Note: This article originally appeared in the October 1979 issue of Ebony. It is printed exactly as it appeared there. For those interested in finding the article, there are pictures of the following OLTL stars: Arthur Burghardt (Jack), Al Freeman (Ed), Lillian Hayman (Sadie), Ellen Holly (Carla), Lee Patterson (Joe), Nat Polen (Jim Craig), Erika Slezak (Viki), Michael Storm (Larry)
ELLEN HOLLY
One Life To Live star will have eight million guests at her TV wedding
by Ronald O. Howell
Carla Hall has eight million friends and all of them will have front row seats when she gets married this month to Dr. Jack Scott, a gifted heart surgeon who has been wooing her for more than a year. Fortunately, Carla's family won't have to worry about writing the invitations, because that substantial task is being handled by TV Guide.
Carla, you see, is a character on the ABC soap opera One Life To Live, one of only two daytime dramas with long-standing Black storylines. And although the wedding may bring tears to the eyes of viewers who have shared her years of joys and sorrows son the tube, Ellen Holly, who plays Carla, will still be a single woman after she says "I do." Most people really do have one life to live, but Holly has two - her own and Carla's.
Carla's marriage to Jack Scott - in real life the elegant-voiced Arthur Burghardt, who played Frederick Douglass on a TV special three years ago - is but the latest episode in a string of crises and triumphs that thread the lives of soap opera characters. Carla made her first appearance on One Life To Live 11 years ago as a very fair-complexioned Black woman who was passing for White, much to the pained sadness of her mother, Sadie Gray, played by Tony Award-winning Lillian Hayman. Carla soon thereafter admits to her Blackness, becomes secure in it and goes on to marry a Black police lieutenant (portrayed by Al Freeman, Jr.), whom she eventually divorces because of her love for Jack Scott. Betwixt and between of course, daily intrigues are interwoven with other ongoing storylines in a way that gives soaps their crisis-ridden flavor.
After twelve critically acclaimed but scarcely lucrative years as a stage actress, Miss Holly concedes that she is comfortable having steady work on television; but she also believes she is performing a valuable service for those millions of White Americans who otherwise would have no exposure to Blacks. For this opportunity she gives credit to Agnes Nixon, the writer who created One Life To Live and All My Children, the other soap that has had a lasting Black storyline.
"There are enormous stretches in this country where they don't know anything about Black people," says Miss Holly, who was reared in Queens, New York. "Our viewers tend to regard us as neighbors. People at the supermarket, total strangers, will throw their arms around you and treat us as a neighbor ... My mother on the show has been a domestic and is now head of the housekeeping staff at the hospital; my ex-husband on the show is a policeman and Arthur plays a brilliant heart surgeon ... I think we've opened up our viewers' heads a little bit more to the variety that exists in the Black race. And the more that happens, the slower somebody will be - when they're conronted with any given Black person - to jump to conclusions about who and what that person is."
Miss Holly says she has no doubts about who she is. And that's why she feels anger and chagrin when slow-minded soap watchers confuse her with Carla, who in the script 11 years ago was passing for White and wanted to marry a White doctor. Hazel-eyed and fair-skinned, with sharp facial lines and long hair, Miss Holly has often been mistaken for White. But she insists her Blackness is too important for her to deny, and she relates that she once turned down a part on a TV series because she was told to keep her racial identity a secret. She also says that in real life the only men she ever loved have been Black and each of them has been an actor. In fact, if there is romantic drama in Miss Holly's real life, it centers on this very fact.
"I have been a lethal attraction to Black actors," says Miss Holly, who lives in a suburban condominium just a 45-minute train ride north of New York City, where she works. "They are the only kind of men I've ever been able to fall in love with. And that's pretty much why connecting with somebody on a permanent basis is difficult, because the men have always been complicated and difficult and they've combined all the problems of being Black males in America and the anxieties of struggling in show business, which is probably the toughest career to survive in. There's also the problem that Black men are leery of Black women who have an identity in their own right. I think in some way they don't trust you; they believe you can support yourself and you do have an identity of you own, and that means you can take a walk. But the truth is, when you dig somebody you're tremendously dependent on him emotionally, and you wouldn't dream of walking away."
About seven years ago, after a brief but emotionally debilitating involvement with one Black actor, Miss Holly went into analysis in hopes of understanding, if not shaking, this obsession. "I don't know for sure what I expected analysis to do - maybe turn my head around to Jewish comics or Chinese dentists. But whatever I expected, it didn't work because $2,000 later I fell in love with another Black actor," she says.
One of the two men she loved most intensely, and would have married if things had worked out, is Robert Hooks, with whom she acted in several plays during the 1960s. The other is J. A. Preston, who had a principal role in the All's Fair TV series that starred Richard Crenna. "They were the only two men I ever went bananas about," says Miss Holly, "but they had other ideas about themselves and went their own ways. I still have enormous respect for them, as people and as actors."
If one were to get the impression that Miss Holy is the merrymaking type, rushing from one party to the next trying to catch the eye of some available actor with a dusky complexion, one would be entirely wrong. Her wardrobe is spartanly simple - denim and drip-dry for the most part. And when she is not at the ABC studio just west of Central Park, she is generally at home, studying or writing. Interestingly, it was an article that she wrote for TheNew York Times back in 1968 that landed her the job with One Life To Live. Agnes Nixon, creator of the show, recalls: "We wanted to do a story of a Black person who passed for White. I would never have cast a White actress; I wanted a Black person of light pigmentation, and it was a great coincidence that Ellen Holly had just written an article for the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times entitled "How Black Do You Have to Be?" It was about her experiences being turned away because she was so light in complexion. The producer called her in, auditioned her, and that was it."
While Miss Holly is able to get some emotional release through the many articles she has written, the greater part of her passion remains bottled in a movie script she wrote between 1964 and 1968 and which she is still trying to get published. God of the Dark is about a young Black classical pianist named Leah - a fair-complexioned woman like Miss Holly herself - who travels to Haiti and through tricks of time and the mind is introduced to the majesty of 19th century Haiti under the Black emperor Henry Christophe. Leah leaves her White lover and runs off with a native Haitian in search of a marvelous Black past she never new existed.
Nothing else in life, says Miss Holly, is as important nto her as one day seeing this work on the movie screen, and she has spent most of her free time in recent years trying to find someone willing (and able) to produce it. Should this dream of hers ever become a reality, it would be a deep and powerful answer to the question she posed in another New York Times article entitled "Where Are the Films About Real Black Men and Women?"
And so, it conceivably could be said that Ellen Holly actually has three lives to live: her own, that of ABC's Carla, and the suspended life of Leah, who now exists only on 90 typewritten pages. Toward the end of the God of the Dark script, Leah gazes at Sans Souci, the sprawling "jewel" of all the palaces built by Christophe and muses:
I Wonder what it was like to live
in a completely Black world ...
of chateaux ... and palaces ...
and lords and ladies ... dancing
in ballrooms ... glistening with
black chandeliers ...
Surely it would not be far-fetched to assume that Ellen Holly, at least a few times in her life, has had the very same thoughts. Back to the Archives
