Not Young, Still Restless Read online

  None of our children was living at home by then. Corbin and Collin had started college, and Caren was thriving at the Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private school near Palm Springs. My plan was to sit down with each of them face-to-face and explain, without going into too many details, that their father and I had separated. Harry, just when I thought I couldn’t despise him more, trumped me by calling them instead, even reaching and devastating Caren at school the next morning with the news that “your mother kicked me out.” I immediately called the headmaster, told him to please keep her in the building until I got there, and made the two-hour drive in just under ninety minutes.

  I wish I could say I felt relieved and glad to be rid of a man with such an obvious lack of integrity. But the truth is, the pain and anger were excruciating, compounded by the fact that as the next days and weeks passed, I discovered that Harry’s serial infidelities were the worst-kept secret in town. It seemed as if everyone knew but me, including my agent, who’d been sharing office space with Harry at my expense. Needless to say, I fired him immediately. A well-known soap columnist admitted in private that he’d spotted Harry several times at a restaurant called Jack’s at the Beach, not with Michelle but with Michelle’s best friend, and Harry had been seen by many of our mutual friends with several different girlfriends at screenings all over town while I was home studying the next day’s script. No wonder he’d been so adamant about not wanting to lose me and the children. We were the perfect defense against his having to make any long-term commitments to the many mistresses on whom he was also cheating. Using me was bad enough. Using my children? Really? The word “unforgivable” doesn’t begin to cover it. I’ve been told there are references on the Internet to the fact that Harry and I remained close friends after our separation and divorce. There you have it—absolute proof that you can’t believe everything you read online.

  It was an awful, painful, deeply insecure time in my life when there were very few places I could turn where I didn’t sense betrayal, secrets at my expense, and astonishing stupidity on my part. One of the places I could turn to was the Y&R studio, where I was valued and where Harry Bernsen meant nothing, and not a day went by when I wasn’t grateful for the safety net my coworkers, and Katherine Chancellor, for that matter, provided me when I needed it most.

  Things weren’t going all that smoothly for Katherine either, by the way. When her husband, Phillip, learned that his mistress, Jill, was carrying his child, he was ecstatic and asked Katherine for a divorce. Katherine, drunk as a skunk, signed the divorce papers and Phillip flew to the Dominican Republic to put a quick end to his marriage so that he could marry Jill.

  Katherine met his plane when he returned to Genoa City and offered to drive him home, during which she tried to convince him to give their marriage another try. When he refused, Katherine pushed the gas pedal to the floor while going around a curve, and the car flew off a cliff. Both Katherine and Phillip were critically injured. Shortly before he died, Phillip had the hospital chaplain marry him and Jill, a marriage Katherine had annulled by successfully alleging that because she’d been drunk when she signed the divorce papers, the divorce wasn’t legal and neither was Phillip and Jill’s marriage.

  One day Katherine’s beloved son, Brock (by her first husband, Gary Reynolds), arrived at her door and begged her to let him take her to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The “Friday cliffhanger” that week was a very shaky, hesitant, frightened Katherine stepping through the door of a meeting with Brock by her side. We had no idea if she was going to stay or run away . . . but Monday’s show opened with Katherine taking a deep breath and stepping forward to announce, “My name is Katherine, and I’m an alcoholic.”

  I was genuinely honored and humbled by the response to Katherine Chancellor’s rehab. For years afterward, I received thousands of letters from fans telling me that it was Katherine’s battle for sobriety that inspired them to overcome their own alcohol addiction, and at countless personal appearances people not only thanked me for the inspiration Katherine provided but also gave me their AA chips as a token of their gratitude. One woman in particular touched me deeply—she’d kept a note that I’d written to congratulate her on her first month of sobriety that was so old there was a three-cent stamp on the envelope. Katherine’s obvious impact on the Y&R audience, and the responsibility that impact carried with it, made such an impression on me that whenever I heard about an upcoming storyline in which Katherine was going to fall off the wagon, I wrote literally hundreds of letters to warn those very special fans what was coming and to remind them that it was only a fictionalized version of what could happen. “Don’t do it yourself,” I told them. “Let Katherine do it for you, and you’ll see, she’ll beat it again.”

  I hope each and every one of you knows what your stories continue to mean to me. I’ve never forgotten you, and I never will.

  Meanwhile, back in Beverly Hills, I filed for a legal separation as soon as I kicked Harry out of the house, but it took almost a year to get the actual divorce under way. During that year I worked hard, trying to regroup and getting invaluable emotional support from such real friends as Doris Day, who’d gone through her own marital nightmare with her late husband, Martin Melcher; Barbara Stanwyck, who lived up the street; and my darling Barbara Hale, whose friendship I continue to cherish to this day.

  Inevitably, all that emotional pain began to manifest itself physically, including an onset of severe stomach spasms. I was at lunch with a dear friend one day about six months into the legal separation when a particularly nasty spasm hit—suddenly I couldn’t breathe, and my stomach distended so horribly that I looked as if I were about eighteen months pregnant. My friend ordered two shots of brandy and told me not to sip them but to belt them down as fast as I could. And what do you know, a few moments later my muscles relaxed, I could breathe freely, and my stomach returned to its normal size. I’d never had any relationship with alcohol at that point in my life, for the simple reason that I just plain didn’t like the taste of it. But if it could calm these stomach spasms, and even my nerves, and make all this not hurt quite so much? Sure, hell, why not start keeping some brandy, or whatever, around the house just in case? It worked too, at first to get rid of the stomach spasms and, before long, to prevent them in the first place. Not only that, but it was also socially acceptable, legal, and readily accessible, and it helped me sleep. Even the taste wasn’t so bad once I got used to it. What had I been thinking, rejecting alcohol for all these years when it had so much to offer?

  The divorce proceeding itself was as predictable as the sun coming up. Harry showed up in court with a team of attorneys and a stack of falsified documents. I showed up with one lawyer and the truth. Harry thought he should receive alimony. The judge and I thought he shouldn’t. He thought I should continue living in our Beverly Hills house and pay him $5,000 a month rent. The judge and I thought the house should be sold and I should pay Harry $0 a month rent. The house went on the market the same day the divorce was finalized, and frankly, at that point, I didn’t really care where I went from there or what, if anything, I took with me. I just wanted out.

  Fortunately, my children did care, and Corbin found a wonderful house for me on Coldwater Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. It was beautiful, secluded, and peaceful but still an easy drive to work, and I loved it there. I spent countless hours decompressing in that house and thinking (maybe even obsessing) about how I got there. The truth, I came to realize, was that while Harry was happy to take every possible advantage of my success, he also resented me for it, and I promised myself I would never again put myself in the position of feeling apologetic for any achievement I damn well knew I’d earned. Nor would I ever again ignore for the sake of convenience what my heart was telling me—in this case, that I’d stayed far too long in a marriage to a man I no longer loved and had honestly come to dislike.

  I would and will always give him credit for two things: being one of the most brilliant agents I’d ever seen before his greed a
nd amorality ruined his career, and being the one and only man who could have given me these three magnificent children I wouldn’t trade for any other children on this earth.

  And while I thought, and regrouped, and relaxed, and faced facts, I drank. I tricked myself into thinking it helped, that it gave me added clarity—in vino veritas and all that. I became an enthusiastic social drinker, telling myself the lie that it didn’t affect my behavior in the least except to possibly make me more fun at parties, and I drank alone, which did make me privately wonder from time to time if I might be developing a problem. In general, though, having clearly learned nothing at all on this subject from Katherine Chancellor, by the time she’d become clean and sober, I’d become a full-blown alcoholic, and I stayed that way for a good—or frankly not so good—three or four years.

  Any illusion I might have had that I was a productive, high-functioning, discreet alcoholic (if there is any such thing) was shattered one day when my son Collin knocked at the door.

  “Pack a bag, Mom,” he said as he came striding into the house. “I’m taking you to St. John’s hospital.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked him.

  He stood facing me, and to this day I remember and admire how neither his voice nor his eyes wavered for an instant. “Bill Bell called. He has a big storyline coming up for you, and he needs you in rehab.”

  I took that in for a long time. Finally I managed to ask, “Is this mandatory?”

  “Yes, it is,” he answered, quiet but firm.

  My response was as big a surprise to me as it was to him—I blurted out a truly joyful, “Thank God!” and hurried to my room to pack.

  I loved rehab. Even during its hardest moments, I was aware that a team of people who’d been trained to help was leading me along an escape route from the prison of alcohol addiction I’d wandered into. I couldn’t have become clean and sober without the entire staff and the ongoing support of Alcoholics Anonymous. (Yes, I’m proud to say I’m a “Friend of Bill.”) Parenthetically, it was an ongoing source of fascination to me that during my stay at St. John’s, I was constantly greeted, even by my therapist, with a cheerful, familiar “How’s it going, Mrs. Chancellor?”

  I have no idea what the “big storyline” was that inspired Bill Bell to send me to rehab. I’m not even sure there was one; I think it was just his excuse to demand I get the help I needed. And believe me, I’m convinced that if I had refused, he would have fired me, and good for him. Good for him for caring enough about his show, and about me, to see to it that both of us had the best possible chance to succeed, no matter what it took. There are some network executives and producers today who could learn a valuable lesson from his example and probably save some lives in the process, just like, in so many ways, Bill Bell and The Young and the Restless saved mine.

  I’d been at Y&R for three or four months before I met Bill and Lee Phillip Bell. I knew the Bells lived in Chicago, where Lee Phillip was a star in her own right with her own daytime talk show. I knew they cocreated the show and that Bill was our head writer. I knew Bill was also a consultant on Days of Our Lives. And I knew he’d had another actress in mind for the role of Katherine Chancellor until John Conboy convinced him to give me a try. So it was a huge confidence boost when I glanced over one morning to see Bill and Lee standing discreetly offstage watching rehearsal, grinning from ear to ear. Bill’s blue eyes were literally twinkling, although his dubious pair of plaid pants caught my attention more. Lee exuded a warm, graceful charisma that made me look forward to getting to know her.

  We quickly became good friends. We genuinely liked and respected each other, and we became almost quasi-godparents to each other’s children—like me, Bill and Lee had two boys and a girl: Bill Jr., Bradley, and Lauralee. I still remember dancing with eleven-year-old Bill Jr. one night at the Beverly Hills Hotel and how fiercely protective I was of Lauralee when she joined the Y&R cast as Christine “Cricket” Blair and had to deal with the double-edged sword of being the boss’s daughter. And when my daughter, Caren, headed to Chicago for college, Bill and Lee made a heartfelt offer of “anything she needs, no matter what it is, all she has to do is pick up the phone.” She never took advantage of their generosity, but it meant the world to her, and to me, that she had someone close by who’d be there for her in a heartbeat.

  The Bell family eventually moved to Los Angeles, into a beautiful estate in Beverly Hills. They were staying at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel while their home was being renovated when I took the family to dinner one night and then ordered them to follow me to a kind of surprise party I’d arranged. Halfway there, they waved me over to the side of the road, and Bradley came running over to my car to explain that it was already past his father’s bedtime (at nine P.M.) and to ask if it would be all right if they just headed home and called it a night instead.

  “No, that would not be all right,” I told him. “A dear friend of mine is expecting us. If your father wants to leave and go home to bed after we get there, that’s fine with me, but we are showing up.”

  Our two-car procession pushed on, I’m sure with a lot of grumbling and whining in the rear car, until we finally arrived at our destination: a club in Hollywood called La Cage aux Folles, renowned for its spectacular, hilarious drag shows. I’d been there before to see my dear friend, a drag queen named James Haake, perform, and I loved every minute of it. (By the way, James, you once told me that, no matter what was going on in my life, I should devote two hours a day, every day, strictly to myself, because it would reduce my stress level and because I deserved it. I’ve been gratefully taking your advice ever since.)

  The Bell family looked understandably tentative as they followed me to our table in the crowded club, Bill cursing me under his breath and yearning for his pajamas, I’m sure. I ordered a round of drinks, which arrived just as the show began—a fabulous show that, thanks to James, was played directly to the Bells for the most part, with many of the standard songs slightly revised to include the name “Bill” (“It Had to Be Bill,” for example, and “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Bill of Mine”).

  It was one of those magical nights I even knew at the time I’d never forget. We all had fun, but none of us more than Bill, who started laughing and singing shortly after the show began and kept right on going until the Bells got back to their hotel at one A.M. In fact, Lee had to retrieve Bill from the middle of the street an hour later, where he’d decided to serenade the heart of Beverly Hills at the top of his lungs, and by all accounts that was the first and last time in his life Bill stayed up until three A.M. and loved every minute of it, whether he remembered it the next day or not.

  Chapter Five

  The Face-Lift Heard ’Round the World

  Not enough can be said about the genius of Bill Bell. The characters he created to populate Genoa City were bigger than life but always based in reality, and they never made an appearance until Bill had meticulously thought through their purpose, their impact, and their past, present, and potential future in the tapestry of Genoa City society. When a character didn’t work, usually because either the actor or the storyline wasn’t developing as he’d hoped, he was the first to erase the part from the canvas, sometimes unceremoniously—one character, for example, whose name I can’t recall, went upstairs in the Abbott house one day to wash her hair and was never seen or mentioned again. Bill’s core characters were part of his family, and even when they were written out of the show for some reason, he never killed them off. The main reason, of course, was that he always wanted to keep the option open to bring them back someday. But I always suspected a little superstition under the surface too: Bill wasn’t about to run the off-chance risk that ending the life of a fictional family member might compromise the safety of his nonfictional family.

  Bill lived and breathed The Young and the Restless. He was a workaholic who took his show and everyone involved very seriously, and he never expected more of any of us than he expected of himself. He also had a short fuse when he detec
ted laziness, disloyalty, or a lack of commitment, and since I’m not exactly known for having the world’s longest fuse myself, he and I had our share of yelling, screaming, shouting matches, as only two people can who are passionate about what they’re doing, know each other very well, and love each other as dear, dear friends.

  Bill had no use for people who complained about trivia, or, even worse, for the sheer attention of complaining. He was not the man to whine to if someone had a bigger dressing room than yours, or if you thought your parking space was an inconvenient distance from the artists’ entrance, or if you didn’t have as many lines as some other actor in any given script. And if you went to him to complain about a problem, you had better have a “fix” in mind, so that it would be a “Here’s what I’m unhappy about and here’s what could be done instead” conversation, rather than a simple, annoying “Here’s what I’m unhappy about.”

  What Bill and I fought about most often involved our occasional differences of opinion about Katherine Chancellor—not how her character was being developed, because it was hard to find fault with that, but how she expressed herself. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was some idiomatic word or phrase in a line of dialogue that drove me crazy enough to take on the boss.

  No one, I sometimes believed, knew Katherine Chancellor better than I did. But of course in the days of Bill Bell, that simply wasn’t true. He originated her on paper, and like every other character on the Y&R canvas, there was nothing imaginary about her as far as he was concerned—she was a real person and she was an essential part of his intellectual and emotional family. He never ceased to appreciate that he and I were Katherine’s “co-parents,” so to speak, but in a knock-down, drag-out fight about what she would or wouldn’t say, he always won.