Jaclyn Smith says Tanya Roberts asked her to join a threesome with Barry Roberts during a flight to Hawaii while Charlie’s Angels was in its fifth and final season. Smith, now 80, wrote that she declined the invitation in her memoir, turning a private exchange into a public account with direct lines of memory and judgment.
I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie
Smith wrote about the episode in I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, and she framed Roberts’ approach in language that mixes admiration with caution: "I found her honesty about her sexuality to be brave and self-aware." She added, "The world is made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of passions, and hooray for that."
The memoir account matters because it comes from a cast member who was in the cabin when it happened. Smith says the proposition came while the Angels were flying to Hawaii to shoot episodes, making the exchange part of the working life of a long-running TV show rather than a retrospective rumor from years later.
David Doyle and the salt line
David Doyle witnessed the conversation from the seat behind the flying Angels, and Smith says that when Tanya Roberts went to the bathroom, Doyle asked whether she needed some salt. Smith recalled his response as: "Take it with a grain of salt." It is the kind of line that changes the temperature of a scene without softening what was asked.
Smith also wrote, "Her choice seemed complicated to me, with great potential for hurt feelings." That sentence is the sharpest part of the memoir excerpt. She does not flatten Roberts into a punch line or a scandal; she separates candor from consequence, and that is why the passage lands as more than backstage gossip.
Julie Rogers, Stacey Sutton
Roberts joined Charlie’s Angels in the fifth and final season as Julie Rogers, replacing Shelley Hack and starring alongside Cheryl Ladd and Smith. She died in 2021. Her later credits included Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill in 1985 and Midge Pinciotti on That ’70s Show, but this memoir passage puts her back inside the television frame where the story began.
For readers of Smith’s book, the immediate takeaway is simple: she says she declined, she says Roberts was open about the arrangement, and she says the moment carried the risk of hurt feelings. That leaves the memoir excerpt as the last word for now, and it is a blunt one.
