SweetPea36

I think I wanted to like Emily more than I actually did. I never did warm up to NL in the role.

Where did Rachel go? How long had she been gone?

Sorry. I misread the question.

Awww, I loved Stone. Stone and BJ's heart were two of GH's best stories.

Some of those old magazines have such a mix of beautiful, personal photos and stories, and thinly veiled hostility/lecturing (from Louella and Hedda and others). I guess the last of that era was Rona Barrett - she was younger, obviously, but had the same tone.

All the magazines seem to start out with some quality and independence and then become trash. The soap magazines of today are so garishly styled, they're not too far off from the dying days of these magazines, as they went on and on with the same tacky covers of Elvis or Jackie and the same headlines about so and so's "love tricks" or their violent arrest.

I guess at least now we have message boards and memories, to help balance out how tabloidy and shilish magazines are now.

I'll never stop believing that an honest and critical soap press could have helped soaps stave off at least some of their decline.

Louella and Hedda got too big for their britches when they realized they could break careers with their insider knowledge about sexual conduct. At least they were a thorn in the side of the movie studios, which is more than I can say for their successors today.

I agree with you. With a stronger soap press, networks, EPs and HWs would have been called out for bad behavior years ago. Instead, they were allowed to get by with it and now we're watching the death of a favorite genre.

They were the closest a viewer got to knowing about stars' personal lives in those pre-Internet days. I sometimes forget how much things have changed since the days of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Sheila Graham.

The soap rags now are unreadable. I doubt they ever publish anything the networks don't want them to say because they're dependent on the networks for their livelihood. It's a shame when they could be a real source of information for readers.

Thanks, CarlD2. I had forgotten Modern Screen. I don't have any idea when it went away, do you?

Strange is a charitable way to describe Judith Chapman's Ginny. I don't know if it was Chapman, who is a tic factory, or if they never figured out who they wanted Ginny to be. I mostly wanted her to go away.

This is what a commenter on YT said about the Luke/Emma Luts scenes:

"I think those scenes are from right after Laura's presumed death in 1982. Luke started seeing Laura in different places and he and Robert went looking for her. Actually it wasn't the real Laura that Luke saw, but holograms planted by the evil David Gray who had kidnapped Laura and shipped her to the Helena Cassadine's island in Greece."

Emma Luts was on GH for three years, so there were many more scenes with her. I think she was a good Luke foil and they used her at various times.

As always, GH threw away the baby with the bath water. The show definitely declined. There were characters like Heather and Scott who were played by good actors who could have been put to good use to help drive other stories. I was never impressed with Lesley or Blackie, so that wasn't much of a loss.

Merrie Lynn Ross played Emma Luts when GH was trying to make Luke an exciting antihero Philip Marlow kind of guy.

Jeanna Michaels was Connie Atkins/Constance Townsend and was thrown in to make Robert look more exciting.

She reminded me of Thelma Ritter, but mostly in a good way.

Of course Monica and Rick's great love story was trash. Monica was total lowlife trash, so how could it have been any different? GH worked at redeeming her for a time and she has become a Carly-level hypocrite now, but she was as bad as Carly back when she was younger. One of the things I liked about pre-John Ingle Edward was that he loved to remind Monica about her past.

I loved Sikking on Hill Street Blues, one of my favorite shows of all times. I was never quite sure what his purpose on GH was supposed to be. He was an alcoholic doctor who was enabled by Audrey and then when he sobered up he got ugly and turned on her, if I recall. He was gone shortly after that in one of those big character purges. I think it was a case where the actor was better than the character so they probably hated to cut him loose. I also think he and Rachel Ames played off each other well. Audrey always did that thing where she looked like your best friend's church lady mother, but she was tough as nails underneath that. Didn't she and Steve get all hot and heavy as soon as Hobart was gone?

I liked the organ music on soaps. I hate that wheezy asthmatic sounds organs make, but for some reason it worked with soap operas. Given a choice between Starr's singing and a wheezy old organ, I would choose the organ any day. I'd rather listen to an organ than Dave Koz' sexaphone.

I know it's blasphemy on this site, but I never liked Lesley or Denise Alexander. When she came on, it was usually my cue to go do the dishes or something. Because of that, I probably should not talk about some of her stories. I honestly don't remember a demonic fetus, but why not? Watching the YTs of the L&L rape and seeing some of the scenes with Alexander's Lesley and Chris Robinson's Rick, I was reminded of how awful I always thought they were. Although I generally liked the Lesley character, Denise had some acting tics and weaknesses that always bothered me. I never minded Laura as much, although I never thought she was very interesting and I always wondered why so many men were willing to jump into the volcano for her. Vapid doesn't blow my skirt up.

Terri's only purpose was to deliver the reveal about Steve Hardy being Jeff's father, wasn't it? I think they tried to do a big romantic story for her but it kind of fizzled and I don't remember why. I was working at the time and didn't get to see GH as often, so I missed some of her story. I remember she was standard-issue pretty, not much else.

I was fine with bringing on the Webbers because I prefer a family-centered soap and it was time for Steve Hardy to have a family to anchor him. For the first years when the hospital stories were big drama and everybody was playing musical chairs and pairing off with each other, it was different but eventually that wasn't solid enough.

Emily being an alcoholic explains a lot of things that always puzzled me about her. Who was the husband she was supposedly pining for, Robert Lansing? I saw a tape ages ago of John Beradino talking about Emily, I think when GH finally said Jessie had died. At the time I wondered why Beradino sounded so sympathetic but her problems explain that. It was probably painful for him to work that closely with her knowing what was going on with her and then watching her be let go. He was probably worried about her. Of course his character had that brazen temptress Audrey to fill her shoes.

What I always heard about Gloria Monty is that she was a huge control freak who did not work and play well with others. It was Gloria's way or the wrong way. She had no use for anyone who preceded or succeeded her, so she probably wrote them all off without a second thought. It was all about Gloria. She locked horns with everybody and was quite disrespectful of anyone who did not agree with her.

No wonder Marland and Monty locked horns.

I was okay when they cleared out that bunch of characters. It got too busy for a while there, with too many characters who didn't really belong and had a tenuous connection. I come from a long line of women who love soaps. My grandmothers used to listen to radio soaps, so I tend to have a preference for the old family oriented shows and I thought they were diluting that too much. GH was tighter after that, so it was good.

I had a major crush on Roy Thinnes' Phil. Anyone trying to replace him would have needed to bring in a tub of water and walk on it before I would have totally accepted him, even though I knew Thinnes wanted to leave. To be fair, West did a good job in the role. His only major fault was that he wasn't Thinnes.

I far preferred Starett because I didn't like how they changed Diana but I can understand why they did it. Bundy was better at who Diana became. I'm not sure Starett could have played that.

An online friend and I have some lively arguments over that hussy Audrey taking Steve away from Jessie. It gets pretty funny sometimes.

I only found out very recently that Emily McLaughlin is believed to have been an alcoholic. That was probably her attraction to Jeffrey Hunter, her last husband. She was also his last wife because he died not long after they were married. That also may be why Jessie Brewer disappeared from GH and was only dragged out of mothballs a couple of times a year. They never wrote her out.

The first day it aired.

And you? You've obviously been watching for a while. I'm amazed at how well some of you remember the old P&G soaps especially.

From everything I've heard about GM, she probably wanted to tell the HW what to write and for it to be done her way with no arguments.

Laughing at the toilet seat photo. I'm not surprised. I was surprised when I kept looking at the dates he was writing GH and it looked like it covered the time of the rape. That is not his style. He left and PFS probably wrote what Monty wanted. I know the interviews I've read were all GM and no writer was mentioned.

"From that point on, we played [Luke's] regret and his total devastation," Geary said. "That's a story nobody wants to tell - that the rapist's life is as devastated as the person he rapes. His great love and regret and guilt are what caught the audience so off guard."

I'm not going to say which in which of his orifices his head was stuck when he said that. Many women turned against Geary for that and other stupid things he said at the time.

I just found it on Wikipedia. Marland left because he wanted to go slower, but Monty was pushing for something more dramatic (the rape). He left, Pat Falken Smith took over and she wrote the rape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_and_Laura

Sorry, I didn't answer the other part. To my knowledge, he never said what he planned to do with Laura. I don't think he stayed around GH very long because he didn't like CA. He may have hated that story, but Monty was given a very short time to turn the show around and they sure pulled that off.

I just went and looked him up on Wikipedia. It says he was hired by Monty in 1978, so he might not have had a story in mind before they had to hit the ground running.

Marland was head writer then. Pat Falken Smith took over, and I think she was writing with him at least part of the time. He was HW during the rape.

Laura had too many people coddling her. It's nice they loved her, but they probably kept her from maturing emotionally.

Leslie was sometimes smart and fairly tough, while other times she was passive and a victim, particularly when it came to Monica. Laura was sitting at the foot of the master and taking it all in. I had not seen those Leslie/Jeff scenes in years, but she comes across as a major wimp there. I had not recalled that.

It really is too bad they couldn't think of another way to move Laura forward without the rape and her involvement afterward with Luke, but it probably would have required something drastic.

Leslie, Jeff and Scotty made a big difference in Laura's favor because they were all so well-liked. Boobie and Luke came across as very obvious villains. JZ played a hard, tough version of Boobie and her reason for hating Laura was flimsy at best. We had no way of knowing Boobie would become so benign later on; who could have guessed that?

It was smart of GH to make Boobie a victim of Cujo because giving birth to that was a huge strike against her.

Luke was a very damaged character. Rather than do something out of character like work for a living, he decided to put his teenage sister Booby on a street corner to hook so he could be her pimp.

There were many of us who knew about that, and then we watched the rape and we hated Luke Spencer. Genie had such a strong connection with viewers that she managed to pull off an enormous feat and redeemed the rapist, but most women I knew were horrified and never got past it. Supposedly they had a huge following who were enthralled by their romance and perfect love and bought the rape as seduction b.s. I thought anyone who bought the romance must have been brain damaged or at least had memory lapses. Luke Spencer was and is a sociopath.

Part of what Monty did to redeem Luke was pit Scotty against him. To make Luke look good, they made Scotty look bad. It was pretty horrible, beginning to end. Scotty was trying to interfere with Luke and Laura's perfect love, so of course everything he did was wrong. We had never seen Scotty do anything but love Laura. Luke loved Luke; always did, always will.

30 years later, we were told that after all of that, Luke was unfaithful to Laura. He should have been in her debt forever for keeping his sorry butt out of prison but instead he had the affair that produced Ethan.

I haven't seen the scenes for years, but after Elizabeth was raped in order to segue Lucky into being angry at Laura because Luke raped her (how stupid was that?), I'm sure both Luke and Laura admitted it was rape. I don't recall it being called a "seduction" then.

I agree about Roy/Boobie. He never seemed to fit in, and I had loved him on Santa Barbara. I felt the same way about Marcy Walker on AMC; they were better together than apart.

I think you're right about JFP not having a lot of influence, but because she was the editor, she got the last laugh because she sometimes went to town cutting scenes she didn't like. She was often accused of being prudish because she allowed far less than the ABC censors would have let go. Mostly she and Guza fought like a cat and dog over budget and his propensity for constantly using their most expensive actors.

JFP had her own special touches. She was (in)famous for wrecking Boobie's last love story and cut way back on Jackie Zeman's airtime because she said nobody wants to see old people kissing. She also decreed good girls are boring, so GH viewers were in for a long siege of Carly/Sam slore stories.

My biggest problem with Gloria Monty was Luke raping Laura and then Monty telling us it was a seduction, not a rape. It was a very violent rape, and GM saying that was so offensive I've never been able to get past it.

Other than that, I thought both Gloria Monty and Wendy Riche were vastly superior to those who have had their jobs after they left. Riche seems to have been able to control Guza's worst excesses where JFP apparently encouraged them.