IT’S A WONDER-FUL LIFE: Lynda Carter on Music, Money, and That Role
by David Lefkowitz
(Note: this article was first published in October 2017)
When Gal Gadot was born in spring 1985, the American television series Wonder Woman had already been off the air for six years. By the time the Israeli actress hit the big screen in this summer’s Wonder Woman movie, the original TV program had already settled into media history as a nostalgic wedge of 1970s cheese: silly, campy, and can’t-look-away-colorful. Another reason eyes were glued to the small screen was its gorgeous star, Lynda Carter, five foot nine niches of glamour packed into a costume that accentuated her . . . well, everything.
That Carter, at 66, has effortlessly held onto her iconic glamour is of more interest to fans and new WW converts than to the lady herself, who was taught early on that good looks could be helpful but had better not be the only commodity you have to offer. In our mid-summer phone conversation, Carter, at work on her fourth studio album, talked freely about her music, her early years, her attitudes and addictions, and the responsibility of being the woman behind the bare shoulders and bracelets.
LONG ISLAND WOMAN: Your last two albums mixed American standards with more contemporary songs by people like James Taylor and The Eagles. Are you planning something similar with the next one?
LINDA CARTER: I guess some are standards, though it’s hard to call them that because they come from such a wide variety of music: country, jazz, old rock and roll, Motown. I have a hard time trying to box in what I do. For example, we’re working on everything from a Chris Isaak cover of “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” to a country song I wrote called “After All These Years.” Also, “You’ve Changed,” the Billie Holiday song; “Take Me to the River,” ZZ Ward’s “Put the Gun Down,” “Lonely Boy” by The Black Keys, a couple of Everly Brothers songs, Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” and a completely re-thought version of “Stop in the Name of Love.”
LIW: How do you go about selecting the songs?
LC: They’re largely what I have chosen over the previous years to go in my live show. Throughout the year, I’m listening to the radio or Spotify, or my husband and son are always playing music. Or one day “Stop in the Name of Love” just came into my head, and I looked at the lyrics online, and I thought, “This is a great, great lyric.” But the way the original was approached, you don’t even listen to the lyrics. So I slowed it way down. You probably won’t even know what the song is until you hear the chorus.
LIW: So you have to connect to the songs in order to put them over?
LC: Everything I do is pretty much a story. A song has to mean something to me—even if it just makes me laugh. I’ll usually have the guitar player do a quick reference demo just to write down the chord charts and how I want to approach it—be it a completely new arrangement or the song itself is obscure. I’m not usually picking a Top 10 record going down the Grammy list. It’s some indie band or something I really want to sing because I love it. For example, I really pared down Eric Clapton’s “If I Could Change the World.” It’s a love song but also a message song about how I really feel about the present condition of the world. If we could just change the world, just change it.
LIW: Well, your world changed after you won the Miss World USA title. Your family had been struggling beforehand.
LC: My mom and dad divorced when I was ten or eleven, and we were scraping by. I worked in one of my uncle’s restaurants and wasn’t really good at that. But I earned enough money to buy school clothes and help my mom. I also worked weekends at a little office doing mimeographing for extra money. At 14, the summer before I went into high school, I joined a band, and that was great, because on a weekend, you could make $75—that was a fortune in 1965. At first, I couldn’t even drive myself to the venues. But at 15, if you had a learner’s permit in Arizona, you could drive, so I did.
When I look at it now, it’s absolutely ridiculous that I was that independent. But I just told my mom what I was doing, and she’d say, “Okay, that’s great.” My brother was off putting himself through college, and my sister was doing what she was doing, so my mom had her hands full. But I always got straight A’s, I never got in any trouble, I didn’t do drugs, and I didn’t date boys. Mom knew she could trust me and that I was a good girl.
LIW: Even though you were touring in a band?
LC: Eventually, I quit the road because I’d spent two and a half years with several different bands, and I knew at a young age I wasn’t going anywhere with that. The guys were men and a lot older than me. You’re living in these crappy motels, and you’re a road band, and you’re a girl singer going from one place to another, and no one’s gonna discover you. It was a dead end, and I knew that. So just quit and moved back to Arizona.
LIW: With no job prospects?
LC: (laughs) Thank God I never had to earn a real living at a real day job. I walked into a modeling agency in Scottsdale Arizona to see if I could get any modeling work, and they were putting on the Phoenix portion of the Miss Arizona pageant. My mom and my sister said, “You gotta do it! You’ll be too old if you don’t do it now.” And I did. I won Miss Phoenix, Miss Arizona, and Miss World USA in about a three-week period of time. It was really quick.
LIW: But not the game-changer you’d hoped it would be?
LC: There was no talent in this contest. It was a bogus kind of thing that wasn’t about anything, and not something I ever aspired to. You feel like a piece of meat as they’re parading you around with a crown and a banner. You’ve got a lot of people around you, and a lot of attention, but you’re opening grocery stores and cutting little ribbons in little towns. There’s no substance. They make you have a chaperone, and you’re not making any money. Whatever they’re charging these people, they’re ripping you off. If they’re making $100, they’re giving you $30 and keeping the rest of it. I mean, yes, it was a little exciting, but I wanted to move to L.A. and study acting and move on with my career.
LIW: At which point you got the role of a lifetime. Once Wonder Woman took off, did you have a level of creative control over Diana Prince?
Yes and no. I think you are restricted by what the words are on a paper. However, I fought tooth and nail for my own interpretation of how she needed to be. Thank goodness the director of the pilot episode was really in sync with me about Diana’s level of discovery in the new world. How she was very naïve and had a great sense of wonder and a fish-out-of-water feeling. Also, her goodness and sweetness. She wasn’t a jaded person; she was a feminist. It was important to me that her loving nature, as well as her fierceness defending what she believed in, was conveyed. I think I was able to do that.
LIW: Well, scheduling problems kept you from having a role in the new Wonder Woman movie. But you did see it, and . . . ?
LC: The director, Patty Jenkins, and I talked very early on, and I think she really understood who that character is. She gave these characters a sense of humor, depth, and inner life. She took the cartoon out of the character, you know? The truth is that every character off of a page is a cartoon. If I sometimes get blowback that Wonder Woman isn’t real, well, no character is real! Most of the politicians you see aren’t real. People you see in magazines—they’re not real; they’re all doctored up. Models aren’t that perfect; it’s an impossible standard to live up to. When you see people on the red carpet, you’re not seeing them in real life. It’s like Cary Grant’s famous line: “I’d like to be Cary Grant, too.”
LIW: But that’s the paradox. Beautiful people get opportunities plain people don’t, but then they complain that they’re judged mainly on their looks. Did you always find your reflection in the mirror a blessing and a curse?
LC: Hey, I appreciated it. Nobody ever feels sorry for you because you’re pretty (laughs). But we’ve all met people who take themselves too seriously because they’re rich or pretty. They’re boring, dull people who are not fun to be around. What helped me was having a very close relationship with my mother. I went through some teenage awkward years, and then I started singing and had a lot of people telling me that I was very pretty. But in my family, I have to say, I was unimpressed by that. My mother was very, very beautiful, and my father was very, very handsome. My brother’s very handsome, and my sister’s very pretty. But the emphasis in my family was about ethics, accomplishment, beauty being skin deep, exercise, education, good grades. So beauty was never something I put a lot of stock or effort into it. My thing was trying to be a creative, smart person, and to be about something.
LIW: You did have your burdens, though. Which led to an alcohol problem.
LC: I didn’t even drink until my mid-20s. My mother and father didn’t drink, but it is a genetic pre-disposition that existed on my mother’s side. So even though my mother did not have it, I got the gene. In the 80s, when I started using alcohol to avoid dealing with a bad marriage, and to escape and avoid dealing with my emotions, is when I got myself in trouble. You find it in the military and a lot of places, but alcohol is so insidious. It’s like opioid addiction running amok in the heartland now, while they’re cutting medical insurance for addiction. For years, Big Pharma made a ton of money off it, but no one’s talking about that part . . .
Anyway, as far as my own alcoholism, it took awhile. I would drink, and then I wouldn’t, and then I would. It was a slow process. But when I finally decided I really needed help, I went to rehab. Now I’m coming up on 20 years sober. I haven’t been to meetings in a long while, but I am very involved in recovery. I’m on the board of Ashley Treatment, which is a recovery center in Maryland, and it’s a very important aspect of my life. I am extremely careful about being mindful.
LIW: Speaking of mindfulness, I imagine most of our readers want to hear that you must spend twelve hours a day in the gym with trainers to keep looking the way you do.
LC: No, I just try to do a little something every day: pushups, walking, biking on the river. I try to be active watch what I eat. Just quantity, really. If I’m gaining a little—like, I think I’m probably a little bit over now—I’ll start to keep an eye on what I’m eating and go down a bit, and not let it get out of hand. Some people can just eat whatever they want…I’m not one of `em. I keep on keepin’ on, but mainly for health reasons.
LIW: Which also leads to the inevitable whispered question, “How much work do you think she’s had done?”
LC: It’s really funny. I’ll do Botox or Restylane, occasionally, if I’m gonna be doing a big photo shoot or something. I try to get rid of that middle frown line because it makes me look mad. But I don’t want to have a frozen face. I don’t want big lips. I am what I am. I’m not saying I’d never have plastic surgery, but I don’t think I will. I just don’t see myself having any cutting on my face because everyone that I’ve seen cut, they look entirely different. I’m kinda terrified. I know people who can afford the best surgeons in the entire world and still…I dunnoooooo. (laughs) Besides, my mom didn’t have any wrinkles when she died, and she was almost 90!
LIW: So much of who you are does seem to keep circling back to your mom.
LC: My mother was a remarkable woman. Even for the music I do . . . She used to play these juke-joint records. She had a collection of these old, scratchy 78s all about pain and suffering (laughs). “You done me wrong.” Sassy blues records from the South with these amazing singers. She also loved country music and rhumbas and things like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, Judy Garland, and torch singers. So that is what’s inside my bones and what I lean toward in my musical taste.
LIW: You mentioned before we started that some of the information about you on the web is wrong. Such as?
LC: There’s no “Córdova” in my name. I don’t know how that ever got started. It’s my mother’s maiden name, but it’s not on my birth certificate. And I did not go to Arizona State University. I got a scholarship that I turned down to go on the road. I did change “Lynda” from an “i” to a “y” before going into high school. There were a lot of people named Linda with an “i,” so I wanted to change it.
LIW: What about nearly having a featured role in Apocalypse Now?
LC: That’s true. I was in the jungle for three weeks, and we got typhooned out. They shut down for a couple of months, and by the time they were ready, I was doing Wonder Woman, so they had to replace me. But I was there with Charlie Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, and Frances Ford Coppola, and I’ve got a great picture at home of all of us to prove it!
LIW: Considering the film’s iconic status, was that a big career regret?
LC: No, it was an amazing experience being there with all of them. It didn’t work out, but I don’t regret it. You just move on.
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SIDEBAR:
A LYTTLE MORE LYNDA
Favorite Songs of Your Own?
The song I wrote for my son, “Jamie’s Song (You’ll Change Just a Little),” and one I wrote for my husband, “After All These Years.”
Favorite Vacation Spot?
Maybe on a boat in the ocean, but really it’s anywhere my family is.
Favorite Website?
The Library of Congress: loc.gov. You can look up anything. It even has Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Favorite Episode of Wonder Woman?
The pilot. It was that new experience, that wondrous, amazing feeling that dreams come true.
What Have You Been Reading?
One of my favorite books was The Human Genome [by John Quackenbush]. Also, Jon Krakauer’s book about the Mormons, Under the Banner of Heaven. I like anything David McCullough writes.
What Have You Been Watching?
Bloodline with Sissy Spacek, Earth 2, and, of course, everybody loves House of Cards. Mostly, I’m wild about any and all documentaries. I love Vice, from Bill Maher’s production company. The stuff they cover is just amazingly great. And Nanking, about the Japanese invasion of China. It’s shocking and unbelievable.
Besides Wonder Woman, Which Other Roles Have Made You Most Proud?
I don’t really watch myself, but it would have to be my TV specials.
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David Lefkowitz is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Northern Colorado. He also co-publishes Performing Arts Insider (TotalTheater.com) and hosts Dave’s Gone By (davesgoneby.com) on UNC Radio. His comedy, Blind Date, was recently staged in Chennai, India.
The Collected Writings of... David Lefkowitz 