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HE'S GORGEOUS, TALENTED, SUCCESSFUL, LOVING--HE CAN EVEN MAKE SUSHI.
HE'S DAVID JAMES ELLIOTT OF TV'S JAG, AND, YES, HE'S MARRIED
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When Los Angeles calls, an actor listens. Even if, as Canadian-born and -bred David James Elliott discovered several years ago, he has just met the woman of his dreams (in this case, actress Nanci Chambers). But persistence conquers all.
"We'd talk on the phone, and she'd say she was coming down," Elliott recalls, "but after a while I just had to go up there and pack her bags!"The two have been together "eight-point- three years," says the 36-year-old Elliott. It's a detail that reflects his passion for his wife, and has nothing to do with the cool precision of Lieutenant Commander Harmon Rabb Jr., the buttoned-down attorney Elliott plays on the CBS naval drama JAG. Elliott, barefoot and with his shirt hanging out over his plaid hipster pants, is clearly someone who favors "at ease" over "attention!"
The California ranch house in L.A.'s Brentwood section that he shares with his wife, Nanci, and their 4-year-old daughter, Stephanie, sends the same message. It is consummately comfortable, with light, spacious rooms furnished in pine wood and neutral-colored cottons and decorated with candles, fresh flowers and a variety of charming objects, like Elliott's hand wrought silver cigar paraphernalia and Chambers' collections of teapots, painted birdhouses and delicate Limoges boxes. (Elliott, who launched his wife's collections, is a romantic with an eye for practicality: "This way, I always have gift ideas.")
After reuniting in Los Angeles, the couple rented "all over the place" and finally mounted a yearlong search for a house that met the prerequisites of many young parents: one that was in a safe neighborhood, close to good schools, with a great yard for their kid to play in. Their dream house was surrounded by a chain-link fence and latticework obscured the view of the pool.
"It was dingy! I thought, This isn't the place," says Elliott, "but Nanci saw nothing but potential."
The 2,150-square-foot house was set on a double lot, for starters, and featured a sycamore tree so huge, the roof had been notched to accommodate it. Its enormous limbs shade the home and comfortably hold both a swing and a hammock. The house's sprawling one-story layout was also a selling point for Elliott, who was tired of high-rise urban living.
They gutted the interiors (the kitchen has yet to be remodeled), laid down hardwood floors, then tore out everything behind the house. Flagstone paths now wind around the property, and Stephanie has staked out part of the yard for her log-cabin-style playhouse. Chambers created a "flight of fancy," inlaying steps leading to a patio with a colorful mosaic of broken plates, bottles, teapots, seashells and stones. She also plans to have two exterior murals executed, a Mediterranean scene on a wall near the pool and an open-barn-door spoof for the garage.
A new pool was high on Elliott's wish list. They had the existing pool from the fifties dug out and resurfaced, and lined the edges with sea-creature tiles.
It's a working pool, Elliott points out: "I read in In Style that Matthew Perry, that guy from Friends, says nobody swims in their pools. I swim in my pool." And he does that after he runs eight miles, down to the beach and back, "for fitness and meditation."
A craving for water in the landscape is practically in Elliott's genes: his father's side of the family is from the Bahamas, and Elliott has visited there all his life.
"I'm related to most of our island," he says. "Everyone's a third or fourth cousin." He now owns two houses there, including the island's first brick house, which has been in the family for generations. "When just the three of us went, the old house was fine, but when we went down with some friends and their children, it was really tight, so we decided to buy the place across the street--right on the water, up on a hill, killer view." He has fished since childhood and likes to wade into the surf with a snorkel and spear to hunt grouper, snapper, yellowtail or tuna. "I pick out the fish I want, then boom!--it's sushi," he says, proud of this self-taught culinary skill. "Imagine," rhapsodizes Nanci of a typical Bahamian idyll, "fishing and snorkeling all day, then home to eat your catch, with homemade key lime pie for dessert."
Back in Los Angeles, the couple generally entertain once a week, usually hosting Sunday pool parties and barbecues for eight. Elliott is an instinctive cook--"I just get inspired"--rather than a recipe-follower; in addition to fish, his specialties include rice and beans and pastas and sauces.
Another natural talent seems to be the ability to balance work and play. As he explains it, "I'm a Virgo, so I'm disciplined, but I'm on the cusp ofLibra--that evens things out." But even for someone with such favorable planetary alignments, achieving that balance demands hard choices. Gardening is out (OK, that's an easy one) and so is golf. "It takes too long--when I have free time I want to spend it with my wife and daughter," he says. "When Stephanie was really young and we were in the first season of the show, she used to think I lived on the set. She'd say, 'Can we come and see you at the trailer where you live?' I'd say, 'No, honey, I live here with you!' "
Now that the show is in its third season, he even manages to squeeze in some quality time playing his guitar, sax and harmonica. Elliott once had hopes of a musical career; he quit high school and, with some buddies, formed a string of punk rock bands: "The Stolen Hats, the Dynamics, Dash Waterjones and His Case of Beer," he recalls. "For a while we were the Supervisors, because someone had stolen four work shirts that said 'Supervisor' off a washing line. But in the end I got frustrated: We were starving, I was living in a boardinghouse, working in a belt factory. It was grisly."
After Elliott returned to school, a teacher heard him read King Lear and suggested he consider acting. "So I thought I'd audition for the best school, and if I got in, that's what I'd do." He trained at Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, which has one of the finest theater programs in Canada, and pulled two hitches with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario before television and film roles led him to the States. Elliott isn't at all bitter about failing at his first love, for acting has had a musical payoff:
"I finally got a Martin guitar--I've always wanted a beautiful acoustic," he says.
One of his favorite venues now is the bathroom, strumming and singing to his daughter while she's in the tub, just as his father did for him and his brothers, Michael and John. This is clearly not the kind of man who worries too much when the family's two portly Creamsicle-colored cats, Marlon (for Brando) and Kurty (for Russell, a favorite of Stephanie's), traipse into the living room and leap onto the sofa. Besides being a cat person, Elliott has an easygoing attitude toward his home.
"I like beautiful, classic things, but the place was really Nanci's vision," he says. "Her taste is my taste. She'd start talking about something, and I'd say OK, cool."
But before Nanci huddled with interior designer Alisa Chodos, a close friend, he warned them against making it a totally female house. "I didn't want to be one of the girls," he says. Not to worry, David, not to worry.
