©1996 News America Publications, Inc. TV Guide is a registered trademark of TV Guide Financial, Inc., licensed to News America Publications Inc.

THE ELEMENTAL TERI
The Lois & Clark star conquers earth, air, fire, and water
BY MARK SCHWED

She can't leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Nor can she run faster than a speeding bullet. The special powers that Teri Hatcher possesses (over superheroes and mere mortals) are of an altogether different nature.

As smart and sassy Lois Lane on ABC's Lois & Clark, just the sight of her can make the Man of Steel weak in the knees. As the reigning sex kitten of cyberspace, her image sends hackers into irreversible downloading dementia.

Which is why TV GUIDE decided to do something we've never done. We hired four top photographers, along with a retinue of accomplished stylists and hair and makeup artists, and turned them loose on Hatcher, using Hollywood's legendary Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard as the backdrop. Each photographer would focus on a different element -- earth, air, fire, and water -- and a different aspect of Hatcher's personality.

Right now, Hatcher is soaked to the bone after posing for two hours in a heated pool. Other stars would probably commence whining, but Hatcher hasn't uttered a peep of protest. Instead, she's laughing. "You know what I was thinking?" she says, grinning as drops of water course along her gown. "I was thinking of being 80 years old. You know, being 80 and looking back on these pictures and laughing about the time when I was a quote-unquote glamorous babe, or this sexpot, or whatever it is. It really made me crack up. You know why? Because it's not me."

Figuring out who Teri Hatcher is isn't easy. You have to wade through what she calls her "multiple personalities" before you even crack the surface. "This is my Vegas personality," she says at one point, swaying her shoulders, pouting her lips, and winking her brown, come-hither eyes. "That's personality number 17 out of 26." Then she laughs again.

Hatcher's only half-kidding. She admits to being intense and demanding on the one hand and a goofball on the other. Her roles have matched her many sides, whether she's playing a sex-starved starlet in "The Big Picture," the woman with perfect breasts on Seinfeld, or a Cajun temptress in her latest feature, "Heaven's Prisoners."

"I am complex," she says. "Nobody knows the real me. People want everybody to be one thing. You know, glamorous, smart, stupid. But no one is one thing."

One thing she's not is shy. During a break in the photo shoot, she learns that Jerry Seinfeld, who wondered whether her breasts were real or fake in that now-famous Seinfeld episode, is in the hotel lobby. Hatcher leaves the Chateau Marmont garden and struts into the lobby barefoot, wearing an electric green micro-miniskirt and a skin-tight top. She gives Seinfeld a bear hug, then complains loudly: "So you're sitting on this plush couch and I'm digging in the mud." Seinfeld's jaw drops as he eyes her get-up.

"What's this?" he asks.

"Oh, it's my gardening outfit."

Photo credits: (Top) Hatcher by Alberto Tolot for TV Guide, (bottom) Hatcher by Lance Staedler for TV Guide

©1996 News America Publications, Inc.
TV Guide is a registered trademark of TV Guide Financial, Inc.

THE ELEMENTAL TERI

How did Hatcher turn into this blithe beauty? It wasn't as easy as she makes it look. A self-confessed nerd and wallflower, she says she was smothered as a young girl by her physicist father and computer-programmer mother. "I think my parents really had a very strong need for me in their life, so that my life was more about making them feel really good than making me feel really good. And I became really isolated by my parents. I still consider myself a loner."

There were also deeper problems, which she seems reluctant to discuss. This emerges when she is asked why she volunteers so much time working with teenage girls at the Aviva Center in Los Angeles, a treatment facility for abused, abandoned, and neglected adolescent girls. "In my own way, I understand the pain of abuse, and I guess that would be a specific connection to why I do that." She pauses. "There," she says, with a measure of relief. "I don't think I have ever said that before. That will be new."

Hatcher will delve no deeper into the details, only saying, "There wasn't a lot of consistency in terms of honesty in my childhood. It was just classic things, like saying, 'I love you,' then treating you another way. So I have a real sensitivity to mixed messages."

Which is why she enjoys talking to the girls at Aviva. There are no mixed messages, no half-truths. The teens pepper her with questions like, What is your relationship with your mother? What stars do you hate? What do you do with your money?

The last one, she says, is the easy one. "I don't have a fancy house or car or fancy jewelry, because I'm not really into that materialism. What I do spend my money on is really exotic trips. Like to Fiji. And one of the goals in my life -- and I know I'll never be able to do it -- is to be able to see the whole world."

Back at the pool, the photographer is snapping away and Hatcher is begging for someone to talk to her. Anyone. Even the cabana boy. But no one talks. They just watch. "This reminds me of when I was a child," she says. "I had to buy friends with Bubble Yum gum."

It wasn't until Hatcher was a sophomore in high school that she "bloomed."

"All of a sudden I was getting a different kind of attention," she says. Inside was the lonely girl with a mind for mathematics. Outside, the bombshell. It took quite a while for the inside to catch up with the outside.

"I feel sexy from the inside. That's a new thing for me," she says. "I think that happened after I turned 30. But sexy from the outside? That I don't get. When I think of sexy in women and men, it's not about having a perfect body. It's more about an essence."

Her husband, actor Jon Tenney, got his first glimpse of Hatcher's essence in action several years ago, at a dinner party. It was the kind of an evening where everyone was talking but no one was listening. So Hatcher walked over to a ficus tree and started talking to the leaves. Tenney saw her cutting up and fell in love. "He enjoyed my joke," she says happily. What does she see in him? "I just think he's so funny and intelligent and kind. Those elements are what made him sexy to me. And he's not bad looking, either."

In a perfect world, no one would dream of pigeonholing Hatcher as "the body" or "the brain." And that's the world Hatcher is hungry for.

"If we could just stop judging each other. Everyone is so hot to judge someone. Who are you and what are you about? Am I better than you? Am I worse than you? That is what we are trained to do. But what's the worth in that -- what is the worth in me knowing that I am better than you? Or worse than you? In the most idealistic world we would all understand that we all have something to offer."