Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 5

CONNECTICUT VING PAGE, i AS; MONDAY. 11 JULY 19, 1993 A10-12 CLASSIFIED USA aims low and outdoes its sleazy image Weather-forecasting competition to be detectable on the screen Once upon a time, Margaret Putsche was a Breck girl i I i mlim argaret Putsche was attending Bay Path Junior College in, Springfield when a call for a new. rr James Breck girl went out from tne pep-, tnarsi L31 ON TV Dopplers pie who made Breck shampoo. lt By the time the Breck girl ad campaign was abandoned in the '70s, about 200 golden-haired (for the most part) hometown' angels (ditto) had reigned over 40 years of tasteful, pastel magazine advertising. Their; most famous ad alumnae include Brooke Shields and Kim Basinger, but, for the most part, the girls were chosen from the Springfield area (home of Breck) for their innocence and looks.

-1 That was 1957. Eighteen-year-old blond Margaret knew she was pretty, but sqe wasn't entirely comfortable with it. From a' conservative West Hartford family, she'd, been raised to be smart. Pretty was a handicap. A young woman who was pretty and smart was too much of a threat; she couldn't have a normal life.

But it was intriguing, this Breck business. So Margaret showed up, her shoulder-length hair washed and combed. The Breck representatives took her to New York City for a daylong photo shoot, which an artist used in re UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. Some people in television have no shame. And a lot of them seem to work for cable's USA Network.

There's proof month after month in USA's sleazy-but-successful lineup of original TV movies. But sometimes USA even outdoes itself. On Aug. 4, from 9 to 1 1 p.m., USA presents Melody Anderson and James Kelly in "Marilyn Bobby: Her Final Affair," a fiction about Robert F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe based in quasi-fact.

Most of the 100 or so critics attending the annual summer press tour here had gotten used to USA's trashy TV dramas, an endless crop of top-rated women- andor men-in-danger psycho-sexual thrillers. Many critics even enjoyed, in a camp kind of way, USA programming exec David Kenin's presentation the other day, in which story lines for upcoming movies drew unexpected laughter. And who could blame them? Just listen to some of the movies Kenin who tried to keep a straight face but couldn't had to plug: "Praying Mantis," starring Jane Seymour and Barry Bostwick, in which a femme fatale who marries her victims and murders them on their wedding night moves into a small town and attracts the attention of an unsuspecting bookstore owner (Aug. 11 from 9 to 11 p.m.). "Rubdown" with Michelle Phillips, Jack Coleman, William De-vane and Catherine Oxenberg, a tale about a Beverly Hills masseur Snapshots; Susan Campbell By JON LENDER Courant Staff Writer Listen.

Did you hear it in the distance? Was it thunder, or was it the rumble of an oncoming typhoon of TV promotion? Connecticut may be in for a local TV-ratings competition based on weather on new storm-detection technology and TV gimmicks for showcasing it. There are indications of a developing hype storm. Keep your umbrellas handy. Television "Jt doesn't get any hi-techer than this," said Steve Schwaid, news director at WVIT, Channel 30, in West Hartford. He and his chief meteorologist, Brad Field, stood last week in a small room at Channel 30 crowded with computer screens, cables and one or two things that beep.

More equipment and computer software was being installed. On one computer screen, huge cloud masses swirled across a miniaturized United States with 3-D-simulated mountains. Nearby, two men from Massachusetts-based National Data and Weather Systems were hooking up what Schwaid is billing as "Super Doppler" radar which Schwaid hopes to have operating this week. No longer, says Schwaid, will the locally based New England Weather Service be the sole possessor in Connecticut of Doppler radar. The New England Weather Service owned by the family of Hartford entrepreneur David Chase is embarking on a contract with WFSB, Channel 3, in Hartford after having served WTIC, Channel 61, also in Hartford, for years.

The Chase-owned service and Channel 3 say that their new alliance (involving a physical move of the Please see The blip, Page A7 I if' v' i hi Tom Stevens Special to The Courant At top, Channel 3' Hilton Kaderli, left, and Joe Furey. Above, Channel 30' Brad Field and news director Steve Schwaid. Please see Bad, Page A7 Goodbye, CB, good buddy 'Run With Wolves' sets these women free to be wild By HELEN UBINAS Courant Staff Writer ost people don't visit their family at the American tagie Truck Stop in Southington, but a South Carolina trucker known as "Luxury Leroy" does. His creating her in pastels. mmmmm In New York, she was chaperoned dQg- ged, really by a grandfatherly man who stood close by when agents who'd gathered for the shoot tried to talk to her.

One asked" her out for a drink, and even though Margaret swore she'd only order Coke, the chaper-i one said no. Undeterred, the agent handed' Margaret his card and asked her to call him. She thought about it thought real hard after she got home with her $50 for the day's work. Here's what she thought: Given the times," if you were voluptuous and Margaret' most certainly was there were only two things people figured you were good at, and neither of those things was art, Margaret's' love. She had a respect for Marilyn Monroe, but she didn't want to be her.

Plus, her conservative parents, and her brother, Thomas, who would later become a respect-1 ed composer and music teacher af Hartt; School of Music, warned her of the ills that can befall a fresh-faced starlet. Besides, get ting by on your looks was cheap, and Margaret was not cheap. Maybe Margaret had some hang-ups of her own. She'd already had some bad expe- riences with men, and she didn't think she wanted to deal with nationwide attention. So she never called.

Instead, she finished her studies at Bay Path, went to Hartford Art School, got married and moved to San Fran-'! Cisco. She let her hair grow long, had twb'' girls, got divorced, landed back in Connecti-' cut, raised her daughters, and married again five years ago, this time to Clifford Thornton. Last year, Dial which had bought Breck and found 150 of the Breck girl por-' traits languishing in a Springfield ware-'' house, put out a call to find the unidentified ones. Margaret almost didn't call. What was 1 the point? Nothing came of it, and even', during the year when her portrait appeared, no one recognized her.

But a friend urged her on, and now Mar-' garet's portrait identified is hanging in the Breck Girl Hall of Fame in Phoenix. She keeps a copy of the magazine adver-' tisement they wouldn't let her have the photo in an album. She claims the pastel was very stylized, but if you look at it, you can see Margaret in there the straight-nose, the deep eyes. Her daughters think it's a kick. Kristi, 30, is a service representative (mechanic) at Thomas Cadillac.

Dorrie, 28, is a costume" designer in Boston. Dorrie is the spitting image of her mother, with a twist. When she graduated from Wes-leyan University in 1991, she accepted her diploma in a slinky, neon-pink dress. She'd grown tired of the earnest grunge-fashions and politically correct thinking on campus, and that was her final protest. Her mother still laughs about it and relax- es in the knowledge that at least these it's thinkable to be pretty and smart at the same time.

It's not hard to wonder what someone like Dorrie would have done had an agent handed her his card and said, "Call me." "Are you kidding?" says Dorrie, looking incredulous. "I would have ditched the the mid-70s, the CB quickly became the hottest item on the market. "Breaker-Breaker" became the catch phrase of the times, and handles (nicknames) were as creative as Cobra, Junebug and U-turn. But the CB lost its popularity in the early '80s almost as fast as it gained it. Try to compare the 70s boom years to the current level of interest, and dealers are quick to say, "What current level of interest?" But in a world buzzing and beeping Please see High-tech, Page A7 trucking family, that is.

It's one of the few chances he gets to see what a lot of them look like. After all, almost all correspondence between truckers is done through a citizen's band radio. And it's been that way for years. But for the rest of us, CB culture is as taai. jlt By JOCELYN McCLURG Courant Book Editor Judging from the letters we received, a fair number of "wild women" are "running with the wolves" in Connecticut.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes' best-selling "Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype" (Ballantine, $23) has become a national phenomenon since its largely unheralded publication a year ago. It has been perched atop best-seller lists for most of that time and has attracted a near cult following among some women (and a few men) who respond to Estes' call for women to "run free and wild like the wolf." Estes, a Jungian analyst and a "canta-dora" (keeper of old stories), uses alternative myths and folklore to show women how to get in touch with their inner intuitive, creative and sexual selves. To tap into one's "wild woman" doesn't mean to run wild in the streets but rather to recapture repressed natural instincts that run counter to society's image of woman as demure, nice and unpowerful. It's feminism with a new, possibly New Age twist. We invited readers to write and tell us why and how Estes' book has touched far gone and forgotten as Atlantis, the Roanoke Colony, or George Segal.

Fifteen years ago, every person with a VW Rabbit owned one, and the CB was celebrated in song and movie. Where the heck did it go? "CB was a big fad when it first came out," said Leroy. "Now, the cellular phone is the popular item to have in your car." Exploding on the scene around them. Two readers told us they belong to reading groups that have sprung up around "Women Who Run With the Wolves," a sort of '90s form of consciousness raising. Jane Ailes of Glastonbury belongs to a Glastonbury reading group of seven women in their late 30s to mid-50s who meet bimonthly for chapter discussions.

Each group member has a copy of a cartoon that shows a forlorn man telling a bartender: "Twenty years of marriage, then one day bang! She has to go run with the wolves." Ailes writes of the group discussions: "We find ourselves sharing our intimate thoughts with each other, connecting as Please see Book, Page A7 Bob Stern Special to The Courant Lisa Kustosik, handle Sweet Lee, is hooked on her CB. Channel 30 news on Channel 20 Today begins the new, live 10 p.m. newscast that WVIT, Channel 30, plans to broadcast daily on WTXX, Channel 20, via a time-lease arraneement brineine refuse," Fox executive Rick Bieber says. Also on tap at Fox: "The Sonny Cher Story," based on Sonny Bono's autobiography, "And the Beat Goes On." Bono, an executive producer, won't play himself. The same goes for Cher.

'90210 fans can relax 'Scarlett' must wait 'til tomorrow It's back to square one for "Scarlett." Producer Robert Halmi, who paid $9 million for film rights to the "Gone With the Wind" sequel in 1991 and competition to the half- hour time slot that WTIC, Channel 61, has had to itself. The new 10 p.m. newscast on Channel 20 called "Connecticut News Live at 10" will have Channel 30's regular news anchors, and will be broadcast in addition to Channel 30's regular 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts. Bonanno and Bono on Fox if' It v'v ay s.

Not to worry, "Beverly Hills, 90210" fans. All the tabloid gossip about cast defections this season turns out to be bogus nonsense, says Fox Inside Almanac A Ann Landers A8 Crossword A9 Games A6 Horoscope A8 Jumble A9 Showtime A6 Television A6 What's going on today Book discussion 7 p.m., Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence," with Rose Quiello, professor of English. Free. Reservations recommended. R.J.

Julia Booksellers 768 Boston Post Road, Madison (245-3959). Summer Sing 7:30 p.m. Schubert's Mass in Faure's "Requiem," conducted by Leslie Eckstein, accompaniment by Nancy Eaton. Registration fee (at door): $5. Sponsored by Wallingford Ecumenical Choir.

Choate Rosemary Hall Chapel, Christian Street, Wallingford. Does crime pay? It does on Fox. Bill Bonanno, son of mob kingpin Joe Bonanno, is an executive producer of "The Bonanno Family Saea." an "epic tale." planned to have the saga in production as a CBS miniseries by mid-1992 has started a new quest for the actress to play the title role. Thus far his search has included open auditions of hundreds of unknowns in New York, Los Angeles, London, Dublin and Atlanta, with a televised casting session in the latter city. By the beginning of this year, Halmi had finally narrowed the candidates to four finalists but apparently didn't decide on one.

The casting call has quietly gone out again for feisty, flirtatious Scarlett Butler. Halmi is now talking about a January '94 start. President Sandy Grushow. "Everybody's back," Grushow told TV critics last week. "Lots of rumors flying around, and that's what makes '90210' the phenomenon that it is.

The new season will involve every cast member who was in the show last season." That includes notorious tabloid bad girl Shannen Doherty, who plays Brenda Walsh. From tUff and wire report Michael McAndrews The Hartford Courant It's one of several big-ticket, Fox-produced miniseries in the works for next season. Joe, 87, will do a cameo in "Family Saga." Fox agreed to the project because Bill Bonanno "made us an offer we couldn't Dorrie Nord, left, is the spitting image of her mother, Margaret Thornton, when she was a Breck girl..