What’s Love Got To Do With It? Everything, For Y&R’s Unlikely Psycho. But Finding Mr. Right Took Forever
At thirteen, Kimberlin Brown was a tomboy who couldn’t stand a certain Gary Pelzer, a twenty-two-year-old cocky college student who hung out at the same San Diego beach. By nineteen, Brown had won a beauty pageant, gone into modeling and started dating Mr. Gary Pelzer. And now Brown, the flawless beauty who has given up modeling to pursue acting as the nasty Sheila Grainger on YOUNG AND RESTLESS has recently married one Gary Pelzer. She describes her mate succinctly; “German. Blond Hair. Blue Eyes. Nice Muscles. Great legs.”
Raised in San Diego, Brown remembers, “I got to play the beach bum, and then I went up to Northern California to the ranch [which belongs to her grandparents] to be the cowgirl. My dream is to do a Western, because I can drive up to a six-horse hitch on a wagon, and I can rope and I can barrel race.”
Brown ditched her tomboy image when she entered a beauty contest on a dare — and won. The seventeen-year old Miss La Mesa went on to other beauty contests, putting off pageant directors with her forthright manner. “They all thought I was a little cocky because I wasn’t the perfect little lady they wanted me to be,” she admits. “The thing about being a beauty queen is you really have to be poised all the time and agree with your superiors, and that’s something I didn’t do.” But, she adds, “I smiled all the time.”
The smiling paid off because Brown went on to win the Miss California pageant, where she hooked up with a modeling agent, Nina Blanchard, a contest judge. Blanchard wouldn’t sign Brown until she moved to L.A., so the aspiring model got a two-thousand-dollar “loan without interest” from her mother and sealed the deal. A few months later, she was modeling in Japan, working twenty-hour days, eating rice, cabbage and egg cake with sushi every day and sneaking trips to Wendy’s and Dunkin’ Donuts franchises in Tokyo. She was miserable after the first three days of a six-month stay, and came home weighing ninety-five pounds.
“I was truly depressed,” she remembers. “Not so much from being homesick but from the culture shock. Their values are so incredibly different from ours. Women are no second-class [citizens over there], or third, fourth, fifth, sixth class. They’re at the bottom of the totem pole.”
But that experience alone wasn’t enough to make her quit modeling. A few months later, Brown took several modeling jobs with small speaking parts. “I thought, ‘This isn’t so tough. I can do this.’ I got a theatrical agent immediately and the very first thing I read for was a guest spot on CHARLES IN CHARGE. When I went in for my reading, they just laughed hysterically, so I thought I was giving the best reading in the world and was extremely funny. Well, I stunk. I was horrible. I called my agent and told him not to send me out on anything until I told him I was ready. I got into acting classes, and I was ready six months later. After that, it was just up all the way.”
The progress of Brown’s career has been a breeze compared to her romantic life, which was rife with heartache for a decade before she finally married. When she first met Pelzer, Brown confides, “We hated each other. He thought I was spoiled because whenever I wanted to go water-skiing, somebody would always jump to take me. And I didn’t like that every single time he came to go skiing, all he did was talk about girls. But when I was eighteen, we all went water-skiing again, and we kind of looked at each other differently.”
The two started dating, but years later her Japanese interlude strained the relationship. The breakup, Brown says, “was pretty nasty. I was always very ready to get married, and he wasn’t, and then he was and I wasn’t.”
They stayed apart for three years and only reunited in the beginning of 1990, thanks in large part to Brown’s mother, who persuaded her to let Pelzer take her to dinner. “She said, ‘Most men would have stopped trying after three years . Don’t you think you can at least be friends?’ ”
Mom’s advice proved wise. “We had a great time,” Brown says. “I was very rude to him and he still liked me. That night he told me things he couldn’t say in the seven and a half years we were together. He said, ‘I know you think you hate me, but for you to hate me so long, I think you still love me, and I know that I love you. I think we should get married.’ I said, ‘I can’t marry you now. If you want to start dating, fine.’ ”
Since then, “it’s been great,” she claims. “I think it’s because his doubts are gone, and mine are now, as well. When you’re really committed and working as a team, it’s so much fun.” Still savoring that newlywed bliss after her May wedding, Brown gamely accepts that she and Pelzer must live in separate cities — she in Los Angeles and Pelzer in San Diego, where his boat business is based. “It would be difficult if it was something we didn’t agree on,” Brown says. “But we both know that it’s something that has to be for right now. If we have to keep this living arrangement for two, three, four, five years, fine.”
That is the same feeling she has about her job. Playing sick-o Sheila Carter Grainger is a coup for Brown, who’s been a Y&R fan for years. “It’s so much fun to be somebody you’re not. I’m not an angry person, and it’s neat for me to get to do that.” In the opinion of castmates like Peter Barton, who plays Shelia’s husband, Scott, Brown has scored with her characterization. “She was cast as a flirtatious woman around the hospital, so this whole role she’s developed around the hospital she can take full credit for. That’s Kimberlin’s feather in her cap. She’s goofy and carefree, kind of zany. She’s nothing like that wildness she plays.”
On the set, everybody tells Brown they love her “Sheila stare,” and she can deliver it on cue, lifting her eyebrows and narrowing her eyes slightly. But the stare doesn’t last for long. Soon Brown is considering coconut ice cream for dessert, telling a blonde joke and practicing curling her tongue. “I have to be so intense all the time [on Y&R], and I’m not really that intense of a person.” The eyebrows lift. “Did I tell you the one about?…”
Just The Facts
Birthdate: “I was born in the 1960’s — the first half. I’m not over thirty.”
Favorite Game Show: JEOPARDY
Worst Subject In School: English. “I write like I talk. In English class you were not allowed to write like you spoke. As for punctuation, what is punctuation?”
Average Credit Card Bill (Before The Wedding): $250. “My husband’s gonna laugh when he hears that.”
This interview appeared in the March 3, 1992 issue of Soap Opera Digest.
