King of the Hill

When the shooting was over, Frank Furillo took off his three-piece gray suit and white shirt and black tie and once again, for a few short hours, became Dan Travanti. It was 9:30 P.M. on a workday that had begun 14 hours earlier. He put on a tan T-shirt and khaki running shorts and zipped out to his silver-blue Mercedes two-seater to leave the stars of Hollywood Boulevard for his home in Santa Monica.

The ample breasts that awaited him were soft and succulent. After such a long day, when a man needed them most, there they were, ready for the taking. "God," Travanti whispered, touching them tenderly, "they're good enough to eat.

"You see," he said, lifting the hot pot, "when you cook a chicken, always cook it breast down. Much juicier that way."

He smirked, ripped off a piece of white meat and savored it slowly. "Mmmm," he said. "This baby, she's a good one."

For Daniel J. Travanti, star of Hill Street Blues, it was just another one of those wild showbiz nights. After he finished with the chicken he'd started cooking that morning, he went up to his study and wrote some checks to pay some bills. Then he jumped onto his stationary bike to do ten tough miles. Somewhere out there in the Hollywood hills, there were parties going on, where people drank and did drugs and talked about taking meetings. But that's not Travanti's style. He'd rather spend what was left of the night with an old friend--his bike.

"The bike helped save my life," he says, breaking into a slight sweat. "During the idle days of my career, I'd just get on the bike and ride and dream. That's when I started taking care of myself. I had coasted for a long time. I'd smoked and drunk way too much. I was on the way out. In big trouble. See, I'm the kind of guy who can't sit still. People don't know that about me when they watch Furillo. But I'm acting. That guy's very self-contained, and I'm not. It was six years ago that I started channeling my energy, six years ago that I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started going to the gym. And look at me now."

He is a solid sight--much bigger than he appears on the screen, even in the bedroom scenes. At 6'1", 190 pounds, his weight is almost all muscle. A former football player, he has the shoulders of a linebacker, the thighs of a wide receiver. And a stomach like a rock. He pounds it a lot, proudly. The only signs of his 43 years are a few wiry gray hairs. He doesn't worry about them, though. He has plenty of other things to keep him busy now--his exercising, his cooking ("Make sure the skin is off the chicken"), his gardening (the roses he planted should be in fullest bloom soon) and the reading and writing of short stories (John Cheever is a favorite).

His house is very comfortable, though modest by Hollywood standards. It's a simple two-story built in 1926, in a residential section of Santa Monica, a mile and a half from the beach. The oak floors are highly polished. The furniture is mostly modern--polished cottons, leather and chrome--mixed with some English and Irish antiques. Upstairs, at one end of the almost all-white bedroom, the one with the fully mirrored wall, are two walk-in closets. He's a bit of a clotheshorse, this Travanti. There are 42 pairs of shoes lined up next to the European-style sports jackets that Frank Furillo would never wear. A tan Armani bomber jacket hangs next to a navy Hill Street Blues satin one.

The TV in the study is topped by two Emmys facing a Golden Globe award. The Emmys are just as heavy as everyone makes them out to be. And around the corner from the stationary bike is a wall of framed press clips, awards and photographs. One of them is a shot from the show--an over-the-shoulder photo of Travanti with co-star Veronica Hamel. She is holding his head and staring into his eyes. The inscription, written in black felt-tip pen, reads, To Daniel, My Dream Man. What You See is What You Get. Love You, Veronica.

Are the two of them really a hot item offscreen as well? Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact that folks would even speculate on it shows that Daniel J. Travanti has come a long way. He's a man who had a bad bout with drinking some ten years ago. The recovery was slow but sure. A once tough street kid, Travanti knew he could beat this thing.

He is from Kenosha, Wisconsin, which until recently was famous only as the home of Jockey underwear. His father was an auto worker, his mother a housewife. He was the youngest of five kids. A straight-A student and a football star in high school, he went on to the University of Wisconsin, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, then to Yale School of Drama on a fellowship. But soon he dropped out to enlist in the Army; afterward, he started working. He played some small parts on TV--in East Side, West Side, Route 66, Kojak. After a try at regional theater, he went back and got a master's degree in English literature at Loyola Marymount University, while doing some part-time acting to keep the money coming in. By 1979, he made it back to television, this time with a steady role in General Hospital.

In early 1980, Travanti was one of more than 50 actors to audition for the part of Captain Furillo in the Hill Street pilot. The producers had never heard of him, but they liked him and kept calling him back. They had a gut feeling that he was right for the character.

The script of that pilot (then called Hill Street Station) sits bound in Travanti's study. What would be his first appearance came on page seven, after roll call. The character is described briefly: "Captain Francis 'Frank' Furillo, late 30s, a 15-year veteran of the force whose natural good looks betray too many symptoms of overwork. In keeping with the division's policy of image, his suit is conservative three-piece."

Travanti laughs at that now. "I'm sure people watch the show and think that I'm really like that guy Furillo," he says, "three-piece suits and all. It's funny, I never owned a three-piece suit. I was used to running around in shorts and tank tops and T-shirts. And very bright colors. That's what I wore to work. And Veronica would just sneer at me. She said my clothes were silly. I started to think about that, and in the past six months, I've accumulated some very nice clothes. I figured out it had to do with self-worth. Clothes should be fun, though. I never wanted to take any of it too seriously. Clothes were materialism. I thought I really didn't like that, but maybe I did. Maybe it was Freudian. Now I go on binges. I'm compulsive. In two weeks, I bought 16 pairs of shoes. All at a discount, mind you. See these? Arnoldo Marcella, $225. I got 'em for $60. I just hate to buy retail. I guess it's the Italian peasant kid in me. I have very basic values."

Travanti is finally finding his sense of personal style. Influenced by Hamel, who wears black, white, gray or beige almost exclusively, he says he's given up the screaming yellows and reds. "But I keep them," he says. "I figure maybe there's a time when they'll come back and Veronica won't sneer at me."

Although Hamel admits to trying to influence him--either with sneers or with gifts--it doesn't always work. One Christmas, she bought him a fancy scarf. Beige. He exchanged it for a burgundy one.

"Dan looks wonderful in colors," she laughs. "But you don't have to wear five at once. I kid him about that. Look, fashion is intimidating to certain men unless someone tells them what's right. And designers aren't the ones who should tell a man what's right. I told that to Daniel. If you feel awkward, if you're not comfortable in it, it doesn't matter who made it. Forget it. You wear the clothes. They can't wear you."

Travanti makes sure that what he wears fits him well. He's in incredible shape. He's always moving. If he's not on his bike or at the gym, he's running up the steps. Or parking at the far end of the lot at the supermarket and walking briskly to the door.

He sees everything he does as exercise. His shooting schedule for the show makes it hard for him to keep a rigid regimen, and he likes it that way. He tries to make the most efficient use of the time he has without being a fanatic about it. He works on his arms and legs and does lots of special sit-ups to keep his middle tight.

"I dread getting these," he says, grabbing imaginary love handles. "I'm just too vain, but I don't kill myself. I see guys on their programs and they're so determined to get all of it in every day. I don't need that. I already have enough tension. Exercise is my way of unwinding. It should be fun, not work."

Some people would call Travanti a fanatic about his diet. His palms are a strange shade of yellow-orange from eating so many carrots. He pops vitamins the way some men pop Tic Tacs.

"Did you read the new thing," he asks, "about carrots (concluded on page 171)King of the Hill(continued from page 162) and vitamin A and how they will prevent anything? They also say the same about broccoli and Brussels sprouts, both of which I love. But they make your skin green. Of course, there's no guarantee with all this. You eat all this healthy food and then you go home and have a heart attack. But that's the cynical side of me. All I know is that I feel great."

And to many female fans of Hill Street Blues, he's become one hell of a sex symbol. He had some trouble dealing with that at first. "Hey, I'm a guy who needs a special nose lens," he says. "Sometimes, on profile shots, I obscure Veronica completely. Me, a sex symbol? Come on. I'll be honest with you, though. I may not understand it--but I love it.

"I think it has to do with the show and the character and the women in his life. It makes me nervous sometimes when women come on in real life, because that sex-symbol image is hard to live up to. I don't want to have to. But I can deal with it now the same way I can deal with success. It's a great relief. I finally broke through that barrier of anonymity--I think. I'm not even sure about it from day to day. Fame comes fast, and it can go just as fast. The important thing is to remember who you are. If there's a sex symbol here, it's Furillo. He's the character. And he's not really me. I'm Travanti. Plain and simple. Always was, always will be. And as someone very close to me once said, 'What you see is what you get.' "

The Official Daniel J. Travanti Lose-the-Fitness-Blues Sit-up

Travanti does this exercise many times a day. He suggests you go easy the first few times you try it. Lie on your back and anchor your feet. Nothing fancy--the bottom of a sofa will do. Don't lie on too hard a surface. Putting a towel underneath you will prevent your rear from getting sore. Now bend your knees and keep your hands folded above your belly. Raise your torso off the floor so you feel tension in your abdominal muscles, not in your lower back. An involuntary rippling of those muscles lets you know you've hit it right. Now just stay there. Try to hold it for a count of ten, working up to a count of 20. You should bob back and forth a little but never sit all the way up or go all the way down. If you can hold it to a count of 50, Veronica Hamel will be banging your door down.