The Montgomery Advertiser from Montgomery, Alabama • 77

(C Everyone wants to know about and photos are going to be taken later. He offers to remove his own tie if it will make Beau 'No, you've got it all wrong, I'd say. 'You've got to live each moment as a fresh mo competition between us." Beau Bridges, an equal in the family but not in Hollywood more comfortable. He has a loving father's desire to make sure Beau's recent work isn't forgotten in a wave of talk about Jeff. "Did you happen to see a movie called Iron Triangle?" Lloyd asks, hopefully.

Nobody has. In fact, few people did. The recent independent film, which paired Beau and Haing S. Ngor, opened and vanished quickly. Beau can see what his father is doing and laughs it off.

After a highly lauded launch in the late '60s with the films Gaily, Gaily and The Landlord, Beau's career lost its heat, although he rarely lacked work and recently added directing to acting. Now he awaits the verdict on The Fabulous Baker Boys to see if it can provide a new spark. There is not a hint of career rivalry between the two brothers. Their embraces are long and warm. They put their arms around each other instinctively.

Both of them have an image of their dad as being a tough and demanding parent when they were young, ment. "He said, That's a nice idea, but you're going to lose a lot of I argued with him for awhile. I'm starting to see that he was right." Beau says that the biggest fights he and his father have had were over "my children, his One morning at a family breakfast, one of Beau's sons wanted the last two waffles on the plate. It triggered a furious argument between a grandfather who thought his grandson was being insensitive and a father trying to protect his son from attack. "I thought I'd destroyed my relationship with my father," Beau remembers.

"But I didn't want my son to be talked to that way. It sounds ridiculous now, but I was enraged. We ended up screaming at each other." "Well, he had already had two waffles and Lloyd begins, but he's cut off by his wife: "Don't start the fight over again." "I find that he has these traits," says Jeff. "He's tough, he's a perfectionist. But that hasn't gotten in the way of the love that's going on.

It's almost like working with a great director. He has a vision of how it should be. But if you don't do that, he'll say it's wrong, it's a mistake, but you won't feel that he doesn't love you anymore. I never felt that" Family is on Jeffs mind because he is separated from his-wife and daughters while shooting Texasville. He has flown to Los Angeles for just 24 hours to promote Baker Boys.

The absurdity of having to visit with his daughters in the back seat of a limousine eats at him. "I still haven't figured out a way to get the core of the family into my professional life," he says, looking at his father, as if he might be able to help. "My girls are just starting school. You can't uproot them and have them leave all their friends behind and take them to some place where there's 90 percent humidity just so that I can tuck them in at night" The Bridges men stare at each other, stumped. And while nobody ever said parenting was easy, the Bridges seem to have come up with a family that connects.

the past year making movies, so they can't find time for just three guys going fishing. "We talk about it all the time," Jeff says, "but we can never make it happen." But they've been able to keep their family life vital. One way is by making movies together as in Tucker and Baiter Boys. Their real secret, though, is their mother, "The General," who orchestrates whatever troop movements it takes to gather the family to the big beach house where there is still "Beau's room" and "Jeffs room" and where she now makes the grandchildren do acting exercises, just as she did for her own kids: "Look happy, look sad, look scared, now make sweet eyes." "Jeff still licks the king off the Christmas cookies," Dorothy says. "And," Jeff says, "I often ask my directors if they'll have me 'make sweet Lloyd enjoys the banter among his sons until they get to the part where they describe him as a "tough" father.

"I'm surprised at you guys," he says, scolding. "Do you think I'm a tough father?" he asks, looking to his wife for help. None is given. Both sons remember an irritating Dad. They'd wash his car and, before they could get the chrome spit-shined just right, he'd burst in, decide it wasn't good enough and finish the job himself.

He was a stickler. Lloyd and Jeff used to have entirely different visions of life. They had woolly partings over philosophy and lifestyle as Jeff went through some wild times before settling down with his wife in 1975. "He would say, 'You know, Jeff, us humans are habitual creatures. It's all about habits.

Bad habits and good habits and the idea is to come up with good but the truth is that the elder Bridges was immersed in Sea Hunt much of the time that his sons were growing up, and Beau, eight years older than Jeff, became a sort of surrogate father to his little brother and to their baby sister, Luanda, who now is a homemaker out of the Hollywood spotlight. Beau encouraged Jeff to get into acting. They put on shows in parking lots from the back of a truck as kids, and when Beau started hitting it big in movies, he prodded Jeff to get in. Beau understands his brother's position in Hollywood's eyes and is deferential to him. "I worried when this Baker Boys project came to me," Beau says.

"First, they had offered this script to Jeff and not offered it to me. He asked me what I thought and .1 1 II .1 fl cnac maae me nervous, i couia see tne scenario: ukc it and he tells me he'd like me to do it and then it becomes a situation where he's trying to push older brother on these people. Maybe he ends up not doing the role because they won't take me." He shudders. It didn't happen. There's relief in his face as he looks at Jeff.

They exchange glances that say, You can only do so much as parents, says Lloyd, the patriarch. "We're very content" "It takes an effort," says Dorothy. At family dinners, "we go around the table and everyone has to tell why they love the person whose birthday or anniversary it is." And the connection comes in trivial ways, too, she says. "I tell Jeff to stop and pick up some nice white wine or Beau to bring something else. I don't need them to do that But it makes it more meaningful.

Beau and Jeff aren't movie stars they're at my mercy." The next family gathering may be a celebration. Lloyd always wanted his sons to play Shakespeare. It isn't likely to happen, even in an age when Mel Gibson plays Hamlet. But Lloyd's grandson, Beau's 16-year-old, Jordan, is doing Twelfth Night in a school production and there is a feeling of passage among the Bridges men. "When we have worked together," says Jeff, "not only is there great fun, but the acknowledgment that fun is always going on.

2 i JLA Nobody but us could have done this movie. In the family circle, everyone is equal. Jeff listens with interest as Beau tells that his 20-year-old son, Casey, has just started film school at the University of Southern California. Beau is the big talker and Jeff seems content with that arrangement Lloyd says very little, except for occasional wisecracks and a few looks of mock horror at what he's hearing. But all three mug shamelessly with each other.

The boys go after Dad, convulsing him by trying to reproduce a stilted pose from his '40s publicity shots. Jeff twirls Lloyd's bushy eyebrows into bat wings. Mom jumps in: "Jeff, do you still drink your bath water? Beau sucked his thumb until he was 10." And everybody pounces on Beau because he has no chin. Lloyd puts his arm around Beau to conceal this flaw while Jeff turns to demonstrate his own uncanny ability to make his double chin disappear in a swift suck-in motion. The camaraderie seems genuine.

The way they touch says they like being together. They see each other often, but probably not as often Beau and Jeff Bridget star with Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. It's their first screen appearance together since 4-month-old Jeff and Beau, 8, were seen in the '50 film The Company She Keeps. as most families who live a few minutes apart. They're all in the LA.

area: Lloyd in the family home in Malibu, Beau with wife Juli, three sons and a daughter in the western San Fernando Valley, and Jeff with wife Susan and three daughters in Santa Monica. But Jeff, who also has a ranch in Montana, has been gone eight months in We're always saying, 'God, we're here, we're together, isn't it Not only do we love each other, but we're expressing it to each other. "Now, with Dad, there's a feeling of being on the same team. It's like a baton pass. Everything he put into his kids, we're going to take and put bto our kids.

To realize this while it's going on it's great" USA WEEKENDOCTOBER 20-22, 1989.