11:03 AM EST on Tuesday, November 23, 2004

BY ANDY SMITH
Journal Television Writer

CBS photo

Jonathan Baker, who has family in Providence and spent time here while growing up, is taking his tensions out on wife Victoria Fuller in The Amazing Race.

Reality TV relishes its villains, the folks you love to hate. Richard Hatch on Survivor. Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth on The Apprentice.

Now, just one show into its sixth season, Jonathan Baker on CBS's The Amazing Race is shaping up as a Bad Guy -- hyper-competitive, over-caffeinated, and nasty to his traveling partner and wife, Victoria Fuller.

"Maybe you should have taken someone else," Fuller said at one point.

"Maybe I should have," Baker snapped back.

(The Amazing Race, in which teams of contestants race around the world for a $1-million prize, airs on CBS at 9 p.m. tonight.) Turns out Baker, described as a "Hollywood entrepreneur" by CBS, has ties to Providence.

In a phone interview last week, Baker said he grew up in New York, Boston and Providence. He said his grandparents, Max and Ann Golden, live on the East Side of Providence, and when he was still a teenager he did some stories for Channel 10's PM Magazine.

Baker, 42, went to the University of Southern California, although he didn't graduate. Now he owns a day spa in Los Angeles and works on movie projects.

Fuller, 32, whom CBS describes as a pop artist/model, was a Playboy Playmate of the Month in 1996. The two got married in 2001.

Baker was not very pleased the way he came across on The Amazing Race.

"The editing wasn't kind to me, was it?" he said. "They used everything bad that was there. Victoria and I are like any married couple, we fight sometimes, but not like that. . . .

"We do love each other. But the way we're represented, I'm abusing her."

Baker is not allowed to talk about what happens on subsequent episodes of The Amazing Race, but he believes his portrayal will become less nasty as time goes on.

In the first episode of the show, which aired last Tuesday, contestants left Chicago for Iceland, where they had to find a particular waterfall, camp overnight on a glacier, and then choose between climbing a wall of ice or seaching for a buoy among hundreds of icebergs.

"We were up for days, and I was drinking a lot of Red Bull [a caffeine drink]," said Baker.

Baker said that while his portrayal on The Amazing Race so far has exaggerated his nasty side, he never intended to be meek and mild.

"In a way, I did this to myself. I went in wearing crazy colors. I didn't want to play the nice guy. I wanted to be colorful and over-the-top," he said.

That explains the canary-yellow shirt he was wearing in the first episode.

"I didn't want to be just nice," he said. "It wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't get any attention. . . . if you just be real, it will be boring. If you take it to a heightened level, it will be interesting."