in which they'd play sisters. Sounds as though there's no room for men in all this skyrocketing.

"I don't think I'm ready for marriage yet," says Judy, "but I'm definitely a one-man woman. I've had only two boyfriends in my whole life. I'm a complete romantic."

So is big sis. "I can romanticize anything," Audrey laughs. "I guess that's the actress in me. If I fall in love with somebody, I don't fall in love a little bit. I mean, I am gone."

Neither is married; neither is engaged. Are those the sighs of 1,000,000 men heating up the page?

Through it all—the jobs and the jeers, the lines they hear and the ones they have to learn, the money and the double-take recognition in the street— they're really a pair of old-fashioned young women. Call them unaffected or just innocent—they're known as two of the kindest, most conscientious actresses in the most disingenuous business of all. They have just bought a house to share in Beverly Hills, decorated the bedrooms themselves (Judy's room is where our hypothetical Dallas scene took place) and they're excited as bubbles about it. They get up almost every morning to run, though even that has become more frantic than it used to be.

"One morning, we were running down one of the main streets, very involved in our own conversation," Audrey remembers. "Well, somebody was watching us. All of a sudden, we heard a screech of brakes, and there was a three-car pile-up. It's a good thing nobody was hurt. Now we run in parks and on side streets."

This is a sweet/sexy sister act that wouldn't hurt a soul or dent a fender, even by accident.