Soap Opera Digest Interview: July 4, 1995

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GUIDING LIGHT's Maureen Garrett and Michael Zaslow
Look Back On Two Decades of Joy, Sorrow and Faked Deaths.

Here's what you need to know: Holly came to Springfield in 1970. Roger showed up the following year. In 1975, their daughter, Christina, was born. In 1979, they married, Roger raped Holly, Holly shot Roger. Roger died and Holly went to jail. In 1980, Roger came back to life and followed Holly to Santo Domingo, where he died, again. Holly left town, but returned in 1989 --- as did Roger. They've been fighting and reconciling and fighting ever since.

DIGEST: Has GL given up on reuniting Holly and Roger?

ZASLOW: No, no, no. At least, Roger hasn't given up.

DIGEST (TO ZASLOW): Roger and Dinah could be a fun pair.

ZASLOW: I know. My parents and I were talking about the new people on the show and my mother was saying how much she likes Cynthia [Watros, Annie]. And I said, "Well, what about Dinah?" And there was a silence and my father said, "She doesn't like that story." She thinks Dinah's too young for me.

GARRETT: Does she have trouble with Vanessa and Matt?

ZASLOW: I don't think so. Just with me and Dinah.

GARRETT: It's a shame, because we were looking forward to playing Holly and Roger in a healthy, mature, give-and-take relationship. The powers-that-be did not find that dramatically interesting, so they quickly diverted us from that track.

DIGEST: Producers think that a happy couple is a boring couple.

ZASLOW: But what is "happy", anyway? If I think about my relationship with my wife over the last 20 years --- we weren't always happy. We fought, we loved, we worked. It is happy, ultimately, from some long perspective, but it's not without drama, let me tell you.

GARRETT: And forgiveness is such a a large element of any long-term relationship. I always get letters asking, "How could Holly forgive her rapist?" Now, I don't mean to minimize it at all, but [the rape] was in the context of a relationship that continued over the years. Over the years, Holly really felt Roger's remorse. She really came to believe that if he could take back anything in his life, he would take back that one night.

ZASLOW: People do change. Redemption is possible.

DIGEST: Did you try to make the rape scenes as graphic as possible?

ZASLOW: Oh, yes. Roger had already raped Rita, and when that aired, I was devastated because it looked like they had had a pretty good time. I thought that was irresponsible. So when they came to us with this rape storyline, I said I would only do it if it was clearly an act of violence, and that nobody -- including Roger -- was having fun. When it was done, Maureen had a black eye and bruises all over.

DIGEST: Was it hard to distance yourselves from the pain your characters were going through during the rape storyline?

ZASLOW: Very much so.

GARRETT: It was very difficult. I was younger then, and when you're young, you take things so seriously. I kept having to remind myself, "They're not my problems, they're Holly's problems."

DIGEST: What do you remember about the Santo Domingo shoot?

ZASLOW: That was a ball. We were such a mess! We took it seriously. Our clothes were filthy.

GARRETT: I had three versions of the same dress, all in various stages of dirtiness and disarray.

DIGEST: What time of year was it?

ZASLOW: Winter. It was the perfect time to go, because I was leaving the show. Roger was dying, and I was booked to do "Macbeth" in Atlanta immediately afterward. In fact, once the dummy plunged off the cliff, they gave me its head to take down to Atlanta because at the end of "Macbeth", Macbeth's [severed] head gets put up on a pike by Macduff.

DIGEST (TO ZASLOW): Did you really think Roger had died then?

ZASLOW: Oh, yes. I insisted that he die. I did not want to do any more television, really, and knowing Roger was alive would have been too strong a temptation, because I had come back so many times. And they did kill me. But a decade later, needing a knee operation, having a child and knowing the knee operation would make me unemployable [in the theater] for a year ...

GARRETT: Things change, perspectives change. And I left [GL] too, shortly after the Santo Domingo story. The Roger/Holly story had come to and end. I wanted to do something else. What intrigued me about coming back 10 years later was the chance to play the Roger/Holly story again.

DIGEST (TO ZASLOW): Did you have to test for Roger Thorpe originally?

ZASLOW: Oh, certainly. I was doing "Fiddler On The Roof" on Broadway at the time, and I had this full beard. They wanted me to shave it off for the screen test. I refused because I was sure I wouldn't get [the part] and then I'd have to wear a miserable fake beard night after night as a reminder that I didn't get it. So I said, "Here's a picture of me without the beard. If you give me the role, I'll shave." They weren't happy, but they bit the bullet, so I shaved.

GARRETT: When I started, I was told that they had written Holly into such a corner being bad that they wanted to bring on someone new and have her be good. [Garrett replaced Lynn Deerfield, who played Holly from 1970-76.] So they gave Holly a personality change. But when I returned to the show in 1989 to play Blake's mother, they wanted me to make my hair gray so I would look old enough to be her mother. I said, "No, I'll just play older."

ZASLOW: I, however, agreed to dye my hair gray for the role.

DIGEST (TO ZASLOW): When GL first approached you about coming back in 1989, didn't they ask you to play Alan?

ZASLOW: Yeah. And I was deep in debt, and I really could have used the job, but I felt that to play a character that Roger was so involved with before would have been abusive to viewers. I said, "Well, if Roger were to make some miraculous entrance from the dead, you have my number." They said, "But he fell off a cliff!" Eventually, they viewed the tape and decided that he bounced.

DIGEST: Well, the episode where Roger fell ran long, so viewers never actually got to see his corpse.

ZASLOW: That's right. It was fate. So I came back in the mask.

DIGEST: How was wearing the mask?

ZASLOW: Dreadful, dreadful. It was leather and it got very sweaty.

DIGEST: Do you keep in touch with the first two Blakes?

GARRETT: Um, a while ago I got a postcard from the first Blake, Elizabeth Dennehy. She just got married in Ireland. And I get messages from Sherry [Stringfield, ER's Susan] through other people.

ZASLOW: My daughters love Sherry. They always want to see her.

DIGEST: Speaking of daughters, another good story was when Holly and Michelle began to connect.

GARRETT: Yes! I wish they hadn't dropped that. Holly was so needy of that relationship because she was so estranged from her own daughter and everyone else in town at that time. And it had that interesting culmination at the Cliffhouse, when Roger was holding onto Ed when he was about to fall off the balcony, which was the reverse of Santo Domingo, when Ed was holding onto Roger.

ZASLOW: Well, they are very symbiotic relationships. Despite all the acrimony, it's hard to imagine ... if Roger died, how would Ed really feel? What would Ed really think? And vice versa.

GARRETT: That works so well in stories that go on like this when they are structured that way. The geometry ...

ZASLOW: It's déjà-vû all over again.

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