Life After Cagney & Lacey
As her memoir is published, Sharon Gless talks about beating alcoholism and the iconic female cop show’s legacy on TV and beyond.
From her apartment on Fisher Island, off the coast of Miami, Sharon Gless is happily recounting tales of Cagney & Lacey – the hit Eighties cop show which used to attract 30 million viewers a week, and paved the way for so many female police series which followed.
Writer Lynda La Plante, creator of Prime Suspect, approached Gless at an event long after Cagney & Lacey ended, the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress recalls, smiling behind her fashionable blackrimmed specs, her white-blonde hair swept back to reveal a seemingly flawless complexion.
“Lynda and I had lunch one day in Los Angeles and she told me that she wrote Prime Suspect as a homage to Cagney & Lacey. When Helen Mirren won her first Emmy [in 1996], the first people she thanked on camera were Cagney & Lacey.”
“I was in a New York theatre once and heard Helen was in the theatre and I waited in the lobby for her,” she continues, warming to the theme. “When I went over to introduce myself, she kneeled down on the floor, raising her arms like worshipping, and I said, ‘Helen! Please stop! Thank you!’ And she said, ‘If it wasn’t for you, my show wouldn’t exist’.”
EARLY CAREER
Gless has done many other things in her career, starring in shows including Queer As Folk and Nip/Tuck, putting on 40lbs to star as Annie Wilkes in the West End production of Misery and even guesting in Casualty, but she’ll always be Christine Cagney to anyone who watched telly in the Eighties.
The sharp, witty Californian looks much younger than her 78 years – “Must be the lighting in here,” she says, erupting into laughter – and still has that husky voice and wicked sense of humour.
Her yo-yoing weight over the years has been well documented, but these days she goes to what she calls a ‘fat farm’ for two weeks once a year to keep things under control.
Her maverick, mischievous personality comes out in her memoir, Apparently There Were Complaints – a phrase coined by the fact her socially inappropriate behaviour at times rubbed people up the wrong way. It’s taken seven years to write and chart her life as a child of a big Hollywood dynasty – her grandfather was a major Hollywood film industry lawyer while her uncle was a casting director – who became the last contract player for Universal Studios. “I worked with wonderful actors who had their own series. I guess I was starstruck,” she recalls.
She dated Steven Spielberg and worked with Robert Wagner (they remain friends to this day), while at events as a twentysomething young actress she was in the company of such luminaries as Henry Fonda, Cary Grant and Charles Bronson.
Gless also reveals some stark truths from behind the scenes, her parents’ break-up when she was 14, battles with booze, her affair and subsequent marriage to Cagney & Lacey executive producer Barney Rosenzweig, and life after the iconic cop show.
BATTLING ADDICTION
Cagney & Lacey, which ran from 1982-88, introduced viewers to independent, single, career-driven Christine Cagney (Gless) and her police partner, working mother Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly). It encompassed issues including financial independence, professional ambition, equality in marriage and the workplace, yet neither characters were activists, feminists or even very politically vocal, Gless points out. “At the time, we didn’t know the impact it would have, but as the years went on we saw the reaction.”
Behind the scenes, Gless and Daly formed their own close relationship, reading lines together late into the night in their trailers. They remain close friends and speak every day. “There’s a personal chemistry between us. We just love each other,” says Gless.
Hollywood excess did not escape the actress, who admits that in the early- Eighties she took drugs, disappearing with pals at the weekend, ‘sucked into a haze of booze and cocaine’.
“I wouldn’t call myself a big user,” she says now. “Weekends were sometimes altered, but never on the set. I never drank or did drugs while shooting. I don’t think I was that good. I wasn’t going to screw it up by altering my mindset. I was not a saint.
Everybody I knew [was doing drugs] but then my world was small.” It was a time when John Belushi died from an overdose and Richard Pryor set himself on fi re in a drug-related incident, she recalls. “That’s the problem with the drug,” she writes in the book.
Gless and her husband, Barney Rosenzweig
“It makes you believe that you are the most indestructible and fascinating superhuman to ever tread the earth. You have no clue what a crashing bore you really are.”
As the decade progressed, she denied the alcoholism which was engulfing her. “I waited until the end of every workday to have a drink,” she writes. “It never interfered with my job. As soon as the assistant director would call the day a wrap, my personal dresser on the show would put scotch on the rocks in a Styrofoam cup and hand it to me. She called it my ‘apple juice’.”
Things came to a head as the series was finishing, when she spent seven weeks in rehab and went to AA meetings.
“It had been a wonderful six years and my life was changing. I was told I was an alcoholic and I was in rehab when I was notified that the show had closed. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Cagney was an alcoholic (in a new plotline) and the New York Times asked if life was imitating art. But I was not drunk when I did those scenes.”
She doesn’t remember how much she was drinking during the worst period, but reckons it was around four Hendricks dry martinis a night. Once discharged from rehab, she did regular therapy sessions which helped keep her off the booze, but relapsed after 15 years on her 60th birthday when she had her first cocktail.
“I just wanted to see what it was like. They tell you, if you have one you go right back to where you started.” Gradually, one drink turned into two and then three. During the 10-year relapse, she started having blackouts.
“I wasn’t remembering things. It didn’t take much for me to get drunk. I didn’t get hangovers, but I’d have mornings when my husband would be staring at the ceiling saying, ‘Do you remember anything about last night?’”
Apparently There Were Complaints by Sharon Gless is published by Simon & Schuster. Available now.
Shortly after her 70th birthday party, she had her first severe pancreatic attack and doctors made it clear she’d have to give up drinking or she could die. She hasn’t had a drink since May 8, 2015. Gless’ marriage went through its ups and downs, particularly in the early days. They saw couples’ therapists and contemplated divorce but, after 30 years, are still together.
She still returns to LA, where she has family, but home through the pandemic has been Miami. Life is calmer now, and she and Rosenzweig rub along just fi ne, she agrees. “He’s a wonderful guy. He was my boss and he gave me Cagney & Lacey. I’ve learned a great deal from him.”
As for the future, she says she’d love to do another TV series. “I don’t remember myself ever not working,” says Gless. “I’m happiest when I’m working.”
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