“Those Are Erica’s Eyes”

The first time I met Agnes Nixon was twenty-six years before the night Soap Opera Digest honored her with that Lifetime Achievement Award. It was during my fifth callback for the part of Erica Kane. The producer was talking to me when I glanced over and saw her. He must’ve noticed me looking her way.

“That’s Agnes Nixon,” he said.

There she was—this petite, blue-eyed, blonde standard of beauty, wearing a cocoa-brown Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit. I didn’t know it was Agnes until he mentioned it. It was the first time I had ever seen a professional woman—or any woman—in such designer clothes in action and in person. I only recognized the suit because it was in the fashion magazines I had read in college, and I had just recently graduated.

This is the woman who had created the show and who had written the very scene I was about to audition with—a knock-down, drag-out fight between a spirited fifteen-year-old Erica Kane and her much more sensible mother, Mona, played by the wonderful Frances “Fra” Heflin. The mother-daughter stories I had seen on TV growing up were always so reverential, like greeting cards, but this was realistic and, in its way, revolutionary, like so much else that Agnes introduced to television.

I was cast as Erica Kane in 1970, the same year All My Children made its debut on ABC. This was shocking. I’d been told that I would probably never work in television because I was too ethnic looking. If only I had blonde hair or at least blue eyes. And yet, Agnes, who was indeed a blue-eyed, blonde classic beauty, chose me. I’m told that when she saw me on camera for the first time, she said, “Those are Erica’s eyes.”

Looking back, it was clear that Agnes had a vision for Erica from the start. The mere notion that she saw Erica’s eyes in mine was bold for the time. My look was not what America saw as mainstream. Agnes wasn’t concerned about that. She wanted something different. Everything changed after our fateful meeting on that day.