Last month, after better than 4,000 gigs on the stand-up circuit, she brought this raw, Southern-fried act to prime time as Grace Kelly, heroine of the ABC sitcom “Grace Under Fire.” Grace is more than a little like Brett. In fact, she is Brett: divorced from a man she says beat her, and lethal with her tongue. “Mister Right Hook,” she says of her ex, “once moved his entire family to another state, just so he could buy beer on Sundays.” Brett in turn is graced. Created by the same production house that hatched “Roseanne,” the new show crashed Nielsen’s top 10 after only two episodes, and the 35-year-old Butler looks like the new TV season’s first breakout star. Maybe even The Next Roseanne (except that this good of churl can quote Shakespeare, Faulkner and Rabelais as well as do the redneck-from-hell bit).
But she is at her best–sassy, earthy, loaded with smarts–when she plays off her own roots. “I’m so Southern,” she cracks, “I’m related to myself " On the show, she portrays a single mom trying to raise three kids on nothing but spunk. No alimony. No child support. No sex life (“I don’t even have time to put the shower head on pulse”). She can do serious stuff, too. Few sitcom scenes have registered as wrenchingly as that in which Grace’s 8-year-old son discloses he knew Dad beat up Mom, thanks primarily to the half-dozen emotions that wrestle for control of Butler’s face.
Butler’s own father split when she was a toddler, leaving her in a sort of matriarchal comedy school. “My four sisters are funny, my mother’s funny, even my great aunt was funny–all 400 pounds of her.” Life turned abruptly dark when at 19 she wed a bad ole boy “who kept a gun in every room in our trailer,” she says. The marriage lasted for three years. “I don’t mean to sound like some glisteny-eyed celebrity survivor,” she says of her rough marriage. “But it happened and I’m still dealing with it. When someone comes up behind me real quick, I flinch.” (Reached by NEWSWEEK in his Georgia home, Charles Michael Wilson, her ex-husband, refused to comment.)
Butler’s temper is as visible as her IQ, and she knows it. Her offstage “hissy fits” about the quality of the scripts, she acknowledges, have led some ABC executives to regard her as a Roseanne-in-training. As Butler sees it, all that she shares with Mrs. Arnold is that “both of us have looked out a trailer window and thought: ‘How the bell do I get out of here?”’ In any case, her admitted reputation as an inhouse “virago” prompted her to propose taping her own network promo: “Hi, I’m Brett Butler–the new bitch at ABC.”
This would be slighting her talent. But considering how well the last woman to suffer this title has done, it isn’t such a bad rap to take.
HARRY F. WATERS
IT’S TOUGH FOR A NEW FACE WHEN most of the talk is about his backside. But David Caruso, who plays detective John Kelly in “NYPD Blue,” is a realist who knows on which side his career is buttocked. The “Blue” in the show’s title is creator Steven Bochco’s cute double-entendre, referring to the cops’ uniforms and to the “adult” nature of the material, prominent among which is Caruso’s rear bumper, displayed in two early episodes of the top-rated new TV dramatic series of the season. “I got nothing to hide,” says Caruso wryly. Ordering a turkey on wheat toast for lunch, he says, “I’m trying to keep it simple, watch the calories now that I’m a hunk.”
In his first leading role, the 37-year-old Caruso is better than a hunk. He’s a nearly perfect TV actor, with presence and rhythm that turns the tube into a window on reality. With his wavy red hair and street-sharpened face, he’s a neo-Jimmy Cagney in the neon jungle. In fact, Cagney’s tough-sensitive style struck a chord when young Caruso worked as an usher in Queens, N.Y., where he lived with his grandparents after his parents were divorced. “The things that sustained me in my earlier life were motion pictures,” he says.
Caruso grew up in Queens’s 112th precinct, next door to the precinct he now works as detective Kelly. He used to pose in police line-ups for $25 a mug. Doing line-ups is about as informative as begets concerning his early life–a vagueness that would make Kelly put the screws on Caruso in the interrogation room. “I lived a variety of lifestyles,” he says. “Every neighborhood in New York is a different culture and I lived in quite a few neighborhoods.” His odd-job life paid off. Delivering liquor for a Christmas party around 1978, he caught the eye of his customer, a personal manager. She liked his look and sent him out to do commercials, which led to a role on Bochco’s pathbreaking police series “Hill Street Blues” as the leader of a real bad Irish gang.
“When you’re from the boroughs where you’re on the street comer a lot, you know how to play a character,” says Caruso. In 12 years he played strong supporting roles on TV and in movies like “An Officer and a Gentleman” and more recently in “Mad Dog and Glory” with Robert De Niro. He’s had his share of lean years but Bochco, a master caster, gave him the classic big break in “NYPD Blue.” The show’s strong writing and witty-gritty realism have been obscured by the controversy about its occasional forays into gutter talk and bedroom action. “you can’t have a cop show in 1993 and delete those things. You just can’t,” says Caruso. It’s a long way from Dick Tracy to “dickhead.” Actually it’s the other guys, not Caruso, who talk like that. His hottest moment came in last week’s episode. He cried.
JACK KROLL with MARK MILLER in Los Angeles
ASHLEY JUDD DOES A LITTLE DANCE. The actress is in New York promoting Victor Nunez’s “Ruby in Paradise,” in which she plays Ruby Lee Gissing, a wandering soul trying desperately to clear her head and heart. New York. it turns out, is just the latest stop on a 13-city press tour. “My ears are ringing,” says Judd. “That’s how little sleep I’ve had.” She stares down at a newspaper ad for “Ruby,” which is full of raves about her performance. She’s determined to remain calm, but suddenly she smiles and shimmies in the middle of a restaurant. It’s a quick swivel of the hips, a victory dance.
At 25, Ashley already has the advantage of name recognition. Her mother and older sister, Naomi and Wynonna, spent the ’80s as a Grammy-winning country act called the Judds. But Ashley grew up before the boon, during lean years lived partly in Kentucky. “I went to 12 schools in 13 years because we moved around,” she says. “I made it my strong point. I could assess a classroom in five minutes and tell you who my boyfriends were going to be and in what succession. The thing is, you sink or swim, and I tried to do the butterfly.”
Judd graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1990, and, in person, she’s equal parts Phi Beta Kappa and Kappa Kappa Gamma: a disarming mix of booksmarts and Southern charm. “I run a really tight house,” she says of her Malibu bungalow. “I’m proud of everything from my flower bed to the fact that my spices are in alphabetical order.” Judd had a tiny part in the Christian Slater vehicle “Kuffs” and a role on the NBC drama “Sisters,” but there’s been nothing to prepare us for “Ruby,” which shared grand prize at the last Sundance Film Festival.
Not much happens in this lovely, meditative movie, but one thing that does happen is Ashley Judd. She’s honest, unaffected and hypnotically calm. Early on in the movie, Ruby pulls into Panama City, Fla., in a banged-up car with a Tennessee plate. “I got out of Manning without getting pregnant or beat up,” she says. “That’s saying something.” Ruby works in a souvenir shop, test-drives two lovers, chooses solitude instead. Judd has enough presence to carry the minimalist plot. In those wistful moments when Ruby simply stares out her window, one is reminded that movie-making begins with an agile face and a camera.
A couple of studios are now vying for the actress’s affections–she says she can hear “the sound of the troops gathering outside MY door.” Judd is looking into two books by the Southern fiction writer Ellen Gilchrist, and she recently finished a harrowing courtroom scene for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers,” in which she plays the only survivor of a serial-killing spree. “I’d sob my bead off during the takes, and between takes I’d cry even harder,” she says. “It was the most fun I had all summer, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. And that is the mysterious perversity of acting.” Some sink. Some swim. Some do the butterfly.
JEFF GILES
