Delta Burke is sitting in the fabled Polo Lounge, defending the remainder of her club sandwich (”I`m going to play with it a little more”) from an overly eager busboy, and talking about the price of relative fame.
”I`ll be trooping into the supermarket wearing a smock or somethin`, no face, and I`m buyin` some soda, and people will stop me and say, `God, you don`t look like much, do you? You look a lot nicer on the television.` One woman from back home told me, `How come your boobs are so big on TV? You didn`t used to have them.` Or, `You`re getting little tiny lines all over your face now. That`s too bad. You were so pretty.` One guy at an affiliates`
meeting was asking me these really intimate questions. He actually told me, `I can ask you anything I want. You`re public property.` I thought, `Is that how they see me? Just some public thing to be played with–tormented like a pet mouse?` ”
Whatever the perception, the public has seen her this season as one of the four stars of ”Designing Women,” CBS` fledgling, bitchy-repartee sitcom that was unceremoniously shelved by the network in January, quickly resurrected in early February after a letter-writing barrage by the public, and yanked again late last month from its Sunday night slot. A network spokesman, however, said six more episodes of the show have been produced, so it will return to the schedule this spring.
In ”Designing Women,” Burke plays flamboyant Suzanne Sugarbaker, the thrice-married, thrice-divorced sexpot and the ”front person” of the Atlanta interior-decorating firm founded by her sister, Julia, a widow with a Bette Davis sardonicism played by Dixie Carter. (Also in the cast are Annie Potts as an insecure divorcee who put her sexist swine of a husband through medical school, and Jean Smart as the lovable dingbat of an office manager.) A man-hungry solipsist, Suzanne tosses out lines like, ”Will the male species never cease to be fascinated by me?” and wears outfits described by a colleague as ”looking like it was chosen by some color-blind pimp.” ”If sex were fast food,” her sister tells her, ”there`d be an arch over your bed.”
The character, says the 30-year-old Burke (herself a former Miss Florida), is a former Miss Georgia, as contrasted with Kathleen Beck, the lascivious, mendacious widow and onetime Miss Mississippi she played on
”Filthy Rich,” the 1982-83 CBS sitcom also created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. It was a part she remembers with affection–unlike the one in ”The Chisholms,” CBS` short-lived 1980 soap-opera western about a Virginia family heading out to California with a wagon train.
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”I crossed the frontier and I was always pregnant. All I was required to do was look at the baby and look at my husband. I really hated it. I had to drag this doll around with me for months, and they always kept its face covered, and it never grew. I just wanted to lose that doll so bad–drop it out of the wagon or somethin`.”
Back to Ms. Sugarbaker. ”I don`t think she`s intentionally cruel. There are women out there who are so into themselves they may not realize they`re being a bitch. She`s also one of those women who was raised to think if you want something, have the men get it for you. So all her talent has been honed into snaring or seducing someone and then tricking him into giving her anything she wants. I know people have given me a hard time. My own mother is so upset because I haven`t learned how to use men. Well, it`s just not my nature. I get upset with them and let loose, and there goes the fur coat out the window.”
Delta Ramona Leah Burke was reared in Orlando, Fla., where her mother was a housewife and her stepfather a realtor. Delta, she wants you to know, is her actual name. ”The true matter is–it`s a stupid story, and my family hates to hear it–that my mother had been given a cat named Delta that was found in the Gulf in Mississippi, and when I was born, my brother came in and said I reminded him of it.
”Ever since I was very little, I needed to be `somebody.` I loved to perform. I was always runnin` around barefoot in costumes in the swamps and woods. Later, at Colonial High School, I didn`t care about anything except drama club. I cut classes to do modeling and beauty pageants and snip ribbons. It was a special world I`d found, which was lucky because I didn`t fit into the other environment at all.”
At 16 she had started participating in the pageants, eventually winning 18 titles. ”I was a local legend in my own time in Orlando. It`s weird, but I was kind of an inspiration to others. In fact, contestants even hunt me down now in L.A.–like I was an aging elephant or somethin`.
”My first title was Miss Flame for the local fire department, and then I was Miss Florida Flame. I wore a lot of red and rode firetrucks and slid down poles. Some of the others were Miss Jamboree Queen and Miss All-American Girl. I was also Miss Orlando Action Princess.” Burke grins. ”I never did figure out what that meant.”
At 17 she was named Miss Orlando and then Miss Florida, moving on to the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. ”My talent was Anne Boleyn in the Tower of London before she was beheaded. (I didn`t do Joan of Arc, because it`d been done too much.) I designed my own costume and I cried real tears. I won talent in Orlando and talent and swimsuit in Miss Florida, and I won talent in Miss America, but I didn`t get top 10 and I was just devastated.
”The thing about all these pageants, no one had a sense of humor–which caused great problems for me. Other girls would say, `I want to bring world peace and work with underprivileged children.` (They were so phony about it. I mean, they couldn`t all want to be doin` that.) And then I`d get up there and say, `I want to go to Hollywood and become a big movie star.` I just couldn`t lie about it.”
After Atlantic City, it was on to England, where she studied for two years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, and then out to Hollywood, where she was cast as the Scarlett O`Hara-like lead in the TV movie ”Charleston,” and later appeared in ”The Chisholms” and ”Filthy Rich,” as well as the HBO football comedies ”1st and Ten” and ”Training Camp.” Now, predictably, she says she`d like to try different kinds of roles. ”I get tired of being the fluff with the cleavage, being ditsy and all that. I mean, I`ve done Lady Macbeth and Blanche (Dubois) and got great reviews.”
As for her personal future: ”I`m very independent. Chances are I`ll be supporting myself the rest of my life because I don`t want to give up my career. If I marry, it has to be to a man who can really take pride in what I do and not feel threatened, and I haven`t found someone like that yet. And if I can`t, I`d just as soon end up some odd little old lady. The most I`m looking for is a nice guy to share things with. At the moment, combining motherhood and a career doesn`t appeal to me. I do think I`d be a very good mother, though.” Another grin. ”As long as I didn`t have to give birth to it myself.”