Morgan Tries Her Luck In Hollywood

One rainy day some time ago, country star Lorrie Morgan was sitting at her mother’s house looking out a window at a willow tree.

“The sun came out,” Morgan remembers, “and it was shining on the willow tree, and it looked like there was a bunch of diamonds on there. But I knew it was just a big illusion. It reminded me of a relationship I was in: Just all illusion.”

The striking widow of the late country singer Keith Whitley and recent sometime date of new Tennessee Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, Morgan nevertheless isn’t the overly demure type who beats around the bush much with anybody, including herself.

Accordingly, in recently acquiring herself a new Nashville manager and a new Hollywood agent, she looked realistically inward and adopted a new attitude regarding the West Coast.

“I think it’s time to spread my wings,” reflects the 35-year-old performer who long has harbored Hollywood hopes. “‘I’m not getting any younger. It’s time to act on my dreams now.

“So Susan (Nadler, her Nashville manager) and myself went out to Los Angeles for media and met with my new agent. He’s the first movie agent that I’ve had. We told him basically what we were looking for in a movie - more drama, good movies, important parts - and two days later he called me with a part for an ABC Movie of the Week called ‘The Enemy Within.’

“It’s a small role, but it’s a start.”

Small? Certainly not insignificant - Morgan has third billing in the company of TV thespians Gerald McRaney (“Major Dad”) and Tiffany-Amber Thiessen (“Beverly Hills 90210”). In the upcoming ABC production, she plays the best friend of the wife of a seemingly perfect husband, who turns out to be a Peeping Tom and a rapist.

The role is somewhat small compared to what Morgan admits she hopes it leads to: Hollywood’s silver screen, a long-held fantasy whose possibility looks much more tangible now than it might have a month ago.

“She’s going to make it,” her Hollywood agent, Joe Rice of the Abrams Agency, says. “I think she’s a viable commodity. This is the beginning of something.”

She is, he notes, “a good-looking woman” who has “hit records” and “a following” that could positively affect a production’s TV ratings.

But he adds the hit records merely got him in the door; Morgan had to have talent. Rice says he took the ABC producers a copy of a lowbudget movie titled “Proudheart” in which she starred a couple of years ago on The Nashville Network. The TNN tape showcased her acting ability effectively enough that it helped her get the ABC part, Rice says.

Rice adds that he knew he only had small windows of time to work with because of Morgan’s country concert itinerary. The singer, a professional since her teens, indicates she has no plan to dump Music City for Tinseltown. This is, after all, the woman whose first major record contract ended after she refused to turn her back on her long associations with stars of the Grand Ole Opry, of which her father was a cast member long before she was. Her record company at the time didn’t consider the Opry “cool.”

The ABC movie shouldn’t be taken as a vehicle for moving her Hollywood aspirations to the front burner, she says. Rather: “I think I would call it the next step.”

Her ultimate film goal? She isn’t one to dream small. She says she hopes for a part like Whitney Houston’s in “The Bodyguard.” Morgan’s choice of that particular model seems significant. Houston, after all, remains a singer, one who is big box-office on both stage and screen.

Meanwhile on her eastern front, Morgan of late has made some moves designed to increase her Nashville profile as well. Partly at the suggestion of her record company, BNA, she parted ways with producer Richard Landis in favor of James Stroud, who currently produces such Nashville stalwarts as Tim McGraw, Clay Walker and Clint Black.

“A few names were thrown out to me by the record label and Susan, and the name that showed up the most was James Stroud,” Morgan explains. “Because James isn’t producing a female at this point, and because I’m a fan of a lot of his records and the way he produces, I figured that was the best way to go.”

Her first work with Stroud appears on her new “Greatest Hits,” released by BNA Records on Tuesday.

The package includes three previously unreleased Stroudproduced singles: a new composition by veteran hit songsmith Paul Davis titled “Back in Your Arms Again”; a Billie Jo Spears classic titled “Standing Tall,” which Morgan pulled from her firsthand knowledge of country oldies; and the current “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength,” which is in the upper reaches of the country hit charts.

She describes it as “an anthem for women.”

“I think it’s pretty autobiographical,” she says. “I think that’s what attracted me to it. A lot of us have lived that way, didn’t know where our strength came from until we had to use it.”

She and Stroud are scheduled to return to the studio in September to begin work on her all-new next collection, she says. Morgan wrote two of the songs they plan to record. One, “Charlie and Betty,” isn’t autobiographical, she says, while the other, “Diamonds From a Willow Tree,” is.

The latter came from that day at her mother’s, she says, when she was looking out the window reflecting on a former relationship that was more show than substance.

She says she has been doing “quite a bit” of songwriting recently. And is working on “three or four” songs by herself.

“It’s real hard for me to find somebody I feel comfortable sitting down with (to co-write),” she says. “I wrote ‘Warpaint’ with Tom Shapiro, but Tom was sent what I had on the song and he put some finishing touches on it, so although he cowrote the song with me, we didn’t actually sit down and do it together.

“That’s just a very hard thing for me. I’m not comfortable with a lot of people, telling ‘em my feelings and stuff that intimately. It’s a very tough thing, I guess, unless you find somebody you really trust who won’t go ‘Phffft! That’s a stupid line!’

“It’s like taking your clothes off in front of somebody. You don’t want to take ‘em off in front of just anybody. They might laugh at you. Unless you’ve got somebody you don’t feel so dang vulnerable with, it ain’t gonna work.”

Morgan’s exterior manner connotes abundant strength, but her feelings lie close to the surface, a combustible combination that should make her attractive to filmmakers. On-camera since her career’s earliest days, when she was singing on an early-morning Nashville television show, her presence has been the dramatic one of a star.

Dolly Parton recognized that quality more than a decade ago and recommended Morgan to her Hollywood manager at that time.

Rice says many people he associates with are aware of Morgan, even though they don’t listen to country music. He hopes that rather than the week-or-two windows her 1995 schedule allows him, in ‘96 she will be off the concert trail throughout the whole of January, February and March, and he can pitch her for larger movie projects.