Fictional characters dog soap actors off-screen for years

Press, 19 July 1989, Page 16

Fictional characters dog soap actors off-screen for years

By

Ray Bennett

Joan Collins never got used to it. Driving in Los Angeles the glamour goddess of “Dynasty” saw some children waving at her. She waved back, and stopping at a red light, rolled the window down to talk. “They came over,” she says, “and they were yelling, ‘Alexis we hate you! We hate you!’ It was staggering.” Donna Mills, who plays the scheming Abby Cunningham on “Knotts Landing,” understands — people still call her Laura from her stint in the mid--1970s on “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” Those with longer memories even call her Rocket, the name of the torch singer she played for six month on the long-gone soap “Secret Storm.”

Soap operas come and go, in daytime and prime time, but they never lose their grip on the emotions of millions of TV fans.

Long-time soap opera writer/producer Al Rabin, who is now creative consultant to “Days of Our Lives,” says people enjoy the soaps for the same reasons they like ball games.

“You share in the emotion of the players,” Rabin says. “You go there to share that moment of joy with them, that moment of anger and disappointment. That’s what viewers do every day with their soaps.”

Fans’ identification with soap characters is so strong that it follows actors and actresses off the screen and for years afterwards. Today’s hot couples, whether it’s Cruz (A. Martinez) and Eden (Marcy Walker) on “Santa Barbara,” or Duke (lan Buchanan) and Anna (Finola Hughes) on “General Hospital,” get their share of attention, but it’s nothing compared with what happened to Anthony Geary and Genie Francis (who is now on “Days of Our Lives”). Geary played Luke opposite Francis as Laura on “General Hospital.” In 1980, they were the hottest couple daytime soaps had ever seen. And Sally Sussman, former “The Young and the Restless” writer who created N.B.C.’s brand-new “Generations,” says, “There hasn’t been anything that big since.”

Luke was a sleazy guy who drifted into “General Hospital’s” Port Charles and took up with the show’s golden girl, Laura Webber. In an incident that shook all of soapland, Luke “raped” Laura. It was staged in a manner that left it unclear whether it was actually rape or not, and Luke went on to become a raffish kind of hero. But the role marked Geary. His career has been spotty since leaving the show. And at the time, on personal appearances, fans yelled to him, “Luke rape me, rape me.” Said Geary, “There is a mad fringe out there.” For a while, Geary handled it fliply, saying,

“Well, rape’s my specialty.” But he soon realised that fans’ emotions cannot be trifled with. “I realised I was wrong,” he said. “If I couldn’t avoid the subject entirely, I just said I appreciated that we touched them so deeply.” Producers and writers are very sensitive to fans! expectations. “I think fans want to see something a little bit larger than life,” agrees Sussman, “but I think they demand honesty and integrity of characters. I think they want consistency.” Soaps create such loyalty because, unlike episodic shows, there’s no hero to win the day every time. “Night-time dramas do nothing but endings,” says Rabin. “We don’t do any endings. We’re very careful about how this week leads us to next week, how this story dovetails with that story. It’s true continuing drama. We’re in no hurry.” That soap .producers know their audiences was evident when “Dallas” successfully pulled off one of its biggest stunts. Patrick Duffy had left the series and his character, Bobby Ewing, was killed. The audience’s desire to see Bobby return was so strong that when he showed up one day in the shower, and his death — and the entire season — was seen to be Pamela Ewing’s dream, fans accepted it." A former “Days of Our Lives” producer confides that there z was a character several years ago named Tom Horton, juri., who had been in a story line that wasn’t working. So Tommy went upstairs. “I said ‘Where’s Tommy?’ They said, ‘Well, he’s upstairs.’ Then one day he came down for breakfast. Three years later, same actor.” Unless it’s deliberately for the publicity value, daytime soaps rarely kill off characters when they write them out. Writers have learned that it’s a mistake to eliminate beloved characters in a dramatic way. “Days of Our Lives” once gave a secondary character a heart attack and he died on the air. “The reaction from

viewers was horrendous. They said, ‘How could you kill the person that we love’?” says the former producer. “So, later when we wrote two very major characters off the show, we said, ‘They’re just working at the hospital down at the corner.’ Nothing. No response at all. Because although they never see them, viewers believe they’re there — they may come back Wednesday, no problem. You don’t play around with the friends and relatives of your audience.” Deidre Hall found that out the hard way when she played the immensely popular Marlena on “Days of Our Lives.” Marlena had a twin who was strangled in a highly publicised story line. For four days it seemed to be Marlena who had been murdered. “Fans were really angry,” says Hall, who went on a TV talk show to take calls from viewers in order to reassure them. “People were on hold for two hours. I wouldn’t do that for anybody. One woman said her four-year-old son couldn’t eat or sleep over it. It was a tremendous outcry.” On another occasion, viewer response actually changed the stoiy line. Marlena’s evil twin, who was supposed to enter a sanitarium, slipped Marlena some sleeping pills and sent her instead. The doctors wouldn’t believe she was Marlena and prescribed shock treatment.

But the day shock treatment was to be taped in Los Angeles, network executives jetted in from New York with bags of mail and telegrams from distressed viewers. “They said, ‘Kill it! Kill the story right now’,” recalls Hall. Ever since 1975, when “Time” put Bill Hayes and Susan Seaforth Hayes ’of “Days of Our Lives” on its cover, soap operas have been accepted as mainstream entertainment. The popularity of “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” “Knots Landing” and the other prime-time dramas made the 80s the soap decade. Copyright Los Angeles Times Syndicate