Not Young, Still Restless

by Jeanne Cooper

  Tricia Cast: My housemate when she flies in to work from her home in a small town near Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, singer-songwriter Bat McGrath. She started acting at the age of twelve and already had an impressive list of credentials when she joined Y&R in 1986 as Nina Webster and became Christine’s best friend and Jill’s daughter-in-law. She’s always been one of my favorite actresses on the show, with a well-deserved Emmy and another recent nomination to her credit, and it’s an ongoing source of amusement for us that Nina lives with Katherine when she comes to Genoa City while Tricia lives with me when she comes to Los Angeles. There are few people to whom I’m closer and of whom I’m more proud.

  Tracey Bregman: An integral member of the cast as Lauren Baldwin (née Fenmore) since 1983, with a few gaps in between. I’ve known her as a single woman, a married woman, a devoted mother, and a divorcee, from huge hair to the gorgeous mane she has now, and not once, maybe because of her show business background thanks to her musician/composer father, Buddy Bregman, have I ever seen an “off” day or a less than utterly professional, right-on-the-money performance. She also manages to get more beautiful with every passing year, by the way, which I would find annoying if she weren’t such a loyal, generous friend. Now if Lauren Baldwin would just repay Katherine Chancellor the $50,000 she borrowed in the 1980s to make an album . . .

  Doug Davidson: He was a major heartthrob when he joined the Y&R cast in 1978 as the private detective Paul Williams, and he’s still a major heartthrob of mine all these decades later. He’s as fine a husband and a father as he is an actor and a man, a perfect mixture of laughter and sensitivity. Give him any storyline, no matter how emotionally difficult, and he’ll make it soar. He’s earned three Emmy nominations, but I would personally add a Most Hilarious Off-screen Comedy Team nomination for him and his most notorious partner in crime . . .

  Don Diamont: Doug Davidson and Don Diamont, our ridiculously handsome Brad Carlton from 1985 until 2009, never let a day go by without finding a way to burst into some form of much-needed silliness to loosen up their castmates. Off-screen, Don is a natural born father and caretaker, someone who’d be there for you at three in the morning if you needed him. As Brad Carlton, he started as the Abbott family gardener and ended up marrying not one but both of the Abbott sisters while becoming a shrewd, formidable businessman. It literally felt like a punch in the stomach when Don stopped me at the elevators one day in 2009 to tell me he’d just been fired from Y&R, killed off, mind you, after an utterly insipid storyline that painted Brad, and Don, right into a corner. He’s right across the hall now, finding all the success he deserves as Bill Spencer Jr. on The Bold and the Beautiful, and as much as we miss him, he’s got a loud, enthusiastic fan club cheering him on from our side of the hall. Thank you, Bradley Bell, for being smart enough and loyal enough to at least keep Don in the building where he belongs.

  And speaking of the Abbott sisters . . .

  Eileen Davidson and Beth Maitland: Also known as Ashley and Traci Abbott, both of whom joined Y&R in 1982. Two spectacular actresses and two of the finest women I’ve ever met. Eileen left us for a while to play five roles on Days of Our Lives and to go across the hall, thanks again to Bradley Bell, to appear on The Bold and the Beautiful, but thank God we’ve got her back. She’s come into her own, happily married with a precious son and a successful career as an author when she’s not at the studio. I’ve always wished our writers would capitalize on a facet of Ashley and Katherine’s relationship that’s never been explored: Ashley grew up thinking John Abbott was her father, but in fact her father was a tennis pro with whom Katherine had an affair and then introduced to Ashley’s mother, which it would seem to me Ashley might resent.

  As for Beth Maitland, our first Emmy Award–winning actress, I swear that woman is lit from within, and with John Abbott gone, we need her back full-time as the heart and the moral compass of the Abbott family, the true reincarnation of her father. It thrills us all when Beth comes to work, and what a joy to see her blossom offstage as well, as a happily married woman with a gorgeous sixteen-year-old daughter, four horses (including a miniature horse), four dogs, two miniature burros, and a hilarious goat.

  And then there’s the original Winters family: Kristoff St. John, Victoria Rowell, Shemar Moore, and Tonya Lee Williams. Each of them sensationally gifted and all of them essential to the foundation of Y&R. Kristoff, aka Neil Winters, a former child actor (I have a framed photo of him and Tricia Cast in my bedroom, from their days together on The Bad News Bears TV series when they were about twelve years old) and a two-time Emmy winner, joined the show in 1991 and is still with us as, until very recently, the CEO of Katherine’s multibillion-dollar corporation, and here’s hoping he will be again. He’s a wonderful dad and a devoted activist for his beloved charities.

  Victoria joined Y&R in 1990 and, with a few interruptions, was with us until 2007. The talent, energy, and spirit she brought to the show were incredible and irreplaceable—she somehow managed to juggle her essential role as Drucilla Winters with a regular prime-time job on Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis Murder while also maintaining her passions as a ballerina, an advocate for foster children (having been a foster child herself), a bestselling author, a wife, and a mother.

  Shemar, one of the most gorgeous men in the history of daytime, arrived in 1994 as Neil’s brother, Malcolm, with a swagger, a flair, an intensity, and a playfulness that made him incredibly exciting to work with. He left in 2005 for a leading role on the CBS hit series Criminal Minds, and I couldn’t be happier for him while selfishly missing that irresistible smile.

  Tonya, aka Dr. Olivia Barber Williams, arrived in 1990 and, despite a lot of protests, including mine, left in 2005, with only rare and all-too-brief appearances ever since. She was the perfect grounded, logical, well-educated counterpart to her sister, Victoria Rowell’s Drucilla, solid as a rock and a joy on the set. She’s gone on to become a producer, a director, and a writer, and no one is more deserving of all the success that’s coming her way.

  Patty Weaver: In 1982 an adorable blonde named Patty Weaver came on board as Gina Roma, restaurant owner and sister of Genoa City’s own rock star Danny Romalotti (Michael Damien). Gina made the best lasagna in town, and Gina’s Place was one of the town’s hottest hangouts, kind of the 1980s version of Crimson Lights, until Kevin Fisher burned it down in an attempt to kill Brad and Traci Abbott Carlton’s daughter, Colleen. (Not to worry, we all got over it.) Gina was one of our most beloved characters, and Patty was one of our most beloved colleagues, with a singing voice like an angel. (Between Patty Weaver and Beth Maitland, Y&R has been blessed with two of the most beautiful voices you’ll ever hear.) I’m told there’s something called “YouTube” on something called “the Internet” on something called “a computer.” (I admit it, I’m technologically challenged, and furthermore, I don’t care.) If any of this sounds familiar to you, please do go on YouTube and look for footage called “Gina Sings to The Young and the Restless Theme.” It’s from 1983, a bit grainy and scratchy, but you’ll never hear our theme song sung more gorgeously. Patty’s last appearance on Y&R was in 2009. She married one of our late, great writers, Jerry Birn, and has retired from acting. We get together with Lee Bell several times a year, and I’ll keep nagging Patty to become the voice teacher I’m convinced she’s meant to be—if she can teach me to sing “What I Did for Love” at a fan event, she’s as good as it gets.

  And even though I’ve talked about her in other chapters, I have to give one more verbal hug to Jess Walton, my sidekick Jill Foster Abbott, the bane of Katherine Chancellor’s existence and my divinely neurotic friend. I don’t say it often enough to her, but Jess, throughout all these years, on-screen and off, what on earth would I have done without you?

  If this chapter sounds like a very long love letter to some of the coworkers who have helped form the core of daytime’s number-one soap opera since 1988, it’s only because that’s exactly what it is, and I make no apologies
for it. I know and love these people, and I want you to know and love them too, whether you’re new to The Young and the Restless, have watched for years, or have never seen a single episode. I have faith in the future of Y&R because I have faith in its past and the goldmine Bill Bell created with an embarrassment of riches still waiting to be explored. Soap operas have outlived their usefulness? I don’t think so. No one’s going to convince me that great actors playing great characters involved in great storylines will ever be outdated, and I’ll believe in this show and this unique, historic genre until the day I walk out the doors of the CBS studio for the last time.

  Chapter Nine

  Where Are They Now?

  Every veteran soap actor appreciates wrapping up storylines. We don’t leave murders unsolved (even when they drag on so long that nobody remembers or cares who the victim was, or if the victim shows up again alive and well and claiming to be an identical twin we’ve never heard of), we don’t leave falsified paternity tests unexposed (even when they come from as inept a facility as the Genoa City DNA lab), and we almost never let an established character wander off into nowhere without some explanation about where he or she might have gone (an explanation that, in real life, would probably involve the words “budget cuts”).

  Since I am nothing if not a veteran soap actor, I feel compelled to wrap up some of the storylines in my life, especially since it will give me a perfect opportunity to indulge in a lot of bragging about my children and grandchildren later in this chapter.

  There’s a famous episode of the classic Mary Tyler Moore series of the 1970s called “Chuckles Bites the Dust” in which Mary, to her horror, begins uncontrollably laughing at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t urge you enough to get a copy of it. It’s hilarious.

  It’s also an unfortunate glimpse of what I went through on the day we gathered to say a formal good-bye to my father.

  Daddy and I had grown further and further apart after he left for the Canadian oil fields while I was still in high school. I remember seeing him at my high school graduation, but our visits from then on were very few and far between, although I did see to it that he met Corbin, Collin, and Caren so that they’d be real to each other rather than just nebulous concepts of “grandfather” and “grandchildren.”

  For the most part, though, except for occasional phone calls, Daddy went on with his life and I went on with mine, which seemed to make us both comfortable. He met and married a woman named Judy in Canada, and the two of them moved to Alaska when his business in the oil fields took him there. I’m not sure I’d ever realized how young Daddy was when Mother died until it occurred to me that Daddy and Judy were married longer than he and my mother were. I think—I hope—that their marriage was a solid, happy one.

  Daddy was in his eighties when Judy passed away. He went to live with my sister, Evelyn, and her husband for a while, and with my brother as well. I invited him to move in with me, but he wasn’t interested. I don’t doubt for a moment that we loved and respected each other. I just think we had so little in common at that point in our lives that we weren’t sure how to even start connecting, so if he had stayed with me, he would have been very well cared for while sharing a house with a familiar-looking stranger who happened to be his daughter.

  A point came when he needed full-time care, for which he was moved to a nursing home in Taft. I went to visit. We smiled and talked quietly to each other. I remember realizing that I loved him, and I treasure those parts of him that are me, but I didn’t really know him. I wonder if anyone did.

  Daddy died on April 11, 1986. Corbin and I drove to Taft the day before the funeral—a service, I was told, that Daddy, a man who had no use for organized religion, had prearranged. The family, including lots of aunts, had already gathered in the viewing room when Corbin and I arrived at the funeral home. I mean no disrespect to anyone else’s beliefs when I say that not for a moment, as I stood there beside that open casket, did I feel it was Daddy lying there in an alpaca sweater and glasses. It was nothing but a body, the vehicle he’d traveled in while he was here, a vehicle he’d happily abandoned and moved on from. He was no more in that body than I was, as far as I was concerned, but I did lean in close to him, in case he was hanging around eavesdropping on all of us, and recite the bedtime poem with which I used to tuck my children into bed:

  Now I lay me down to sleep.

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  Guide me through the starry night

  And wake me when the sun shines bright.

  (For the record, I know those aren’t the most common last two lines of that poem, but no way would I send my children off to sleep with the cheerful suggestion “If I should die before I wake” unless I were trying to raise a houseful of insomniacs.)

  An impressive crowd of family members and Taft residents assembled in the funeral home chapel the next day to say a final farewell to Daddy. Again, remember, every part of the service was supposedly at his personal request, which, if the results were any indication, must have started like this: “I want a pastor who wouldn’t know me or my immediate family from a herd of cattle to officiate the ceremony with the help of a boom box.”

  So sure enough, up the aisle came Reverend Somebody-or-Other, carrying a boom box the size of Michigan, which he set up on the podium and solemnly hit the Play button, treating us to a tinny, badly played organ solo of a hymn I’d never heard before in my life.

  When the prerecorded music mercifully ended, Reverend Somebody clicked the Off button and launched into a somber, heartfelt stream of descriptive words and phrases about the “dearly departed.” It was a lovely tribute. Unfortunately, not a word of it even remotely applied to Daddy. For all I know, it might have been left over from a funeral the day before, and, pressed for time, Reverend Somebody simply decided it was such a hit that he’d just use it again.

  Not that there wasn’t a personal moment or two. The reverend did acknowledge Daddy’s pride in his son, Jack, and nodded in the vague direction of my brother. Then, of course, there was Daddy’s “beloved daughter Evelyn,” on which he pointed to someone a good twenty feet away from my sister, prompting our entire row of Coopers, including Evelyn, to lean forward and crane our necks for a glimpse of the designated “beloved daughter.”

  And sometime during the synchronized scanning for the new Evelyn, the boom box, and the sermon by a total stranger tenderly describing Daddy as everything from a professional tap dancer to an avid needlepoint enthusiast, I began to laugh so hard that I had to hide my face in my hands, so hard that I didn’t even notice Reverend Somebody’s failure to mention a word about Daddy’s third child, his beloved daughter Wilma Jeanne. If you’ve ever tried unsuccessfully to make yourself stop laughing, you know how excruciating it is, and I would feel guilty about it if it hadn’t been so involuntary.

  When the service finally ended—with one more ear-grating selection from the “Barbie’s First Organ” tape on the boom box—we all trooped off to the cemetery, half of which is populated with my relatives, to bury Daddy beside my stepmother, Judy, at his request. I paused at Mother’s grave to pay my respects, and I couldn’t resist adding under my breath, “Thank God you’re already dead, because what we just sat through would have killed you.”

  I didn’t cry over Daddy’s death. Not then, not to this day. I think of him and smile, and I thank him, with love, for giving me life and countless qualities I’m sure he genetically passed along, from his extroverted fearlessness to his sense of adventure to his reverence for this earth and all living things with which we share it. It might also be true that I inherited from him the very lack of sentimentality that kept me from crying when he died.

  I did send a huge, beautiful wreath to the cemetery a few days later. There was no card, no indication at all of who sent it. It wasn’t for Daddy’s grave. It was for Mother’s, to say out loud that I thank her too, and always will.

  I swear that silly funeral made a lasting impression on a
ll of us, including my brother, Jack, who, when he passed away in 2004, made it very clear that he wanted to be cremated. (For the record, I’ve specified the same thing.)

  The six-year age difference between me and Jack prevented us from being very close when we were growing up. I loved camping and hiking and doing “boy” things with him, and I was proud of him for being a football hero and a great athlete in general. But when he left home at eighteen to get married, I was only twelve. And while we didn’t ever become especially close as adults, I can’t say enough about what a wonderful man he turned out to be. His marriage to Edith was a true love story, lasting more than sixty years, until she passed away a few years before he did. He was fun and funny, with a great, infectious laugh, and he was a devoted father who outlived three of his four children. He and Edith lived in Alaska for forty years, where Jack was a consultant in the oil business.

  We saw each other at a long-ago family reunion, and I went to Jack and Edith’s fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. The many miles between us kept us more separate than we meant to be, I’m sure, and frankly, so did Harry Bernsen—Jack, like the rest of my family, found Harry unbearable, and Harry made it apparent that my family was of no interest to him whatsoever. In fact, Jack and Edith would only come to visit on the condition that Harry wasn’t around. (Why didn’t I think of that?)