The Doctors Discussion Thread

[slick jones]

Thank you, I must have missed that when I read through the thread. I appreciate your response. I was reading summaries in the archive

section of SON. It's been a while since I read the summaries in this thread.

[TimWil]

As with the other threads I thought I'd share my brushes with various performers from this particular show, including my friendship with the very special Geraldine Court:

In 1974 I was in a production of Macbeth at Lincoln Center starring Christopher Walken. Peter Burnell (Mike Powers #4) played Malcolm. He was a very nice guy. I was sad to learn he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987.

In 1975 I played John Adams II (as a teenager) in the PBS miniseries The Adams Chronicles. The actor playing my older brother was David Elliott (not to be confused with David James Elliott). He was a cool, dark haired dude with a real swagger to him. I wasn't surprised to see him on The Doctors as Billy Aldrich. He was perfect as a troubled teen/stud in training. He left the show to do Jaws 2 where he played the cocky son of the mayor. According to imdb he now works in film production in LA and elsewhere constructing sets. I might look him up someday.

He was replaced on the show by Shawn Campbell, who I used to see from time to time at auditions. He had longish blond hair and always wore flares/bell bottoms with silk shirts unbuttoned to below his chest. He never impressed me. He was a stereotype of a former child actor who had hit his mid teens and was trying too hard to be cool. I remember one particular audition when soap veteran Ariane Munker showed up and they peered at the rest of us like we were peasants. I heard he was fired from The Doctors because he got caught smoking weed in the halls of 30 Rock, where the show taped.

Shawn Campbell was replaced by, of course, Alec Baldwin. I'd see him many, many times on the Long Island Railroad (Babylon line) commuter train studying his script. He was stunningly handsome, needless to say.

In the fall of 1977 I was one of the leads in a play called The Dream Watcher. It was performed at the Seattle Repertory Theater and was slated to come to Broadway but never did due to the fact that it just didn't work. Geraldine Court played my character's chain-smoking, materialistic mother going on and on about wanting "a kitchen island." I was thrilled that Geraldine had been cast. Dr. Ann Larimer was one of my favorite soap characters. It must have been the storyline of her locking up Carolee in that sanitarium that did it for me. Anyway, after rehearsals and performances Geri, Peter Bartlett (who went on to play Nigel on OLTL and is now in Cinderella on Broadway) and I would go to a diner called Dick's (yes, really) and she would have us in hysterics over her stories about The Doctors, which she had only just left. To answer an earlier question in this thread the reason she left the show was because she had no faith in the new co-headwriters Mel and Ethel Brez, who she called "Methel." She was good friends with Douglas Marland and he told her he'd get her on every show he worked on in the future and she was OK with that. She really wanted to do theater, film and primetime TV, both as an actress and writer. In the early/mid 1960s she had been in a national tour of Neil Simon's Barefoot In The Park with Myrna Loy playing her mother-in-law and William Shatner playing her husband! OK, here are my two favorite stories of hers: there was the one about her character catching the dreaded Obonda fever on a connecting flight-someone apparently coughed into a tissue on a plane bound from Nairobi, carelessly left it under the seat and it ended up infecting all the passengers on the subsequent flight, including Ann. For some reason this left her incapable of having a child. The other story I loved was the one in which she, Elizabeth Hubbard, David O'Brien, James Pritchett and Lydia Bruce had to stifle sobs of laughter when they had to all stand behind a hospital glass window partition and look down with grave concern at poor little tot Stephie who was under observation. The child actress who played her kept whimpering "Little Stephie's not feeling too good," most likely parroting the exact words her real life mother had used when explaining the scene! Geri said the director had to yell "CUT!" several times because the actors were all in hysterics over this kid. Geri said she loved her time on The Doctors because she had became really good friends with Marland, Robert Anton (costume designer), David O'Brien and Glenn Corbett. She met Anna "Banana" Stuart on The Doctors and they stayed extremely close friends from then on. I remember her saying Armand Assante had terrible body odor issues, most likely because he'd roll into work after a night of carousing. She totally adored O'Brien and Corbett and was really devastated when they both passed away in the 1980s.

Geri was such a special lady. Highly intelligent, intellectually curious, deeply spiritual and politically progressive. She was also one of the funniest people I'll ever hope to meet. I'm so grateful to have known her. I miss her tremendously.

Edited July 4, 2014 by TimWil

[teplin]

Love your stories, TimWil. Thanks for sharing.

[DRW50]

Wonderful stories. The one about the little girl is hilarious. I'm glad they had fun. I know Alec Baldwin said by the end it was gloomy.

[TimWil]

You're welcome, guys. I had a bit of a cry after posting that. I loved her very much.

Geri told me a wonderful story about William Shatner from when they were on the road with Barefoot In The Park. She kept her distance from him socially because he seemed rather shallow and uninteresting. He'd asked her out to dinner a few times within hours of meeting her and she'd refused. One day she was sitting outside a rehearsal room studying her script and she heard beautiful piano music coming from inside the room. The music stopped and Shatner walked out of the room. Geri was impressed that he could play such lovely music. Maybe she was wrong about him? He asked her out to lunch and she said OK. After lunch they went back to rehearsal but nobody else was back there yet. She asked Shatner to play him something on the piano. He said he couldn't play the piano. It was then that Geri noticed the record player in the corner along with an album of Debussy classics. Heh.

[danfling]

One producer of The Doctors, Robert Costello, has passed away. Here is his obituary from the East Hampton Star:

Robert Costello, TV Producer, 93

April 26, 1921 - May 30, 2014

By Irene Silverman | June 26, 2014 - 10:06am

Robert Costello, TV Producer, April 26, 1921 - May 30, 2014

Robert E. Costello, a pioneering producer of classic ’50s television shows who later won a Peabody Award for the PBS series “The Adams Chronicles” and two Emmys for ABC’s daytime serial “Ryan’s Hope,” died of a heart attack on May 30 at his summer house in Amagansett’s Beach Hampton neighborhood. He was 93 and had been diagnosed many years before with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In the ’60s and ’70s Mr. Costello introduced viewers to “The Patty Duke Show” and “Dark Shadows,” a vehicle for TV’s first vampires. He was most proud, however, of his work on “The Armstrong Circle Theatre,” a series of true-life “docudramas” that ran from 1950 to 1963 and gave such movie stars as James Dean, Grace Kelly, and Jack Lemmon their first taste of the small screen.

One legendary episode, “The Contender,” starred Paul Newman as a professional boxer who fears he will be brain-damaged if he keeps fighting; another, “The Engineer of Death: The Eichmann Story” (with Carroll O’Connor, a k a Archie Bunker, as Eichmann), included actual footage of Auschwitz and was rebroadcast the day after Eichmann’s trial in Israel.

Mr. Costello took a roundabout path to television. Born in Chicago on April 26, 1921, to Robert E. Costello Sr. and the former Bernice McClure, he was an only child. His father sold advertising space in farm magazines, and often took the boy with him on cross-country business trips. The family settled when he was 5 in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he attended high school.

He entered Dartmouth College in 1939 but left to join the O.S.S., the Office of Strategic Services, soon after America went to war. He was a code-cracker and ciphers man, stationed in Europe and North Africa, where he met his first wife, the former Mary Eddy, now Mary Eddy Furman. They were married in Algiers.

Many other members of his Dartmouth class of ’43 enlisted in the military before they could graduate. Along with those classmates, Mr. Costello finally received his college diploma 50 years late, marching proudly with the class of 1993.

He returned home after the war to attend the Yale School of Drama, graduating with an M.F.A., after which the Stevens Institute of Technology hired him for his first job, in its theater research unit. Mr. Costello had been something of an artist as a child — his parents once gave a railroad porter $10 to keep him busy, according to family lore, and the porter taught him to draw — and while at Stevens he illustrated a book called “Theaters and Auditoriums.”

Then came an odd but entertaining interlude: The book caught the attention of a wealthy Dutch businessman who owned a team of performing Lipizzaners. He hired Mr. Costello as the lighting and theater designer of the horses’ act, and later sent him through Switzerland supervising the animals in a one-ring circus.

Mr. Costello married his second wife, Barbara Bolton, the actress Barbara Dello Joio, in 1950. Five years later they bought the Amagansett house, said to have been the first one built on Marine Boulevard. They were divorced in the 1960s.

His TV productions in those years included “Mister Peepers,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Another World,” and many more. The demands on his time allowed him little time for hobbies, but he managed to amass a vast collection of whaling harpoons and scrimshaw, including one Civil War-era carving bearing the words “Death to the Confederacy” and the carved heads of several Southern generals.

After retiring in the ’80s, Mr. Costello became a tenured professor at New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television. With his third wife, the former Sybil Weinberger, a TV music producer and Emmy-winner in her own right, he also lived in Manhattan. They were married for 37 years.

He leaves three daughters and a son. Martha Keating of Church Creek, Md., and Julia Costello of Mokelumne Hill, Calif., are the children of his first wife; Kathleen Bar-Tur of New York City and Ned Bolton Costello of Old Lyme, Conn., are the children of his second. Both former wives survive, and “all spouses are friendly with each other,” said the family.

Mr. Costello is survived also by seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He was cremated, and his ashes will be buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs on July 23 following a private family service there.

[dc11786]

I cannot remember if I posted this or not...

Dixie Carter appeared as Linda Elliott in 1977. Her character's husband was Barry Elliott was played by Donald Symington. The Elliotts were friends of Jason Aldrich living on the Riviera who Jason and Nola stayed with during a vacation.

[DRW50]

I didn't know that about Dixie.

Sad to hear about Robert Costello. He was so important to Dark Shadows.

[Paul Raven]

Feb 79

Elizabeth Levin and David Cherill replace Linda Grover as headwriters

May 79

Geoffrey Horne, who played Jim Strassfield on ATWT is now on TD as Dr Frankel.

He had appeared in 'Bridge on the River Kwai'

Edited July 7, 2014 by Paul Raven

[DRW50]

Weekday TV March 1976

[TimWil]

Thanks so much for the article about Geri, DRW50! I don't think I ever read one about her before. Her remarks really do sound like her. She was one deep thinker, that one! So wonderful.

Did you know her real last name was Oldenboom? Good old Dutch name!

Edited July 8, 2014 by TimWil

[slick jones]

Does anyone know what the name of the serial killer Sam MacMurray played on TD?

[amybrickwallace]

Was he the one who was a cult leader of some kind and held the hospital hostage? Dorian Lopinto's character of Missy ended up being killed off in the crisis, I think.

[slick jones]

The cult leader was Far Wind/Dr. Warner. I just read an old interview on We Love Soaps and he talked about RH as Wes Leonard and TD as " a guy who killed a bunch of people".

[amybrickwallace]

OK, thanks. I was surprised by the sheer amount of credits on his imdb page. WOW!!