Not Young, Still Restless

by Jeanne Cooper

  I can’t say exactly when Ed and Melody started seeing each other and fell in love. I can say that somewhere along the line, as we reached the mid-1980s, things slowly began to change between the three of us, and I wasn’t quick to catch on.

  When Melody had mononucleosis and wasn’t able to work, I called her one morning on a day off to suggest I come over to see her and take care of her for a few hours. There was a long, deafening silence before she finally said, “Uh, no, today wouldn’t be good.” I didn’t think a whole lot about it, but I did have an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

  Something wasn’t. For the next two years after that phone call, Melody didn’t speak a single word to me. Not so much as a simple hello. Nikki kept right on speaking to her dearest friend Katherine, of course. But the minute a rehearsal or a scene ended, Melody turned her back and walked away. There was no explanation, there was no willingness to discuss it, there was just, all of a sudden, nothing. I was shocked, I was devastated, and I had no idea what I’d done or what to do about it.

  By then Ed and Melody had become a serious couple. In fact, they were married in 1985. And the air had decidedly cooled between Ed and me as well. Obviously it wasn’t a coincidence, and it hurt. It hurt even more when, as time went on, I felt like Ed Scott, whom I’d cared deeply about and cheered for and supported, was trying to wipe both me and Katherine Chancellor right off the Y&R canvas. No matter what you do for a living, if you’ve ever found yourself working closely with a former friend who clearly doesn’t want you there anymore, you know the cycle of emptiness and anger in the pit of your stomach that became my constant companion.

  It was a tough couple of years on the set. I missed Melody. I missed the days when Katherine Chancellor was a force in Genoa City rather than an occasional part of the background. I missed looking forward to going to work. And all the while our days were getting longer and longer as Ed would repeatedly demand forty-five minute breaks to relight Melody in a scene or have her hair redone. Inevitable as it may have been, I hated it that some of my resentment toward Ed was spilling over onto Melody, but in my heart of hearts I kept hoping that someday—although I had no idea when or how—she and I would find our way back to each other.

  I still don’t know what brought this on, but I know I’ll never forget it. One day, after two years of silence, Melody and I were preparing to shoot a scene together. Ed must have spent half an hour lighting and relighting Melody until he was satisfied with how his wife looked on-camera. At the same time, he was so obviously ignoring me that, I swear to you, I was left standing there in the dark. He was walking away, ready to shoot, when Melody’s eyes met mine and out of nowhere I saw a flicker of love and recognition, of my old friend reconnecting as if she’d just awakened after a bout of amnesia, followed by, “Ed, wait. What about Mother?” As suddenly as she’d gone away, she came back, and slowly but surely and a bit tentatively, what do you know, we managed to pick up where we left off.

  In fact, not long after our “reunion,” Melody provided me with a memory I still treasure to this day. She and her then-one-year-old daughter, Alexandra, had picked me up for a trip to the park to cheer on our team at a Young and the Restless versus The Bold and the Beautiful softball game. We were starving, so she did what I’m sure was the most natural thing in the world: she pulled into a Jack in the Box drive-thru and asked, “What would you like?”

  To her incredulity, I was completely lost. As far as I was concerned, she’d just pulled off of a perfectly normal street into The Twilight Zone, and I answered accordingly. “I don’t know,” I said. “Where are we? What are we doing?”

  She couldn’t stop gaping at me. “Are you telling me you’ve never been to a fast-food drive-thru before?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  When she finally recovered from that revelation, she ordered for both of us, since I didn’t have a clue how to do that or how to go about retrieving our food without leaving the car. We headed on to the park, spread out a blanket, and had the loveliest afternoon, watching the game while having a picnic of the most convenient hamburgers and French fries I’d ever eaten. I loved them too, almost as much as I loved the sheer magic of this newfangled phenomenon called a “drive-thru,” which I would never have discovered without Melody.

  A seemingly trivial event, I know, but it makes me smile as if it happened yesterday instead of twenty-some years earlier. I never pass a drive-thru to this day without remembering that sweet afternoon with my new old friend, and I can now say after a great deal of personal follow-up research that my preferences are In-N-Out hamburgers and McDonald’s French fries.

  Which reminds me, what’s this I hear about something called an ATM machine?

  I do insist on memorializing this in print: it’s obscene that Melody Thomas Scott doesn’t have an Emmy in every room in her house. She has my greatest admiration as an actress and as an extraordinary mother to her three beautiful daughters, and it’s a joy to work with her and count her among my friends again.

  As for Ed Scott, he left Y&R in 2007. He’s now literally across the hall from us at CBS producing The Bold and the Beautiful, and his marriage to Melody is still going strong after twenty-six years. It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally over it—all the “it” that went on between him and me for much too long. I believe in karma, after all, and I’m referring to my karma, not his. His karma is none of my business. Mine, on the other hand, demands that I say, and mean from the bottom of my heart, that I wish him nothing but happiness and success.

  Kate Linder

  In 1982 I finally convinced Bill Bell that Katherine Chancellor needed a replacement for her original maid, Emma, who’d passed away a year earlier. Katherine lived in a vast three-story mansion, and she had no doorbell in those days, just a heavy door knocker. The audience was seemingly being asked to believe that even from the farthest corner of her mansion, Katherine could hear that door knocker and manage to answer it quickly enough that her visitor didn’t assume she wasn’t home and leave. And why on earth was this insanely wealthy woman answering her own door in the first place?

  Bill cooperated. Halfheartedly, but it was a start. A young actress named Kate Linder was recruited to hover around the Chancellor mansion in the old-school maid’s uniform I knew Katherine would demand—black dress, lacy white hat, white apron, and occasional feather duster. She had no lines, limiting her to nothing but a lot of smiling and head bobbing. She also had no name, referred to in scripts only as “Woman Maid.” So when she began serving tea to Katherine, Nikki, and friends, I suggested we call her Esther, as opposed to “Hey, you!” or “Thank you, that will be all . . . whoever you are.” I started taking delight in yelling orders offstage to Esther whether she happened to be working that day or not, and in looking at her as I still look at her today—as if I appreciate her as part of the household and part of the family, but I can’t quite put my finger on what planet she’s from.

  Before long the writers made the transition from “Woman Maid” to “Esther,” bestowed her with the last name of “Valentine,” started giving her dialogue, and put Kate Linder under contract, and no doubt about it, she’s become the most iconic maid in daytime.

  A few weeks after Kate joined The Young and the Restless I boarded a United Airlines flight from New York to Los Angeles, settled into my first-class seat, and, shortly after we’d taken off, heard a voice say, “Mrs. C.! Hi!”

  And there stood Kate Linder—not a fellow passenger, it turned out, but one of the flight attendants. She sat down beside me and said very quietly, “Please don’t tell anyone at work about this. I don’t want them to think I’m not serious about my acting career.”

  “Are you kidding? Why keep it a secret?” I asked her. “It’s part of who you are and what you do and how you earn a living. I would let everyone know if I were you, and be proud of it.”

  It’s still true, and it’s become common knowledge: Kate Linder, thirty year
s later, still balances her duties as Esther Valentine with her job as a United Airlines flight attendant. She is also involved in more charities than anyone else I’ve ever known, is incredibly gifted at promoting herself to the point where she has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has created a whole cottage industry out of being the actress who plays Katherine Chancellor’s maid on The Young and the Restless. My hat’s off to her for every bit of it too, with the one possible exception she’s always denied.

  It was the mid-1980s, a few years after Esther Valentine officially joined the cast, when I got a phone call out of nowhere from one of our production assistants. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up about something,” she said. “A rumor might work its way back to you that Katherine Chancellor is going to be killed off and you’ll be out of a job. Don’t believe a word of it. I promise you, it’s not going to happen.”

  I thanked her, hung up in shock, and immediately started asking around to find out what the hell could have prompted that call. The story that finally got back to me, and that I don’t mind telling you threw me into a rage, was that Kate had arranged a lunch with Bill and Lee Bell in New York at which she pitched what she thought was a great idea, based on a scene we’d already shot in which Katherine Chancellor told Esther she was including her and her newborn daughter in her will. Katherine Chancellor, Kate decided, after leaving Esther her mansion and a vast amount of money, could die, and Esther could become the mistress of the mansion, a zany, madcap, eccentric former maid who runs around Genoa City using her newfound wealth to help the needy.

  It hit me like a punch in the stomach to think of any castmate, let alone Kate, being so ambitious that they would dream up a storyline in which a close castmate dies. It goes without saying that I confronted her about it, and she completely denied it, as she does to this day. Mind you, it was during this same period of time that I was sure Ed Scott wanted me gone. How does the saying go—“It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you”?

  It was a difficult time, when the studio that I’d thought of for so long as my safe haven became a place where, for a while, I was never quite sure who or what to believe. I’m so thankful that those days are behind us and that Esther’s still around, in uniform, as devoted to Mrs. C. as Mrs. C. is devoted to and perpetually mystified by her. All the best to you, Kate, with all my heart.

  Terry Lester

  Terry Lester, who came roaring on-screen in 1980 as Y&R’s original Jack Abbott and played him for nine unforgettable years, passed away in 2003. Not a day has gone by when I haven’t missed his friendship and wished I could pick up the phone, call him, and solve a vast majority of the world’s problems.

  Terry was a brilliant man, a concert-level pianist and singer, who was generous and playful, with an occasional dark side that kept him from letting too many people get close. He wore his best and his worst just beneath the surface, which made him a fascinating man and an equally fascinating Jack Abbott. That I was one of the few people he let in was a real source of joy in my life.

  It was Terry, for example, who leapt at my idea, and split the cost with me, to rent a party bus for twenty cast members who joined us on a silly, hilarious one-hour trip to see our friend and castmate Marla Adams (Dina Abbott) in a production of A Little Night Music.

  It was Terry who joined me in hosting and paying for an annual party for our unparalleled Y&R crew.

  It was Terry who could make me laugh and move me to tears in the same scene, Terry to whom I wanted to give a good swift kick in the butt when his dark side crept in, and Terry who always made me feel loved and supported on my best days and my worst ones.

  It was Terry who, on hearing that I was going to Taos, New Mexico, for two weeks to shoot Sweet Hostage, a TV movie with Martin Sheen and Linda Blair, told me to look up a friend of his while I was there, which is how I met a man we lovingly called “that crazy Indian” (as if this Cherokee has a lot of room to talk).

  His name was R. C. Gorman, and he was a spectacular Navajo artist. At Terry’s insistence, I went to Gorman’s gallery in Taos on my first afternoon off. The instant I walked in the door his friend and manager, Virginia Dooley, let out a gasp and said, “Oh, my God, it’s Mrs. Chancellor.”

  After we properly introduced ourselves, I told her that Terry Lester had suggested I stop by to say hello to R. C. He wasn’t there, Virginia told me, but he would be as soon as she called and told him who was looking for him.

  A couple of hours later R. C. Gorman burst into the bar of my hotel where we’d agreed to meet. “Mrs. Chancellor!” he yelled across the room, and he came over and hugged me as if we’d known each other for years. And thus began a great friendship that lasted until he passed away in 2005.

  One of my fondest memories involved another trip to Taos a few years later. A parade to celebrate God knows what was being held, and R. C. invited Terry and me to join the festivities. Caren went with me, and the spectacular Jeffrey Jones, a friend of Terry’s who was shooting a movie in Santa Fe, joined us too. (You’d know Jeffrey from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Amadeus, Beetlejuice, Deadwood, and countless other projects.) I think the entire population of Taos was lining the streets as Jeffrey, Terry, R. C., and I drove slowly by in our respective convertibles, happily waving and having the time of our lives. Unfortunately, the weather decided not to cooperate. Early in the proceedings it began to drizzle. When it progressed to a light rain, Jeffrey, Terry, and R. C., unbeknownst to me, abandoned their convertibles and made a break for the sidelines. In a matter of minutes I was riding along in a steady downpour, still waving and drenched to the bone, only to hear Terry yelling and cheering and whistling from among the equally drenched crowd: “Look, everyone, it’s Katherine Chancellor!!! Let’s hear it for Mrs. Chancellor!!! [whistle, whistle, woo-hoo, whistle]” He was getting a huge kick out of himself, and as hard as I tried to fight it in my dripping wet, unsightly misery, so was I.

  It was also Terry who saw to it that I met the “Bill Bell of As the World Turns,” the extraordinary head writer Douglas Marland. Terry had left The Young and the Restless in 1989 for reasons too idiotic to go into, and after a brief stint on Santa Barbara, he’d signed on for a role on As the World Turns, which Douglas Marland had created just for him. When Terry introduced us at a party at his house, I said, and meant it, “It’s an honor to meet you. I’m a huge fan of yours.”

  As luck would have it, he was a fan of mine too, and by the end of the conversation he told me he’d love to create a part for me as well, if I’d be willing to do it.

  I wasn’t about to say no to Douglas Marland, and frankly the thought of moving to New York, where I’d always dreamed of living, tackling a part written just for me by the likes of him, not to mention working with Terry again, sounded almost too good to be true.

  “Doug,” I said, “you write it and I’ll be there.”

  After which Douglas Marland flew back to New York and promptly died of a heart attack. The loss to daytime television was and is incalculable . . . and once the shock wore off, I couldn’t help but selfishly feel a little robbed and wonder what could have happened.

  It’s an understatement to say that my life, onstage and off, is infinitely richer for having known, loved, and been loved by Terry Lester. Rest in peace, my dear, dear friend.

  And before I leave the subject of the late, great Douglas Marland behind, I can’t resist sharing something he once wrote, which I firmly believe every soap opera writer and producer should be required to memorize and adhere to religiously. I wonder how many treasured soaps could have been saved . . .

  How Not to Ruin a Soap

  • Watch the show.

  • Learn the history of the show. You would be surprised at the ideas that you can get from the backstory of your characters.

  • Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience’s favorites.

  • Be objective. When I came in to ATWT, the first thing I said was, “What is pleasing the audi
ence?” You have to put your own personal likes and dislikes aside and develop the characters that the audience wants to see.

  • Talk to everyone, writers and actors especially. There may be something in a character’s history that will work beautifully for you, and who would know better than the actor who has been playing the role?

  • Don’t change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn’t have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, “He would never do that,” then you have failed.

  • Build new characters slowly. Everyone knows that it takes six months to a year for an audience to care about a new character. Tie them in to existing characters. Don’t shove them down the viewers’ throats.

  • If you feel staff changes are in order, look within the organization first. P&G [Procter & Gamble] does a lot of promoting from within. Almost all of our producers worked their way up from staff positions, and that means they know the show.

  • Don’t fire anyone for six months. I feel very deeply that you should look at the show’s canvas before you do anything.

  • Good soap opera is good storytelling. It’s very simple.

  —DOUGLAS MARLAND

  Peter Bergman

  The relationship between Terry Lester and The Young and the Restless ended in 1989, and I promise you, based on a lot of long, emotional phone conversations, he deeply regretted the bridges he’d burned along the way. Arriving to assume the role of Jack Abbott was a tall, handsome actor named Peter Bergman, with perfect military-class posture, an amazing shock of hair, and a soap following from his days as Dr. Cliff Warner on All My Children.

  The transition from Terry to Peter was an interesting one for us actors, let me tell you. Terry wore Jack Abbott’s imperfections on his sleeve. From the very beginning Peter kept them well hidden, pulling them out only on an as-needed basis when he saw no other choice. Terry’s Jack Abbott was likely at any given moment to be a loose, silly, playful womanizer who happened to be an executive in the family business. Peter’s was and is, first and foremost, an executive in the family business who happens to have a somewhat flawed personal life and an all-encompassing love of family. Just like in real life, you couldn’t imagine Terry Lester or his Jack Abbott settled down with a wife and children, while you couldn’t imagine Peter any other way, or doubt that his Jack Abbott wanted to settle down, no matter how misguided his efforts might be toward that goal. But the bottom line was, incredibly different as they were as people and as actors, both Terry and Peter brought great talent and depth to a complex role Bill Bell meticulously created when he decided Y&R needed a new core family named Abbott in Genoa City in 1980.