The Many Stages Of John Cullum -- The Actor Coasts Through Bursts Of Stardom

Prelude The setting: The AHA! Theatre, quartered on the top floor of a two-story building in a scruffy-chic corner of Seattle's Belltown, just a few doors down from that cult rock 'n' roll eatery, the Crocodile Cafe. The time: A September evening in 1993.

Up a steep flight of stairs and beyond a sparsely furnished lobby, the AHA! looks cramped and modestly equipped compared to ritzier local venues. The low-budget tribe of actors and directors who run the joint are mostly arty under-30s with eclectic (sometimes eccentric) dramatic tastes, and a youthful reservoir of ambition and adrenaline.

But in a ratty back room, outfitted with a linoleum floor that hasn't seen a coat of wax in years and fluorescent tube lights that buzz like a choir of angry mosquitoes, a craggily handsome, sandy-haired man of about 60 is guiding some actors a third his age through a rehearsal of AHA!'s next production.

So what is John Cullum - the Emmy-nominated co-star of the locally filmed CBS television series "Northern Exposure," the two-time Tony Award winner for lead roles in Broadway musicals, the Laertes to Richard Burton's Hamlet and the mature Tom Sawyer to George C. Scott's aging Huck Finn in "The Boys in Autumn" - doing moonlighting in the Seattle equivalent of an Off Off Broadway theater?

Two things, both of them quintessentially John Cullum. He's loyally aiding his writer wife, Emily Frankel, by staging the premiere of her apocalyptic comedy "Shattering Panes." And he's maintaining the breakneck pace and eclectic creative agenda he's kept up for about 30 years, through spurts of stardom and patches of near-obscurity.

At the moment, the petite but forceful Frankel (a former dancer) is busy showing an actress some choreographic moves. Cullum, casually attired and bespectacled, leans back in his folding chair and takes the opportunity to bestow some actorly advice on young cast member Bruce Holmes.

"Never tell anybody your real age," Cullum counsels Holmes, in a river-deep Tennessee drawl. "Lie if you need to. Whatever age they want you to be, that's how old you say you are. And then you just act it. I've been doing that for years."

ACT I The setting: A drafty, cavernous sound stage in Redmond where most of the interior scenes for "Northern Exposure" are shot. The time: A morning last December.

On the friendly, crowded "Northern Exposure" set it's almost impossible to tell the extras from the stagehands, and the actors from the production people. The universal mode of dress here is Eddie Bauer chic: jeans and down vests, plaid flannel shirts and thermal long johns, rubber moccasins and wide suspenders. The only hint of Hollywood glam is the luxurious, full-length sable coat series ingenue Janine Turner slips into during breaks in the action.

The scene at hand takes place within the Brick, a funky, bustling tavern and the preferred local hangout in Cicely, the mythical Alaskan outpost where "Northern Exposure" takes place. As the 13 million people who tune in weekly can tell you, Cicely is crammed to the city limits with benign eccentrics. And one of the most likable is 64-year-old Holling Vincoeur, a former hunter and the Brick's genial proprietor.

The public now identifies John Cullum, first and foremost, as Holling, a role he has worn for nearly four years with down-home grace. Holling might just be the sexiest sexagenarian character on network television - thanks to his marriage to the 21-year-old waitress Shelly (Cynthia Geary), a fecund story line the show's producers refer to as "Gary Cooper meets Madonna." (Cullum calls it "a positive twist on an old myth, going right back to Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale.")

Are Cullum and Holling much alike? Both have an innate courtliness and poise, coupled with a blunt naivete. Both are devoted to their wives. Both are good ol' guys: Cullum has a soft spot for benefits, hosting the opening night of the 1993 Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival and pitching in at a recent fund-raiser for "Northern Exposure" co-star Peg Phillips' Theatre Inside, a program for incarcerated youth.

But, as Cullum puts it, "Holling is a concept people have about a character, and they assume that's me. But I'm not who they think I am."

He's right. You get the sense Cullum would never stay stuck in a backwater like Cicely. He is, in the old-fashioned sense, a real trouper - a stage junkie who displays more enthusiasm for his weeklong stint as Hamlet in Milwaukee 20 years ago than for his 1993 Emmy nomination for best supporting actor in a dramatic TV series. A guy who'll trek to Jones Beach, N.Y., to do "The King and I" or Miami to play Cyrano de Bergerac, or Belltown to direct "Shattering Panes."

But the name of the game in television acting is hurry up and wait, and Cullum plays it with good humor. Today a sardonic, bear-shaped Los Angeles director named Michael Lang is guiding the actor and several colleagues - Turner as the bush pilot Maggie, Phillips as the town shopkeeper Ruth Anne, Rob Morrow as transplanted New York doctor Joel Fleischman - through a brief card-playing scene.

The whole bit lasts about two minutes, and Cullum has only a couple of lines. But since "Northern Exposure" is shot with a single camera, and this scene demands reaction shots from several angles, the performers must slog through it about 20 times.

That translates into several hours of painstaking, tedious toil, during which Cullum's concentration and energy level never flag. He jumps out of his chair and says, "I've got to check on that pot of Mulligan stew!" again and again - each time as if the idea had just occurred to him.

Ask people involved in "Northern Exposure" about Cullum and the buzz is uniformly positive. While rumors of swollen egos and prima-donna behavior have swirled around the show's Redmond and Roslyn sets, the whispers never implicate Cullum. Instead, the word "professional" comes up over and over, like a mantra, when cohorts discuss him.

Andrew Schneider (who executive co-produces the series and writes many of the episodes with wife Diane Frolov) observes, "John brings with him the consummate professionalism of the theater. He's always prepared, he always understands what he's doing."

Even Cullum's recent complaints about the negative kinks and murky past the writers are adding to Holling's persona don't seem to upset his bosses. "If he ever has a problem," Schneider says, "it's not about vanity. It's always about making a scene better, and his character more true to form."

Relaxing in his cozy trailer-dressing room during a lunch break, Cullum displays his usual blend of home-grown sang-froid, and veteran actor smarts. "I get along fine with just about everyone here," he muses. "Of course, they don't have the slightest idea about all the stage things I've done before this. But why should they? It's another world."

Act II: Flashback to another world The setting: New York City The time: 1957

A self-confident novice actor in his mid-20s named John Cullum trades in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., for the dazzle and promise of the Big Apple - which at this point is a bustling theatrical mecca.

Broadway hosts a bonanza of new musicals ("West Side Story," "My Fair Lady") and "legit" plays ("Long Day's Journey Into Night"). Meanwhile, maverick directors and playwrights are concocting an alternative Off Broadway drama of reinvigorated classics and daring new works.

There's still room for a gifted-but-green young actor, with only a clutch of lead roles in University of Tennessee student productions to his credit, to get a foothold in "the business." But at first Cullum is so naive, he remembers much later, that "I was afraid to go down to Greenwich Village because I thought there was a bunch of wild bohemians there!"

Soon, though, he feels right at home in the hurly-burly, employing his easygoing charm and native talent to secure tiny roles in Off Broadway shows. One of the first is a low-budget production of "Hamlet," during which he discovers "one of the loves of my life, William Shakespeare."

"I was working with these guys who approached Shakespeare the way I had approached Arthur Miller or Clifford Odets - as a modern playwright. We'd spend hours and hours in bars talking about, analyzing the plays, and I got so excited about this stuff I could barely stand it."

Ensconced in a $6-a-week apartment, Cullum snags a minor part in an outdoor, Central Park version of Shakespeare's "Henry V," produced by the brashly ambitious Joseph Papp.

One night, an actor with a flashier role gets ill, and Cullum goes on for him. An aide to "My Fair Lady" lyricist Alan Jay Lerner happens to be in the audience.

The rest is classic Big Breaksville: Cullum gets "discovered" and lands in the original 1960 production of Lerner and (Frederick) Loewe's "Camelot." He takes the small role of Sir Dinidan, but also understudies Richard Burton's King Arthur and Roddy McDowall's diabolical Mordred.

A blockbuster hit, the musical marks the jump-start of Cullum's Broadway career and the onset of his warm professional friendship with the legendary Burton. The two will go on to appear together in two more Broadway events: a heralded 1965 production of "Hamlet" and a 1983 version of Noel Coward's comedy of postmarital affairs, "Private Lives." The latter was most notable for its reunion of Burton with his twice-wed ex-spouse, Elizabeth Taylor. ("It was weird," Cullum says, "because it's exactly like their relationship.")

Burton the Welshman and Cullum the Tennessean hit it off right away. "It was tremendously exciting being around Richard at that point," Cullum reflects. "Though later on, when I got to be a star myself, it could be an awkward situation for me, because Richard was a guy who always had to hold center stage. And that made me the sycophant, the great admirer.

"But even though we never socialized much offstage, Richard loved me and I loved him. And if it weren't for Richard I wouldn't have been in his `Hamlet.' "

With Cullum as Laertes, Burton's "Hamlet" becomes the hot ticket of 1965 - more because of the outrageous media circus surrounding the burgeoning Liz-and-Dick romance, than Burton's impressive rendering of the melancholy Dane.

Cullum says, "Richard never realized his potential as an actor, but he did as a human being. Basically, he was too much of an intellectual to be an actor. He just got bored with it."

Cullum does not get bored with it.

ACT III: Flashback The setting: Knoxville, Tenn. The time: The 1930s through the 1950s

Growing up in the tightknit, staunchly Baptist, upper-middle-class community of Knoxville, John Cullum is considered both a fair-haired boy and something of a black sheep.

The youngest in a brood of six, Cullum's upstanding mortgage-banker father wants him to enter the family business. "I tried to do it," the actor recalls. "But I was a terrible student in high school, couldn't keep a B average to save my life. I really got by on charm.

"And though I studied finance at the University of Tennessee, I was mostly interested in acting in student shows, and playing tennis. I was good enough to travel around on the European circuit. I also got very excited about dance, and did a little work with the Knoxville Ballet."

By the time Cullum returns from an Army reserve hitch in postwar Korea, the contradictions are blinding. "I was leading the choir at the Dixie Lee Baptist Church, working for Dad, performing in plays. I was unhappy because I was leading three lives, so I started drinking heavily. That's when I got into a little scrape with the law."

Cullum's arrest on drunken-driving charges lands in the local papers, and soon after he decides it's time to light out for New York.

Years later, he sees the intrinsic connection between his strait-laced Southeastern upbringing and his professional calling: "My heritage is based on the Old and New testaments, and the essence of drama to me is still tied up with religion. Good vs. evil - that's what it was about with the Greeks, with Shakespeare. And that's how I see it now."

ACT IV The setting: New York City and Redmond The time: A montage, 1966-1993

He never intended it this way, but John Cullum is a Broadway musical star.

Assuming the lead role in the 1966 Lerner-Burton Lane show "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever," winning Tony Awards as a Civil War patriarch in the 1975 musical "Shenandoah" and as an egomaniacal Hollywood director in Harold Prince's "On the Twentieth Century" several years later, Cullum takes his place alongside other charismatic actor-singers - Richard Kiley, Len Cariou, John Raitt, Alfred Drake. He may be one of the last of an obsolete breed - "a dinosaur," in his words.

But Cullum modestly sees that glittering chunk of his career as an accident: "I was a star on Broadway, but my climb to the top was built on rubble and chaos. I usually wasn't the first guy they had in mind, it just eventually came down to me."

Most surprising, though, is his attitude toward The Voice. Those supple pipes that made the title song from "On a Clear Day" soar long before Barbra Streisand gets a hold of it. That hearty, well-trained instrument Newsweek critic Jack Kroll called "the best singing voice on the American musical stage" and the Wall Street Journal pronounced "the most magnificent baritone on Broadway."

The Voice that animated Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Aspects of Love" on Broadway one summer, that guest-crooned the national anthem (with the impish deletion of a few words) at recent New York Giants and Seahawks games. The Voice that has even launched into song on a couple of episodes of "Northern Exposure."

Sitting in the living room of his unpretentious rented bungalow in Redmond, Cullum says, "I'm not a singer by nature. Singing to me is always an extension of the speaking voice, of acting. If you asked me to sing at a party, or do ballads in a nightclub, I'd be very uncomfortable. I'm more interested in the whole drama."

And what about all those summer-stock appearances in "King and I," "Camelot" and "Carousel"? "Don't get me wrong," he responds, with that aw-shucks grin. "I love to sing, I love doing musicals. It's just not any big mystical thing for me."

Act V The time: Opening night of "Shattering Panes," last November The place: The lobby of the AHA! Theatre

It doesn't matter if a Tony-winner directed the play. Or that Barry Corbin, a fellow actor on "Northern Exposure," is there tonight, decked out in a cream-colored Western suit, a ten-gallon hat, and snakeskin cowboy boots. Or that TV cameras and newspaper photographers are recording the event.

This is still a fringe theater lobby, and the after-opening spread is still cheese, crackers and veggies, and cheap white wine in plastic glasses. It's the custom of the country.

Cullum and playwright-novelist wife Frankel are no strangers to this kind of scene. Together for roughly 30 years (neither will reveal their age, so it's hard to get a fix on the exact number of years), they share a marriage built on mutual affection and frequent artistic collaboration.

They also have a son, a struggling 26-year-old Hollywood actor named J.D. (John David) Cullum, whom they raised in New York. And they kept each other going through the harrowing aftermath of Frankel's 1971 car wreck, which landed her in intensive care with a broken back and other severe injuries that required a long recovery.

In between Cullum's Broadway stints, and his bread-and-butter screen jobs on films like "Hawaii" and "Marie" and TV epics like "The Day After," the couple has worked often together. He toured in Frankel's adaptation of "Cyrano de Bergerac." She founded the American Dance Drama Company in 1967, which he helped run.

Some of their joint projects, like "Cyrano," have gone over splendidly. "Shattering Panes," however, will not. Seattle critics will uniformly pulverize Frankel's fuzzy black comedy about a couple living in a disintegrating high-rise apartment in New York.

Some of the alternative weeklies will even suggest that Cullum and Frankel have "bought off" the AHA! Theatre for a vanity production, besmirching the integrity of fringe drama. (AHA! managing director Allison Halstead forcefully denies it: "We just wanted the chance to work with someone of John Cullum's caliber, and we liked Emily's play." Cullum's reaction? "Emily and I've been doing this sort of thing, developing plays in little theaters, before some of these critics were even born!")

But tonight the reviews haven't been written yet, a lot of friends from "Northern Exposure" are on hand, and J.D. has made the trip from Los Angeles to attend his parents' premiere. Cullum introduces people, embraces his wife, smiles for the cameras, generally plays the affable host.

And he looks at least as pleased about an AHA! gala as he might be about an opening night on Broadway.

Misha Berson is the theater critic for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.

-------------------------------------------- JOHN CULLUM THEN AND NOW -------------------------------------------- In a career that encompasses Broadway, regional theater, Hollywood films and television, John Cullum has appeared in well over 100 roles. Here are a few performances you can still catch up with:

On compact disc:

-- "Shenondoah" - On the original 1975 cast recording Cullum shines as Charlie Anderson, a Virginia patriarch whose family is divided by the Civil War. "My favorite part in a musical," the actor says, "and definitely the closest to me."

-- "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" - The 1966 Broadway cast recording features Cullum, as a psychiatrist, opposite time-traveler Barbara Harris. "They gave me a ridiculous Viennese accent," he remembers. They also gave him great songs: the title ode and the beseeching "Come Back to Me."

-- "The Secret Garden" - A 1986 studio version of an enjoyable English musical based on the children's story, it teams Cullum with another Broadway musical legend, Barbara Cook.

-- "On the Twentieth Century" - Cullum and his co-star Kevin Kline had a terrific time out-hamming each other in this 1978 musical adaptation of the John Barrymore movie, "The Twentieth Century." And even though she left the show shortly after it opened, the irresistible Madeline Kahn graces the original cast album opposite Cullum.

On video:

-- "The Day After" - If you can stand to watch it again, this scarifying 1983 TV movie about the United States in the wake of a devastating nuclear attack features Cullum as a Kansas farmer fighting for his family's survival.

-- "1776" - A Broadway musical romp based on those party boys, the Founding Fathers. The strong cast for the 1972 movie includes Cullum as South Carolina senator Edward Rutledge.

-- "Hawaii" - It took many months to film, went through more directors than "Gone With the Wind" and nearly drove Cullum and the rest of the actors crazy. But the 1966 cinematic treatment of James Michener's sand-and-surf saga holds up surprisingly well, and boasts a sturdy performance by Cullum as Reverend Quigley, an island missionary.

In the future for Cullum: his first job directing a film. He's hunting for backers for "The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton," a black comedy he hopes to film this summer. He'll play the lead role, and hopes "Northern Exposure" colleague Janine Turner will co-star.