His list of film, TV and theater credits is as long and impressive as anybody's: 30-plus years of Broadway lights, Emmy and Tony nominations, scenes shared with everyone from Laurence Olivier to Kevin Costner. But Charles Keating's hair is even longer than his resume, and sometimes, much to his ire, that's all that matters.

"It really has pulled attention beyond what it deserves," he grunts. "This is how shortsighted people are: There have probably been jobs that I've gotten because I had it." AW wasn't one of them, of course; back when Keating's Carl Hutchins first appeared in 1983, his coif was close-cropped, and color was a greater issue than length. "I've been going gray since I was 16. When I was first on the soap, they would say, 'You've got to put Chocolate Kiss on it.'"

Today, the thought of anyone telling Charles Keating to dye his trademark ponytail with Chocolate Kiss is laughable; he doesn't suffer fools, and anyone with the faintest interest in his hair falls under that classification. "One day, the boss asked me if I would cut my hair," he grins. "I said, 'Yes, to play Quasimodo." It's a personal choice. It's my hair. I didn't ask their permission to grow it, and the minute I'm sick of it, I'll cut it, and I won't ask permission to do that, either."

Nor does he have any plans to hit the gym and makes his body more, uh, camera-ready. "They never ask me to take my clothes off, so they know I don't have a good body," he laughs. "I don't believe in spending hours in the gym working on my pecs. I think that's vain glory. I couldn't give a rat's ass about pecs."

Despite that attitude--or, perhaps, because of it--Keating has emerged as one of daytime's least-likely sex symbols. "Vicky Wyndham [Rachel] said to me once, 'You're a sex object, that's what you are.' What bulls--t, " he says. "My wife, Mary, was online and she found these people talking about Carl, and there were all these things they wanted to do with him, like take a bubble bath and be read poetry. I think that's very surprising."

For almost as long as he's been an actor, Keating has been married to Mary. They met in 1962, shortly after he jettisoned his first ambition--hairdressing--to focus on the stage. "We were both at the Cleveland Playhouse," he recalls. "She was a young apprentice and I was one of the actors of the company. One day, I went looking for a roommate of hers and knocked on her apartment door. She tells me that it was I who pursued her, and I, as a gentleman, would have to agree. But I think it might have been slightly reciprocal."

The Vietnam War interrupted their life together. "I was drafted into the American army in 1964," says Keating. "I was at boot camp at Fort Knox for eight weeks, and then another eight weeks in Oklahoma. I was to be an artillery gunner. That was when I discovered something about myself: I'd always thought of myself as violent, and I realized that I actually wasn't. I was nonviolent. On three occasions during basic training, I was found sleepwalking up and down the barracks screaming, 'I won't kill him! I won't kill him!' Clearly it affected me. I would not have fired an artillery gun if the Communist hordes were about to come down Seventh Avenue."

Keating and Mary had been living together for 18 monthes before he was drafted; they made it official shortly thereafter. "When I was in basic training, I said, 'Did you ever think of marrying me?' And she said, 'Yes.' 'Do you want to?' 'Yes.' 'Well, let's do it, then.' We got married at the local justice of the peace. I went AWOL to do it. I was confined to the barracks that weekend because I hadn't laid up my bunk properly."

In the end, Keating managed to avoid a court-martial because some "people who took a liking to me" got him switched to the army's entertainment division. He's been acting professionally ever since--notably in the films Awakenings and The Bodyguard, TV projects like BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and so much good theater that it would be ridiculous to single out just a couple of plays. And, of course, there's AW, where he has enjoyed critical acclaim (like his 1996 Best Actor Emmy) and massive fan popularity off-and-on for 14 years. After all that time, he believes he's entitled to a few opinions.

For starters, he doesn't understand why the show has been so grim of late. "I actually went [to the writers] with the idea of Rachel being pregnant," he relates. "We had done so much Sturm und Drang and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have a wonderful, idyllic pregnancy?' A fantasy pregnancy that we all wish we could have gone through and never did. But, unfortunately, as writers weigh in and weigh out, it took on a different tone."

A decidedly medical tone, in fact--and that brings us to AW's super-duper hospital set and its incurable fascination with hospital scenes. "Why did we have to do that?" he wonders. "Our show is called ANOTHER WORLD. It's not called WE ARE AN IMITATION OF ER. We'll never do it as well as they do, so why bother?'

But the actor is as protective of AW as he is critical. Like a parent whose child has brought home a lousy report cared, Keating knows the show has potential, and wants it to do better. "It depresses and upsets me that we're on the bottom of the ratings pile. It has upset me for the last few years. And while there's still energy to pull out the oars and row some more, I want to see meaningful, creative change. I think it's finally afoot."

If not, there's always commercials--or maybe not. Though he was the Snapple voiceover man for a short while, Keating doesn't really have the disposition for that kind of work. "When some little girl from the office is saying, 'Could you please be more emphatic toward the tomato,' I tend to overreact," he explains. "It isn't long before I tell her what to do with the tomato."

Soap Opera Digest
July 15, 1997 Used without permission