Agnes Nixon's Maiden Voyage
One Life to Live made its debut in 1968, the most violent year of the revolutionary decade of the 1960s. To cite just a handful of its dozens of turbulent events:
In January 1968, North Korea captured the American battleship USS Pueblo and held it hostage, raising the specter of nuclear war. A week later, the Vietcong launched the Tet offensive. Come April, Martin Luther King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Come June, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. August brought the violent, bloody riots of the Democratic Convention. By fall, Jackie Kennedy startled the nation by climbing down from her pedestal as the worshiped widow of Camelot to marry Aristotle Onassis. The spaceship Apollo closed out the year by circling the moon.
In this violently eventful year, Agnes Nixon embarked on a maiden voyage as the producer of her own writing with a soap called One Life to Live. A lesser writer would have drowned. A genius, Nixon found a way to master the turbulence and make it her servant.
Four years earlier, the Civil Rights Act had opened the door to black equality for the first time in American history. In a move that made her new soap as exciting and relevant as that morning's newspaper, Nixon put me forward as Exhibit A and arrested America's sharp attention on the claim that she had just created the first black star in a central role in the history of daytime television.
I wasn't the first black contracted to play a recurring role. That first belongs to the multi-gifted actress/singer/composer Micki Grant, for playing a secretary, Peggy Nolan, on Another World (1967-73).
However, because my role was central and lived at the heart of the action, Nixon was able to claim a first for creating daytime's first black superstar.
I played the role of Carla Benari. Carla was a black actress who, after being continuously rejected for black roles on the grounds that she looked white, decided to pass for white in her hunger to become a star-and then lived to regret it.
At the time, I was a "name" on the New York stage. I was considered to be a brilliant talent by such giants of the theater as Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg and Michael Kahn and by Joseph Papp, the impresario of the NY Shakespeare Festival, for whom I had already played half the great roles in the Shakespeare canon: Kate in The Taming of the Shrew... Princess Catherine in Henry V... Titania... Desdemona... Regan in King Lear... Lady Macbeth. You name it, I'd played it.
I had played on Broadway opposite huge stars such as Jack Lemmon and Barry Sullivan and played off-Broadway opposite James Earl Jones in Macbeth, The Cherry Orchard and Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, a pairing described as "magnificent" by the critic Walter Kerr.
Playing opposite...
Photograph by Will Rapport
The Billy Rose Theatre Collection,
Photograph by
My name on the New York stage coupled with the barrier I was breaking brought Nixon an array of spectacular gifts... ...her name rendered as indelible in the history books for her black first much as the name Branch Rickey for the hire of Jackie Robinson... saturation coverage in a soap opera press fascinated by the concept of a "Black Superstar"... mainstream press coverage-unheard of for soaps at the time-as major articles appeared in such mass-circulation publications as Newsweek and TV Guide...an entire page in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times with five-column-wide head shots and myself asked to write the article describing my breakthrough role.
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