Fame & Fortune: Actor-author Ron McLarty A word from Stephen King launched his second career
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Bankrate: Back then, you were a "serious actor" or a sell-out, right? You were expected to be on one track or the other.

McLarty: Absolutely. And I was more interested in having enough money to clothe and feed my children and write than I was being a star. Ultimately, it was satisfying. You come to a time in your life -- I'm 59 now -- and I do not have hurt feelings over the theater, I just don't have them, where a lot of my friends do. A lot of my friends still want those roles, still wonder why they weren't Jack Nicholson, and that's a hard thing to do, because you never want to come to the end of a career with any kind of bitterness. It's just not worth it.

Bankrate: What were some of your craziest commercials gigs?

McLarty: I did a lot of goofy things. I played the 10-pin in a bowling commercial. I was a Tylenol time capsule in bed; I was inside this plastic thing with little balls and my face sticking out. I played a floor with my face in the floor on a Dutch Boy paint commercial. I once did a play called "The Really Portable Hamlet" on roller skates and I fell off the stage.

Bankrate: What ultimately led to your second career was that you spent your down time as an actor writing novels and plays.

McLarty: Yeah. You know, you do a television series like "Spenser for Hire" or "Cop Rock" or "Champs," you spend a lot of time in your trailer while the crew takes hours and hours to light the set. Between reading and writing, I got a tremendous amount of work done.

Bankrate: Ironically, you had given up any dreams of being published when sudden luck launched your career as a novelist in the person of Stephen King.

McLarty: It's really been amazing because you think at a certain age you're not going to get a shot. You know how, when you walk down the street and you have somebody on your mind that you haven't seen for a long time, if you say to yourself you're going to see him, you never see them, but if you're just thinking about them, often you'll see them? I remember walking down 57th Street and for some reason I was thinking of Johnny Carson and I looked across the street and there's Johnny Carson! But I know I wouldn't have seen him if I'd thought I was going to see him. I think that's what happened to me, too. Once I got past the idea that I needed to be published, I had to be published, I'd die if I wasn't published, once I got past that and started to think kind of ingenuously about it and just making the writing work, I think I opened myself to get that little bit of luck.

Bankrate: With a million-dollar book deal, you may yet reverse that hyphen and instead of being actor-author you may become known as an author-actor.

McLarty: The last thing in the world I expected was that writing could be commerce, that I could make any money on it at all. I think it's important for me at my stage of life not to think about that at all when I'm working and just tell myself a story. Because I have found that when I tell myself a story and read it out loud, I'm pretty sure I'm not bulls----ing myself.