Not Young, Still Restless

by Jeanne Cooper

  His name is Beau Kazer. Fans of The Young and the Restless probably know him better as Brock Reynolds, Katherine Chancellor’s son.

  Of course, there have been many actors on Y&R to whom I was wildly attracted but with whom there was never anything more than wonderful platonic friendships and, in one case in particular, a storyline in the late 1970s/early 1980s that made it a joy to go to work every day.

  As usual, it all started with the Katherine-Jill rivalry. Jill was a manicurist at a salon called the Golden Comb, where the irresistible Derek Thurston (originally played by Joe LaDue) was a hairdresser, cosmetologist, and manager. Katherine fell in love with Derek, who wanted Jill. Katherine, never one to let Jill win without a fight, managed to get Derek drunk and married him before he could sober up. Despite his feelings for Jill, Derek realized there were certain advantages to being Mr. Katherine Chancellor, not the least of which was enough money to open his own salon.

  Derek’s avowed love for Jill, though, sent Katherine into almost suicidal despair, particularly when Jill began an affair with Stuart Brooks and Derek realized he might be losing her. In an effort to hang on to him any way she could, Katherine convinced him to stay with her on a purely platonic basis for a year, after which she would handsomely reward his loyalty. He finally opted to stay with Katherine, and Jill married Stuart Brooks.

  Afterward, there was an unfortunate shooting that left Katherine temporarily paralyzed, but that paled in comparison to the arrival of Derek’s ex-wife, Suzanne Thurston-Lynch (played by Ellen Weston), who was intent on winning her husband back. So she did what any romantic rival would do: she offered Katherine candy laced with drugs. That sent Katherine to a sanitarium, which her roommate set fire, leading the people of Genoa City to presume Katherine was dead. Derek, who was still legally married to Katherine, inherited her fortune and planned to spend every dime of it on his beloved Jill. But just as they were about to be married, Katherine appeared at their wedding, alive and well, and reclaimed both her husband and her money.

  To celebrate their reunion, Katherine and Derek went on a cruise, intended to be a second honeymoon. Unfortunately, it didn’t go well, and after one particularly heated fight, Katherine leapt overboard in yet another failed suicide attempt.

  But what luck—Katherine was found and rescued by a Cuban revolutionary named Felipe Ramirez (played by the stunningly attractive Victor Mohica), who took her to the island on which he was holed up.

  They fell madly in love, while Katherine also fell madly in love with the simplicity of Felipe’s lifestyle, having nothing to do with luxuries and everything to do with hard work and inventiveness just to survive. Katherine might have vanished forever into the Jill-free jungle with her beloved Felipe had she not severely injured her leg and had the injury not resulted in a life-threatening infection that forced Felipe to risk his own freedom to return her to Genoa City for proper medical treatment. Heartbroken but knowing there was no future for him in Katherine’s world and in a country in which he would undoubtedly be arrested, he left her there where she belonged but he didn’t.

  She recovered, of course, and immediately divorced Derek.

  As far as I’m concerned, Katherine has never loved another man, before or since, as much as she loved Felipe Ramirez.

  And to this day I smile at the thought that if Harry Bernsen had tried to send me from Rome to Majorca for the weekend with a handsome, uncomplicated hero like Felipe Ramirez, and if I hadn’t had my beautiful children waiting for me in Los Angeles, I might have become a Majorcan resident and lived simply and happily ever after.

  Ask most actors who’ve been on a soap opera for a long time and I believe they’ll tell you the same thing: sometimes we can’t help but wonder if our bosses have surveillance teams following us around, sneaking their way into our homes and our heads. I’ve suspected it over and over again about the occasional eerie parallels between Katherine Chancellor’s life and mine, but never did she and I fall into perfect step more literally than in 1984.

  I turned fifty-five in October 1983. Even then I didn’t think of fifty-five as old, and I wouldn’t have minded looking my age. But more and more often, I found myself looking in the mirror and wondering where “I” had gone. Rather than seeing fifty-five-year-old Jeanne Cooper, I kept staring at someone who was wearing every hurt, every moment of stress, every disappointment, every lie, every betrayal, every tear and sleepless night on her face for all to see, and I hated it. On a more practical, less emotional level, I also hated that my time in the makeup chair at work had expanded from thirty or forty minutes to a mind-numbing two hours, which was both boring and intensely discouraging.

  As luck would have it, I’d already scheduled my allotted vacation, and the idea evolved with growing excitement that I wanted to spend it under the knife of the best plastic surgeon in town, reclaiming a face that looked as healthy and happy as the rest of me felt. After a lot of research, a lot of referrals, and a lot of consultations, I chose Dr. Harry Glassman, who, among many other accomplishments, has been the chief resident in plastic and reconstructive surgery at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1975. (His name might also be familiar to you as Victoria Principal’s husband for many years.) I liked him very much and found him positive, confident, and reassuring, and I also admired his extensive, often pro bono experience with life-altering reconstructive surgery.

  Dr. Glassman required full payment in advance. It was a lot of money, more than I could afford, and God bless my agent for lending me what I was unable to come up with on my own.

  It’s no surprise that I began talking about my upcoming face-lift at work—I was nervous and excited and had no interest in being secretive about it, and we all spent so much time together that there was very little we didn’t know about one another anyway. Among my most supportive Y&R teammates were our executive producer Wes Kenney and, most especially, our producer Tom Langan.

  Predictably, it came up in our many conversations that my having a face-lift meant Katherine would be having a face-lift at the same time.

  Unpredictably, although it felt perfectly logical and even inevitable, the idea took root and grew of letting my/Katherine’s face-lift and recovery be filmed and aired as part of Katherine’s storyline on The Young and the Restless. Bill Bell was ecstatic and readily agreed to my demand that it be shot documentary style—no special effects, no “prettying it up” for the cameras. “If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right, let’s do it ‘real,’ and let’s do it honest,” I said. “Let’s have Katherine show people who are afraid of plastic surgery exactly what it’s like and what a difference it can make.” And that unanimous commitment was at the heart of every decision we made from that day forward. Tom Langan was in enthusiastic, capable charge every step of the way, which gave me the luxury of knowing that all I had to do was hold up my end of this storyline—I could trust Tom, without a second thought, to take care of everything else.

  As has happened more times than I can count over all these years, Katherine and I had hit simultaneous low periods in our lives. She was feeling as “used up” as I was. Both of us had children who’d grown up and gone out on their own. Katherine was facing the added torture of knowing that Jill’s precious growing son had been fathered by Katherine’s late husband. (Okay, Katherine switched Jill’s baby with someone else’s at birth, but I’ve never claimed she wasn’t moody.) To rub further salt in the open wound, Jill had now married Katherine’s dear friend and former lover John Abbott. Derek was gone. Felipe was gone. Katherine was fighting her alcohol addiction again, and there didn’t seem to be much left for her to live for.

  Bill wrote a gorgeous scene that was as easy to play as it was excruciating, a scene that perfectly expressed what both Katherine and I were struggling with. Katherine and Dina (John Abbott’s ex-wife and a confidante of Katherine’s, played by the wonderful Marla Adams) were in Katherine’s bedroom after some sparkling social occasion or other. (Remember sparkling social occasions i
n Genoa City, especially at the Colonnade Room? I miss them terribly.) While they talked, Katherine slowly began disassembling herself, removing her glittering gown . . . her makeup . . . her false eyelashes . . . at that moment in time, as far as she was concerned, the whole carefully constructed disguise she wore to trick people into thinking she was still an attractive, vibrant woman. As she looked in the mirror, her façade crumbled, exposing the flawed, fading, empty shell she felt she’d become, and she began baring her soul, first to the much younger, happier Dina and then to herself, in a beautiful monologue of quiet despair that ended with a helpless, hopeless “God, someone help me.” It was one of my most memorable performances as far as I’m concerned, probably because it wasn’t a performance at all, and I can still feel Terry Lester’s arms around me when it was over. Terry originally played the role of Jack Abbott and played him brilliantly for many years. We were very close off-screen; we shared each other’s joys and knew each other’s demons without judgment, and we understood why that scene had made us both cry and impelled him to run onstage to hold me and let me hold him for a long time the instant the director yelled, “Cut!”

  (Terry left the show in 1988 and passed away, far too young, in 2003. I think of him and miss his friendship every day.)

  I give Dr. Glassman a lot of credit for agreeing to perform my face-lift “live” on worldwide television and the patience with which he tolerated the often tedious and cumbersome production preparations. More than his share of colleagues was strongly warning him against it. I think the word “crazy” was even tossed around. Who wanted millions of people watching in the unlikely event that something went wrong, after all? But he stood his ground and had the courage to rise to the occasion, and I’m eternally grateful to him for that.

  I’m also grateful to an actor named John Beradino, by the way, who had nothing to do with it whatsoever, other than showing up for his scheduled gall bladder surgery and discovering that he’d been “demoted” from Operating Room 1 to Operating Room 2 because of Y&R filming. “My gall bladder is taking a backseat to some soap actress’s face-lift?” I’m told he said as they wheeled him into Room 2, and if the situation had been reversed, I’m not sure I would have been as good a sport about it as he reportedly was.

  For obvious reasons I don’t remember the surgery itself. I have vague memories of spending that night at a first-class surgical recovery center in Beverly Hills. And I certainly remember being surrounded by cameras while Katherine and I had our bandages removed and got our first “live” look at the results. There was some concern that the unveiling might be too graphic for daytime television, but I promised I wouldn’t bleed, and sure enough, I didn’t. Millions of viewers saw Katherine’s new face at the same moment she and I did, and with bruises, swelling, and all, it was too exciting to be scary.

  The shows themselves were artfully done. My on-screen surgeon’s hands, for example, were intercut perfectly with Dr. Glassman’s hands when the bandages came off, and the postoperative instructions were written into the dialogue to make the whole experience as real and informative as possible. Our ratings soared. I think I was on every national and local talk show in the country, and I got literally thousands of letters from people all over the United States and Europe telling me that watching Katherine Chancellor’s face-lift defused their fears of plastic surgery—a big accomplishment in the 1980s, when it wasn’t nearly as common a procedure as it is today. It was even more gratifying that, as I’d hoped, the vast majority of mail came from men and women who’d been considering plastic surgery not for the sake of vanity but to correct some birth defect or trauma-induced disfigurement that had created a barrier between themselves and their God-given right to enjoy full, confident lives.

  In fact, I had the honor of meeting one of those people, and she holds a special place in my heart to this day. A few weeks after the face-lift shows aired, I was in Dr. Glassman’s office for a checkup when he asked if I’d mind talking to a woman who’d flown in from San Francisco for a consultation and was in his waiting room, hoping for a chance to talk to me. She was in need of some extensive reconstructive surgery after a terrible car accident. Her face had been so badly damaged that she’d become reclusive, hiding from the world in her small apartment but too afraid of the idea of plastic surgery to explore her options, until she watched The Young and the Restless and saw Katherine Chancellor go through it from beginning to end and emerge healthier and happier than ever. The woman and I had a great talk in Dr. Glassman’s waiting room, and well beyond my assuring her that it was the nicest, safest present she could possibly give herself, I think seeing me thriving in person, with no TV lighting, makeup, and clever camera angles between us, eased her mind just enough to summon her courage and let Dr. Glassman work his magic on her. She wrote me a gorgeous letter several months later to thank me for giving her back the full, happy life she’d had before the accident. All the credit for that goes to her and Dr. Glassman, of course, but I was humbled to know that Katherine and I, along with the whole Y&R team, played some part in making a difference.

  And on that same subject, I must say it made me happy to do something that benefited Katherine Chancellor after all she’d done and continues to do for me.

  That televised face-lift was rewarding in countless ways, from the overwhelming fan response to the fact that, without my asking, Tom Langan saw to it that I was given a raise, not only because I initially paid for the surgery (with my agent’s help) but also to thank me for the surge in our ratings. Again, isn’t it amazing how a voluntary, unexpected gesture of gratitude from your bosses can win your loyalty and respect far more effectively than yelling, threats, and complaining ever could?

  So there you have it, the reason I will always proudly maintain that in 1984, The Young and the Restless and I cocreated television’s very first reality show.

  Chapter Six

  Awards and Other Dramas,Onstage and Off

  There’s a real sense of community among soap actors that’s very unique in the television business. You’ll find it within specific prime-time shows and maybe some talk shows and reality shows, for all I know, but you won’t find it across the board among, let’s say, all sitcom actors, or all one-hour-drama actors. We long-term soap actors, no matter which network we’re on, who’s producing us, and who’s writing for us, have too much in common to not cheer for one another’s victories and feel one another’s pain when the chips are down, the stakes are high, and we’re being told on a sickeningly regular basis that this medium in which many of us have loyally, lovingly dedicated the majority of our adult lives is dying of old age. (We don’t happen to believe that, by the way. We really are bright enough to know the difference between “dying” and “being killed.”)

  Being a soap actor means working your ass off, memorizing vast amounts of dialogue day after day, with no long hiatuses and few, if any, reruns, therefore few, if any, residuals. In fact, a friend of mine, whose career began on a soap before she went on to a distinguished film career and married an insanely wealthy man, once told me that if she had to work for a living again, she’d go back to her waitressing days before she’d audition for another soap, because by comparison being a waitress was so much easier.

  Being a soap actor means watching executives and writers come and go, whether or not they seem to have respect for the show, the storylines, or the cast. It can be infuriating, for example, not to mention intensely discouraging, to read interviews in which your newly hired boss is taking pride in never having watched a single episode of the show of which he’s now in charge.

  Being a soap actor means being asked to take pay cuts every time your contract is up for renewal because of the economy, budget constraints, blah, blah, which would be a bit more palatable if the executives who are so concerned about our budgets were taking pay cuts as well.

  Being a soap actor means devoting the majority of your professional energy to shows that are rarely given a fraction of the promotion and publicity prime-time sho
ws enjoy.

  Being a soap actor means being given some storylines you adore and some storylines that make absolutely no sense to you at all, and when the latter is the case, knowing your input, even your expertise, about what your character would and would not do, or what might be a really interesting direction for your character to take, is about as welcome among the executives as a swarm of bees at an outdoor wedding.

  Being a soap actor means enjoying a theoretical illusion of job security with a constant awareness that at any given moment, you could be let go or replaced for “budget” or “storyline-dictated” reasons, or, in this new era of disregard for our time-honored legacy, your show could be canceled completely because those in charge have stopped paying attention and/or giving it the support and respect it deserves. And, of course, there’s also the inarguable fact that networks can produce a game show or “lifestyle” show for a fraction of the cost of producing a soap, and if it means saving money, who cares that audiences don’t have the slightest interest in watching them?

  Being a soap actor means working with some of the best professionals in the business, sometimes on more than one soap, so that sooner or later it feels as if you’ve all worked together somehow, somewhere, and especially in the good old days of the Soap Opera Digest Awards and the more generous Daytime Emmy Awards, you’ve most certainly partied together.

  Being a soap actor means pulling for other shows as surely as you pull for your own, because when one goes, it hurts everyone.

  Being a soap actor means having the most extraordinary, loyal, generous, passionate, knowledgeable fans any medium could ever hope for, fans to whom you’re enormously grateful and whose frustrations you share when their input is dismissed.