Hidden Faces

[DRW50]

April 1969 Afternoon TV

[Paul Raven]

So glad to read that.

Hidden Faces has always fascinated me. It seemed to have an interesting premise but was thrown to the wolves up against ATWT.

NBC had lost the rights to Let's Make a Deal which had provided some competition to ATWT for 4 years and ABC picked up LMAD which left NBC in the wilderness.

Hidden Faces was created by Irving Vendig, who had created Edge of Night.

NBC should have programmed it at 4.00 where, like EON, it could have captured the male and teen audience that enjoyed Edge.

[DRW50]

Thanks for reading. I forgot it was NBC, not ABC. I should have put NBC.

I wish I could see some of the show, especially since the female cast didn't do a lot of other big soap roles.

I have a few other articles around here and there, when I can find them.

[Paul Raven]

Some more info on Hidden Faces.

It ran from Dec 30 1968 - June 27 1969

As well as performers listed above the cast included Nat Polen as Earl Harriman, Ludi Claire as Grace Ensleyand a young Linda Blair as Allyn Jaffe.

Tony LoBianco was also listed as Nick Capello Turner.

[dc11786]

Interesting article.

I always forget about "Hidden Faces." The story with Louise Shaffer's character and her boyfriend sounds very traditional for a show that seems very out of the box in terms of typical soap opera fare.

[DRW50]

TV Yearbook circa early 1969.

[danfling]

Actor Joseph Daly, who played Senator Robert Douglas Jaffee on Hidden Faces, died on August 8, 2015.   If I locate his obituary, I will post it here.

[danfling]

JOSEPH DALY

 

Obituary

Guest Book

• "RIP Joseph Daly - one of the best teachers I ever had. You..."
  - Sharon Wajswol

View Sign

 

DALY--Joseph,

April 7, 1930 - August 8, 2015. Husband, father, actor, teacher. Memorial Services in New Jersey August 15; in NYC August 23 at Producers' Club.  

- See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?pid=175491954#sthash.kaVGXENz.dpuf

[danfling]

Actress Rita Gam, who played Elinor "Mimi" Jaffee, has passed away at the age of 88.

[Paul Raven]

Rita Gam also appeared on Love of Life.

[danfling]

For many years, I have wondered if Irving Vendig had written this show by himself or if he had another writer.   I had even asked Louise Shaffer (who had replied that she never looked at the name of the writer that early in her career).   Tonight, I have learned that Wayne Greenhaw also wrote the show with Mr. Vendig.

 

from the Encyclopedia of Alabama:

 

Wayne Greenhaw

 

 

 

 

 

Barry M. Cole, University of Montevallo

Writer and poet Wayne Greenhaw (1940-2011) produced a broad spectrum of fiction and nonfiction books, two plays, poetry, travel guides, and scripts for film and television. Greenhaw's writing reflects strong advocacy of the civil rights movement, expressed vividly through personal reflections. As a journalist in the 1960s, Greenhaw directly witnessed the civil rights movement as it unfolded through his personal association with movement leader E. D. Nixon during the Selma to Montgomery March. Since that time, many of his works have focused on civil rights. Greenhaw's writing is not limited to any one style or genre, although he has named Harper Lee as his primary influence, as well as individuals he met during the civil rights movement.

Wayne Greenhaw in Montgomery

Harold Wayne Greenhaw was born in Sheffield, Colbert County, into a troubled family; he grew up in Trussville and Tuscaloosa. Greenhaw contracted polio as an infant, causing health problems, including a curvature of the spine, that persisted through his teen years. At the age of 14, he underwent major surgery to correct his spine and was confined to a body cast for six months. During that time, he read extensively and learned to love literature. After graduating from high school in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, Greenhaw moved to Mexico at the age of 18 to study creative writing at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende in the summer of 1959. He returned to Tuscaloosa and entered the University of Alabama to study writing under English professor Hudson Strode. In 1958, Greenhaw gained part-time employment as a sports reporter for the Tuscaloosa News. He served as sports columnist for the Graphics Weekly from 1963 to 1964 and worked as a writer assigned to an educational project at Draper Correctional Center from 1964 to 1965. He then took a position as a general assignment reporter for the Alabama Journal newspaper in 1965 and completed a B.S. in education at the University of Alabama in 1966. His first novel, The Golfer, was published shortly thereafter in 1967.

In 1971, Greenhaw published an article on the My Lai massacre (the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians by members of the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War) that earned him a Nieman Fellowship to study journalism at Harvard University in 1972. He became Jimmy Carter's press secretary in Alabama during the 1976 presidential campaign. That same year, Greenhaw penned an editorial in the New York Times exposing Alabamian white supremacist Asa Carter as the author of The Education of Little Tree, a supposed biography that Carter had written under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. In 1982, he published Elephant in the Cotton Fields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South and two years later published Flying High: Inside Big-Time Drug Smuggling. From 1984 to 1988, he was editor and publisher of Alabama Magazine.

Several of Greenhaw's books center on the state of Alabama and Montgomery in particular. Examples include Alabama on My Mind: Politics, People, History, and Ghost Stories (1988), Montgomery: Center Stage in the South: A Contemporary Portrait (1990) and Montgomery: The Biography of a City (1994). In 1993, Gov. Jim Folsom appointed Greenhaw as director of the Alabama Bureau of Tourism (now the Alabama Tourism Department). In 1995, Pres. Bill Clinton appointed him as a representative to the White House Conference on Travel and Tourism. That same year, the Southeast Tourism Society named Greenhaw Travel Writer of the Year. Greenhaw continued to write, publishing Alabama: Portrait of a State in 1998

Fighting the Devil in Dixie

and Beyond the Night: A Remembrance the following year. The latter work is a poignant telling of a young boy's near-death experience. In 2000, Greenhaw was appointed to the board of directors of the Alabama Humanities Foundation by Gov. Don Siegelman. In 2006, he co-authored with Donnie Williams The Thunder of Angels, which details the struggle for racial equality in Alabama. His writing was augmented by frequent lectures and seminars.

Greenhaw was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Harper Lee Award from the Alabama Writers Conclave and the Hackney Literary Award from Birmingham-Southern College. Greenhaw published several hundred articles in publications ranging from Reader's Digest to Music City News. Residing in both Alabama and Mexico, he produced works in English and Spanish and found common ground in both places in his writing.

Greenhaw died on May 31, 2011, in Birmingham from complications related to heart surgery.

Selected Works by Wayne Greenhaw

The Golfer (1967)

"Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter? Only Josey Wales May Know for Sure" (1976)

King of Country (1994)

Beyond the Night (1999)

My Heart is in the Earth (2001)

The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (2006)

Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama (2011)

Additional Resources 

Best, Ricky, and Jason Kneip. Guide to the Papers of Wayne Greenhaw. Montgomery, Ala.: AUM Library, Archives & Special Collections, 2005.

Dixon, Joyce. "My Heart Is In The Earth: An Interview with Author Wayne Greenhaw." Southern Scribe, 2001. [See Related Links]

[Paul Raven]

 

 

 

[Paul Raven]

Glad to be able through these pics to be able to give more of a sense of how the show was presented.

Conard Fowkes and Tony LoBianco

With Gretchen Walther

 

[Paul Raven]

Louise Shaffer (her first soap role) as Martha Logan (on the right) and Mary Bracken Phillips as Jeanette Sloane. Looks like these characters were fashion designers?

 

Stephen Joyce, Joe Daly and Nell Bassett in an unknown role (possibly secretary?)

 

Edited April 28, 2020 by Paul Raven

[Paul Raven]

August 1987

Writer Doesn't Miss Creating Heartbreak

Looking over a desk stacked high with files, Montgomery author and magazine editor Wayne Greenhaw laughs about his secret life a life spent creating bitter divorces, scandals and even engineering the occasional killing. "You mean my life in the soaps," the former Nieman Fellow says, a grin emerging from under a pepper-gray mustache. "That was a lot of fun. It was a lot of heartache, but it was a funny kind of heartache." His life in the soaps began in 1969, when Greenhaw, then a young reporter for The Alabama Journal, began talking at a party with Irving Vendig. Vendig had written scripts for radio shows like "Perry Mason" during the 1940s, but he did not find his true niche until he wrote the scripts for a television serial called "As the World Turns." At the party, Vendig and Greenhaw talked about Greenhaw's first book, "The Golfer," which had just been published and about a new television serial Vendig was working on called "The Hidden Faces." "Vendig called me the next morning and asked me to come over," said Greenhaw, who now edits Alabama Magazine and freelances for newspapers ranging from The New York Times to The Atlanta Journal. "He had bought a copy of my novel and read it that morning. He said he liked it, and after questioning me at length about things like character development and motivation, he asked me if I would like to help him develop the story line for the new serial."

 

After sending ideas to Vendig from Montgomery, Greenhaw was hired to move to Sarasota and be junior writer on the soap opera, even though he had never written a dramatic script. The plan was for the two senior writers, one of whom was Vendig, to turn out two scripts a week, while Greenhaw turned out one, but those plans changed drastically when both senior writers became ill. "Both were too sick to work," Greenhaw remembered. "They just said, 'OK, kid, it's up to you.' " For more than two months Greenhaw wrote about a 30-page script a day, only taking an occasional Sunday off. Scripts were written by Greenhaw, edited by Vendig, who "was still very ill," rewritten by Greenhaw, reedited by Vendig and then rewritten again by Greenhaw before finally being mailed to New York, where they were performed. The performances weren't live, but they weren't far from it. "I would go over to Irving's house everyday to watch the show on television," he said. "Back then if they made mistakes, they didn't go back to correct them. "You would watch the show, and sometimes you'd just want to cry. They'd perform it just as you'd written it, every period and every comma and that made it worse because if it was bad, you knew it was because you had written it bad. Sometimes, you'd watch and just feel sick."

 

Greenhaw said "Hidden Faces" was up against a powerhouse soap opera and because of that never developed much of an audience. "I think most of the people watching us were people who couldn't get the other channel on their TV sets," he said smiling. "Still you realized that even that small percentage of the audience probably amounted to millions of people. "When there was a bad show, you'd think about those millions of people and you'd think 'How could I have done this to myself.' " Greenhaw says he was not proud of most of his work because he was having to turn it out so fast. "Out of all those scripts, I was happy with maybe two of them," he said. One thing Greenhaw was proud of was his creation of a black family as one of the major groups of characters on the show. "As far as I know, that was the first black family featured in a daytime drama," he said. After a few months, NBC gave up "Hidden Faces," replacing the soap opera with the game show "Let's Make a Deal."

 

Greenhaw left the world of soap operas and returned to the less hectic and less lucrative world of journalism. Although there were times when Greenhaw cringed when he thought about how viewers were reacting to his bad scripts, his last memory of the soap opera is a happy one. ' "Right after I left the show, I was in the Eastern Airlines lounge at the Atlanta Airport and the television was tuned to 'Hidden Faces,' " he said. "We wrote the scripts two weeks in advance so even though I'd already left the show, the episode the people were watching was still one I'd written. "I looked around, and there was a little old lady who was watching it and crying. As I watched her shedding tears about my show, I remember thinking 'Well, at least we got to one of the millions of people out there.' When the credits rolled, and my name was there as the writer, I wanted to go tell everyone who was watching it that it was me."

 

 

New Daytime Serial Will ' Be born On Dec. 30 'Hidden Faces'  By CYNTHIA LOWRY NEW YORK.

 A new daytime serial will be born Dec 30 on NBC, and its creator will be hurt and a little angry if "Hidden Faces" is kissed off as just another soap opera. "It is an adventure-mystery serial in which we develop characters," insisted author Irving Vendig. "We'll show the action our characters won't sit around drinking coffee and talking; about something that happened off-camera."

 

The serial has been planned deliberately for a long life. Vendig created "Edge of Night" as an adventure-mystery serial and wrote its scripts for nine years before he moved along to other things, and the serial is still on the air. He turned out more than 2,200 scripts for "Perry Mason" in its radio days and recalls it went on for 15 years and was followed by the Raymond Burr TV series for an other nine. " Vendig made a master plan for "Hidden Faces" that carefully puts his principal characters in positions surrounded by drama.

 

His male lead, for example, is a state senator victimized by a blackmail plot Vendig does not expect the series will receive immediate acceptance. "Getting these daytime things going takes time," he said. "It usually takes a year, and even longer, because daytime viewers are more creatures of habit than nighttime viewers, even if they are the same people. I do, however, think it is wrong to treat the daytime audience as if it consisted only of housewives. I believe that about one quarter ; of that potential audience is men men who work at home, night workers, garage men, doctors and others.

 

Vendig started turning out broadcast material in Chicago during its golden radio days. While he has been associated with some big, long-running shows, he also has experienced disaster, most recently with a short-lived daytime serial called "Paradise Bay" a few seasons back. "It was one of the worst concepts for a serial," he admitted frankly. "I knew it couldn't work the minute I saw the first show and I wanted to kill it then j and there. But the network was committed to 26 weeks, so we staggered on to the end." It takes time and patience to get a new serial on the air. NBC received Vendig's original concept in March 1966, and four months later was given five sample scripts. .. "They liked it, had no room, and let a year go by without anything happening," Vendig said.

Edited February 15, 2021 by Paul Raven