As The World Turns Discussion Thread

[DRW50]

Mary is in the 1978 episode Oakdalian posted. She's having dinner with Bob here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy4DMgVhJyw

She is also in the 1988 Mac/Nancy wedding episode Oakdalian uploaded - I think she's just in one or two scenes.

[soapfave06]

Thanks! I didn't realize she came back in 1988 either.

[DRW50]

Neither did I (or Penny or Don). I'm glad the show kept trying to bring them back. That was just dropped by the show's last decade, and Penny no longer even existed.

[Mitch]

LOL, oddly enough, he was one of the soap hunks I actually thought was hot, usually I am not so much when they bring someone on and I know they are supposed to be a "hunk." But Walters brought a kind of quiet intensity to it. Wanst a great actor but there was something about him that made him a bit more then the typical boring hunk.

On the other hand that Mike Kasnoff never did anything for me. I always felt he was too organge and his hair was weird. Last year I turned on Days of Our Lives and he was on it, and wouldnt you know, he was even MORE orange and had exactley the same hair. Dude, let the 80s go!

[Soapsuds]

I agree Mitch with you about Walters...and LOL about Shawn Christian...so true.....lol

[DRW50]

Neither of them did a lot for me. I tended to prefer the guys who were by the mid-90's seen as unacceptable, like Greg Watkins, or even Scott DeFrietas.

[DRW50]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH1UBtOqkYo&feature=channel&list=UL

I'm glad Kathryn Hays stopped coloring her hair after a while.

Edited June 16, 2012 by CarlD2

[Khan]

I'm with Mitch and Soapsuds in the Alexander Walters camp. Sorry, Carl, but dude was a MAJOR hunk.

[danfling]

I have confused Mary and Sandra too over the years.

[Quent]

Walters was so bland he faded into the woodwork. A hunk who was brought in for no other reason than to be a hunk. Maybe that's why they made the Taylor/Batten switch. Could anyone really believe that ART's Connor would be content with this airhead Kasnoff?

[DRW50]

This article from a February 1989 Digest has a Valerie photo I'd never seen before.

[DRW50]

July 1958 TV Radio Mirror

[P.J.]

LOL---I remember that article. I probably still have it somewhere.

Geez, I miss Ben H. The anniversary of his death is right around the corner.

[DRW50]

of this woman. And the music is always there, a constant challenge and a constant pleasure in her personal life. In fact, Helen's husband, theatrical producer Robert Willey, has bought the best-selling Joy Chute novel "Greenwillow," and is planning it for a Broadway musical!

Speaking of Nancy Hughes, Helen says: "This is a wonderfully kind and loving woman who has a terrible fear of any changes in her life. She clings to family, I approve of that. But Nancy makes the mistake of tying them all together in one tight little package. No one is an individual - not her husband, not her children, not even herself. My own family background would not have given me an understanding of a woman of this type, but New York I met women like her. Very human, very warm, but finding it difficult to free those they love."

As a little girl, growing up in Lubbock, Helen's world was a comfortable and happy one, bounded by music. To such a degree that, after her senior music recital in high school - a recital that was a quadruple-threat performance as vocalist, pianist, organist and violinist - she vowed that she had had all the music she could take for a while.

She also firmly announced that she had her own ideas about college. Her parents had gone to Monmouth, in Illinois; her sister was there. Monmouth had been her mother's home town. Helen said she wanted something different. And, very definitely, she had no intention of majoring in music, on in speech. No one pressured her. It just happened that she ended up with a degree in music and in speech - and from Monmouth.

"There is usually one person who comes into your life at a crucial time," Helen explains, "someone outside the family circle who opens your eyes to the things the family has been trying to instill, to things your former teachers have tried to tell you. In my case, the person was my piano teacher at Monmouth, Edna Browning Riggs. She built further on what Margaret Huff, my first music teacher, had already given me in the way of knowledge and appreciation. She opened the world of art in all its forms to me. Monmouth meant a great deal to me in many ways, but particularly because of Miss Riggs."

In New York, Helen studied, was a church soloist, finally broke into show business in a deceptively easy way. She was just past twenty, a pretty and graceful five-foot-five, with light brown hair and blue eyes. Though friends of her sister Ruth's husband, Malcolm Laing, she auditioned for a job with the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company.

"I sang in the chorus and had some minor roles," she recalls. "I was thrilled. It was a beginning. The difficult times came later, when I had to make rounds, to open doors and ask to see the people who had jobs to give." Gradually, after persistence and struggle, jobs began to come, alternating between singing and straight acting parts. She was chosen for a role in the Hammerstein-Romberg musical, "Sunny River." Twice she played in "Oklahoma!" on Broadway, leaving it between times to go on tour with a Theater Guild company doing Shakespeare. She sang in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. She did some of the Greek tragedies. She played off-Broadway, as well as on.

It was on one of her job-hunting tours that Helen first met Bob, a good-looking six-footer, blond, with brown eyes. He had been an actor from the time he was a Pasadena Playhouse scholarship in his middle teens. But, after World War II service, he had come back determined to get into production. He was then connected with a theatrical office as an assistant producer, on his way up to a management job and ap lace as full producer.

"I went to Bob's office about a part," says Helen, "but then another one came along and I turned his down. Now I'm sorry, because it was the only chance I would have had to work in a play with him. Nothing he has been associated with since has had a part for me.

"I met him frequently after that and sometimes had coffee with him. He asked for dates, but I always turned him down. Once i was very angry, because I had an appointment to see the producer, Guthrie McClintock, about a job - and Bob breezed into Mr. McClintock's waiting room to see him, without an appointment and got in first. I couldn't wait and had to go back another day."

Some time later, she found herself in Bob's office, about another job, and once more he asked her for a date. "You might just as well start going out with me," he said. "Because I am going to marry you some day."

She didn't take this very seriously. Just as she had told herself she wouldn't go to Monmouth and she wouldn't be a music or speech major, now she told herself that never would she marry this man. But she did. "Suddenly, my eyes must have been opened to the kind of person he really is. I started to accept his invitations. Two years later, we were married."

The year was 1954. The wedding was set for August. In June, Helen went out to visit her parents at their summer cottage in Cuchara, Colorado, a remote camping community. Bob telephoned one day to say he was coming out. She thought that was wonderful. "I mean, coming out to marry you, now," he went on.

Her wedding dress was bought, but it was in her apartment in New York. With her at the camp were such items as blue jeans and shorts and blouses - not one dress-up costume. From the single telephone in the camp, she gave Bob long-distance details about what to bring along with him. The wedding outfit. Underwear, hosier. Dresses and hats for the honeymoon. Fortunately, her roommate did the actual sorting out and packing.

The wedding date was June 21. The minister, an old friend, came up from New Mexico to perform the ceremony. Some of the relatives could come on short notice. Her sister Ruth wouldn't have missed the event. Colorado law demands that both blood tests be given by the same doctor at the same time, so Bob was hustled from the plane to a doctor's office. It was all very fast, but it all went smoothly.

In New York, until the spring of 1957, the Willeys lived in an apartment. Now they have a house just outside the city, in an attractive village setting. An old three-bedroom stone house, with walls as thick as a fort. With wide window sills for many plants. With an elegant Georgian rose-brick fireplace in the living room. The fireplace, Helen's piano and the record player were the essentials around which the room is now being developed into just what they want it to be.

"The house was furnished when we bought it," Helen explains. "It has a mixture now of the things that were in it, the things we brought from the apartment, the things we have been slowly adding. So far, the living room have a new divan and new curtains. We waited to add a lamp until we found the right one, using a bedroom lamp in the meantime."

Bob's den has a built-in desk, much too big for any ordinary purpose, but great for a man who collects stamps and likes to spread them out, album after album. He got a pleasant surprise when he found that his next-door neighbor, Budd Simon, is as rabid a philatelist as he is. "Imagine finding you have moved next to the most charming people, Budd and Bunny Simon and their two children, and also finding that the husband has the same mad hobby as yours!"

The wives "share-crop" together. The Simons had extra space for a vegetable garden. The Willeys didn't want to plow up any of their lawn. But Helen wanted to grow some of their own edibles. She started the garden, it rapidly became a cooperative affair with both families tending it and sharing in the produce. "Now nobody has to eat everything that comes up. My frugal soul wouldn't have let any of it be wasted. So there are two families to eat the tomatoes (best I ever tasted), the beans (not like any ever bought in a store), the asparagus. And two of us to put up what we can't eat."

Helen is the cook, except on occasion, Bob thinks he had enough of cooking in his bachelor-apartment days. He is the handyman. "He won't call in an expert unless something gets really out of hand. Sometimes I wish he would," Helen comments.

Since Helen went into television, she has worked less and less with music. There have been dramatic parts in the night-time shows - on Studio One, Suspense, and the Robert Montgomery dramas before they went off the air. She played Marge, daughter of Charles Ruggles and mother of Glenn Walken, in The World of Mr. Sweeney, until Mr. Ruggles decided to take the show to the West Coast. Helen, of course, wanted to stay in the East, where Bob's work is.

It was just about then that As the World Turns was being planned. The director knew Helen's work. She auditioned, won the part of Nancy and went on the air when the show started on April 1, 1956. She's never missed a day, except when her father died last November and she went home briefly to Texas, where her mother still lives.

Except on the days when she isn't in the script, Helen is on the set at 7:30 in the morning. Rehearsals continue until broadcast time, there's a lunch break, then more rehearsals for next day's show. Whoever gets to the parking lot where Bob and Helen leave the car waits for the other, to drive out of the country together.

Helen loves her job as as Nancy Hughes. But, like every woman who is wife as well as actress, she thinks of Bob's work as the more important, "Greenwillow" is his first completely independent production and she is interested in every facet of it.

She remembers that, during her first months in New York, she asked her father if he had ever questioned whether he would finally become a doctor. "There were times," he wrote back, "when it seemed a very long road. But I always knew that, like my father before me, I could be a good carpenter - and happy doing it - if I couldn't be a doctor."

For Helen now, the music in her life is not the career. She's a dramatic actress. Happy doing it. Knowing that nothing she has ever done will be wasted. Certainly not, with all the bright years stretching on ahead.

[DRW50]

I didn't realize that. I had stopped watching ATWT by the time he died and I was so shocked and hurt - I'm not sure any soap actor's death has ever affected me so much. I couldn't watch the memorial. I finally did a few years later, on Youtube. It was OK, I guess, although someone seemed so fixated on Hal having a bunch of kids (yet didn't bother to have several of them on the show).