Charlie’s Angels is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and actress Jaclyn Smith is celebrating the release of her new memoir. Jaclyn is now 80 years old, and in her new memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, she shared some unexpected details about working on the show that changed her life forever.
One of those unexpected details involves her co-star Tanya Roberts and a NSFW question she asked her during a flight to Hawaii.
In her book, Jaclyn explained that Tanya was very open about her sexuality.
Jaclyn made it clear that she didn’t see this as a bad thing. She actually really admired Tanya’s “honesty about her sexuality,” and found her “brave and self-aware,” per Page Six. But Tanya’s openness also led to a pretty unexpected proposition while they were traveling together.
In her memoir, Jaclyn mentioned how Tanya and her husband, Barry Roberts, had an open marriage. This wasn’t exactly a secret to the people who knew them. As Jaclyn described it, Tanya “wasn’t shy about it in the least, or about propositioning people to ‘swing’ with them,” per People.
So, knowing that, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that Jaclyn was among the people they asked to join them for a threesome. Jaclyn said Tanya asked her about this while they were on a plane together, on their way to shoot Charlie’s Angels. Ultimately, Jaclyn said she wasn’t interested, but she didn’t seem offended by the question.
Tanya died at the age of 65 in 2021.
Jaclyn also wrote about dealing with tons of negative rumors.
Some of those rumors were about her relationship with her co-stars. Based on what she wrote, the rumors that she and her co-stars were competing with each other and were envious of each other couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, they “stood by one another,” she wrote, according to an excerpt shared by People.
“(Tabloids) liked to perpetuate this idea that we were jealous of each other,” Jaclyn wrote. “Not true.”
The fact that these kinds of rumors emerged is not exactly shocking, given how much people seem to enjoy pitting women against each other. Jaclyn addressed this as well.
“Another rumor was that we fought each other for more screen time,” she continued. “It was just too predictable to try to pit women against each other. The truth was, we fought for each other to have less screen time.”
There were other issues on set, though.
Some of the other details Jaclyn included in her memoir make it clear that she’s not offering an overly rosy portrayal of her time on the show. During the final season of the show, there seemed to be a pervasive cocaine problem on set. Jaclyn wrote that she “never” tried cocaine, but it sounds like many people around her had.
“The more drug use I saw, the more time I spent in my motor home,” she wrote, per People. “I was in there a lot by the end of the series.” She added that she has “watched that drug, in particular, turn people into the worst version of themselves.”
Overall, though, the show’s success and impact is undeniable—even if it wasn’t necessarily expected. “People still send Charlie’s Angels pictures for me to sign every day,” Jaclyn told the publication. “Who would have dreamed the afterlife of Charlie’s Angels would be like this?”
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