OLTL's Ellen Holly's Open Letter to Fans and Historians

[SFK]

See, how quickly did Carla's "decline", if you will, begin? Kendall said that she helped carry the show throughout the seventies while I always got the impression that her first storyline was indeed her first and last great one. I absolutely hate that I'll never be able to judge this for myself.

[Khan]

Honestly...? I wouldn't have minded learning Victor Lord himself was half-Black. That's one secret of his that could've been interesting.

That saddens me, too, if only because I think she gave OLTL's veterans too little credit. Of course, we don't know what any of them are like behind-the-scenes, but I doubt they'd rub their large paychecks in her face. In fact, I wouldn't have been surprised if Linda Gottlieb and Michael Malone had seen her work and said to themselves, "Gosh, we have to keep her on this show and give her something good to do!" (Say what you will about LG, but I do think she tried hard to bring diversity and innovation back to OLTL.)

[EricMontreal22]

That article's interesting--he says that soaps wouldn'tdare a story like that when it came out--1993 but wasn't that the year Taylor on AMC went disguised as a greek heiress?

Ha and I read this just after my post.

[Vee]

The uncanny thing about Holly is that if you go back and watch the material available of her as Carla in the 80s, opposite Hayman, she basically comes off, note for note, as a black Erika Slezak to me. The emotion and pathos in the characters are very similar, IMO, as she confesses her romantic woes to her mother. And I think that's how the character should have been positioned, as mirror images even if they weren't very closely aligned socially, but ABC abandoned that early on. I think it would be a very profound note to end things on if OLTL had done a story where it turned out that the Lords and Grays were related, making Victor, Viki, etc. all mixed-race, and entitling Carla and Sadie's children and grandchildren to a share of the central fortune in Llanview. It would have taken things back to the beginning, in terms of the two sides of the community, and of course of the people themselves - Viki and Niki, Viki and Meredith, Jessica and Natalie, Todd and Victor Jr., Viki and Dorian, Bo and Clint and so on and so on.

[Khan]

+1. I might have given LOVING more of a chance had Ellen Holly and Lillian Hayman "relocated" there. And if they'd been on the show when Debbi Morgan and Darnell Williams had joined? Oh my God! I'm having orgasms just thinking about it!

[Y&RWorldTurner]

I'd like to know this as well.

Not much seems to be discussed about early to mid 70's OLTL.

It seems like the show didn't gain momentum again until the late 70's with Karen/Larry/Marco/Jenny and that bunch. In fact, I don't think the show ever intended for those characters to become as big as they got, it just sort of happened.

[Vee]

What little I know about Carla's storylines in the 70s involve her being courted by first Bert Skelly, a cop or the DA or something, and then Ed, who I guess supplanted Bert. Supposedly she had a choice at one point of a man of expensive tastes - Bert, perhaps - and the more rough and tumble Ed, and we know how that turned out. Later, they had the Josh story (with little Josh being widow Eileen Riley Siegel's pusher for prescription drugs) and then of course the Jack Scott story, which led to Carla's exit.

[Khan]

In a way, I feel the same about John Danelle (Frank) and Lisa Wilkinson (Nancy) on ALL MY CHILDREN. I know they were present on the show throughout the '70's and early '80's, but just how big were they? Were they as front-burner as Phil and Tara, let's say, or as Joe and Ruth?

Going on my mother's recollections, it seems Carla, Sadie and Ed had a much bigger presence on OLTL than the "official" history books give them credit for. You could say, too, that the fact people forget or don't know how much about them is the consequence of ABC's attempts at whitewashing the past. On the other hand, it seems like much of OLTL's history before 1985 (or thereabouts) has been erased and forgotten, save for certain parts of it that have been distorted and retconned into oblivion, and that their story just had the misfortune of being tossed out with the rest.

[Paul Raven]

Robert Milli actually moved from OLTL to AW where he played Wayne Addison from Dec 69 - Nov 70.

Before OLTL he was in the premier cast of LIAMST where played opposite an Asian actress.

Interesting how both roles were involved interacial relationships.

An overview of the story 1968-74

Carla Gray (Ellen Holly), a light-skinned black woman, tried to pass as white while romancing both Dr. Jim Craig and Dr. Price Trainor.

A mysterious young out-of-work actress named Carla Benari arrived in Llanview suffering with anxiety attacks. Eventually overcoming her problems, she found a job working as a secretary for the hospital's chief-of-staff, Dr. Jim Craig. Jim eventually asked Carla to marry him and she accepted, however she was simultaneously attracted to Price Trainor, a black intern. Viewers were stunned when Carla came face-to-face with Sadie Gray, a black woman working in the housekeeping unit of the hospital. Sadie referred to Carla as "Clara" and claimed she was her daughter!

Carla Benari was revealed to be in actuality Clara Gray, daughter of Sadie. Carla had been passing herself off as white for years, hoping to make it big as an actress, after having run away from home as a youth. Sadie eventually shamed her daughter into the realization that she couldn't be anyone other than who she was, and taught her to be proud of her heritage. Carla broke off her engagement with Jim and fell into a relationship with Price.

Carla and Price's romance eventually failed because his mother was in opposition to the match. Eventually Price accepted a job overseas and left town.

Carla met politician Bert Skelly, who fell instantly in love with her. Though she didn't love Bert, she now knew what it was like to be totally loved by a man.

Bert proposed to Carla; she considered it, but then met police officer Ed Hall (Al Freeman, Jr.). Ed looked at Carla, told her she was much too stuffy and kissed her. They fell in love and married shortly thereafter.

After Carla's wedding to Ed, the woman who had once tried to pass for white soon became proud about being black and the couple adopted young ghetto youth, Joshua West. Together, Ed, Carla and Joshua became a happy family.

[Khan]

Speaking of Mr. John Danelle:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-mcdonald-aka-danelle/23/549/1b4

[Paul Raven]

1979 Ebony article

Carla Hall has eight million friends and all of them will have front row seats when she gets married this month to Dr. Jack Scott, a gifted heart surgeon who has been wooing her for more than a year. Fortunately, Carla's family won't have to worry about writing the invitations, because that substantial task is being handled by TV Guide. Carla, you see, is a character on the ABC soap opera One Life To Live, one of only two daytime dramas with long-standing Black storylines. And although the wedding may bring tears to the eyes of viewers who have shared her years of joys and sorrows son the tube, Ellen Holly, who plays Carla, will still be a single woman after she says "I do." Most people really do have one life to live, but Holly has two - her own and Carla's. Carla's marriage to Jack Scott - in real life the elegant-voiced Arthur Burghardt, who played Frederick Douglass on a TV special three years ago - is but the latest episode in a string of crises and triumphs that thread the lives of soap opera characters. Carla made her first appearance on One Life To Live 11 years ago as a very fair-complexioned Black woman who was passing for White, much to the pained sadness of her mother, Sadie Gray, played by Tony Award-winning Lillian Hayman. Carla soon thereafter admits to her Blackness, becomes secure in it and goes on to marry a Black police lieutenant (portrayed by Al Freeman, Jr.), whom she eventually divorces because of her love for Jack Scott. Betwixt and between of course, daily intrigues are interwoven with other ongoing storylines in a way that gives soaps their crisis-ridden flavor. After twelve critically acclaimed but scarcely lucrative years as a stage actress, Miss Holly concedes that she is comfortable having steady work on television; but she also believes she is performing a valuable service for those millions of White Americans who otherwise would have no exposure to Blacks. For this opportunity she gives credit to Agnes Nixon, the writer who created One Life To Liveand All My Children, the other soap that has had a lasting Black storyline. "There are enormous stretches in this country where they don't know anything about Black people," says Miss Holly, who was reared in Queens, New York. "Our viewers tend to regard us as neighbors. People at the supermarket, total strangers, will throw their arms around you and treat us as a neighbor ... My mother on the show has been a domestic and is now head of the housekeeping staff at the hospital; my ex-husband on the show is a policeman and Arthur plays a brilliant heart surgeon ... I think we've opened up our viewers' heads a little bit more to the variety that exists in the Black race. And the more that happens, the slower somebody will be - when they're conronted with any given Black person - to jump to conclusions about who and what that person is." Miss Holly says she has no doubts about who she is. And that's why she feels anger and chagrin when slow-minded soap watchers confuse her with Carla, who in the script 11 years ago was passing for White and wanted to marry a White doctor. Hazel-eyed and fair-skinned, with sharp facial lines and long hair, Miss Holly has often been mistaken for White. But she insists her Blackness is too important for her to deny, and she relates that she once turned down a part on a TV series because she was told to keep her racial identity a secret. She also says that in real life the only men she ever loved have been Black and each of them has been an actor. In fact, if there is romantic drama in Miss Holly's real life, it centers on this very fact. "I have been a lethal attraction to Black actors," says Miss Holly, who lives in a suburban condominium just a 45-minute train ride north of New York City, where she works. "They are the only kind of men I've ever been able to fall in love with. And that's pretty much why connecting with somebody on a permanent basis is difficult, because the men have always been complicated and difficult and they've combined all the problems of being Black males in America and the anxieties of struggling in show business, which is probably the toughest career to survive in. There's also the problem that Black men are leery of Black women who have an identity in their own right. I think in some way they don't trust you; they believe you can support yourself and you do have an identity of you own, and that means you can take a walk. But the truth is, when you dig somebody you're tremendously dependent on him emotionally, and you wouldn't dream of walking away." About seven years ago, after a brief but emotionally debilitating involvement with one Black actor, Miss Holly went into analysis in hopes of understanding, if not shaking, this obsession. "I don't know for sure what I expected analysis to do - maybe turn my head around to Jewish comics or Chinese dentists. But whatever I expected, it didn't work because $2,000 later I fell in love with another Black actor," she says. One of the two men she loved most intensely, and would have married if things had worked out, is Robert Hooks, with whom she acted in several plays during the 1960s. The other is J. A. Preston, who had a principal role in the All's Fair TV series that starred Richard Crenna. "They were the only two men I ever went bananas about," says Miss Holly, "but they had other ideas about themselves and went their own ways. I still have enormous respect for them, as people and as actors." If one were to get the impression that Miss Holy is the merrymaking type, rushing from one party to the next trying to catch the eye of some available actor with a dusky complexion, one would be entirely wrong. Her wardrobe is spartanly simple - denim and drip-dry for the most part. And when she is not at the ABC studio just west of Central Park, she is generally at home, studying or writing. Interestingly, it was an article that she wrote for TheNew York Times back in 1968 that landed her the job with One Life To Live. Agnes Nixon, creator of the show, recalls: "We wanted to do a story of a Black person who passed for White. I would never have cast a White actress; I wanted a Black person of light pigmentation, and it was a great coincidence that Ellen Holly had just written an article for the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times entitled "How Black Do You Have to Be?" It was about her experiences being turned away because she was so light in complexion. The producer called her in, auditioned her, and that was it." While Miss Holly is able to get some emotional release through the many articles she has written, the greater part of her passion remains bottled in a movie script she wrote between 1964 and 1968 and which she is still trying to get published. God of the Dark is about a young Black classical pianist named Leah - a fair-complexioned woman like Miss Holly herself - who travels to Haiti and through tricks of time and the mind is introduced to the majesty of 19th century Haiti under the Black emperor Henry Christophe. Leah leaves her White lover and runs off with a native Haitian in search of a marvelous Black past she never new existed.

Nothing else in life, says Miss Holly, is as important nto her as one day seeing this work on the movie screen, and she has spent most of her free time in recent years trying to find someone willing (and able) to produce it. Should this dream of hers ever become a reality, it would be a deep and powerful answer to the question she posed in another New York Times article entitled "Where Are the Films About Real Black Men and Women?" And so, it conceivably could be said that Ellen Holly actually has three lives to live: her own, that of ABC's Carla, and the suspended life of Leah, who now exists only on 90 typewritten pages. Toward the end of the God of the Dark script, Leah gazes at Sans Souci, the sprawling "jewel" of all the palaces built by Christophe and muses: I Wonder what it was like to live in a completely Black world ... of chateaux ... and palaces ... and lords and ladies ... dancing in ballrooms ... glistening with black chandeliers ... Surely it would not be far-fetched to assume that Ellen Holly, at least a few times in her life, has had the very same thoughts.

[EricMontreal22]

It could be her typical, and somewhat annoying, false modesty, but she has always made no qualms to the fact that she considers herself a poor businesswoman. in All Her Children she mentions that all the financial stuff for her company was initially handled by her husband (Is he the one we should be demonizing? )

I think it's in that interview but she seeed all too happy to sell both shows after five years with each when I assume she felt she had built them up enough. I get the impression she was eager to not have to deal with that aspect (I can only assume she never sold Loving because she felt it never got into that sense of stability--though maybe ABC didn't wanna buy it either)

[Khan]

That's my impression as well: that OLTL began strong (although, the end-of-year ratings don't look all that impressive...), then faltered around '73 or so, struggled to stay in the middle of the pack for much of the mid-'70's, then rebounded around the time Judith Light entered the picture and her storyline began to draw attention.

[Paul Raven]

1969 NY Times article

In September of last year I was approached to try out for a part on a brand new ABC soap opera called "One Life To Live"; the part was a black girl who passes for white. I didn't give it much thought. If you're black you don't get white parts, and if you're a "black who looks white" you don't get black parts either. But what most people don't realize is that even when there's a part for a "black who looks like white," it never goes to a black person but to a white one. Follow? I know ... I know ... it's hard for me, too.

Some years ago I was interviewed for the film "I Passed For White" and the part went to the white Sandra Wilde. Some years later, I was seen about the remake of "Imitation of Life." Ross Hunter cooed over me, told me I looked like Loretta Young, and gave the part to the white Susan Kohner. I had dim memories of Jeanne Crain in "Pinky," Ben Aliza in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window," Mell Ferrer & Co. as the family in "Lost Boundaries" and numerous other whites masquerading as blacks masquerading as whites which, as far as I am concerned, cancels out the whole point much in the manner of a double negativity. So I thought I knew pretty much what to expect from "One Life To Live."

At the interview with the producer, Doris Quinlan, I smiled and did my best to look amiable, talented and 20 (which was what the part called for and which I hadn't seen for a goodly while), but in the back of my head I was already bracing for the inevitable turndown. She smiled a lovely smile back and said that they were being polite about things and looking at all the white girls the agents were sending them but that she didn't really see the slightest point to the whole thing if the girl wasn't the genuine article. It sounded revolutionary enough to report her to the H.U.A.C. They tested me. A couple of days later I had the part. I couldn't believe it.

Then I began to worry. I have such a personal distaste for blacks who pass for white that I wondered how the story line was going to be handled. If an actor's at all squeamish or apprehensive about the part he's playing, a soap poses a rather special problem for him. In a play or film you know the whole story before you contract to do it, but in a soap the story is open-ended. New writing is a constant and you don't know from one moment to the next what words are going to be put into your mouth. If you're dealing with dense writers, you can end up playing a ventriloquist's dummy Uncle Tom or quitting the job to avoid it.

On the other hand, in terms of the particular story line, I found the idea fascinating. I felt that the unique format of a soap would enable people to examine their prejudices in a way no other format possibly could. In a play or a film the audience would relate to the character as white only briefly and then discover she was black perhaps an hour later, but the soap audience would relate to her as white for months... months in which she would become part of their daily lives ... for some, virtually a member of their family. The emotional investment they made in her as a human being would be infinitely greater, and when the switch came, their involvement would be real rather than superficial. A lot of whites who think they aren't prejudiced - are. It seemed like a marvelous opportunity to help them confront their own prejudices. When the switch came, those who would radically alter their response to the character would surely demonstrate to themselves that they don't dislike black people because they are dirty or lazy or stupid, but just because they are black - i.e., they would have a chance to isolate not only the existence of their own prejudice but, also, its lack of a logical base.

My character, Carla Benari, was introduced last October. For four months thereafter I was presented as a white girl, a struggling actress engaged to a white doctor but gravitating - against her will - toward a gorgeous black one. Ironically, for the first time in my life, I had to "cool" being black lest I tip the plot. I had to forgo an appearance on another ABC show called "Like It Is" that deals with the black scene, and patiently wait for an issue of Look in which I appeared properly labeled as a black actress to disappear from the stands. Even though the situation was temporary, I found it much more destructive to my psyche than I had dreamed ...

A month went by, and we got to an important turn in the plot. I kissed Peter De Anda, who plays the gorgeous black doctor, and confessed my love for him. Immediately, the switchboard was flooded with calls from irate white men defending my supposedly Caucasian virtue (later, after the switch, I'm sure they felt like a bunch of idiots) and the show was dropped like a hot potato by a station in Texas. Most producers would have blanched and dropped the story line; Doris Quinlan had been prepared to lose more. The reaction from white women was different. They wrote in (people who are angry seem to call at once to relieve their feeling; people who are pleased seem to write at their leisure) and said, "Well, it's about time."

.. Finally, we got to the switch. In an ingenious script whose parallel cutting was almost as well done as Hitchcock's tennis game sequence in "Strangers on a Train," I met up with the black mother I had abandoned nine years before (a major character, who had already been well established in the story line long before I was, and played by Lillian Hayman of "Hallelujah, Baby" fame). People were genuinely surprised. Most found it absorbing. Others were fascinated by the way all the pieces fit. There were, of course, the inevitable ones who found it hard to accept ...

It is now several months since the switch. Presumably, people would have made emotional adjustments they felt necessary and settled down. Still, there are those who call the show from time to time to check to make certain that a black actress rather than a white one is playing the part. Whether it's a black person checking to make sure that a soul sister wasn't done out of a job, or a white person checking to make sure a white actress isn't playing opposite a black actor, is never clear. What is clear is that it's going to be a great day when America ceases to be obsessed with color...

I love my job. Jack Wood and Don Wallace direct the show with a special care of things. The actors are some of the best around. The writer, Agnes Nixon, is more sensitive to the vibrations of the black community than any white I've ever met and I think three or four of the episodes have been more relevant to life and real concerns than any I ever dealt with during a decade in the theater. The tedious but necessary aspects of soap opera are definitely present - exposition to help newcomers catch up on plot lines, dull stretches, repetition. But within the framework of the genre surprisingly much has gotten said - among other things, that blacks pass for white not because they value whiteness per se, but rather because they value the special rights and privileges that unfairly accrue to whiteness ... New as it is, "One Life To Live" has one of the highest ratings of any soap on the air. Not only because of this story line, but because of several things equally well done, including the major one about some swanky goings on on the Philadelphia Main Line.

I love the job, but I have one major regret ... I look forward to the day when America believes that the relevant thing about me is not that I am black but that I am Ellen.

[Khan]

See, I don't like that sentence, because it implies that falling in love with a Black man made her proud of "being Black." Really, I don't like the fact that Carla seemed to fall only for Black men once her secret was out and her relationship with Dr. Craig was finished. Why couldn't Carla have re-discovered her pride in her heritage and found happiness with a man who didn't share that heritage? Oh well.