Midwest Today, June 1998

ROBERT URICH: SAILING INTO CALMER WATER

His inspiring story of triumph over life-threatening illness

Temporarily bald from the chemotherapy, Robert unselfconsciously went pubic with his illness as an inspiration to others. Slowly, he fought his way back to health. Now, fully recovered and with a full head of hair, Bob is enjoying life again.

Recently Urich signed on as Captain of "The Love Boat: The Next Wave," the new, up-dated version of the popular one-hour series from producer Aaron Spelling.

Recipient of Emmy and Cable Ace awards, Urich is proud of his work. But he admits that in the past, "I had created a lifestyle that I could afford but was predicated on my working all the time, and taking jobs I didn't want to take." He told TV Guide, "I don't know how it got out of control. But it turned into a runaway train."

After the cancer struck, Robert and his family decided to sell their 8,900-square-foot mountain home in Park City, Utah, and move into more modest surroundings.

His wife Heather, a former actress who played Louisa in the movie "Sound of Music," and their two teenagers, Ryan and Emily, were strong supporters during the grueling ordeal of Bob's illness.

Robert recalls that after the diagnosis, for awhile he "could not get through a sentence without crying." Soon, however, he had re-established enough equilibrium to face this life-threatening challenge head-on.

During his nine-day chemotherapy cycles, Urich underwent four hours of preparatory drugs, then had a Walkman-size device full of chemical agents strapped to his waist and hooked into a surgically implanted port in his chest. For the rest of the day and night, drugs were administered into his body, straight to his heart, attacking the cancer and reducing the production of red and white blood cells.

When his hair began falling out in clumps, his family turned it into a playful event. Bob sat on the patio drinking a beer while his son took an electric clippers and sheared his dad's scalp as Heather took pictures. "We all laughed, and it demystified it," Urich recalls.

Best friend and business partner Dyrk Halstead says Robert "has risen above it. He's not bitter or resentful of the disease. It's just another challenge to overcome."

Though he is not considered cured until ten years have lapsed without a recurrence, Robert's prognosis is excellent. He received over 50,000 letters of encouragement for his ordeal and now serves as the 1998 National Spokesperson for the American Cancer Society.

A surprisingly accessible celebrity, the big, strapping, 51-year-old Robert Urich is well-read and given to philosophical pronouncements. But he's also a "regular guy" and outdoor enthusiast. He's highly likable, and this is seen also in the large number of fans who respond to his web site to wish him well. (http://www.roberturich.com)

We understand you were born in Toronto, Ohio
Right. It's a small town about 39 miles west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It's the Tri-state area of the Pennsylvania, West Virginia panhandle and across the river into Ohio. It's an industrial area: coal mines, brickyards, steel mills. As a matter of fact they shot portions of Robert DeNiro's feature of a few years ago called, "The Deer Hunter" there. So that sort of would tell you what it looks like. Blue collar all the way. My father worked in the steel mills all of his life. You know, God-fearing, extremely sound work ethic and good folks. That's the kind of stock I come from.

Did you know when you were growing up that someday you would want to pursue an acting career?
Yes. From the very beginning. I was strange. I know that most people cock an eyebrow when I say this, but I can remember being an infant in a crib, not having the benefit of speech and seeing light come through a venetian blind in through the window and strike the wall and the floor of my parents' bedroom and was aware of the way that light made me feel. And I knew that someday that those feelings and how I felt about that sort of thing would be important in the work that I chose to do.

It turned out that I was a fairly decent athlete. I always loved playing. We played roughhouse football for hours all day Saturday in vacant lots across from where I lived, there was little league baseball and track. And so because I was an athlete and captain of my high school football team and all that sort of thing, it was okay that I would leave the track after running the 120-yard high hurdles in my sweats, run across the street to the school auditorium and rehearse for the play. I was also the choir master for the school choir. So I was always interested in the arts, and music and the performing arts.

I knew even then that I would someday find my way into the performing arts.

You attended school in Florida, and also in Michigan. What did you major in?
I got a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Communications at Florida State University where I attended on a football scholarship, and Bobby Bowden, who's the head coach now, was our offensive coordinator then. Upon graduation I went to Michigan State University where I got a degree in Broadcast Research and Management. So I'm not just another pretty face, Larry. [laughing]

Somebody told me that you at one point had been an account representative for WGN in Chicago. Is that true?
Yes. Upon graduation from Michigan State, I went to work for WGN as an ac-count executive and ultimately became head of their research department. I was responsible for interpolating information from the American Research Bureau and the A.C. & Nielsen Company and creating 'random stratified samples to target the areas of dominant influence' so that we could skew programs to attract the most effective target audiences for our buyers. But that's a technical explanation.

Translated, that means the lowest common denominator. Right?
I was selling stuff, yes. I was giving salesmen information to sell clients. After about a year of that I realized that was not what I wanted to do.

We know your first TV series was "Vegas," was it not?
No. It was not. My first series was a half-hour comedy based on the successful motion picture, "Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice," and I played Bob. It was for ABC and we did 13 episodes early on. I was with Ann Archer - who's become a movie star - and David Spielberg and Anita Gillette. The network sort of got cold feet and diluted the whole idea.

I remember being very naive about ratings and what all they meant. The first night that we were on we were up against "Sonny & Cher" in their prime. It was a big hit at the time. On the other channel was John Wayne -"Salute to America," and John Wayne hosted this special with Bob Hope and had the President at the time, Richard Nixon on and Lucille Ball. And so we got buried. We got like a 12-share, and I said "Wow! Great! What's that mean?" and my agent said, "Well, a 35 would have been fine."

That's why I had never heard of it.
[Laughing] You're probably not the only one who's never heard of it!

Tell us what it is about acting that appeals to you so much.
You know, I'm not sure that it does anymore to tell you the truth. My whole life as an artist and as a human being has been about the truth and I think that's what is most appealing. [Acting is] about the pursuit of the truth. Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, said that "all true things must change and only that which changes remains true." So if you're pursuing the truth as an artist, as an actor, as a human being you're growing. You're changing. It's not always comfortable, it's not always fun, often times it's pushing the edge of your comfort zone, but it's really about growing as a human being. And when you are acting properly you are forced in essence to become a better human being.

You had high hopes for "Lazarus Man" and then something happened to you personally that really was just devastating for awhile. You probably get tired of talking about that, but could we touch on that a little bit?
Yeah we can. It was extraordinary that most people don't know that getting a pilot on the air and bought by a network is extremely difficult to do. It's a one in a million shot and then to have the show become a success and then to get picked up for a second year, you're almost assured a pay day beyond imagining. And that's where I found myself when I discovered this lump in my body.

[It threw into question] everything I believed to be true up until that time - if you worked hard and you were responsible and virtuous, that good things would happen to you. Suddenly I was faced with a catastrophic, life-threatening illness: an extremely virulent form of cancer that was in stage four. I was lucky enough to find some internationally renowned doctors in this kind of cancer treatment who took some steps very aggressively to treat it. I went through nine months of sheer hell. It was six major chemo courses that ran nine days in a row, a month of radiation, two major surgeries.

But today I find myself cancer-free with a full head of hair, feeling good, running on the treadmill, playing golf and pursuing all sorts of activities, not just acting. I'm also involved in other sorts of businesses, using other kinds of talent that have sort of been dormant for a long time.

Of course, it's hard for anybody to really imagine what they would do or feel or say or think if they were confronted by this awful prospect of cancer. How did you confront your fears?
Well a long time ago I realized that I had to take responsibility for my own life, that as soon as you place blame for any misfortune that you have, you make yourself a victim and you surrender any personal power that you might have.

There's a writer that I recently was reading (Kathleen Brehony, "Awakening at Midlife.") that said - and many people have said this in different ways - we can't always control our destiny, we really can't always control what happens to us, stuff happens, but we can always control how we react to what happens to us. With a loving family, lots of support from my friends, I just chose to take charge of what was happening to me, not to be a victim, not to feel sorry for myself. There wasn't any room, I didn't think, for any of those kinds of emotions.

I was frightened, no doubt about it, but I took a very businesslike, positive approach to getting the job done of being treated and in a very organized way. I contacted friends who were physicians and I found the best doctors in the world - and I was lucky to have the resources to find all those people and have them at my disposal. So it was a matter of choice.

There's a very wonderful line in "popular culture." Kevin Costner in this movie, "Tin Cup" - it was out last year - he turns to Cheech Moran and says, "There comes a time in your life where either you define the moment or the moment defines you." I just chose to define it with dignity. I've always played these characters who were capable and who were up to the task and I thought "Well, it's time to display some of that character and some of those traits and let's see if I can't get through this in a positive way."

And what it's turned out to be is a life-changing event. I now travel all over the country speaking to large groups about survivorship and taking positive approaches to solving major problems in your life. It's become a major part of my career now.

That's a wonderful success story. Is there anything you want to leave people with about the subject of cancer?
That it is survivable, it's not the same disease that we were faced with even a decade ago. Ten years ago they would have sent me home to die, quite frankly, but through research and technology they've developed treatments that work. We have to keep supporting cancer research and cancer treatment. Every day I get calls and letters and e-mails from people that have said "I'm a 20-year survivor," "I'm a 15-year survivor," "I'm a 25-year survivor." So [I tell them] not to lose faith and to attack it aggressively and with a positive attitude. Ultimately what it really comes down to is that we only have today, and we can choose how we approach our lives on a daily basis.

We understand you kept a diary during your illness. Are you going to make a book out of it?
Yeah, I'm working on a book right now. I was pressured by some people to write it right away, while I was even going through it and I just couldn't do that. All I could do was sort of transcribe how I was feeling and put that down on paper. I have volumes of stuff that I have written and have thought about along the way and now I'm trying to assemble it in some sort of cohesive form.

During the period that you had lost your hair, somebody had said that women were actually swooning over this Kojak look.
[Laughing] No comment. I have no idea! People were being very polite. "You could be in 'The King and I,'" and "You could be Daddy Warbucks" and they were all trying to be generous as saying, "You know you look fine without it."

And I chose to do that series for ABC, "Vital Signs," without a hairpiece. That again was part of telling the truth of where I was in my life. Although they were being kind, for me it was nothing more than a reminder every time I looked in the mirror that I was dealing with cancer. It's not just the hair on your head that goes away, it's your eyebrows and your eyelashes and the hair on your arms. You know, you're pretty much a scalded chicken, and the drugs they give you make you bloated and puffy and you lose your shape. That was the most depressing part about the whole thing, that you know that you have to take all these drugs to get better. It sure is debilitating in many, many ways.

Among other things, now you are involved with a new company, Computer Sentry Software. Let's talk about that.
It's happened quite by accident. A friend of mine I've known for ten or 15 years, a real bright guy and a medical doctor in Nashville - he and I used to go out into the field and hunt upland game together, quail and pheasant. He called me [when] he was getting ready to go on-line banking on his pc.

And he thought, "What happens if someone hacks one little password?" With a few key strokes all his money could be transferred out of his account and wind up in someone else's account and you would never know. Concurrently I had a son in boarding school who called in tears - this big, strapping 19-year old kid who plays LaCrosse, and is on the wrestling team - and he's in tears because someone had stolen his laptop [computer] with all the year-end term papers on it.

I said, "Doc there's got to be some kind of program where we can protect our information and maybe even locate our stolen property if someone takes it." We did a thorough search and there just wasn't any product out there, so we hired four or five programmers and started working on a wish list of what we wanted this program to do.

The company is called Computer Sentry Software and the name of the product is the Cyber Angel. It basically does three things:

You have an unprompted password on your computer and if it's not entered every time you boot it up, or turn it on, you are notified. You decide how you want to be notified, faxed, paged, phone called, e-mailed on another device and in about two minutes we will let you know that there's an unauthorized person using your computer.

The second thing it does is it shuts down the communication port on the modem so that no information can be downloaded, they can't get into your Dean Witter account, they can't get into your banking account. This is a very good thing in terms of the kind of pornography you're finding on the Internet these days, [because] your teenager can't get on the pc at home at 2:00 in the morning and log onto something without you knowing about it; you'll be alerted.

The third thing it does is if this hardware is stolen, again within two minutes - usually within 30 seconds - we will notify you however you decide and give you the phone number, the address and fax you a map with a little circle around the location where your stolen property is. Now the next version of our product has encryption, which is a very hot topic now in terms of transporting such technology into Europe and having it fall into foreign hands. But it's a program where with just four keystrokes all the information on your computer is encrypted, so if somebody comes along and you go out to lunch or if your computer is still on, if they try to see what you're working on all they get is garbage, gobbledygook.

If anybody wants to find out about it, it's not just available for big businesses, but that's who we are selling it to right now. Big corporations are very hot to have it, but it's available from our company over the Internet. You can contact us at www.sentryinc.com and you can call us at 1-800-501-4344.

It's a monitoring thing where if you're going to invest $5,000-$6,000 in the computer, why not spend $54 a year to protect not only the hardware, but more importantly the data? That's what all these big companies [do]: Proprietary information, banking information, legal firms. There was an article the day before yesterday in the LA Times: U.S. businesses lost $300 billion through corporate espionage last year. People losing information on laptops, research and development information, product lines, price lists.

You believe a lot in television, we know, in terms of your career. The focus has been not on movies, for example, but on television. You have become a household name by virtue of all these different series that you have been in.
I believe in television. I think that it's the most powerful medium on the planet. Think about poor Kevin Costner who spent two years of his life preparing, writing, directing, editing, scoring, promoting "The Post Man." Then it's gone in 48 hours. Gone.

I think television is such an intimate way to communicate very powerful ideas. That's why I wanted to do a talk show, I'm still going to do something in that area.

Tell us about your family. We understand your wife is a former actress.
Right, she played Louisa in "The Sound Of Music." My kids are teenagers now. My son is getting ready to go off to college and we all live at home under the same roof.

What do you enjoy doing when you're not working?
My passion is fly fishing and upland game shooting if I'm not working. If I can somehow get away, you can usually find me - two weeks ago in the snowstorm I was standing waist-deep in the Green River at the Flaming Gorge National Park in Utah, fly-fishing. And of course golf. Golf is big in America - I've been playing golf for years - but now I'm passionate about it. We're building a home on a golf course in Los Angeles. Someday I would like everybody to say, "Whatever happened to Robert Urich?" And when they ask themselves that question because they haven't seen me around, just know that Bob's playing golf or fly-fishing and having a great time.

You did the "Boatworks" series and now are going to star in a reprise of "The Love Boat." Is boating a passion for you also?
Yeah, I used to have a big sailboat and at one time I had a business manager that said, "If you buy one more boat we could lease them to a Third World nation as a Navy." [Laughs] But I don't have any big boats. I have a couple of fishing boats, a Boston Whaler. But I love wooden boats, old boats. I have old cedar strip canoes and old cedar strip boats that belonged to my father and my uncles. I've restored them lovingly myself in my own barn.

You divide your time between California and Canada?
We have a home in Canada and we've spent our Summers fishing, sailing, water-skiing and eating fresh vegetables. We don't live a glamorous Hollywood life-style. Our life is about being together and there's nothing I would rather do than just take a day off and pal around with my wife, just shop and have lunch and do fun things like that. We don't always wind up on the cover of exciting magazines be-cause we sort of shy away from that limelight.

When you announced on your web page that we were going to be featuring you on the cover, we started to get e-mail from people. And one of your fans is a Marie Clabeau who has e-mailed me. She wants me to ask you, "What advice are you giving your children now that they are approaching the age where their decisions affect their future?"
Well you know what? By now it's probably too late. I think that most research shows that up until the age of five, how caregivers take care of their children is the most crucial. I think that from the very beginning we have tried to instill in them a certain set of family values that are principle-based and if nothing else, what I'm trying to do before I send them out into the world is help them to form and develop the ability to think critically, to be able to take information, to evaluate it and to make the right choice. I think you can do that only in three areas. If you have integrity and ethics when you deal with yourself physically, intellectually and spiritually, those are the only three areas that you need to worry about, and if you're following some sort of path, you can judge everything you choose to do against those three criteria.

Is this good for my body or isn't it? If I eat this chocolate cake am I going to be able to lose that weight I want to lose? If I'm going to smoke dope or experiment with drugs, is that good for my body or not? It's very simple. It makes it very clear-cut.

Same thing with intellectual stuff. If I read this class work and I really apply myself, will I get something out of it that's going to benefit me? or Do I want to waste my time?

Same thing with the spiritual notions. I find a great sense of peace and spirituality when I'm spending time in nature. We also still attend church.

I think those are the only three areas you need to look at, but right now with teenagers it's this notion of thinking critically and being able to make the right choices. But you can only make the right choice if you have all the information, so I encourage my kids to read newspapers. It's amazing how many kids don't know what's going on in the world. It's all about MTV, headlines and our society is so noisy. We're being bombarded with all this trash noise and so I encourage my kids to read at least the front page of the newspaper every day. Look at the front page of each section and just scan it.

And I make sure they travel with us. Another thing is - they say, "We don't want to go to Uncle Harry's."

[And we say] "Well, you're going."

Even if you have to negotiate: "You can go out with your friends at such and such a time, but on Sunday afternoon we're all going over to Uncle Joe's and we're going to have dinner..."

It's important for kids to hear adults talk about family history, to share stories together. It's the way they learn how the family works, and that it isn't just about this minute, today, that there's a history that we have about being a member of a family and that you're not involved in this alone, scary as it is to go out in the world and make your way. You're not the first person to have to go through this and that there are a great many members of your family who have done it before you and who are willing to help you.

So that's my basic philosophy in a nutshell.

You must be quite a reader.
I guess I'm one of these what you call "Self-Help" book junkies. Although I have two college degrees, I feel like I have always had this huge black hole in my education which I have continued to try to fill as I go along in my adult life. I do love to read, love to think, I love to write . Once you put it down on paper too, your ideas become very solid. They become something that you can talk a-bout and we try to do that. We make sure we have family meals on Sundays, actually we have dinner together almost every night. Friday sort of breaks, everybody kind of goes their separate way. But we cook every night, we spend time as a family every night, we talk about things. And sometimes we don't say anything, but we're there together.

What is something about Robert Urich that people would be surprised if they knew?
That I'm a singing fool. I sing like you would just never know. [Laughs]

What do you sing?
I actually thought I wanted to be on Broadway and do show tunes and all that. I always look for something with an emotional content in the music that I sing. I love old fashioned ballads. I grew up sitting around campfires with my aunts and uncles and my parents who sang all those old ballads - "Ramona" and "Carolina Moon" - and my whole musical taste has been influenced by all those old fashioned kind of songs.

Any health regime to keep up with this pace?
Drink lots of water, and I have a jogging machine that I use every other day. I try to find a few minutes every day to be quiet, to let all that noise drift away and think about what I really want to do and the kind of person I need to be.

For a copy of the issue of Midwest Today containing this story, send $5 (includes S&H) to: Midwest Today, P.O. Box 685, Panora, Iowa 50216.

To hear excerpts from our exclusive interview with Robert Urich, go to our RADIO EDITION page.

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