WITH HIS SURFER-BLOND HAIR STILL WET FROM A shower or a swim, his collegiate blue and white shirt half-unbuttoned, shirttails blithely flapping outside his white tuxedo sweat pants, his sleeves rolled up and his gym shoes worn down, Christopher Atkins looks like a well-known subspecies of California inhabitant: the cute beachboy who surfs every morning, then drives over to Westwood to go to his classes at UCLA.
Except Atkins transcends this genre. His eyes are startling, somewhere between blue and green—sea colors—and are incredibly wide and intense and sparkling, mischievous eyes. And the mainstream beauty of his face, the healthy glow of his skin, is marred, on his right cheek, by a small straight scar near his perfect straight nose. Atkins is as winning as a puppy, slim, big-boned, wholesome, instantly warm: a few minutes late for our meeting, he apologizes sincerely, profusely, and, just as the apology is about to careen into the territory of the fulsome, he does a mock cower, this young god of a boy, and says, “Don’t hit me!” Christopher Atkins has that quality that must be one of the most important for film actors: He is immediately and completely likable. Later, he turns out to be much more than this, an odd combination of enthusiastic earnestness and naiveté, younger than his years; and compelled, hard-nosed, self-critical toughness, older than his years—a man-child in Hollywood.
Atkins was a high school student, sailing instructor and model when Hollywood first called. He did numerous screen tests and interviews for the male role in The Blue Lagoon but for months he hadn’t heard from the producers, and assumed nothing had happened, that someone else had gotten the part. Then, “they called me up and said, ‘You’ve got Blue Lagoon‘” he says, gesticulating with his overlarge hands, eyes never still, meeting mine, then darting around the room, to the table in front of him where he has opened an envelope of clippings a press agent sent him. “I said, ‘Thank you, but no thank you. I’m just gonna go back and start teaching sailing, work with little kids. It’s flattering, but I’d ruin your movie. I’m honored you want me in your movie, but I don’t know how to act.’ Then mom said, ‘What have you got to lose? You don’t have to do it if you don’t like it. You don’t have to be in the business if it isn’t fun.’ ‘And if I’m bad in it?’ Mom said, I still might let you through the door.’ So, I went off and did it.” And millions of teenagers fell in love with his supertan, tanglehaired, loinclothed image—Brooke Shields’s movie lover.
Christopher Atkins
The onscreen romance with Brooke Shields surely catapulted Atkins’s career into the firmament; everyone wanted to see vestal virgin Shields being made love to on the screen, especially by this golden boy. The publicity machine of the film worked overtime to cook up real romance, and half-real gossip about the two, but what really happened? Atkins digs right into this question after a good-natured comment that “Everyone always wants to talk about Brooke.” He says, “I’ll tell you everything, honestly,” and tells how director Randal Kleiser had Atkins sleep with a picture of Shields pinned up over his bed, so that he could always gaze at this teen-goddess. Of course, he developed a crush on her before he ever met her. But he was intimidated as well.
“1 thought, I’m just a stupid sailing instructor picked to do a movie. I was just going to leave them [Brooke and her mother] alone. Then she got on the island, and right away she started talking to me, asking me things, and Randal wanted me to go with her when he started showing her the island. The first day we were taking walks together on the beach; I taught her how to scuba dive the very first day. I had to carry those tanks for literally a mile, well, maybe a half a mile—but a long way. We had a great time. We used to take long walks together and she would talk to me. The girl’s very intelligent. She’s always had that little girl inside her, even though they make her up to be older looking. I got as close to Brooke Shields as anybody could ever possibly get. I might have been the first person to ever really kiss her. We really got very close.
At the beginning, we did have a romance.” Here he stops, looks down, smiles, plays the moment to the hilt as he says, “I’m so embarrassed,” then continues: “It was so innocent, the whole thing was so innocent. I was 18 years old, but I’d missed a lot of what I was going through with Brooke—you know, the little games.” Here Atkins talked about his four knee operations, the results of devotion to athletics, particularly baseball, while he was in high school. While his friends had their first girlfriends, their first kisses, their first whatevers, Atkins was in the hospital trying to rehabilitate his leg, learning how to live with pain. Hard to believe the girls weren’t anxious to help nurse this beautiful boy back to health, but this is the way Atkins tells his story.
Christopher Atkins
But back to Brooke: “I was being romantic as I knew it, and it wasn’t what she was ready for. She was into the little teasing, the little games, because she was just 14. But we started getting this relationship, and it was really neat. But it got so big, and we were on that island for so long, that it turned into this friendship instead of a relationship.”
Here, Atkins play acts more coyness, then he flirtatiously half meets my eyes, then, “Oh, I have to say it,” then the revelation (and I start to get an idea how truly canny this kid is): “In the beginning, her mother wanted me to stay with them, so I was sleeping in the same place as Brooke. We used to have talks while spending the night. I wasn’t sleeping with Brooke— that’s not what I was getting at. If you’ve ever met Brooke and Mama …. There were times when Terry was at the main camp. We would sit there and talk like two little kids sleeping over with one another. Brooke has very, very deep feelings.”
From Blue Lagoon and Brooke Shields we naturally segue into the arena of romance in general, a topic that greatly pleases Atkins. Atkins has been linked with numerous women during his brief Hollywood career: models, beauty contest winners, actresses like Olivia Newton-John (“Not true,” Atkins says of this, “Olivia is one of my best friends, and so is her boyfriend Matt Lattanzi”) and even, reportedly, the notorious Britt Ekland, Hollywood’s man-eater par excellence, who turned down a date with young Atkins because she was tired of training men in the art of love. We start out small, after I ask him a general question about his views on romance. “Blue Lagoon was very special to me, because it was about romance, and not sex. It’s one thing to just jump right into bed in a film. It’s another to really go through things, experience things, feel things, as a couple would do. Romance is just gone today. People get married and then they get divorced. I like to treat a woman like a woman, you know? Some girls I’ve met don’t like that. I can’t fathom it. I was just brought up that way. Send flowers, poems, stuff like that.”
Then I insist that we get more specific, and bring out the roster of his amours, which, I tell him, I scrounged from his clippings at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences library. He loves this, cheeks light up, eyes dance, all mischief: “How cool! I’d love to see that! I’m in there?” This genuinely pleases him, the extent of his fame.
Christopher Atkins
But how does he feel about women, what is he looking for? Come on, Chris—let’s get specific. He starts: “I love girls, women. I get kicks out of being romantic. There’s Cindy [actress and model Cindy Gibb], who I’ve been seeing for a long time. But out here the business makes it very hard for me to have a love life. Then there’s Lori [actress and model Lori Loughlin]. I met her on my second modeling job, and I thought she was absolutely beautiful. Being this 18-year-old kid thrown into this world of modeling with all these beautiful girls all in one place. I loved it. You feel satisfied just looking at these beautiful girls.”
“I started seeing Lori when Cindy took off to start going with her old boyfriend. That’s when Lori started. But now Cindy’s still there, and we’re still going strong.” Atkins then gets more serious, talks about his insecurities with women, his fear of women seeking him out just because of his fame. “I like a girl who cares for me, not just for what I am, but who I am. I’m always testing. It’s my fault, because I’m so critical of myself, not that I mean to judge others. But I’m star struck too sometimes, when I meet a movie star.”
On the topic of romance, Atkins is absolutely nonstop compelling: “I love lying by fires, I love going for midnight swims, being down by the water and taking long walks on the beach; I love going off sailing and being very outdoorsy, I love going off to the mountains, making love in the open air. I love beautiful, soft, wonderful things, whether it’s a landscape or a person who can touch me. Someone who I can cry in front of, who I can get sympathy from. I have to feel special in somebody’s eyes. I like to go out a lot. If I see somebody who I think is very beautiful and very nice, I like to get to know her better.”
This is all fine, but what does this 21-year-old ensconced in the Hollywood fast lane think about the future? He had talked about his love of children, of wanting kids while he is young enough to energetically enjoy them, and the solidity of his family life, of his connection with his home in Rye, New York. I mention the possibility of marriage, and he looks at me, looks away, thinks for a moment. “I would love to live with somebody,” he says, “because I love that affection. A hug is everything to me. A kiss you can fake, but a hug…. I would love to live with somebody, but at the same time I love meeting people. I don’t know. I would like to have a steady girlfriend out here.” Cindy, his number-one heartthrob, lives in New York, and though Atkins does spend lots of time back home with mom and Cindy, he is clearly anchored in Los Angeles at this point, anchored in his career…
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