Des Moines Tribune from Des Moines, Iowa • 7

Mar 1, 1982 PAGE 7 Daniel J. Travanti: 'rime time's sexiest cop I By Carol Wallace 1982 New York Dally News EW YORK, N.Y. It is the morning after the Night of a Hundred Zillion Stars and Hi i Travanti and "Hill Street" co-star Veronica Hamel. til the great kissers on the tube today. Devoted "Hill Street" watchers know this because on nearly every episode he plants a lingering wet one on the lips (and other available prime-time anatomy) of Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), his lover by night (and occasional lunch hours) and a public defender by day.

While all the characters get equal -time, and the cast appears en masse on talk shows looking as happy as The Waltons, Travanti has emerged as a special fan favorite. To many women he is "The Man I'd Most Like to Mud Wrestle With." To many cops he is "The Man I'd Most Like to Have As My Captain." And to many husbands he is, perhaps, the reason their wives are in the mood for love on Thursday nights. Travanti says he's genuinely surprised by this sudden adoration. "The other day somebody called me a heartthrob. I said, i I'm comfortable with it now.

I guess I had a low self-image. "I always thought I would make it because I'm talented. And that was a good thing because I'd look at myself on screen and go aaaargh," he says as he buries his face in his hands. "I'd see Newman or Redford and say, now those are gorgeous-looking guys. I'd feel like a dog." In person, Travanti is taller and more muscular than he appears on TV.

He has craggy good looks and a dazzling smile, and his hair is threaded with strands of gray. Leaning against a dresser in his hotel room, with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, he is smiling and relaxed and light-years away from that grim-faced Furillo guy-Other differences quickly become apparent. Furillo communicates heavily with his eyes; Travanti communicates mostly with his mouth. Furillo seldom gestures when he talks; Travanti is wholly animated. Furillo is low-key and has a dry sense of humor, Travanti is spirited and gregarious.

Furillo says it all in 25 words or less; Travanti often rambles in long, stream-of-con-sciousness soliloquies. am convoluted as hell," he concedes, "but I do get to the point How would he describe Furillo? "I think Furillo is tough without being afraid of being soft. He is vulnerable. He is very emotional, but controlled. He can communicate and he is non-judgmental." And Furillo's appeal to women? "I think he is just the kind of man many, many, many women dream about.

A guy who can say 'I'm hurt, I'm sorry, I'm confused. But I know what to Daniel John Travanti was born in Kenosha, the youngest of five children of immigrant Italian parents. (His father was an auto worker.) An overachiever, straight-A student, star athlete and all-around hotshot, he stayed the plush lobby of the Kelmsley Palace is bulging with camera-toting tourists, stiff security types, paying guests and assorted lingerers, all hoping for a cheap peek at any of the Hundred Zillion who are registered there. Daniel J. Travanti, who plays Frank Furillo, police captain extraordinaire on NBC-TV's "Hill Street Blues," strides jauntily through the lobby.

Having traded in his Hill Street getup a three-piece suit and tie for tight blue jeans, a red T-shirt and white sneakers, he looks more Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, than Hollywood, Calif. A security type who recognizes Travanti intercepts him just a nightstick away from the revolving door. Outside, hundreds of stargazers have "kiss me, sign this, pose for me" written on their celebrity-hungry faces. Better find another way out, Travanti is told. As the security man and his aide huddle on strategy, a middle-age woman standing nearby overhears their frantic whispers.

She turns to Travanti. "Who's supposed to be here?" she asks, unaware that she is talking to the man who has run Erik Estrada off the prime-time highway as TV's most popular cop. "Who's supposed to be here?" he repeats, throwing his head back and exploding with laughter. "Me! I'm supposed to be here! Me!" Make no mistake, folks. It's Daniel J.

Travanti's turn. The man is on a roll. The Emmy. The Golden Globe. The magazine covers.

The invitation to host "Saturday Night Live." The recognition from his peers. Even the invitation to the Night of a Hundred Zillion Stars. Yes, that was his bod up there on stage at Radio City Music Hall with the likes of Cagney and Newman and Pacino and others who need no first names. You see, after a 19-year gestation period that was riddled with self-destructive behavior, Daniel J. Travanti has delivered unto us one healthy, 6-foot I-inch, 190-pound, talented, likable, deliciously complicated fellow.

"I did my best to screw everything up," says Travanti, 42, who conquered a 10-year bout with alcoholism. "Everything's come out all right despite me, thank God." If you haven't seen "Hill Street Blues" you may be wondering what all the hoopla is about Simply put, it is a show about the gritty innards of cop precinct in Any City, U.S.A. At the hub of the precinct, the Elmer's Glue-All of Hill Street, if you will, is Capt. Frank Furillo. Tough.

Smart. Controlled. Fetching-ly handsome. Sensitive. And one of off-camera romance are true.

In fact, be is tight-lipped about his private life. "That's one area I won't talk about," he says testily. "It's nobody's business." When he's not at the studio, he reads (John Cheever is a favorite), writes short stories, exercises, gardens, cooks or entertains friends. He recently splurged on a new Mercedes. took me three months to get the guts," says the practical-minded Travanti.) After lunch, Travanti agrees to visit the nearby 17th Precinct station on E.

Fifty-first Street "Hi, I'm Dan Travanti," Travanti says, extending his hand to the desk sergeant on duty. The man seems genuinely unmqved by that information. Travanti continues. "I'm on a show called 'Hill Street Suddenly, the light goes on. Heads turn.

People come running. "Hey, it's Furillo!" an aide shouts. Travanti smiles, shakes hands and chats with the cops about the show and its characters. "You're one of my heroes," Sgt Stan Celmer, 44, a 22-year veteran, tells him. "Hey, how come we don't get any assistant district attorneys in here who look like Joyce?" asks one cop.

Celmer tells a reporter that he likes the character of Furillo for several reasons. "You can communicate with him. He's sensitive. He makes the hard decisions. And he's got a beautiful girlfriend.

"I think many of the (cops') wives like the program because of Celmer added. "They think he's sexy or something or other." As his attitude changed, his career picked up. He had guest spots on many TV series, began doing commercials had resisted them for a long time because I was angry that I was reduced to and even appeared on "General Hospital" for six months in 1979 as Spence Andrews, an ex-football player. When he read the pilot script for Hill Street Street in early 1980, he says he knew immediately it was "a masterpiece." He was the first to read for the role of Furillo. The show's creators, Michael Kozoll and Steven Bochco, liked what they saw but continued their hunt.

"He had a wonderful smile, charming nature and a kind of sex appeal," says Kozoll. "He also has the ability to transmit a quiet strength. "But we had never heard of him. The guy was 40 years old. You ask yourself, 'Why haven't we heard of him As it turned out, Dan was an accomplished performer who just hadn't gotten lucky until then." Travanti lives in a renovated Victorian-style house on the cliffs of Santa Monica, seven blocks from the ocean.

"I'm very comfortable with people and also am very good about being alone. I tend to be private." He is chummy with many of his "Hill Street" colleagues, including Hamel. "I love her and I think she's terrific," he says, offering no clues as to whether those rumors of an separate from his peers because "I was afraid they would find out I was a fraud." He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin in 1961, won a fellowship to the Yale School of Drama and stayed there a year. (Three years ago, he earned a master's degree in English from Loyola-Marymount in Los Angeles.) In 1963, after a stint in the National Guard and work in summer stock, he moved to New York. "The expression that describes my psyche and my soul for a long time is egomania with an inferiority complex," he says of his angry-young-man days.

His erratic career compounded a growing drinking problem. After alienating agents and thumbing his nose at prestigious theater companies that courted him, he fled to California in 1966. There he survived on guest-star roles on such shows as "Gunsmoke" and "Route 66," continued to drink heavily and to wallow in self-pity. In January 1973, during a performance in Indianapolis, he suffered a breakdown. Seven months later, in New York he suffered another collapse.

"I said, 'I can't do this anymore. I'm lost. My brain isn't working. I have a fine mind that's of no use to me whatsoever. I'm crying, shaking all the time.

I don't know where to go. I'm And I was still feeling very sorry for myself." He was finally persuaded to get help, and on "Aug. 14, 1973," he found sobriety..