My Exclusive Interview with BRIDGET DOBSON - Part Four

We’re coming to the fourth part of my interview with Bridget Dobson. If you have missed the previous parts, you can read them by clicking here. Finally we have come to SANTA BARBARA. As Bridget Dobson recalls, “NBC-TV called to ask if we were to own a show, if we were to be in complete charge of every creative aspect of a show, from sets and costumes and hairstyles and music to every minute detail of the production, acting and writing, would we be willing to work again? Nobody in history had ever been asked this question.  Not before and not since. We were being offered total creative control of an hour a day television drama five days a week.” Ms. Dobson is about to tell us how SB was born, how they convinced Dame Judith Anderson to star on SB and everything about the birth of a series that has made ​ worldwide television’s history. Did you know that one of the four SB families was not part of the Dobsons’ original idea? Reading this interview is the only way to find out which family I’m talking about… Enjoy!

We finally come to the “mountain to climb”. When you and your husband conceived the idea of SB, what was your starting point – a particular character? A certain plot? How was Santa Barbara born?

The mountain was indeed in front of us, once the contract with NBC-TV was signed.  At that point in time, I had started to outline a novel, which Warner Books was interested in publishing, but we knew we couldn't do both the tv serial and the book.  It was an easy decision to use the basic structure of the book, two somewhat competitive (though quite different) families and an ethnic (Mexican) family, in the soap. The characters seemed indigenous to Santa Barbara: they were the people we saw in a daily way, and they were seemingly as one with the sunshine, the ocean, the architecture, the air.  They belonged to the land as much as the land belonged to them.  

The challenge was to make the characters fascinating (each in his own right) and the stories riveting.  To strengthen our own experience in drama, we turned to great examples of literature and theater. Day after day, little by little, we scoured and devoured most, if not all, of Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, early cinema, Tennessee Williams, among many others.  We gradually eschewed the examples of “typical” families we had experienced on other soaps.  Relationships were never simple, always complicated by all the rivulets of emotion that infiltrate much of classic literature. Inundated, we made background notes on our favorite dramatic and psychological themes. With this huge and intense spectrum of dramatic precedent which had survived through the ages, with the further understanding (reading Freud, Jung, and more) that these themes were still being repeated in every modern culture on this planet (not to mention our own lives), we began to mold our own drama around the Capwells, the Lockridges, and the Andrades. 

Dame Judith Anderson, a diminutive woman of towering ...even booming...personal strength, was a small but important part of the social fabric of our lives at the time.  We had attended a few of the same parties, barely spoken a few words to her. She was also a neighbour.  We jogged past her house every day.  Jerry and I had seen her performances in “Medea” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, and we, like most people, were utterly awed. Early on, before the show was fully formed, we knew we wanted to have her be part of SB. But how dare we?  It was a dream, that's all, a wish, a fantasy. This woman had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth for her abilities as an actress.  She was universally revered. Not only was the thought verboten, it was presumptuous beyond belief. Inviting her to be part of our regular cast would be like inviting Hoover Dam to dance.  And so it began.....

I felt a similar emotion when I dared to ask you for an interview, except that I am a humble fan. How did you manage to convince her to accept the role?

Fearful - indeed, practically certain - of rejection, Jerry and I flipped a coin to see who would be the unlucky one to visit “DJ” (Dame Judith) and speak to her about being a regular on our show.  I won.  Jerry had to go to her house.  He was gone a very long time. Hours and hours.  When he came home, his left hand was bleeding heavily and looked like a ball of ground beef.  He explained that DJ's much adored little dog had spent the entire interview on Jerry's lap, chewing on his flesh.  He didn't complain -not so much as a grimace or groan, and he didn't throw the little bitch out the window, which may have been his inclination - because he didn't want to do anything to irritate DJ.  He was successful.  Though he had a (temporarily) non-functioning left hand, with literally dozens of puncture wounds, and blood stained clothes, we had our first cast member. The only thing Jerry had to promise her, creatively, was that she could "still be sexy" and she could carry a riding crop (she wanted a whip, but he talked her out of it) at all times.

Next problem: her contract.  DJ had no agent or lawyer.  Jerry and I never negotiated contracts (other than our own).  So she negotiated on her own behalf with our attorney in NY.  (Our attorney was very impressed that this senior citizen - she lied about her age, said she was 74 - was tough and astute in every conversation he had with her.) They came to terms in a few weeks. Except for one major detail, which was a deal-breaker:  she wanted the services, in her own home, one day per week, of the Dobson's full-time maid.  Take it or leave it.  

In addition to the riding crop, she was allowed to change the name of her character, from Birdie to Minx, maybe not everybody knows that. However, casting the patriarch of the Capwells was more complicated. Lloyd Bochner, your first choice, suffered a heart attack a few days after the first shooting. So he was replaced by Peter M. Richman, then briefly  by Paul Burke, later by Charles Bateman and finally by Jed Allan. Why was it so difficult to find the right CC Capwell?

There are frequent casting complications on daytime dramas.  Actors become sick or pregnant or, perhaps, they aren't as good as they were first thought to be.  Sometimes an actor can't handle the volume of memorization required on a soap.  It is not unusual - certainly not unheard of - to make more than one change in the casting. Four different actors is not what anyone wants, but considering health problems, and the need to make rapid changes, and the outsized demands of a daily hour-long drama, I am not surprised.

At the beginning the show consisted of a representative microcosm – the wealthy Capwells, the eccentric Lockridges, the Mexican Andrades and, from the middle class, the Perkins. In addition, to balance the tension linked to the murder of Channing Junior, there were the young players (Ted, Laken, Danny and Jade) off to Hollywood, and also the pungent irony of Minx. Soon the Perkins, the Andrades and Minx began to appear less often. Was that just the normal adjustment of a new show or were there other reasons?

The Andrades

Successfully writing a soap requires constant adjustments.  It would be a very bad idea to plan a show in your office, not watch the show, and follow your blueprint to the letter. Instead, you watch and listen, and you are guided by your instincts.  What's working?  What isn't working?  Should the emphasis be here or there?   By fine tuning as you go along, you minimize “mistakes” and maximize the stories and characters that are creating the best drama.  This may happen more often on a new show, but it also happens, in a daily way, on an established show.  The writers who are emotionally tuned to the progress of the show, and who are most willing to adjust when the emotions are even slightly off kilter,  are the most successful writers; they are the ones who learn as they go along. Adjustments are normal; without them, a show will falter and fail.  Having said that, television writers are in a business, and sometimes politics seem to transcend the drama of the moment.  For example, a network executive may plead for, even insist on, a character or a storyline being included. This situation is also normal, and it can become a kind of wrestling match.  If the writer has enough experience to know that a “trial run” of the character or the story won't “kill” the show and will placate the executive, then it may be included, for a short period of time.  If  it works, hooray.  If it doesn't, with luck, the executive will learn from his errors.  I have yet to live long enough to see that happen. But I advance it to you as a hypothetical theory.

And here “subtext speaks louder than text”. When you wrote the stories, how did you decide on the right balance between drama and humor? Are there unwritten rules?

Lane Davies

I don't think there is a formula for the relationship of humor to drama. We learned the “serious drama” kind of soap writing primarily from P&G  (though I don't want to downplay the importance of studying creative writing at Stanford).  It had been well-established through the years on all the daytime shows.  But it felt a little somber, a little drab.  Our instincts were to trust our instincts: we felt the audience might  be more receptive, as we were, to drama laced with humor.  And though we had experimented with humor earlier, on GL and on ATWT (P&G was cautious of it at first, then accepting, then trusting), we had carte blanche to use it on SB.

Almost parenthetically, I need to say that humor is, quite naturally, a HUGE part of Jerry’s personality, our marriage, and our lifestyle. It is part of the air we breathe. SB, by extension, was known for its humor.  My paintings, according to more than one critic, look like Santa Barbara.  It's something that exists within each of us.  It can’t be added to or subtracted from either one of us.  We're blessed - or, more accurately, stuck - with it.

Back to the soap opera:  there can be humor both in plot and in character.  In my opinion, every character should have humorous qualities, but it always needs to be integrated with and intrinsic to the character. You wouldn't fall in love with each character, know what thrills and pains each character, if the tenor of humor were the same for each.  On SB, Mason's was the darkest, the most intellectual, the driest humor and it stemmed, in part, from pain he carried within. Though he may have joked about it, you know by his wry words that Mason was competitive with, or felt diminished by, CC.  Humor can intensify pathos. When he was inebriated, speaking to a fish, muttering “Alas, poor Yorick”, did you want to  laugh or cry or both? Did each emotion intensify the other?  It did for me, both writing it and watching it, until I almost thought I'd explode.  Thus, the arrogance of instinct and how it can (with luck) blindside an audience.

Shakespeare’s Yorick, like the fish, has never had a voice, he speaks through the voices of others. He is the fool, the voice of a different truth: MEMENTO MORI. This leads me to the function that I believe Mason has on the show: I believe that Mason personifies the Greek chorus. He was a much beloved character while being evil sometimes. In the Greek tragedy chorus has a precise function: to express the tragic poet’s feelings. But it expresses the feelings of the people, too, of the audience, to make them feel themselves as part of the story. I can see all of this in Mason’s character. Maybe we forgive Mason because we are Mason. Could it be so?

The character Mason was created to function as a kind of Greek chorus.  You are quite right.  It is the term we used when the show was first being conceptually delineated, long before his character was developed and melded into the storyline. And though we hoped the audience identified closely with him, we wished that the audience would also identify with each of the other characters.  I agree that Mason had a unique perspective, sometimes tragic, sometimes ironic, sometimes comedic.  To me, he was the most fascinating of all.

to be continued...