Love of Life
| Love of Life | |
|---|---|
The Love of Life title card from 1977-1980. | |
| Created by | Roy Winsor |
| Starring | Audrey Peters Ron Tomme et al |
| Country of origin |  United States |
| No. of episodes | Approximately 7500 |
| Production | |
| Running time | 15 minutes (1951-1958) 25 minutes (1962-1969, 1973-1979) 30 minutes (1958-1962, 1969-1973, 1979-1980) |
| Original release | |
| Network | CBS |
| Release | September 24, 1951 – February 1, 1980 |
Love of Life was an American soap opera which was aired on CBS from September 24, 1951 to February 1, 1980.
Production
Love of Life was taped at several studios in New York City, but primarily at the CBS Production Center on West 57th Street and CBS's Studio 52 behind the Ed Sullivan Theatre. In 1975, the studio was moved to make room for a nightclub that would eventually become known as Studio 54. Until 1980, Love of Life was taped in the same studio as another CBS soap opera, Search for Tomorrow.
Format
Unlike most other soap operas, Love of Life was originally not split up into segments dictated by commercial breaks. Because the show was owned by packaged-goods giant American Home Products, and merely licensed to CBS, all commercials were for AHP brands, and occurred before or after the show. In the 1960s, one commercial break was allotted around the middle of the program, but this was mostly to allow affiliates to reconnect with the feed after airing local commercials. Love of Life adopted the five segments-per-half hour standard in the 1970s.
In 1958 the show extended from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. In 1962, the show was cut back to 25 minutes; the last five minutes in the half-hour timeslot (a timeslot that generally led into the noon hour in most areas) were reserved for a CBS News update. It was then extended again to again in 1969, only to go back to 25 minutes in 1973.
Ratings/Scheduling history
Love of Life began, as most television serials of that era, as a 15-minute program, airing at 12 Noon Eastern/11 Central. The program became so popular, though, that CBS expanded it to 30 minutes on April 14, 1958, keeping it at Noon/11. During that period, LOL was generally among the top six rated soaps in the 1950s and 1960s. This occurred despite CBS' trimming the show five minutes in order to accommodate a newscast, beginning on October 1, 1962.
By the late 1960s, however, NBC's Jeopardy! eventually rose to become daytime's second-highest-rated game (behind Hollywood Squares), eroding LOL's audience in the process. In order to make room for a new in-house serial, Where The Heart Is, CBS moved LOL ahead a half-hour on September 8, 1969, against NBC's Squares. Further, the show once again expanded to a full half hour, only to lose its last five minutes again to CBS News on March 26, 1973; this may well have hurt the program's ability to compete against the top-rated NBC game. By this time, CBS had assumed production from the original packager, American Home Products, as it had The Secret Storm.
Despite the network canceling two in-house soaps in 1973 and Secret Storm in early 1974, LOL managed to escape the chopping block for several more years, due to a brief rise in the ratings in the mid-1970s, occasioned largely by the reintroduction of Meg to the storyline. Still, the momentum was not sustained (although it had climbed as high as 9th, above even General Hospital and One Life to Live in 1975-1976); and by April 1979, CBS decided to, in effect, abandon the program to a time slot highly preempted by affiliates, 4 p.m./3 Central, although restoring the daily five minutes lost six years earlier. Not surprisingly, LOL went rapidly to the bottom tier of the ratings, setting up an abrupt cancellation almost nine months later.
Titles and theme tunes
B/W years
- In the early 1950s, a typical episode began with announcer Don Hancock saying, "Good afternoon. Don Hancock speaking. Welcome to Love of Life," over a shot of the fountain outside New York's Plaza Hotel with the show's title appearing diagonally across the screen in elegant sweeping calligraphy. After a brief commercial was the main title sequence, where Charles Mountain said over this visual, "Love of Life, the exciting story of Vanessa Dale and her search for human dignity." This was followed by some credits. The theme song was done by organist John Gart.
- In 1957, the show changed visuals twice. The show briefly used a time-lapse shot of a flower, with announcer Herbert Duncan saying "To live each day for whatever life may bring . . . this is Love of Life" over it. This was changed to a shot of a starry sky, as seen in the accompanying picture. By the early 1960s, the opening narration had been shortened to simply, "This is... Love of Life," with Ken Roberts (father of actor Tony Roberts) at the microphone.
And Then It Happened
- In spring 1967, the show switched to color, and a picture of sunlit flowers by a window for its titles. This visual lasted about ten years, and was accompanied with two different themes: "And Then It Happened" by Charles Paul (1967-1973) and "The Life That You Live" by Carey Gold (1973-1977).
The final years
- In 1977 (at the latest), the show used as its theme a pop-style ballad composed by Hagood Hardy. The main title visuals were set against a black background and had the show's new logo, designed by Lou Dorfsman, on at the bottom and a series of head shot profiles of the main characters on the top.
Plot
Beginning years
The original story was a morality play of good versus evil, illustrated by the interactions between two sisters, Vanessa Dale (originally Peggy McCay) and Meg Dale (originally Jean McBride). Vanessa (often referred to as "Van" for short) was "the good girl." She stood up for what was right in life and in her community. Meg was the schemer and all-around "bad" girl. While Van disapproved of Meg's actions, she still loved her and taught the audience the value of forgiveness. The show was painted black-and-white in this regard, which was evident in the tagline recited at the beginning of each of the earlier episodes: "Love of Life: The exciting story of Vanessa Dale and her courageous struggle for human dignity."
The show changed directions when the character of Meg was phased out and the show changed locales (first set in the fictional town of Barrowsville, it moved to Rosehill, where it would remain for the rest of the show's run).
During this time, the actress who originated the role of Van (Peggy McCay) left the show and was replaced with actress Bonnie Bartlett. Bartlett was subsequently replaced by Audrey Peters, who played Van for the rest of the run, from 1959 until 1980. Peters had an unusual debut; Bartlett had played the role of Vanessa up to Vanessa's wedding day. The next day, when Vanessa walked down the aisle, Bruce Sterling raised Vanessa's veil, and revealed Audrey Peters. Peters admitted that, during the wedding reception scenes afterward, she didn't know the names of all the characters that were interacting with Vanessa, so she called everyone "dear."
In the 1960s, most of the drama was focused on Van and her new marriage to Bruce Sterling (played by Ron Tomme). The late '60s involved attempts to shake up the somewhat staid atmosphere through campus unrest and a return of Vanessa's first husband, who had been killed off in the mid '50s. Vanessa divorced Bruce to reunite with her first husband, outraging many in the audience who could not accept their heroine getting a divorce.
The other major story of the late '60s involved Tess Krakauer and Bill Prentiss, played by real-life couple Toni Bull Bua and Gene Bua. Tess and Bill had the perfunctory tortured love story, including separations, children, and murder trials, until Bill died of a "rare blood disease" in 1972 and Tess left town in 1973.
The final years
As ratings began to slide in the 1970s, Meg (now played by Tudi Wiggins) and her son Ben Harper were brought back to the show (Ben, now an adult, was most notably played by Christopher Reeve). Under the reins of critically acclaimed daytime writers Claire Labine and Paul Avila Mayer the show returned to the original "good Vanessa, bad Meg" theme. Meg broke new ground for daytime when she called her son's newborn daughter, Suzanne, a "bastard", the first time profanity was spoken on daytime TV.
However, after Labine and Mayer left, the show lost focus. The grittier storylines that took over the show (one story implied that while Ben was in prison, he had been sodomized) were not warmly received by the audience, and the ratings dropped. The show also was challenged by its fringe timeslot: since the beginning, Love of Life had aired in the very late morning, and few soaps had been successful airing before noon. The show's ratings had been middling in the 1950s and 1960s, but had dropped sharply as the show entered the 1970s.
On April 23, 1979, Love of Life moved, for the first time, from midday to a mid-afternoon airing. At that time, the show had early soap opera writer, Jean Holloway as the head writer, and her storylines, which were almost from the medium's early days, had not caught on with the audience, and had been considered one of the factors leading up to the end. Love of Life ended its run abruptly on February 1, 1980, with a cliffhanger: after testifying in a trial, heroine Betsy Crawford (Elizabeth Kemp) collapsed as she was leaving the stand. No one knew what happened to her as the show was not picked up by another network. The final scene of the series was longtime director Larry Auerbach walking through the empty sets, as Tony Bennett's "We'll Be Together Again" played in the background.
