Alaska

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A HEARTBEAT FOR HER PEOPLE

It's after 2 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon when television producer, reporter and host Jeanie Greene finally sits down to lunch. Plastic carry-out containers jockey for space on a desk strewn with loose papers, dog-eared file folders and an open container of mascara. A cracked dimestore mirror tacked to the side of a bookshelf allows the cramped back corner to double as a makeup studio. It also gives the actress-at-heart the chance to frequently monitor her appearance, whether on the phone with a San Francisco station manager or talking with a visitor in her midtown Anchorage studio. A sideways glance and toss of the hair. A smudge of make up smoothed. She seems utterly unaware that she's doing it.

Dressed in a short black dress, olive green jacket, and ever present clip-on earrings and black heels, the 5-foot 2-inch Greene has just finished taping the opening of this week's edition of "Heartbeat Alaska." Production of this Native news magazine has changed considerably since it was launched in October 1992 from a makeshift set in the dining room of Greene's two-bedroom apartment. The show, now available throughout Alaska and on some 30 public broadcasting stations across the country - as well as in Canada, Greenland and Eastern Russia - has aired every Sunday evening since.

This week may be the exception.

Construction of a new set is taking longer than expected, forcing Greene to delay taping. Yet with little more than 24 hours until air time, she is unfazed. "You do what you have to do," says the 44-year-old woman once dubbed the "Oprah Winfrey of the North" by a Seattle television commentator. If taping can't continue Greene will offer broadcasters a documentary taped earlier on the island village of Savoonga. Greene's grace under fire comes as no surprise to those who've known and worked with her the longest. Her perseverance, energy and optimism are her trademark. "She feels like she can do just about anything," says Tracy Hinkson, an Anchorage theater director who worked with Greene on several community theater productions during the 1980's. "Wide-eyed energy, that's the way I would describe her. She has definite stars in her eyes and that's what gives her her drive."

"She tends to be a bubbly person," says co-worker Gary Fife. "That's Jeanie. Part of it's her background as an actress and a producer and television person... she does come off sometimes as being more TV personality than Yupik Eskimo, but that's just the way it is."

So what about the real Jeanie Greene, the one who always seems "on" even after the studio lights have dimmed! What about the one talking excitedly about developing a children's show, airing "Heartbeat Alaska" globally or opening a training center for Native broadcasters? Is she always this, well, animated? "Believe it or nor," says Greene one November morning over coffee, "this is my natural state."

Husband Dennis Greene concurs. Though separated for three years, the two remain close and talk by phone almost daily.

"What you see," says the Anchorage psychologist, "is exactly what you get."

Mabel Blatchford really isn't too surprised that the third of her seven children - six of whom are girls - has assumed the role of minor statewide celebrity. It's a role Blatchford says her daughter seemed born into.

"She seemed to have made up her mind when she was young," Blatchford says from the family home in Seward. "She just had a lot of plans." As a youngster growing up in Sitka and Seward, Jeanie would appoint herself theatrical director, and recruit siblings and neighborhood children to perform in little television spots, and earn a bachelor's degree in theater arts - with a minor in anthropology--seemed part of the script. (When she received her diploma from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1990, Greene became the first in her family to earn a college degree.)

"She was always starting something else," says Blatchford of her middle child. "And she always had that enthusiasm."

Sitting in a high-hacked restaurant booth, her small, unmanicured hands wrapped around a cup of weak black coffee, Greene offers an unrehearsed portrayal of the woman behind the Tammy Faye eyelashes, sequined sweaters and glitzy clip-on earrings seen by viewers from Fairbanks to Philadelphia. At times she speaks as if stuck on fast-forward. Other times she's more deliberate. Always she is intense, her large brown eyes dead set on her audience.

"Sometimes I just veg out on the couch and watch TV," says Greene. "I love to go to the movies. I love to go through bookstores and garage sales. I love to cook (though) I never use recipes. I make fabulous stews, caribou stews, and pizzas." Greene also enjoys writing poetry and thumbing through historical books, especially those about Alaska before contact with white explorers and settlers.

She rarely socializes. Though seemingly never at a loss for words and comfortable performing before an audience of strangers, Greene often finds herself ill at ease in social settings and so shuns most invitations.

"I feel too outrageous. People look at me strangely," says Greene, aware that her boisterous laugh and is-this-for-real enthusiasm can be oft-purring. "I'm always aware that I'm different from other people.

You know when I (finally) fit in? When I got into theater." Dennis Greene understands how she feels. He's seen the looks on people's faces when they meet his wife over evenings of salmon pate and polite conversation. "They are frequently taken aback," says the soft-spoken Greene, her husband of 14 years. "They are not prepared for that level of energy. People say she talks too much, but it's not just idle chatter.

"Jeanie has a strong personality, although even now she's a bit fragile. Her feelings are easily hurt."

That may be, but it doesn't seem to stop her. "She keeps pushing forward," says Dennis Greene. Asked to describe his wife, he ticks off adjectives that include "dynamic," "optimistic," and yes, "bull-headed."

"You'd be well-advised not to deliberately confront her," he says.

Greene knows she can come on strong. And she knows that as a boss, she can be demanding. "I expect people to just do their thing," says Greene of the standards she sets for her three part-time employees. "I'm not a babysitter, nor am I a good teacher, I pick things up quickly. I expect people to do.

I'm not in this business to be liked," she says flatly. In the same breath, however, she adds without flinching, "but I'm so loved by so many people."

Working the crowds at the Alaska Federation of Natives' conference in Anchorage, Greene's popularity is obvious. She talks with visitors from Wainwright, Grayling and Shishmaref, some of whom have supplied her with homemade videos of village life that are the essence of her show. She asks about mutual friends, thanks a Kotzebue viewer for sending gifts of seal oil and berries, and admires the handiwork of those selling beaded earrings and fur-lined slippers. Introducing herself seems unnecessary, so accustomed are those at the annual conference to seeing her on their television screen.

"I'm interested in Native issues, and I feel she covers the whole state. She's personable," says Karl Greenwald Jr., an Anchorage resident originally from the southeastern village of Hoonah.

"It makes you proud to be a native," says Shirley Goldie of Kotzebue. "It makes the kids know who they are."

Knowing who she is has never been a question for her, says Greene.

Though originally from the small northern villages of Point Hope and Teller, respectively, Greene's parents, Mabel and Eugene Blatchford, moved their young family first to Sitka for medical services and then to Seward, arriving in south-central Alaska just months ahead of the 1964 earthquake, Jeanie was 12. And although the family spoke English and ate store-bought food, Greene remembers her childhood as largely traditionally, with fond memories of the stories her mother told other family up north.

"We were nurtured," says Greene, "We were raised the Eskimo way."

But growing up an Inupiat Eskimo in 1960's Seward wasn't easy. "High school was painful for me," says Greene. Students at the predominately white school would whisper "There's that Native," and tried to belittle her by calling her a "salmon cruncher." Guidance counselors didn't take her seriously, says Greene, and told her not to waste her time taking standard college entrance exams.

Piecing together grant money and earnings from a summer job, Greene went to college anyway, studying at Sitka's Sheldon Jackson College and in Anchorage before her first marriage to a Seward man in 1971. Five years later, Greene found herself divorced and working as a heavy equipment operator during construction of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. It was a wild ride.

"I used to party in my 20's," Greene says without apology. "It's a lost time for me."

Back in Anchorage, Greene met her future husband in the fall of 1980. By spring they were married. Three years later the Inupiat actress and her anglo-pyschologist husband launched Way-Off Broadway Productions. For the next five years the two staged a variety of Anchorage area dinner theater productions, including Bob Randall's "6 Rms Riv Vu," Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound" and Neil Simon's "Chapter Two."

"We didn't spare any expense," says the then theater novice Dennis Greene. Local critics praised their efforts.

The work was constant. The stress of opening and closing a show grinding. They took their final bow in 1989.

Greene gravitated to local television, where she continued hosting a weekly real estate show and, beginning in 1990, twice-weekly Native news segments on one of Anchorage's three network news programs. Differences of opinion, among other things, prompted her to leave the station two years later. Convinced to go it alone. She bought second-hand equipment, pushed her dining room table aside and launched "Heartbeat Alaska."

I'm not a newshound, I'm a creator," says Greene. "I don't need the goodwill of any of my peers," she says, aware that some journalist don't take her, or her show, seriously. What I need is the goodwill of my Native viewers, and I have that.

During 1993, its first full year on the air. "Heartbeat Alaska" generated $50.000 total, Greene says. That figure more than doubled last year, with Greene expecting revenues for 1995 to reach at least $250,000. For most of that time, Greene has functioned not only as producer, reporter and host, but also as a one-woman sales and marketing department. Show sponsors have included Coca-Cola Inc., Native corporations, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute and, behind the scenes, Dennis Greene, who estimates he's pumped "several thousand dollars" into production. I put whatever money I have into the show rather than in the bank," says Greene. "I see it as a sound investment."

During the current year, Greene plans to make her product more appealing to Outside broadcasters - both public and commercial by replacing "Heartbeat Alaska" with its more wide-reaching sister show "One Sky." The latter will include stories from Alaska as well as segments on Native news from television stations around the country. Viewers in Alaska will continue seeing "Heartbeat Alaska."

And after that?

"I'm going globally with (the show)." says Greene, adding that she's currently working to air Heartbeat Alaska in Germany. "I believe we'll be the center for Native television across the world.... I'm going to make movies here about Natives, create commercials."

On this particular Saturday, however, Greene will be happy just to finish taping this week's edition of "Heartbeat Alaska." With a T-shirted carpenter still working on the set behind her, Greene greets her audience for a show that will take them to a classroom in Ambler and to a wrestling meet in Barrow.

The documentary on Savoonga can wait for another time.

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Robin Mackey Hill is a regular contributer to Alaska's Northbound column. Jim Lavrakas is a photographer with the Anchorage Daily News