He looked down at his plate uncomfortably. “I get a lot of that, and it’s a real strange sensation,” he said awkwardly. Then he tried to laugh it off. “Personally, I think I’m way too old for the teen magazines. I got one letter from a girl saying, ‘I don’t think 18 years is too much of an age difference, do you?’”

For the past year or two, Springfield has been trying to deal with, understand and occasionally change those kinds of reactions. He got into rock ‘n’ roll to get the girls, but when he got them he decided that what he wanted was credibility. He refused to have anything to do with the teen magazines, which ran stories about him anyway. He made plans to leave General Hospital, and did so a year ago. He rumpled his sleek black hair and ditched the squeaky-clean image for a grungier look that featured lots of stubble. His popish love songs gave way to harder-edged, synthesizer-driven rockers.

And eventually, he realized that his struggle for credibility had gotten out of hand. “I got caught up in the whole image thing,” he says now as he sits in the Record Plant. “Credibility got to be such a priority that I was going about things for all the wrong reasons. I was much too concerned with what people thought of me, or what I thought of me and how I could change that. I went after certain magazines because they were image-enhancers and all that, and I always thought, ‘How can I do this to appear that way to these people?’”

He pauses to take an apple wedge off the tray. “I’m not sure, but I think I’m beginning to get all this stuff balanced. Consequently, I’m a lot happier.”

Even as a kid, Rick Springfield has image problems. To the girls, he was just another nondescript kid in class. To his parents - his father was a lieutenant colonel in the British Army, both parents were members of the strict Church of England – he was a budding thug who hung out with the wrong crowd. To his schoolmates and neighbors, he was usually the new kid in town, the Army brat who was uprooted every three years for a new city or, occasionally, a new country.

“I used to be a real open kid,” says Springfield, born 34 years ago in Sydney, Australia. “I remember moving to one little bush town and going up to a bunch of kids and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Rick.’ I thought they’d welcome me, but they grabbed me, took off my shirt and hit me across the back with a thick leather belt. I’ve still got a lot of walls up, and I think it comes from things like that.”

During one brief stay in England, Springfield found refuge in rock ‘n’ roll – specifically in the British instrumental band the Shadows. He got a guitar at age 13 and says his interest in rock intensified when he found that his parents couldn’t stand the music. “The guitar was a way to be by myself,” he says, “and also a good way to piss them off.”

It was a morbid period in his life, “I use to build 12-foot working guillotines in the backyard. My mom would say, ‘I’m gonna knock the bloody thing down!’ and run outside with an ax and start whaling. A couple of weeks later I’d be back out there putting it up again.”

As his conflicts with his mother got worse, Springfield became the youngest member of the Jordy Boys, a rock band whose other members had criminal records, a taste for drugs and other unsettling habits. He says they never included him in their most unsavory dealings, but all the same, young Rick Springthorpe learned to break some laws on his own. As he confessed in a song from 1983’s Living in Oz album, “We got caught up in the image of living young rebels by the handbook.”

When he was 17, he changed his last name at the behest of a bandleader (“I never liked my name anyway – forgive me, Mom”). His subsequent bands played everywhere from Melbourne’s sleaziest nightclubs to a three-month tour of firebases in Vietnam. “We brought along a couple of girls who sang ‘Light My Fire’ out of tune and wiggled their butts. I took my big solo on ‘Love is Blue,’ and then the troops went out into the jungle to fight. It seemed like cowboys and Indians to me.”

By the early seventies his music had brought him to the United States. His ballad “Speak to the Sky” made the top twenty, girls started to notice the dark-haired guy with the cute accent, and he recalls, “It seemed like, “Next stop – Springfield mania.’”

Instead, things started to unravel. “As soon as I got over here, my manager said he’d arranged magazine interviews. It sounded fantastic. I did the interviews, and I’d say, “I was in bands back home; I want to write songs and become successful; I like to go to movies…My favorite color? Oh…Then the headlines would say HIS FAVORITE COLOR IS BLUE, and the stories would talk about my long eyelashes and dimpled grin.”

When he tired of being a reluctant – and fading – teen idol. Springfield fired his manager and wound up with immigration problems and legal barriers that prevented him from recording or touring. Badly in need of money, he began sheepishly attending an acting class, and soon became a regular. “I didn’t have any friends at the time,” he says, “and that class had a great camaraderie.”

For the next few years, he did better as an actor than as a musician. The one record he made, Wait for Night, was released just before its record label folded. Meanwhile, he was given a contract with Universal Studios and the parts trickled in: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Nancy Drew Mysteries, Battlestar Galactica. “I was killed off at the start of that pilot,” he says of Battlestar. “But my friends and I forged hundreds of letters to the studio suggesting that they find an ear floating in space, clone me and bring me back.”

Then came the beginning of 1980. Springfield gets unusually intense, even mystical when he speaks of this time; it was, he knew, his last chance to have a real musical career, and it became “a real cleaning period.” He broke up with his actress girlfriend of five years and cemented a partnership with a dog.

“She’s the girl who gave me my dog, Ron,” he says of the stocky half-Pit Bull, half-Great Dane who adorns two of his album covers and some videos. “It was a very traumatic breakup, and when we split I drove away from the house with my clothes, my television set and my dog. There was Ronnie, jammed in the front seat. We became partners then.”

At the same time, RCA Records became interested in his latest batch of songs. One looked particularly promising: Like most of his urgent love songs, it was written from personal experience, this time about a close friend’s girlfriend on whom he had a serious crush. “I thought about sending her a copy of the manuscript and a rose because I heard that Neil Young did that once,” he says. “But I chickened out.” Veteran producers Keith Olsen helped him rearrange the song, and “Jessie’s Girl” looked like a potential hit.

Just before the album was released, he got a call to audition for a television show. “I thought, ‘Soap operas are for little old ladies – what’s that gonna do for my musical career?’” he says. “I hadn’t done any acting for about eight months, and I didn’t need the job. Then I found out the show had a huge college audience.” He pauses. “And we are talking bucks here.”

When the dust cleared in the summer of 1981, Luke and Laura were household names; Working Class Dog, a record that had been slowly moving up the charts, was certified smash; “Jessie’s Girl” was one of the year’s biggest singles; and Rick Springfield had himself a musical career, albeit one that was helped along by a soap opera. “It still makes me go ugh inside, but the TV show did help get the record out there and move it along,” he says.

Springfield lets out a self-deprecating laugh. “I’d been working for 15 years to have a hit, and I finally got one. If that was you, what would you do for your next album?”

What Springfield did was release the conservative Success Hasn’t Spoiled Me Yet, which he frankly admits was almost a sequel to the first record. Then came his mind revolt, his bid for credibility via the stubble-and-synthesizers approach to the traditional, reasonably successful Living in Oz. Now, he says, he’s ready to put those image worries behind him and concentrate on sustaining two careers, music and movies, definitely in that order.

Is Springfield ready to settle down, away from the indulgent sex & drugs & rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle?