Debra Pickett

He's mostly out of the television business now -- though he is pitching one new idea that he says could get him back into the game in a pretty major way -- and spending most of his time on a newly developing acting career and a successful run as a detective novelist.

'None of that bitter lettuce'

Still, when he first walks in to the Palm steakhouse, sporting a serious tan and perfect L.A. teeth, he looks like a straight-from-central-casting Hollywood executive. Dressed in a dark blue shirt, topped with a navy blazer that has been adorned with a plain white pocket square, the impressively trim Cannell, 65, is not the kind of guy who bothers with looking at a menu.

He's a regular at the Palm in L.A., where they make a special "ground round" plate just for him, and a big fan of the pickles and radishes that appear on the table as soon as he sits down. He orders the blackened ribeye special as soon as the waiter names it and then adds a salad to his order "with none of that bitter lettuce. What do you call that, radicchio?"

They're used to special requests here, where caricatures of the famous and semi-famous line the walls and the din of competitively boisterous conversation drowns out soft voices.

Cannell likes attention. He likes buzz. But he is also enough of a writer at heart that, when he looks around the crowded dining room, he says, "If we could get everyone out of here, I could write here, facing that wall."

'It's all just opinion'

Cannell is incredibly prolific -- writer's block has never been an issue, he says, largely because he's never fooled himself into thinking he has to make every sentence soaringly perfect -- and the kind of writer who'll occasionally teach a college fiction workshop just for the fun of it, handing out assignments like, "write a dialogue between a nun and a 16-year-old delinquent who has just done six months in CYA [California's juvenile justice system]."

But, he says, "I don't think of myself as a very good writer."

"Even now?" I ask, pointing out the dozen best-selling books and more than 40 TV series to his credit.

"I don't think it's healthy," he says. "I'm not into acclaim. I tune it out. . . . I kind of don't want to be complimented . . . running a studio, you learn not to trust that, anyway."

He's willing to admit that, yes, of course, "it's nice to have a good review and it's not fun to have a bad one," but he adds, "Really, it's all just opinion. When I first started doing 'Rockford Files' [his first big creation as a producer], I kept reading that it was just average TV, while 'Lou Grant' was doing 'issues.'"

"Rockford" has stood the test of time, Cannell says, and, besides still being watchable, the show holds a certain sentimental value for Cannell.

"I like 'Rockford,'" he says, "obviously because it was a wonderful time in my life. I went from being a nobody to having a line at my door."

The show's success was a surprise, he says. And, in fact, throughout his career, he says he was "continuously surprised by what worked and what didn't."

Who knew, for example, that "The A-Team" (now being made into a movie, which Cannell is producing) would achieve iconic status?

"None of us," Cannell says, laughing. "Or, actually, only George [Peppard]. He said it would be a huge hit before we ever turned on a camera."

I resist humming the theme song and reciting the melodramatic opening lines, "If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire . . . the A-Team." But Cannell sees me straining.

"Sometimes," he says, "I'll be standing in line at the market, and a guy will have just the right change or something, and he'll say, 'I love it when a plan comes together.' And I get to look at him and say, 'I wrote that!' "

Lost 15-year-old son

Cannell's pride is genuine, almost naive, but it's the pride of a guy who struggled through school with undiagnosed dyslexia, and who never quite thought he'd make anything of himself.

"My father was a really great businessman," he says, "and I was supposed to take over that. When I decided to become a writer instead, it was clearly not about money."

Even now, Cannell says, his priorities don't fit the stereotype of the typical Hollywood Player. He and his wife lost their 15-year-old son to a tragic accident, and Cannell says, "That was a big wake-up call for me."

While he used to spend long nights in the editing room, he started having dinner with his wife of 42 years and their three other children every night.

"I hadn't done that before," Cannell says, ". . . and, when he died, I realized I'd made a wrong choice."

"A wrong choice." It's a quick statement, one on which he clearly doesn't intend to elaborate, the kind of thing that a character on a TV show might say in summing up an important life lesson.

And, after Cannell says it, he is done talking about Hollywood. He fills the rest of our time together with stories about his family.