It was eventually explained to me by the show’s resident historians that The Doctors’s golden years predated the “youth revolution” in daytime drama, when soaps were launched featuring stars and storylines that were younger and the change in demographics pushed more mature actors into the background, into supporting roles. So our cast was an anomaly. The colorful casting director, Roger Sturtevant, along with his partner Pat McCorkle, eschewed hiring models in favor of trained actors for whom the TV gig meant a steady paycheck and medical insurance that allowed them to do theater. Valerie Mahaffey, John Pankow, and Tuck Milligan were among the actors given favorable shooting schedules that allowed them to appear onstage at a Wednesday matinee, and Elizabeth Hubbard and Jim Pritchett, principal players who had been with the show for years, took theater roles during their hiatus from the show. The theater was all they talked about. Hollywood might as well have been the Kimberley diamond mines in terms of their familiarity with or interest in it. Before I had arrived, Kathleen Turner left the show and went to Hollywood to shoot Body Heat. Upon hearing the title, someone in the cast of the soap asked if she had starred in a porn film.
The show taped at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in a small studio that seemed as if NBC had forgotten it was even there. Some of the aging, battle-weary crew dated back to the days of Dave Garroway and Carson’s early stint in New York. Saturday Night Live was a television sensation that was about to undergo a fallow period coinciding with the brief absence of Lorne Michaels. The building housed the Today show and Tom Snyder and not much else. Each day after work, I walked out of 30 Rock knowing that there were elevator operators who were better known at NBC than I was. No one was watching the show. The scripts were anemic, but David O’Brien, who played my father, explained that it was hard to expect much more from the writers, who had to churn out fresh pages every day. He said it was our job to try our best to bring something to it.
O’Brien was the first person to greet me and embrace me. He served as my invaluable guide and dear friend during my debut in the business. As elegant as Cary Grant, as witty as No?l Coward, and as quick as Johnny Carson, O’Brien was one of the kindest, most intelligent and urbane men I’ve ever known. Unlike some of the veterans, who seemed wary of the young additions to the cast, as the show became less and less about them, O’Brien loved actors of all ages and extended himself easily. He was playful one moment and instructive the next. He was kind, patient, and funny every day, and his sense of humor about the job, and the business in general, helped me handle what was often a frustrating introduction to acting in front of a camera.
The show was shot “live to tape,” so we were asked to perform it almost like theater: don’t stop, unless absolutely necessary, as to do so required extra time and money. No wonder theater actors tended to thrive in this venue. The pressure could be tough. Recalling line after line of often trite and repetitive dialogue wasn’t easy. Giving a real performance was elusive. Early on, every day ended with the thought “Better luck tomorrow.” But O’Brien knew every trick in the book and didn’t hesitate to share them with me. His one overarching note? “When you don’t know what to play, I recommend ‘Someone in this room farted and I intend to find out who,’” he cracked.
As a few months passed, I was given more to do. The producers wanted me to play a self-involved, semiruthless, amoral cad. It didn’t matter if I possessed the personal character of Abraham Lincoln or John Glenn. The audience liked characters who were bad. That’s what the producers wanted me to be. O’Brien would tell me acting is about making the audience believe what I’m saying. Some choose to go to the gym every day, dye their hair, whiten their teeth, and hope they get lucky enough to play some uncomplicated leading man or superhero. But if you learn how to act any role, he said, the options get better. That hit me hard about six months into the job. I had thought about quitting, feeling like an idiot for abandoning my plan to go to law school in order to stand on some moldy old set saying, “But, Greta—I love you!” over and over again. However, having spent hour after hour observing the people around me, younger and older, I realized that what was considered good acting was hard to do. I owe that to O’Brien. He told me to view the soap as a means to an end. “Don’t ever think that this is all you are or could be,” he said. During his breaks from the show, he would go off and perform plays like Light Up the Sky at the John Drew or King John at the McCarter. Val Mahaffey was doing Top Girls downtown. John Pankow had understudied Peter Firth in Amadeus. Tuck, who became a good friend, performed all over the country in Equus, The Crucifer of Blood, Big River, and The Kentucky Cycle. At nearly every turn, it was drilled into me that the goal was to learn how to act and that such learning could best be achieved in the theater.
After work, which ended at around three or four o’clock, we would go downstairs to Hurley’s, a Rockefeller Center restaurant, where O’Brien and other members of the cast taught me how to drink by following their example. We would order some small plates of food, just substantial enough to prepare the way for the booze that was to follow. Then it was post time. The sound track of this drinking scene, however, was different. I was no longer in some damp, suburban woods in Massapequa. No one was going to burst in here and order me to take out the garbage or shovel the snow or tell me that my parents’ check had bounced. I didn’t have to cut my neighbors’ grass to pay my bar bill. I’d light another cigarette and think, “Who the fuck cares where I have to be at six thirty? This is where I want to be. This is what home feels like now.” I’d get warmer, sillier, cozier. In this honey-colored state, if there was a woman between the ages of eighteen and fifty nearby, I feigned interest in whatever she was interested in, so long as she let me believe there was genuine hope for some kind of future for us. Sitting at a bar in New York City in 1980, I was falling in love, but not with a woman in a silk dress, her face turned away, her love poured out for someone else. As I learned to drink alongside some of the best actors I would ever meet, I was falling in love with show business and the people in it.