The plane banked hard to the left as it pulled away from the fuel line, its engines roaring through the dark over the Persian Gulf. Jane Phillips was in the cockpit, exactly where she wanted to be, with Bob Hope seated to her right. When the refueling mission was complete, Hope asked the pilots if he could say a few words.
Of course he could.
He thanked them for their service and wished them a Merry Christmas. Then, without missing a beat, he added one more line: “But by the way you forgot to check the tires!” The pilots laughed and promised to get it right “next time.” Phillips still calls the moment priceless.
That night aboard a military aircraft was one stop on a career built on stages, gymnasiums and runways around the world. Rebecca Jane Phillips is a former professional performer whose credits include multiple USO tours with Bob Hope and performances at the Kennedy Center, work that came years before she became known for interior design.
These days, Phillips runs an interior design business built on warmth, sentimentality and a taste for the unexpected — a natural next act after years spent as one of the top-producing real estate agents in Texas.
Long before she was choosing paint colors, however, she was coaching sellers through decluttering and staging their homes to shine, work that called on the same showmanship that carried her through decades on stage. One of her favorite sales came the weekend before The Byron Nelson golf tournament, when she and a few fellow agents built an open house around it. “I placed my golf bag and clubs at the front door and wore my cute golfing attire,” Phillips said. “I did sell my listing that weekend!”
Before any of that, she trained, toured and performed her way across five continents, and that same discipline and glitz impacts everything she does today.
Jane Phillips: ‘I Got A Small Taste Of Being Famous’
Phillips’ performing career started as an athletic one. In high school in Texas, she set state records and finished third in the nation, results that earned her two Division I scholarships to Baylor University, one in basketball and one in track and field, where she competed as a pentathlete. At Baylor, she trained under Olympic coach Clyde Hart, whose roster of athletes would later include Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson.
Getting to compete in the first place took some initiative. “I started Title 9,” Phillips said. “When I wanted to compete in track and field there was no team. So my parents would drive me to the meets. I could enter five events and win five events.”
She became known, she said, as “the one man track team,” once placing third as a full team all by herself at a major meet.
That same drive carried straight into performing. Her first professional job came the day after she graduated from high school, a mostly seasonal production open to performers of every age. This year, that show celebrated its 60th season. “It’s a show I can return to and still feel like family,” Phillips shared with a smile. From there, she built an international touring career, spending eight months performing in South America, nine months in Europe and six months in Japan, split across three separate trips because of Japan’s two-month work visa limit.
The attention that came with that kind of travel took some getting used to. “I got a small taste of being famous,” Phillips said of hosting a television show early in her touring years. “Sometimes I was really tired and just needed to go to the grocery store but everyone would be in awe. I kept smiling.”
None of it came without hours in the studio. At the height of her training in New York, Phillips took dance classes for up to six hours a day, and she is firm about which one mattered most. “One class must be ballet,” she said. “It is the foundation to all of dance just like the ABC’s are for words and communication.”
That standard stayed with her even once she was training alongside some of the biggest names in the field, including a class with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who she watched turn 11 times in a row to the right without breaking form. To the left, she noted with a laugh, he could only manage two. “He’s human,” she said.
The polish came next, and Phillips is candid about what it took to break in. “Get a professional headshot,” she said, adding that a young performer’s résumé has to be talked up a little in the beginning. “At first your résumé has to be embellished. You’ve got to make the smallest job seem bigger and better.” Years later, she looked back at everything she had actually built and realized the embellishing was long behind her. “It was truly all mine,” she said. “What a great feeling of accomplishment.”
Center Stage On Broadway
Years of training and touring positioned Jane Phillips for one of the biggest opportunities of her career, a lead role in a national Broadway touring production. When her partner and one of the show’s leads left to originate the role of Gaston in Broadway’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Phillips stepped up to become the company’s dance captain.
She filled the vacancy with a performer she had met while working on the movie “Cotton Club,” Grant Miller, whose skill as a singer, dancer and actor made him, in her words, a quick study. The two spent nine months touring Europe together.
“Performing with the best raised my standards in every way,” Phillips said. “I worked hard to earn these roles.” Of her replacement, she added, “After our nine month European tour, he stayed in Europe and became a big star. He got to live two dreams back to back. Later he expressed his gratitude to me for making it all possible.”
The role demanded the same versatility her Baylor training had built years earlier, the ability to step into a new part on short notice and keep a show moving without missing a beat. It is a skill set she carried directly into her work with Bob Hope and onto the Kennedy Center stage.
Bob Hope, the USO and the Kennedy Center
Ask Phillips what stands out most about the Kennedy Center and she does not hesitate.
“Everything!!!” she said.
She first performed there for President Reagan before an audience she remembers as packed with stars. One number featured flight suits and blonde wigs that came off mid-performance to reveal red sequined costumes underneath. Backstage brought its own drama.
“Something I didn’t plan for is the Secret Service locked us out while they made sure everything was secure,” Phillips said. “I really wanted my purse and didn’t have it. So me and a few others were just stranded outside of the Kennedy Center. It was fun to go in the ‘cast only’ backstage door.”
A decade later, Phillips joined Bob Hope on the USO tour she remembers as 1987’s “Around the World in 8 Days.” She learned choreography in the back of the plane, a setup she compares to “being in a rocking ship,” and eventually needed medication for motion sickness.
The trip also put her in the cockpit over the Persian Gulf, where she spent time with the pilots and watched Hope connect with service members firsthand. Footage from the tour still circulates online, with Phillips appearing as the first dancer out in one number and finishing center stage.
She later performed at Bob Hope’s 80th birthday special at the Kennedy Center alongside entertainers including Lee Greenwood, Barbara Eden and Connie Stevens.
Life on the road rarely unfolded exactly as planned. One tour bus still carried Bon Jovi’s name across the front. On another stop, high winds forced the company to reroute to a base that had not been expecting them. School buses became dressing rooms, and the performers found their own way to pass the time.
“I have the only photo of Lee Greenwood hanging upside down doing the splits in a school bus,” Phillips said. “He was surprisingly good.”
Still Center Stage
Rebecca Jane Phillips eventually left performing behind for real estate and, later, interior design, but she sees the careers as closely connected. She still believes in making an entrance.
“They all go together,” she said of her Broadway years and her design work today. “It’s all about creativity and turning a blank canvas into something beautiful, happy and peaceful.”
The instinct for the unexpected that once shaped her life onstage now shows up in the rooms she creates.
“Expect the unexpected,” Phillips said. “I love to surprise everyone with the small to big wows.”
After a career built on movement, reinvention and spectacle, Phillips still comes back to something much simpler.
“I believe everything we see should bring us joy,” she said.
