As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

September 1956 TV Radio Mirror

[DRW50]

and carried a live turkey up the steps of City Hall in New York...Yet, when Orson Welles first went to Hollywood and needed a "real lady" to play his wife in "Citizen Kane," he sent for this same Ruth Warrick - the ex-Jubilesta queen....and when the producers needed someone who wasn't a "lady," but down-to-earth enough to play the "other woman" in As the World Turns, the new CBS-T daytime drama - they, too, sent for Ruth Warrick.

But you've driven along the Hudson River as far as Sing Sing Prison...time to turn off the road for Ruth's place. There it is - the Gate House, as charming a retreat as you've ever seen, complete with grounds and flowers, grass and trees, and a dog who jumps all over you. There's even a view of the Hudson flowing self-consciously by. And then...out comes a woman so beautiful that you wonder what's wrong with television. Why don't they catch the delicate coloring, the soft red hair, the womanly radiance of her?

"And how do you do, Miss Jubilesta?" you gulp.

As she introduces you to the family, however, her grace as a hostess comes into play. This, you recognize, is the "real lady" of "Citizen Kane." Her husband, Bob McNamara, seems like the happiest Irishman you've ever met. Then you shake hands with Jon, her thirteen-year-old son. You try not to frighten Timothy, the baby.

"Such a cutie pie!" Ruth cries, referring to the baby. Then, noticing the cap on her fourteen-year-old daughter's head, she explains: "Karen's been wearing her hair under a sailor's cap ever since she saw Mary Martin in 'South Pacific.'"

It's such a happy family scene, you suspect the real Ruth Warrick will turn out to be Mrs. Bob McNamara - in her favorite role as wife-and-mother. But then she ushers you into a huge studio living room, filled with antiques and fine old furniture...and, sitting before a ten-foot fireplace for a private chat, you're in for the surprise of your life. For of all things, Ruth Warrick turns out to be a philosopher. She's a real student - of life, as well as books - and much too intelligent, much too busy, to have time for off-stage pretense. She's a wife, a mother, an actress, but she's also a thinking human being. The real Ruth Warrick is like geometry: The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts.

When she speaks of her acting, she refers to it as "communication." And she is much more concerned about communication in life than she is about communication on the stage. "The greatest thing in human existence is communication," Ruth claims, "and all unhappiness is the inability to communicate."

She isn't referring to the means of communication. We may have the telephone, the cable, the singing telegram and the loud speaker, but there must still be someone to send the message - and someone else to receive it. All our technological progress cannot substitute for the art, the skill, "the feel," it takes to really project to another human being or to really hear with your heart that someone else is trying to say to you.

Ruth was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, the daughter of Frederick Roswell Warrick, Jr., and Annie Laurie Scott. Ruth laughs, "You think that's something? Wait till you hear my aunt's name. Now hold your hat!" And then she tells you: Bonnie. "I was a big girl," Ruth recalls, "before I knew there might be anything strange about their names."

If their names were Scotch, so was their character, and Ruth speaks proudly of her Scotch ancestry: "Some of their opinions may seem narrow-minded today. But, in their actions, they always came through with honor and integrity. They had courage, the unostentatious kind. And, though it made them seem a bit reserved at times, they had humility and pride - both in the same breath." It was because of them, Ruth admits, that "every time I found myself in a spot ready to throw in the cards. I'd think of them - and then I couldn't."

A good inheritance for an actress...except, of course, that the Scott sisters would never approve of any of any "well-brought-up lady" being an actress. "They were a little on the Southern side," Ruth says, "my mother especially. It was all right to sing, however. That was a ladylike art." Mrs. Warrick was quite a singer herself. In fact, she had once been asked to sing on the famed Chautauqua Circuit. "Naturally, she turned it down. It was something ladies just didn't do - on the stage...Even today when she learned that her granddaughter loved music, she said: 'How nice for Karen to have music for a hobby.' Hobby??" Ruth repeats. "It's my daughter's whole life!"

In Ruth's own case, the "hobby" started at five, when her father took her to see "Blossom Time." It was love at first sight. She knew then she had to be either a great actress or a great singer. It didn't matter which, just so she could stand up there on the stage - and it wasn't till later that she learned the verb she wanted.

The verb she wanted was "communicate." It meant to share with thousands of people, in a hushed auditorium, the feelings you could no longer contain within you. Hushed auditoriums, however, are not always available to young girls in St. Joseph, Missouri. But Ruth had to express herself...so, until the day she could get to New York, she decided she would be a great writer. She majored in English, won prizes for a number of essays and short stories, and directed several theatrical sketches at school.

One of those sketches was about Greta Garbo, and Ruth had written it herself. She had chosen as her idol a supreme artist of communication...and, naturally there was no girl in Ruth's school who could impersonate the great star to the director's satisfaction. It ended up with Ruth having to play Garbo herself.

That did it! Communicating with a sheet of blank white paper in the typewriter was nothing compared to to communicating with a live audience. In spite of her mother's objections, she knew she just had to go on the stage. "My father was all for it," Ruth recalls. "He loved the theater. Every time he went to New York on business, he used to send me the music from the latest shows, and clippings about my favorite stars."

Although she was determined to go on the stage, she still hasn't made up her mind whether to be a singer or an actress. "Today," Ruth explains, "they expect you to be both. In those days, however, you had to be one for the other."

During her senior year in high school, the family moved to Kansas City, where Ruth became active with the Center Theater, a local repertory group. The following year, at the University of Kansas City, she played leads in a number of school productions. She also continued with her singing. She appeared in college productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as on the local radio station.

Then, one day, she just made up her mind. She decided to be an actress rather than a singer. "I knew my voice wasn't great enough," Ruth admits. Besides, she had discovered an exciting new way to make her acting more expressive - more communicative.

Today, thanks to the popularity of such Actors' Studio graduates as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Eva Marie Saint, there is a lot of talk about "The Method." (The actor prepares for his role, not only by studying the script, but by figuring out the character's life before the curtain goes up. Then, when he is on stage, he can be that person, living the part, rather than acting it. Students at the Actors' Studio are asked to do exercises: Eva Marie Saint had to be a weeping willow tree. Marlon Brando had to live the part of a wax statue melting in the sun.)

But, long before Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg had popularized "The Method," Ruth had devised one of her own. "The important thing about acting," she says, "isn't so much knowing how to read a line as knowing who the character is. That's why I started using what I knew as a writer to help my performances on the stage. I would write out the complete story of the character I was to play...background, history, habits - everything."

Reminded that this is like "The Method," she says: "I worked it out all by myself. Besides," she laughs, "I agree with Orson Welles. He never said you had to make like a tea kettle in order to make like a person." But she might never have met Orson Welles...if Fate hadn't taken a hand in her affairs. Kansas City decided to have a "Jubilesta" - a fall festival to attract visitors to its city.

"A man I had worked with at the Center Theater," Ruth recalls, "happened to be directing the Jubilesta. He called me up and asked me to come down. He thought I could be Miss Jubilesta. I said no. I could just see my family if I ever tried out to be a beauty queen. 'But it's not that,' my friend insisted. It's not a gag. It's a job. Thirty-five dollars a week, and all the clothes you can wear."

Ruth was chosen Miss Jubilesta, and toured the Midwest, inviting people to the Jubilesta and recording interviews which were later broadcast on the radio station in Kansas City. But she ended up where she wanted to be - in New York City...with "all the clothes she could wear," a return-trip ticket she was determined not to use, and thirty-five dollars she had saved from her job. The train ticket was part of her prize as Miss Jubilesta. It was also the one thing which made her family change their attitude about acting. They couldn't very well stop her from going to New York when she had a ticket.

Ruth's one regret was leaving the University of Kansas City...but the president, a friend of the family, told her: "Ruth, if you were like the majority of my students, I would hesitate and try to dissuade you from leaving. I H have a feeling, however, that you are one of those persons who wont't stop their education just because they're leaving school." She hasn't. To this day, she confesses to "running a temperature just walking through the door of a library. I am transported, any time I find a new subject - a new field to explore." And Ruth, with her goal of being a well-rounded person, has explored most of them.

But, before she was finished with her job for Kansas City, she had one last assignment as Miss Jubilesta. She had to walk up the steps of New York's City Hall carrying "a live and kicking thirty-five-pound turkey" and present it to Mayor LaGuardia. "It was the hardest job I ever did," says Ruth.

In retrospect, however, it seemed easy compared with the job of breaking into radio. "You just stand in the halls," she recalls, "and you wait. It's the test of fire. You hear the statistics. They tell you you haven't a chance. It only makes you more determined. It isn't because you think you're better than the others, it's because you're you. And so, you keep standing in the halls." (This was one of the times when Ruth was tempted to "throw in the cards." But Scotch determination kept her fro m returning home.)

"And then, one day," Ruth continues, "someone gives you two lines to do - maybe because he thinks you're attractive. You do the two lines. You don't goof. And it goes on from there. You become a member of the union. And you find that, once someone uses you, you've passed the test. They all start using you."

Ruth appeared in network radio on Joyce Jordan and Grand Central Station, then moved on to Aunt Jenny for her first real success. She acted in a Broadway play that ran two nights...and now the scene changes to Hollywood, where Orson Welles - in most ungentlemanly fashion - kept insisting he couldn't find any "real ladies." ("That's where my mother comes in," Ruth says, thanking her for the training.) Ruth was sent for, and went to Hollywood to test for the role of the wife in "Citizen Kane."

"It was a wonderful break," she recalls, "and I was terribly nervous. But you should have seen Orson! He had been on the lot two years without making a single picture. This was his first day of shooting, so all the big brass came down to watch on the sidelines. I was trying so hard to keep him from being nervous that I forgot about myself and settled down." As it turned out, she settled down with the coveted role and a seven-year contract at RKO. During the next ten years, she appeared in more than thirty motion pictures.

In 1952, Ruth returned to New York to do a play, but it closed in Philadelphia. Then she turned to live television, which excited her. She finds it much closer to the stage than to motion pictures. And as for communication - television is the great est opportunity in the history of the world!

She starred in Robert Montgomery Presents, Studio One, Lux Theater. And then she took over the role of Janet in the popular daytime drama, The Guiding Light. She had had recognition as a motion-picture star, but never anything like this! When she left the show, strangers stopped her in the street to scold her: What did she mean, leaving The guiding Light?

All she meant was...she was having a baby. For a woman, it is the ultimate communication with life. She never meant to return to acting again...

Ruth can tell you exactly how she met Bob McNamara, a television executive: "A girl friend of mine, whose husband works in the same company as Bob, used to use him as a bachelor to 'fill in' at her dinner parties." Ruth pauses, and you gather that she was asked to one of those dinner parties. "She was quite chagrined when I took him off her list."

She must also have been surprised, for no two persons could be more unlike. Ruth has a strong sense of duty, so that her Scotch conscience must be a battleground of conflicting loyalties - to husband, to children, to self, to career. Bob, on the other hand, prides himself on being "the real ham in the family." He is also one of the few living soft-shoe dancers left, and likes to demonstrate this at parties. In fact, he likes nothing better than a party, and the McNamara's throw one frequently. (Particularly on St. Patrick's Day. That's the big night at Bob's house, not New Year's Eve).

A friend, thinking of Dale Carnegie's popular book, once suggested that there ought to be a special book for Bob called "How TO Stop Living and Start Worrying." But the nurse who came from the hospital with Ruth, to help with the baby, paid Bob a much kinder tribute. All the time that she lived in the house, it never occurred to her that Karen and Jon - the two older children - are not Bob McNamara's own. She never knew that they were Ruth's children by her former marriage to Eric Rolf.

Ruth herself finds - and she passes it along to other girls: "A man who can laugh and have fun makes a much better husband than the serious type. He doesn't look for his lighter moments elsewhere. He has his fun right at home."

And they do have fun. The most prominent spot in the living room is taken up by a set of rums, for Bob has organized McNamara's Band - which is ready to play your favorite request number at any time of night or day, even if you don't request it. Bob plays the drums, Karen the clarinet, Jon the trombone, and Ruth a bad but "enthusiastic" piano. There's trouble brewing, though. Baby Tim not only inherits his father's "ham" - he wants to take over the playing of the drums.

He was fifteen months old when Ruth received the offer to play the role of Edith Hughes in As the World Turns. It seems so simple. The baby was old enough to spare her a few times a week. And yet, Ruth admits, she went through agonies of indecision, before she finally took the role. "I make myself suffer. No one else fights me. I keep asking myself: 'Do I have a right to be an actress?' And then I get sick. It was the doctor who advised me to go back to work. 'You're no good to your family this way,' he pointed out." And Bob, who's quite a communicator in his own right, simply said to her: "Hey, why don't you relax?"

But she had never relaxed in her life. Here she was, still a young woman, and she wan't doing anything with her life. She remembered her grandfather - on the Scotch side. He went bankrupt at sixty-three, but he started up again. What's more, he ran a successful business until he was eighty-three.

That was when Ruth got out of bed, grabbed the phone, and said: "I'll take the part." She realized, "I'm no good as a mother, unless I'm a whole person."

For those who must communicate, there's no stopping place. For those who are blessed with searching minds and feeling hearts, life is always a continual striving rather than a permanent achievement. That's Ruth Warrick McNamara's strength! Sh e has not settled for being any one of her parts but for being all of them. Today, she is truly a complete person.

What's more, if you want to know what "communication" really means, watch her on As The World Turns. Story-wise, she must know that Edith Hughes is neither heroine nor saint. But Ruth doesn't play her as a villainess, either. Ruth plays her like a human being...a complete human being.

[soapfan770]

Thanks for sharing/finding those clips from the 1992-1995 period. Even though Marland had passed away in the middle of all this, I enjoyed 1993-1995 so much. I loved the Damien/Lily/Holden triangle, Janice's descent and her relationship to Andy, Julie's wicked children coming to town even though I hated Pete, Hans the terrorist and Lily's kidnapping, Barbara faking her stalking then being stalked for real, Evan and Barbara, Cal and Connor, Linc's murder mystery, Royce's descent etc. Not to mention I believe ratings were still quite good throughout 1994 unlike GL which took quite a tumble that year mainly due it becoming progressively worse.

Edited September 9, 2011 by soapfan770

[DRW50]

Looking back, there was a fair amount to enjoy in 1994, and I was just annoyed/spoiled...I didn't know how much worse the show could get as I had only seen the best (for me anyway) as I'd only started watching in about 1990 or 1991. I was annoyed at Lyla and Iva leaving, by what they'd done to Shannon, by the unbelievably boring Rosanna and Rosanna/Mike, by Holden chasing after dull Lily while he neglected the child he'd yanked away from Iva. At the time the stories I enjoyed most were Julie and Pete, Barbara stalking herself, and Janice's schemes. They were all very interesting stories yet also believable.

[ZoeTate]

What about Alma Miller?? I Loved the dithery Ethel Remy and her attempts to 'hook up' with Grandpa Hughes!

[DRW50]

That sounds like a much more interesting character than I had expected. I wish I could see her

[soapfan770]

I don't think I didn't paid attention enough to the Holden/Iva custody stuff to care LOL although I thought it was odd Aaron bounced to everyone. I've always been a Lily fan and didn't find her dull until the late '90s or so with her umpteenth kidnapping. Looking back they really needed to give her more of an edge I've always been fascinated by Connor chastising Lily so much it always put her on the defensive.

Mike and Rosanna were indeed boring and it was a cliched story with Alexander's interference. Not to mention all those cheesy names they gave to cars made by Cabot Motors in an attempt to make them sound like real car brands ie Cabot Mountaineer.

[DRW50]

Oh I wish I hadn't paid attention. But I was a big Iva fan - I have known so many people like her (that doesn't say very much about me...) and I just hated that she loved Aaron and she lost Aaron out of spite. It would have been one thing if Holden had been shown spending a lot of time with Aaron, and adjusting, but instead he just kept dumping this child off on Emma until she said no more.

I used to start fast forwarding every time I heard "a part of each other." That was my trigger word.

I remember being interested in Dawn's story too, although it seemed like she went from making a pass at Tom to dying pretty quickly. Or did she go away and then they found her as she was dying. I can't remember.

Some stuff from that period, like Dani's arrival, I don't remember at all.

[DRW50]

[DRW50]

[soapfan770]

What did everyone think of Rose D'Angelo? How did you like Byrne as Rose? The silly notion of forgetting you gave birth to a child aside, I did like her at least until she became too grating/annoying there in '03. I was really satisfied with the murder mystery surrounding her death. I'm sorry McCouch's Dusty and Lily never actually went all the way because I thought the two shared great chemistry. More interesting than what Holden and Lily had become by the early 2000s. I was for sure after Rose's death a hook-up was inevitable.

[P.J.]

Hated Rose. For probably the first three months, it worked as a gimmick, gave Byrne the opportunity to "stretch". It went downhill fast the more Rose intergrated with Oakdale, and seemed to completely forget she was a con artist and started treating her like a Joisey PrincessLily. I hate that Scott Hoylrod was tied to her---I'm sorry---Byrne looks a good fifteen years older than him. I don't think he ever truly got a fair shot at a storyline of his own after that.

[Khan]

I didn't. I would've been much happier to have Rose outed as someone who underwent surgery to look like Lily in order to steal her fortune and life.

[Y&RWorldTurner]

Looking back, I have to say that Martha Byrne grates the hell out of me as an actress (as do Lily and Rose as characters). And no, I am not a Noelle Beck fan.

[rlj]

Oh I liked Rose in the beginning but as someone already stated she became annoying as hell, she shouldntve lasted that long and took up all that airtime and I def thought she had no chemistry with SH's Paul!