A & U Magazine
May 2001
Has Soap Opera’s Day Of Compassion Had Its Day?
Catherine Hickland Talks About AIDS, Soaps, And Why They Should Intersect
“Vixen,” “troublemaker,” “neurotic, wisecracking manhunter,” gold-digging,” “villainous” –these are some of the terms applied to Catherine Hickland’s character Lindsay Rappaport on ABC’s daytime soap opera One Life to Live (often referred to in TV land simply as OLTL). Anyone who’s seen the show will agree with that assessment. Lindsay, in Hickland’s own words, makes “everyone’s life miserable” in OLTL’s make-believe town of Llanview.
Offscreen, of course, when Hickland plays Hickland, it’s another matter. A singer as well as a veteran of several other soap operas, she’s performed with a symphony orchestra in France, recorded a music CD titled Sincerely Broadway, and taken a star turn singing on Broadway and on tour as Fantine in Les Miserables. She created two cabaret side shows titled Boys on the Side and Once More With Feeling, writes a regular beauty column for Soap Opera Digest, has launched her own line of cosmetics (Cat Cosmetics), and—oh, yes, is happily married to fellow actor Michael E. Knight, who plays Tad Martin on another of ABC’s daytime shows, All My Children. No villain she, although Hickland does admit liking to play a troublemaker onscreen, saying: “It’s fun. Lindsay’s so unpredictable.”
The character of Lindsay Rappaport also gives no clue to yet another side of the real-life Catherine Hickland: her commitment to a number of causes that have won her heart over the years and to which she devotes not just money, but time and energy. “I only have so many hours a day to commit to causes,” she says, “but AIDS, animals, and sick children are three I just cannot turn my back on.”
Hickland’s personal introduction to AIDS came about through her work as a performer, and left a lasting mark on her life. “Between my last TV show and One Life to Live, I went on the road with Les Miz,” she explains. “When I returned to New York at the end of the tour, I had no work lined up other than recording my CD Sincerely Broadway. Being a high-energy person, I needed someething more to do, so I and a couple of guys I knew from the cast of Les Miz became involved with Hearts & Voices, a group that goes and sings in the AIDS wards of local New York hospitals. The first place we performed at was Roosevelt Hospital on Manhattan’s West Side, and there I met this fellow named Billy, a young man who looked a lot like Eddie Murphy, but was even more handsome. He had been a New York City detective in the homicide unit. A nurse told me he collapsed a few weeks earlier, and until then no one he worked with had known he was gay or had AIDS. Now he lay in bed paralyzed from side effects of the disease. I went home that day and couldn’t get Billy out of my mind. I’d been told he liked to watch daytime TV. So I had my husband get as many autographed pictures as possible from the people on his and other shows, took them to the hospital, and put them up on the walls of Billy’s room. I started going to see him every other day, and we would sit and talk. Of course I did all the talking since his paralysis wouldn’t allow him to speak. Sometimes we’d just stare at each other for hours, holding hands. Eventually he was moved to hospice, where he died about eight months after I first met him. Over that time I watched the physical deterioration of this human being who from what I was told must have been a classy, full-of-life person when he was well. It ripped me up. It was one of the most intense relationships I’ve ever experienced, and I never even heard the sound of his voice.”
Hickland says her experience with Billy “touched my life and changed it, immeasurably.” One result: She never misses a chance to work with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (BC/EFA), the AIDS fund-raising organization of the theater community, always participating in the Shubert Alley “flea market” sale of theater memorabilia BC/EFA holds each fall in New York and donating proceeds from her cabaret performances to that organization. “I’m on television,” she says, “and that packs a house whenever I do my show. Giving the money it brings in to BC/EFA is the least I can do.”
Each in year in June many of the soaps—including OLTL—program into their schedule a “Day of Compassion” episode relating to AIDS. But Hickland would like to see more: “It annoys me when characters are brought onto shows as stereotypes—they’re gay, they’re lesbian, or they’re dying of AIDS, but the storyline avoids the intense relationships or complicated lives these people would have in the real world. I know people freak out and say America isn’t ready. But I’d love to be part of a story that integrated characters like that into a regular storyline and presented their lives in all the complexity they deserve.”
Who knows? Maybe that will come to pass yet. In the mid-1990’s OLTL ran a storyline about a gay teen with an AIDS subplot that people did not freak out about. It starred Ryan Phillippe—who later went on to movie star fame—and according to OLTL’s current producer (Frank Valentini) the audience found it very rewarding. Perhaps with a push from actors like Catherine Hickland or even from fans of the soaps who read A &U, a new storyline this time centering around AIDS will make its way onto one of the daytime shows. As they say: It ain’t over till it’s over. And that goes for AIDS programming on the soaps as much as anything else.
