80's Tv Shows

Before she won the vixen role of Abby Cunningham on CBS' Knots Landing in 1980, Donna Mills had made nearly 20 TV movies where she played victims stalked by stranglers and rapists. In her nine years on Knots (currently being rebroadcast by the Soapnet Network), she made Abby one of the strongest and most fascinating women characters in pop history. Mills gave Abby intelligence, wit, grace and style.

Treating men as tools, Abby is a fusion of the mythic femme fatale with the blonde American cheerleader. (Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John role in Grease, 1978, was based on Mills as a Chicago teenager.) Abby is fashion personified--a shimmering apparition glittering like a Byzantine cult object. She's like a self-created Warhol superstar, living in a virtual world of her own divine fabulousness.

A resident of Los Angeles (near which Knots Landing was set) for over 30 years, Mills is executive producer of her own production company. She has sponsored and starred in many TV movies exploring controversial social issues, and she is a prominent activist for causes such as environmentalism and reproductive rights.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Hello, Donna Mills. It's somewhat mind-boggling to be talking to you!

DONNA MILLS: Well, I'm very happy that we are.

CP: Here's what I've been telling my classes at the University of the Arts since the mid-'80s about your creation of Abby Cunningham. When the history of feminism is rewritten accurately, Joan Collins' performance as Alexis Carrington on Dynasty and yours as Abby Cunningham on Knots Landing will be seen as the pivotal roles in popular culture that had a revolutionary impact on women's behavior and self-image. You showed women around the world how to integrate power in the workplace with female sexual power. Joan's persona is very European, but you're the one who created the realistic American version. You showed what it was like to actually work in an office and also be a harried single parent, negotiating between work and home. And you created a sexy style for hard-driving businesswomen that's lasted for 20 years. So that's what I've been saying.

DM: God. [both laugh] Wow. Thank you.

CP: I've followed your work since one of my favorite movies, Play Misty for Me, came out in 1921. So I'm quite aware that you are not Abby and that you created her.

DM: Abby was the first time I'd been able to play the bad girl. I was always the goody-two-shoes before that. You know, when they called me about the role, I thought Knots Landing was a show about a houseboat with Andy Griffith! At the beginning, the show was much less sophisticated--I was basically a bookkeeper in a used-car lot. But I kept screaming at the producers. I said, Nobody wants to come home from a hard day working and turn on the TV and see the inside of a garage!" So I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.

CP: So you're the one who made Abby evolve toward that lavish fashion presentation that I adored through the '80s. It was totally out of sync with where feminism was at the time. In Hollywood, Meryl Streep was on top, and beauty and glamour were out. At the Oscars, it was chic to underdress--glamour was frivolous. But I felt that what you were doing with Abby was in the main line of old Hollywood--the high glamour style that Madonna would also resurrect in the mid-'80s. Most women viewers loved your use of fashion.

DM: I found through my fan mail that women really liked it and wanted a role model. They followed what Abby did. One reason was because Abby always won.

CP: In the '70s, women were moving into the workplace but were being sold the severe John Molloy dress-for-success look--very frumpy and unisex. By the '80s, women felt more comfortable with power and were looking for a way to recover their femininity. And that's where you were truly cutting-edge. You sensed the historical moment.

DM: I thought it was very important that femininity wasn't lost.

CP: That's a big difference between Alexis and Abby. Joan Collins' performance was female, while yours was feminine. You recovered the fragility and delicacy, the small gestures of femininity. I always attributed it to your ballet training. Dance gave you exquisite poise. You drew on fairy-tale princesses in Romantic ballet--Swan Lake, Giselle.

DM: That's certainly what I grew up with--ballet and musical comedy. My mother taught ballroom dancing and, I think, would have liked to have been a dancer herself. So she pushed me a lot when I was very young, but I loved it. All I really wanted to be was a dancer. There's a discipline in dance that you don't get anywhere else.

CP: I'm always drawn to actors onscreen who have dance training. I feel that choreography and body language are the most fundamental tools of communication and that film and TV are still, in some sense, silent. People vastly overestimate words in a script. So much comes from body language and facial expression. On Knots Landing, you were pushing the medium of television, making it cinematic. As a dancer, you understood physical space and props--doorways, a desk, a couch, pens, telephones. My favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, was a master of that physical dimension. This is a fundamental of film acting that's been lost in the last two decades of dizzying special effects. You gave a fantastic lesson in how to make the most of a role when the camera's on you.

DM: I never thought of it that way, but I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life--they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing--which was redundant.

CP: It was also your subtle facial expressions. You had an incredible instinct for the closeup. When the camera comes in, there's just you with this ethereal cloud of Botticellian blonde hair [Mills laughs] and the wide eyes and brilliant eye makeup. What you conveyed with a twitch of the eyelids! Abby would be smiling, get impatient or condescending, and her eyes would go cold. There's a fineness to your work in that role that we associate with classic Hollywood movies. Were there stars you admired?

DM: I always loved Bette Davis--she's probably my very favorite. She had an influence on me in that I felt I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking the things she wanted me to know about. When you're in extreme close-up, all you have to do is think, and the thoughts will read.

CP: This is music to my ears. Contemporary acting has lost that. Old Hollywood films trusted emotion and weren't embarrassed by melodrama--great theatrical emotions. Bette Davis, of course, was a great schemer--wheels were always turning in her mind. You must have been attracted to that, too.

DM: Yes--one of my favorite movies is The Little Foxes [1941].

CP: So this is the lineage of Abby Cunningham--Bette Davis eyes!

DM: Yes, I think so. It's funny because I've never even thought of it before. I also loved musicals because I was a dancer--An American in Paris [1951], Singin' in the Rain [1952], Gigi [1958].

CP: You started in live theater and then went into soap operas--which used the Hollywood-style close-up. In soaps at their height, from the '60s through the '80s. you'd see suffering women's faces lined with tears. Do you think that prepared you for Knots?

DM: Right. I did two soap operas before I moved to California. On The Secret Storm, I played a nightclub singer named Rocket. Then I did Love is a Many Splendored Thing, where I played a nun. Both shows were on CBS, so the stagehands used to call me Sister Mary Rocket!

CP: Were you in full habit?

DM: Yes.

CP: Did the nun's cowl help you show emotion using just your face and eyes?

DM: To some extent, yes. I was very uncomfortable in the habit--all that starched white stuff. I smoked at the time and used to love to walk down the halls of CBS with a cigarette dangling out of my mouth. [both laugh] People were just aghast, but I always wanted to go against hat grain because it was too restricting.

CP: Do you come from a religious background?

DM: Yes. I was brought up Catholic, and my family is still very religious.

CP: I think the structure of Catholicism gives one discipline.

DM: Well, maybe. But it never sunk in! They sent me to catechism classes and then to first grade in a Catholic school, and apparently I cried and moaned and bitched so much that they took me out.

CP: But didn't you have a sense of transgression or evil in your role as Abby?

DM: Yes, but I didn't think Abby was evil! That's the way she was. She never thought anything she did was wrong. And she never did anything truly evil. For example, when Val [Joan Van Ark] had twins, the producers thought, Wouldn't it be fun if Abby stole the twins? I went into them and said, "If you don't want me on this show anymore, then go ahead and do that, because the audience will never forgive me." That was not something I felt Abby would do. She was a mother, and that was going too far. So they had somebody else steal the twins! But I really had to fight them on that. Abby would do things that weren't very ethical, but she was never evil. She had a humanity that characters like her on the other soaps didn't have.

CP: That's right--Abby was never a cartoon vamp figure just bent on destruction.

DM: She was always grounded in certain values.

CP: But she was manipulative and did have an amoral will to power--

DM: Oh, yeah. Somebody else's husband-that was no barrier to her!

CP: I think the closest parallel to Abby was Vivien Leigh's performance as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind [1939]. Was there any connection?

DM: I feel flattered that you think so. Scarlett O'Hara didn't think she was manipulating. That's just the way she got what she wanted. And Abby was like that, too.

CP: Both Scarlett and Abby were talented, aggressive businesswomen who also had all the arts of flirtation and seduction-the entrancing code of femininity. And both were physically very petite.

DM: The way Scarlett moved and those big dresses--I always loved that kind of stuff. I was very particular on Knots about who bought my clothes. Most shows like that have a wardrobe designer who brings a couple of things to choose from, and then they fit it, and that's it. I was obsessed! We did most of our shopping at Neiman Marcus and spent some money.

CP: It looked like it.

DM: I would spend at least one day a week--whatever day I had off--shopping for the next show. A lot of times, I'd have seven or eight outfits in one show. There might be a gown or cocktail dress, but even if Abby was at home lounging, I felt the clothes had to be special.

CP: You showed a fabulous range of fashion, from those elegant gowns to business wear to the casual look, like those flowing trousers--you'd just stand there chicly with your hands in your pockets like a model. I'm always complaining about today's young actresses, who have no ability whatever to wear a dress. The stylist picks a dress for them, and they don't know how to work it. They don't know where the emphasis is in the dress--how one should move in it. But you could show an outfit to the max. It's your dance training again.

DM: Yes, but I was also very particular. I studied acting with Wynn Handman, who still teaches at the American Place Theater in New York. He had this big costume room in the back of the studio. When you were going to do a scene, he'd send you in there to find the clothes. It made such a difference to how I felt in a character. The shoes, the clothes, the hat helped me form her. Ever since then, that's how I start to create a character. I don't feel comfortable if clothes aren't part of the scene.

CP: Perfect! I've always thought of you as the American equivalent of one of my favorite actresses, Stephane Audran--director Claude Chabrol's wile and leading lady in the '60s and '70s. Audran prowled Parisian salons to find exactly the right handbag for a role. She'd say, "Until I have the clothing, I don't know who the character is." It's exactly opposite to the Actors Studio: a Method actor begins inside and works out. Your tradition is the Hollywood studio era: There was such a meshing of the actors with what they were wearing. It's partly why those films have lasted and lasted.

DM: Yes--even colors were important to me. If it was a somber scene, the colors were muted and dark. If it was a happy or seductive scene, the colors were brighter. I spent an enormous amount of time doing That. As a matter of fact, once I left Knots Landing, I didn't shop for years. I was so tired of shopping!

CP: This is why watching you was such an artistic pleasure--your work appealed to the eye. What about eye makeup, which you revolutionized in the '80s?

DM: Well, I did a video at the time, and now I have an eye-makeup kit out. I did the video because I got so many letters asking, "How do you do your eye makeup?" They would say, "I put the VCR on pause and tried to figure out how you did that!" The makeup grew with the character too, because I did my own makeup. Early on in my career, I'd go into the makeup trailer, and they'd spend an hour doing my makeup, and I would hate it. I'd go into the bathroom, wash it off and start over again, which took an enormous amount of time. So I just started doing it myself. On Knots, the makeup had to match the clothes. I had every color eye shadow you could possibly imagine, and I'd use a little spot of this and a little spot of that.

CP: It's really very painterly. It's almost like Impressionist painting.

DM: That's my favorite kind of painting. I love the Impressionists, especially Monet. I've been to Giverny three or four times. I feel a very strong attraction to it.

CP: In Monet, everything seems to be dissolving. Abby's eyes are so liquid--it's like Monet's paintings of water lilies. You use all these shaded pastels--it's so pictorial. Your sense of the camera is amazing.

DM: I feel more comfortable in front of a camera than anywhere else.

CP: Really? There's a stillness and intimacy. You're able to open to the camera and thus to the audience, which really bonded with you.

DM: Yes. A lot of actors just do whatever they do, and wherever the camera is, it is. They don't pay much attention, but I always did. I was always very close to the camera crew. They were my best buddies, no matter what movie or show I was doing. The focus puller, the [camera] operator, the DP [director of photography], the lighting guys--they become part of the world you create in front of a camera. I always wanted to know what lens they were on, how close they were. I didn't do it with a plan in mind, but I would instinctively gear what I was doing toward what lenses they were using.

CP: I just knew there had to be some collaboration with the technical crew. You were replicating the Hollywood studio, when Marlene Dietrich and loan Crawford had that rapport with the crew. Again this is neglected in a lot of contemporary filmmaking, where the actors bond in an ensemble but then forget that their medium of communication to the audience is the technical apparatus.

DM: Oh, I feel that very strongly. The lighting is so important. I'm still like that. I go to an interview on some show and sit down and say, "No, that won't do. Uh, could you take that light over here and put it there?" And most of the time they're nice about it--though probably in the back room they're going, "Oh, she's such a bitch."

CP: But that was exactly what loan Crawford paid attention to. She knew, just by the heat on one cheek, where the light should be. And the result was gorgeous images that have lasted over 60 years.

DM: One thing that makes me nuts about the lighting now is that they spend an enormous amount of time lighting the set, the background. But the most important thing in the scene is the actor.

CP: Exactly. Lighting helps to create the body in space--like a work of sculpture. I always point this out in class when we look at 1930s photos or films: There's a complexity of lighting from so many different angles. It's even on the back of the shoulder, so the body exists in three dimensions.

DM: Rita Hayworth in Gilda [1946] is probably the best example of that ever. There's not a shot of her in that movie that isn't gorgeous. Fortunately, we had some great DPs on Knots that were concerned about making the show look good. Dallas and Dynasty would be finished at 4:30 in the afternoon. On Knots, we never shot less than a 12-hour day. Everybody tried to make it special. And I think it showed.

CP: Oh, I think so. To me, glamour is a great art form--going back to ancient Egypt. But you were not understood by the politically correct cultural elite in the '80s. Post Madonna, it's now absolutely crystal clear what you were doing before Madonna. When I came on the scene with my first book [Sexual Personae, Vintage Books] in 1990, the fashion industry was under a cloud. Academic theory condemned it as oppressive to women--a sadistic, capitalist, heterosexist conspiracy. In the U.S. and U.K., I was out there arguing that fashion and fashion photography belong to the history of the fine arts-a point now obvious to the generation of young feminists influenced by Madonna. What you did is such an important part of the historical record.

DM: It was really fun to do, too.

CP: Well, you put fun into the role. You made Abby funny and witty.

DM: There was a lot of comedy in Knots, which most people never recognized. Different writers were really funny. One reason I left when I did was because the writers at that time weren't particularly witty and didn't know what to do with Abby.

CP: Was there any resistance to your development of the role toward high fashion?

DM: Yeah, there was resistance. They didn't know that world; they didn't get it. I had to keep badgering them, and once they moved that way, the show became more and more popular. Left to their own devices, it would not have gone that way.

CP: Joan Collins' great moments as Alexis are florid and flamboyant--almost drag. But Abby is usually very quiet and whispery. How in the world did they mike you?

DM: The sound department was constantly yelling at me. [laughs] I don't have a very loud voice to begin with. A lot of times, they'd put a lavaliere mike on me and crank it up.

CP: That's part of Abby's power--the enormous willfulness and assertion and yet the breathy, seductive femininity that draws the viewers in. You created a private space around yourself.

DM: I always insisted that Abby never cried or showed any weakness except when she was alone. She'd walk into the bathroom to cry.

CP: Was there a particular designer you gravitated toward at the time?

DM: I created a deal with Escada, whose clothes are very expensive. They gave the show half off of wholesale. I got it because the Escada people liked me. They were very well-made clothes yet flamboyant and colorful. Esacada size four fit me perfectly. But even the jackets had to be taken in, because I'm small-boned. When I first started out, I did some modeling, and I used to feel tremendously inferior because I'm 5'4", and I was always around these six-foot women. I felt like a shrimp. And I hated that. So to be on Knots in these wonderful clothes--I'd feel tall. But the fittings! We'd have to fit everything. I'd have to be in the fitting room on my lunch hour or after work.

CP: So the fittings were at the studio and not the store?

DM: Yes, because they had very good studio fitters. They were from the old school--older women from the glory days of Hollywood. They wanted everything perfect. When they did a seam inside, they'd bind it and do all this handwork. It was beautiful, beautiful work.

CP: Well, it really shows.

DM: I was a maniac about that, too. Everything had to look right from every angle, not just the front. A big thing was, when we were outdoors, finding a place for the sound pack. Most people put it at the back of the waist, and of course it makes you look fat! So I invented a pouch that went under the arm. And with those big shoulder pads, [both laugh] no one ever knew it was there!

CP: That's great! What about shoes?

DM: I always wore the highest heels possible, because the other women on the show were tall--Michelle Lee is 5'9", and Joan's at least 5'6". Sometimes I was walking on my toes. Because I was not going to be shorter than the rest of them! I had my slippers right next to the set, because it would kill my legs to wear those high heels all the time. And they couldn't get the shoulder pads big enough for me. When I look at those clothes now, I go, 'What was I thinking?" [both laugh]

CP: That's a huge part of fashion history. It descends from when Adrian made shoulder pads for Joan Crawford. It's a male silhouette: Women were shouldering their way into men's public space. Sometimes you wore those big sweaters with abstract patterns.

DM: Yes, there were a lot of Escada sweaters. The shoulder pads were very powerful-and made the waist and hips look smaller, too.

CP: Was Abby's business acumen drawn from personal observation?

DM: My father was a middle manager at an oil company, but I never knew anything about his work. Whatever business acumen I have just got gleaned over the years. If there is anything I would do differently in my life, it is that I would study business more. I'm trying to teach my daughter Chloe at an early age about investing and money so she's not afraid of it.

CP: It should be taught in high school. If there's one thing that women and minorities need, it's an early introduction to business.

DM: I would have liked to do a lot of what Abby did. Playing a character for that long, I gave her a lot of my own personal stuff, but she gave me a lot, too. She gave me her ambition and drive. It's osmosis, I guess.

CP: It's sort of a symbiosis, like Charlie Chaplin and the Little Tramp.

DM: Yes. It's a funny thing. It's weird.

CP: But it's central to the artistic experience. Well, it's been a thrill talking to you.

DM: Really, it's been a thrill for me, too.

CP: Thank you so much for your time.

Camille Paglia is a Contributing Editor to Interview. Above: A still from Mills' The Eyes Have It makeup video. Photo: Photofest.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Develop Through Targeted Training - Sponsored Link
Ad - Download a white paper about creating effective training development programs.