MOVIES : Sans Ferrari : Don Johnson steers his career from his ‘Miami Vice’ persona by co-starring with his wife, Melanie Griffith, in a small film about normal people

The corner booth at the Polo Lounge is a power spot if there ever was one. Situated near the kitchen entrance, it affords both a commanding view of the restaurant and a fair degree of insulation. Actually, with the addition of a few more cushions in front and a small gun turret, the position would be quite defensible.

But these days the gentleman reclining on its tufted red leather no longer requires such barriers between himself, the public and the press. Don Johnson, free of Sonny Crockett, is just another SAG member again. His pastels are not Miami Beach as much as they are Palm Springs, and the sullen, be-stubbled Sonny glare has been replaced by the satisfied grin of a family man who just birdied twice on La Quinta’s back nine. No longer hounded by the tabloids for allegedly impregnating aliens from Alpha Centauri or other such nefarious deeds, Johnson is able to direct his energy into roles that he hopes will convince a wary industry that he is not an inaccessible television star, but a actor looking for serious material.

The film that may persuade them is “Paradise,” in which Johnson co-stars with his wife, Melanie Griffith. A Touchstone Pictures production with a directing debut by veteran screenwriter Mary Agnes Donoghue (“Beaches”), the story concerns 10-year-old Willard Young who is left by his pregnant mother to spend the summer with her old friends, Lilly and Ben Reed (Griffith and Johnson) at their home in the South Carolina lowlands. Alienated and lonely, young Willard becomes a bridge between his guardians, whose relationship has degenerated into bitterness and recrimination.

Johnson is proud of his work in this simple, but moving, film. While its stoicism and self-containment are familiar trademarks of Johnson’s craft, there is also an emotional resonance and humanity not evidenced by his most recent work. He drives an old Ford pick up in “Paradise,” not a Ferrari, and wears it comfortably. Paradise, S.C., is a long way from Miami Beach.

“For better or for worse, ‘Vice’ will always be a part of my story,” Johnson concedes. “I think the show was so big, and so powerful, that it left an indelible impression on many people’s lobes. Not only is there a stigma attached to achieving a certain amount of celebrity in television, but it seems difficult for some people to separate the persona of Sonny Crockett from Don Johnson, the actor.”

As if on cue, Rip, a hotel maitre d’, respectfully approaches the table to pay his respects.

“You’re looking good, Mr. Johnson.”

“I’m feeling good, Rip.”

“Now, when are you going to have another series?”

“Oh, man, I am trying to avoid that. It’s work.”

“Well, I am going to tell my two daughters and son that I saw Mr. Don Johnson today, and they’ll be wanting to know when you’ll be back on ‘Vice’ again.”

“Tell them we might make a movie of it one of these days.”

“Well you do that right away ‘cause we want to see Sonny Crockett up there, not any of this bow and arrow shooting stuff.”

Despite this gentle nudge toward the past, Johnson claims it is not his public, but the industry that’s unwilling to disassociate him from “Miami Vice.” He expected the name recognition he enjoyed when ‘Vice’ went off the air in 1989 to precipitate moving vans delivering each day’s script offerings. Such was not the case. The quantity was sometimes there, but not the quality.

“I chose the best of what came to me out of the lot, but I’ll be the first to admit that not all of it was the best it could be,” he says. “In retrospect, I should have done nothing rather than some of the pictures I chose. But, on the other hand, projects come along and as an actor you have to think to yourself, ‘This is an interesting character, I think there is something I can do with this.’ ”

Earlier projects filmed during “Miami Vice’s” three months spring hiatus showed some promise for Johnson’s transition. There was the television production of “The Long Hot Summer” in which Johnson was lauded for his post-rock Ben Quick; and “Sweathearts’ Dance” in which the actor did a nice turn as a Vermont contractor undergoing the thirtysomething crisis.

Unfortunately, the latter caused barely a ripple at the box office despite good notices and such co-stars as Susan Sarandon, Jeff Daniels and Elizabeth Perkins. Then the darkness fell. There was not a great deal Johnson could have done about such pictures as “Dead Bang,” “The Hot Spot” or “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man;” they were ill-received by both critics and the public.

“ ‘Dead Bang” was the victim of some studio shuffling,” Johnson recalls, “And John Frankenheimer’s vision for that film suffered for it.” He is less apologetic, however, for “Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.”

“When Mickey and I got the scripts, we both saw it needed a lot of work. We were promised that substantial changes would be made. I gave them page after page of notes and suggestions, but I guess they were all made into paper airplanes. Unfortunately, Mickey and I didn’t know each other well enough at the beginning to unite forces. We were both aware of the Hollywood scuttlebutt about how these two volatile stars were going to hold up production for six months. So you become aware if you fight too much to change the material and bring it up to snuff, then everyone is going to say, ‘See, they’re temperamental and disagreeable.’ Your other choice is to sit back and say ‘OK, guys, I’ll do whatever you say.’ Then when the movie falls at the box office, it’s not the producer and director’s fault, it’s Mickey and Don.”

Though it may seem to many that Johnson materialized full blown on the set of “Miami Vice,” the fact is he had been a working actor for nearly a dozen years, though, he admits, not with dizzying levels of success. “I think Tom Selleck and I hold the record for most rejected pilots before landing a series,” he laughs. “I made a lot of legendary films people remember, but they were pictures that never did the job of making me the kind of actor who attracts great material and directors.”

According to the actor, his choice of careers emanated from failure. “I had this business class after lunch my senior year with a teacher who had an incredibly monotonous voice. I was always asleep within five minutes. Finally, she kicked me out. So I went to my counselor and she told me the only class available was drama. It meant having to drop seventh-period athletics. In those days, though, it was really a big deal to graduate from high school, so I decided to do it. The drama teacher, Ms. Pyle, had me audition for ‘West Side Story’ before she would let me in the class. I was pretty motivated. The next day I found out I’d landed the lead. From that point on, I definitely had the acting bug.”

By the end of the term, young Johnson had summoned the courage to audition for one of eight places at the University of Kansas repertory theater. Success again. After two years on scholarship there, the student actor met up with American Conservatory Theatre’s William Hastings and “bugged him relentlessly” until the visiting director agreed to an audition. That summer, 1969, the 19-year-old Missouri native found himself in San Francisco training in ACT’s conservatory.

“I look back now and it seems incredible to me this boy/man from a dirt poor farm in Kansas could have ended up in theater in San Francisco while still a teen-ager,” Johnson marvels. “It was an incredible time. Of course, I was in a huge hurry to make my name. I remember an old hand pulling me aside one day and saying, ‘Kid, stop worrying about where you are going and when you are going to get there. Just slow down. Studying the craft is the best part of the work.’ ”

The ‘70s were a decade of success and disappointment for the actor. Though he won raves for his role as Smitty in Sal Mineo’s famous production of “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” in 1969, his entry into films was rather shaky. “The Secret Garden of Stanley Sweetheart” almost ended Johnson’s career before it started. Though he fared somewhat better in such cult classics as “Zachariah,” “The Harrad Experiment” and “A Boy and His Dog,” recognition seemed elusive at best.

He bounced around through numerous television roles and fizzled pilots until 1983, when he landed both the lead in the acclaimed Vietnam vet drama, “Cease Fire” and the role of Sonny Crockett in “Miami Vice.” It was also the year he kicked drugs and alcohol. Cigarettes, golf and power boat racing are the only vices to which he is still addicted and on this late summer morning, he claims the first has only two more days left in his life.

It’s next to impossible to equate the relaxed guy in the yellow golf sweater talking animatedly about his children (Jesse, 9; Alexander 6; and Dakota, 2) with the reportedly Valentino-clad Genghis Khan of “Miami Vice.”

“I am not going to pretend I was a choirboy during that period,” he chuckles. “I was an involuntary jerk because of the circumstances. You are working 12 or 14 hours a day and you have Universal, NBC and the producers in your face everytime you turn around to give up your free time to the press. Naturally, you act differently under that kind of stress and fatigue than what’s normal. So, instead of ‘May I have that prop, please?’; it’s ‘Give me the --ing prop!’ I was perceived as arrogant when I was just a guy trying to save his own life. I marvel that with all training necessary to learn the craft of acting, there is nothing you can study to learn how to handle the stress of being a star.”

It was, in fact, the small film quality of “Paradise” that attracted Johnson and Griffith to the script. Two years ago, Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenburg sent the script over to the couple for consideration. “It was like manna from heaven,” Johnson recalls. “What immediately attracted me was that it was about normal people going about their lives and having to deal with (a) tragic circumstance. Ben and Lilly have this life they have designed for themselves in the country and they’re not interested in fame, or wealth or cities. They’re sophisticates in appreciating the life they have.

“But in the middle of this a terrible void has grown between them. It is like the Chinese proverb where the blade of grass grows through the rock. This is something both Melanie and I could relate to personally: little things that become huge monsters you have to fight.”

Johnson and Griffith had acted once previously in an episode of “Miami Vice” entitled, “By Hooker by Crook.” “I played a woman Don falls in love with,” Griffith remembers. “He doesn’t realize until later, though, she is running a call-girl service. It was a year before we got back together, but we had a love scene that was so intense, the network refused to show it.”

Though “Paradise” contains no such steamy scenes, Griffith said of working with her husband: “First of all, I really like him as an actor, but besides that, you have this person you love and trust, so you are free to try anything you want. Usually when you start a film it takes a while to get to know your leading man, but with Don I could skip past all that and go directly to the story line . . . and concentrate on the character.”

For Johnson, the advantage was an enforced honesty. “You have a friend there who is not going to judge you, so you take chances you might not otherwise take and you are careful not to get lazy and slip into your actor’s bag of tricks. Both Melanie and I inherently understood these characters even though we have very different lives. This film gave us the opportunity to do a lot of deep work on our characters. That kind of work can be painful when you strip open your own psyche and expose your fears and frailties, but it is an opportunity you don’t get very often.”

Most of all, Johnson says the film gave him the opportunity “to portray a character in which the scenes I play have to stand on their own . . . without shootouts or car chases . . . what is euphemistically called pacing.”

Indeed, since the heyday of “Miami Vice,” the pace of Johnson’s life has decreased significantly--much to his relief and pleasure. Though the couple moved last week to New York where Griffith is in rehearsal on Sydney Lumet’s “Close to Eden”; their spiritual home remains the rugged hills near their house outside of Aspen, Colo. “When we get there,” laughs Johnson, “there is very little glamour. We are just this normal couple who hike, ride horses and play with the kids . . . and every once in a while Dad goes off to play a round of golf.”

While there are no acting projects in the works, Johnson’s production company, Bull’s Eye Entertainment, is producing a movie for CBS entitled “In the Company of Darkness” about a female undercover cop who goes after a serial killer. He believes his production company may go some distance in helping with the dearth of good material that comes across his desk. “I really don’t think you can be involved in the business anymore without helping to develop material. You can’t just sit around and wait for it to come to you,” he says emphatically. “After all, if you are not part of the solution. . . . “

Finally, Don Johnson feels that “Paradise” has enabled him to refocus his ambition. “I am anxious to revive my career as an actor in terms of the work, reviving my craft and letting it take on a new persona quite apart from ‘Miami Vice.’ Like any other actor, I want the access to great material and great directors, Most of the time I feel acting is a very noble profession. Your most basic job is to connect people to their feelings. There is great reward when you succeed.”