PART 24: GYNOCENTRIC SERIAL DRAMA

We had met in March of 1967; the trip to Grand Rapids occurred the following Christmas. I knew I was being scrutinized as a candidate for inclusion into the family, but I was sure it wouldn’t happen. but it was still an article of my faith that I wasn’t ready to think about marriage. Breaking off long relationships was a process with which I had some familiarity. I had broken up with Sue after three years and with Jo-Alice after three months, hadn’t I?

But I was having so much fun with Nancy! We shared everything; we had the same tastes in movies, in food, in how to spend an evening or a weekend, in other people, in bed. So breaking up with her became less and less a priority. And she wasn’t exerting any pressure to legalize our status, though I was certainly aware that it was on her agenda.

But why was breaking up with her on mine?  I didn’t want to see other women. I’d left Sue to become a man of affairs, so to speak, and – within the limits that my ingrained domesticity and caution set for me – I’d done that. I was aware that Nancy wouldn’t fit seamlessly into an academic setting; other faculty wives would have advanced degrees and more book-knowledge. But Nancy was a quick learner. She had entrusted her further education to me, and was happy to read the books I recommended, and when I told her she was mispronouncing a word that she’d never heard spoken (she said chick for chic, but only once) or what all those things that hadn’t been on Michigan menus were – quenelles and tarte tatin and escargots – she simply filed the information away for future use. Some girls would have found me (all right, had found me) insufferably pedantic, but Nancy had come to New York to become a New Yorker, and I was her mentor. She already loved plays as much as I did; having changed her major from drama to television in college had been a vocational decision, not an expression of preference.  When she eventually ascended to the rank of producer – which in the world of daytime TV was the creative job; directing was more a technical function – it struck me that she and I had both chosen careers in theater – I in its theory and she in its practice.

In the early years, she took any job she could get, and most of them didn’t last long. Reach for the Stars overreached itself in only 13 weeks, and so did a quiz show called Dream House, for which she wrote questions: quick, what’s the only state that ends in the letter K?  The gimmick was that the contestants on each show were trying to win a room in an imaginary house – a set of bedroom furniture, a suite of kitchen appliances – and if they kept winning they kept coming back. If they won seven rooms, the grand prize was an actual house to put all that furniture in. No houses were won during the first 13 week cycle, so they dropped their insurance. In the second 13, they had to pony up for seven houses, and they went broke. End of the Dream.

Nancy finally decided to work only on soap operas, because they seemed to last forever. Her first was called The Best of Everything, and it went belly-up after six months. Actually, bellies were up almost throughout its run; three of the actresses happened to get pregnant at the same time, and the writers couldn’t realistically account for that growing development, so these women had to walk around carrying something in front of them that would shield their bodies from the camera -- a basket of laundry worked fine, but how much laundry could they plausibly be doing? Toward the end of the run, it was all facial close-ups, all the time.

Next came How to Survive A Marriage, which itself survived for only twelve months. But then, Nancy had the great good fortune to be hired by the brilliant Claire Labine, who had created a soap titled Ryan’s Hope. Unlike the rest of its ilk, it was set not in some generic suburban location but in Inwood, in northern Manhattan, though I thought it more resembled Hell’s Kitchen, where it was taped. It was all about the stormy lives of the Ryan family, who owned a bar that resembled actual West Side Irish pubs down to the last pint of Guinness.

Kate Mulgrew as the heroine, Mary Ryan

Claire was the head writer as well as co-producer, and the scripts were everything dramatic dialogue should be, and, on most soaps, isn’t: literate, witty, emotional without being sentimental. The acting was a cut above what you found on other daytime dramas as well. Several of the cast members had Irish roots; Helen Gallagher, who played Maeve, the matriarch of the Ryan clan, came by her Donegal accent honestly, and so did Kate Mulgrew (who eventually became one of the serial commanders of the Enterprise on a Star Trek spinoff), her feisty daughter. It was a given that, year after year, Ryan’s Hope – this little thirty-minute one-set pipsqueak of a show that was never in the running for the Best Daytime Drama Emmy – would win for Best Writing, because Claire always wrote the script submitted in its entirety.

Serendipitously, all these shows were produced on the West Side, in studios at 53rd and 10th, 67th and Columbus (only a block from where I’d grown up, at 2 West) and finally, at a building on 66th and the Hudson River that won many awards for its superstar architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox. Unfortunately, Messers. K, P & F didn’t consult anyone in television production before they started sketching, and the building they came up with, though it looked good from the outside, was functionally a disaster. KPF put the offices in the basement and the studios on the second floor. This meant that the people who worked in those offices (Nancy was one of them) never saw daylight, and the studios, which were supposed to be insulated from noise and light, abutted the elevators from which the sets had to be loaded and unloaded, a process so noisy that the unloading and taping could never be scheduled at the same time.  Still, the UWS location made it easy for me to spend some time there, which I loved doing. If we were going to theater, or to our favorite restaurants, or out with friends who lived on that side of town, I always volunteered to pick Nancy up at work. In the 70s, we moved to the other side of Central Park, and getting on the westbound crosstown bus made me feel as if I were going home.

There were other reasons why I hung around the studio. I’ve always loved to watch actors rehearse. Television production is, technically speaking, not the same thing as putting on a play, but it was still about actors learning their parts, making choices, getting notes, trying things out – just infinitely more compressed. A play might be in rehearsal for a month before it opens, and throughout its run, things would be tweaked and tightened. But the big soaps like All My Children had to grind out five hours of product a week – the equivalent of two full-length feature films. People who sneer at the crudity of production values have no idea how hard everyone on such a show has to work to get everything right the first time. I had been one of those people until I saw the light.

The third attraction that drew me to those studios was that that, though I had a girlfriend, I hadn’t become immune to the appeal of attractive women. One of the perks of being Jo-Alice’s boyfriend had been all those other young and pretty flight attendants; but they couldn’t compare to the actresses on soap operas, who were chosen, it must be said, primarily for their looks. If they could act, it was a bonus. Some of them had both looks and talent going for them, like Marg Helgenberger, who went on to star on China Beach and CSI. When Marg showed up for an audition on Ryan’s Hope, a gorgeous redhead fresh from Northwestern’s theater department, no one could believe their eyes when they saw her or their ears when she read for them. Eva LaRue was breathtaking and so was Cady McClain. Kelly Ripa got her start on that show, as did her husband, Mark Consuelo. There were always jokes about the fact that the show’s star, Susan Lucci, was passed over for an acting Emmy eighteen years in a row, but she was a good sport about it, and indeed, there was a lot of serious competition; when an acting award went to, say, Judith Light of One Life to Live, who had starred in A Doll’s House on Broadway, you couldn’t really claim that the fix was in.

These women liked me, partly because I was a professor who taught Shakespeare and Strindberg and I reminded them of their college drama courses, when they all thought they were destined to play Ophelia and Hedda Gabler. And they were demonstrative, these stunners. Actors are pushers of boundaries, and they were always squeezing my arm, tousling my hair, kissing me on the mouth. Nancy wasn’t jealous; she trusted that her actors were as off limits to me as my students. Of course, as a general rule, people in the theater rut like rabbits. The first time he played Hamlet, Laurence Olivier asked a famous company director named Sir Beerbohm Tree whether Hamlet had slept with Ophelia. “In my companies, always,” replied Sir Beerbohm. One of the actresses on AMC, a 22-year-old clone of Marilyn Monroe, decided one evening, probably out of sheer boredom, to take a male intern home with her, a sweet, slightly nerdy 19-year-old kid named Brendan. The next morning, pale and shaking, he knocked on the door of the show’s producer, Joe Hardy. He had come to submit his resignation. He felt he’d disgraced himself and the show and sullied the actress, and he was bitterly disappointed in his moral failings. Somehow keeping a straight face, Joe absolved him of his sin and sent him back to work. Joe told Nancy later that he had an image of this poor Brendan being led up 66th Street by his penis.

And there was another production assistant on the show, a kid named Jeffrey Scott Lane who eventually became a successful writer and producer of television shows, but was then just a kid, a couple of years younger than Nancy. But a very funny kid; we both loved him. He, in turn, liked me well enough but had a big crush on Nancy, and expressed his passion by creating a virtual show about the two of us that he titled Nancy and the Professor. He told us he could have called it Dick and he Production Assistant, but we all agreed his second choice was better. The show was in the genre of marital sitcoms like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy, and each day, Nancy would arrive at work to find a TV Guide-style summary of that night’s episode, something along the lines of, “THE PROFESSOR’S HOT BATH: Nancy drops her hair dryer into the tub and the Professor blows a fuse!”