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

[soapfave06]

I remember in Erika Slezak's newsletter, she was asked about Ellen Holly's claims of her being happy or not caring that Llanview was full of upper class white people in 1988 and Erika explained that she wasn't happy about that and if I remember correctly, she said their were people who tried to defend Ellen in 1985 when Rauch fired her. I am waiting on Robin Strasser to comment on her Twitter. I wonder if any of Robin and Paul's disagreements stemmed from Holly's firing.

[DeeeDee]

Pretty much.

[Juliajms]

I think it's easy to say that someone should let go of what happened 26 years ago, but it's a hell of a lot harder to do it. I find that the relatively petty injustices I endured as a child still have the ability to piss me off, if I think about them. Small things that every child goes through such as being accused and punished for something I know I didn't do can still have an effect after all these years. So I can only imagine how hard it is to let go of an injustice you feel has made your life a "dirty joke".

I find it much easier to forgive the people who simply treated me badly 20 years ago, then the ones who dealt me an actual injustice. For whatever reason, I think the mind and soul rebel against the simple unfairness of it and it's very hard to come to resolution about these things. It has to be even harder for people who are dealt an injustice due to their identity. That's an assault on your self esteem not just your sense of justice.

Of course, it's clearly healthier to just let the past go, but I imagine the fees she'd have to pay the shrinks to accomplish that would be more than she was paid for her time on ABC. If you've read the whole letter you can see that she feels her whole life was f*cked because of what happened. Good luck just letting that kind of feeling go.

[chyti]

I am not familiar with Agnes Nixon at all but I want to know why is it so hard to believe that she can be capable of things said by Mrs. Holly and still have a fondness for the work she created with the Sadie storyline. I didn't even think this was a pick sides thing, someone is speaking about their experiences the hardships they went though and some are judging her without personally knowing her or Agnes, having lived through what she had or being a part of what she is speaking of. Watching videos and reading interviews doesn't make you an expert on a person's personality no one here knows anything about what happened all those years ago but those involved.

As far as Mrs. Holly and her contract she is just one of many that got caught up in a bad situation, most entertainers during that period got screwed out of their money it probably sounded better than what she was getting and she went with it.

[DeliaIrisFan]

Reading this made me so sad, especially this part:

I've only seen a fraction of Ellen Holly's daytime work, and most of it from her GL stint, but I feel confident in saying that's not the case. From what little I've seen, it's clear that I was watching an amazing actress, and a part of history that nobody at ABC can ever completely erase. I can't speak to Agnes Nixon's role, if any, in this injustice and I won't begin to fault Holly for not moving on and still holding onto her anger. I don't know how I would have been able to let it go, had I been in her shoes, and as a white man I'm the last person to judge her. But I sincerely hope that her "grimmer days" have not been the norm, and that her spirit has not been completely destroyed what ABC, et al did to her. Because she is clearly so much better than Paul Rauch, better than ABC Daytime, and better than OLTL, which - in the end - has ended up netting in the negative column every time as far as all of the lofty things it was originally supposed to represent.

I will say that I hope Holly has had other things in her life that made up for the lack of deserved rewards she was prevented from reeping from her acting career. Not because she deserves a consolation prize, but simply because she just deserved better than what she got from this industry, period. On the other hand, it looks like she may well outlive this genre. I will miss soaps, hard as it is to argue with those who say they deserve their fate - and as a member of the LGBT community, I do know a little about what it's like to watch these shows over the decades and have your identity devalued by them time and again. Certainly, I will mourn the loss of what they had the potential to be more than what they have become today: I agree with what Holly said all those years ago about soaps being unique in that they could help people rethink their prejudices through getting to know people who are different than themselves. Clearly they haven't lived up to that, though, and if Holly is able to find any peace in the obsolescence of an industry that decided she was obselete long ago, then I can't fault her in the least.

I do think it's eery how OLTL especially has played out, with striking similarity, this same pattern of tearing down every effort to move daytime ahead and ultimately setting the genre back even further. Every attempt at a black family/group of characters has eventually been wiped out from the canvas. Not one, not two, but three different attempts to tell a gay story have ended in the actor(s) being abruptly fired and the characters never mentioned again (or worse, as in the case of that character Matt Cavenaugh played, whose biggest mark on the longterm story was a supporting player in that atrocious gay serial killer nonsense). And the show's attempt to depict rape in a more accurate, progressive way than daytime had done before (not that I necessarily agree that the original Todd story achieved that, based on the clips I've seen, but I'll grant that the intent was sincere) ultimately led us to not one but two sociopathic rapists as the center of this show, romantic and otherwise, long after the would-be heroine of that story was completely destroyed. (I would love to see Ellen Holly, Susan Haskell, the Kyle and Fish actors, etc. do an off-off Broadway show together.)

I've tuned back in for the end of OLTL and I was amazed to see that a South Asian family has been introduced. Is that another daytime first and, if so, is it possible that the show will finally manage not to completely screw something like that up? The show has already finished taping, but I can just see someone from ABC issuing a press release saying that they have realized those characters were the sole reason the show failed, and they are going to do eleventh-hour re-editing to cut out all of their scenes between now and the finale, in a last-ditch effort to get Prospect Park to reconsider keeping OLTL going online.

I also can't help but wonder if the incident with EH and LH set a precedent for daytime soaps pretending their history didn't exist, that ultimately ended up moving beyond racism to broader ageism and sexism. ABC/Rauch pulled it off, with or without Nixon's blessing, and they enjoyed commercial success for a long time afterward. And 25+ years later, Rauch's version of OLTL's history has in fact literally become history. I'm watching and enjoying this Fraternity Row subplot, and admittedly I appreciate that it is giving an actress like Ilene Kristen, who has been a victim of ABC's "isms" more than once over the years, a moment in the spotlight. But when you think about it, what happened to the Kyle and Fish actors, Daphne Duplaix, et al a couple of years ago really was the current management's greatest homage to OLTL's true legacy, much more so than paying tribute to one of Rauch's "classic" stories.

[Khan]

And I'd love to see someone who remembers EH's work (either on OLTL or on the stage) and is in a position of power read her letter and offer her a gig of some sort. If she's even half as good as many say, then it's criminal how she's not able to apply her craft today. To me, that -- being allowed the opportunity to return to acting -- would be the ultimate revenge against ABC Daytime.

[DeliaIrisFan]

PS: Not that this is an excuse at all, but I am genuinely curious from an historical perspective: Is it possible that ABC (and/or Nixon) weren't just temporarily capitalizing on the historical moment in which OLTL premiered, but that they were actually trying to expand the traditional soap audience to include black women, whom they expected to be increasingly demographically desirable in daytime TV? In 1968, the civil rights movement was probably more on the radar screen of TV/ad executives than the women's rights movement. Does anyone think that TPTB, however abominably they treated individual actors, perhaps genuinely aspired to create a show for a more diverse group of stay at home wives and mothers, akin to what the P&G soaps were offering to white women, and they saw that business model lasting for a longer period of time than it did? I'm not sure I completely agree with Holly's implication that the plan was always to use her briefly to launch the show and its white stars and then cast her out completely, although again not that that in any way justifies the end result or the way that black actors were treated along the way. I just don't know if it was expected at that point that so many of the women who had watched soaps would enter the workforce so soon afterward - with presumably the more progressive women self-selecting to make that migration in many cases, and perhaps the ones left behind being thought of as less accepting of social change. And I don't know that anyone could have foreseen the political pendulum shift that had taken place by the mid-'80s, with someone like Reagan becoming president and enjoying widespread popularity while not-so-subtly telling white Americans that they didn't have to think about any of the questions that the civil rights era raised anymore.

[Vee]

I believe it was Mario Van Peebles (or Andre Braugher? one of the two directed this) who gave EH a job several years ago in 10,000 Black Men Named George, a drama about the sleeping car railroad porters during the Depression. She still looked striking and beautiful, though she was made up to look like a struggling older woman of the period; she's looked much better in other photographs since. In the film, she played the wife of the late Brock Peters.

Holly is also apparently still in touch with Robin Strasser. I seem to recall her also having kind words for Bob Woods, Michael Storm and others. Five or six years ago, SOD claimed she was writing a thriller screenplay for Strasser, of all people. I assume that went nowhere.

The thing about characters like Kish, though, is that OLTL did not want to lose them; in fact, they tried to get them back before the end recently. All they've gotten away with is referencing them a lot since. And I know an attempt was made to put Shane across as a gay teen this year, though ABC said no. For me, the Kish saga, brief though it was, wiped out the horrific stain of the disgusting Daniel Colson story. It's just a shame no steps were ever taken to right the situation with Ms. Holly and the Grays-Halls. I would've given a great deal to see that.

[SFK]

AN has said that Carla's story was inspired by an interview of Eartha Kitt she had caught on television. Miss Kitt talked about being ostracized growing up in the south, struggling to find acceptance among blacks, who derisively called her "yella gal!", and whites alike. A lot of AN's stories were inspired by real life events, so I don't view it as some sort of flash in the pan shocker just to secure a black audience. I think if the black audience embraced the story, that was of course wonderful as she had set out to create an inclusive soap, but I really don't think it had anything to do with business, as Hyman Roth might say.

[R Sinclair]

Pretty much.

[marceline]

I love your whole post but these last two paragraphs deserve to be engraved in stone.

This was excellent timing on her part. Everybody's gearing up for the great OLTL Homegoing and she's reminded people that it wasn't all camp and comedy. AMC at least had that family photo of the Hubbards in the last week. Even though the way they were treated was certainly nothing to shout about, they were there. What EH has done is make sure Carla's "there" at the end for OLTL even if she had to crash the funeral. And Lord knows, none of this will even be a discussion item when GH goes next year.

[Juliajms]

Ugh! This topic really makes me wonder where it all went wrong. Was it TPTB who were racist or was it a reflection of the audience in some way? When and how did the most conservative part of the audience get control and start to matter more than those of us who don't want to see only people who are just like us on screen? At what point did it become a self fulfilling prophecy? I guess we'll never have the answers.

[Khan]

Frankly, I think ABC was concerned more with grabbing younger audiences. (The more things change, right, lol?)

[EricMontreal22]

I think they probably did hope to take advantage of her naivity about movies/tv and how it works, etc, tand Agnes pshoul dhavge done something as she was in charge at the time--that said I doubt it was her decision to do that, and Ellen didn't seem to bring it up with her, even though they did have SOME sort of relationship.

I agree about the 3 weeks before thing--they'd always been very clear that the story was proving hard to cast, and ABC recommended an Italian actress instead of searching for a light skinned black one, but she refused.

[Khan]

Well, of COURSE she and RS remain in touch. Ellen's probably Robin's boo.

(Conversely, if I were Kathy Glass, I'd be careful going into ladies' rooms alone.)

It would've been so awesome to see Carla come back as Destiny's attorney in the big custody fight for her and Matthew's baby.