by Anne Diffily

"A miracle on Broadway," proclaimed Newsweek in January, "—an American musical, with American jazz rhythms, American wise-cracks, an original American script not based on English poems or French novels. It's got singers who don't think they're in an opera, singing songs that aren't about the Weimar Republic or the reign of Louis Philippe.…(It) may be a sign that the American musical is at last fighting back against the wave of imports that have taken over the Broadway stage."

"One would have to travel back to the 1960s…to find a musical as flat-out funny," wrote an enthusiastic Frank Rich of The New York Times.

Variety called it "the sleeper hit" of the season. And James Barnhill, professor emeritus of theatre arts at Brown chimes in, "It's about time we had a good old American hit."

The show garnering these and other accolades is City of Angels, a double spoof of detective novels and the 1940s movies based on them. It's the result of a collaboration between writer Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the hit television series "M*A*S*H") and composer Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, Barnum).

Top billing among the show's stars goes to James Naughton '67, a veteran actor who has spent the past twenty years working on stage and in film and television. As the alter-ego creation—a private eye named Stone—of a novelist-cum-scriptwriter named Stine (played by Gregg Edelman) in this "movie"-within-a-play, Naughton cuts a Marlowesque figure in slouchy suit and fedora. In black, gray, and white movie-like scene, he barks gruffly at women, hangs a cigarette off his lip à la Sam Spade, tussles violently with a giant and a dwarf, and plays out a passel of Stine's writerly fantasies. Meanwhile, in full-color "real-life" scenes, Stine grapples with his troubled marriage and a megalomaniac movie mogul (played by René Auberjonois) who keeps messing with his script.

The play rollicks along on the strength of clever dialogue, exuberant songs, and characterizations that take off on old detective-movie clichés. "…In James Naughton's wonderfully wry performance," Frank Rich wrote, "[Stone is] a comic shamus who is the stuff that dreams are made of. Naughton himself describes Stone as "a wonderfully constructed character, a guy who talks tough and has a heart of mush. Even when his heart's broken by a girl, he has a quick rejoinder."

While this is not a role laden with social significance, it may well turn out to be the most important to date for the forty-four-year-old actor. Since graduating from Yale School of Drama in 1970, he has worked steadily—no mean feat in a cutthroat business. He was one of only two in his Yale class to be selected for a job with the Yale Repertory Theatre after graduation (the other was Henry Winkler, later famous as "The Fonz" on TV's "Happy Days"). Scarcely a year out of acting school, Naughton broke into the New York theater scene in a big way with a principal role (Edmund) in Arvin Brown's 1971 production of A Long Day's Journey Into Night, which also stared Robert Ryan, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Stacy Keach. The show received Theater World, New York Drama Critics, and Vernon Rice awards, and it brought Naughton a slew of offers.

Naughton shortly thereafter made his film debut in another destined-to-be-classic production, the 1972 movie The Paper Chase, in which he played Kevin Brooks, the self-doubting law student who commits suicide. The film, and Naughton's performance in it, were acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, and Naughton seemed poised on the edge of stardom. But after only a few more years in Los Angeles, during which time he acted in the television series "Faraday and Company" and "Planet of the Apes," Naughton made several decisions that for nearly two decades cemented him in the ranks of highly respected, but not instantly recognizable, actors: he moved to the East Coast, indulged his love for the stage, and refused work that would keep him away from home for more than a few weeks at a time. To date, he has never quite made that leap to stardom that would open up the meaty movie roles he envisions, that would forever liberate him from needing occasionally to do the televisions series work he feels, at best, ambivalent about.

This is why City of Angels, and the attention it has brought him, may mark a pivotal episode in Naughton's career. Soon after the rave reviews made the show a hit, Naughton told a New York Times reporter, "I'm still kind of shaking my head.…I've been waiting—I mean I've been working—for twenty years. I can't tell you the number of sure things that didn't make it. Then, all of a sudden, here it is. When something like this comes along, you say, 'This is what I've been working toward.'"

"I'm very happy for Jim," says James Barnhill, the man whom Naughton credits with pointing him toward an acting career. "He went through the fire to get here. It will give him the recognition in the theatre world that nothing else can give. He's earned it." Naughton, Barnhill adds, "has given up a lot" by staying on the East Coast. In show business, the actor who has the best shot at success is one who stays around Hollywood, "makes the rounds, and says, 'I'm available.' Most people try to parlay a role like Jim's in The Paper Chase into a big-time career. He didn't, and you have to commend that Jim put his family first."

Family is the key to everything else that has happened in Naughton's life. He married right out of Brown to his sweetheart of four years, Pamela Parsons, a Middlebury College graduate from is hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut. Today she is a psychiatric social worker. Several years ago, Naughton told a reporter that in his life so far he had done "one thing right—latching onto my wife. I can understand the dilemma people go through these days, wondering if they want to marry at all or if this person is the right one," Naughton added. "But for Pamela and I, the decision made itself. It was intense and passionate and great and the best way to go about it."

By the time he was twenty-five, Naughton and his wife had two children, Gregory, born in 1968, and Keira, in 1971. He speaks proudly and affectionately of them, noting that both love the theatre (Greg, who has been active in theatre at Middlebury and will be graduating this year, has been asked to read for a movie part). "They were literally brought up backstage," Naughton says. "When I did I Love My Wife [another Cy Coleman musical] on Broadway for fifteen months, I think Greg saw it about thirty times."

It was his intense love and concern for his kids that led Naughton to leave the land where stars are made and return his family to Connecticut. "When we lived in Los Angeles, I realized that my kids were outdoors all the time—the weather was always nice," Naughton recalls. "But that meant that the only thing that was important to them was dirt bikes and skateboards. Among their friends, there were a lot of unhappy kids from broken homes. I said to myself, 'This is not a healthy environment.'

"At the same time, my wife had a very elderly grandmother in Connecticut, and I wanted our kids to know her. You can't just say, 'Well, someday we'll do that,' because someday they may not be around anymore. We had a large extended family back here that I wanted my children to be exposed to, and we were spending a lot of money flying back for Christmas and summer vacations.

"And, finally, I wanted to work on the stage. The thing that really made up my mind was that I kept running into people in L.A. who said, 'Yeah, we want to move back East, too.' One of my neighbors was raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. He told me, 'I can't wait to go back East.' I said, 'Really? How long have you been out here?' And he said, 'Let's see; nineteen years.' Nineteen years! I thought, 'Oh my god, I've got to get out of here.'

"So we sold our house in L.A. and bought a 200-year-old farmhouse we still live in [in Weston, Connecticut]. I determined that if I had to, I would go out to L.A. to work. And I've done that, but I've never been away from home for more than two or three weeks at a time. There were other jobs I didn't take, particularly Broadway musicals, because they usually went on the road for anywhere between a month and a year before coming to New York."

Naughton kept getting roles, on the stage in New York and environs, on television, and in some movies. His alumni file at Brown is now stuffed with headlines such as these: "James Naughton Prefers Living in Connecticut," and "'Trauma' [Center, a television series] lured Naughton from Connecticut." His stage credits include several Broadway productions in addition to City of Angels: the musical I Love My Wife and the drama Who's Life Is It Anyway?, in which he co-starred with Mary Tyler Moore. Off-Broadway he appeared in Mike Nichols's production of E.L. Doctorow's Drinks Before Dinner, among other plays; and he has had many leading roles with regional theatre companies.

Naughton has had modest success on the big screen. In addition to The Paper Chase, his credits include an adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel, Cat's Eye with Drew Barrymore; The Good Mother with Diane Keaton; and The Glass Menagerie, in which he played the Gentleman Caller. That 1986 film, directed by Paul Newman and co-starring Joanne Woodward, Karen Allen, and John Malkovich, grew out of a summer performance with the same company (Barnhill calls it "the ideal cast" for the play) at the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theatre Festival, where Naughton has been a regular for many years. Since The Glass Menagerie collaboration, the Naughtons and the Newmans, who are neighbors in Connecticut, have become good friends. (A class note sent in by Naughton three years ago includes the off-hand information that "I will be attending the [Cannes film] festival with my wife, Pamela, and the Newmans." One had to read on to realize that, yes, it was those Newmans.

Then there is television. Naughton sighs a little when this medium comes up. The sighs aren't so much for his TV movie work, which has included starring roles in CBS Playhouse 90's "Look Homeward Angel" with Geraldine Page, and in Antigone with Genevieve Bujold. But Naughton waxes cynical when it comes to his series work. He has starred in several, most of them short-lived: "Raising Miranda," "Trauma Center," "Who's the Boss?," "Making the Grade," "Planet of the Apes," and "Faraday and Company." In many cases, the jobs have meant weekly coast-to-coast commutes for Naughton.

"You always go in there with the best of intentions," Naughton says. "But what happens to you in Sitcomland is that they take a decent premise and they force you into a format that makes you want to gag." Acting in TV series, he says, "pays the bills and keeps the kids in school. There's a reason to do it, but it's not a lot of fun. It's tough when you can't be proud of your work.

"'Planet of the Apes' back in 1974 is a good case in point. I had turned down the role for about three or four weeks. But I finally got to the point where I had a rent payment that was two weeks overdue, and I had about $300 left in the bank, and I had a wife and two kids. So I said yes. We made the series for about five months, and that was it. I made a very dear friend in Roddy McDowell." And a good sum of money. "Sitcoms are very seductive," Naughton adds. "You work from 10 to 5, four or five days a week. You work for two to three weeks, then take a week off. It's a wonderful schedule. And they pay you ridiculous amounts of money. But they're just not rewarding; they don't do anything for your soul."

Still, as Naughton reminds himself, "Actors love variety. We live and die by it. Pam was asked years ago what it's like to be married to an actor and she answered, 'There's no security, but it's not boring.' When I've made a bunch of money in a TV movie, I've been able to say, 'Okay, now I can do an off-Broadway play.' I can do something for art's sake because the bills are paid. Then another time I can't do a play; I've got to make some bread, and that means a TV pilot or a series or a movie. Acting is always a mixture of the art and the commerce. It used to be that I always most wanted to do what I wasn't doing at the moment. If I was doing a play, I'd be thinking, 'God I wish I were doing a movie,' and if  was doing a movie, I'd say, 'Boy, to be up on the boards.' I've learned over the years to enjoy what I'm doing at the time."

He winces when asked if he considers himself a success. "That's the kiss of death—to say you're successful," Naughton demurs. "There certainly aren't any laurels yet that I'd like to rest on. But I'm a working actor. I've had good roles. If you asked me twenty years ago what I wanted to be, I'd have said, 'The best actor I can be.' And I still think that's true."

Many years before that, when he was a young Cub Scout in West Hartford playing the part of King Author in a skit, Naughton had already been bitten by the bug. "My mom brought seven or eight women from my hometown to see me in I Love My Wife on Broadway," he recalls, "and they couldn't wait to tell me, 'Jimmy, when you were six years old, I asked you what you wanted to be, and you said, " I wanta be an actor."' And I guess that's true."

Naughton was active in choral and dramatic groups in high school, and had lead roles in musicals: Billy Bigelow in Carousel, Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun. "And I was a sixteen-year-old Emile De Becque in South Pacific," he recalls with a wry smile. "I came upon a picture of that the other day. God, I looked like a baby with some white stuff in my hair!"

Naughton continued to sing at Brown, where he was a member of the first Jabberwocks and then of the Bruinaires, both a cappella groups. (In a 1977 interview in The New York Times, he described that as "the college kind of stuffed-shirt octet thing.") But he was better known as an athlete who played on several of Cliff Stevenson's NCAA contender soccer teams in the mid-sixties, and who played baseball for two years.

Naughton remembers precisely when he was lured back to the theater and began to consider that it might be his life's work. "In November of my junior year, in 1965, I wandered into the Faunce House Theatre one night on my way to the library," he says. "They were holding audition for Guys and Dolls, and I was sitting with my friend Judy Pulver ['67]. When Jim Barnhill said, 'Okay, who's next?' Judy did one of these [points to his head] to me. Jim said, 'Come on up.' I explained that I wasn't there to audition, but he said, 'Don't be shy. What have you done? You must have done something.' I told him I had done some high-school musicals, so he said, 'Sing a song from one of them.' I got up and sang 'The Girl That I Married' from Annie Get Your Gun, and them Jim had me read for him."

Barnhill asked Naughton if he were a freshman. "No, a junior," was the reply. "Where the hell have you been?" Barnhill demanded. Naughton said he had been playing soccer and baseball, to which Barnhill responded, "Oh, you're one of those." And offered Naughton a part in the play. "I said to him, 'To tell you the truth, I can't.'" Naughton recalls. "We were about to go to the NCAA soccer tournament and there was no way I could do both. Jim made me promise to come back and see him when soccer season ended."

Barnhill knew the young athlete had acting potential. Of the college-era Naughton, he says, "He was good-looking, had a good voice, had a good presence." When they finally got together that January, Naughton recalls that the theatre veteran told him, "you know, I think if you wanted to, you could do this."

"What do you mean, 'do this'?" Naughton said. "Do you mean, do this? For a living?"

"Yeah," said Barnhill.

"But how do I get there from here?" Naughton wondered.

"First, you take my course," Barnhill replied. "Then, in eighteen months you go to Yale Drama School."

Naughton promptly signed up for Barnhill's course in acting and play production, English 23-24 (now Theatre Arts 23-24). He also began landing roles in Sock and Buskin productions, among them Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice. After considering international relations, history, and political science, he majored in English. And then he went to Yale.

After only two days at Yale, Naughton said to himself, " 'This is it.' I realized I was where I belonged, and I was so relieved. The whole time I was at Brown I never had a direction. I used to envy the engineering majors, who had a plan. But when I finally got myself to Yale, it made my life a lot simpler."

After Yale, he joined Yale Repertory for a season. "While I was there," he recalls, "I was in possibly the worst production of Macbeth that has ever been done. Every time I say that, another actor will say, 'Oh, no no no, I was in the word production of Macbeth!' I guess there haven't been many good productions of it. The concept of this one was that it took place in the Bronze Age, so we were running around on stage in furs with clubs. It was not good. It was not a happy moment." He shakes his head woefully.

"We closed that play on a Saturday night, and I went to work in New York on A Long Day's Journey into Night the following Monday. That was like walking out of the fires and into the clouds. It was terrific, a landmark production, and everybody in the business saw it."

Now Naughton is back in New York, and feeling good about it. As this is being written, he and his agent are negotiating an extention of his six-month contract with City of Angels. "It's just great to be in a hit," Naughton emphasizes. "It's so much fun. Last week I walked into a restaurant and Paul Sorvino jumped up and grabbed me and said, 'Jimmy, God, I saw the show, it's wonderful, you're wonderful.' We'd never met before, and that's kind of nice. Everybody in the business has come to see the play. Last night Steven Spielberg was there, and last week Lauren Bacall came backstage to my dressing room. It's fun."

His aspirations are varied, and not all career-related, although in that respect the former Brown baseball player has one specific hope: "There are a lot of baseball movies out. I'd love to get into one of them." He allows that any really good movie role would be a nice follow-up to his current Broadway star turn. Away from the limelight, Naughton has somewhat more adventurous goals, one of them directly related to his friendship with Paul Newman.

"A couple of years ago I went to West Virginia to a race track, and spend a couple of days in a car with an instructor," Naughton says. "It was a blast, and I'd love to do it some more. Up until now, I've had neither the time nor the money to devote to it. But Newman drove his first professional race at age forty-seven, so I've still got a couple of years." In a replay of Naughton's portentous first meeting with Jim Barnhill, the driving instructor said, "I think you'd be good at this," and asked Naughton to be the third driver on his summer driving team. Acting commitments kept him from fulfilling his instructor's prophecy then, but he still speaks reverently of the thrill of racing: "It's a combination of wanting to go fast, and having some judgment."

Another skill Naughton would like to develop is flying. "Flying lessons might be in my future," he says. "But that's another thing, like racing, that you have to have time for. So this spring, it will be golf, I think, while I'm doing this play." Still lean and athletic, he also plays squash and racquetball, and works out with weights.

"There's a lot of stuff I still want to do," Naughton says. "And we've got a lot of time to do it. The plan has always been that the kids would be gone [his youngest is now in college] and Pam and I would be in our early forties. And here we are. I would say that at the moment, things are very, very good in my life."

In City of Angels, Naughton's gumshoe character Stone sings a song called "Ev'rybody's Gotta Be Somewhere." Right now, Jim Naughton is right where he wants to be: on stage, in a hit, with his personal and professional life in order. And, maybe, just around the corner lies the big movie role that will elevate him to loftier heights of stardom and, more importantly, bring him even more control over his career.

But in the meantime, Naughton says, "I couldn't be happier. Some people in show business take their careers too seriously, but I've always considered my career to be a part of my life, not my whole life. So I'm very, very lucky. I've got a terrific family, and they're all healthy and happy. Life is sweet."