“Is that any way to talk to your mothers?”

Let’s say it now, in unison, to get it out of the way: “Incidentally, which one of you b*tches is my mother?” That notorious question, from 1984’s Lace, is Phoebe Cates’s most enduring contribution to cinema that doesn’t involve a red bikini. And it cuts jaggedly to the neon-pink heart of this ABC miniseries, a soapy, sprawling maternity mystery that plays like the most scandalous Facts of Life episode never made.

Adapted by Elliott Baker from Shirley Conran’s saucy novel, Lace is first set in 1960 and tells the story of three friends and roommates at a Swiss boarding school: the pouty French Maxine Pascal (Arielle Dombasle); sardonic Brit Jennifer ‘Pagan’ Trelawney (Brooke Adams); and adventurous American Judy Hale (Bess Armstrong), who entertains her friends with passages from a bodice ripper she scribbles between classes that features a heroine called Lucinda Lace. It’s a name the pals use interchangeably when one of them finds herself pregnant on the eve of graduation, and the trio form an unusual pact of secrecy to protect her at any cost.

Lace’s three musketeers: Adams, Dombasle and Armstrong.

Their scheme, crafted with help from Dr. Geneste (Anthony Quayle), a village obstetrician, is to go into hiding for the final months of the pregnancy. After she’s born the baby will live with a married couple on their small farm in the Alps, until the first of the friends to get settled into adult life can reclaim her. Maxine’s blowsy Aunt Hortense (Angela Lansbury) provides the necessary funding, an arrangement that is uncovered 20 years later, when Lili (Cates), an actress and international sex symbol, visits the old woman and angrily presses her for details.

“Baguette, découpage, Marcel Marceau, Édith Piaf!” Hortense rambles incoherently in response. Lansbury sounds like Mrs. Potts, her Beauty and the Beast character, imitating Mel Blanc’s Pepé Le Pew as she explains, “I never knew which one of them it was. It was as if the child belonged to all three of them. That’s how special their friendship was.” Lili, who is dressed like a street-walking ostrich from the flapper era, views their secrecy differently—to her, it’s an unforgivable personal betrayal.

Angela Lansbury in Lace.

“They made their pact against me and stuck to it,” she fumes to Hortense, Cates sounding all the while like a parody of a bad All My Children audition. “You helped them conspire against me!” she continues, even after Hortense volunteers that the child is dead, killed in a car accident years earlier. “They’ll wish I was,” Lili vows. “They made their schoolgirl pact and sent me to hell. I’ll teach them what I learned there!” The ingénue’s machinations take her, and the estranged Lucinda Laces—who lost touch after their daughter’s death—around the globe, where one dramatic showdown after the next concludes with a fiery Cluster B explosion as Lili reels from her childhood trauma.

First she enlists a Greek shipping tycoon as an intermediary to meet Judy, whose struggling Lace magazine could use a blockbuster cover story. (“Revenge has a distinctive odor, Lili, and it is not sweet,” the magnate pointlessly warns her.) Lili agrees to share lurid autobiographical details in print, including a pointed “I was pregnant when I was 16, Miss Hale. Were you pregnant when you were 16, Miss Hale?” In France, she visits Countess Maxine’s château, where she is called “the new Greta Garbo” before revealing far more of herself in dinner conversation than the elusive Swede would have allowed. She toys sexually with Maxine’s teenage son for good measure, culminating in a catfight straight from the ’80s primetime playbook.

Phoebe Cates is a child of darkness, child of light in Lace.

It isn’t the last time she’ll risk a little incest to provoke a nemesis. Her clash with Pagan involves cozying up to King Abdullah of Sydon (Anthony Higgins), Pagan’s “everlasting” first love, an affair doomed by the expectations of the throne. (Lili’s paternity is explored in a sequel, Lace II, which inevitably finds her demanding “Which one of you bastards is my father?”) The failure of the relationship precipitates Pagan’s descent into alcoholism, even as she marries a crusading cancer researcher and throws herself into supporting his career. It is Pagan, the most confrontational of the three friends, who asks why Lili has meddled in her life.

“All right, I’ll explain,” Lili says. “At least, the way that different psychiatrists have explained it to me. They blame various unpleasant, unnatural experiences. Like being abandoned by my mother.” Here she looks at Pagan expectantly. “One of them claimed that much of my behavior is from having to appear in pornographic films. Have you ever had to appear in a pornographic film, Lady Swann? Have you any idea what it does to a 17-year-old girl? To all her romantic dreams? To any kind of respect she has for herself?” There are, in fact, few traumas that Lili hasn’t endured, and she’s willing to trot them all out for shock value.

I laughed at this scene like it was a Marx Brothers film.

Pagan’s withering assessment of Lili’s acting skills—“You can’t pretend to be anything but what you are”—hits her like a slap. Cates plays these scenes, and the summit Lili arranges to reunite her possible mothers and pose The Question, to the hilt, like a mustache-twirling villain from an old silent thriller tying a baby to railroad tracks. That her artistic choices rarely work lends the performance a bit of charm; she’s willing to go down swinging. Dombasle, too, is out of her depth, leaving Adams and Armstrong to anchor Lace, a silly story that only grows more preposterous as it approaches its Maury Povichesque denouement.

My favorite maternal telefilm of 1984 remains Loni Anderson’s unintentionally hilarious My Mother’s Secret Life, but Lace is still appointment viewing. A perfectly-preserved ’80s American made-for-TV time capsule, it features terrible accents and unconvincing romances, teenagers who look 35, predatory gay (and lesbian) characters lurking in the background, and fashions you might find in an attic trunk belonging to your drunkest and most whimsical aunt. Director Billy Hale (One Shoe Makes It Murder) throws in the occasional nice touch, like a shot of Judy from beneath her typewriter keys. When Lili’s mother finally steps forward, you might cackle at how long it finally takes them to reach each other. Or you might be reminded, just a smidgen, of Joan Crawford’s long walk to the sea in Humoresque.

Streaming and DVD availability

Lace is available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection. It comes and goes on YouTube, where you can (as of this writing) find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.

… But wait, there’s more!

As in I Think I’m Having a Baby, a 1981 Afterschool Special starring Jennifer Jason Leigh (a good friend and occasional costar of Phoebe Cates), there’s a discussion of abortion in Lace that will be jarring to modern American audiences, who now find themselves in the same predicament as characters from 1960 (and 1976 or so, when a teenage Lili finds herself pregnant and procures a back alley abortion). The exchange comes as the friends debate how to proceed with the pregnancy.

Judy: In another 10 years, abortions are going to be performed like appendectomies, in proper hospitals by proper doctors.

Pagan: Yes, but for the time being they’re performed by creepy little men in filthy little rooms.

Judy: What right does society have to dictate what a woman does with her own body? Especially a society run by men!

Pagan: Nobody’s arguing.

Judy: It isn’t fair to the mother, it isn’t fair to the child.