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

[Khan]

Exactly. I mean, look how long it took these shows to give us front-burner gay characters -- and even now, as this genre dies out completely, there's still the feeling that they cannot get it right.

[Khan]

IA.

The truth, however, is that Broadway, and the New York theatre scene in general, has been much, much kinder to AA's than daytime or even primetime TV; so the fact that EH's acting career has evaporated into nothingness makes me wonder whether it has everything to do with how one "dinky little soap opera," to paraphrase EH, mistreated her.

[SFK]

Dana, I know what you mean, but I have had some similar slippery experiences with agents who didn't know me from Adam. They somehow get a hold of your resume, or in modern times, attach themselves to it via your online profile on a casting website. They see, or assume, that you have no signed representation so they feel free to freelance you without your permission, assuming you'll be grateful to get an audition let alone a booking, and assuring themselves a commission if you do. It can all be so frenzied when you get a call out of the blue, and in Miss Holly's case, this was years before caller i.d., star-sixty-nine, or Google. That said, I still do not understand how so many years went by without her finding out who this mystery voice was. I assume all of the correspondence she got was on Creative Horizons letterhead. And if she got scale plus twenty-five, who was she paying her commission to?

[DRW50]

What I wonder about - and I don't mean to paint Agnes Nixon as someone who doesn't look at the details - is if Agnes' name being on something means she was really paying that much attention, especially if she had moved on from OLTL. The part about Agnes' name being on the contracts so she knew Ellen Holly wasn't getting enough money - I wonder if by that time Agnes' secretary was writing it out, or stamping it.

[SFK]

You took the words right out of my mouth, I'm just kind of going one thought at a time.

All I know is the mystery voice denouement made the hairs on my bronzed Popeye-like forearms stand up, and this part landed like an anvil in my gut, made me well-up a little:

For all its eternal boasts of revolutionary change… when One Life to Live closes out its 43 year run on ABC this coming January …it will have done so without ever allowing the black audience, so critical to its success from Day One to Day The Last, to have purchased one single first class ride for an American black….either in front of …or behind…the camera.

[DeeeDee]

And 45 years later they still aren't.

[Khan]

It doesn't. It should -- and I know I'd never allow my name on any document without looking it over -- but I think her name still attached to anything OLTL-related is like Corday Productions' name always being attached to Y&R. IOW, it's a figurehead, and nothing more.

[marceline]

Based only on my own business experience not in the entertainment business, a CC means nothing. Getting CC'd on a letter or memo basically meant that it got sent to your secretary and dropped into a file. I say this as somebody who was once that secretary. I'm not trying to let Agnes off the hook but the realities of the pre-email workplace meant that that letter was probably stuffed into a pile of a million other pieces of correspondence and there's no guarantee she got it in a timely manner. That copy could've showed up in her inbox a month or two later. That's the great thing about life in the digital age. Now we know when things get sent, received, opened and read.

[SFK]

Yes, I definitely noticed that. But she still refers to ES as a rookie which I think is unfair. She may not have had EH's NY credits, but how many soap stars today or even back then were RADA graduates who worked steadily in rep playing many of the classics in their early twenties? EH also didn't have signed representation at the time she joined OLTL while ES did. ES's agent was Joanne Dorian's agent, as ES talks about in her Archive interview.

[marceline]

I hope that all the people whining, begging and hating on Oprah for not coming to the rescue of these shows (I'm looking at you, Ilene Kristen), read this. Perhaps then they'll get a clue. Why should Oprah save a show where someone like her would never exist?

[SFK]

I wonder that too. Vee posted some pictures of her at an event in NY from I think a year or two ago. She used to sort of be a "neighbor", she lived a couple minutes away from me which is like a 45 minute train ride to Manhattan. It's hard enough to make a living doing theatre, and my guess is that she just wasn't even getting the audition opportunities to make her acting hustle worth continuing. Her job at the library may have paid modestly, but it probably wasn't worth losing financially for a two month off-Broadway gig in the city. I don't know...

MMPH!

Indeed.

[Khan]

And I think that's the bottom line.

Say what you will about ES, but I think she is genuine when it comes to this issue. I don't think she was jealous of EH and LH's status on the show; and I don't think she enjoyed seeing OLTL "whitewashed" by producers and HW's under any circumstances.

Agnes Nixon, OTOH...? Well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe she is just a racist b***h.

Oh well. One thing's for certain: I don't think Doug Marland would have allowed this kind of treatment for any actor, regardless of color. I'm just saying.

[Cheap21]

Its amazing yet pathetic that the struggles that Holly went through in the 80s STILL represent how black actors in daytime go through. Nothing has changed. Her letter could apply to present day soaps

[marceline]

IKR. I've had this discussion with friends about actors in different situations. "How could he or she just stand by and not speak out?" sorts of things. In the end, we can never know the content of someone else's soul. I think most of us can think of times in our lives when we wish we had done better. Obviously Agnes isn't a racist bitch. Without her, I doubt Ellen Holly would've gotten a shot. That doesn't mean that Agnes was always brave or did the right thing. That doesn't change the fact that, IMO based on the way daytime has treated has treated its minority actors and audience, it deserved to die. These shows need to evolve or perish. They did the latter. These shows killed themselves.

[SFK]

I imagine AN hearing about something like EH's firing and just sort of sucking her teeth and shaking her head like my grandmother, like, "Well, what are ya gonna do..."