Agnes Nixon Presents Susan Lucci and Ellen Holly to the Museum of Broadcasting as the Two Most Precious Jewels in Her Crown as "The Queen of Soaps"

Meanwhile, there was a final Gothic twist to the saga of Carla.

In 1988, the same year that Erika Slezak informed Soap Opera Digest of the termination of the Carla story line, the Museum of Broadcasting (later renamed the Museum of Television and Radio and currently the Paley Center for Media) devoted an evening to the celebration of Agnes Nixon's career.

Nixon now found her way to a phone and invited me to share in the proceedings. She explained her three-year silence by saying she had cut all ties to One Life and had only just learned I was no longer on its roster. A year later, the August 26, 1989 issue of TV Guide put her in fourth place below Oprah Winfrey on its list of the wealthiest women in television and said of her current involvement, "The 'Queen of the Soaps' created One Life to Live in 1968 and All My Children in 1970. She sold both shows to ABC in the 1970s but remains a consultant." If the magazine's information, which came from the ABC VP in charge of daytime, was correct, it is my opinion that that would have meant that she had been one of the parties signing off on my termination.

In 1988, lacking that future information, I agreed to attend. I was then sent a 30-page document of her planned remarks in the mail. They were an exercise in fanciful mythmaking. A good four pages were devoted to the riveting tale of her creation of the character of Carla, and she had choreographed the evening to present Susan Lucci and Ellen Holly as the two most treasured stars of her career.

What the museum audience could not have known was that my 17 years of work, all added up, came to $727,557, a sum paid out to Susan in seven months. They also could not have known that I'd been terminated three years earlier. By contrast, Susan would be kept on the payroll for the next quarter century to earn her kind of money.

Of interest in this regard are the two statements of Susan's and my earnings. On the left are my annual earnings statements from AFTRA, the relevant union. To the right is a gauge of Susan's earnings as gleaned from a Nixon quote two years later in a 1990 TV Guide article.

In my opinion, Nixon seems to take affectionate pride in the largesse bestowed on Susan and the extent to which complex negotiations resulted in contracts custom-tailored to accommodate both her personal and professional life. By contrast, the listings on my AFTRA statements make clear how much less I earned and how my contracts on which Nixon was cc'd were so devoid of personal accommodation, they took up a single page.

Meanwhile, make no mistake, I'm a huge Susan Lucci fan and consider her to be a gifted actress and genuinely charismatic star worth every penny she's ever been paid...and then some.

To appreciate the range of Lucci's talent, just take a look at her movie Mafia Princess. She's also a delightful person. Further-unlike all the top stars on One Life to Live who joined the show years after its debut, played no role in launching it into orbit, and slid into millions on the backs of other people's work-Susan built up All My Children from the basement and stands on nobody's shoulders but her own.

I provide these two statements because they exist as the only public records I am aware of that disclose the sums that were paid out to Nixon's major stars.

These records demonstrate how profoundly I believe Agnes Nixon was prepared to renege on the implicit contract she had made back in 1968, not just with me, but with the press, the public and the history books.

From my involvement with her series, spectacular rewards came Nixon's way-her name revered in the history books for her black "first," the extravagant coverage in both the soap opera and mainstream press, the major black audience that would keep both of her shows afloat for 40 years-these were gifts she was given, up front, based on the public perception that she was an equal opportunity employer who intended to give her black star the same first-class ride as her white stars.

In my opinion, the earnings information speaks to how well she kept that bargain.