Susan Lucci is a diminutive mafioso in Lady Mobster.
Susan Lucci’s Laurel Castle doesn’t come right out and quote Michael Corleone in Lady Mobster, but her behavior toward the heads of other crime families echoes something Michael told his consigliere: “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies. That’s all.”
In this pulpy 1988 TV movie, Laurel has enemies from way back. A hitman killed her parents when she was a teenager, and slashed her face before fleeing from the police. (Her wound heals nicely, sparing her the fate of Judith Anderson’s Lady Scarface.) Her father was targeted for trying to take mafioso Victor Castle (Joseph Wiseman) legit, a crusade Laurel resumes as a young attorney.
I hadn’t planned on posting anything here until Monday, when we’ll tackle Judith Anderson’s Lady Scarface, but the mailwoman just dropped something off that changed all that. Behold, French Silk (and read on for its gonzo back cover and a special YouTube treat).
It’s a guarded autobiography, padded by flowery, repetitious gushing (about everyone from Regis Philbin and Marvin Hamlisch to private drivers and her family’s treasured nanny) that holds readers at arm’s length. She references this in the first chapter of the book, when discussing her roots:
I believe in mystery. I am drawn to it and am very comfortable being surrounded by it. Maybe that is part of why I chose to keep an air of mystery over my own life as I stepped into the limelight years later. Maybe.
susan lucci, all my life: A memoir
At times her relentless cheerfulness, humility and gratitude lend the volume a MadLibs quality. The word “wonderful” appears at least 35 times; “beautiful” 25. Here is a full accounting of things she calls “gorgeous”:
A heartbreaking work of staggering, uh, something.
You’d never know it from the trashy books I tend to write about here (apologies to Rielle Hunter, Loni Anderson, and whoever was responsible for Hedy Lamarr’s Ecstasy and Me), but my personal library is mostly full of works by serious authors. Alas, we aren’t here today to discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett, our favorite Graham Greene novels (The End of the Affair), or whether Pevear and Volokhonsky translations are overrated. We’re here to begin a beautiful literary journey through the life of Susan Lucci.
Susan Lucci and David Charvet in Seduced and Betrayed
Susan Lucci’s no stranger to adulterous affairs in TV movies, but there’s a twist in Seduced and Betrayed (1995)—Lucci goes full psycho. In The Woman Who Sinned and Between Love and Hate, it’s the scorned other man who seeks his revenge. In Blood on Her Hands, she’s a schemer content to let others do her dirty work. But in Seduced and Betrayed, there’s no outsourcing. She’s as determined to claim David Charvet for herself as she was to ruin Christmas in Ebbie.
Philip Casnoff is one of many pawns in Susan Lucci’s game.
All My Children legend Susan Lucci’s long and not-so-illustrious career in TV movies (dating back to 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which we’ll get to eventually) was running on fumes by the Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story era of the mid-’90s. Its last gasp (to date — you know how soap actors love to reanimate the dead) came in 1998 with Blood on Her Hands, the perfunctory tale of a seductive schemer who leaves a trail of ruined men in her wake.
Unlike her character in 1991’s The Woman Who Sinned, Lucci’s Isabelle Collins is not a reluctant adulteress. She embraces the role with gusto, expertly fanning her cuckolded husband’s suspicions and taunting him with thinly veiled banter she knows will provoke a reaction. Stewart (John O’Hurley), an ill-tempered venture capitalist whose hobbies include golf and domestic violence, is happy to comply. A typical nasty exchange goes like this:
Ah, the look on your wife’s face when she sees what came in the mail this week, knows it’s absurd, and is faintly fearful she might be expected to watch it. In light of extenuating circumstances (i.e., the mystery knot currently residing in my underarm and my stint under house arrest while COVID overwhelms our local hospitals), she wisely refrained from comment.
Susan Lucci and Tim Matheson are on the outside of their marriage looking in.
First thing’s first: The Woman Who Sinned, a 1991 TV movie that bravely asks the question, Is it okay to cheat if you’re married to Tim Matheson?, is no Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story (1995). Few films are. If you’re here for Taran Noah Smith’s Tiny Tim singing a Christmas carol while Susan Lucci’s a raging asshole to everyone, you’re out of luck. If you’re here for endless scenes of Lucci crying and a few seconds of Matheson fresh from a swim, you’re in the right place.
What we have here, mostly, is adultery. Adultery as far as the eye can see. And, to keep things lively, the occasional murder. Lucci is Victoria Robeson, a gallery owner whose best friend, author Jane (Lenore Kasdorf), is an outspoken proponent of extramarital affairs. When Victoria is uncharacteristically tempted to have one of her own, Jane is full of encouragement. And when that tryst with Evan Ganns (Michael Dudikoff, In Her Defense) ends poorly, Jane winds up dead—and Victoria’s wrongfully accused of the crime.
Susan Lucci plays Ebenezer Scrooge in Ebbie, a Lifetime holiday classic.
Who knows what Lifetime Television viewers did back in 1995 to earn a spot on Santa’s naughty list (we were still a year away from asking Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?), but boy were we richly rewarded with Ebbie. A holiday classic for the ages, this modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, set in a department store, established All My Children star Susan Lucci as the finest cinematic interpreter of Dickens since David Lean—and gave us all the beautiful gift of reading “Taran Noah Smith as Tiny Tim” in the opening credits.
Lucci stars as Elizabeth ‘Ebbie’ Scrooge, a cutthroat store owner who kicks things off by telling her right-hand woman, Roberta (Wendy Crewson) of a malfunctioning musical window display, “Tonight is their final performance!”
“But Elizabeth,” Roberta exclaims, “Dobson’s Christmas windows are a tradition!”
“Spare me,” Ebbie rants (she later says the same of Christmas carols). “Tradition is a thing of the past, Roberta Cratchit. It would cost me a fortune to get those puppets repaired. Besides, I’m running a business here, not some G-rated peepshow. Next year I want merchandise in those windows.”
All My Children‘s Erica Kane: “I love my dead gay son!”
… Upon hearing they’re finally getting a lesbian neighbor. A source at Granada (the TV production company, not the Andalusian province; they already have lesbians in Spain) has told the News of the World that writers of the popular British soap will introduce a lesbian character at some point in the (presumably near) future, explaining, “‘Corrie lags behind on issues of race and gender. Executives want to create a soap which is representative of society in 2008 and they are acutely aware they need more gay characters.”
Which: duh. Coronation Street has been on the air for approximately five hundred thousand years, and this will be its first lesbian character. To put this in some kind of historical context, lesbians have existed in England since at least 1965, when Mrs. Peel first appeared on The Avengers and the sight of Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit turned thousands of schoolgirls across the UK gay overnight.
That means Corrie writers have been ignoring us for decades, which is more than a little ludicrous when you consider that lesbians have been stealthily infiltrating seemingly ordinary streets in seemingly ordinary towns in Great Britain and the United States for many years now, ever since Elton John and Billie Jean King reorganized the Velvet Mafia and unveiled a newer, more aggressive gay agenda around the time “Philadelphia Freedom” hit the charts in 1975.
Anyway, here’s hoping the Coronation Street lesbian, whoever she ends up being, is treated with a little more respect than America’s token lesbian soap opera character, Bianca Montgomery of All My Children, has been shown. Bianca — and correct me if I’m wrong about this, because I’ll take a Douglas Sirk melodrama over a standard TV soap any day of the week — fell in love with a corporate spy; was raped by a family enemy (who later became her brother-in-law); became pregnant from the rape; had the baby in the middle of some kind of disaster and was told her baby died; eventually found out the baby was alive and had been switched at birth; and then annoyed viewers by falling for a transgender character whose name was Mork or Alf or Nerf or something unusual like that.
In between all of that, Bianca killed her rapist and lapsed into a coma for some reason or another. Eventually she woke up and headed off to Europe, the better to oversee the international goings-on of her family’s cosmetics empire. (You might call Bianca Montgomery the ultimate lipstick lesbian.) It all sounds pretty fucking moronic, doesn’t it? Yet I have to admit that back in 1999 or 2000, whenever it was that Bianca’s coming-out storyline was first announced, I tuned into All My Children just to see how they’d handle it.
It seemed like it took Bianca, who was a teenager at the time, months to come out, but once she did the hilarity factor went through the roof. Every conversation she had with her mother, the legendary Erica Kane, included a half-dozen mentions of Bianca’s sexuality. The words “gay” and “lesbian” always came after long, dramatic soap opera pauses, so a scene might play out like this:
Erica: I, I don’t want to talk about … this.
Bianca: What, Mom? What don’t you want to talk about what? That I’m … gay?
Then there would be a commercial break, after which the action would continue:
Erica: I don’t know what you’re talking about. This has nothing to do with your being… Your being…
Bianca: What, Mom? Why can’t you just say it? Gay. My being gay.
Then there’d be another commercial break, before the conversation would resume with more of the same:
Erica: Oh, that word. That word —
Bianca: What word, Mom? Gay?
It was hilarious. Cheesy soap music would play in the background and Susan Lucci would do a “Love Me, Emmy Voters!” flinch every time she heard the words “gay” or “lesbian.” One or both characters were often on the verge of tears during these heated exchanges, and then ABC would cut to laundry detergent commercials with happy-bouncy music and sunny images of toddlers and golden retrievers before diving right back into a Straight Mom/Gay Daughter throw-down.
It made me want to spice up my own interactions with my mom by getting similarly defensive about my sexuality. Every time she’d ask whether I’d done my homework or unloaded the dishwasher, I imagined turning to face her, fists clenched defiantly, my chin quivering with emotion and my eyes filled with glycerine tears as I raised my voice to demand, “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” (It was like stepping into the Twilight Zone years later when I learned of this now-infamous Law & Order clip. My “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” would have been so much better than that one.)
By the way, in a perfect world, this post would end with a link to video of the old SNL sketch “All My Luggage,” which starred Susan Lucci. Alas, NBC Universal are bastards — or bastard people, as Corky St. Clair would call them — and I couldn’t find the clip online anywhere.
