Can you have too much charm? Even in Hollywood? Consider the case of Bruce Boxleitner. Boxleitner has gotten rich from tv's star-making machinery. He's in his third year of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, where he's busy being charming every week. This followed another series, Bring 'Em Back Alive, and a curious year he spent idle but still earned a cool million thanks to a "play or pay" contract (which pays the actor whether the show is made or not) that superagent Jay Bernstein won him for a never-made series.

The road to banking Hollywood's millions was paved with many small checks. Boxleitner, now 35, came out of the Chicago theatre in 1970 and heard no brass bands upon his arrival in Los Angeles. Eventually, a five-line debut on the Mary Tyler Moore Show led to bit parts on various series.

His big chance was How the West was Won. In that 1978-79 series he played James Arness' nephew, Luke Macahan, a fugitive from justice because he'd killed three men (in self-defense, of course). The series made him a viable action hero and it also brought him a wife, his co-star Kathryn Holcomb.

The Boxleitners have two children, a five-year-old named Sam and a baby born late last year. Family man Boxleitner says, "Kitty is my partner.

"Right now it's not in our best interests for her to go back to work. I'll probably have feminists coming out of the woodwork for this, but I confess I'd hate to go home to no one and a note on the refrigerator saying 'Sorry, dear.' "

Boxleitner feels he has enough to worry about at work without having to cook his own dinners. "In a series you have to stick within your parameters. It can be frustrating sometimes. But if you go outside your limits you risk losing your audience.

"Lee and Amanda have a few different little numbers this season. They're still the mismatched couple who are in love and will be the last ones to admit it. If we ever admit it, we might get burned the way Cheers did. The two leads had an affair and there went the chemistry.

"I started in heavier drama—How the West Was Won, The Gambler, The Macahans—and now I'd like to get some drama into Scarecrow. I realize it's an eight o'clock show, but I'd like a little harder edge to go with the fluff, so I won't be Mr. Joyboy forever."

"Nice" is bad, but "sexless" is the worst. So he hired himself out in a CBS telefilm, Passion Flower, as a killer who goes where his groin leads him.

"I had to remind people I can do something different," Boxleitner says. "Scarecrow is a take-charge guy who never kisses the girl. My character in Passion Flower is a romantic who is swayed by passion. All my big acting scenes are in bed."

Tall, light, and handsome, Boxleitner is adept at sidestepping the hard parts of life. His manner is easy, his smile is quick, his humor is self-deprecating. He's the David Niven of modern American tv actors.

That's why the part in Passion Flower is about "what a young guy does for love," Boxleitner says in his jesting tone. "It's a plot straight out of Double Indemnity. It's a film noir—but in color, of course. There's a lot of Body Heat in there too. If you're going to steal, I say steal from the best.

"I play a guy who should have been the All-American boy but fell shy of the goal. He's an opportunist and something of a rake. He's all right until he meets the lady played by Barbara Hershey.

"She gets him to murder her father. The father is a powerful man, and a lot of people would like to see him go. Another figure in the story is Nicol Williamson. He's a banker who's a bit of a pirate. He manipulates me, too. Everyone seduces me, come to think of it."

Boxleitner explains the show's title: "The orchid is thought of as a passion flower. It's a metaphor for the beauty of the Orient and the danger."

Diet proved Singapore's chief danger in Boxleitner's seven-week stay. He came to the city-state on the southern tip of Malaya to sniff the flowers but stayed to sit on the toilet. "Eating—ah, that was the big adventure," he recalls now, fully recovered.

The government remembers Peter Bogdanovich, who came to the city with an innocuous script and left having surreptitiously filmed a drama about prostitution, Saint Jack.

"We had gun-running in the first draft of the Passion Flower script," Boxleitner recalls. "That got cut out. Then when we arrived we looked in the newspaper, and there was this story about gun-running. They're serious about crime there. Get caught dealing drugs and you pay the ultimate price."

One benefit of filming in Singapore was that in such a small place, Boxleitner was a considerably bigger frog than he is at home. "Here in Los Angeles you're just another one of many tv people. They treat you like a big star. It was a little scary."

What about films? Boxleitner starred in Tron in 1982 but hasn't worked in a feature since. "That's because I love tv too much," he says, winking. "No, every actor would prefer working in features, but there are some fine things to be done for tv.

"I'm not in a position to call all the shots. I'm not at some great huge peak, looking out and saying, 'All this is mine.' I still think of myself as a working hack. Tv can make you so fast. It can lose you so fast. I'm going for the long run."
 

Thanks, Claudia!