On Screen: Brazen - Off Screen: Bashful

Though she's making a name for herself playing TV tarts, those characters make SANTA BARBARA's Jane Sibbett (Jane Wilson) blush.
By Michael Logan
Soap Opera Digest - May 19, 1987

The outside of Jane Sibbett's apartment building is enough to give anyone a migraine. Some nincompoop painted it a truly agonizing shade of bright pink and then topped it off with iron veranda gratings that are a disastrous turquoise. Sibbett did warn me about it when we spoke to confirm out interview time but, upon answering the door, she feels obliged to apologize again, mumbling that it all had something to do with the '84 Olympics.

Inside, it's quite a different story. Everything is light and airy and feminine. Tea is brewing, giant, fresh strawberries spill out of a basket and croissants are about to pop out of the oven. The hardwood floors shine better than they do on TV commercials, and over-stuffed country pillows, lots of them, are everythwere you turn. It's a working girl's hideaway, a refuge from the din of the outside traffic snarls and the even crazier hubbub of show business -- as comfortable and stylish as you can get and still save your dough. Sibbett clicks on her tape recorder -- this being her first interview ever, she wants it for posterity -- and blushes nearly the color of her building's offending paint job.
Actually, she blushes a lot. As a terminally red-faced teen, Sibbett felt so humiliated in her public school classooms that, in an effort to start fresh, she enrolled in an all-girls Catholic academy -- and she isn't even Catholic. Despite a few years of adulthood to her credit, she still turns shy at the drop of a hat. Basically, she hangs in there OK when playing SANTA BARBARA's plain Jane Wilson, the troubled girl with the trampy mom. But, when the character's alter ego or split personality or whatever it is takes over in the form of Roxanne, Sibbett has been known to break into tears of shame. Roxanne, you see, is a trollopy bar fly who just loves to pick up guys and re-enact the ice cube sequence from 9 1/2 Weeks -- and the costumes (corsets cut to the bully button and lingerie with little red riding hoods) have frequently unnerved the actress.
"I was in tears on the set one day," she admits. "They had Roxanne positioned upside down on a chaise lounge, talking on the phone. I was wearing this...thing...that would not stay up and would not stay down -- and there were twenty-five men on the set. I don't know where they came from."

While she describes most of the Roxanne frocks as "frighteningly trasy," they have proven to be a big hit on the SB set, and even Sibbett can manage an occasional snicker when the blushing ebbs. Once, when a super-sexy corset was called for in the script, she even volunteered to pick it out herself. Hightailing it down to West Hollywood's Trashy Lingerie boutique (kind of an upscale Fredick's of Hollywood, the store has a "Members Only" policy to discourage gawkers), Jane tried her best to describe her needs to the salesperson.
"I explained that my character was sort of disturbed...maybe slightly sadomasochistic," recalls the star, "and then the clerk said, 'Well, come into my S&M parlor,' whereupon I'm led into this room with all these whips and chains on the walls. They tried to interest me in these little leather handcuffs and I'm thinking, 'Uhhhh... I don't think so. Not even liberal L.A. would appreciate little leather handcuffs on a soap opera.' Finally, I went to The Broadway department store to find my corset -- and I told them it was for my mother."

The difficulty in describing Sibbett's raunchy Roxanne role doesn't lie just with the actress -- the SANTA BARBARA execs aren't even sure what's coming down. When the writers gave her little more to go on than the facts (at times of extreme emotional stress, Jane Wilson manifests another personality), the actress tried to make heads or tails. "I thought, for a while, that my character was schizophrenic but, when I researched that, it turned out to be a misnomer," she notes. "Then, I decided that multiple-personality syndrome was most likely what Jane had, so I played it that way." Some two months later, then-producer Mary Ellis Bunim got around to informing Sibbett that Jane's turning into Roxanne was really a conscious decision. "That," sighs the actress, "kind of changed what I'd been doing for a couple of months." To complicate matters further, the actress was then asked to play a scene in which Jane realizes she doesn't know why she becomes Roxanne, indicating it wasn't such a conscious habit, after all. "So," continues the star, "I guess it's a little bit of a mental disorder, but a little bit of a choice...it's kind of like an uncontrollable thing...kind of like alcoholism...it kind of pulls you under...or maybe anorexia or something like that."
Or maybe bad writing? Sibbett won't bite that bait -- but she does admit, "I know there are a lot of angry viewers when a story line is dropped or switched or confused, but the writers are working under such tremendous pressure that it's bound to happen occasionally. It would have been nicer had they more clearly defined the character for me -- or maybe I should have asked more questions from the beginning. Maybe it was my responsibility to find out what it really was. Maybe they weren't sure how far they wanted to go with it." In the long haul, it probably doesn't matter. Roxanne hasn't reared her head much at all, lately, causing Sibbett somewhat relunctantly to observe, "I guess she's in remission."
This isn't the first time the actress has played a tart -- she's practically a veteran at it. Despite her high, sweet-little-girl's voice and an offscreen image that's as well scrubbed as an Idaho potato, Hollywood has always seen her as a sexpot. While still a theater arts student of UCLA, Jane played a receptionist who caught the roving eye of lady-killer Jordy Clegg (Todd Curtis) on CAPITOL. "Then," the actress says, "I played a disgusting bimbo on THE FALL GUY. I was picking up boys. It was gross, just gross. It was embarrassing. I've never seen it and I don't want to. Then, carrying the theme a little bit further, I played a high-class hooker on SCARECROW AND MRS> KING."
She also landed what was to be a recurring role as secretary to Steven Carrington (played by Jack Coleman) on DYNASTY, but the offer to play Jane/Roxanne on SB intervened. Tempted by the more secure daytime contract, Sibbett gave up the maybe-we'll-see-her-maybe-we-won't nighttime gig. Looking back, it seems it was always in the stars for her to become a SANTA BARBARA resident.

Apparently, the soap's producers have made several attempts to hand her a role. Back in 1984, when the show was about to premiere, Jane tested for the part of Kelly Capwell, which eventually went to Robin Wright. Later, she tried but failed to win the Courtney Capwell part, which went to Julia Campbell. She's got no regrets about losing out on either, though (seemingly ignorant of the pure hell that resulted when they tried to get SB off the ground) Sibbett does allow, "I'm glad about the way it turned out, but it would have been fun to start off the show." After testing for the T.R. role on SEARCH FOR TOMORROW (eventually played by Jane Krakowski), the actress became a big favorite of NBC casting honcho Paul Decker -- so much so that he paid her to read opposite several hundred actors who were hungrily vying for a handful of network soap parts.

And that's how she met the man of her dreams, Larry Poindexter. Though it took a while for Cupid's arrow to strike (laughs Jane, "I'm sorry to say that I don't even remember his first audition"), there was no mistaking true love by the time Poindexter returned for a callback. "After his reading, we walked down to the parking lot together," Sibbett recalls. "I was pretty lonely at the time. We wound up talking for an hour and a half." Two years later, the match is still going strong.

Technically, they even acted on SANTA BARBARA together. Dex -- as he's know to buddies -- played Kelly Capwell's neighbor, psychiatrist/
saxophone player, Justin Moore, for a few weeks and, coincidentally, his last few days overlapped Jane's first. She blushes profusely at the very idea of discussing her romance with the press, though she acknowledges, "Well, it made the SANTA BARBARA newsletter, so I guess it's semipublic." And though this newcomer may be wrapping up her very first interview, she's already gotten savvy. When asked about the possibility of wedding bells in the not-too-distant future, Sibbett bats her baby blues and assures me, "My mom will be the first to know."