I, AUGUSTA

During the summer of 1984, there was one particular promotional photo for NBC's upcoming new soap opera SANTA BARBARA that held the promise of a rich and bountiful story to be told.  It showcased three generations of women bound together as the show's very own Three Graces: grandmother Minx, daughter-in-law Augusta and granddaughter Laken, respectively represented by a film and stage legend, a veteran actress, and a fresh-faced newcomer.  The pyramidal positioning of this impenetrable female circle couldn't have been more picture-perfect: Dame Judith Anderson reigning as Pride Lioness, complete with a Mona Lisa smile; Louise Sorel looking like a Cat On A Hot Tin Roof that just ate the canary; and kittenish Julie Ronnie as the fey-like lamb in a den full of foxes.  This little lamb, however, had the potential of being their littlest fox, for she secretly held the most power in that photo.  This future fox was the promise holding past and present together in the enactment of a female trinity.  This, folks, was a portrait of intergenerational matriarchy. 

The generations-old feud between the Capwells and the Lockridges was not just about modernity vs tradition and corporatism vs. aristocracy, but it was at heart the primordial war between patriarchy and matriarchy.  In contrast to the hyper-masculine Capwells, the Lockridge dynasty was decidedly matrilineal, built upon a tradition of women who married into the family and hermaphrodized that legacy with sheer female will-to-power.  We can trace this appropriation back to the 1800s, when Horatio Lockridge married Amanda, whose name would join the ages as the Lockridge most preserved in legend.  Hers  was not just the name of the famed treasure-laden ship that went down somewhere off the coast of California in the late  19th Century, but it was titled as the very source of the legendary family feud itself.   Like Helen of Troy, Amanda was the ultimate trophy wife, the desired prize to be won in a rivalry between Horatio and his former best friend Nathaniel Capwell that resulted in Lockridge's mysterious death, always attributed to Nathaniel.  Horatio and Amanda's son Douglas T. MacDonald ("T "for Tiger, at least according to his wife) would marry a woman who preferred to be called Minx who had a penchant for riding crops, vintage birdshots and borderline sociopathic behavior.  Upon his death, Douglas left his widow to be not only conservator to the family vendetta against the Capwells but the sole custodian of a centuries-old family lineage.  Their grand Montecito Manor Estate may have been built by T. MacDonald himself, but it was the women who presided as wives, mothers and soulmates who made the house a home.  These formidable forces of female nature renovated a dynasty into a gynarchy.  

Tiger and Minx's son Lionel would bring Augusta into their fold, another little fox who seemed to override biology and, in a self-realized act of expropriation and obfuscation, appeared to have pruned the Lockridge blood-vine into her very own DNA as the name Lockridge came to define her very identity (as Marge Simpson once declared to Lisa, "When I took your father's name, I took everything that came with it - including his DNA!").  Like castaways from a Victorian-like monarchy, this mother-ruled family was a showcase of dominant female personalities, while the men were but portraits to be honoured in the family gallery, male idols scattered  throughout the Great Mother's altar.   When we first met the Lockridges in the summer of 1984, we weren't aware of any dominating male presence in this proverbial hen house, with the exception, of course, of Lionel and Augusta's son Warren, whose only plans to exert any masculinity was on the beachfront with the babes.  Augusta tried but failed to refocus her wayward son's watered-down ambitions into a more powerful position within the family fold.  Warren, instead, was full of the same kind of daydreams that fueled his dream weaver father's wanderlust - at least mentally, for Warren was too much of a pampered mama's boy to want to venture too far from mother's coddling and home life security, luxuries the ramblin' Lionel (and the roarin' Tiger before him) was ready and willing to gamble with.   

It was Lionel and Augusta's youngest child that carried upon her small shoulders the heady history that carved out its own prime real estate establishment in this particular part of the California coast.  Not only was the seemingly simple Laken Lockridge the only true biological Lockridge female in this family (and the only one throughout the entire show's run), but she was the sole inheritor of this centuries-old self-willed matriarchy. 

Needless to say, much depended on this young woman's next step into the future.

                                                 I

Once upon a time, this little lamb growing up in a house full of foxes started out on the right path by finding her way to the back fence that divided her homestead from the big bad wolves that lived next door; there, she fell in love with their very own Teddy bear, the youngest and most bright-eyed innocent of this neighboring den full of its own bestial hybrids.  It was a fairytale beginning of what could only lead to a classic tragic romance, for our two young innocents were dealt quite a heavy hand  by destiny.  Their families weren't just rivals of the social kind.  The Capwells and Lockridges were captured and locked in some kind of sick fatal attraction to one another.   Laken and Ted were heirs to something deeper than just class warfare - their destiny was a forbidden passion that was engraved on the darkest underside of the Rock of Ages.  

On their merry way down their lovely wooded path, our two young lovers were following in the footsteps of shared ancestral romantic tragedies that stretched back to near-antiquity (well, at least for teenagers, it would seem that ancient).  From Laken's great grandmother's titanic crossing with Ted's great grandfather to Ted's mother's cataclysmic coupling with Laken's father, the Capwells and the Lockridges had a long history of forbidden romantic disasters and claustrophobic incestuous-like entanglements between them that would leave Emily Bronte gasping for air.  The winds of family warfare can have an aphrodisiac effect on the young and the restless, something Shakespeare knew all too well, so it was only natural the two youngest members of these warring dens would find their way to one another.   In fact, Laken and Ted had no choice but to be the next in line for they seemed fated to carry this centuries old curse of unrequited love into a whole new era.  As Lionel once declared to C.C., "... you and I will stand off (against one another) for the rest of our lives, but whatever relationship is going to be in the future between these two families will be decided between Ted and Laken ..."  (Ep 98).   The future of the show was in their smooth unlined teenage hands.  

That kind of deciding-factor coupling should have been as epic as the tragedies that came before them.   From the courtly indiscretions of Arthurian legend (Amanda and Nathaniel) to the wind-swept lovers of Dante's hellish imagination (Lionel and Sophia) to Shakespeare's doomed romance of two young stars crossed by fate,  Laken and Ted were to inherit a mindset of mythopoetic passion steeped in archetype.  This was the kind of live palpitating passion that echoed throughout history, calling to those like-minded souls that craved something more, its predatory nature hunting the evolutionary track for lonely spirits to misguide, new bodies to possess, and new hearts to set aflame in its insatiable appetite to survive.  Bodies may die, but this kind of otherworldly passion lives on and on and on.    It roams the spacescape like an alien virus disguised as shooting stars for foolish lovers to wish upon.  Like the universe forever expanding from the cosmic combustion effect of the Big Bang, this passion ripples along the timelines like sonic shockwaves.  What was in store for Laken and Ted was a tsunami of erotic tension generated by a centuries-old shipwreck that kept getting bigger and bigger - and more costlier - through the generations, a calamity and catastrophe left eternally unresolved and begging to be reincarnated over and over again because of its craving for the agony and ecstasy of love's darker passions.   The bar had been set dazzlingly high and the stakes were even higher.   

The greatest tragedy that came out of all this promise and potential, however, was that the characters and their story didn't even come close to achieving what the fates had expected of them.  Sonics weren't quite seized and shockwaves fizzled; those seismic ripples unleashed by that first Big Bang of an ancient primordial passion grounded to a screeching halt and went thud without even an exclamation mark.  In lieu of a grand shipwreck, all we got to witness was the plug being pulled out of a sink full of water and having to listen to the last gurgle going down the drain.  The newest initiates into a centuries-old lineage of otherworldly passion woke up from a dream state and pushed the snooze button and slept in - then kept on sleepwalking after dragging themselves out of bed.    The only aftershocks that could be detected was a distant rumbling from below which was only the sound of Amanda's eyes rolling over in her grave - and perhaps the shudder of disgust she felt at what the lovers of the world had grown into, squandering their soulful duty to live up to love's full do-or-die potential.    

As heir to the cosmic collisions of Nathaniel and Amanda and Lionel and Sophia, Ted and Laken were humiliating torchbearers, their tiny flame generating not even a spark, but simpering down into a speck and then into a nothing, a slow torturous burnout to sit and watch.  A walk of shame should not be because you didn't do anything!  Ted and Laken's love story deserved to be just as fierce as not only the over-forties but the centenarians as well!   Lionel reading the entries from the captain's log of that fateful Amanda Lockridge voyage that were so full of raging hormonal adultery on the high seas provided meatier material.  19th century Amanda Lockridge the woman put more Bang in that Big Boom Theory than a 20th century teenager who had more at her disposal than an exposed ankle to set those lurid corners of the imagination aflame.  Laken the little lamb was never allowed to be the show's littlest fox, and as a result, Teddy Bear never grew up into the gallant hero of a mythic quest that should have been his duty to try and resolve - not absolve.   Instead of pathos, we got pathetic.         

Spending most of her time defending her love for Ted to her family and the rest of her time defending her chastity to a frustrated Ted, Laken's lovers lane was worn down by aimless meanderings and pointless side trips, eventually leading her - and us - to a dead end.  A little over SB's first full year, Julie Ronnie's Laken left town to take up skiing in Lake Tahoe, recasted two years later as Susan Marie Synder's beach-blonde ski bunny who had been around a few slopes or more.  Having undergone a radical personality change that suited more plot than purpose, our once sweet and simple Laken was now savory and seductive and intent on breaking up her ex-boyfriend's marriage, something she wasn't good at because she left eight months later clueless and Ted-less.  A couple of years later she returned to her rootless family fold in yet another recast (Shell Danielson), no longer seductive but more spunkier; this Laken searched for her tomorrows in extreme career choices (acting and race car driving!) and through available men this time (whomever it was - it didn't matter) before she took off for New York in 1990, never to be seen again.  

The touch of madness that was rumored to run through the Lockridge family tree and expressing itself through varying degrees of compulsive eccentric behavior appeared to have sprouted in the family darling, revealing herself to be her wayward chameleon-like father's daughter after all, but that just amounted to another soap opera daddy's girl - a role this show stubbornly excelled in.  This was a far cry from the young cub who was heiress to a carefully pruned matrilineal lineage, which started to wilt on that day in 1985 under a frosty chill of cool air when Laken took off for the slopes.  With her departure, the matriarchal history that was so brilliantly laid out at the onset of a brand new show - and at the feet of what could have evolved in a reimagined rendering to be one of SB's most interesting female characters - became a relic of the past.  So much for female will-to-power.  

 

                                                                 II

No other soap opera took such detailed care to establish a rich history and all its rippling effects to create present day story, but the potential that Laken had in opening a whole new chapter for the continuation of that backstory was completely overlooked from the very beginning.  For a show that promised to never be a typical soap opera, the typical young ingenue was never allowed to break the rules of the mold.  On paper, Laken served the advertiser's requirement to target the teen demographic; as ingenue, she was just under Kelly Capwell's own A-plot duty as romantic young adult heroine.  Since that other Hatfield and McCoy-format soap opera CAPITOL (1982) had built its center around a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed romance between its warring families, SB's co-creators Bridget and Jerome Dobson  wisely chose not to make their matinee couple a Capulet-Montague rip-off (but it must have been very tempting to make Joe Perkins a Lockridge!).  It's just a given that two warring families must be entangled romantically somehow, so that first Capwell-Lockridge fusion to which we were introduced (because there was a real doozy that was being saved for later) was given to the youngest supporting members of their respective sets to fulfill dramatic duty as the show's alternating C and D plot.  

Wisely, the Dobsons synthesized the teen lovers with the two other youngest members of SB's four leading families, and the Capwells' Ted and the Lockridges' Laken made an appealing quartet with Danny, the baby-faced dollop of the Andrade clan, and Jade, the pretty little gem of the blue-collar Perkins household.  This fresh-faced soap began in the thick of summer, and a perfectly formed teen set (pun intended) was essential in attracting younger viewers (and those who liked looking at younger people in their bathing suits) to flock to this essentially multi-generational new show on the block.  Almost immediately, the group was flung into teen action, zipping off on a road trip adventure to the spleen of Hollywood, miles away from Santa Barbara and removed from the real intrigues developing between all four of their families.  In hindsight, that may have been a huge mistake.  The youngest cubs should have been developed among their own folds before separating them out into the wilderness.  All four characters suffered as a result, each struggling to find a footing in the more primary adult dramas while devoid of any real inner lives to seriously affect one another socially, culturally, personally and - most unfortunately - sexually.   Jade's brother was convicted of killing Ted's brother; Danny's family had been servants to Ted's family for years; pampered Ted and Laken were not only spoiled rich compared to Jade and Danny, but flaunted their puppy love in their single friends' faces daily … yet none of these very real emotional force fields palpitated between these seemingly blank specimens of a pop-fueled generation that would be marked by later chronologists with a big empty X.  

The pivotal roles they could have played in helping to flesh out the more worldly dramas that swirled around them were strangely - almost consciously - ignored.  For instance, when the Gang followed Jade to Hollywood to pursue her dream of being in the movies, they met proverbial Hollywood den mother Peaches DeLight, a former actress and burlesque fan dancer (and a wasted guest arc by a delightful Virginia Mayo).  It would have been natural to connect Peaches to Ted's late mother Sophia, a former actress with whom Peaches could have been big sister to in those early Hollywood years before Sophia left the business to become Mrs. C.C. Capwell.  Through Peaches, the first mention of a mystery man hidden in Sophia's past could have set the chain of events in motion that would eventually have led each teen right back to the doorsteps of their own homesteads, resulting in the reveal that Sophia's secret lover was Laken's father Lionel (of course).  Ted's foray into the backstage world of tinseltown dream factories could have been the pathway back to dealing with a make-believe mother he could only dream about, leading to the discovery of long-buried secrets that somehow connected all four families in surprising and unexpected ways (yes, even the Andrades, if the writers had even cared to think about it!). Unfortunately, none of these natural avenues were even considered.   

The future generation of the show's prime families existed in a universe all their own, an alternate timeline that was blissfully ignorant of all the myriad opportunities to graduate these heirs from Scooby Doo hijinks to higher education drama.  Their foray into sex education was as clumsy as a 13 year old dropping the Vaseline jar into the toilet with the first knock on the bathroom door.  This self-contained universe which housed these four cartoonish characters could have been a little more colourful if it had had its own self-sustaining combustional energy to thrive on.  Wouldn't it have been natural to have Danny harboring a secret love for his best friend's girl Laken, or Jade not-so-secretly pining for her best friend's boyfriend Ted (wouldn't ambitious Jade have been enthralled by the Natalie Wood-like legend of Ted's late movie star mother, who had mysteriously drowned all those years ago in a boating accident)?  Perhaps that kind of youthful melodrama was too predictable a soap cliché for the quirky Dobsons, who opted for trivial spunk and giggles instead of sturm und drang.  It was more important to keep these teens in a perpetual state of prepubescence playing patty cake with one another rather than any kind of hanky panky.  How else can one explain the absence of a real sexual awakening in this new band of postpubertals?     

This newest entry in the teen soap sweepstakes was alarmingly sexless and way too well-groomed.  They were a strange throwback to a square 50s sitcom or the good clean fun of 60s Beach Blanket Bingo escapism, where everyone's virtue always remain intact in  a laugh-a-minute kooky kind of way.  By the time SANTA BARBARA premiered, Agnes Nixon, Bill Bell and Douglas Marland had already revolutionized a new level of maturity in youth storytelling for the ever-widening multi-generational soap audience.  In small fictional towns like Springfield, Oakdale and Pine Valley USA, a new social consciousness underlaid some of the most dramatic stories soaps were tackling regarding young people: teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug abuse, rape, murder … the list grew more and more adult on a daily basis.  Other than a brief foray into the sleazy underworld of underage porn trafficking (which was resolved as quickly as a very special two-parter of THE FACTS OF LIFE during ratings sweeps week), our new teen set were about as serious as Velma's myopia and Shaggy's hygiene issues.  For that matter, they were about as sexy as the hormonal merry-go-rounds of Archie and the Gang, who experienced more angst and action with Archie's ménage-a-trois with Betty and Veronica.

Libido had to be kept in check behind running gags and sitcom-inspired scenarios that treated sex like a joke that always came without a punchline. For example, when our Gidget-inspired quartet decided to go enterprise and open up an abandoned motel to the teen public for community recreational use, gum-smacking prostitutes of the variety show variety moved in on our uncontaminated teens' turf to use their establishment to conduct their business transactions, but the teens were too preoccupied by the possibility the old building may have been haunted (Scooby, Scooby Doo, where are you?) to take seriously the implications of getting involved in the sex work trade.  Meanwhile, their stern and strict homeroom teacher and self-styled Wild E. Coyote Mr. Bottoms (played by FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH's famous stern-and-strict teacher Ray Walston, used mercilessly in a stock-in-trade typecasting stunt) wanted to catch them all in the act of what could only be salacious teenage horseplay but got caught in some compromising situation with said ladies of the evening by a police officer in a so-called comedy of errors that scores one for the teenagers!  Gnarly, said-teens rejoice! Gnot!, most viewers agreed, all of whom were being sorely tested on the limits of loyalty by staying through this fructose-fueled Saturday morning buffoonery and probably wondering why they should care (poor Mr. Walston must have been thinking this too … in fact, that was the last we ever saw of Walston; Ted helped his old man nemesis out of his misdemeanor jam and the two called a truce, surprisingly without the wild pool party that always erupts spontaneously among the community at the end of those 80s teen flicks).  These teens were kept sheltered from the taint of any real sexuality.   Even virginal Ted's May-December first-time flirtation with his English teacher flunked before it got to be fodder for campus gossip.  And our adorable little energizer bunny Danny Andrade ... the only action this little fireball got was when his bed was shaken across the room by the great Santa Barbara earthquake of 1985 - and he slept through it!  Guffaws aside, there was a brutal cosmic punchline hidden in there somewhere.  

It wasn't until the arrival of Tricia Cast as troubled Marlandesque teen Christy Duvall (who really should have been the character of Jade Perkins from the very start of the show) that the stakes were amped in the under-20s.  However, the sexual threat she brought to the grouping as a sexual abuse victim herself was to paint sexuality as an invading destructive force and not a natural step in the personal and emotional growth of young adulthood.  Instead of sexual awakening, we got a rude one: sex is a dirty little secret.  Ted had to be (falsely) accused of Christy's rape (committed by her stepbrother) in order to be taken seriously.  That only perpetuates an old-fashioned notion of sex as corrupter and pollutant.  Everyone was comfy and cozy in a mind-numbing Neverland before Christy showed up with her ugly little realities of sex; in fact, Laken and Ted's playhouse romance didn't survive this intrusion of brutal reality and it would be the catalyst for Laken to leave puppy love behind and skip out of town, leaving Ted in the lurch and howling like an abandoned hound dog.  Sexuality literally soiled Laken and Ted's star-crossed love story.   

This isn't all to say that Ted and Laken failed because they weren't raging sex maniacs.  They had much more to offer in helping to foster the more intimate and problematic aspects of two families intertwined in a love-hate relationship.  Ted and Laken were indeed essential in dragging their respective families kicking and screaming into a whole new century.  We truly missed out on some wonderful entangled inter-family relationships that could have given this story of maturing puppy love some real bite: a natural kinship of sorts between Kelly and Laken, for instance, could have benefited both of the show's young heroines to have one another as friends and confidantes; C.C. could have eventually developed  a soft spot in his hard heart for his worst enemy's daughter while Ted looked to Lionel as a more fitting father-figure than his own - in fact, spontaneous Ted was more of a Lockridge than the more typically stoic Laken, who could have found herself relating more intellectually to his siblings than he ever could.   These kinds of dichotomous dynamics between characters could have created some true psychodrama: an unusually vulnerable C.C. bending over backwards to gain Ted's approval in the same way Mason was begging for usually hardshelled C.C.'s favour; Ted surprisingly accepting Lionel's affair with Sophia while Laken expectantly resents her father's indiscretion ... the desires and secret longings found hidden in between parents and their children, between siblings and within kinships of any kind can be just as rife with dramatic possibilities as sexual conundrums.  Unfortunately, passion in all its many ilk was what was missing in what could have been one of this show's most compelling couplings.  Puppy love is cute, but it has an expiry date, and eventually it is raw unadulterated passion in all its varying degrees of conflict that makes a soap - no matter the age.  

Executives do what executives do and blamed newcomers who weren't quite ready for daytime, but the cold hard truth was the writing was not there to engage eager and willing young actors to develop their craft and mature beyond a high school production.  Danny was never allowed to be anything other than a clownish sidekick, Jade Perkins' star-struck ambitions burned out quite quickly (which is a shame because she really should have been this show's answer to Nola Reardon), and one-note Laken was never quite able to break out of her role as teen angel.  All three characters were phased out by the end of the show's first full year.  Not so surprisingly (and a portend for things to come), the Capwell survived this teen massacre.   Score one for patriarchy.  

 

                                                                                     III

Delving deeper into this fledgling conundrum, one comes up against the question of intention, which takes us all the way back to the very beginning in pre-production: to conception and then to casting.  In the original bible for the show, the character of Ted Capwell was drawn as a moody, troubled "James Dean-type" whose life by then had been deeply impacted by the death of a mother he barely knew and the murder of a brother he idolized.  Instead of James Dean, however, they went with John Ritter.   With his boy-next-door good looks, Peter Pan charm, bull-in-a-china-shop comic timing, and near-Jimmy Stewart delivery, Todd McKee was more little rascal with a comic bit than a rebel without a cause, tumbling more than rumbling.  From conception to final casting, the executive decision was made to revise the show's youth-angst representative  and to go for something completely different; somewhere along the way, intention went from heavy-handed psychodrama to light-hearted pantomime.  Recalling his audition for Ted, McKee recounts introducing a bit of his own humour to the proceeding, "bringing out more of my own character ... (playing) a lighter and less serious Ted. Ted ended up being a lot more like who I am."  With all due respect to the talented and lovable Mr. McKee (for you can count me in as one of those fans who couldn't help but love the guy), the character of McKee's Ted was a lightweight who lacked any real potential to be a true dramatic competitor with his more heavy contender siblings.  

The question remains as to why?  Perhaps because the canvas already had a James Dean-type in the headlining character of Joe Perkins and the Capwells already had a family black sheep in Ted's half-brother Mason, the original Ted may have been deemed superfluous.  That doesn't help clarify why the original conception of Ted was completely gutted of all its complex psychology.  Nice guys can have deep-seated issues too.  Did experienced writers of brilliant soap opera melodrama like the Dobsons really sacrifice in-depth character motivation and all its far-reaching repercussions in order to accommodate the infectious personable charms of one particular actor who could bring some comic relief to the show?  Or, to put it bluntly, did they just not take anyone under 20 seriously enough to truly want to write for that demographic, and, in this new burgeoning youth market, hoped they could coast on lightweight?  Did they sacrifice a Wild One for an easy ride?  

Julie Ronnie's dimpled sunny California valley girl features were the "look" that was in at the time, but if she had more to offer, it didn't seem to be too important to explore with the one-dimensional character she was expected to bring to life.  This new kit on the block had undeniable charm that translated well through the lens, but the chances were very limited for this stumbling newcomer to learn from the incredibly seasoned pros around her with all the paper-thin material given to her that could only result in paper-thin performances.  Of course, it didn't help that those experienced vets that surrounded her were unsure as to who their characters were supposed to be, the very brutal reality of a show starting out from ground zero.  There are going to be casualties and collateral damage.  Unfortunately, it was going to be the youngest who suffered the most from a brand new soap opera's growing pains.  The show had to grow up first before it could nurture its own issues.  

Then there's the case of Rupert Ravens, who wasn't given any chance to work in depth with any seasoned vets at all as he had only a few (count them: few!) scenes with his onscreen family during his entire run as Danny Andrade.  He was primarily kept to kick around as Ted's one-note sidekick.   His capability to handle more serious drama was teased when Ravens reappeared for a brief guest turn in '86 as a drug-addicted Danny charged with drunk driving, a character rebooted for reasons that will always be unknown for he disappeared as quickly as he suddenly reappeared (leaving us all to wonder if the poor kid ever kicked his habit).   Even when the show started to hit its stride two years after its debut, the priority level for this one particular character was always strangely - embarrassingly -  low.   

And it truly does say something that Melissa Reeves (née Brennan), who teeny-popped her way through her brief showcase role of Jade Perkins at the age of seventeen, went on to join the cast of DAYS OF OUR LIVES a month after being phased out of SB at the age of eighteen - and stayed with that show throughout the last 40 years to become one of DAYS' most beloved leading legacy ladies.  There is just something telling about that.  Perhaps Brennan wasn't ready to tackle her first-ever national exposure, or perhaps the not-so-solid footing of a brand new show couldn't provide the kind of environment for all of their newcomers to grow.  

Or did perhaps the Dobsons realize too late that they truly had no sustained interest in who and what Jade was supposed to be early on after her story was underway - so they went lightweight and thought no one under 20 would notice and those over 20 would care?    The level of commitment to this character seemed high as Brennan's Jade was the only teen in a handful of new faces that was so heavily promoted in the weeks leading up to SB's premiere, but the stability of that level of commitment became no more glaringly obvious in the way Jade was written out: enjoying a few weeks of front-burner importance, Jade's appearances started to get smaller and smaller until, like Alice's worst nightmare come true, she just disappeared forever - without any explanation to the audience ... or to the actress.  "I was never told the reason why I was let go ..." Reeves revealed in an interview with Soap Opera Digest.   

Any loyal viewer of the show can fill in the official answer because they've heard it all before: execs decided Jade's blue-collar background and Danny's ethnic servant-class heritage weren't as interesting as the Capwells' lifestyle of the rich and f*#ked-up.  This is the predictable trump card to play for executives who feel the need to save face and pass the buck onto an audience that makes the viewer accountable, even if it means making the viewer look rabidly prejudiced and intellectually superficial.  I resent being asked to feel like I somehow had a part in this unfortunate fiasco which led to the firing of three young newcomers.  There is something else going on here that deserves calling out: I suggest the teen demo was used to fit formulaic requisites that were the new standard at the time and there was no real intention to follow through ... and in a case of postmodern dissociative parenting, those in charge crossed their fingers and hoped their teen issues would just work themselves out on their own and let nature takes its course without zero nurturance.    

There is a sense of whimsy and fickleness when it comes to evaluating the Dobsons' failed attempt at creating their own teen quartet.  There's also a hint of appropriation.  Their Southern California foursome must have been inspired by their time-slot rival's very successful Four Musketeer grouping on GUIDING LIGHT, where Pamela Long was spearheading the Dobsons' old show into a whole new Golden Age as it's new multi-generational Head Writer in 1984.  In an obvious reworking of that show's iconic Phillip-Beth-Rick-Mindy quadrangle, Ted-Laken-Danny-Jade were not-so-subtle reinterpretations with subtle shifts in their predecessors' personages: where GL's good girl Beth was from the wrong side of the tracks, SB's good girl Laken was from a well-to-do family; likewise, where GL's spunky princess Mindy was nouveau riche, SB's bubbleheaded wannabe actress Jade was blue-collar.  In fact, it's not out of the realm of possibility that casting could have been influenced by Beth and Mindy's original portrayers, in particular in the case of Brennan, whose 80s teen beauty pageant look was quite similar to GL's perky Krista Tesreau (Mindy).  

Meanwhile, GL's original Odd Couple Phillip and Rick found their Batman and Robin-type bromance copied in the friendship between their SB counterparts Ted and Danny, but without the pathos - or the romantic undertones.  Casting may have took note of the similarity between the athletic Todd McKee's hardbodied attributes and the chiseled Grant Aleksander's rock-solid features in order to draw some kind of subliminal comparison, but that's where the similarities ended.  Ted was more of a rich boy version of GL's suburban nice guy Rick Bauer.  If one is following this parallel game of twister and switcheroo, Danny should have been more like Phillip, but strangely enough, tousled-haired Danny was yet another version of curly-haired comic sidekick Rick Bauer.  Both Ted and Danny were too much alike for either of them to ever rival a serious Homeric hero such as Phillip Spaulding, which is ironic because it was the Dobsons themselves who created Phillip in the first place way back in 1977 - not to mention all that impeccably plotted-out foundational family drama that developed that character through three consecutive decades of storytelling (which included Long's invaluable contributions) into one of the most fascinating complex male roles in daytime history.   In the hands of those who had proven beyond any doubt that they were capable of that kind of foundational writing, Ted or Danny should have been one hell of a force to be reckoned with.  The kind of established family drama the Dobsons crafted on GL is what truly made Pam Long's Four Musketeers work - these were the youngest members of very complicated family backgrounds that were all somehow entangled with one another, with those interactions all rooted in personal histories, class structure, social issues and cultural constructs.  SB's  Four Mouseketeers actually had all these very same crucial elements and more to take them to places Phillip, Beth, Mindy and Rick had never been.  Everything was in place to turn Ted, Laken, Jade and Danny into their own little lionhearts of epic teenage odysseys, but instead they ended up being poor-man parodies of soap opera trendsetters.   

  

If it were a case of characters that were miscast or green actors who weren't ready to handle the exigencies of daytime TV, the result ends up being the same:  the teen ensemble did not stand a chance in making anything of itself without the proper support of the creative powers that created them in the first place.   If roles are miscast, they need to be recast because the story to be told is important.   But there was no real story in the first place, and thus no characters to be invested in - not only for the viewers, but for the producers as well.   The writing on the wall is a cold hard slur to swallow: it was all in the writing.  

Youth storytelling was never the Dobsons' forte.   When he took over head writing duties of GUIDING LIGHT from the Dobsons in 1981, Douglas Marland noticed a glaring gap in the otherwise rich and complex canvas he inherited from them.  "One of the things that bothered me," he said in a 1982 article in Soap Opera Digest, "was that there weren't any teenagers."  Marland understood the motivations of a 16 year old are different from the desires of a 25-year old, needs that change as one gets older and enters their 40s, their 60s, etc..  In fact, he found it easier writing about life and love's biggest mistakes for those under 25 than for his other characters.  "People are willing to forgive nineteen and twenty-year-olds just about anything because they're young," he proclaimed, insinuating the older a character becomes, the more complex it is to justify selfish and self-destructive behavior (which, incidentally, doesn't appear to be a problem on today's soaps as 50-and-60something vets are going through their forth or fifth childhoods and those under 25 are living out Miltonic sized worldly passions more than ever, a change in storytelling that reflects more about us and where we are as a society than the empty state of creativity in today's inferior genre).  Mapping out these myriad stages of maturity in a constantly cyclical looping of stories-within-stories is the secret to painting a complete kaleidoscopic portrait of the human experience for viewers of all ages to have something of their own to become emotionally invested in.  

Marland also understood that youth was an investment in the future. "It's wonderfully exciting to see how the audience reacts to these characters now who were new two and a half years ago," he said of his youngest creations in 1982.  "They're standard characters now."  Of course, those new standard characters of Marland's youth group would all be written out throughout Pam Long's run, but it would be her youth-replacements (who were, in all fairness, just cleverly subtle reinterpretations of Marland's teens) who would be the ones that stuck until the show's end in 2009, all grown up and helping to carry the show through its last three decades.  Marland may not have been right about the longevity of his own creations, but he was proven right by his successors who followed his torch-passing dictum: the future is our youth.  The future of SANTA BARBARA was in its youth, but they were never allowed to build new foundations for future storytelling that could carry SB after the Dobson-favored 30-and-40somethings would inevitably find their stories coming to an end.   Without a real solid teen base, there was no real future for this brand new soap.   

                                                                IV      

Romantic teen heroine was not all that Laken offered as a character.  She had a core part to play in the cultivation of her own family unit as its own self-preserved entity outside of the Capwell-Lockridge story.  The part she should have held in her mother's story was never played out, mostly because Augusta's own direction as the show's driving force veered off-course into a dead end before her trip even began.  In that would-be scenario, Laken would have been Augusta's conscience personified, the Saffron to Augusta's Edwina Monsoon, or using Lillian Hellman's play "The Little Foxes" as inspiration, the sobering voice of cold hard truth the young cub Alexandra was for her repulsive scheming wolf of a mother Regina.  We missed out on what could have been another cornerstone relationship for the SB canon that was rife with rollercoaster parent-child emotions and conflict, but always, at heart, an endearing love story between a mother and her daughter.  An absolute must in the telling of a  matriarchal saga.   

As the conscience of the irascible Lockridge family, Laken could have come to represent the heart and conscience of the entire show (a must for every soap, no matter how quirky and iconoclastic it aims to be).  Oversensitive and intuitive, Laken as the littlest fox should have been the old soul of a scatterbrained family full of madcap adventurers and larger-than-life eccentrics.  The Lockridge dynasty was built by art scavengers and connoisseurs, a family culture shaped by the finest of the world's art.  It's only natural this family would eventually create its own artist.  And how fitting that it be the only biological Lockridge daughter in what could be decades.   Lionel would seek to claim history's greatest masterpieces for his own, but Laken should have been the one to create her own art.  

Re-imagining Laken as a budding violinist or concert pianist somehow entrenches her more in the old world aristocracy of her classic family; if not a musician, then perhaps a writer - or both: a classically trained musician who goes against family wishes by choosing to abandon one gift to develop a long-dormant passion for prose and poetry.  Part Jane Austen-chronicler of family entanglements, part brooding Bronte seeking inspiration from the ocean sounds during moonlit walks on the beach: this family prodigy should have had depths as deep as any watery abyss the family treasure had drowned in.  Laken could have been this faded family's one last hope to regain cultural credibility.  If the Lockridge marriage was based in part upon the Dobsons' (as SB folklore has it), it makes perfect sense to have their only daughter Laken a writer (Mary Dobson was part of her parents' writing team).  Laken would not have just been the requisite Juliet to a ready-made Romeo, but someone with a deeper and more engaging inner life that saved her from the idiocy of the ingenue by being a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.     

Perhaps Minx had a tragic Bramwell-like brother in her youth who didn't have the strength to fulfill his own literary calling, and her granddaughter would be the one to succeed where he couldn't; meanwhile, Augusta would oppose her daughter's literary aspirations because of an irrational need to control the narrative so to speak,  a constant source of argument between her and her husband, for the Byronesque Lionel would of course want nothing but to encourage his youngest in any of her chosen artistic pursuits; meanwhile, wayward Warren would feel envious of his little sister's multi-talents, because wayward Warren was following in the footsteps of Minx's Bramwell brother, overshadowed by a more stronger sister.  In fact, it would have been nice to have a more textured, more complex relationship between Laken and her brother in order to help him flesh out his own sketchy characterization (see more on Warren in my Postscript below).   

A re-imagined Laken energizes not only family dynamics, but also a teen showcase that was desperately in need of reworking before its premiere: we could have had a rich and deeply textured frenemyship between material girl Jade and a schoolmate known for lone moonlit walks and writing brooding romantic poetry that belied a real thirst for independence; Ted and Laken's relationship could have been much more than their family squabbles and her cherished virginity, but a clash of personal egos and ambitions with earnest Ted's own fancies of a budding writing career coming in direct conflict with his girlfriend's more superior talent; and honest Danny could have benefited from being Laken's most ardent supporter despite his culture's traditional machismo, placing him in the middle of the tensions between his best friend and his best friend's girl, thus giving him a more endearing relationship with someone other than his pubertal bromance with Ted.  All these could-haves, should-haves, and what-ifs end up being mere conjecture, and such creative flexing amounts to nothing but ordinary obsessive fanfiction.  The point to be reiterated is that there truly was much more these well-intentioned but delinquently misguided characters had to offer to not just the present state of affairs, but also the future of the show, which may have been a little more clearer through all its rewrites and revisions while still managing to remain true to its original inception without throwing so many of its babies out with the bathwater.  

 

                                                                V

The Lockridges would be one of the greatest casualties of the struggling SANTA BARBARA's bid for survival.  Without Laken to pick up the mantle of a female-ruled genealogy, the matriarchy of SB's balanced world officially collapsed.  Without Laken and Ted together, the collision of the feminine eternal and the masculine eternal of SB's carefully planned out cosmology never happened as the past had promised.  And in that historical competition, Patriarchy came out the victor: the father-centric universe of the more urbane Capwells became the Law of One.  Gynarchy was expelled for full-on DYNASTY, this Southern California-based serial aiming to be the West Coast version of Denver's Carrington saga.  The traditional young ingenue reared by women became a what-if while the father-reared Capwell daughters set the standard for the new modern romantic heroine (and whose emotional transgressions against standard acceptable behavior would always be attributed to their rebellious mother's biological donation).  Meanwhile, Dame Judith Anderson's original matriarch Minx was reduced to a punchline and, another new victim of Alice's nightmare scenario, got smaller and smaller until no one saw her anymore.  By then, Augusta had already left the fold without any real explanation.  Eventually, all Three Graces of SB's great expectations were expelled from their ancestral garden to roam the earth as exiles; they were all allowed to come back every now and again but they were shells of their former selves, headless statues that were put on exhibition as antiquated rediscoveries and curious novelties complete with a shelf life.    

The males fared much better in this Darwinian rendering of the battle of the sexes, with globetrotter Lionel managing to always be Lionel and Warren achieving new leading man status as a world-weary Hemingwayesque crusader, both survivors of a long-forgotten matriarchy.  By the time a revisioned Minx (played by the much younger Janis Paige) had returned to Santa Barbara and rebuilt the family house near the end of the show's run (for it had symbolically burned down somewhere in those lost years in which the Lockridge family were MIA), the gesture seemed empty, for the legacy had already been lanced and torn, the deeply rooted family dynamics long dis-membered.  Any attempt to mend it was beyond the point of truly understanding such an endeavor; it was as if we were in an alternate reality with reverse Lockridge doppelgängers in some weird parallel universe, where Augusta was a broken and boring alcoholic, Warren wasn't Lionel's son, and Minx was eerily closer to age to Lionel and suddenly had a secret child she bore when she had to have been - if we are going with established chronology instead of revised history - close to her 70s (let's give Caesar his due, though: this long-lost child was at least a daughter, which fit into the original conception of a Lockridge gynarchy and was the only thing that could be deemed passable in this square-bashed-into-a-round-hole purely-for-plot twist).  

The downfall of the original Lockridge family was SANTA BARBARA's one serious crime against Mother Nature.   In ways that can never truly be understood, they were always completely maltreated by their makers, cock-blocked by their own creators.   And that endearing promotional photo of Minx, Augusta and Laken as their own titan trinity becomes faded with discarded grey matter and is now a curio of its own ancient past, haunting still with notions of what could have been.  

                                                                          A KIND OF POSTSCRIPT 

If anyone is wondering where I fit Lionel and Warren in the Lockridge gynarchy, I say they actually fitted quite well - in their own ways.  Surrounded by so much estrogen could keep any male off-kilter, but the key for a man to survive within a female-dominated environment is to follow that philosophical maxim inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in ancient Delphi: know thyself.  If there was anyone who knew himself it was Lionel Lockridge.  Lionel was Dionysian by nature, a born-Bacchan who adventured along the flow of nature's fluidity (a master scuba diver, he especially loved the water).  He was the favored son of the Great Mother  (actually her only son), the Osiris God born through her, a position of privilege within the mother cult from which he drew and nurtured his strengths from.   He felt no need to repress or capture the feminine, only to explore and meld with it.  Primarily, his main source of strength was embracing the feminine (literally and figuratively) to enjoy the privileges and the potentialities his masculinity could drain from unrestrained maternal abundance - no apologies made.  Free reign within a matriarchy suited this free spirit just fine, as it afforded him all the unconventionalities of operating outside the patriarchal system, which was too stifling for a cultivated nonconformist.  Hence, his natural antipathy with patriarchal incarnate, C.C.  Capwell.  

Lionel's true counterpart, however, was not the Capwell patriarch but that family's scion and fellow anti-hero, Mason.  Unlike Lionel, Mason was a product of patriarchy: polished and organized, dry and stiff like a good martini, trapped in demanding necktie-strangling masculine constructs.  Apollonian Mason was the complete antithesis to wolf-runner Lionel, a prodigal son who benefited from a strong mother's presence; Mason's eternal search for his lost mother twisted his closeted Dionysian nature into a compulsion for subversive self-destructive behavior.    Who benefited the most from the respective environments each of these men were reared in?  

In contrast to his father, Warren is a much more complicated study.  When we first met twentysomething Warren, this proverbial eternal beautiful boy was cradled in an all-female environment, an 80's Narcissus that echoed all those beautiful boys of the classical imagination from Hadrian's adored Antinous to Tadzio, Thomas Mann's objet fetiche.  He was consort and trophy in his mother's own imagined goddess cult, a husband-replacement in which she could correct the inability to capture and control its wayward original.  Forced to overcompensate, this phallic totem was posturing himself as a swaggering ladies man (what would have Tadzio been like if he had survived into adulthood?), but the persona belied a little blonde boy lost.  Never quite sure of his own footing, the Adonis-like Warren appeared to be in constant misstep with himself, wanting to emulate his heroic father but never quite possessing Lionel's lucky streak.  He always seemed to be in conflict with himself, usually caught in between his parent's battles, pulled in two different directions by the feminine and the masculine.  

Bacchan Baby Boomer Lionel found himself born in the right era, for he flourished in the sexual revolution of the Dionysian 60s and 70s, but the Apollonian 80s for his heirs were presenting a whole new set of postmodern cultural constructs that perhaps arrested Warren's development when we were first introduced to him; sons of trailblazers have nothing to push against like their fathers do in their trailblazing times, so they end up pushing against themselves, resulting in second-generation poseurs rather than pioneers.  And emulated heroes are sure to become legends - and impossible acts to follow.  While Lionel roamed mother earth accumulating knowledge and diving into the depths of her deepest oceans (literally and figuratively), Warren stuck close to the home-womb and rebelled by becoming a lifeguard.  He  would eventually succeed in becoming as swashbuckling as his idolized daddy, but only after the matriarchy he grew up in was dismantled and the two male members of this once-mighty family were left to roam the world rootless, so to speak.  Hence, only a complete rewrite of this character's original incarnation could make Warren into the masculine persona he idealized.  

Warren's relationships with women were never quite as epic as those that chaptered his father's romantic odyssey:  a planned romance with Eden Capwell never even got off the ground after their one moment of friction underneath her deflated parachute; his flirtation with Jade Perkins flunked without even an "E" for effort; his Summer romance with Gina's sister was doomed to die from the start for all its empty-calorized coma-inducing sugar rush; a minor flirtation with Elizabeth Peale turned out to be as real as the fraudulent art she manufactured;  his ready-made tortured romance with married Maggie Gillis burned out into oblivion when the body heat wore off; a Singapore streetwalker he hooked up with in the Orient turned out to be his Aunt (before his own biological claim to Lockridge blood was taken away from him with the misguided executive decision near the end of the show's run to reveal he was not Lionel's son after all ... just silly) ... regardless, his flirtation with incest vis-à-vis Minx's secret daughter Cassandra Benedict was bound to happen for this miscued meandering male whose relationship with his own mother had questionable vibes in the early inception of the show.  

By now, Warren was revisioned as a cigar-chomping hard-drinking man of the world, but his slippery romantic slides were just as sloppy.  A romance with married Angela Raymond began to erode when she was finally available (his eternal bachelor MO); and he apparently found a twin soul with a younger tomboyish (and sexually damaged) girl named "BJ" (hmm ...) who attracted him in the beginning by posing as a boy.  Yes, I am suggesting exactly what it sounds like.  It's amazing how characters essentially write themselves.  In my fantasy reboot of SANTA BARBARA, I would deal with the character of Warren Lockridge exactly the way it was screaming from the closet (or the lifeguard locker) to be dealt with.  Did anyone honestly believe Warren and Channing Capwell were just "friends" ...?  Come on, folks ... even his own mother was hinting at it with her fear her son had murdered the Capwell heir for her own reasons which were never truly clarified.    

WORKS CITED

Coons, Joanna.  "Soaps That Sizzle: A Look At What's Cooking On Cable - Part II".  Soap Opera Digest.  March 1983.   112-119

Dobson, Bridget and Jerome, creators.  Santa Barbara.  New World Productions and NBC-TV.  1984.  

McKee, Todd.  "I had a great time working on Santa Barbara".  Interview by Nicolas France.  Santa Barbara le site Français.  October 6, 2010.  http://santabarbara-online.com/InterviewTMcKee2.htm

Reeves, Melissa.  "#TBT - Melissa Reeves".  Soap Opera Digest.com.  October 31, 2019.  https://www.soapoperadigest.com/content/tbt-melissa-reeves/


"What are "Guiding Light's" chances to be #1?"  Soap Opera Digest.  August 17, 1982. 25-29.  vol 7, no 17