He Seeks Car Billing, Not Star Billing

You have to admire Lorenzo Lamas, the race driver. The things he goes through to further his career. The sacrifices he makes.

History is fecund with the stories of people who have suffered for their art--painters who starved in garrets, singers who waited on tables, musicians who played street corners, actors who parked cars.

Lorenzo Lamas is no less dedicated. Each day, he sucks it up and goes through some of the most traumatic travails it is possible to imagine, all for his art.

He has to do scenes with some of the most gorgeous women in the world. He has to be seen at some of the most glamorous restaurants. He has to wear the latest fashions and get his handsome features made up. He has to attend charity functions on the arms of some of the town’s most spectacular centerfolds. He even signs himself on to sing the national anthem at sporting events, and he cuts albums.

Talk about giving your all for your career!

Lamas endures all of this just so he can get on with his real life’s work--risking his life in a 200-m.p.h. race car, hanging a spinning vehicle on a wall, driving through corners on the knife edge of no control at all. The real fun of life.

No one has ever been able to figure out what makes a race driver. Usually it’s a guy who has a choice of that or a career on a lube rack in Torrance or the cab of a semi toiling over the Grapevine.

Most people would consider they had it made if they got top billing on TV, had matinee-idol good looks and spent most of their time necking with some of the reigning American beauties of the day. Lorenzo Lamas considers it the same as going down into the mine every day to get enough money to run away and join the circus.

He can’t explain it.

Millions of American young men might envy him. He envies A. J. Foyt. Making love on camera is hard work. “Somebody’s got to do it,” he sighs.

To him, screaming down a race straightaway, trying to coax one more lap out of a bald set of tires, is the real romance in life. To give you an idea where Lorenzo is coming from, before racing, he was into tournament karate. He had to give that up when a kick turned his knee cap into a hunk of bubble gum.

The producers paled to think what would have happened if the kick had been five feet higher, but his next choice of recreation was no comfort. They still stay awake nights when they think of what might happen to that profile, those green eyes and that tousled brown hair if the car kicks back some afternoon.

There are probably not two more typical American art forms of the day than the soap opera and the racing automobile. Lamas is on TV in one or the other. If he’s got clothes on, he’s in a race car. If he hasn’t, he’s in “Falcon Crest.”

Lorenzo Lamas is the son of the late Fernando Lamas, a gifted actor from Argentina who was a mainstay at MGM--”More Stars Than There Are in Heaven”--in the glory years of that famous film factory. Mother is Arlene Dahl, one of the most beauteous women ever to grace a Hollywood sound stage.

The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree. Like son, like father.

Fernando Lamas, a man of rare humor, was fond of saying, “Acting is just a profession, not a way of life.” An accomplished athlete himself--he was a prizefighter, horseman, swimmer and fencer--Lamas pere spoke five languages, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and English. But he was able to dismiss his film career as one in which he “had a sword in one hand, a blonde in the other and a camel waiting outside.”

Son Lorenzo has a Buick-Hawk GTP waiting outside, a Sports 2000 racing machine in which he will be one of 56 entrants in Sunday’s race in that class at Riverside Raceway.

It really is a tender love story: Boy meets car, boy loses car, boy wins car and race. Lorenzo is not the first to fall head over heels for a faithless four-cylinder heartless wretch of a machine. For him, it happened while he was recuperating from his karate-ending injury and he was tapped to drive in a celebrity race at the Long Beach Grand Prix.

It was love at first sight. Nothing had made him feel that way before. He not only won the race, he lost his heart.

They didn’t exactly march off into the sunset together, though. It wasn’t long afterward that the fickle machine spun him into a wall, backward, and broke his shoulder blade and collarbone.

You would think that would have convinced him that his love was unrequited, that there was no future in their relationship. It only made Lamas love her more.

“It was a kind thing to do,” he says. “It made me learn to be more professional.”

Kind of like Leslie Howard always apologizing for that waitress who kept throwing him out and cheating on him.

Lamas, in short, is hooked. Lots of actors take up sideline sports as publicity stunts. He sees his acting career as a kind of complicated publicity stunt for his real avocation. It costs $150,000 to outfit and mount a campaign for his racing team, and Lorenzo uses his notoriety as a TV and film performer to raise the funds.

If Lance loses a girl, or even a wife, in the fictional wine country of Falcon Crest, he knows there’s plenty more where that came from. If he loses a car, or a race, that makes him feel really betrayed and he mopes around for days.