Soap icon Susan Lucci earned her diva-dom the right way.
She spent 41 years and 10,000-plus episodes of “All My Children” playing Erica Kane, right up until the show met a grisly end in 2011. A vixen at times, with bottomless wants, Kane was no doormat and “sex-positive” well before Samantha Jones on “Sex and the City.” There were Mattel dolls in her image, and songs inspired by her, including one by Aaliyah that goes, “She’ll make a honest man steal from his folks. And drain a millionaire man until he go broke.”
Lucci’s alter-ego made history: Erica was the first woman on TV to have a legal abortion, shortly after the Roe v. Wade ruling of 1973, and her daughter, Bianca, later came out as gay. Now, the show is being exhumed from the TV ashes; it recently began screening on Pluto TV in Canada, and eventually the full catalogue will be free to watch.
Lucci herself was the first and only soap star to host “Saturday Night Live” on the strength of her soap career alone. But she gained infamy for being the nominee with the most losses in awards show history. After being nominated 18 times, she finally nabbed an Emmy in 1999. The clip of her accepting it regularly makes the meme rounds on social media: Oprah crying. Rosie bawling. The whole of Radio City Hall riding a crest of jubilation.
“I feel like the world was with me,” Lucci told me recently at the Shangri-La Toronto, before an event held in her honour. Soft-spoken, as vibrant as ever, the 79-year-old is like a preserved hothouse flower.
Her life has seen plenty of ebbs and flows, revealed in her new memoir, “La Lucci.” While Erica was famously betrothed 12 different times, Susan only married once, and she writes poignantly about losing Helmut, her husband of 52 years.
“It poured out of me,” Lucci said, adding that writing the book provided a bolt of catharsis. “I wanted to be so candid. No bumper stickers. No advice-giving. Merely to tell my experiences, and to share the choices I made.”
Here, Lucci takes us further down memory lane.
We can’t talk about Erica Kane without talking about the woman who invented her: the late Agnes Nixon, a legend responsible for some 15,000 hours of TV, having created both “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” You’ve both said that Erica was kind of a stand-in for Agnes. Tell me about her.
“When I went to audition for Erica Kane, I was just out of college and was told I probably wouldn’t work in television because I was too ‘ethnic-looking.’ It was a hot summer day in New York. I wrapped my head in a scarf. On the fifth callback, it was down to two of us, after they’d auditioned hundreds. At the corner of my eye, I saw a glamorous woman down the hallway, and someone said, ‘Oh, that’s Agnes Nixon.’ Here was this petite, blue-eyed woman in an Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit and high heels. I had actually never seen a professional woman. She was watching me watching her.”
She was a total trailblazer.
“She was a very modern woman, whether writing about Vietnam (‘All My Children’ was the first soap to address the war), or AIDS.”
“All My Children” is of a time when there were like 15 soaps on the air daily, and they sat at the centre of the culture. But it also hearkens back to the vanished world of New York soaps, specifically. None of the remaining ones shoot there now. Talk about the New York-iness of those shows.
“I loved the New York-iness. I grew up on Long Island, and it might as well have been another world. My dream always was to go to New York and become an actress. It was wonderful entering this world. Back then, it was a whole micro-industry in New York, and our show, and others like ‘The Guiding Light’ and ‘As The World Turns’ had this synergistic relationship with Broadway. For instance, James Mitchell (who played wealthy patriarch Palmer Cortland on AMC) was in the original ‘Oklahoma.’”
You were on Broadway too, taking over from Bernadette Peters in “Annie Get Your Gun.” You were doing that at night, while still filming “All My Children” by day?
“The world of soaps, y’know? The story never ends.”
Soaps used to be boot camps for future stars, like Julianne Moore and Demi Moore, Meg Ryan and Bryan Cranston. Your show gave us Amanda Seyfried and recent Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan. He’s credited you and ‘All My Children’ for being his true acting education.
“I don’t think it’s just boot camp. People who come in with stuff — they either have it or they don’t. What you can learn is discipline, a respect for collaboration. Michael B. Jordan was 16 when he was on. He was so respectful, wanted to learn. At the time, he talked about being a basketball player. He was a doll.”
Certainly, Sarah Michelle Geller — who broke out playing your daughter, Kendall — had ‘it’ from the start.
“She was talented from the beginning. Of course.”
A writer in Salon once called Erica Kane “one of television’s first unselfconsciously feminist characters.” What do you say to that?
“It was normal to me. It was the era. We all wanted careers and had our own dreams. It was a question of how fast we could make it happen.”
When did you know that Erica had struck a chord in the popular imagination?
“Early on. The show took off right away, so did the character. I guess when I was invited to speak at Princeton — I was barely out of college myself — I thought, ‘something is happening.’”
You are back in Canada, which is where the most famous Erica scene was shot: When stranded in the wilderness, she came face to face with a grizzly bear…
“’I’m Erica Kane … and you are a filthy beast.’ The famous line. It was really hot that day, and the bear did not want to work. We finally got it on one tape.”
By the way, how did the nickname La Lucci come about?
“Regis Philbin used to call me that. ‘La Lucci, La Lucci!’ I guess it stuck.”
