From These Roots

[DRW50]

I wonder why they changed their mind.

[Paul Raven]

August 1960,NBC announces that Roots will remain on air due to viewer feedback-thousands of letters were sent once word got out about the imminent cancellation.

[DRW50]

That's rare - that a soap is saved because of viewer anger.

[DRW50]

January 1961 TV Radio Mirror

[DRW50]

bound to be some kind of competition, some clash in ego."

Giving up dates started when Sarah Hardy was in high school, and already a member of the Columbia Junior Theater. She missed a big school dance because there were rehearsals at the theater. Her mother warned, "You will have to make a great many sacrifices to your theatrical ambitions. Are you sure it's going to be worth it?"

She still thinks it is. In her early twenties now, Sarah feels she can afford to wait a while, if necessary, for marriage, and the four children she would like - "two boys and two girls, so each will always have a pal."

Sarah comes from just such a family. She has a twin brother, Archie, now completing work for his master's degree at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Archie is in youth work. "It's far removed from acting, in a way - and in a way, not. He must must meet people well. He sings, plays the guitar for the kids - the guitar was our present for one of our birthdays, but he learned to play it. He leads young people in recreational activities, entertains them, gives talks, went to Europe last summer for the World-Wise Christian Youth Conference."

Edmund, the younger brother, will be going into their mother's insurance business. "But he's got some ham in him - we all have." Elizabeth Cecil, at fifteen, plays bass sax with the high-school band and has also acted in school plays.

The Hardys had a home life in which something was always happening - "marvelous, exciting, chaotic, closely knit in the tradition of the South, where family is so important," as Sarah describes it. "But we all have strong personalities of our own. My mother used to say that the only unfortunate thing about us was that we had all leaders and no followers."

At the Junior Theater, Sarah's first performance was in the fairytale, "The Princess and the Swineherd." She played the villain of the piece. Her best friend played the princess. Afterward, the kids swarmed backstage to tell the princess how wonderful she was, how beautiful, how much they loved her in the show.

Sarah waited for her turn to be congratulated. "It was awful. They came over to me, yanked at my costume, and said they hated me. I was upset. It took me quite a while to understand that it was a tribute to the reality of the performance. But it didn't exactly help my popularity, either."

After high school and the five years with the children's theater, she felt ready for New York. Her parents, conditioned to the fact that they had an actress on their hands, agreed she could go. She had seen the city briefly, when she was thirteen, and was more scared of it than she admitted. "My parents stuck me in a residence club for girls, so I would be sure of eating three times a day and have a little supervision. It took a year and a half to persuade them to let me get a small apartment of my own," she says with a rueful smile.

She studied nine hours a day at the American Theater Wing - acting, dancing, play analysis, theater history. Her first professional job was with the Valley Players, at Holyoke, Massachusetts, doing the young-girl comedy role in "A Roomful of Roses." Later, she played the important ingenue part in the same play with the Port Players, in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and repeated that part in a 1957 production at Rome, Italy.

Sarah's first New York acting job was in Moss Hart's "The Climate of Eden," for the Equity Library Theater. Extra parts on television followed - for Kraft, Studio One, other nighttime dramatic shows. Her first big TV chance came in a sequence of The Verdict Is Yours.

A one-shot she did on The Edge of Night impressed Don Wallace, who was then directing that television serial. Later, when Wallace was casting for From These Roots, on NBC-TV, Sarah was just the actress he had in mind for the part of Lydia Benson. That was more than two years ago, and she has been Lyddy ever since.

"Lyddy isn't the usual ingenue," Sarah emphasizes. "I've grown up, and grown mature, with Lyddy. That's one reason I love to play her. At first, I thought of a part in a daytime serial as something that would give me a chance to be choosey about other parts that were offered me. A kind of security. Now I like it completely for its own sake. From These Roots is one of the best, as far as quality is concerned - the production, under Paul Lammers, the writing, the acting. One of the nicest things is working with the same people, day after day, but doing different episodes."

When there's time for dates, Sarah tries to avoid places and parties with an all-theater atmosphere. "I find it refreshing to talk to people in other professions and other businesses, with entirely different interests. One of my best friends teaches in a grammar school. His creative ability comes out in his teaching. We have wonderful talks together."

With another girl - the producer with whom she worked in Rome - she shares a four-room duplex apartment near Central Park, on a street of old New York town houses. With one wonderful room upstairs, which is Sarah's. It has windows on three sides and the sun circles around them from dawn to darkness. Sarah has turned the room into a kind of den, where she keeps her hi-fi and her drawing board. She has a talent for line drawings, done with pen or brush and ink, mostly character studies of people. She also has the beginnings of a nice collection - some original Mary Cassatt lithographs and two drypoints.

She likes to cook - but is still "too nervous about cooking, too afraid it won't turn out right, to enjoy it thoroughly." She "invents" dishes, once made a perfect orange spice cake that she can't, for the life of her, repeat - because she can't remember how she did it. She thinks nothing is more wonderful than a good, hearty stew - or a good, thick vegetable soup, served with home-made corn bread. "At home, we used to make a meal of that." And she likes to eat to music - liturgical recordings, or folk music, with a dash of other kind.

On the show, she calls her mother "Mama." And it comes naturally. That's an old Southern custom - and apparently prevails elsewhere, judging from her mail. She gets letters from women and from men, who tell her they love to hear her say it. "I called my father 'Daddy' and, when I occasionally said 'Father,' he would immediately ask, 'How much?' He knew it preceded a request for funds!"

One of Sarah's great disappointments is that her father died just before she began to play in From These Roots. But her mother now watches the show - from her office. If people happen in when the broadcast is beginning or is on, she hands them cups of coffee and they watch with her. "A lot of businessmen in our town know the show. They have to, if they arrive when it's broadcast time!"

Last summer, one day's show was made up entirely of two dream sequences - one with Ann Flood as Liz Fraser, one with Sarah as Lydia Benson. These were done surreastically, with "limbo" sets - just frames of doorways, mere suggestions of backgrounds and furnishings - in and out of which the girls had to run with split-second timing.

"By the time we are ordinarily getting ready to go into 'dress' rehearsal," Sarah recalls, "we were only half through the camera blocking - and still had the run-through to do. We were all off-schedule. An air of resignation fell over the studio. This had turned into a spectacular. How could we possibly go on the air that day?

"Then the time came to go on, and the show went beautifully. I had worn flats with leather soles, held on by thongs - and, when I ran around the studio, they kept slipping. I was terribly scared that I would ruin the timing on the air. So the dream sequence almost turned into a nightmare for me - but no one else guessed that."

Not all the days are as strenuous as that one, of course. But acting in a daytime serial is demanding of time and energy. There never can be time enough for rehearsals. Performances have to be spontaneous. And they can be given only once, with no chance for improvement. An actress learns to respect the demands, and to demand the same respect from others.

"I had one little experience," she reminisces, "with a boy I had been going with, off and on, since my early teens. He was working at writing, and had little use for the actor's contribution to a play. We went to see John Gielgud's 'Ages Of Man' - which was absolutely magnificent in every way. As we came out, this friend said, 'Well, it just goes to prove that the actor never can be as great as the man who writes for him.' He meant it, every word, and I was angry. And, all the time, he had been asking me - an actress - to marry him!"

Sarah won what she terms "a small victory" while she was playing in Rome - and this, too, concerned a boy she had dated in high school when he was a university student. He had the temerity to predict that she would never continue a career but would throw all her training away, marry, and have three children before she was twenty-five.

He subsequently went into the Navy, was stationed in Italy, and Sarah never really expected to see him again. But, one day, standing in front of the theater in Rome, she noticed a sailor studying the poster announcing that "A Roomful of Roses" was playing there. He looked at her, looked back at the poster - and finally walked over. "He was a little awed," Sarah smiles, "and a lot surprised! It made me feel good."

But victories, in themselves, can be hollow. What makes up for everything - at least, for the present - are the wonderful relationships on a show like From These Roots. The friendships. The working together. "You work with younger and older people, and age makes absolutely no difference. There are no caste systems. Everyone's work is respected. Each does his part in putting the whole together."

In short, it's rather like the teamwork of a closely knit family. The kind of family Sarah Hardy herself comes from. The kind she likes, and hopes to have herself some day - when there's more time in her life for romance.

[danfling]

My understanding about the departure of Picard and Provo:

Procter and Gamble discovered that they were a same-sex couple, and the company disapproved. They were removed from writing this show (that they had created, along with Concerning Miss Marlowe) and never wrote again for Procter and Gamble. Roy Winsor hired them later to write Love of Life. I think that they also contributed some scripts to The Doctors before that show became serialized.

[danfling]

Did From These Roots and Our Five Daughters end on the same day?

I noticed several performers from those two shows who were either in the original cast of Another World or were in the cast as replacements early in the run of Another World: Jacqueline Courtney (from Our Five Daughters), Leon Janney, Audra Linley, and Vera Allen.

[DRW50]

That's pretty disgusting. I didn't realize such bigotry even went on behind the camera. How ironic considering that gay men later helped keep some of their main soaps from being roadkill.

[DRW50]

From These Roots ended on 12/21/61. Our Five Daughters ended on 9/28/62.

[toml1962]

Edited June 9, 2012 by toml1962

[danfling]

According to what I have read online, Richard X. Slattery was a New York City police officer until 1960, so he apparantly was one during the time that he appeared on From These Roots.

[dc11786]

I was looking through this thread again.

Carl asked about when Leonard Stadd was fired. John Young, the show's final head writer, donated his papers to a university (Syravuse?) I believe his scripts only covered the last three months (Oct. - Dec. 1961). So Stadd would have been headwriter from Sept. 1960-Sept. 1961. I thought he was there longer as I had once read the creators Provo and Pickard were only with the series six months. Provo and Pickard's papers were donated to a television museum in California I believe. And, of course, there are scripts available for "From These Roots" in the P&G collection at Bowling State University. Anyway, it would seem our current writing credits for FTR would be:

John Pickard / Frank Provo : June 1958 - September 1960

Leonard Stadd: September 1960-September 1961

John M. Young: October - December 1961

[DRW50]

Thanks. When you read the writeups on the show you'd think Stadd was there for a few years at least.

[danfling]

My understanding is that Provo and Picard were fired by Procter and Gamble when the company learned that they were a same-sex romantic couple.

They were later hired by Roy Winsor as headwriters of Love of Life. I understand they also submitted scripts to The Doctors.

[Soaplovers]

Looking at the photo of Julie Bovasso, I thought she looked awfully familiar.. only to find out that she was John Traveltra's mother in Saturday Night Fever... Played a relative of Cher's in Moonstruck.. and was Molly Ringwald's Grand-ma in Betsy's Wedding.

Even though she was let go/walked off the set, it looks like she carved out a nice career as a character actress in a few memorable movies, imho.