A Posthumous Encore

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THE GUIDING LIGHT
For Soap Star Michael Zaslow, a Posthumous Encore

By Paula Span
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 25, 1999
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

Michael Zaslow expected to be at the Golden Theatre tonight.

He planned to motor onstage in his bright red scooter and welcome the audience to the benefit he'd helped organize, using a computer voice-synthesizer he'd relied on since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease) had taken his ability to speak and walk.

Then, after watching a reading of the play "Love Letters" from the wings, he intended to wheel back out and read from a talk he gave in Washington last spring, while lobbying for ALS research funding. "We are going to be heard," his electronic voice would proclaim. And the crowd of soap stars, Broadway actors, ALS activists and worshipful fans would surely have cheered his courage in revealing, and then publicly combating, his illness.

None of that will happen: Zaslow died last month at age 54. But the show will go on, although subtly changed. Ever since his diagnosis in 1997, Zaslow -- an Emmy winner as the despicable yet dashing villain of "Guiding Light" -- had determinedly exploited his daytime-TV celebrity. Dumped from the drama when his speech began to falter, he landed a job on ABC's "One Life to Live" playing a character with ALS; he and his daytime co-stars filmed public service announcements, held fund-raisers, buttonholed legislators. In short, officials of the ALS Association say, he'd done more to educate the public about Lou Gehrig's disease than anyone since Lou Gehrig.

Tonight's gathering, featuring Alec Baldwin, Blair Brown, Jane Alexander, Kim Zimmer of "Guiding Light" and a raft of Zaslow's other soap colleagues, "was just going to be a benefit," says Mimi Torchin, editor of Soap Opera Weekly. "Now, it's going to be a public memorial."

Daytime TV is known for generating decades-long audience loyalty. Though Zaslow acted off-Broadway and on (he and his actress wife met in the original production of "Fiddler on the Roof") and appeared in movies and prime-time series, he'll probably always be remembered as Roger Thorpe, the scourge of fictional Springfield, a role he left and returned to several times over more than two decades.

Roger was a nasty piece of work: He raped his wife, Holly, and was acquitted of the crime, whereupon, in a delusional state, she shot him. "A tortured relationship," Torchin notes. Fans loved him nonetheless, which may explain why he survived, only to fall off a cliff in Santo Domingo a few years later when Zaslow wanted a break from the show. Despite Roger's funeral, a minor impediment in daytime drama, "Guiding Light" viewers never stopped hoping for his return. And in 1989, after Zaslow had spent several years playing a much nicer fellow -- concert pianist David Renaldi -- on "One Life to Live," Roger did resurface in Springfield. (He'd been a spy all along, it seemed, and had faked his demise.)

Given this long history together, viewers naturally noticed when Zaslow's speech began to slur late in 1996. "I started getting e-mails and letters from fans, asking if I knew what was wrong," Torchin says. "There was clearly something the matter." Rumors circulated that he'd suffered a stroke, that he was having trouble with alcohol.

In fact, Zaslow did not know what was causing his vocal problems, and a round of doctors' appointments provided no explanation. "He just knew things weren't coming out right," says his wife, Susan Hufford, now a psychotherapist. "It was horrible." Procter & Gamble, which owns "Guiding Light," lowered the boom as his symptoms continued month after month. "They called him in after a show and said, 'Michael, this is your last show. We're going to have to replace you,' " Hufford recalls. Suddenly unemployed with two daughters to support, facing some mysterious malady, "he was in shock; we all were."

On Internet news groups and chat rooms, in petitions to P&G, in letters to soap magazines, Zaslow's fans soon made their fury known. A perfectly decent actor brought in to replace Zaslow was thoroughly rejected; Roger Thorpe was eventually written out of the show. "We were outraged," says Teresa Brown, a fervent fan and an assistant attorney general in West Virginia who helped design a protesting Web page. "Michael was one of the legends of daytime! I don't think 'All My Children' would recast Erica Kane" -- played, since time began, by Susan Lucci."

But Zaslow, who'd sought union arbitration and eventually negotiated a settlement with P&G, had more immediate concerns. A Houston specialist finally diagnosed ALS in 1997 and, Hufford says, "I couldn't tell you if it was worse before we knew, or afterwards." A lethal neuro-muscular disease, ALS leaves patients' minds intact while progressively rendering them unable to use their limbs, speak or swallow and, eventually, breathe. The disease strikes about 5,000 Americans annually -- roughly equal to the number of cases of multiple sclerosis -- and the probable life expectancy is two to five years. (Physicist Stephen Hawking, also a victim, has survived considerably longer.) Scientists have yet to determine a cause or a cure; the only drug approved for treatment prolongs life by a few months at best. Caring for an increasingly disabled person drains families both emotionally and financially.

Zaslow, friends say, managed to resist despair and inertia in the face of such news. The son of lefty parents, politically inclined himself, he'd worked with the Creative Coalition, been a leader in his union, hosted benefits in Washington for Handgun Control Inc. "We're obsessive, proactive people; it's not in our nature to do nothing," Hufford says. With industry friends, they formed ZazAngels [ www.michaelzaslow.com ], which operates under the Greater New York Chapter of the ALS Association to find "A Cure by 2000" (Zaslow ignored cautions that his motto might prove unrealistic) and to raise awareness.

Key to the latter was finding a way to keep himself before the public. Zaslow wanted to show "that people live with ALS, not just die with it," Hufford says. "They can think, they have a sense of humor, they can still be winners." ABC executives, to whom Hufford and Zaslow pitched the idea of a return to "One Life to Live," were intrigued. So last spring, David Renaldi resurfaced in fictional Llanview after more than a decade -- he'd also been a spy, it turned out -- using a wheelchair (though Zaslow could still walk at the time) and that oddly inflected synthesized voice. ABC draped a sign outside its West Side studio for his first day: "Welcome Home, Michael." He worked for three long days his first week to reestablish the story line, then came back for a day's shooting every other week or so. His real-life problems got incorporated into scripts: When Zaslow fell, David Renaldi got to explain why he had bruises; when a cab company hung up after hearing Zaslow's computerized voice, Renaldi encountered the same frustration.

"There certainly were concerns, before he started, about whether he'd be able to do this," says Jill Farren Phelps, the show's executive producer, a daytime colleague for two decades. "They evaporated the minute he came on camera. He was still the fine actor we'd known for so long." Though Zaslow's stamina did decrease as the months passed, "Michael was a warrior," Phelps says.

As vain as any star, Zaslow hated to be seen in his diminished condition: He was becoming gaunt; his mouth drooped; he sometimes drooled because he couldn't swallow well. His co-workers, too, faced an adjustment. "Given the kind of intense physical attractiveness he'd had, to see him have great difficulty walking, unable to talk -- many of us were rendered speechless for a moment as well," says Robin Strasser, who plays Dorian, the mother of David Renaldi's illegitimate daughter. "ALS can be very fast."

Yet working was a tonic. In fact -- also like any star -- Zaslow was hoping the writers would give his character more to do. "He thrived on work," Hufford says. "The weeks he wasn't working were when he got depressed."

He wasn't the first actor to play a disabled character on daytime TV, which has a history of incorporating social issues into its plots, or even the first disabled actor to play a disabled character. "What was groundbreaking was, he had a disease no one has ever survived, and it's progressive," Torchin observes. "You watched his deterioration, whether you wanted to or not."

Still, no one expected his death quite so suddenly or so soon. Zaslow had been spending hours in intensive physical therapy; his family thought he was regaining some strength. In early December, Hufford says, he managed to stand unassisted for the first time in weeks. Yet three days later, she came home from their daughter's violin recital to find two ambulances outside their apartment building. "I started running," she says. "I knew."

Friends and co-workers packed a memorial service a few days later -- "it was almost like the Emmy awards," says one who attended -- but tonight's event will be the first at which the public can pay tribute. Hundreds of fans from a dozen states have sent for tickets (a few are still available via the ALS Association's Greater New York Chapter at 800-672-8857). Among them is Teresa Brown, who says she and several other West Virginians will try not to cry, because Michael loved great parties. The fate of David Renaldi, onetime concert pianist living with ALS, has yet to be determined.

Meanwhile, Hufford has this extremely minor consolation: While most ALS patients succumb to their respiratory problems, her husband's immediate cause of death was a heart attack. Somehow, it matters. "Michael always said he didn't want ALS to get him," she recalls. "So I say, it didn't."