This article appeared in the February 1971 issue of TV by DAY.
It is accompanied by photos of Joe Gallison (Tom Edwards)
This article wouldn't be here for your viewing without John. THANKS John!!!
Joe Gallison: “I Can’t Seem To Remember My Second Wife!”
by Leslie Harris
Joe is as forgetful in real life as he is on the show! But we know his secret! – his second wife was blonde Connie Sharpe, a beautiful model and sometime actress.
If Joe Gallsion ever lapses into the character he plays on One Life to Live, he may be forgetful at times, but one’s thing for sure – no one who meets Joe is likely to forget him! It’s not just because of his Irish good looks and winning smile – it’s also because he’s an intense actor who has a sense of humor and who cares about things like his country and the problems of today. He’s the kind of man whom any woman would stare at on the street, and after getting to know him, not be disappointed.
We were lucky enough to catch Joe for lunch at a small French restaurant near the ABC studios and his upper West Side apartment. Despite the fact that Joe looked like he has just gotten out of bed and that he had a dentist appointment to look forward to in the afternoon, he was friendly and cheerful.
“I know very few people who begin their careers on soaps,” Joe said. “You usually start in theatre, films, summer stock or commercials.” Joe had done all these things before he began appearing on One Life to Live in which he has been working for a year. Perhaps you remember him from Another World where he played Bill Mathews for five years.
Joe has been acting for twelve years. Although from his looks you should expect that he had started as a child, he actually became interested in acting in college.
After growing up in Boston, in a family of six children, Joe went to West Point where he played football. Unfortunately, he was injured and he received a medical discharge. Then he went to Northeastern College where he majored in physics! That’s where Joe Gallsion the future scientist was transformed to Joe Gallison the actor. He took a speech course and began acting in college plays – and his future career was set … almost. He was sidetracked on his way to New York to enter the theatre by a professor at the University of Connecticut who convinced him to teach an English course there.
“I only taught for one semester although I loved it,” Joe explained. “It was completely by accident. It seemed that a teacher had been in an automobile accident and they needed someone to teach the course. So I took it. So instead of an actor, suddenly, I was a teacher!”
While teaching, Joe married Maxine Klein. “I was twenty two,” he told me. “My wife was getting her doctorate at Cornell while I was in Connecticut. Somehow we never managed to live together! I must say that she and I are very close friends still. She’s now teaching at Boston University – in fact, she won an Obie (the Off-Broadway equivalent to Oscar) last year.”
Joe was married the first time for only a year. Then in December of 1967 he married model Connie Sharpe. Their split was final just last May. I asked him about his second wife.
“I can’t seem to remember her for some reason,” he told me. I sensed that this was one subject Joe didn’t want to talk about and not because he had amnesia, either!
I asked Joe if he would ever marry again?
“I like being single better than I liked either of my two marriages,” he answered. “I can understand the feeling after divorcing that you never want to marry again, but I don’t feel that way. I don’t think marriage is a vanishing institution. I think it will stay with us for quite some time.”
“What do you think of Women’s Liberation?” I asked, fully expecting Joe’s Irish temper to flare up against it.
“I’m 140% in favor it!” he said. “I find that most of my arguments about it are with women who care against it! I think there are a lot of women who don’t want to accept the responsibility of being liberated. I don’t understand how any man, who understood it, could be against it. I presser to deal with women as equals, but I’ve found very few women who are willing to deal that way, unfortunately. They’ve been brainwashed.”
Joe is playing the field now, and I wondered what kind of girl he likes to date.
“I think the first attribute I like in a girl is passion,” he said. “An ability to communicate emotionally with me, being open, and the ability to express her feelings and accept my feelings … honestly. The second would be intelligence. I like beautiful women, attractive women. The women I’ve been involved with don’t seem to hold to one physical type though – tall, thin, and blonde or short and dark.” (It might be noted that Joe’s second wife whom he can’t remember is tall, thin and blonde!)
I asked Joe if he’d like to marry an actress?
“I like actresses,” he explained. “But I would presser not to marry an actress. A compatible relationship between a man and a woman is difficult enough normally and two careers in one family are just another factor that could cause problems. Actors are really nomads. I have to go where the work is. It’s not inconceivable that I’ll spend six months in Africa doing a film … or go out to the Coast for six months … or be out of town doing a Broadway play … or a season at the Guthrie Theatre in Minnesota. Who knows? And being married to a woman who was doing the same thing, well maybe I’d be so much in love with her that I couldn’t do without her!
“I date actresses, and I think the chances are that if I marry again, I’ll marry an actress because I see more actresses than anyone else.”
“There’s also the possibility that I’ll be out of work and my wife will be working for six or eight months … and I’d get jealous!”
“What if your wife is more talented than you are? It would be difficult to accept as it would be difficult, for most men, to marry a wealthy woman, whereas a woman has no compunctions about marrying a wealthy man. I would find it difficult to deal with. I’m not sure I would feel comfortable in a close relationship with anyone who was better than I was at what I want to be good at. I mean, if I suddenly struck up a good relationship with Robert Redford, part of me would resent he fact that he was so good!”
“I’m not ruling it out that I’d marry an actress. If I loved her and she loved me, everything could work out. But I would prefer not to.”
“It does seem that most of the world’s attractive, intelligent marvelous women are already married – but with the divorce rate being what it is, who knows?”
I asked Joe about his family
“My father is dead. He had worked painting ships in a shipyard in Boston. My mother used to be a telephone operator with the telephone company, but now she’s a switchboard operator at a television station in Boston. She can’t even watch my show because they’ll only let her watch their channel!”
“My youngest brother is still in college, my other two brothers are carpenters and my two sisters work for the airlines.”
Joe’s over thirty, but I asked him if there was a generation gap between him and his mother.
“Yes, but I’ve had that since I was fourteen,” he replied.
Joe feels that of all daytime TV shows, One Life to Live has the greatest following of young people because it deals with the most relevant problems. As a McCarthy campaigner in New Hampshire two years ago, Joe is not one to shirk his responsibilities to the things he believes in.
“Right now we’re doing a thing on the show with Odyssey House,” Joe explained. (Odyssey House is a drug rehabilitation center for kids in New York). “One of the characters becomes involved with drugs. This particularly appeals to young people. I don’t take drugs, but I think a lot of the young people do. I can only guess at their reasons – because of the increasing complexity in our society, the way the country is being run is inadequate, there is a very real generation gap, and the young people have been exposed to very different things than their parents were. There’s such a lack of understanding between countries.” All these things, Joe thinks, are reasons for the widespread use of drugs today. He feels that television, if used to deal honestly with really relevant problems, could help solve them.
Joe had been in the movies before coming to television, under the name of Evan McCord – a name forced on him by the studio. His memories of Hollywood and movies are not the warmest!
“I lived in Hollywood for four years,” Joe told me. “I prefer living in New York to Hollywood. I think it’s geographical. I’m from the East and I’m used to big cities. Hollywood is sort of a spread-out place. The lifestyle in New York suits me better. I found myself not doing much in Hollywood. Someone once said about Hollywood that one day you walk out of your apartment, sit down in the sun by the pool, fall asleep, and when you wake up you’re seventy years old!”
“I think the people in New York are ruder, but I also think they’re more interesting. I think Southern California is a receptacle for lunatics of all kinds, especially political. I think there are five moderates in all of Los Angeles country!”
Although Joe loves New York, he loves to travel too.
“I just got back from Spain,” he told me, “where I studied guitar for three hours a day. I also went to a bull fight and took a mule trip into the mountains – it was exciting but very precarious and I was very sore afterwards!”
I asked Joe what kind of character he likes to play.
“I’d much rather play bad characters than god ones,” he said. “That’s because I’m so good! There’s more conflict in a bad person, too.”
I asked him if he identified with the character he plays on One Life to Live.
“I think that when you’re doing character acting,” he explained, “the two become one. It’s not a matter of reacting from the character. It’s a matter of the actor using different facets of his own personality – there’s no such thing as two different personalities.”
As we were leaving, I asked Joe if he ever regretted becoming an actor.
“Only when I’m not working,” he laughed. He can afford to laugh because it’s not very often!