This is my time.   Why shouldn't I go for it all?

Douglas Sheehan is doing just that, not only acting on Knots Landing, but playing polo and the bagpipe, and being a California country squire.

Alongside the lush, green polo fields of the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, elegant luncheon tables have been set out, champagne is flowing and The Beautiful People are Checking out each other's "Great Gatsby" attire as they chat over the music of a Roaring '20s Dixieland band.  The Cadillac International Polo Classic is in full swing, and although the audience is too self-absorbed to notice, some of the best polo players in Argentina and America are out there playing six chukkers of high-goal polo.

In the center of this swirl of glamour is Douglas Sheehan, known to the fans of CBS' Knots Landing as that mild-mannered cable station manager Ben Gibson, who was always rescuing Valene from her troubles  and who, last November, finally married her.   But for a guy who plays such an innocuous on-screen character, Sheehan cuts a dashing figure in his white jodhpurs, riding boots, jersey and helmet.  To the delight of the Entertainment Tonight  camera crew and several hundred cheering fans, he was one of the starts of the Celebrity Polo Match that occurred at the half time of the real game. 

"I have been playing polo for two years," he explains.  "I had read about the British Raj and loved David Niven's books about the high life in old Hollywood.   So when [Knots co-star] Bill Devane convinced me to take a few lessons, I was hooked."

Sheehan plays or practices every weekend at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center and has a "short string of ponies" consisting of Seumas, Estrella and Wildfire.   "I enjoy the game," says Sheehan, "but I also love all the romantic associations" with horse racing.  "This" -- he gestures expansively toward the moneyed crows, the Rolls-Royce's and the polo fields -- "is how I like to live my life."

Without a doubt, he means the High Life.  Sitting in a ritzy Los Angeles restaurant, he admits with a big grin: "I attack life as a big romantic adventure, and my romantic approach has paid off."  Celebrating  his third season on Knots Landing with a glass of Cordon Rouge, Sheehan has a right to feel expansive, he was playing Shakespearean roles at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego for $65 a week before he was plucked by Hollywood to play Joe Kelly on General Hospital.  his performance in that role earned him a daytime emmy nomination.  Four and a half years later, he moved into primetime with Knots Landing and parlayed his highly visible image into a promotional deal as the Aramis Man.

"This is my time.  This is my turn.  This is my life.  Why shouldn't I go for it all?"  he asks, lifting his glass of champagne.  And he does.  In addition to playing polo with the hot set, he owns an ultralight airplane, which he's flown over the California desert.  He's shot grouse in Scotland.   He composes his own music, which he can play on piano, banjo or bagpipe.  And, periodically, he dresses up in his tuxedo to have formal candlelight dinners alone with his beautiful wife, Cate, a tall blonde with fiery emerald eyes, who states categorically:   "My husband is the most crazily, wonderfully romantic man in the world."

So why is he playing this character Ben Gibson, who Sheehan agrees " . . . is sort of a nerd"?  When we asked him earlier this season, he said that he saw it as both an acting challenge and as a service: "I think women need to believe in the concept of a man who is selfless, loving and completely loyal.  Ben Gibson is a bigger-than-life man in that sense, a truly noble character. [Two seasons ago, for example,] Val goes out and comes back just a little bit pregnant by her ex-husband.   What does Ben do?  He's totally forgiving.  'Don't let it happen again, dear,'  But I think that's beyond selfless.  That's being a nerd. . . . I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Ben have a little more guts."

Late this season, Sheehan got his wish when Ben embarked on an affair with singer Cathy Rush and then stunned Val by announcing that he needed to get away from her for a while and was going to accompany Cathy on tour as her road manager.

Long before Ben shed his nice-guy image, Sheehan's co-star Joan Van Ark observed: "Doug has a strong masculinity that comes through everything he does.  I just love his gentleness as Ben, and I think it is much more appealing to women than melodramatic macho."

Knots producer Larry Kasha agrees.  "Doug has charm and affability, yet strength.  That's what we saw on General Hospital before we hired him.   This year, I think you saw him stretch out to use many more facets of his talent as an actor."

At the Old Globe, Sheehan used those facets to play Alcibiades in "Timon of Athens," Nestor in "Troilus and Cressida" and Sir Toby Belch in "Twelfth Night."  Elsewhere in the theater, he played such diverse roles as Big Daddy in "Cat on a hot Tim Roof" and the title role in a musical version of "Zorba."

He takes his soap-opera acting just as seriously.  "Soaps, in a perverse way, are a celebration of the human condition," says Sheehan.  "The soap isn't just the  performance we see on the screen.  It's an emotional relationship between the viewer and those characters.  It is good to know how to cry for other people.  That's what the theater always has done."

Perhaps Sheehan has a special compassion for the ups and downs of other lives because his own life has the emotional ingredients for a soap opera: "My father was born in an Irish ghetto in Dunkirk, N.Y., and moved to California with $36 in his pocket.    By the time I was born -- on April 27, 1949 -- he was well on his way to being a millionaire in the aerospace industry."  His Irish father and Scotch-Irish mother imparted a strong sense of heritage to their three sons.   "We grew up in Redding, Cal., going to a Catholic school taught by nuns who were right off the boat.  I had an Irish accent through the sixth grade because I thought that was how everybody talked."

When Sheehan was 11, his parents were divorced.  "I moved to San Diego with my mom," he recalls.  "We lived in a little house across from a chicken ranch, and I still remember the smell to this day.  I was a surfer and my brother taught me how to scuba-dive, so I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist.  But when I walked into my first college botany class, I was totally overwhelmed.  I walked right out and enlisted in the Army in the middle of the Tet Offensive."

After his Army stint, Sheehan studied acting at Mesa College in San Diego and was apprenticed to the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park.  "For three years, I spent 14 hours a day eating, sleeping and breathing Shakespeare.  When we finished with rehearsals, we had to take classes before the evening performances.  I remember the dramaturge lecturing us that we had to experience everything the Elizabethan did: the feel of a sword in your hand, a hawk on your arm; the exhaustion of being on a house for four days.  That's how I got involved with playing the bagpipe."

Sheehan also became involved with the girl of his dreams, Cate Abert, who was a dancer in the non-professional company working with the Old Globe.  In 1981, they were married in a Scottish regimental wedding under crossed broadswords.  (Sheehan wore his full highland dress, of course), and they honeymooned in Scotland and Ireland.   Now, they spend most of their free time at their ranch-style house in bucolic Tarzana, Cal., raising ducks. 

The den in their home resembles a Scottish hunting lodge, with guns and stuffed   birds on the walls, as well as delicate woodcarvings that Sheehan creates in his workshop in the backyard.  A dedicated hunter who has done shooting demonstrations to promote the US Olympic shooting team, Sheehan says, "I don't think gun control means that someone is going to come and take away my guns.  It seems perfectly reasonable [that you should] register your shotgun every year as a sporting arm.  On the other hand, unless you are shooting competition pistols on a team, I don't know why anyone needs a handgun.  I feel that the sport of shooting is maligned in the country because of the gun-control issue."

Pinned discreetly to the wall is a photograph of Sheehan in his tux for an Aramis Man ad, being seductively entangled by a gorgeous model.

And how does Cate feel about seeing her handsome husband in torrid embraces with beautiful women on the screen or in cologne ads?  "When I see him in love scenes on television, it isn't Doug,"  she says.  "It's Ben or Joe or whatever character he is playing.  Like any other member of the audience, I think it's great it bothers me less than it bothers him, because he's so shy."

Sheehan admits, "When you have to be hot and heavy first thing in the morning with some actress who really jumped on me in the love scene and it got to  be pretty unnerving.  After all, we're trying to act, for God's sake!"

What is most refreshing about Douglas Sheehan is that being a television celebrity really doesn't seem to matter to him, "I never have been -- and never will be -- just a show-business person,"  he asserts.  "I make a living at acting so that I can go hunting and fishing and play polo.  Recently, I bought about 25 acres of forest land down in San Diego.  Someday, I will return there to live out my romantic dream of just being a country squire."

TV Guide- June 7, 1986