A first-look snap judgement: Jon-Erik Hexum is the male answer to Christie Brinkley.
The evidence? For one thing, his blatant muscle display in a topless pinup poster. For another, his TV-movie debut playing a beautiful clotheshorse in Male Model. And now his new series, Cover Up, targeted straight at the Tom Selleck watchers and featuring a fashion parade by top designers such as Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis. Hexum, 25, plays a renegade Green Beret who tackles secret missions disguised as—what else?—a leading fashion model.
Furthermore, consider the raw material: a six-foot, one-inch, 190-pound physique featuring a chiseled jawline, stunning Adriatic blue eyes, deeply resonant voice and brawny, well-contoured muscles. All in all, Hexum certainly qualifies as the sexiest shape on America’s small screen.
But those pretty-boy superficials turn out to be highly deceptive. Beneath them is a man of tenacious ambition who’s planning for the long-term future rather than just soaking up the immediate advantages. He’s much more likely to be working out at the health club or driving himself through daily acting classes than smiling for the paparazzi with his arm around the latest young, blond starlet. “I am passionately strict. I am a perfectionist,” says the actor, who insists he will someday produce his own films.
A more revealing piece of evidence: Back when he was still scrubbing grimy floors and mixing drinks at a sleazy Times Square disco to earn his keep, he turned down half a million dollars’ worth of TV contracts. Specifically, Hexum thumbed his nose at the hit series CHiPs and The Dukes of Hazzard, as well as the short-lived Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. He also turned down the opportunity to replace Jeff Daniels in the Broadway hit Fifth of July.
Hexum vividly remembers how his California-based manager, Bob Le Mond, would jet into New York, pull up in a limousine outside Hexum’s place of work, tell him to turn down all the offers, then drive off into the night. Meanwhile, Hexum was struggling to keep his head above water.
“We are talking about turning down a half million dollars,’’ Le Mond admits. “And the daytime shows would have taken Jon-Erik in a hot minute. I admire him and really respect him for holding out. I think it was trust— knowing Jon-Erik, probably a little begrudging trust —in my judgment, and a deeper trust in his own potential.”
At Le Mond’s urging, Hexum reluctantly moved to California in September of 1981. Four months later, he landed the Voyagers! TV series, an offer that they both felt had the right stuff. Voyagers! held on for 22 episodes, but placed opposite 60 Minutes, it naturally settled at the bottom of the ratings with a resounding thud.
Undeterred, Hexum pumped $50,000 of his own money into a self-promotion plan that had him traveling around the country doing talk shows, cutting ribbons and generally capitalizing on the fact that although his show was about to bite the dust, the reviews were good and so was he. Five weeks later he got Male Model.
Cut to August 1984 and Cover Up‘s murkily ugly-beautiful San Pedro, California, location, which will pass for Central America onscreen. You need only spend a couple of afternoons with Hexum and all preconceived ideas crumble once and for all.
For a start, there is none of that tedious denial of his beefcake status; no trying to transform the launch of his unabashedly commercial poster into high-minded art. No pretending someone took the picture when he wasn’t looking. He says he flogged the poster around himself, got rejected five times, made a sale on the sixth and that’s that.
When Male Model elevated Hexum to “potentially hot” in October of 1983, offers poured in. But it wasn’t until Glen Larson pitched the concept for Cover Up that Hexum was hooked. “I thought it sounded wildly commercial,” he says. Although the Cover Up story is completely different from Male Model, Hexum acknowledges that his series was born from the success of the TV movie.
In a nutshell, the Cover Up plot has Mac Harper (Hexum) being thrown out of the Green Beret special forces, but not before posing for a Join the Marines poster. This is spotted by Jennifer O’Neill (Cover Up‘s answer to Joan Collins), whose husband has been murdered. On learning that he was an outrider spy for the C.I.A., she hires Harper to help her track down her husband’s killers. Their cover? A glossy, jet-setting model photographer team.
“Mac Harper is a cross between Hawkeye Pierce, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Mr. Magoo and Superman,” Hexum says, while lounging in his trailer between takes. “But I’m telling you how I think the show should be, and that ain’t necessarily how the show turns out. I consider myself phenomenally fortunate, but I kind of hoped for more creatively.”
Hexum’s tinge of disappointment has another source. He accepted a part in the recent film The Bear (which stars Gary Busey as Alabama football coach Bear Bryant) solely on the strength of a challenging dying scene—which ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Hexum admits that as an actor on a formula TV-show he’s something of a commodity, like a new brand of coffee: “Sure, but so is Tom Selleck, and I think he’s real good in some of his Magnum scenes. Sure, there’s a danger of becoming just a product, but you can get beyond that if you have the talent and are willing to work on it.”
“Look at Paul Newman—he had his shirt off in Hud. So did Burt Lancaster in The Crimson Pirate. That beefcake, hunk thing has been going on for years and it’s no big deal.”
“Look at Harrison Ford. The guy’s very rakish. He’s got that hat, the beard, the whip; She’s got his shirt all open. It’s not that different. Raiders and Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom are not loaded with dialogue, but there’s plenty of opportunity for him to do some good acting.”
Hearing about Hexum’s childhood explains a lot about his determination. Born of Norwegian immigrant parents in Tenafly, New Jersey, he was only four when his father, Thor, walked out. Gretha Hexum immediately knuckled down to the task of keeping a roof over the heads of her two sons, Jon- Erik and Gunnar. She juggled three jobs at once, working as a secretary, a waitress and scrubbing floors. Somehow she also managed to take her young son to Broadway plays; but since she could only afford one ticket, she’d wait for him in a nearby coffee shop.
Hers was a silent effort, made without a lot of fanfare either then or now. Hexum says his mother doesn’t feel she made any special sacrifices. and even now that her son has real-estate interests, she’s not above doing odd jobs, like fixing toilets.
Hexum’s cut-and-dried assessment of those early days: “My dad didn’t do his job and my mom just did what she had to do.” He hasn’t seen his father since he was nine. It’s his choice; he has no desire to.
Rather than ruminating on the past, Hexum focuses obsessively on his work. “I’m real fired up,” he shrugs, adding that small talk bores him and idle chitchat sends him running. He is tough and judgmental toward himself and others.
“Given the opportunity. I’ll fire people as fast as I can for incompetence, myself included. I have high standards, although I don’t live up to them a lot. I still get disappointed with myself.”
Bob Le Mond, who used to guide John Travolta’s career, calls Hexum “a hundred percenter.” Attempting to describe the way he works with his clients, Le Mond leaps to his feet and bursts into a frenzied bout of ya-ya shaking. “You know,” he says, “when you’re an Ikette behind Tina Turner and you’re up there shaking away and she’s up there shaking away, well, as long as she’s in front shaking just as hard or even harder, you can’t bitch, you just keep right on shaking! That’s how it is with Jon-Erik.”
The real saving grace with all this frenzied, one-track-mind working—and the reason those around him seem to genuinely like his company—is Hexum’s sense of humor: sometimes wacky, often self-deprecating.
Publicist Guy Thomas reports that Hexum once came into his office wearing a pair of vintage 1958, winged, rhinestone-studded specs, held together with a safety pin at one side. His own glasses were broken so he’d borrowed an old pair from his mother. He wore them totally straight-faced and left without explanation or comment. Thomas grins, “My new assistant was appalled. She said, ‘That’s Jon-Erik Hexum?’”
On the usually sensitive subject of sexual preferences, Hexum simply laughs off the rumors. His only long-term relationship (4 1/2 years) broke up a year ago and his ex is now married. Apart from a flurry of rumors about a liaison with Joan Collins, there has been no rampaging romance for him. So, some reporters resort to speculating that he’s gay. Rather than react angrily, Hexum plays along.
He’ll leave phone messages giving the name of a gay bar and say, “Have him call me at the table, the regular one.”
Ask him about growing up handsome and he answers: “I certainly wasn’t real confident with girls.” Long pause. “I guess that’s what got me started with guys.” Another pause, “and small animals.”
Getting serious for a second, he explains. “1 don’t care if people think I date a lot or a little, if they think I’m gay or if they think I’m aborigine. Who gives a shit?”
“I would rather people didn’t think I was gay, but I don’t ‘rather’ it a whole lot. It doesn’t upset me a whole lot, and I’ve been to gay bars with friends and I don’t worry about it. If that’s where you want to go, OK. If you want to go to Studio One, OK. If you want to go to American Boy, OK. I’m not going to The Manhole, though!” he grins.
These days, Hexum rides a bicycle for 30 minutes each morning and works out at a gym alternate days, mostly lifting free weights. He runs every night for 30 to 45 minutes, maintaining a steady 190 pounds.
When he’s not working, he flings himself into daily acting classes, spicing up the menu with improvisation, cold readings, twice-weekly voice classes and twice-weekly classes in contemporary jazz dance, for grace, movement and balance.
All this activity is nothing new. In school, he played horn in the orchestra, later switching to violin to get better parts. He played organ in church for two years, has played piano since he was nine and has been known to earn a crust playing in bars. He still plays for fun on his recent (and rare) indulgence— a Yamaha grand piano equipped with stereo speakers…
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