Jaclyn Smith, 80, Recalls Drugs, Alleged Rivalries and Pay Battles on ‘Charlie’s Angels’

Jaclyn Smith, 80, remembers Charlie’s Angels as a sisterhood. She also remembers fighting for better pay, hiding from cocaine use on set and turning down a proposition from one of her costars.

Smith gets into all of it in her new memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, published Sept. 8, as the series approaches its 50th anniversary. Charlie’s Angels aired on ABC from 1976 to 1981 and followed three women working as private investigators for the unseen Charlie Townsend. Smith played Kelly Garrett; Farrah Fawcett played Jill Munroe; and Kate Jackson played Sabrina Duncan. 

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One battle started before she ever played Kelly Garrett.

Smith says she was offered $3,000 an episode, compared with $5,000 for Farrah Fawcett and $10,000 for Kate Jackson. Believing she and Fawcett had comparable experience, Smith told her agent she wanted the same amount of money as Fawcett and was prepared to walk away. She got a raise.

“I was probably a little more aggressive about that than today,” Smith told People. 

Things got considerably wilder once the series was a hit.

By the fifth and final season, Smith says, cocaine use had become hard to avoid around the production. She dealt with it by retreating to her trailer. “The more drug use I saw, the more time I spent in my motor home,” she writes in an excerpt shared by People. “I was in there a lot by the end of the series.” 

She never touched it, she writes in her book: “I’ve watched that drug, in particular, turn people into the worst version of themselves.”

For all the off-camera chaos, Smith pushes back on one enduring Charlie’s Angels story: that she, Fawcett and Jackson were jealous rivals.

“We all loved one another,” Smith told People. “There was no competitiveness. That sisterhood was strong.” 

That bond endured long after Fawcett left the series. USA Today reports that the Christmas before Fawcett died in 2009, she gave Smith a bronze sculpture and a personal letter that Smith shares in the memoir.

“She said that fear is a funny thing,” Smith told USA Today. “She wrote, ‘I have never feared anything; now fear is around the corner.’ ”

(From left) Seen here are Jaclyn Smith, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Kate Jackson in a 1976 still from “Charlie’s Angels.”

ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

Smith was with Fawcett near the end. During their final visit, USA Today reports, Smith brought Pinkberry frozen yogurt and rubbed her friend’s sore feet “for hours.” Smith was also caring for her own mother in Houston at the time. Fawcett died in June 2009. Smith’s mother died less than two months later. 

Cancer had already touched Smith’s own life. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 after a routine mammogram and underwent a lumpectomy and radiation. She has since advocated for mammograms and early detection.

Smith had the longest view of the show from inside it. She played Kelly Garrett from the 1976 premiere through the 1981 finale, making her the only Angel to appear in all five seasons. She later reprised the role in the 2003 and 2019 films. Now Charlie’s Angels is turning 50, and Smith is still reckoning with what the show gave her and what it cost.

“I would have had a totally other life if it hadn’t been for Charlie’s Angels,” she told USA Today. “I’ve loved every minute of it.”