In her new memoir and in her candid PEOPLE interview, the actress opens up like never before about what nobody ever saw on TV

NEED TO KNOW

• Jaclyn Smith shares behind-the-scenes stories from Charlie’s Angels, including drugs use on set in the fifth and final season
• She recalls being offered less pay than her season 1 costars Farrah Fawcett and Kate Jackson and how she successfully negotiated a raise before filming began
• Smith reveals the costar who once asked her to have a threesome

Charlie’s Angels will turn 50 on Sept. 22, and the life of its star Jaclyn Smith is filled with reminders of the iconic crime drama. The phone at the gate of her Los Angeles home rings with the show’s theme song. In her living room sits a bronze sculpture that Farrah Fawcett, her late former costar, gave her as a gift.

“People still send Charlie’s Angels pictures for me to sign every day,” Smith, 80, says in her PEOPLE cover story. “Who would have dreamed the afterlife of Charlie’s Angels would be like this?”

When the Houston native debuted as Kelly Garrett in 1976, opposite Fawcett and Kate Jackson, their lives changed overnight.

“We were just three girls hoping to find an audience, and boy, did we find an audience,” she says.

Jackson was the only Angel to star in all five seasons of the show until its end in 1981. A decades-long acting career and business empire followed, and now, in the new memoir I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie and in her candid PEOPLE interview, she opens up like never before about what nobody ever saw on TV.

Among her revelations, Smith says she was initially offered substantially less pay than Jackson and Fawcett when they were cast. Jackson, who’d previously established primetime credentials as a regular on Angels executive producer Aaron Spelling’s The Rookies, was top-billed as Sabrina Duncan, at $10,000 an episode.

Fawcett, meanwhile, was offered $5,000 to play Jill Munroe, while Smith was only offered $3,000 for Kelly. Believing that she and Fawcett were on equal footing with their respective guest spots on the shows Switch and Harry O, Smith told her agent that if she didn’t get the same pay as Fawcett, she’d walk away from the role. She ultimately received a raise.

“I was probably a little more aggressive about that than today,” she says. “I don’t know where that business sense came from, but it was there, I guess, from my daddy. He would always say, ‘Have a backup plan. Really think things out.’”

After just one season, Fawcett left the show to pursue more dramatic roles.

“Kate had a hard time with Farrah gone,” Smith says. “No one could replace her.”

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When Cheryl Ladd was brought in to complete the trio as Kris Munroe, Smith says, the dynamic shifted: “Kate was sharp and fought for everything, and Cheryl was pretty easygoing, so I felt sometimes caught between the two because they were so opposite.”

When Jackson left after the show’s third season in 1979, she was replaced by Shelley Hack. The following season, Hack was replaced by Tanya Roberts, who, Smith writes in her memoir, had an open marriage with her husband, Barry Roberts, and “wasn’t shy about it in the least, or about propositioning people to ‘swing’ with them.”

While on a flight to Hawaii to shoot Angels, Smith recalls, Roberts, who died in 2021 at age 65, asked Smith to join her and Barry for a threesome. She declined but found Roberts’ “honesty about her sexuality to be brave and self-aware.”

By the fifth and final season of the show, Smith writes in her memoir, cocaine had become a constant presence on set.

“The more drug use I saw, the more time I spent in my motor home,” she writes. “I was in there a lot by the end of the series.”

Smith writes that she’s “never” used cocaine and “never will,” as “I’ve watched that drug, in particular, turn people into the worst version of themselves.”

She knew the fifth season would be her last. Still, through all of the ups and downs, her bonds with her original costars Fawcett and Jackson remained tight.

“After the applause, the friendship is still there,” she says. “That sisterhood was strong.”

For more from Jaclyn Smith, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE on stands Friday.

I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie is available wherever books are sold.

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