Tim Matheson keeps up a running commentary during lunch on the various famous and semi-famous people who have walked in the door of the Columbia Grill, a fashionable watering hole smack in the center of Hollywood. “Nancy Allen is now coming our way,” he says pleasantly between munches of his nouvelle-cuisine entree. Then, later: “Okay, don’t turn around, but Burt Reynolds has just walked in. . .’’ By now Matheson is using the same tones your airline pilot uses to tell you that to your right is the Grand Canyon. “He’s wearing a lavender sweater. He’s with Burt Convy. He looks good. I thought it was a Burt Reynolds impersonator for a minute. Only kidding. You can turn around ve-r-y slowly now.” Who would Tim Matheson turn around for?
He smiles his most deliciously ingenuous smile, one that cannot help but take your breath away. “Oh, I’d turn around for Clint,” he says. “Mel Gibson. Sissy Spacek. I’d turn around for Meryl Streep. I’d get up and run across the street for Meryl Streep.” It hardly needs to be said that Matheson turns a few heads himself. Recently, he was interviewed on Larry King’s national call-in talk show, and the show’s producers were stunned by the response. Once Matheson’s name was announced, the switchboard was flooded with calls from hyperventilating women who gasped, “I just have to talk to Tim!” Now this is all made even more interesting by the fact that Just in Time, the half-hour romantic comedy TV show that Matheson both produced and starred in, had just been canceled by ABC. Nevertheless, in only six episodes, Matheson—if not the show—had attracted a fanatically loyal following of viewers. “You don’t understand,” said one of the women queried on the subject. “Once you see Tim you feel like you’ve known him forever.”
Meeting Matheson is much as his breathless fan said; you somehow have the feeling you have known him forever. Most handsome actors who inspire adulation in women are not particularly comfortable to be around. They are too intensely aware of themselves and their effect on others. Matheson is an exception.
Some of his openness may have to do with the fact that he came late to leading man/sex symbol status. He was a shy, sensitive kid, brought up in Burbank, California, who took it hard when his parents divorced soon after he turned six years old. “It was difficult not having a male role model,” he says. “I think that’s why I spent so much time at the movies –I went to a lot of movies as a kid– because I was trying to pick up male role models. You know, James Bond! OK, that must be it.”
Maybe his search for a male role model led him to acting at a young age. His first TV appearance at age 12 was on My Three Sons. But his budding personal life didn’t always go as well as his professional life. “I didn’t fit in socially. I wasn’t at all comfortable with girls. And I was short,” is how Matheson puts it. “My sister wouldn’t even talk to me. She was a year ahead of me in school and she would avoid me when she saw me in the hallways. She was in the popular social set and it was like,” he affects the exaggerated disdain of a socially-conscious adolescent girl, ‘“That’s not really my brother.’”
Two particularly crushing moments stand out in Matheson’s early incarnation as a nerd: “The first was when Jonelle Penny said, ‘you’re so cute, if you were six-feet tall I’d go out with you.’” Matheson laughs at the memory now. “At the time I was, like, five-three and a senior and I looked, you know, like I was about ten years old. But the worst was Linda Kenny [the names have been changed to protect the guilty parties] who broke my heart because she started going out with one of the basketball players. She just crushed me. I remember walking her home, we’d been to a party or something, and she told me she wanted to see other people — specifically this one guy. This taller guy. It was just brutal! I went back to school and I was just humiliated because I knew everybody knew it. For a week it was like each minute was an hour long. Finally I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to either kill myself or come back somehow.’ And I decided I would never be that sensitive or that vulnerable or that open ever, ever, ever again. And I followed that road for a couple of years. I was trying to emulate those jocks who treat girls very offhandedly. Until that time, I had always been very sincere.” He smiles The Smile. “I was just like Alan Alda.”
Life offered Matheson its own form of poetic justice. After he graduated, he shot up to 6’1” practically overnight. Then it didn’t matter if he was comfortable with girls, since every girl within visual range wanted to get comfortable with him. Consequently, he spent the next several years punishing every woman for the sins of that heartless jock dater, Linda Kenny.
“I would make a bond and then I’d disappear,” says Matheson of those years. “And there were some hard feelings. Finally, when I was twenty-six, I woke up and realized this was no way to run an airline. So, I went to every person I’d done this to, called them up and acknowledged that I’d been a jerk. I said, ‘Look, I realize I didn’t treat you fairly and I apologize. All but one of the women said it was great.” He blushes as he laughs, “She told me to eat shit and die!”
Although Tim Matheson was a child actor, he didn’t really spring to national prominence until his starring role as Otter in the 1978 megahit Animal House. Subsequent leading roles in Dreamer, 1941, Fletch, A Little Sex and (the very sexy) Impulse had film writers calling him “the next Cary Grant.” Yet, because of the flaws of the films themselves, no project after Animal House gave Matheson’s career the boost to stardom that both the experts and the fans were waiting for. So, rather than hang around for somebody else to come up with the right vehicle, Matheson decided to take matters into his own hands and become his own producer. First came Just in Time. And now there is a promising new series (about which he is still very secretive) being developed for Warner Bros.
The office that houses Matheson’s new production company is small and unassuming. “Cheap and shabby,” he corrects. “Let’s be honest about it.” Actually, it isn’t shabby, but, by comparison to the multi-secretaried headquarters that most producers in Hollywood seem to deem de rigueur, Matheson’s office is modest to the max. However, from these unpretentious four walls he is simultaneously developing the new Warner Bros, series and a new feature film, as well as sitting on the board of directors of National Lampoon, all while he is neck deep in producing his first feature, Blind Fury…
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