Edge of Night (EON) (No spoilers please)

[DRW50]

She and her husband had kidnapped Nancy because she'd found out something, I think. There's a 1981 episode on Youtube that features this story.

[danfling]

Doris Belack played Beth Bryson, R. N. She and her husband operated a private clinic. Nancy followed Sharkey there. Sharkey was suspected of impregnating Emily Michaels where she was being treated. Sharkey had been an orderly there. He left there to work for Dr. and Mrs. Bryson.

Dr. Bryson specialized in a certain type of plastic surgery. He would secretly give criminals and others wanting new identies new faces. In the clinic was Ira Gideon (played by Randy Phillips) who was there trying to get a new facial identity. There was an assistant, older doctor there also named Dr. Arnold Featherstone (Humphrey Davis), who I don't think was aware of the criminal nature of his surgeries.

Nancy was discovered. Beth wanted to kill her, but Kenneth (her husband, played by James Hawthorne) felt sorry for Nancy. Beth resented the attraction that she felt Kenneth had for Nancy.

Nancy was eventually presumed dead. Elizabeth Parrish (who later played Buffy Revere) played a psysic who tried to help Mike.

Dr. Bryson decided to give Nancy a new face. Beth wanted to make it a horrible looking or kill Nancy.

Dr. Bryson was the father of Valerie Bryson (Leah Ayres). Beth was her step-mother. Valerie later moved in with Nancy and Mike. She was attracted to (at different times) Nancy's nephew Kelly, Jefferson Brown, and others. I think that she was a lovely, wonderful actress on the show.

When Mike finally found Nancy, he also located Ira, who had been wanted by Mike's office for some time.

James Hawthorne, who played Kenneth, later played Kenneth English (brother of Phoebe and father of Brooke) on All My Children for a brief time.

Sharkey was played by Norman Snow for a brief period, but he was replaced by Christopher Goutman.

Sorry, James Hawthorne played PHILIP English on All My Children, not Kenneth English.

[DRW50]

Can you tell me who the man and woman were in that episode who were on a roof or something, the woman watering plants?

[danfling]

That's Valerie Bryson and Jim Dedrickson.

I had forgotten that Valerie was a photographer. That studio was originally opened as a photography studio by Carlo Crown, who was a former acquaintance/love of Martine DuVal.

Is that the same place that Gavin had his dance studio?

[DRW50]

Thanks. I guess Jim was the guy Nancy was asking Beth about.

[danfling]

Jim was a theatrical director. He had a flirtation with Buffy Revere after Johnny Gentry left. I think that she may have dumped Johnny, but he made a play for one of the female characters. I can't remember right now who it was; maybe it was Poppy.

I do NOT know who the lady was sitting in the airplane with the veil pulled over her face.

I also don't remember what connection Jim Diedrickson had with the Bryson family. I do know that Valerie Bryson had fallen in love with Jefferson Brown. I suspect that the person Nancy it asking about was really the late Jefferson Brown (who assumed the idenity of Schylar Whitney).

David Allen Brooks played Jim Diedrickson. He is one of the performers from The Edge of Night I still see occasionally in commercials.

Elizabeth Parrish played Buffy Revere. Craig Augestine played Johnny Gentry. Lela Ivey played Mitzi Martin. All three of them (as well as Kenneth and Beth Bryson and Matt Sharkey) were without contracts to the show.

Albert Owens played Carlo. Carlo used a different last name, but he was revealed to be Carlo Crown. Mr. Owens had a contract with the show, but he was only on it for a short period.

[DRW50]

This is an episode that has more of the kidnapping story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKqB8ts6aJo

[danfling]

Martha Greenhouse, who played Hannah on The Edge of Night in 1979, died on January 5.

Hannah tried to help April to escape from jail.

[saynotoursoap]

As danfling wrote, Nancy followed Matt Sharkey to the Bryson Clinic because Sharkey had fathered the child Emily Michaels attempted to pass off as Draper Scott's. When Sharkey refused to answer Nancy's questions, she sneaked into the clinc to force the issue and came face to face with Ira Gideon, an embezzler who had been indicted in Monticello. Ira was there to have his face altered and flee the country. As a reporter, Nancy recognized him. Beth Bryson drugged Nancy and confined her to a hospital bed in the clinic, with Nancy's face swathed in bandages so no one would recognize her. Nancy had been scheduled to leave for a conference in San Francisco that day. Beth took the airline ticket and posed as Nancy whom the police would assume had "disappeared" in California. Beth and Sharkey wanted to kill Nancy, but Kenneth Bryson fell in love with her. April Scott went to the clinic posing as "June", a waitress who worked with Sid Brennan and Sharkey's old girlfriend Bobbie Gerard. Draper followed April, and when they recognized the voice of Dr. Bryson's patient as Nancy, Draper posed as an orderly (Richie Johnson) to get into the clinic and find Nancy. Emily also turned up at the clinic and exposed their identities. Sharkey and Beth took all of them hostage, intending to kill them with a bandaged Ira Gideon's support. At the crucial moment, Gideon wrestled the gun away from Sharkey. He ripped the bandages from his face and was revealed to actually be Mike Karr. The police had already captured Gideon, and Mike assumed his identity to infiltrate the clinic.

A couple of clarifications about Sharkey and Dr. Bryson. Christopher Goutman was hired to play Matt Sharkey, but initially he was not given a contract. Due to schedule conflicts, Norman Snow played Sharkey for two episodes, and then Goutman resumed the role for the remainder of the character's run. Also, James Hawthorne appeared on All My Children as Brooke's father before playing Kenneth Bryson on Edge.

The Bryson Clinic story wrapped up in June 1981. Dr. Bryson died in July, off camera in prison. But the plot dovetailed into a concurrent story when it was revealed that Schyuler Whitney, who had returned to Monticello in October 1980, was actually not Whitney at all, but former government traitor Jefferson Brown. Dr. Bryson had altered Brown's appearance to look like Whitney so that he could assume Whitney's identity. This had occurred off camera, three years earlier in 1978, and was told via flashbacks. In 1978, Valerie Bryson, Kenneth's daughter, had fallen in love with a bandaged patient in Bryson's Swiss clinic. She knew the patient as Vietnam war hero Jim Dedrickson, but he was, in actuality, Jefferson Brown. Brown had stolen the real Jim Dedrickson's identity while working in Washington. He merely posed as Dedrickson while undergoing surgery. When the real Jim Dedrickson arrived in Monticello in the autumn of 1981, Nancy's nephew Kelly Pollock thought that Jim was an impostor. Since Beth Bryson had seen Dedrickson's face after the surgery, she was the one person who could definitively answer whether or not the man calling himself Jim Dedrickson in 1981 was the same man Valerie fell in love with in 1978. This is what is being discussed in the scenes in the Youtube clip.

Dedrickson wanted to start a repertory theatre called The Maskers and had hoped to get his hands on Valerie's fortune. He did fall for Val, but Beth Bryson's visit with Nancy forced him to admit that he had not met Val in 1978. Jim forced his hunky himbo Johnny Gentry to romance wealthy old Buffy Revere, who had a proclivity for bedding and sponsoring handsome gigolos. Johnny and Buffy left Monticello together for Europe. Buffy returned the following autumn without Johnny and offered to sponsor Jim, but he too departed Monticello.

To answer danfling's question, no, Carlo Crown's photography studio was not the same as Gavin Wyllie's dance studio. Those sets were different and were used concurrently in the storyline. Carlo Crown was an alias, by the way. Carlo's real name was Collier Wells. He was an international jewel thief and the husband of Martine Duval. They had robbed the fake Sky Whitney's house in Paris years earlier.

Edited January 10, 2013 by saynotoursoap

[saynotoursoap]

danfling. Martha Greenhouse did not play Hannah. Hannah was played exclusively by the late Bobo Lewis in 1978-79. I have an episode compilation with her on my Youtube channel.

[robbwolff]

Man, your recollection of these stories is spot on! Thanks for bringing back memories of these incredible plots.

[saynotoursoap]

There is so much here, I miss points.

The lady with the veil was Libby Webster, played by Marion Lines. Libby was in love with the real Schyuler Whitney and hoped to win his affections by helping him reclaim the Whitney fortune. It was she, dressed in a black ski suit and mask, who shot and killed Jefferson Brown in the Swiss Alps. Sky used that knowledge to blackmail her into leaving Monticello, a very rare instance in which an Edge villain escaped punishment for a crime. The Edge Swiss remote was interesting. A crew from All My Children accompanied the Edge crew, with both shows taping in the St. Moritz area at the same time in December 1981, though each shoot was separate and in different locations.

According to Henry Slesar, Jeff Brown was originally supposed to fall to his death off a cliff while attempting to kill Raven, but ABC requested they change it because All My Children also was having a character fall off a cliff. Instead, Jeff ended up getting shot on the edge of a cliff. The fall would have been an ironic ending in another changed plot point. Back in August 1981 when Jeff told Raven the story of the plane crash that supposedly killed Sky Whitney, Jeff claimed that he found Sky dead in the snow after the accident and only then decided to assume his identity. We saw this in flashback. Originally, Slesar had intended to show a second, later flashback in which it was revealed that Sky survived the crash, but Jeff Brown deliberately pushed him to his death off the cliff in order to steal his identity and fortune. However, by the time those scenes were to be taped, it was apparent that actor Larkin Malloy was too popular to lose, and they would have to bring him back as the real Sky. So, the scenes of Sky's murder were never taped.

[DRW50]

Thanks. This is all fascinating info. It makes sense that they would have originally planned to kill off Sky. I wonder what their plans for Raven would have been.

[Bright Eyes]

It sounds odd that the show would ever backtrack like that considering they killed off Adam and Nicole and I'm sure many other popular characters.

[danfling]

I had forgotten all about Libby Webster.