Search For Tomorrow Discussion Thread

[SoapDope]

Thanks for more SFT. I hope that poster keeps uploading. Sherry Mathis is a sweetheart. I like watching her in scenes.

I find Justine annoying and not attractive at all.

[SoapDope]

I didn't realize Page Hannah was married to crusty old Lou Adler. He has to be at least 30 years older than her. He was married to 60's teen sweetheart Shelly Fabares and married her when she was like 19 and he was in his 30's back then. He and Shelly seperated in 1966 and didn't divorce till 1980.

[Vee]

Why am I not surprised?

[DRW50]

amybrickwallace asked me to upload this. It took me a while to get it up, as I don't use Photobucket as much as I used to. I hope this works.

[DRW50]

This comes after the next to last page.

"mediately, when she got a lucky break - almost literally.

Just a few weeks into the production, one of the lead actresses twisted her ankle during the first act, and Sherry was hustled into a too-small costume and pushed before the audience.

"Before I realized what was happening, I was on stage, and thinking frantically, 'What's my first line?'" she told "Memphis Press-Scimitar" columnist Jane Sanderson, who followed Sherry's career closely. "I don't know what it is, but something inside starts to respond. It's like a machine taking over."

A critic for the "Hollywood Reporter" was in the audience that evening: "The night I caught the show, Sherry Mathis replaced Victoria Mallory in the role of Anne, and it's difficult to imagine anyone doing it better. Miss Mathis is a most attractive and engaging performer and sailed through the role as if she had been doing it all along."

It just so happened that the play's composer, Stephen Sondheim, was also in the audience. After the show, Sondheim came backstage and, wrote Sanderson, "complimented Sherry highly, stating her performance was so good he couldn't believe it."

Sherry brushed off her good fortune, telling Sanderson, "It was a lucky thing for me. What 50% of this business is anyhow is luck."

If this were a movie, the next scene would have Sherry starring in her own Broadway play. Real life doesn't work that way. "A Little Night Music" closed in August 1974 after a nine-month run, and Sherry found herself taking small jobs here and there: doing voiceover dubbing for a forgettable Columbia Pictures film called "Emmanuel", playing in a short-lived off-Broadway play called "Parto" for just $150, even performing in a television commercial for Ajax Cold Power detergent. That first TV role paid her precisely $105.99.

"Any time she got a part, she was glad to get it," says brother Bill. "From her perspective, anything she did helped her grow in acting."

She played carhop Darleen in a curious Broadway production called "Truckload" - a musical based on truckers and truckstops (this was the 1970s, remember, when convoys and CB radios were all the rage), but the play folded almost immediately. She then landed the role of June Ann in the Burt Reynolds movie "W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings", and is shown kissing Reynolds in the back seat of a car during a drive-in movie.

"I think her face is on the screen for only about ten seconds," says Bill Mathis. "She didn't pursue that; they pursued her. She went down to Nashville [to film it] but she"

Edited September 10, 2014 by DRW50

[DRW50]

This comes after the last page.

Scimitar" in 1979. "Then it grew into a great big friendship, and finally it grew some more."

After the tour, Sherry got the biggest break in her life. She landed the lead role of the rich and beautiful Liza Sentell in "Search For Tomorrow", the longest-running soap opera in television history. Lanning remembers that she earned the part when the nature of soaps was drastically changing.

"When Sherry started, that as the beginning of the studios taking it, as you might say, out of the kitchen," says Lanning. "They used to have the 'core family' that you might see for 20 years. And maybe the daughter was having trouble with her new husband, so the whole family would sit around the kitchen table and discuss it. And that would be the whole episode."

In the late 1970s, the soaps became more exciting, and plotlines on "Search" included kidnappings, shootings, boat explosions, ocean cruises - even journeys to China. "They started to cost more money, and they started to become more important," says Lanning.

Plus, Sherry - the fourth actor to play Liza since "Search For Tomorrow" began in 1951 - brought a new element to the role. "The producers noticed she could sing, so they introduced a story line about her singing career," says Lanning. One episode even featured Sherry performing alongside the "Velvet Fog" himself, Mel Torme. It was good thinking; ratings for the show soared.

Lanning got a part on the show, too, playing the New Orleans villain, Nick D'Antoni. He and Sherry very quickly became full-blown stars, the king and queen of daytime dramas, appearing on talk shows and in all sorts of entertainment publications. (A typical story: "My Boyfriend Treats Me Like a Real Lady" in a 1979 issue of "Daytime TV" magazine.

On June 30, 1979, Sherry and Lanning took two weeks off from their hectic schedule, flew to Memphis to be married at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, then rushed back to New York. They lived in an apartment just one block from Central Park, and later bought a penthouse a block west of Broadway.

Fans often couldn't separate the actors from the roles they played. "Liza was like Cinderella," says Lanning. "Because she comes to town and meets the richest guy there, Travis Sentell [played on "Search" by actor Rod Arrants]. And I'm the guy hired to keep them away from each other, to add danger to the situation. So when we would go out in public, she would get cheers and I would get sneers."

In a 1979 interview, Sherry told a reporter, "You know, if you're in a play or prime-time series and people stop you for an autograph, they call you by your real name. But if you're in a soap, they call you by your character's name. You're in their homes every day, and that's how they think of you."

Despite her growing celebrity status, friends say Sherry never let it get to her head. "We could be eating lunch somewhere and fans would come up to her and ask for her autograph," says Kenworthy. "She was always recognized by a lot of people. But she made a point of staying in contact with those in her life who were really important to her."

Even so, Sherry definitely had star power. Former teacher Martha Wallace remembers when she and friends went to visit Sherry in New York. "We were sitting at a table, and all of a sudden this vision of loveliness stepped off the elevator," says Wallace. "She had a stunning white chiffon dress with a white shawl, and she looked like a movie star. All the men in the place turned to look."

Lanning was on "Search For Tomorrow" just one year before his character was killed off. ("They had to kill me," he explains. "I was just too bad.") He then went on to star as billionaire oilman Justin Marshall in the soap opera "Texas".

Both husband and wife now had great roles, but it was hard work.

"You get up when it's still dark, and they pick you up in a car so you won't be late," says Lanning. "You're in makeup by 7 a.m., and you're rehearsing by 7:30. And you're always carrying your script with you, because some days you might get 30 pages of lines to memorize."

Brother Bill Mathis moved to New York for several months around this time and stayed with them, getting a glimpse of the not-so-glamorous life of actors. "Sherry was studying every night," he says. "We might go out to dinner or something, and by 7 o'clock she would go into her bedroom, shut the door and go over the lines for the next day."

Plus, there were publicity stunts dreamed up by the studio's PR departments, such as singing in various shopping malls in New Jersey or flying overnight to Florence, South Carolina, for a March of Dimes telethon. In July 1978, she guest-starred in an episode of "Switch", the detective series featuring Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert. And in the summer of 1980, during "Search"'s off season, she traveled to Dallas to perform in a two-week production of "Brigadoon".

The November 1980 issue of the "Saturday Evening Post" featured Sherry in an article on TV's "Sexy Soaps". In 1982, she was profiled in a "TV Guide" story called "It's Fine With Sherry". But things WEREN'T fine. That same month, in a cover story in "Happenings", an entertainment publication, Sherry expressed a desire to try something new.

"If I can manage to find a way to do other things and continue on 'Search' for a little while, that might be a possible solution," she said. "I'm just now beginning to discuss this with the show - and myself."

And she told a "Press-Scimitar" writer, "The longer I'm away from the stage, the more I miss it. I'm craving to get back in front of an audience."

In 1985, after seven years of playing Liza Sentell, Sherry left "Search For Tomorrow". She told reporters, "It will give me a chance to take a career breather. I'm physically exhausted, and I want to spend some time with Jerry as a housewife before deciding what I want to do next as an entertainer."

Act Four: Coming Home

The rich tapestry of Sherry Mathis' life began to unravel. On April 18, 1986, her beloved father, Milburn, died.

"Sherry depended on her father," says her sister-in-law, Carol Mathis. "Not that she wanted him to tell her what to do, but she ran stuff by him, and she would talk it out with him. And right at the time when she was leaving the soap opera and searching for whatever it is she wanted to do, he was not there for her."

Sherry developed a strong interest in psychology based on the theories of Carl Jung, reading all the books she could on the subject, and even traveling to Zurich, Switzerland, to study at the Jung Institute there. She wasn't entirely finished with show business, though. In March 1987, she and Lanning flew to Palm Beach, Florida, to join in a special 100th birthday tribute to George Abbott, singing show tunes from some of the producer's many Broadway hits before an audience of more than a thousand of Abbott's friends.

But Sherry never appeared on stage after that. She dabbled with painting, jewelry design, and other hobbies. At one point in 1987, she approached patent attorneys about marketing a device she had invented. Called a "Lite-Mother", it was a small pyramid covered in silk, with colored lights mounted in the base. You inserted a cassette tape, and lights flashed across the surface of the fabric. After spending money on patent searches, she stopped pursuing this venture.

Around this time, she took classes at Columbia and had the credits transferred to Memphis State, so she could graduate in 1988 with her friend Sherrie Kenworthy.

But her life in New York was "beginning to get rocky," according to brother Bill, and she decided to return to Memphis in 1991, moving back into the family home on Vinton with her mother. She and Lanning were divorced in 1992, after 13 years of marriage.

"By that point, I think she had lost her focus and wasn't sure what she wanted to do," says Kenworthy. "He wanted to stay in New York and act, and she wanted to come home."

She would not live here long. In 1993, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Sherry had finally met a challenge that her strength, talent, brains and beauty could not beat. Independent to the end, even in her last days, she didn't want people to know how sick she was.

Her friend Anita Grayson Daily was living in Colorado and called her. "Sherry said, 'Sweetie, I'm really sick' but she never told me she had cancer. She said, 'I'm going to be fine, I'm okay.'"

Hal Morse knew otherwise. "Who knows why we do things? I made it a mission to go by two or three times a week, and we talked and renewed our friendship," he says. "She was a special person in my life, and I wanted to be there for her."

Sherry Mathis died in Methodist Hospital on January 23, 1994. At the funeral service held at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, brothers Charles and Bill delivered loving eulogies about their sister. She was laid to rest that afternoon on a hill at Forest Hill Cemetery, close by her father. Among the pallbearers was her lifelong friend, Hal Morse.

"She did so much in the short time she was alive," says Daily. "She was a dear, dear friend, and I would love to have her in my life right now."

"What little time she had, she used it well, didn't she?" says Sherrie Kenworthy. "She made quite an impact in those 44 years, on a lot of people, in a lot of ways."

CURTAIN

Edited September 10, 2014 by DRW50

[DRW50]

The screencap is for MissLlanviewPA.

This is Louan Gideon material.

[Khan]

I'm sure Mary Stuart wasn't surprised either. I'm just glad Jo got her house back before the show was done.

[Vee]

Did she? I didn't notice.

[amybrickwallace]

I want to thank Carl for posting the Sherry article, as well as the Marcia McCabe screen capture and my letter and autographed index card from Louan Gideon. I know that many people on this board are fans of Sherry, so I figured the timing was perfect for the article to be posted.

Then I realized I had forgotten to send Carl the first page of the article!!! I just emailed it to him, so I'm sure he'll have it posted here in short order.

Watching these recently posted episodes, I find myself skipping over much of the Cagney/Suzi/Warren/Justine/Brett melodrama, as well as the Chase/Adair scenes (though I have enjoyed the father/son scenes with Lloyd and Chase). But I am loving the Liza/Kentucky "partnership", and seeing Jo, Stu, Sunny and Stephanie.

Speaking of which, you'll notice in the closing credits that one of the writers at this time was Roger Crews, who was (and still is) the real-life husband of Louise Shaffer. They've been going strong since 1980. :-D

[robbwolff]

Jo didn't get her house back. She still had a place at Liberty House. The house seen in the final episodes was the McCleary home.

And I don't think Jo had a house. In the episodes that are popping up on YouTube, she seems to have an apartment. After that, she moved into the Caldwell House.

[Khan]

You mean she was standing in front of the McCleary house in the show's final moments? But I thought her place was one of the few that had survived the flood?

[MissLlanviewPA]

Thank you Carl and Amy!

[safe]

Yes, thanks to Carl and Amy for sharing this with us!

[amybrickwallace]

You're all welcome! I thought that it would be a nice way to pay tribute to our final two Lizas. I was FB friends with Louan and she was an absolute sweetheart. She played Mrs. Belding on Saved By the Bell (who went into labor and gave birth in a stalled elevator during an earthquake - how very soapy) and the stepmother of Jerry's girlfriend (played by a pre-Gilmore Girls Lauren Graham) on Seinfeld, who put him on her speed dial. "Hello, Jerome." LOL

I thought it was a nice touch that Jerry Lanning was interviewed for the article about Sherry. Even though their marriage didn't last, it appears their love and mutual respect did.