Who is Marlena? Connie Passalacqua Hayman, a.k.a. Marlena De Lacroix

[j swift]

I was an avid SOW reader.  But, I don't recall her other magazine Episodes, about the ABC soaps, at all.  I've seen it on eBay.  Yet, I don't think I ever saw it on a magazine stand at the time it was published.

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I think the shift in the entire soap print media toward irrelevancy can be foretold by the moment when each magazine stopped using their own photographers, and started cutting and pasting production stills. 

Edited July 18, 2024 by j swift

[Soapsuds]

I bought both when I could but I preferred SOW for its up to date ratings.

Towards the end it was mostly SOW that I would buy.

[Contessa Donatella]

I believe now he is very involved in classical music. If I recall correctly, he is a cellist. Correcting myself. Stand-up bass, not cello.

Yes, she was a close friend of Reilly. Someone else who considered him a close personal friend was Kay Alden. 

I remember well that when he died, Marlena took many people to task for not having respect for the dead, at least for the moment. 

Edited July 18, 2024 by Contessa Donatella
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[VelekaCarruthers]

My guess is that it was Ken who tried to get her fired. 

Edited July 18, 2024 by VelekaCarruthers

[Contessa Donatella]

It was Ken who was furious with WEEKLY for offering genuine critique. If I recall correctly, he shut them out, wouldn't give them access to actors or writers or producers, to no one!!! Then, he became even more furious when they continued to cover the show like all the other shows that were giving them access. 

[j swift]

For rhetorical sake, there are at least two arguments against blaming Ken Corday in this instance.  First, according to my review of the story from this interview, it occurred at SOD, not SOW.  Second, when Ken Corday got mad at SOW, they published an account of the entire interaction, so there would be no need to keep his name secret many years later. 

Edited July 19, 2024 by j swift

[Contessa Donatella]

I think the thing about not naming names is odd. Of course it might not be Corday. It might be someone else & Corday is the only EP we know of that went on a tear about the soap press.

Jill Farren Phelps said at one point that there was a name she could name in regard to the Murder of Frankie Frame but that she simply was not going to name names. I concluded she was thinking of the HW, Margaret De Priest. A month later I saw Jill on the Locher Room saying, "It was the writer! It wasn't me!" So much for the assumed nobility of not naming names. 

Perhaps Connie is more noble. 

[DRW50]

I didn't get into soap magazines for the most part until the mid '90s, and it didn't take long to realize just what superior quality SPW was in every way. I do think that by the late '90s, Marlena, Mimi Torchin, etc. had probably said everything they had left to say (Torchin in particular spent more column time writing about her favorite movies and primetime shows), but Marlena could still give some great material - I remember a column tearing JFP's OLTL apart which meant something because she had often praised and defended JFP's work. Ditto for panning Guza's GH around 1999 or so. It's unfortunate the magazine was completely gutted around this point - you could tell SPW up to that point had a lot of respect for its readers. Afterward the whole thing was extremely generic and hard to believe it was the same magazine that had detailed articles on canceled soaps, painstakingly tracked down dozens of soap actors for a where are they now feature, had the greatest moments in soap history issue that taught me so much about moments I never would have known otherwise, etc. 

Frankly, I'm surprised SPW managed to scrape through another decade. 

[Contessa Donatella]

The corporate ownership of DIGEST & WEEKLY just got worse & worse & went down & down. Also publishing across the board got into more & more trouble because of problems with fulfillment houses, cost of paper, cost of postage, etc. I also thought it was less than useful for them to be owned by the same corporate entity & to have an overall editor over both.