DeeVee

When I was a kid, I would watch DOOL with my mom. I remember Denise as Susan so well. And later, of course, on GH. How sad to hear she has passed. RIP.

I have to dig that scene up on YT. I'm glad they gave them some kind of happy ending, even if it was really late. Interesting! I remember Justin and Sarah being involved, but I either forgot or never caught their backstory. The girl with money and social position of course turns out to be Jackie. He sort of did to Sarah what Vanessa did to his brother! I do remember Justin started out as not the greatest guy. Kind of a horn dog. It's only when Ross comes on that he becomes the "good" brother. I only have some vague memories of Ben and Hope, mostly of when they were in a positive relationship. He certainly changed over time. "Chill" would be the way I would describe Ben (along with "handsome but kind of a yawn") for most of his time on GL, so hearing he once had a violent temper is very surprising.

Ha-ha-ha, I thought it was Marland who turned Mike into a jerk, but apparently not. I get that they probably felt the Mike/Leslie story had run its course, but they should have at least let them have a kid. Especially since they were soon ensnaring him in a storyline with a woman who couldn't have children (Elizabeth). Of course, no one could have predicted there would be a dearth of Bauers a few years later. I remember this! I remember Holly sitting by the phone, desperate for Ed to call so they could stop the divorce. I forgot it was Rita who never gave him the message. What a bitch. 😂 But, yeah, this is the Rita I remember at the beginning: very determined to bag Ed. I contend that Holly never, ever got over it, never stopped regretting that the divorce went through. I wish at some point over the years they had let Holly and Ed reunite for more than a brief affair. It feels like a thread that was left hanging. There she is! I was beginning to think I had dreamed up the Rita/Tim/Evie triangle.

This is AWESOME, thank you for taking the time to post this! My first thought: My memory is a lot better than I thought it was, LOL! The first episode I clearly remember watching had a scene of Ed confronting Holly about Christina's paternity. He lamented how wonderful things had been over Christmas, so looks like I started watching the show early 1976. The only thing puzzling me is where is Evie? I thought she was around BEFORE Rita got involved with Tim, but maybe that's one gap in my memory. It makes Rita look slightly better--in that case, she didn't seduce Tim knowing her sister had a crush on him.

Not only that, but Tony, Annabelle, and Jim had zero skin in this game. The Fishing Trip story had a huge impact on the Reardons and Annabelle because it was about THEIR relatives and how what happened to them shaped their own lives. People directly and indirectly affected by this--i.e. Alan, Amanda, Philip, and even Lujack--weren't involved in this at all, either because they were off the canvas or involved in other stuff. I mostly admire Long's talent for using the past to enhance her stories in the present, but this one was a huge turkey. We saw Brandon old and decrepit dying on screen. Even if we were able to suspend disbelief, why wouldn't he have wanted revenge on Lucille, who tried to kill him? If he wanted to go live with his Barbados squeeze, who would have cared about that by then? In the end, it had little to no impact on the larger story because they were too chicken to bring in that branch of the Spauldings into the main story (until later). Just a really bad storyline that mainly existed to stretch out the GL stints of the actors who played Tony, Annabelle, and Jim.

I love MKA and feel like they never used her to her full potential with India. The character seemed to exist merely to fight with Alex and blackmail men into marrying/sleeping with her. As if! Then adopting an orphan right out of Little Orphan Annie...somebody BTS didn't like her, I think.

So Sonni would have somebody to talk to who she wasn't conspiring with (Will or Alan)? Alex kept telling Sonni how important her friends were...when she had virtually no friends. Instead they created loyal servants like Jane and Vera to give Alex people to play off of. They did that with Iris on AW, but Vivien was mostly there for comic relief Alex keeping Marah's paternity a secret was absurd. But I still love the scene between Alex and Alan where he convinces her by reminding her how they protected each other from their abusive father. Chris and Bev ATE that scene. Unfortunately, that took place only a few months before he exited the show...always thought they could have built on that, explored more how being Brandon's children screwed them both up. Maybe even used it as an explanation for the way their relationship could constantly swing from hatred to love. Instead of it being merely dictated by the plot.

Thank you for clearing that up. I wasn't watching GL regularly yet at that point, but seems to me I should have remembered the big wedding after Leslie's death (which I do remember) described in the profile. Is there a web archive of SOD summaries, or are referring to your own personal collection?

PAM!! YES!!! You have jogged my memory. She worked at Cedars. She's mentioned in a write-up of Tim's history in the show. It says she was a nurse, but I seem to remember she was a secretary at Cedars, working for either Ed or Sarah. (It's almost 50 years ago, so I definitely could be wrong). I'm certain she was an unwed mother. I recall reading an interview with the actress, Maureen Silliman (I looked it up, that's her correct name, LOL). She started on the show just before the Dobsons started writing it. She was shocked to get a script that said her character had been pregnant since she hit town. I remember a scene where she told Tim she was going to leave SF for a better job for her daughter's sake (really, I think she was upset he was serious about Rita). I don't remember them getting married and leaving town, but according to "Who's Who in Springfield" that's how the characters were written out. Mattson did All My Children for several years, so she might have been persuadable. Here's an interesting factoid I recently learned on these message boards: Elvera Roussel was in the running to play Delia on RH when the show first hit the air. How wild is it that Mattson played Delia for a while? (Though from what I saw of her performance, she was miscast). It's hard to know if Roussel would have been a good Delia. You'd think she would have been better suited to playing Faith Coleridge, but who knows? She didn't get to show a whole lot of range as Hope.

Oops, sorry about that. I'm awful with remembering names, LOL. Thanks for sharing the picture!

This is how I remember it, too. I remember Evie confronting Rita about her involvement with Tim when she knew she was in love with him. Bawling her eyes out, talking about how she dreamed of marrying and having children with him. It's amazing she and Rita stayed close after that. I don't recall who he left town with. Yes, Holly definitely evolved/grew up after she and Ed split. I remember Lynn Deering as Holly. She was very different from Maureen Garrett. I remember Garrett's first episode. She is a rare example of a recast who caught on with the audience fairly quickly. They were pretty much over--Evie saw them hug goodbye when Hope was about to leave town. She misinterpreted the kiss, fell down and hit her head. That's how she became blind. Robin Mattson was playing Hope at the time. If they didn't want Elvera back in the mid-80s, it could have been interesting if they had brought Robin back to play a Hope with more backbone.

I remember some of it. SO different from Billy. He was the hospital heartthrob. I have such a clear memory of Rita seducing him. I swear to God, Santana's Samba Pa Ti was playing in the background. It's funny the details you remember. Honestly, anything that would have prevented him from being pulled into the Reva vortex would have been O.K. with me.

It's too bad they didn't see it through. Alan and Van could have married for all the wrong reasons and ended up caring for each other, with Ross in the wings and possibly Rita, too, to cause trouble. Rita was a LITTLE BIT of a schemer. She was kind of the Nola of her era, without the goofy personality. She deliberately went after Ed because she thought he would give her the lifestyle she wanted. She could do malicious things, i.e. cooly seduce Evie's crush (who was played by Jordan Clark, btw) and string him along until she was sure she had Ed. While Rita claimed to be deeply in love with Alan at the time she departed, part of the attraction for her was his money and power. As well as sharing aspects of Nola's character, she was also a more subtle version of Reva-she grew up poor and always wanted more than she had.

Interesting that Donald May has been mentioned twice. He's on my dreamcast list for Alan. He was somewhat older than Stewart and Bernau, but he could have played either role. An actor I thought about for Mike was Dan Hamilton. He played a role on GL during the 60s, but enough time had passed that it shouldn't have been a problem. He usually played smarmy characters but it would have been cool if they had gone against typecasting.

It's doubly a shame because one thing Long excelled at was using backstory to enhance the present story. I think that's one reason why Josh and Reva took off the way they did--the early stuff is really good. (Unfortunately, they ruined it by overusing the characters). Imagine if Roger returned to get involved with Alex, and her brother and ex, who used to be dire enemies, came together to oppose him. Instead, Mike was nowhere to be seen and Alan was written out for years. Yes, casting would have been an issue, but when you think about what they wound up with for 15 years...

Oh, wow. This explains why there is a scene in one of the 1987 episodes where Alan out of the blue brings up Rita to Ed! It always seemed incredibly out of place before now. For most of 1987 Alan was involved with Vanessa. Marland initially planned to have Rita and Vanessa become rivals over Ed. They ultimately decided Ed and Van were not a good pairing. While I was never convinced Van was in love with Alan, she could be very possessive, so the two of them fighting over him could have been very interesting. If she had come back with a KID, after Maureen accepted Ed's baby with Claire.... SO MANY great possibilities here. Not to mention, if she had come back, MAYBE that would have kept Alan out of Reva's orbit. (I can dream, can't I?) My guess for why they didn't bring her back in 1989--Alan was being hustled off the canvas, plus after bringing back Zaslow and Garrett, they might not have been able to afford her. He complained a lot about Mike's romantic pairings. I seem to remember he also complained that he didn't get to do enough action scenes. I think he wanted to fly a helicopter in a scene and was miffed they had the stunt man do it. Which was probably done because of insurance reasons. In Locher Room interviews I can't recall anyone who worked with him who speaks of him fondly, while people will speak warmly about Chris Bernau and Tom O'Rourke. The best Elvera could do was mention he flirted with her mother during a set visit.

It's interesting that we're talking about Charita right now, because if you look at the available older episodes of GL from the 50s and 60s, Bert was NOT the shining matriarch we saw during the 70s and 80s. She was a very complex character. She was dissatisfied with her lot, always disappointed in Bill and later on her children. Papa Bauer was constantly trying to set her straight. He was very fond of her in spite of everything. That seemed to change around the time Bill was written out of the show and then the actor who played Papa Bauer died. Regardless of era, she was still an important and vital character. (I like to think the reason she was the one Bauer who was fair to Alan was because of her past). Bill Bell was very good at creating matriarchs who were interesting and complex. Kay Chancellor from Y&R--she was an alcoholic and nympho and yet anchored the show for decades. Sometimes shows had the "good matriarch" and the "dark matriach"--i.e. Van and Meg on Love of Life, Mary Matthews and Aunt Liz on AW (she wasn't "dark" but she was a terrible busybody), Mona and Phoebe on AMC, etc. Ada on AW was another wonderfully complex matriarch character. Good or dark or something in between, they were very important to the shows they anchored. Then GH catapulted soap operas into the mainstream. Before that, soaps were a niche--a very lucrative niche, but still a niche for a certain audience. Soaps started focusing so much on younger characters and trying to pull in a younger audience. The kind of storylines being written did not easily feature middle-aged women who were wives and mothers. She had a very successful prime time career. She was booked a lot as a guest star on prime time shows and she did films, as well. She came back to soaps for a time on Santa Barbara. Maybe because the Dobsons, who created Rita, created the part for her? And we all know what a great decision that was. The prejudice against older women on soaps strikes again...I don't think it would have been that big a deal. I wasn't a huge Don Stewart fan, but the show definitely had a hole in it without Mike. Leaving Ross the only major legal eagle was awkward. He was shifting from prosecuting to defense a lot. Also, there was all that history between Mike and Alan that was right there ready to be used. Even though Alan and Ed were far from friends, his hatred of Ed and how he went after him and his family after his 1986 return didn't really ring true. It was almost as if they took scenes that should have been between him and Mike and stuck Ed in there instead.

I agree. I think it goes back to Marland's sudden exit from the show. I'm certain he was planning to bring Rita back. They were setting it up for like a year. Then the EP Allen Potter quickly left after him, and the new people clearly had no interest in bringing her back. I doubt Lenore Kasdorf would have returned. Maybe that's why it took so long, they were looking for the right actress for the recast. She got lost in the shuffle. There would have been lots of potential in bringing her back, IMO. I like her and feel like she was starting to fulfill her potential during her exit story (much like Ellen Parker did with hers). Up to then she was mostly the dutiful and wronged wife. Then she finally got meatier stuff to play and it was like, bye-bye. Would have loved it if they had brought her back.

While I don't dislike Peter Simon as much as some people, I think if Mart Hulswit has been retained as Ed, the show would have weathered Charita's death a bit better (Richard Van Vleet was Ed at the point she passed away no? Even moreso). There was something about Mart that was so relatable. Peter was kind of dour, and RVV was...well, he just wasn't Ed. It was like Chuck Tyler was visiting Cedars.

Yes, I think her name was Janet or Janice? (We're talking over 50 year ago here.) Yes, I agree, it had a lot to do with resentment of Ed. Ed and the rest of the Bauers were very close to Peggy. They were almost like siblings. I think Roger felt that Peggy left him in part because of Ed being hurt by Christina's real paternity. Also, he chose the night of Rita and Ed's engagement party to rape her. He was once involved with Rita and even saved her from a murder charge by giving her an alibi. He may have felt her getting with Ed was a betrayal. I missed this entire storyline. Thanks for filling that in! That makes a little more sense. Kind of, LOL. I wonder if Elvera would have come back. At any rate, they didn't seem to care as far as recasting Alan and Amanda. But you could be right about AM--once Maureen dies (I remember he was there in the hospital and very distraught when she was brought in), they don't talk much about him being a Bauer, do they?

Never understood this. She was a core family member, had all that backstory with Alan, was AM's mother. It's ridiculous they never brought her back. And yet for some wild reason they had Michelle name her kid after her, so it's not like they didn't know she existed.

Oh, they lost a lot of his backstory in the dustbin. Some of it was probably forgotten, other things deliberately obscured because they wanted to have the Roger/Holly thing. When he comes back they make it seem like the rape was a blip in his history. The truth is, he was abusive almost from the beginning. He attempted to rape Holly's sister-in-law, he didn't rape Hillary but he was physicially abusive while they were in a relationship. He did many other terrible things: blackmailed Alan into faking his death so Holly would go to prison for many years, tried to kidnap Christina, kidnapped a pregnant Rita instead and left her in a burning building so that she lost her baby, indirectly caused the death of his French girlfriend Renee, kindapped Holly and tried to kill Ed and Mike. Peggy was supposed to be his redemption and when she left him that's when he really lost it. The other thing they changed (or possibly forgot) was that it was NOT Roger who was in love with Holly. It was always the other way around. She was obsessed with him for years, since she was a teenager. Only after her marriage with Ed ended did that kind of kill her feelings for Roger. She deeply regretted letting that marriage end. (Interesting that they didn't forget this yet they never gave Ed and Holly a real romantic story again). She married Roger only for Christina's sake. Sure, they had to find a way to work around this stuff to make him a viable character on the show after he returned. They probably assumed a lot of people wouldn't remember it or many of those fans who did had long abandoned the show by then. Although I think you are correct that she at one point had cancer, I believe her actual cause of death was complications from diabetes. That's why she lost her leg. She was open about it and spoke about it in interviews. Amazing lady, very brave. Those scenes between her and Josh during rehabilitation are classics. Watching them still make me emotional.

Holly should have known. Roger got the vasectomy because the woman he married before Holly, Peggy, insisted on it. It's possible no one on the writing and production team at this point of the show's history knew of or remembered this detail. You would think that Zaslow would remember this--he was playing Roger back then (a different actress played Holly at that time)--but I've noticed when actors are interviewed they frequently forget storyline details. WE remember storyline details for decades, but they don't, necessarily. 😄

I was not watching the show much during this period. There's something that has always puzzled me about this, maybe someone can clear it up: Back in the day, Roger had a vasectomy. This is one of the reasons he became so obsessed with Christna (Blake), because she was his only biological child. Did they just memory hole that? Or did Roger doubt Hart was his kid at first? I know soap opera vasectomies pretty much ALWAYS fail--i.e. Fletcher's, during this same era. I'm just wondering if this was ever mentioned on screen.

Lisa Brown was still on ATWT--as that was both a P&G and CBS soap, they might have been able to made a deal to bring her back for one or two days. Possibly Lee Lawson? That would have been way better than literally no one on screen from Mo's family. Of course it's possible they tried and were turned down. Though after the storm of protest, they probably would have said they had tried.