WASHINGTON -- She plays the wheelchair-bound ballistics expert Annie on 'Houston Knights', a CBS-TV police drama about a couple of mismatched male cops. Her character is strong, funny, sexy and smart.
In a hotel suite in Washington, the city where she was born 50 years ago, the real Madlyn Rhue is actually all these things -- including physically challenged with multiple sclerosis.
She was diagnosed 10 years ago with the progressive disease that destroys the myelin coating around the nerves. Aside from confiding in her closest friends, like Suzanne Pleshette and Loretta Swit, she kept it as her own horrifying secret until just last September.
'People in Hollywood thought I was acting for attention. That I was putting it on,' says Rhue wryly. 'Because at first, I had said that I was in an automobile accident. Well, when some time passed people were thinking, 'OK Madlyn, throw the cane away already. Cut with the sympathy bit.'
'When I went to two canes, I told everyone it was an arthritic hip. When I went to the chair, I had to be truthful.' This fall she became a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and her story hit the press.
She insists with humor in her caramel eyes and a toss of her red hair that this is no 'poor-Madlyn' tale. Ironically, in Hollywood, a town where fitness is deemed the loftiest of virtues, Rhue is on a high in her career.
'Before I went public, my agent just couldn't get me a job. I had only four parts offered to me in three years. Casting people would say, 'Oh, she's walking with canes now. Hmm, no, that's not going to work. We have to have someone who can run. But we'll find something for Madlyn.'
'And my agent, bless his heart, would say, 'Don't do us any favors. We don't want any 'pity-poor-Madlyn-parts.''
This feisty actress has been a regular on the screen for more than three decades, appearing in 20 films and 200 TV shows, from 'Gunsmoke' to 'Dynasty' to 'Days Of Our Lives.' She received an Emmy nomination for 'The Nurses.'
'My visibility is not the type of visibility where people say, 'Oh my God, it's Cher,'' Rhue says with a husky laugh. 'It's more like 'Oh, you're what's her name.' And I say, 'I am. I'm what's her name.'' But that glorious day she auditioned for 'Houston Knights', Rhue was as red hot as a dancing Cher.
'I am notoriously known for being the world's worst reader. My mouth dries out from fear and my lip goes up like this,' Rhue pushes up the side of her mouth. 'I was really scared, but I wanted this part so badly.
'Well, I gave one of the best readings I've ever given in my life. Probably the first good reading in 15 years. I'm serious. And I got the part.' She takes a long sip of Perrier and her face appears both smug and serene.
'Because of the MS, my emotions are right on the surface. Parts of my body have no feeling, but the parts that do are hyper-sensitive. And right up top here', she brushes her long russet fingernails across the top of her pink blouse, 'are all those tears and all that anxiety, and those emotions were in the script. And I just gave a wonderful reading.'
Jay Bernstein, executive producer of 'Houston Knights', encouraged Rhue to go for the part. On the day of her audition, she remembers him leaning over, kissing her on the cheek and saying 'Hope this works, kid.' He said Rhue was just what he was looking for.
'This isn't charity, believe me,' said Bernstein in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. 'The primary thing is that she's the right actress for the right part.'
Bernstein, who has known Rhue for 20 years, is also the mega-manager who shaped the legendary ascents of Farrah Fawcett and Linda Evans. He sees star quality in Rhue: 'I believe that Madlyn is as fine as an actress as anyone I know. On the show, we don't talk about Madlyn being ill; she's just there as if she were standing.'
Rhue has heard from MS patients across America since her coming-out on 'Houston Knights'. Each letter is a fresh pierce to her emotions, so she can only deal with the correspence bit by bit.
'It's so overpowering,' she says, breaking up when she talks about one young father who reached out through the mail. 'I was feeling really good one day, and I opened up this letter. 'Dear Miss Rhue. I also have MS. I'm a father of three. My wife left me ...' Now I knew this wasn't going to be jolly time, and all the feelings got up here in my neck.
'He was writing for no other reason other than it made him feel good to know that somewhere, someone understood that every day he was in pain. He has to hide it from his children because he doesn't want them to think negatively of him. I mean, there was so much stuff in that one letter.'
Asked about her own pain, Rhue snaps, 'Yeah, I hurt every day, but so do you. Don't we all?'
It is estimated that more than a quarter-million Americans have multiple sclerosis, a chronic disorder of the central nervous system that strikes young adults in their prime. The first symptoms, such as double vision, weakness and slurred speech,generally occur between the ages of 20 to 40, and women patients outnumber men 3 to 2.
MS is most prevalent in the colder Northern regions of the country, and New York, Minnesota and Washington have the largest concentrations of persons affilicted. While medication may provide relief, there is no cure for the disease. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society has earmarked $7.6 million for 1988 to be spent on medical research.
Complete paralysis evolves in the most severe of cases, yet the disease is not fatal, a trait that is not necessarily a blessing. 'You don't die from MS. You have to learn to live with it, and that's harder,' says Rhue quietly.
'But I think this was meant to be. I'm supposed to be a regular on a TV program. I'm supposed to show that people who sit in wheelchairs are whole human beings in every way. I intend to be more successful than ever. I'd like to eliminate the words handicapped. Cripple. Gimp. All those words that are negative words.'
Rhue was born in Washington, D.C., the child of a broken home and two stepfathers. She lived in Baltimore and several other cities before settling in Los Angeles. 'I always had to pretend as a child because I didn't like my life, and I pretended it was something other than what it was,' she says. 'So of course I was going to end up in show business.'
A hasty quest for Mr. Right at a young age ended in marriage and divorce. Her natural parents have been dead since 1960, but she has a close relationship with an older sister who lives in Northern California. Rhue, who has no children, has never remarried, but the search goes on.
'I have to say there's a part of me that still hopes for Prince Charming. I mean, even though I'm 50, I've got to think that somewhere out there is a 36-year-old waiting for me,' she laughs raucously.
She used to play tennis three times a week. Now she exercises in a swimming pool to beat the numbing fatigue that is a constant with MS. A personal assistant tends to some details of her life but she lives alone in Beverly Hills, and drives a van. 'And I put my own wheelchair in the car, which I can do. It ain't easy, but I can do it.
'Because what's important to me is my independence.'
Some longtime friends suddenly fled her life when news of her MS surfaced, like her beau at the time: 'He's off in the dust somewhere faraway,' Rhue says sarcastically. Among those she counts as her most loyal comrades are Pleshette, Swit, Robert Blake and Sammy Davis Jr.
'I have absolutely no doubt that I will be out of this chair. I get out of it now. I have to get out of it at least once an hour for the circulation, and for the circulation up here,' she says, pointing to her head.
'What happens in life is your dream changes,' Rhue adds defiantly. 'The trick is not to stop dreaming. I still dream about dancing. I still dream about making love. I still dream about running on the beach. I still dream of that freedom. Because if you stop dreaming, you've given up.'
