Soap Opera Weekly
Volume 4 Issue 42
Oct 19, 1993
HER SECRET LIFE
By Robert Rorke
Victoria Wyndham's secret life is as dramatic and thrilling as any television show. In the action-adventure time slot, we would find the woman we know best as Another World's Rachel Cory screaming, "Give me our money!" and practically decking the smarmy owner of a rock club who didn't want to pay Wyndham's band after a gig. That happened to Wyndham during her rock 'n' roll period, until a biker in the bar interrupted the near fistfest and said, "You better give her the money, she's on television."
Hit your remote and there's Wyndham on Entertainment Tonight, consulting with soap execs on long-term storylines. She was even approached about taking over head-writing duties for one troubled show, whose name she won't reveal. "I watched the show for a couple of weeks and didn't have a clue as to what to do for that show," she says with a burst of wild laughter. "There wasn't one person who popped out at me. It was a daunting experience."
All these women are facets of Victoria Wyndham, but she keeps the real one under wraps. Among her daytime peers, she keeps a profile so low that it borders on anonymity. En route to her dressing room after her third and final scene of the day, during which her big line (to would-be-bride Paulina) was, "Don't you look radiant," Wyndham says, "I don't want anyone to know I'm here." She doesn't hang. She's not out there working it in front of the paparazzi, like many of her daytime cronies whose nights and weekends are perpetually free for photo ops. Vicky Wyndham's booked. She makes a note to herself for this interview on her mirror - in pink lipstick. After the interview, she's going to meet with her writing collaborator, with whom she will put in another eight hours.
It has been this way for the 21-year AW veteran. For the most of that time, she has been a single parent; Wyndham raised two sons, Darian, a 23-year-old filmmaker, and Christian, a 22-year-old student at Juilliard, while she was appearing on the show. Black-and -white head shots of the two as adults stand in a Lucite frame next to Wyndham's makeup table. Pulling out these recent photographs, she shows why her late and beloved co-star Douglass Watson (Mac Cory) gave her the frame: There are two more photos taken when the boys were very young.
There are other photo's in her dressing room, mainly of her horses, dogs and her relatives, but one picture jumps out at you. It's a photo of four teen-age boys, standing on chimney pots with their jeans down around their ankles, flexing in their white briefs. "It was my answer to the Calvin Klein ads," Wyndham says, with a hearty, wicked laugh. "It helped us get quiet a bit of notoriety."
The "us" is the Bane, the rock band Wyndham managed for six years, an experience like none other she's had. She took on the band as a "cool" family project, one that would help her raise her teen-age sons. "I was looking for something that would give them a cachet so that they would feel very proud about who they were and not feel they had to go to the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, rebellious teen-age syndrome," she says. "As a single parent who worked 70 miles from her home, I had enough to worry about without wondering what they were getting into when I wasn't around." One of her drivers (AW provides its actors with a car service to take them to the NBC studio in Brooklyn), whose nephew was in the band, gave her a tape, and after her sons encouraged her to take on the project, she met with the band, deliberately inviting them to an upscale restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "In this sea of Yuppiedom was this island of black spiked hair and black leather," she says. "They were huddled together, feeling totally out of place in the big, bad world. I took one look at them and it was like looking at a basket of puppies, and I thought, 'Oh, no, here you go, four more children that you can ill afford.'"
Touring the Eastern seaboard and Canada, rescuing the Bane from groupies, the police and themselves, Wyndham's life seemed light years away from Bay City. "Managing a band is like a disaster a minute," she says. But she and her sons learned important lessons. "I felt like I didn't know enough about the concerns of teen-age men, except the obvious ones," she says. "I thought maybe I could learn quite a bit by working with kids who weren't my children, regular kids who haven't has as much, who haven't had a structured life. I thought it would be a good learning experience for my boys. They'd see kids who grew up the way they wished I'd let them grow up. I thought that both groups could learn from each other, and on top of it, my children would see the inside of the entertainment business that they found so fascinating."
Darian and Christian worked as roadies and were there for one of Wyndham's most memorable nights, at CBGB's, New York's legendary new-wave rock club. There was a chance that the Bane would be bumped from the lineup, which featured Living Colour. "It was a toss-up between bumping our band and bumping another band that was going to go on," she says. "Vernon Reid of Living Colour looks out and says, 'Ain't you Rachel?' And I said, 'Yeah, but come on, don't tell me you watch our show.' And he said, 'Yeah, I do. My grandmother does and my mother does.' And we weren't bumped."
Wyndham's enthusiasm for her night job crashed after six years, when she suffered a crushing blow on her day job - the sudden death of Doug Watson, who suffered a massive coronary. She was beyond devastated, and filled with regrets. "You can't do rock 'n' roll without a sense of humor and I didn't have a sense of humor [anymore]," she says quietly. "Doug's death was a blow that I wasn't able to recover from. It took me three years to recover from it. I guess I felt like I hadn't been available for him. When I was doing rock 'n' roll, I was so out of it, I'd just come [here] and leave. You always think of what you would have done."
Together Wyndham and Watson created one of daytime's landmark love stories, the story of Rachel and Mac, a May-December romance that initially gave the show's sponsor, Procter & Gamble, a sweaty upper lip. P&G didn't want to get any criticism," she says. "They didn't want it to be distasteful. Nor did we. We worked hard to make it work. But what more could a girl want? [He was] a great actor and a terrific man - my best friend of all time."
Wyndham credits the show with helping her overcome her grief. "If I had let myself take anytime away then, I don't think I would have come back because [the show] was just so totally different. "It was like, 'What's the point?' she says candidly. "There is no Rachel without Mac, as far as I'm concerned. I had to get over that, and the show helped me. They wrote it beautifully. They incorporated those feelings into what they wrote. Unfortunately, he died and we had to wait three weeks before I could play any of that, so I sort of went through a double mourning process, which took it's toll visibly, tremendously."
Life for Rachel without Mac has been spotty at best. An aborted storyline with Lewis Arlt (who played Ken Jordan) made Wyndham feel "For a minute" that Rachel's future held possibilities, but ultimately left her simmering with resentment. "I couldn't believe that I'd been so lucky," she says. "How can you lose a wonderful acting partner and get another? I mean, it just doesn't happen. It's like falling hopelessly in love twice. It started out looking like it was going to be so much fun. And then it turned out to be not fun, and that was too bad. I felt very paranoid and I thought, well, obviously, they don't want there to be a Rachel without Mac. I guess I felt that I'd rather they not give him (ken) to me at all than to get my hopes up and dash them so quickly. That took me a while to get over." Wyndham claims she's "even-tempered enough these days to know that lack of story had to do with the show finding itself, finding out where it was going."
It is easy to see why Wyndham would feel so isolated amid the changes. The death of Constance Ford (Ada Hobson) last February was another blow (though the actress says, "Once it's happened terribly the first time, every subsequent one is sad but doesn't hit you the same way"), and left her the last of AW's old guard, the group of performers who led the show in it's heyday of high Neilson's ratings. These days, the show's future is a topic of much concern at the studio. With consistently dismal ratings on a network that seems to be paying lip service to its soap lineup, the show seems on shaky ground. Wyndham is confident that P&G's commitment to the show will protect it from the current "Don't see if anything works, just yank it" attitude.
Her perspective on the fate of the medium may offer comfort to loyal soap viewers. "What this show's got going on now, Guiding Light (where Wyndham played Charlotte Bauer) was going through [in the late 60's]," she says. "It had a very successful run early in its career and [then] was on its last legs, but then you wait. If you have luck and money and the time to wait, you find a team that can eventually do it again and the show has a renaissance." She believes AW has turned a corner, and that "across-the-board" improvements indicate that we might be on the right track."
One of those improvements is the current storyline in which Rachel has a pact with the devilish Carl Hutchins (Charles Keating) in order to save Cory Publishing from a hostile takeover. (Carl used his 10 percent of Cory stock to vote with Rachel, but he did it on the condition that she would date him and help furbish his tarnished reputation.) After many years of "holding up the scenery," the actress was clearly looking forward to having something tangible to do. "It's going to be so cool if they continue to do it as planned," Wyndham says.
If not she will continue as usual, juggling many projects. She candidly admits her passion now is for writing, not acting, and that she would readily give up performing. "I feel like I have done the acting," Wyndham says. "If someone was going to write terrific stories for me that I wanted to do - there's that, too. I've been doing this a long time without a break, thank god, and there are certain stories I wouldn't be interested in doing. I mean, thank god Linda Dano (Felicia had that [alcoholism] storyline. I would not have liked doing that for one minute."
Wyndham has no gripe with Dano's Emmy-winning performance in the story, but objected to its melodramatic slant. "I just don't like that kind of story," she says "[It's too] Disease of the Week. It's like, 'Oh, please'" - she gives a Bronx cheer - "and I don't like those soapy things that much. Bless [Linda's] heart, she did a fabulous job. I like lighter things. I'm good at that. They're nice. You get awful tired of Strum and Drang." On the lighter side, Wyndham plans to develop her experience as a band manager into a sitcom, kind of Soapdish meets The Commitments. The rock 'n' roll scene, she says, "is a lot funnier, a lot zanier and a lot more outrageous than what [The Commitments] did."
Wyndham, who is divorced, freely admits that pursuing her diversity of interests is more important to her than romance or remarriage. "I have so many things I still want to do. I'm not willing to give someone else the monopoly over me, and that's usually what somebody wants. They want to be able to count on me to be there to go out all the time, and I won't be able to do a certain amount of that. It's better seeing people when I feel like being sociable, and the rest of the time I do my own thing. All the relationships I've had in my life, that's what they point out in great frustration to me, 'Oh, you need [so much] space' or 'You're too independent.' Sorry."
But this fiercely independent woman isn't quiet ready to go totally out on a limb. She needs that old friend - Rachel Cory - to help her launch all her other brilliant careers. Life without her, she claims, would be "terrifying. I am old enough to have grown children, and I want an easier life, not a harder life," says Wyndham. "I want to be able to write when I want to write and to do what I want to do. That's not so easy to achieve. This show affords me that. I'm very fortunate. Also, I've been Rachel for so long that [losing her] would be like another death in the family. She really does exist for me on some level. It would be like the death of a twin, or a sister. I'm pretty used to her. She's much zanier and more difficult than you ever see on the show. She really kicks up when she thinks she's being ignored."