Ed Begley acts on his eco-beliefs
STUDIO CITY, Calif. -- Ed Begley Jr. leads what seems an enviable life.
He has a show in its second season on HGTV called Living With Ed. Next month he's jetting off to New York to be in Woody Allen's latest movie. His résumé reads like a history of boomer TV, and the residuals from six years on the 1980s hospital drama St. Elsewhere still trickle in.
But when Hollywood friends come for parties, they often leave his home depressed.
"They look around at this two-bedroom, 1½-bath house in the (San Fernando) Valley and they say, 'Forty-one years in the business and that's all he has to show for it?' " he says, gesturing to his lovely but admittedly un-palatial 1936 home.
But Begley is living the green life.
The money others might spend on a fancy house and big cars, Begley, 59, puts to infrastructure. Solar panels on his roof track the sun. The latest electric car sits in his garage next to a bank of batteries. In the basement, a high-tech heating system uses sun-warmed water.
From the outside, his house wouldn't look out of place on the 1960s sitcom My Three Sons, where Begley made his acting debut at 17.
It was in the 1970s, when he'd graduated to pop-culture-icon shows like Room 222, Mannix, Adam-12 and Nanny and the Professor, that Begley reached a turning point. He'd grown up in Los Angeles, "choking on the horrible smog. By 1970, I'd had a bellyful," he says. He changed his life, adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle that was highly unusual at the time.
For the past 38 years he has stayed true to his beliefs, driving electric cars before George Clooney got his driver's license, eating vegetarian before Woody Harrelson eschewed meat, and diminishing his carbon footprint years before Al Gore spoke of inconvenient truths.
Begley says he has never been shrill about his beliefs. He just lives his life as he thinks is appropriate and lets others live theirs, giving advice only when he's asked.
But when a TV production company did the asking, his advice suddenly got a much broader audience. His show, Living With Ed, chronicles a low-carbon (him)/high-makeup (her) marriage to Rachelle Carson-Begley, and along the way shows regular people how they can "pick the low-hanging fruit" and live a greener, less-expensive life without moving into a cave.
He also has a new book out, Living Like Ed: A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life (Clarkson Potter, $18).
It all started with friends Joe Brutsman and Tony Peck, who had been listening to Begley and his wife bicker good-naturedly for years over living well vs. living ecologically. In addition to being actors, they also produce shows, and they saw a serious-yet-funny show in their friends' marriage.
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