Loni Anderson attends an event in Beverly Hills, California, in November 2023.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Loni Anderson, who died Sunday at 79, auditioned for the role of Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company before the sitcom’s debut on ABC in the late seventies. Though she wowed the producers, the relatively unknown actress did not get the job. Apparently, Anderson was too beautiful and too savvy for the envisioned simple-minded, apartment-sharing secretary character.
The role instead went to Suzanne Somers, who won a People’s Choice Award in 1978 for her performance and later made a fortune mastering thighs. And Anderson? The actress soon distinguished herself and found fame as receptionist Jennifer Marlowe in CBS’s beloved radio station-set TV series, WKRP in Cincinnati.
The irony of it all was that the Marlowe character skewered the ditzy blonde stereotype exemplified by Somers’s Chrissy Snow. Anderson’s tight-dressed, cool-headed bombshell was the rare voice of reason in a hapless radio station full of renegades and utter incompetents.
The vivacious, self-possessed Marlowe established her ground rules in the first scene of WKRP’s debut episode in 1978 by easily swatting away the lascivious advances of plaid-suited sales manager Herb Tarlek (played by Frank Bonner), as if he were a harmless housefly.
Then, she moved on to the newly-hired program director Andy Travis (Gary Sandy), wielding her impressive curves near him while admonishing men who only wanted sex. “You’re not like that, are you,” she said.
Coming from her it wasn’t a question, it was a stipulation.
Popular 1980s actor Loni Anderson of hit TV series ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ has died at 79
Marlowe received phone calls and visitors efficiently. She shielded bumbling station manager Arthur Carlson (played beautifully by Gordon Jump) from important mail and meaningful decisions. Subservient tasks were beneath her.
Carlson: “I would like to dictate a press release.”
Marlowe: “I don’t take dictation.”
Carlson: “It’s probably going to be a long meeting, though, so why don’t you get coffee for all the guys here?”
Marlowe: “I don’t get coffee, Mr. Carlson, we agreed. You have to draw the line somewhere. Will there be anything else I can do?”
Carlson: “No, I think that just about does it.”
Before landing the WKRP job, Anderson actually appeared in a Three’s Company episode as an old flame of John Ritter’s lead character, the skirt-chasing Jack Tripper.
In Chris Mann’s 1998 book, Come and Knock on Our Door, Ritter said the reason Anderson didn’t get the Three’s Company role was that she was too poised for the character: “No one would believe she couldn’t live in her own apartment, that she would have to struggle to get the rent paid.”
She was a better fit on WKRP. It was revealed in a 1979 episode that receptionist Marlowe was the highest-paid station employee, with a salary of US$24,000 per year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than US$100,000 today. In season three, the impossibly wealthy Marlowe bought a large house in the suburbs.
In the classic Turkeys Away episode, a Thanksgiving promotion at the station, involving live gobblers dropped from a helicopter, went horribly wrong. As chaos ensued, Marlowe stayed calm. “A lot of turkeys don’t make it through Thanksgiving,” she rationally explained to an irate caller to the station.
Anderson’s Marlowe winked at the cliché of the hair-brained blonde by posing as that type to gaslight a program consultant hired to straighten out the station. On another episode, she spoofed a breathy sexpot caricature by aping Marilyn Monroe’s famous birthday serenade for the commander-in-chief John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962.
For her WKRP acting, Anderson earned two Emmy Award nominations and three Golden Globe nominations.
To this day, men who were young during WKRP’s four-season run from 1978 to 1982 still proudly express their preference for Jan Smithers (who played the brown-haired ingenue Bailey Quarters) over Anderson. They see themselves as virtuous by siding with the girl next door instead of the voluptuous platinum blonde.
The truth is, much like the TV characters who lusted after Marlowe, many men are intimidated by overt, confident sexuality. Whenever Marlowe playfully suggested she might submit to Tarlek’s goofy advances, the married sales manager hyperventilated. His bluff called, the ridiculous man who wore matching white belts and shoes was the dog who finally caught the car.
Because Tarlek was out of Marlowe’s league. Almost everybody was.
