Not Young, Still Restless (9 page)

I
’d been at
Y&R
for three or four months before I met Bill and Lee Phillip Bell. I knew the Bells lived in Chicago, where Lee Phillip was a star in her own right with her own daytime talk show. I knew they cocreated the show and that Bill was our head writer. I knew Bill was also a consultant on
Days of Our Lives
. And I knew he’d had another actress in mind for the role of Katherine Chancellor until John Conboy convinced him to give me a try. So it was a huge confidence boost when I glanced over one morning to see Bill and Lee standing discreetly offstage watching rehearsal, grinning from ear to ear. Bill’s blue eyes were literally twinkling, although his dubious pair of plaid pants caught my attention more. Lee exuded a warm, graceful charisma that made me look forward to getting to know her.

We quickly became good friends. We genuinely liked and respected each other, and we became almost quasi-godparents to each other’s children—like me, Bill and Lee had two boys and a girl: Bill Jr., Bradley, and Lauralee. I still remember dancing with eleven-year-old Bill Jr. one night at the Beverly Hills Hotel and how fiercely protective I was of Lauralee when she joined the
Y&R
cast as Christine “Cricket” Blair and had to deal with the double-edged sword of being the boss’s daughter. And when my daughter, Caren, headed to Chicago for college, Bill and Lee made a heartfelt offer of “anything she needs, no matter what it is, all she has to do is pick up the phone.” She never took advantage of their generosity, but it meant the world to her, and to me, that she had someone close by who’d be there for her in a heartbeat.

The Bell family eventually moved to Los Angeles, into a beautiful estate in Beverly Hills. They were staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel while their home was being renovated when I took the family to dinner one night and then ordered them to follow me to a kind of surprise party I’d arranged. Halfway there, they waved me over to the side of the road, and Bradley came running over to my car to explain that it was already past his father’s bedtime (at nine
P.M
.) and to ask if it would be all right if they just headed home and called it a night instead.

“No, that would not be all right,” I told him. “A dear friend of mine is expecting us. If your father wants to leave and go home to bed after we get there, that’s fine with me, but we
are
showing up.”

Our two-car procession pushed on, I’m sure with a lot of grumbling and whining in the rear car, until we finally arrived at our destination: a club in Hollywood called La Cage aux Folles, renowned for its spectacular, hilarious drag shows. I’d been there before to see my dear friend, a drag queen named James Haake, perform, and I loved every minute of it. (By the way, James, you once told me that, no matter what was going on in my life, I should devote two hours a day, every day, strictly to myself, because it would reduce my stress level and because I deserved it. I’ve been gratefully taking your advice ever since.)

The Bell family looked understandably tentative as they followed me to our table in the crowded club, Bill cursing me under his breath and yearning for his pajamas, I’m sure. I ordered a round of drinks, which arrived just as the show began—a fabulous show that, thanks to James, was played directly to the Bells for the most part, with many of the standard songs slightly revised to include the name “Bill” (“It Had to Be Bill,” for example, and “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Bill of Mine”).

It was one of those magical nights I even knew at the time I’d never forget. We all had fun, but none of us more than Bill, who started laughing and singing shortly after the show began and kept right on going until the Bells got back to their hotel at one
A.M
. In fact, Lee had to retrieve Bill from the middle of the street an hour later, where he’d decided to serenade the heart of Beverly Hills at the top of his lungs, and by all accounts that was the first and last time in his life Bill stayed up until three
A.M
. and loved every minute of it, whether he remembered it the next day or not.

Chapter Five

The Face-Lift Heard ’Round the World

N
ot enough can be said about the genius of Bill Bell. The characters he created to populate Genoa City were bigger than life but always based in reality, and they never made an appearance until Bill had meticulously thought through their purpose, their impact, and their past, present, and potential future in the tapestry of Genoa City society. When a character didn’t work, usually because either the actor or the storyline wasn’t developing as he’d hoped, he was the first to erase the part from the canvas, sometimes unceremoniously—one character, for example, whose name I can’t recall, went upstairs in the Abbott house one day to wash her hair and was never seen or mentioned again. Bill’s core characters were part of his family, and even when they were written out of the show for some reason, he never killed them off. The main reason, of course, was that he always wanted to keep the option open to bring them back someday. But I always suspected a little superstition under the surface too: Bill wasn’t about to run the off-chance risk that ending the life of a fictional family member might compromise the safety of his nonfictional family.

Bill lived and breathed
The Young and the Restless
. He was a workaholic who took his show and everyone involved very seriously, and he never expected more of any of us than he expected of himself. He also had a short fuse when he detected laziness, disloyalty, or a lack of commitment, and since I’m not exactly known for having the world’s longest fuse myself, he and I had our share of yelling, screaming, shouting matches, as only two people can who are passionate about what they’re doing, know each other very well, and love each other as dear, dear friends.

Bill had no use for people who complained about trivia, or, even worse, for the sheer attention of complaining. He was not the man to whine to if someone had a bigger dressing room than yours, or if you thought your parking space was an inconvenient distance from the artists’ entrance, or if you didn’t have as many lines as some other actor in any given script. And if you went to him to complain about a problem, you had better have a “fix” in mind, so that it would be a “Here’s what I’m unhappy about and here’s what could be done instead” conversation, rather than a simple, annoying “Here’s what I’m unhappy about.”

What Bill and I fought about most often involved our occasional differences of opinion about Katherine Chancellor—not how her character was being developed, because it was hard to find fault with that, but how she expressed herself. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was some idiomatic word or phrase in a line of dialogue that drove me crazy enough to take on the boss.

No one, I sometimes believed, knew Katherine Chancellor better than I did. But of course in the days of Bill Bell, that simply wasn’t true. He originated her on paper, and like every other character on the
Y&R
canvas, there was nothing imaginary about her as far as he was concerned—she was a real person and she was an essential part of his intellectual and emotional family. He never ceased to appreciate that he and I were Katherine’s “co-parents,” so to speak, but in a knock-down, drag-out fight about what she would or wouldn’t say, he always won.

I would come across some word or phrase in Katherine’s dialogue that seemed completely foreign to me, and if it became too awkward for me to shrug off, I wouldn’t hesitate to march upstairs into Bill’s face.

“What the hell is this line supposed to mean?” I would roar. “I’ve never heard this word [or phrase] in my life, and I would certainly never use it.”

“This isn’t
The Jeanne Cooper Story
,” he would roar back. “I don’t care what you would or wouldn’t say, I care what Katherine Chancellor would or wouldn’t say.” He would then point out the countless differences between Katherine’s history and mine, including the fact that she was a Midwestern woman, remind me that he knew Midwestern idiomatic speech infinitely better than I did, and end with a firm, usually loud “The line stays as written.”

On rare occasions he might be a little flexible, particularly if the alternate dialogue an actor suggested was an improvement and was clearly thought through. But Bill had one unconditional rule: his “tag lines,” the lines that ended a scene, were never to be tampered with, as Jess Walton once found out despite my warning that she’d be fighting a losing battle if she spoke up about it.

For some reason, she dug in her heels about a tag line in which Jill was supposed to say, “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a distended bladder.” Jess didn’t want to say it. She thought saying something about excusing herself to go to the ladies’ room, or to powder her nose, would be much more natural, and she felt strongly enough about it that she insisted on confronting Bill.

“Forget it. It’s a tag line,” I told her. “He’ll never let you change it.”

“We’ll just see about that,” she said, and she marched upstairs to his office.

She was back a few minutes later, and, while I’m sure it was under protest, delivered the line as written. That was probably in the late 1980s. And as recently as the
Y&R
fan event in 2011, viewers from all over the world were still taking delight in quoting what’s become known as “the distended bladder line.”

As fiercely as Bill could take one of us on at any given moment, his ferocity multiplied when he was fighting with CBS for the success and integrity of his beloved show. He knew
The Young and the Restless
was making a fortune, and he knew it earned every dime it made for the network thanks to the blood, sweat, and tears he and his cast and crew were investing in it. We were no fluke, no passing stroke of luck, and he wasn’t about to let us be treated as if we were. He and his creation changed the face of daytime. If CBS didn’t care to give us the support and respect we deserved, he left no doubt in executives’ minds that he was fully prepared to go elsewhere. Having been on the losing end of more arguments with Bill than I can count, I’ve never been surprised that we started on CBS in 1973 and we’re still there almost forty years later.

Bill and his “real life” family were also among the most generous people I’ve ever met, and we lucky recipients of that generosity were treated to some truly memorable parties. The annual Christmas festivities at the Bell house were as spectacular as the house itself: five-course sit-down dinners for the cast and our guests. The show’s anniversary celebrations invariably took place at the stunning Bel-Air Bay Club overlooking the ocean. There were so many cake parties on the set that I think we stopped just short of celebrating someone’s successful trip to the mailroom, and in every case, no expense was ever spared. I wish to this day that the “suits” would learn from Bill’s example and recognize what a difference gestures like those can make when it comes to cast and crew morale. The issue isn’t how much money is being spent to show us a good time. It’s our bosses simply understanding that everyone who works for them would appreciate a thank-you here and there in the midst of the current, much more frequent “There’s no room in the budget.”

In my educated opinion, the soap opera world has never known a more dedicated, more gifted head writer than Bill Bell. He was an artist with uncanny instincts and a brilliance for weaving several carefully constructed storylines together into a balanced, compelling tapestry. He and I had our disagreements, some of which you’ll read about, and I often accused him, as did many of my castmates, of spying on us when our fictional storylines hit a little too close to home in our personal lives. But we all owe the last thirty-eight years on the air, and our twenty-three years as the number-one daytime drama, to him. I thank you, I miss you, and God bless you, Bill.

A
long with my deep feelings for Bill, I fell in love with Katherine Chancellor and the cast and crew of
The Young and the Restless
the instant I met them. In so many ways, they saved my life, challenging me and stimulating me and becoming a ready-made group of friends to look forward to seeing four or five days a week . . . even if a couple of those friendships got off to a rocky start.

The role of Katherine Chancellor’s nemesis, Jill Foster, was originally played by a sexy, feisty actress named Brenda Dickson. In our first scene together, Katherine, in a full-length mink coat, swept grandly into the salon where Jill was working as a manicurist. During rehearsal I accidentally dropped the coat on the floor at Brenda’s feet and asked her to please pick it up and hand it to me. You would have thought I’d asked her to please wash and kiss my ass. I picked the coat up myself and walked away without saying a word—which, as those who know me will tell you, took every ounce of restraint I could muster. But she was interesting to work with, full of surprises, with an offbeat delivery unlike anything I’d ever seen before, so at least, I decided, there was something to be said for her.

Unfortunately, our next encounter was no warmer or fuzzier. We had a very important, difficult scene to shoot, and Brenda was nowhere to be found. I was getting angrier and more anxious by the moment as the search for Brenda spread throughout the building, so that finally, when she came flying in at the last possible instant, I blew.

“How you treat your other castmates is none of my business,” I snarled in her face. “But when you have a scene with me, don’t you ever pull this shit again.”

She took a step toward me, glared into my eyes, and said unapologetically, “I’ve never been spoken to like that in my life. How dare you?”

I wasn’t done yet, stepping even closer to her without losing eye contact. “I don’t know what your background is,” I said, “but mine is theater. I’m a very disciplined actress, and I don’t appreciate being panicked right before a scene begins. It shows in the performance, which means the audience gets less than they deserve. That may be okay with you, but it’s sure as hell not okay with me, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you get away with it when we’re onstage together.”

In my very early days on
Y&R
, Brenda mentioned that she’d seen and loved
Let No Man Write My Epitaph
, a dark, gritty movie costarring Shelley Winters as a tough, troubled barmaid who becomes a heroin addict. Brenda was especially taken with Fran, the redheaded prostitute in that film, and she was impressed to hear that I was the actress who’d played Fran.

And so, wanting to be sure I’d made a lasting impression on her, I couldn’t resist finishing what I’ll politely call our little ground rules discussion with a firm, pointed “Or, to put it another way, pretend I’m Shelley Winters.”

Her eyes widened, then she turned and stormed away without saying a word. For the next three days we didn’t speak to each other except as Katherine and Jill. She stared menacingly at me at every opportunity, and, depending on my mood, I either stared back or ignored her completely.

Finally, on the morning of the fourth day, there was a knock on my dressing room door. To my surprise, it was Brenda, and she didn’t seem to be holding a weapon. After a long moment of silence between us she said, simply and quietly, “You were right. I apologize. It won’t happen again.”

And thus began a friendship I cherish to this day. I loved working with her, and I love her. I always will. Under all that attitude and bravado, I found her to be tender, generous, and sometimes heartbreakingly fragile. One night I’ll never forget because it touched me so deeply: she called in tears and asked if I could please come to her house as soon as possible. I arrived to find her in the midst of a full-blown meltdown over the fact that her fiancé had broken up with her with no warning at all, just a few short weeks before the wedding.

“What am I going to do with these?” she sobbed, pointing to four hundred beautifully engraved wedding invitations.

“You’re one of the stars of the number-one show in daytime,” I told her. “I’ll bet you could sell them for five dollars apiece minimum.” She smiled for the only time during that long, sad night. I ached to see her in that much pain, and watching the tenacity and determination with which she pulled herself out of that darkness made me proud to be her friend.

She left
Y&R
amid a flurry of rumors and tabloid publicity. Her reasons for leaving belong in her book, not mine. Even after all these years, while I don’t see her or talk to her as often as I should, I hope she knows how fondly I remember her and wish her the best.

T
he role of Jill Foster Abbott passed from Brenda Dickson to Jess Walton in 1987, and I’m not sure any two actresses could have been more different. As intriguing and professional as Jess was from the very beginning, with a great track record from her days on the CBS daytime soap
Capitol
, it wasn’t the world’s smoothest adjustment for me, a little like making the transition from working with a Vegas showgirl to acting opposite a classical ballerina. In an earnest effort to be helpful, I gave Jess several hours of Brenda-as-Jill tapes, for backstory and some idea of the stilettos she’d been hired to fill. She never watched them. She wasn’t interested in portraying Brenda Dickson playing Jill Foster Abbott. She was interested in playing Jill Foster Abbott, and doing it her way. At first I was annoyed at her for ignoring what I thought was a very generous, embracing gesture on my part. Looking back, and being brutally honest with myself, I doubt if I would have appreciated being handed a pile of tapes of someone else playing Katherine Chancellor with an implied subtext of “Here’s how to portray this character.” I came on board to make Katherine Chancellor mine, as surely as Jess came on board to make Jill Foster Abbott hers, and I respect her enormously for that despite my initial reaction to the contrary.

The relationship between Katherine and Jill has always been a fascinating one: brilliantly conceived by Bill Bell, a great rivalry between two strong-willed, passionate women who have every reason to despise each other but, underneath it all, might take a bullet for each other under the right circumstances. The only period in which it was less than a joy for Jess and me to play the roles was that bizarre, and thankfully temporary, twist that had Katherine and Jill believing they were mother and daughter, news that sent Katherine into an instantaneous, cataclysmic stroke. It was one thing for Jill to use her favorite term of endearment—“you old bat”—on her nemesis. It was quite another, as far as the audience, Jess, and I were concerned, for Jill to say such a thing to her mother. A cake fight between two women who’ve spent decades torturing and loving each other is understandable if not downright entertaining. But a cake fight between a mother and daughter? Really? It was a tough emotional tightrope for us to play, and we did our damnedest to make it work, but we couldn’t have been happier or more relieved when the writers saw fit to let that notoriously unreliable Genoa City DNA lab discover yet another of its mistakes and announce that Katherine and Jill weren’t really related after all.