Not Young, Still Restless (10 page)

There are times when I think, “Bill Bell would be spinning in his grave.” That was one of those times.

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s far as I was concerned, from that moment in 1974, when I packed up Harry’s belongings and had them delivered to his office, I was a single woman and fully intending to stay that way. I was ready to enjoy my life, heal my eroded self-confidence, and rediscover what it was like to live without that constant dull, sad ache of mistrust in my soul. If never fully trusting anyone again was the best way to guard against a repeat performance of all those years with a man whose motto was “Don’t tell Jeanne,” that was fine with me. But it didn’t have to stop me from having a good time, both onstage and off.

There was, for example, the broodingly handsome Donnelly Rhodes, aka Phillip Chancellor II, Katherine’s husband when
Y&R
began. This was around the time when Phillip’s affair with Jill led to their marriage, and Katherine, attempting to win him back, caused a car accident that inevitably resulted in his death. The short version of that story: somewhere in there, Donnelly and I spent a couple of perfectly lovely afternoons together at a friend’s apartment. It was far too brief and uncomplicated to be called an affair, but it was memorable enough for me to still be smiling about it almost forty years later.

Come to think of it, that storyline inspired one of my more amusing moments at an airport too. I was waiting for my luggage at the baggage claim carousel when a woman who was clearly a
Young and the Restless
fan stepped over to me and said in a rather loud voice, “Admit it, you deliberately killed your husband, didn’t you?” I smiled and gave her a noncommittal shrug. As my bag arrived and I started toward the exit, I noticed a couple and their child gaping at me with more than a little concern—clearly not
Young and the Restless
fans, clearly not having a clue who I was, and clearly having overheard the woman’s question. Rather than disappoint them, I passed them quickly and quietly said, “Of course I deliberately killed him, and I’d do it again.” To this day I wonder how many news broadcasts they watched trying to get a glimpse of that strange lady at the airport so that they could alert the authorities that I’d confessed to them on my way to the exit.

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any years later there was the divinely fun, brilliant, multitalented Quinn Redeker, who played Brian Romalotti (father of Danny and Gina), a con man Jill hired in yet another plot against Katherine. Brian underwent a makeover, funded by Jill, and was introduced to Katherine as the fabulously wealthy Rex Sterling. To Jill’s profound chagrin, Katherine and Rex ended up sincerely falling in love. They probably would have lived happily ever after if Katherine hadn’t been kidnapped and replaced by a diner waitress named Marge Catrooke, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Katherine Chancellor. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) Rex, unaware of the switch, found his beloved “Katherine” to be increasingly obnoxious and not nearly as appealing as the woman he married, and he ultimately divorced her and married, of all people, Jill.

Quinn Redeker and I spent a hilariously fun weekend in San Diego together, just the two of us. It was romantic and silly and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, nor would either Quinn or I have wanted to take it one bit more seriously than we did.

One thing that always bothered me about that storyline, by the way, and about similar storylines on
Y&R
and other soaps in which an imposter has infiltrated a relationship, is the apparent inability of a character to tell that the person with whom they’re being intimate isn’t the same person with whom they were being intimate just hours or days before. I don’t care how identical the imposter is to the person they’re pretending to be—I will never believe that, when bedtime rolls around, the differences wouldn’t be immediately apparent. Wouldn’t you think at some point pretty early in the proceedings the words “Wait a minute, who are you?!” would enter the picture? I know. Soap operas, suspension of disbelief, blah, blah, but still, wouldn’t you love for the writers, just once, to either acknowledge that problem or find a way to explain it?

I’ve said it a thousand times in interviews, and I’ll say it again: I loved playing the dual roles of Katherine and Marge. And the greatest acting challenge of my career was playing the blue-collar, plainspoken Marge pretending to be the insanely wealthy, grammatically precise Katherine Chancellor. I always made it a point to keep Marge’s impersonation of Katherine slightly, subtly imperfect but still close enough to fool Katherine’s family and friends. I was and am proud of those performances, and it’s the one Emmy I didn’t win that I truly felt I deserved. I’ve never forgotten Crystal Chappell, who was on
Days of Our Lives
at the time, making a point of telling me at a pre-Emmy gathering that year (1990, I believe), “If you don’t win this year, you got robbed—you more than earned it.” When I finally did win my first Emmy, in 2008, I made it a point to find Crystal in the crowd and wink at her on my way to the stage. It’s not as common as it should be in this insanely competitive business for actors to be generous with their compliments to each other, and I’ll always appreciate her for that.

I
did have one genuine love affair with a castmate on
The Young and the Restless
. It lasted more than a year and ended gently and mutually. To this day I can count on less than one hand the members of the cast and crew who won’t be surprised when they read this.

I still remember my first impressions of him—tall and strong, with a handsomely kind face, the sweetest smile, and the gentle heart of a hippie. In the beginning it was just a lot of long, relaxing, pretty dinners at the beach. It evolved into much more. In fact, he, with his guitar perpetually in hand, was the first man I’d brought home to my children and my bed since Harry moved out, and he and my children loved each other. To this day I can picture him, Corbin, and Collin cutting down a rubber tree in our yard, singing and laughing and having the best time together. I wondered then and I wonder now why I hadn’t insisted many years earlier on a house for my sons and my daughter that was filled with more fun than tension.

We talked about marriage. My disinterest in it had nothing to do with him.

I wasn’t nearly ready to be his or anyone’s wife again. I still had far too much healing to do, and I shudder to think how much misdirected surplus anger and mistrust I might have aimed at him, despite the fact that he’d done absolutely nothing to deserve it. Through no fault of his, it would never have worked. I’m as sure of that as I am grateful for the fact that we still are and will always be good friends.

And while it didn’t bother him in the slightest, our age difference bothered me. As I pointed out to him more than once, “When I’m eighty, you’ll only be sixty.” He meant it when he said it wasn’t an issue for him—not long after our romantic relationship ended, he briefly married a woman ten years older than I was.

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

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f 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.

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sk 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.