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Grant Aleksander
The Trouble With Being A Star
by Andrea Payne
Soap Opera Digest
January 31, 1984

Teenage girls tear their hair out and mail it to him. Some send him pictures of their wrists with his initials carved into their flesh, or photos of the letters they’ve branded into their skin--G.A.

Grant Aleksander, a 6’1” blond-haired, blue-eyed heartthrob is scared.

“I’m telling you, these girls have very serious problems...I have girls who wait for me every day outside the studio early in the morning, and they scare the hell out of me. I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know whether or not to try and talk to them, to help them, or to ignore them entirely because a lot of times you are just hurting them when you try to get close.” Although Aleksander is obviously distressed, his voice remains at a steady pitch.

“One girl kept writing me, saying that if I didn’t talk to her, she was going to commit suicide and it really scared me. So, I talked to her and now she feels that a personal relationship is developing. You can’t do that with every person who comes along because it gets to be absorbing. They start calling back every day, three or four times a day. And they have,” he stresses, “to talk to you. It’s rough.” A note of bewilderment creeps into Grant’s voice as he sits, arms resting in front of him on the white tablecloth in a Manhattan restaurant. He leans forward and looks at me for a brief moment. His gaze is intense. “I looked at one girl during an appearance and she passed out. You wonder, ‘Am I doing them good, or am I doing them bad?’ It’s a strange sort of feeling.”

Like others before him and many to follow, Grant Aleksander, who plays GL’s Phillip Spaulding, a character he says is modeled after James Dean, is in the precarious position of being a teen idol. For many, this phrase--teen idol--conjures up little more than visions of screaming girls, outstretched to their beloved, or memories of our own youthful idols, Michael Jackson, Billy Dee Williams, David Cassidy, Frank Sinatra. But it means much more to Aleksander. It means trying to cope with a phenomenon he doesn’t understand; trying to reach people he’s never seen, to let them know he’s just a person.

While Grant truly appreciates his fans, he says, and answers all his mail, he worries about the suicide threats and admits that he feels responsible even though he knows that, “If these people bumped into you on the street a year ago, they might look at you, they might not. They wouldn’t give a damn about you one way or the other, probably. But now, you have a certain mystique to them and they are willing to die for you. It’s an obsessive mentality and I am not real knowledgeable about how to deal with obsessive mentalities. I don’t know what to do, what is the right response.

“It’s terrible feeling responsible, thinking about what if someone did kill themself. Now, you can say if it wasn’t over me, it would have been someone else, but you don’t know that. And you still carry that around with you and I don’t care to. I don’t ever want to have anybody do anything like that because of me.” Despite the girl who fainted when he looked at her, Aleksander thinks that doing public appearances is helpful because then he becomes more than just an image in some young girl’s dream. “When they se you right in front of them in the flesh, you become real. It’s that unreal quality that can cause the problems sometimes, because all they have is their fantasy. They have no grasp on reality at all.”

In person, Aleksander is handsome. He’s got a firm, square jaw, a smooth complexion and sandy blond hair parted at the left with bangs that sweep across his forehead. His lips are thin, but sensuous and he’s got a very Waspy nose. Today, Grant’s casually dressed in an off-white shirt which nicely accentuates his athletic body. The sleeves are rolled up to his elbows to reveal strong arms and he’s wearing a pair of slightly droopy jeans.

Grant Aleksander is as low-keyed as Phillip Spaulding is explosive. An articulate man, he speaks in a well modulated voice. There’s no real hint of the man who matter-of-factly mentions that he’s had “some” car accidents and is amazed that he’s still alive after falling off the edge of a waterfall during a drunken outing with a friend in college. “I’ve had a lot of experiences like this, so it’s not unique,” he explains. But despite what seems like obvious differences in demeanor between Grant and his character, Aleksander thinks he’s got a lot in common with Spaulding. Like Phillip, Grant confesses, he was always getting into trouble, but laughs that he was also good at getting out of trouble. “Other people would always get in trouble for the stuff I was a part of.... I’ve never been a follower, I’ve sort of done what I wanted to do. Sometimes it was worse than what the crowd was doing, but I never enjoyed doing what everyone else was doing and that’s a very Phillip thing.”

Born in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, Grant is the youngest of three boys in a closely-knit family which he describes as “off-beat.” He attended prep school where he was introduced to acting by an English teacher, who, he says, was more of a friend than anything else. He persuaded Aleksander to exchange the football and baseball fields for the stage. “There was no way that I was going to do something Thespian but he got me to try.” To his surprise, Aleksander enjoyed the experience and thought he was good at acting. He continued performing in college and had roles in such diverse plays as “The Crucible,” “ The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Glass Menagerie,” and “Hamlet.”

His big break came one day while chatting with an actor friend who recommended that he see an agent, looking for “his type.” Aleksander contacted the agent and a week later he was in Los Angeles auditioning for “The Dukes of Hazard.” Soon after that, he tested for the part of Steven Carrington on “Dynasty,” a role he almost won, but not quite. Still, things began to happen for Aleksander. He appeared in an afternoon special, “A Very Delicate Matter,” which was his only television experience before signing on with “Guiding Light,”

Aleksander started on the serial in December 1982, but it wasn’t until the spring that his popularity began to soar. Although he is aware that his looks have something to do with the effect he has on young women, Grant believes that his fans are reacting to something else.

“This is a business which is predicated on looks, so you can reach your hand into any barrel and pull out hundreds of guys who are as good looking as I, or better. What they are responding to is the character...to the fact that the character is well written...that it’s a character who is sensual. It’s all of those things wrapped up into one. Looks have very little to do with it,” Aleksander says, right before he contradicts himself. “Then again, most of the time they do.”

The love story of Beth Raines and Phillip Spaulding is one that pits them against the world as they struggle to deal with Beth’s emotional fallout after being raped by her stepfather, Bradley. Phillip is the white knight on the horse, who runs away to New York with Beth to help her escape a painful situation which has her sitting in her room listlessly pulling the stuffing out of a rag doll. The idea of total love, or pure love is one that America can’t seem to resist, and Phillip embodies that ideal. Maybe that’s why girls say they are willing to die for Grant Aleksander. They are confusing him with the role he plays.

Added to his concern about his impressionable fans, Grant is also anxious about the impact his storyline may have on young girls who find themselves in a situation similar to Beth’s. “It’s always the endings of storylines that worry me. I want the little girls out there who are being molested by their fathers or stepfathers, brothers, or whoever, to be able to have an idea of a way to deal with it that’s going to help them. I don’t know exactly how our story is going to end,” he offers. “I’m waiting to see just like the audience. And I’m hoping.”

With Grant’s popularity, there are bound to be women who throw themselves at him, but he says he’s not tempted. Presently, he shares a Manhattan apartment with his girlfriend, actress Sherry Ramsey, whom he met at an audition. They’ve been together for four-and-a-half years and Grant, who considers himself a one woman man, says that if he ever got the urge to date other people, he’d let Sherry know. “I’m not a fooling around kind of person,” he says seriously.

But Aleksander wasn’t always so committed to that one woman ideal and admits that in high school he did a lot of experimenting. Surprisingly, however, he had trouble getting dates at first. “To be perfectly honest, when I was in elementary school and junior high, I was the nicest guy in the world to go with, but girls were just not interested in me. I kept looking at the guys they were interested in and they kept treating them like crap so I said, ‘Well there must be something to it.’ So I started following suit a little bit, and damn if I didn’t have more dates than I knew what to do with!” he laughs. But despite his prosperity, Aleksander didn’t like the games he had to play and dropped the act. “I was always amazed,” he remarks wryly, “that there were a lot of people out there who didn’t want you to treat them well.”

Sherry was different. “I knew when I found someone who really demanded that I treat them with respect, I would have found the right person and that was Sherry.” Later he adds, “My dad used to tell me that you’ll know you are in love when you can be with a woman that you’ve been seeing a few months, a person you really think you are in love with and you can go away, just the two of you, and have a wonderful time and never touch each other. And that’s actually the test...If sex is necessary then something is missing. A sexual relationship has to be the icing on the cake.”

Because both are actors and Sherry is unemployed, there are some complications. “It’s always a bad situation when one person is working and the other one isn’t.” Grant acknowledges, “But we know that one day, the shoe will be on the other foot.” During public appearances when Grant is treated like “the king’s son” and Sherry is like “chopped liver,” Aleksander admits that it sometimes drives her crazy, but they deal with it. “It’s all part of the business,” he shrugs, then comments, “I know it would be tough if it was the other way around.”

For now, the couple is enjoying Grant’s success and some of the changes it’s brought them, like a nice apartment with a view and a fireplace instead of the rat infested tenement they lived in for two years while Aleksander eked out a living working in restaurants and modeling. To Grant, the change in his life has also meant gaining a little more self-assurance. “I’ve always had a lot of self-confidence in myself,” he states. “But when you are working as a bartender you doubt yourself from time to time and begin to wonder, “Well, am I ever going to get the right break? Am I ever going to get lucky?”

With those questions answered, Grant is now faced with a hectic schedule as a result. He’s at the studio sometimes from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Personal appearances take him out of town on weekends and on weekdays he’s busy with photo layouts and press interviews. He “must” work out at least three or four times a week, he insists, “or else I start going a little crazy.” To get away from it all, Grant takes to the mountains, but confesses that he can only enjoy himself if he knows that there’s work to go back to.

Admitting that one of his greatest fears is to be unemployed (“You live in peril as an actor”), Grant says that his professional goal is to continue working. “I’d love to win awards and acclaim and all that. That would be nice, but all I really want is to keep working. That’s when I’m the happiest, when I’m working on something that is challenging.” Although he wouldn’t mind some recognition for his talent, he’s not quite interested in being a star. “I think that part of the reason anyone is in this business is for reinforcement. You want to have that positive reinforcement from the audience and being a star is the ultimate, but I am getting a little minor celebrity, and I think that I’ve got as much as I ever really want as far as stardom is concerned.” Thinking about those star-struck teenage girls who mutilated themselves in his name, I can understand where he’s coming from.#