a closeup of Shelley
from a 1979 promo pic
Shelley joined the cast of Charlie's Angels in 1979, taking over the slot left empty by Kate Jackson. She was already world-famous by then... as THE Charlie Girl, Revlon's IT girl and the glamorous version of the newly liberated woman of the 1970s. "I had done a lot of press before. There was so much to do then, so you just deal with it," she told one reporter after her much publicized casting. But the Supermodel wasn't aware that she was entering a totally different space, rock star space. "I couldn't believe it. What was I doing in the evening news," Shelley exclaimed at the time. "Yesterday, I was a schnook, and today I can't get across the street," she added. When she arrived in St. Thomas at the Caribbean, where her first Charlie's Angels episode was going to be shot, she was greeted by the paparazzi. "When I got off the plane, there were maybe eight million paparazzi. I looked around for Sophia Loren. It was for me. I couldn't believe it," she said astonished by the amount of attention her Angel casting was getting. "I had press people crawling in my windows," she told E! in 2002. Shelley had jumped to Hollywood superstardom overnight.
Shelley in a promo pic from 1979
