Irving Vendig era (1956-65)
For the serial’s entire duration, stories either revolved around, or had much to do with, Monticello lawyer Mike Karr. As the
series began, Mike Karr's relationship with Sara Lane essentially reproduced the radio serial's Perry Mason/Della Street relationship. The added complication for Mike Karr was that Sara's family was involved in organized crime through her
paternal uncle Harry Lane, a corrupt, megalomaniac, whose trucking company was a front to fence stolen goods. In the first major story arc, Sara’s impressionable younger brother Jack (Don Hastings) was slowly being drawn into the criminal world through Harry, who plotted to murder his blackmailing secretary Marilyn Bollon and frame his dipsomaniac wife Cora. With this plot, creator/headwriter Vendig established a winning formula that would guide the series for the next nine years: a villain would create an elaborate plan to murder an enemy and frame an innocent party for the crime. Every murder plot ended with a criminal trial, in which Mike Karr, often with the assistance of close friend and Chief of Police Bill Marceau (Mandel Kramer), would solve the puzzle, prove the innocence of his client, and bring the killer to justice. Although this story structure was predictable (which, in truth, probably accounted for the program’s success), the writers worked overtime to devise an endless stream of idiosyncratic villains in a variety of interesting settings.
Notable baddies included corrupt businessman JH Phillips, who thwarted Mike’s political career (1957); murderous motivational speaker Maximillian Bryer, who poisoned his wealthy wife and framed mild-mannered brother-in-law Dr. Hugh Campbell
(1959); Frank Dubeck, a hulking, multiple strangler whose last killing was blamed on Jack Lane (1960); and Scofield Killborn, a crazed heroin addict who kidnapped Phil Capice, replaced him with plastic-surgery altered double John Lambert, then murdered John and framed Phil’s wife Louise for the crime (1962).
By the early 60’s, even women were getting in on the act. Icy blonde Teresa Vetter poisoned her boring husband George, then stabbed her larcenous lover Victor Carlsen in the back with a letter opener, stealing his money and framing Bill Marceau’s naive daughter Judy for the crime (1961). Eve Morris, another female with an affinity for sharp objects, was a sophisticated theatre patron who murdered her ex-lover Malcolm Thomas with a pair of scissors, framed his new wife Cookie for the deed, and attempted to stab Cookie herself in a violent rage following a dramatic courtroom confession (1965).
Three high profile casting changes occurred during Irving Vendig’s tenure. The first came in early 1961 when actress Teal Ames opted to relinquish her role as heroine Sara Lane Karr. Operating under the assumption that no other actress could successfully replace her, the writers had Sara struck by a car while saving daughter Laurie Ann, who had wandered into the street. Five days later, Sara died peacefully in the hospital. Grieving fans immediately swamped local affiliates and CBS with
telephone calls and telegrams, with almost 500 logged before the episode went off the air. Public reaction was so fervent that Teal Ames made a special appearance at the end of the following episode, explaining to the audience that she had voluntarily left the series to pursue other interests. Sara’s loss was also reflected in the Nielsen ratings, as Edge’s viewership declined for the first time in its history. Eight months later, when lead performer John Larkin announced his intent to leave, too, producers wisely sent Mike Karr to Capitol City for a brief sabbatical until an appropriate actor could be found to fill part. In early 1962, veteran soap performer Lawrence Hugo assumed the role of Mike Karr and was immediately paired with Ann Flood’s sympathetic reporter Nancy Pollock, their popularity reaching the same level of audience interest previously held by Mike and Sara. A year later, on 22 April 1963, Mike and Nancy were married. Their union was to be the series’ longest, lasting until the final episode over 21 years later.
Lou Scofield era (1965-68)
During early 1965, Procter and Gamble and CBS decided that in order to appeal to a wider audience, Edge should abandon its strict adherence to Irving Vendig’s format and explore other crime genres. Vendig, opposed to tampering with what he
felt a solid formula, resigned as headwriter and began to disassociate himself with the series. Procter and Gamble replaced him with Lou Scofield. Scofield’s first storyline capitalized on the growing Cold War spy craze, popularized by
James Bond films and prime-time TV series such as The Man From Uncle, as French criminal Andre Lazar (Val Dufour) attempted to infiltrate Monticello’s Grimsley Foundation. The Lazar plot also dove-tailed into Edge’s first murder mystery when abusive Roy Cameron was found dead in an alley, having been pushed from his high-rise office window by an unseen intruder.
In 1966, Scofield introduced the wealthy-but-doom-prone Hillyer family: benevolent patriarch Orin (Lester Rawlins), his much-younger, restless second wife Laura (Millette Alexander), and Liz (Alberta Grant), Orin’s impressionable teenage daughter from
his first marriage. Their introduction precipitated one of the most popular storylines in Edge’s history, an elegiac tale in which Laura fell into a stormy love affair with disc jockey Rick Oliver (Keith Charles), a handsome Lothario who plotted to murder Orin and get his hands on Laura’s fortune. The plan backfired, and when Laura realized the truth, she grabbed a revolver and fired all six rounds into her lover. While the series had always been one of the more successful soaps, Rick’s murder, the subsequent trial in which police chief Bill Marceau’s wife Martha (Teri Keane) was falsely accused of the crime, and Laura’s
dramatic demise in a fiery, cliffside car crash, sent Edge soaring to the top of the ratings, where it remained the second most-watched soap opera for a full year. Scofield followed this storyline with the unpopular “Project R” plot, a convoluted espionage caper involving industrial spies and a stolen microdot containing plans for a mysterious project at Monticello’s electrical company. Viewer reaction was intensely negative, and the ratings began to falter again.
During this period, headwriter Lou Scofield took a three month sabbatical from the series in order to care for his terminally ill wife. Procter and Gamble hired veteran mystery writer Henry Slesar to substitute for him in the summer of 1967. Slesar instantly mastered the genre, introducing the pivotal character of counterespionage agent Adam Drake (Donald May) and concluding the preposterous Project R story with an exciting shootout on a military airfield. With Mike Karr happily married and taking a less active role in the drama, Adam was poised to become the soap’s new leading man, and actor Donald May proved so popular with viewers that he eventually received special billing in the serial’s closing credit crawl. Before his temporary duties concluded, Slesar also revisited the Hillyer family by devising a storyline in which Orin became obsessed with Julie
Jamison (Millette Alexander), a riverboat entertainer who also happened to be a dead ringer for the deceased Laura Hillyer.
Henry Slesar era (1968-83)
In April 1968, Lou Scofield left the series to create Where the Heart Is, a new CBS serial. P&G quickly rehired Henry Slesar to replace him, thus beginning what was to become, at that time, the longest headwriting stint of any soap opera scribe. Slesar’s talents as a mystery novelist and frequent script contributor to Alfred Hitchcock Presents were perfectly suited for Edge’s
constant barrage of murder and mayhem, and he quickly gained a reputation for his unusually-named characters, clever whodunits, and delicious use of irony. Slesar’s first task was to conclude the Julie Jamison story, the plot he introduced the previous summer. Falsely accused of murdering Harry Constable (Dolph Sweet), her blackmailing boss at the Riverboat, Julie was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang on Christmas Day. In an exciting Agatha Christie-inspired conclusion, taped on location at a real riverboat in Connecticut, cuckolded husband Ernie Tuttle was unmasked as the killer. Ernie engaged the police in a violent shootout, then plunged over the side of the boat, falling to his death on the paddlewheel far below. This sequence sent Edge soaring back to the top of the ratings, where it remained a solid #2 in the Nielsens for the next two years.
At the end of 1968, Slesar introduced Nicole Travis (Maeve McGuire), who was to become one of the most iconic characters
in the series. At first unsympathetic, Nicole slowly began to change into a warm heroine when she was charged with the first degree murder of Stephanie Martin (Alice Hirson), a woman who had been stalking her in a misguided sense of revenge. During her trial, Nicole’s relationship with attorney Adam Drake evolved from antagonism to unrequited love. Their stormy courtship, often affected by outside criminal influences, became enormously popular among the audience, with Don May and Maeve McGuire consistently ranking in the top ten favorites of Daytime TV Magazine’s monthly reader’s poll. 1970 saw the
introduction of the Whitney family, a Kennedyesque political dynasty headed by manipulative matriarch Geraldine (Lois Kibbee), a character who would remain prominent for the remainder of the soap’s run. Geraldine had two sons: Colin
(Anthony Call), a state senator running for re-election, and Keith (Bruce Martin), a violent sociopath who faked his death, returned as disguised hippie Jonah Lockwood, and went on a murderous rampage, killing six people and
attempting to murder both Nancy Karr and Mike’s now-adult daughter Laurie Ann (Emily Prager). Keith’s reign of terror climaxed in a chase sequence taped on location at a country estate in Pennsylvania. After terrorizing Laurie with a
shotgun, Keith attempted to toss her off the top of a tower but tumbled to his death down a staircase instead.
Slesar followed this storyline with several memorable plots, including: the “haunting” of the Marceau home by presumed
dead criminal Frank Sloane, a long drug smuggling caper inspired by The French Connection, and wife-killer Jake Berman’s obsession with Nicole. In a nod to the past, Slesar also reintroduced Orin Hillyer, who returned to Monticello from a trip abroad following the death of wife Julie in a plane crash. Recovering from the accident, Orin was pursued by the conniving Elly Jo Jamison (Dorothy Lyman), Julie’s niece. With the assistance of hypnotist Simon Jessup, Elly Jo schemed to become heir apparent to the Hillyer fortune by hypnotizing a pregnant Liz Hillyer Fields into driving to her death off the side of a cliff. In typical Slesarian irony, Elly Jo was tricked into riding with Liz, and believing her to be in Jessup’s deadly hypnotic trance, Elly Jo jumped from the speeding car and died from her injuries. The exciting sequence, taped on location in New Jersey,
won Edge its first Emmy award as Outstanding Drama for the 1972-73 season.
The following year brought the high profile departure of popular castmember Maeve McGuire, who left to pursue opportunities on the West Coast. In the story, Adam and Nicole were finally married, but their happiness was short-lived. Attempting
to thwart Adam’s burgeoning senatorial career, the mob planted an explosive device on the Sprite, Adam and Nicole’s honeymoon yacht. The bomb detonated on 30 May 1974, blowing the Sprite to smithereens. Adam was rescued from the
wreckage, but Nicole, nowhere to be found, was presumed dead. Now paired with new assistant district attorney Brandy Henderson (Dixie Carter), Adam’s crusade to bring Nicole’s killers to justice dominated the narrative for the next year, dovetailing into numerous subplots of blackmail, murder, and attempted murder, involving the entire cast in one way or another. Serena Faraday, a distant cousin of the late Nicole, was also introduced during this era. Suffering from multiple personality disorder, Serena’s truculent alter-ego “Josie” had mob ties, as well. Meanwhile, Geraldine Whitney, who by now had buried both of her sons and her husband, was comatose following a mysterious fall down a staircase in the Whitney mansion. Geraldine was slated to die, but a behind-the-scenes emergency saved her. In September 1975, P&G announced Edge’s imminent move from the CBS television network to ABC. In a bid to retain its audience in the move, producer Nick Nicholson managed to lure Maeve McGuire back to the series. Nicole was revealed to be alive and suffering from amnesia in Paris, just as the last CBS episode was telecast.
Edge’s premiere on ABC, a dramatic 90-minute special preempting that day’s broadcast of General Hospital and One Life
to Live, opened with the discovery of Nicole by old friend Kevin Jamison (John Driver). By the end of the episode, Nicole had regained her memory, while back in Monticello, the trial between Mark and Serena Faraday for custody of their
young son Timmy (Doug McKeon) reached a stunning climax when Serena reverted to split personality Josie and assassinated Mark on the courthouse steps. Nicole’s return threw a monkey wrench in Adam’s love life; he had just announced his
engagement to Brandy when Nicole reappeared. Moving into 1976, most of the narrative was dominated by the mystery of what had happened to Nicole following the explosion of the Sprite two years earlier. This precipitated another plotline involving the entire cast, as Nicole’s former captor Claude Revenant, an embezzler hiding on a remote Caribbean island, sent a seemingly endless stream of hit-men to silence Nicole before she could recall his whereabouts. Nicole was also targeted by Revenant’s enemies, who hoped she could lead them to Revenant before the authorities caught up with him. Practically every Friday episode during this period ended with an attempt to eliminate Nicole, though often resulting in the death of another character, as Slesar slowly began trimming longstanding castmembers.
The most shocking cast departure occurred on Friday, 10 June 1977, when a mysterious assailant fired two bullets into the
heart of Adam Drake, ending the character’s long tenure on the soap. The announcement that actor Donald May had been fired from the serial didn’t sit well with fans, who held out hope that Adam’s death was simply one of Slesar’s clever tricks, but Adam remained dead, and Nicole was paired with new physician Dr. Miles Cavanaugh (Joel Crothers). Shortly thereafter, Maeve McGuire announced her intention to leave Edge for a second time. P&G chose to recast, and although several high profile soap vets were up for the role, including Judy Lewis and Karen Gorney, the part ultimately went to newcomer Jayne Bentzen. This bit of casting created controversy among fans as Bentzen was nearly 20 years younger than her predecessor.
The focus on youth was a deliberate one as Edge desperately tried to appeal to ABC’s younger demographic.
From 1978 on, Slesar refocused the storylines on the travails of young heroines April Cavanaugh (Terry Davis), Miles’ sister, who developed psychic abilities after a near-death experience, Deborah Saxon, a beautiful police officer, and Jody Travis, Nicole’s teenaged half-sister. He also got a great deal of mileage out of anti-heroine Raven Alexander (Sharon Gabet), a
fascinating vixen whom the audience loved to hate. Popular stories during the late 70s included Denise Cavanaugh’s (Holland Taylor) malevolent attempt to keep Miles and Nicole apart by committing suicide and framing Miles for the “crime”, Winter Austen’s trial for the murder of blackmailing pornographer Wade Meecham (in an ingenious twist Winter was exonerated then revealed to actually be the killer), and an homage to Sunset Boulevard with fading movie queen Nola Madison (played by Oscar-winner Kim Hunter) resorting to deadly measures to revive her career. Nola’s appearance triggered a year’s worth of plot after she murdered April’s mother Margo Dorn then framed April’s husband attorney Draper Scott for the crime. Ala The Fugitive, Draper’s train crashed on the way to prison. He was presumed dead, developed amnesia, and with the help of
neurotic Emily Gault (Margo McKenna) ended up assuming the identity of Emily’s missing husband Kirk Michaels, a petty thief who had been killed by the cops years before. Emily and Draper were kidnaped and held hostage in an amusement park by Kirk’s former criminal associates, who mistakenly believed that Draper was actually Kirk. After this was resolved, April and Draper found it impossible to rid themselves of Emily, who claimed to be pregnant with Draper’s child. Her desperate bid to maintain a hold on Draper led to another series of murders, culminating in a nail-biting, week-long sequence in which April was trapped by the killer in a deserted house during a violent storm.
In 1981, Slesar launched two storylines that are generally considered by Edge devotees to be his last great plots. The first story arc involved the vanishing of Nancy Karr, who inadvertently discovered that Dr. Kenneth Bryson’s Rexford Clinic was a haven for plastic-surgery altered criminals. This segued into a second story arc in which Raven Alexander, now married to Geraldine Whitney’s nephew Schyuler Whitney (Larkin Malloy), realized that her husband had been one of Dr. Bryson’s
patients and was actually an impostor named Jefferson Brown. To keep his true identity hidden, Brown was forced to commit a series of homicides, and the storyline climaxed with an extravagant location sequence taped in St. Moritz, Switzerland, where Brown met his death in the Alps while attempting to throw Raven off a snowy, mountainside cliff.
Several problems began to affect The Edge of Night in early 1982. First, ABC affiliates started dropping the serial at an alarming rate. This was due in part to the expense of the series, which was more costly for local stations than syndicated or community-produced programs; however, it was also the result of declining viewership, as ABC began exercising more “creative control” over the program, resulting in a number of unpopular storylines. Among those were master of disguise Smiley Wilson’s plot to steal Raven’s fortune by framing her for a faked murder, using the same techniques perpetrated by her late husband Jefferson Brown. The audience also didn’t warm to the preposterous “Martyr of Eden” story arc in which teenage
heroine Jody Travis became entangled in the mob’s scheme to smuggle art out of the fictional Republic of Eden. Slesar gained some ground with the machinations of villainess Nora Fulton (Catherine Bruno), a delusional psychopath who vented
her lethal aggression on Miles and Nicole, but the heralded return of fan favorite Larkin Malloy as the real Sky Whitney was derailed when Malloy was nearly killed in a real-life hit-and-run accident and was replaced by a weaker performer for months.
Coincidentally, as Slesar prepared to celebrate 15 years with the soap, his last storyline for The Edge of Night mirrored the plot
he inherited from Lou Scofield when he first joined Edge in 1967. A group of international spies vied to gain access to The Phonebook, a valuable list of secret agents and their real identities, which had been stolen from the government by the deceased Jefferson Brown and hidden within a computerized chess game. The storyline ran for eight months and crossed over into the Nora Fulton arc, as Nora was murdered by double-agent David Cameron after she eavesdropped on a conversation and learned that Cameron was trying frame Sky Whitney for treason. As the ratings dropped to record lows, Henry Slesar was
given an anniversary party by P&G then told that this contract wasn’t being renewed.
Lee Sheldon/ final era (1983-84)
In May 1983, Lee Sheldon replaced outgoing writer Henry Slesar. Given a mandate to accelerate the plot, focus on younger characters, and add a generous dose of humor to the dialogue, Sheldon’s first storyline was reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, as deranged villain Louis Van Dine (Jerry Zaks) attempted to take over Monticello by sending subliminal messages through the city’s cable TV system. When the plot concluded six months later, Nicole had been murdered (killed by
poison in her makeup), Sky and Raven were married, but had lost all of the Whitney fortune, and a slew of new characters had been introduced. Sheldon’s next story was a short, six-week arc that focused on a supposed haunting in the Whitney mansion, a plot reminiscent of the Marceau home haunting twelve years earlier. A number of dayplayers were killed off before Sky and Raven discovered that the haunting had been engineered by former manservant Spencer Varney, who had converted the Whitney fortune into diamonds and hidden them within the mansion.
Early 1984 brought a plethora of brief, unpopular story arcs, such as: a decades old mystery involving murder and Native American land rights, Jody’s enrollment at nearby Wellington College, which was terrorized by a campus killer, and a proxy fight for a secret plastics formula that led to Sky and Raven being trapped on the edge of a seaside cliff by a gang of assassins, just as the serial took a two-week sabbatical for the 1984 Olympics. By this point, Edge had fallen to last place in the daytime ratings. Although Lee Sheldon’s approach initially increased the soap’s audience share, many Edge devotees
complained that the veteran cast were becoming peripheral to uninteresting, short-term characters. Perhaps in response to this, Sheldon devised what was arguably the best story of his tenure, a clever locked-room murder puzzle that resulted in the arrest, trial, and conviction of Raven Whitney for the shooting death of her ex-husband Logan Swift. Sheldon also returned to Edge’s roots with a mystery surrounding the reappearance of Mike and Nancy’s daughter Laurie, who had been confined to a mental institution since 1977. Unfortunately, it was all to no avail; P&G announced the cancellation of Edge of Night in October
1984. Lee Sheldon was given enough time to resolve most of the storylines, although one was deliberately left dangling just in case the venerable soap was picked up for first-run syndication. In the final telecast, Louis Van Dine and henchman Donald Hext (who had been killed onscreen a year before) reappeared to apparently murder Louis’ sister Alicia in a bizarre antique shop. The killing was witnessed by Detective Chris Egan, but when she returned with the police, the shop and all its occupants had mysteriously vanished into a snowstorm.
For the serial’s entire duration, stories either revolved around, or had much to do with, Monticello lawyer Mike Karr. As the
series began, Mike Karr's relationship with Sara Lane essentially reproduced the radio serial's Perry Mason/Della Street relationship. The added complication for Mike Karr was that Sara's family was involved in organized crime through her
paternal uncle Harry Lane, a corrupt, megalomaniac, whose trucking company was a front to fence stolen goods. In the first major story arc, Sara’s impressionable younger brother Jack (Don Hastings) was slowly being drawn into the criminal world through Harry, who plotted to murder his blackmailing secretary Marilyn Bollon and frame his dipsomaniac wife Cora. With this plot, creator/headwriter Vendig established a winning formula that would guide the series for the next nine years: a villain would create an elaborate plan to murder an enemy and frame an innocent party for the crime. Every murder plot ended with a criminal trial, in which Mike Karr, often with the assistance of close friend and Chief of Police Bill Marceau (Mandel Kramer), would solve the puzzle, prove the innocence of his client, and bring the killer to justice. Although this story structure was predictable (which, in truth, probably accounted for the program’s success), the writers worked overtime to devise an endless stream of idiosyncratic villains in a variety of interesting settings.
Notable baddies included corrupt businessman JH Phillips, who thwarted Mike’s political career (1957); murderous motivational speaker Maximillian Bryer, who poisoned his wealthy wife and framed mild-mannered brother-in-law Dr. Hugh Campbell
(1959); Frank Dubeck, a hulking, multiple strangler whose last killing was blamed on Jack Lane (1960); and Scofield Killborn, a crazed heroin addict who kidnapped Phil Capice, replaced him with plastic-surgery altered double John Lambert, then murdered John and framed Phil’s wife Louise for the crime (1962).
By the early 60’s, even women were getting in on the act. Icy blonde Teresa Vetter poisoned her boring husband George, then stabbed her larcenous lover Victor Carlsen in the back with a letter opener, stealing his money and framing Bill Marceau’s naive daughter Judy for the crime (1961). Eve Morris, another female with an affinity for sharp objects, was a sophisticated theatre patron who murdered her ex-lover Malcolm Thomas with a pair of scissors, framed his new wife Cookie for the deed, and attempted to stab Cookie herself in a violent rage following a dramatic courtroom confession (1965).
Three high profile casting changes occurred during Irving Vendig’s tenure. The first came in early 1961 when actress Teal Ames opted to relinquish her role as heroine Sara Lane Karr. Operating under the assumption that no other actress could successfully replace her, the writers had Sara struck by a car while saving daughter Laurie Ann, who had wandered into the street. Five days later, Sara died peacefully in the hospital. Grieving fans immediately swamped local affiliates and CBS with
telephone calls and telegrams, with almost 500 logged before the episode went off the air. Public reaction was so fervent that Teal Ames made a special appearance at the end of the following episode, explaining to the audience that she had voluntarily left the series to pursue other interests. Sara’s loss was also reflected in the Nielsen ratings, as Edge’s viewership declined for the first time in its history. Eight months later, when lead performer John Larkin announced his intent to leave, too, producers wisely sent Mike Karr to Capitol City for a brief sabbatical until an appropriate actor could be found to fill part. In early 1962, veteran soap performer Lawrence Hugo assumed the role of Mike Karr and was immediately paired with Ann Flood’s sympathetic reporter Nancy Pollock, their popularity reaching the same level of audience interest previously held by Mike and Sara. A year later, on 22 April 1963, Mike and Nancy were married. Their union was to be the series’ longest, lasting until the final episode over 21 years later.
Lou Scofield era (1965-68)
During early 1965, Procter and Gamble and CBS decided that in order to appeal to a wider audience, Edge should abandon its strict adherence to Irving Vendig’s format and explore other crime genres. Vendig, opposed to tampering with what he
felt a solid formula, resigned as headwriter and began to disassociate himself with the series. Procter and Gamble replaced him with Lou Scofield. Scofield’s first storyline capitalized on the growing Cold War spy craze, popularized by
James Bond films and prime-time TV series such as The Man From Uncle, as French criminal Andre Lazar (Val Dufour) attempted to infiltrate Monticello’s Grimsley Foundation. The Lazar plot also dove-tailed into Edge’s first murder mystery when abusive Roy Cameron was found dead in an alley, having been pushed from his high-rise office window by an unseen intruder.
In 1966, Scofield introduced the wealthy-but-doom-prone Hillyer family: benevolent patriarch Orin (Lester Rawlins), his much-younger, restless second wife Laura (Millette Alexander), and Liz (Alberta Grant), Orin’s impressionable teenage daughter from
his first marriage. Their introduction precipitated one of the most popular storylines in Edge’s history, an elegiac tale in which Laura fell into a stormy love affair with disc jockey Rick Oliver (Keith Charles), a handsome Lothario who plotted to murder Orin and get his hands on Laura’s fortune. The plan backfired, and when Laura realized the truth, she grabbed a revolver and fired all six rounds into her lover. While the series had always been one of the more successful soaps, Rick’s murder, the subsequent trial in which police chief Bill Marceau’s wife Martha (Teri Keane) was falsely accused of the crime, and Laura’s
dramatic demise in a fiery, cliffside car crash, sent Edge soaring to the top of the ratings, where it remained the second most-watched soap opera for a full year. Scofield followed this storyline with the unpopular “Project R” plot, a convoluted espionage caper involving industrial spies and a stolen microdot containing plans for a mysterious project at Monticello’s electrical company. Viewer reaction was intensely negative, and the ratings began to falter again.
During this period, headwriter Lou Scofield took a three month sabbatical from the series in order to care for his terminally ill wife. Procter and Gamble hired veteran mystery writer Henry Slesar to substitute for him in the summer of 1967. Slesar instantly mastered the genre, introducing the pivotal character of counterespionage agent Adam Drake (Donald May) and concluding the preposterous Project R story with an exciting shootout on a military airfield. With Mike Karr happily married and taking a less active role in the drama, Adam was poised to become the soap’s new leading man, and actor Donald May proved so popular with viewers that he eventually received special billing in the serial’s closing credit crawl. Before his temporary duties concluded, Slesar also revisited the Hillyer family by devising a storyline in which Orin became obsessed with Julie
Jamison (Millette Alexander), a riverboat entertainer who also happened to be a dead ringer for the deceased Laura Hillyer.
Henry Slesar era (1968-83)
In April 1968, Lou Scofield left the series to create Where the Heart Is, a new CBS serial. P&G quickly rehired Henry Slesar to replace him, thus beginning what was to become, at that time, the longest headwriting stint of any soap opera scribe. Slesar’s talents as a mystery novelist and frequent script contributor to Alfred Hitchcock Presents were perfectly suited for Edge’s
constant barrage of murder and mayhem, and he quickly gained a reputation for his unusually-named characters, clever whodunits, and delicious use of irony. Slesar’s first task was to conclude the Julie Jamison story, the plot he introduced the previous summer. Falsely accused of murdering Harry Constable (Dolph Sweet), her blackmailing boss at the Riverboat, Julie was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang on Christmas Day. In an exciting Agatha Christie-inspired conclusion, taped on location at a real riverboat in Connecticut, cuckolded husband Ernie Tuttle was unmasked as the killer. Ernie engaged the police in a violent shootout, then plunged over the side of the boat, falling to his death on the paddlewheel far below. This sequence sent Edge soaring back to the top of the ratings, where it remained a solid #2 in the Nielsens for the next two years.
At the end of 1968, Slesar introduced Nicole Travis (Maeve McGuire), who was to become one of the most iconic characters
in the series. At first unsympathetic, Nicole slowly began to change into a warm heroine when she was charged with the first degree murder of Stephanie Martin (Alice Hirson), a woman who had been stalking her in a misguided sense of revenge. During her trial, Nicole’s relationship with attorney Adam Drake evolved from antagonism to unrequited love. Their stormy courtship, often affected by outside criminal influences, became enormously popular among the audience, with Don May and Maeve McGuire consistently ranking in the top ten favorites of Daytime TV Magazine’s monthly reader’s poll. 1970 saw the
introduction of the Whitney family, a Kennedyesque political dynasty headed by manipulative matriarch Geraldine (Lois Kibbee), a character who would remain prominent for the remainder of the soap’s run. Geraldine had two sons: Colin
(Anthony Call), a state senator running for re-election, and Keith (Bruce Martin), a violent sociopath who faked his death, returned as disguised hippie Jonah Lockwood, and went on a murderous rampage, killing six people and
attempting to murder both Nancy Karr and Mike’s now-adult daughter Laurie Ann (Emily Prager). Keith’s reign of terror climaxed in a chase sequence taped on location at a country estate in Pennsylvania. After terrorizing Laurie with a
shotgun, Keith attempted to toss her off the top of a tower but tumbled to his death down a staircase instead.
Slesar followed this storyline with several memorable plots, including: the “haunting” of the Marceau home by presumed
dead criminal Frank Sloane, a long drug smuggling caper inspired by The French Connection, and wife-killer Jake Berman’s obsession with Nicole. In a nod to the past, Slesar also reintroduced Orin Hillyer, who returned to Monticello from a trip abroad following the death of wife Julie in a plane crash. Recovering from the accident, Orin was pursued by the conniving Elly Jo Jamison (Dorothy Lyman), Julie’s niece. With the assistance of hypnotist Simon Jessup, Elly Jo schemed to become heir apparent to the Hillyer fortune by hypnotizing a pregnant Liz Hillyer Fields into driving to her death off the side of a cliff. In typical Slesarian irony, Elly Jo was tricked into riding with Liz, and believing her to be in Jessup’s deadly hypnotic trance, Elly Jo jumped from the speeding car and died from her injuries. The exciting sequence, taped on location in New Jersey,
won Edge its first Emmy award as Outstanding Drama for the 1972-73 season.
The following year brought the high profile departure of popular castmember Maeve McGuire, who left to pursue opportunities on the West Coast. In the story, Adam and Nicole were finally married, but their happiness was short-lived. Attempting
to thwart Adam’s burgeoning senatorial career, the mob planted an explosive device on the Sprite, Adam and Nicole’s honeymoon yacht. The bomb detonated on 30 May 1974, blowing the Sprite to smithereens. Adam was rescued from the
wreckage, but Nicole, nowhere to be found, was presumed dead. Now paired with new assistant district attorney Brandy Henderson (Dixie Carter), Adam’s crusade to bring Nicole’s killers to justice dominated the narrative for the next year, dovetailing into numerous subplots of blackmail, murder, and attempted murder, involving the entire cast in one way or another. Serena Faraday, a distant cousin of the late Nicole, was also introduced during this era. Suffering from multiple personality disorder, Serena’s truculent alter-ego “Josie” had mob ties, as well. Meanwhile, Geraldine Whitney, who by now had buried both of her sons and her husband, was comatose following a mysterious fall down a staircase in the Whitney mansion. Geraldine was slated to die, but a behind-the-scenes emergency saved her. In September 1975, P&G announced Edge’s imminent move from the CBS television network to ABC. In a bid to retain its audience in the move, producer Nick Nicholson managed to lure Maeve McGuire back to the series. Nicole was revealed to be alive and suffering from amnesia in Paris, just as the last CBS episode was telecast.
Edge’s premiere on ABC, a dramatic 90-minute special preempting that day’s broadcast of General Hospital and One Life
to Live, opened with the discovery of Nicole by old friend Kevin Jamison (John Driver). By the end of the episode, Nicole had regained her memory, while back in Monticello, the trial between Mark and Serena Faraday for custody of their
young son Timmy (Doug McKeon) reached a stunning climax when Serena reverted to split personality Josie and assassinated Mark on the courthouse steps. Nicole’s return threw a monkey wrench in Adam’s love life; he had just announced his
engagement to Brandy when Nicole reappeared. Moving into 1976, most of the narrative was dominated by the mystery of what had happened to Nicole following the explosion of the Sprite two years earlier. This precipitated another plotline involving the entire cast, as Nicole’s former captor Claude Revenant, an embezzler hiding on a remote Caribbean island, sent a seemingly endless stream of hit-men to silence Nicole before she could recall his whereabouts. Nicole was also targeted by Revenant’s enemies, who hoped she could lead them to Revenant before the authorities caught up with him. Practically every Friday episode during this period ended with an attempt to eliminate Nicole, though often resulting in the death of another character, as Slesar slowly began trimming longstanding castmembers.
The most shocking cast departure occurred on Friday, 10 June 1977, when a mysterious assailant fired two bullets into the
heart of Adam Drake, ending the character’s long tenure on the soap. The announcement that actor Donald May had been fired from the serial didn’t sit well with fans, who held out hope that Adam’s death was simply one of Slesar’s clever tricks, but Adam remained dead, and Nicole was paired with new physician Dr. Miles Cavanaugh (Joel Crothers). Shortly thereafter, Maeve McGuire announced her intention to leave Edge for a second time. P&G chose to recast, and although several high profile soap vets were up for the role, including Judy Lewis and Karen Gorney, the part ultimately went to newcomer Jayne Bentzen. This bit of casting created controversy among fans as Bentzen was nearly 20 years younger than her predecessor.
The focus on youth was a deliberate one as Edge desperately tried to appeal to ABC’s younger demographic.
From 1978 on, Slesar refocused the storylines on the travails of young heroines April Cavanaugh (Terry Davis), Miles’ sister, who developed psychic abilities after a near-death experience, Deborah Saxon, a beautiful police officer, and Jody Travis, Nicole’s teenaged half-sister. He also got a great deal of mileage out of anti-heroine Raven Alexander (Sharon Gabet), a
fascinating vixen whom the audience loved to hate. Popular stories during the late 70s included Denise Cavanaugh’s (Holland Taylor) malevolent attempt to keep Miles and Nicole apart by committing suicide and framing Miles for the “crime”, Winter Austen’s trial for the murder of blackmailing pornographer Wade Meecham (in an ingenious twist Winter was exonerated then revealed to actually be the killer), and an homage to Sunset Boulevard with fading movie queen Nola Madison (played by Oscar-winner Kim Hunter) resorting to deadly measures to revive her career. Nola’s appearance triggered a year’s worth of plot after she murdered April’s mother Margo Dorn then framed April’s husband attorney Draper Scott for the crime. Ala The Fugitive, Draper’s train crashed on the way to prison. He was presumed dead, developed amnesia, and with the help of
neurotic Emily Gault (Margo McKenna) ended up assuming the identity of Emily’s missing husband Kirk Michaels, a petty thief who had been killed by the cops years before. Emily and Draper were kidnaped and held hostage in an amusement park by Kirk’s former criminal associates, who mistakenly believed that Draper was actually Kirk. After this was resolved, April and Draper found it impossible to rid themselves of Emily, who claimed to be pregnant with Draper’s child. Her desperate bid to maintain a hold on Draper led to another series of murders, culminating in a nail-biting, week-long sequence in which April was trapped by the killer in a deserted house during a violent storm.
In 1981, Slesar launched two storylines that are generally considered by Edge devotees to be his last great plots. The first story arc involved the vanishing of Nancy Karr, who inadvertently discovered that Dr. Kenneth Bryson’s Rexford Clinic was a haven for plastic-surgery altered criminals. This segued into a second story arc in which Raven Alexander, now married to Geraldine Whitney’s nephew Schyuler Whitney (Larkin Malloy), realized that her husband had been one of Dr. Bryson’s
patients and was actually an impostor named Jefferson Brown. To keep his true identity hidden, Brown was forced to commit a series of homicides, and the storyline climaxed with an extravagant location sequence taped in St. Moritz, Switzerland, where Brown met his death in the Alps while attempting to throw Raven off a snowy, mountainside cliff.
Several problems began to affect The Edge of Night in early 1982. First, ABC affiliates started dropping the serial at an alarming rate. This was due in part to the expense of the series, which was more costly for local stations than syndicated or community-produced programs; however, it was also the result of declining viewership, as ABC began exercising more “creative control” over the program, resulting in a number of unpopular storylines. Among those were master of disguise Smiley Wilson’s plot to steal Raven’s fortune by framing her for a faked murder, using the same techniques perpetrated by her late husband Jefferson Brown. The audience also didn’t warm to the preposterous “Martyr of Eden” story arc in which teenage
heroine Jody Travis became entangled in the mob’s scheme to smuggle art out of the fictional Republic of Eden. Slesar gained some ground with the machinations of villainess Nora Fulton (Catherine Bruno), a delusional psychopath who vented
her lethal aggression on Miles and Nicole, but the heralded return of fan favorite Larkin Malloy as the real Sky Whitney was derailed when Malloy was nearly killed in a real-life hit-and-run accident and was replaced by a weaker performer for months.
Coincidentally, as Slesar prepared to celebrate 15 years with the soap, his last storyline for The Edge of Night mirrored the plot
he inherited from Lou Scofield when he first joined Edge in 1967. A group of international spies vied to gain access to The Phonebook, a valuable list of secret agents and their real identities, which had been stolen from the government by the deceased Jefferson Brown and hidden within a computerized chess game. The storyline ran for eight months and crossed over into the Nora Fulton arc, as Nora was murdered by double-agent David Cameron after she eavesdropped on a conversation and learned that Cameron was trying frame Sky Whitney for treason. As the ratings dropped to record lows, Henry Slesar was
given an anniversary party by P&G then told that this contract wasn’t being renewed.
Lee Sheldon/ final era (1983-84)
In May 1983, Lee Sheldon replaced outgoing writer Henry Slesar. Given a mandate to accelerate the plot, focus on younger characters, and add a generous dose of humor to the dialogue, Sheldon’s first storyline was reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984, as deranged villain Louis Van Dine (Jerry Zaks) attempted to take over Monticello by sending subliminal messages through the city’s cable TV system. When the plot concluded six months later, Nicole had been murdered (killed by
poison in her makeup), Sky and Raven were married, but had lost all of the Whitney fortune, and a slew of new characters had been introduced. Sheldon’s next story was a short, six-week arc that focused on a supposed haunting in the Whitney mansion, a plot reminiscent of the Marceau home haunting twelve years earlier. A number of dayplayers were killed off before Sky and Raven discovered that the haunting had been engineered by former manservant Spencer Varney, who had converted the Whitney fortune into diamonds and hidden them within the mansion.
Early 1984 brought a plethora of brief, unpopular story arcs, such as: a decades old mystery involving murder and Native American land rights, Jody’s enrollment at nearby Wellington College, which was terrorized by a campus killer, and a proxy fight for a secret plastics formula that led to Sky and Raven being trapped on the edge of a seaside cliff by a gang of assassins, just as the serial took a two-week sabbatical for the 1984 Olympics. By this point, Edge had fallen to last place in the daytime ratings. Although Lee Sheldon’s approach initially increased the soap’s audience share, many Edge devotees
complained that the veteran cast were becoming peripheral to uninteresting, short-term characters. Perhaps in response to this, Sheldon devised what was arguably the best story of his tenure, a clever locked-room murder puzzle that resulted in the arrest, trial, and conviction of Raven Whitney for the shooting death of her ex-husband Logan Swift. Sheldon also returned to Edge’s roots with a mystery surrounding the reappearance of Mike and Nancy’s daughter Laurie, who had been confined to a mental institution since 1977. Unfortunately, it was all to no avail; P&G announced the cancellation of Edge of Night in October
1984. Lee Sheldon was given enough time to resolve most of the storylines, although one was deliberately left dangling just in case the venerable soap was picked up for first-run syndication. In the final telecast, Louis Van Dine and henchman Donald Hext (who had been killed onscreen a year before) reappeared to apparently murder Louis’ sister Alicia in a bizarre antique shop. The killing was witnessed by Detective Chris Egan, but when she returned with the police, the shop and all its occupants had mysteriously vanished into a snowstorm.