I graduated from Yale School of Drama with a notebook full of relaxation exercises (designed to help me force myself onto a stage, when I was swamped with stage fright) and a copy of the phonetic alphabet, with which, in theory, I could approximate any of the accents that would be required of an actress who was going to be playing characters in the great theatrical works of western culture. I also acquired a new accent of my own, based on something called Mid-Atlantic Speech, which was supposed to qualify any American actor to work in Great Britain, but really just made us all sound kind of snotty.

I left behind me a list of student performances that included a couple of uninspired Chekhovian Masha’s, an incomprehensible Lady Anne in Richard III (I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what motivated that girl), a record for unintended laughs for my performance as Sara in A Touch of The Poet, and my one big triumph when I camped my way through a production of the old melodrama, Fashion, playing Gertrude The Governess, with a total lack of respect for any of the traditions of historic American Theater. I committed this heresy at the end of my final year, and the dean of the school called me into his office to give me a lecture about lowering my artistic standards by going for cheap laughs. I must always remember what I owed to the training I had received at Yale, said he. I must never sell out the lofty ideals of that institution. As I listened to him, I couldn’t help thinking that I wished I’d known how easy it was to get cheap laughs before I tackled Sara. Or, either of those Masha’s.

But, that was a brief moment of rebellion and I squashed it fast. I believed the dean. Having been to Yale, I had a higher calling than achieving mere commercial success. When I left school, I was supposed to get a job in a regional theater, somewhere in the hinterlands, where I would play bit parts in great plays while continuing to hone my craft. Over the years, I would work my way up to secondary and then leading roles until, finally, one day, in some theater, somewhere, I would give the world my Hedda Gabler. Even if I was pretty sure no one would enjoy my Hedda. Even if I knew I wouldn’t. Regional theaters regularly held auditions, and Yale kept its graduating acting students informed about the time and place of these events. I managed to miss all of them. And, no, I don’t want to try to dig into that. Anyone can oversleep a few times. Okay, many times. The point is, when I left school, I had no other option for employment but the dreaded commercial theater. I was headed for New York and the bright lights of Broadway. I told myself I was sad about it.

I walked into the city prepared for… nothing. Broadway, back then was home to (mostly) musicals and tired-businessmen comedies. I could sing any ditty that required a thirteen-string lute, but belting out a Broadway show tune was beyond me. As for landing a role in an old-school comedy, at five feet, eight inches tall and not sylph-like, I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a spunky little ingenue. Also, in those shows, it was the ingenue who provided the sex appeal – and a reassuring hipness for the middle-aged audiences -- by wearing trendy-for-day mini-skirts. You needed long, slim legs to carry off a mini-skirt. I had (and still have) legs that were designed to hold up a piano.

The odds against my ever landing a gig seemed overwhelming. But then, like every other newbie actor in the city I discovered Off Off Broadway. Traditionally, Off Off Broadway was where the exciting experimental theater was done. In the early Sixties, that meant a form of entertainment known as Happenings. These offerings --it wouldn’t be accurate to call them plays – were done in high crime districts, usually in abandoned buildings with tricky flooring and an active rodent population. Most of the time there wasn’t an actual script. The characters had names like Spirit of Hate and Shit Eating Centipede. Actors were encouraged to improvise angry riffs on the government, the Vietnam war, and their parents. You might also be called upon to pantomime anatomically impossible sex acts or you could be told to break raw eggs over yourself and roll in feathers on the floor, while doing Om chants. The one certainty was that at some point in the evening’s festivities, you and the rest of the cast would turn on the audience and start snarling at them. You might toss a raw egg or two in their direction. It definitely wasn’t Hedda Gabler. But it was a way to work. The creators of Happenings were willing to cast unknowns. In fact, if you were young and desperate, you were their performer of choice.

What they wouldn’t do was pay you. Not that I ever heard anyone suggest that they should. We were artists, and talk about money was uncool. Like every other actor I knew I supported myself by waiting on tables, working nights so I could make the rounds of agents’ offices during the day. I lived in a studio on the fifth floor of a run-down brownstone on the Upper West Side, next to a park favored by the local drug dealer as his main place of business. Hot water in my home was spotty. Heat in the winter was spottier. There were wet patches on the floor in the hallway that I didn’t want to think about, and the two sisters who lived in the apartment below me entertained gentlemen callers for a living. One of their regulars had the delightful habit of getting drunk and breaking down the front door of the brownstone, instead of waiting for them to let him in. I told myself I was good with all of it. But then a couple of miracles happened -- after almost a year of knocking on agent’s doors I landed one, and a few weeks later I scored a part in a play. A play with dialogue that was written down. A play that was headed for Broadway. A play that paid me a salary. When I recovered from the shock, I grabbed the real estate section of the New York Times and started looking for an apartment.

On our opening night at the Belasco Theater, on the backstage callboard, next to the pile of telegrams congratulating the cast and crew, the producers of the show posted the closing notice. Two weeks later I was unemployed.

I told myself it could have happened to anyone. I told myself that it was crazy to think God was punishing me for skipping all those regional theater auditions at Yale. Or for hating Hedda Gabler. I bought a new can of Mace and braced myself to audition for more Happenings. But my new agent had another idea for me and my career. He said I’d have to keep an open mind about it which made me a little nervous. Then he said he’d take me to The Russian Tearoom to discuss it, which really scared me because that was a pricey restaurant and he’d never bought me as much as a cup of coffee before that moment. But I was in no position to be negative, so I said I loved borscht and off we went. At lunch he downed two vodkas in rapid succession, but he still couldn’t bring himself to pitch his idea. By then I was pretty sure it included work in the world of adult entertainment. I was getting ready to tell him that I wasn’t that kind of actress -- or woman -- when he pulled himself together and blurted out that he wanted to submit me for a contract role in a daytime drama. As in a soap opera. As in the joke genre of our industry. As in, an insult to a serious actor. Having delivered his bombshell, he cringed back into his chair and waited for me to storm out of the restaurant.

It was what I should have done. It was what any self-respecting actor would have done. But I had a dirty secret. Artistically speaking, it was even worse than my very public desecration of Gertrude The Governess. Once, when I was a kid, I had become besotted with a soap opera. The show was called Miss Susan. The lead character was a lady lawyer in a wheelchair, and the actress who played her was in one. in real life. I have no idea why that show got to me the way it did, but one winter I leaned into my limited acting skills and conned my mom into believing that a twenty-four bout of the flu had extended into a week so I could stay home from school and watch my guilty pleasure. And I had never forgotten how much pleasure it was. So, decades later, in the Russian Tearoom, I didn’t storm out in a cloud of professional outrage. Instead, I heard myself ask, “How long is the contract?

It took my startled agent a moment to recover himself but he admitted that I would be consigning myself to this degradation for three years. By the time I was free again, I would be branded as a soap actor. Rehabilitating myself after that wouldn’t be easy. It might not even be possible. Clearly, I had to turn down the audition; to do anything else was career suicide. But before I could say the words, my agent, who knew when to pounce, told me what my salary would be. In one day on the soap opera I’d earn more than I did in a week as a waitress. I’d earn more than I’d made in half a week on Broadway. I was a sheltered girl from the suburbs who was used to amenities like a functioning furnace and a front door I could lock. I was sick of washing my hair in ice water.

“I’ll go and read,” I said. “For the fun of it. If I get the job I don’t have to take it.”

“Of course not,” said my agent, the snake in the grass.

The audition was held at Grey Advertising Agency, which was in a civilized neighborhood. The floors of the building were not only stable and dry, they were carpeted. I was reading for the part of Anne, a young woman who was arguing with her mother-in-law about a domestic problem that I found a lot easier to relate to than the rantings of either The Spirit of Hate, or Hedda Gabler. My treacherous middle-class heart shouted that I’d found my artistic home. I did my best to shut it down. But I had a great audition. Even I knew it. I didn’t get the job—I was too tall for the guy who’d be playing my love interest -- so I didn’t have to find out if I actually would have turned it down, but I knew it had been a close call. Way too close. I promised myself that I would never flirt with temptation in that way again. Then the rat committed suicide in my toilet. I found it floating there one chilly morning when the furnace was out again. Obviously, I didn’t know what drove it to end it all, and I never will; although, since it was living in my apartment, I can guess. What I know for a fact, was the effect its watery death had on my life. I called my agent and told him I’d read for any soap opera that would have me. Then I moved to a hotel.

A few weeks later I read for the part of Emily Rogers Hunter on Search for Tomorrow and I got the job. And I loved it. We worked super-fast, grinding out the same amount of content in one day that prime time took a week to shoot. There was no time to think or, in my case, to overthink. I learned that I could memorize wads of dialogue quickly, and I was good in a crisis. Search for Tomorrow was a fifteen-minute show and it wasn’t done live by the time I joined the cast, but we only had the cameras for the amount of time that it took to shoot our quarter of an hour. We didn’t stop for anything. Literally. A set could fall down behind us -- and they did -- and we went on. I once delivered a half a page of dialogue while clutching a portion of a wall that hadn’t been properly spiked, and was in danger of rolling away. I didn’t miss a beat. Afterward I got a standing O from the crew.

But more important than any of that, I discovered that I was perfectly suited to soap opera acting. It dealt with human emotion. In the very best sense of the word, it was melodrama. I had what I learned to refer to as a quick emotional instrument. In real life that made me an overly sensitive, overreacting, emotional basket case. On a soap set it was gold. I could relate to the sorrows and joys of Emily with ease. Portraying all of it felt real to me in a way that nothing else ever had, and I wanted to share it with an audience I knew I’d never meet but I hoped that, somehow, I’d connect with them. And soap audiences were amazing. They got it. And they weren’t just loyal viewers; they wrote letters and let the actors know that they got it. Working for them was the most satisfying thing I’d ever done. And that was my problem. I thought I had to suffer for my art. Acting on a soap was never even close to suffering for me.

My stint on Search ended eventually and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do daytime again. And for a while I held to that noble stance. I worked in a repertory company and I did some off Broadway. But those gigs ended, and I was back to auditioning and worrying about the rent. I really hated worrying about the rent. So, when another soap beckoned, I gave in, once again, to the siren call of regular work that I actually enjoyed and a steady paycheck. And that began a pattern that lasted for a few years for me. I’d land a soap job, love it while it lasted, and tell myself I wouldn’t do it again when it ended. I’d swear that, this time, I was going to do the work I was supposed to do. But after a few months of nail-biting unemployment, another soap job would pop up, and I‘d jump at it. I’d avoid my Yale reunion that year, and apologize for my choice to anyone who would listen; but I’d jump. And I’d live with the guilt.

Until the year when all of that changed for me. I was in my dressing room in the 46th Street Theater. My last soap opera job had ended a few months earlier when the show was cancelled and I’d landed a bit part in a pricey Broadway show that was designed to bring in the lucrative matinee crowd. My last months on the soap had been bittersweet. The show had been on the air for almost five years and most of the cast had been with it from the beginning. As a good bye, our writers handed us a big story full of achy emotion to see us off the air. Okay, it was melodramatic. But it was also heartfelt, and we played it with full hearts. And we nailed it. I had the proof of that on my dressing room table. It was a letter that had been sent to all of us after the soap went off the air and someone at the studio had made copies of it and mailed it to us. I walked to my dressing room window and looked down at the street as a busload of well-heeled women got out, chatting and laughing, and made their way into the theater for an afternoon of fluffy entertainment. Then I went back to my table and picked up the letter and reread it. I don’t remember word for word what it said, but it was from a woman whose mother had recently died after a long illness. She said her mother had had a hard life and, when she was told she was going to die, she couldn’t let herself grieve. But when she was in the hospital, there was a television in her room, and one of the nurses turned on our show. And this next part I do remember. “Mom watched you every day,” the woman wrote. “And sometimes she cried. She couldn’t cry for herself but she could cry for you. I wanted you to know that.”

The Broadway show ended and true to my pattern another soap job came along. I took it gladly. And I never apologized again.I Sold Out – And Loved It.