When Hillary Bailey Smith arrived on the set of ONE LIFE TO LIVE, Erica Slezak (Vicki) welcomed her and said, “I thought you’d retired.” Retired? Hardly.
In her three years away from daytime, Hillary B. Smith, who has shortened her maiden name to an initial, played for high stakes in theater and prime-time television. There were some big coups and some blistering disappointments. Smith made a name for herself in New York theater and was courted by the head honchos of prime-time television. She spent the better part of 1992 on and off planes at the behest of Jeff Sagansky, president of CBS Entertainment, who wanted her to tape pilot after pilot. The chief property among these was LOVE AND WAR, Diane English’s highly touted sitcom.
The pace of these days was so frantic that Smith literally changed clothes before meeting English in the front seat of a rental car outside English’s office in Burbank. “I had stopped at my friend Lindsay Harrison’s house and raided her closet. I said, ‘Give me your clothes.’ Thank God she’s a size six. I put my stockings on in the car with my legs sticking up. I had bras and underwear strewn all over the steering wheel. Diane could have looked out her window and seen me.” Smith takes a breath and deadpans: “Of course, I had to collect myself.” Smith’s experience in Hollywood is a vivid example of what a catch-22s await an aspiring prime-time television star. After she read with LOVE AND WAR co-star Jay Thomas, Smith’s agent got the call from English saying they wanted first right of refusal if any other offers came her way. “If anyone else wanted to offer me a test, they wanted to enter a test-option agreement with me,” Smith says, which would have made it hard to audition for other projects. Other tempting offers came in, and Smith’s rattled nerves drove her to tears as she turned down two pilots to stick with English. Not that English was promising anything, but encouragement from the MURPHY BROWN creator convinced Smith to stick around L.A. for a month to meet the director of the pilot. Smith believes she was the only actress in the running for the show–until a name like Susan Dey stepped into the picture. The pressure was intense.. “I was going nuts,” Smith says, “but I knew I wanted to see this through. I also knew that if I lost out, it would be to Susan Dey because of her name and her look, which were different than mine. I truly felt that it would not be because of talent. I had gotten thus far strictly on the work, and I knew it had to come to name.”
What’s in a name? In Hollywood , everything. Instead of gambling on Smith, English played it safe with Laurie Partridge, leaving Smith “heartbroken, devastated.” English’s condolences – a bouquet and a nice note– were delivered to her home in New Jersey, but Smith still feels that the role was hers and that English “shortchanged or short-shrifted her own name. She would have gotten the rating regardless of who she got in there because it followed MURPHY BROWN. She could have taken the risk.”
Knitting a green sweater for her husband, Nip, in her dressing room at ONE LIFE TO LIVE, Smith, who is positively skinny these days, is certainly at a comforting distance form the exciting and painful spring and summer of 1992. She capped off pilot season by taping the controversial pilot for DRIVING MISS DAISY on the night of the L.A. riots and flew out to L.A. again when she was summoned by Sagansky to do the pilot for Arleen Sorkin’s DIRTY LAUNDRY. Smith had just dropped her kids, Courtney, seven, and Phipps, four, off at school when the call came; she saw them a week later.. “I was madly calling up people saying, ‘Can you get my kids? Can you hold my kids?’” Smith remembers. “I thought I was only going to be out there three days, and I thought the show was really going to go.’ When it didn’t, Smith’s husband said, “Are we through with this now? Have you we had enough?” Smith’s answer was an unequivical yes. “I was wiped out. I left the soaps to spend more time with my kids, but they never knew when I would disappear. It was too much.”
The very thought of another airport, another baggage claim and another audition is enough to give Smith a migraine (something from which her OLTL character, Nora Gannon, suffers). Smith trusts her considerable contacts will still be out there if she wants to go that route again, but she’s adjusted her horizons to the daytime level. She’s hot on her new role, a quick witted attorney whom Smith compares to ATWT’s executive mommy Lucinda Walsh. This time out, Smith also gets the wardrobe, including stylish corporate and evening wear. Never again will she wear the likes of Margo’s police blotter plaid blazer. When she told her parents about her new role, each had a very different reaction. “I said to them, ‘I’m playing a Jewish lawyer who was married to a black prosecutor (and now poliece chief), and I have an 18 year-old mulatto daughter.’ My mother said, ‘Black?’ My father said, ‘Jewish?’ I said, ‘Eighteen.’ All in all, I’m thrilled for every aspect of it.”
In another weird bit of career irony, Smith couldn’t cash in on daytime’s current trend of hiring famous actors back to previous roles. Deidre Hall and Wayne Northrop came back to DAYS OF OUR LIVES; Michael Knight came back to ALL MY CHILDREN; but Smith didn’t come back to AS THE WORLD TURNS. But she might have if the timing had been better. Ellen Dolan, who has just left the role, announced her resignation days before Smith stated taping OLTL. Although she had notified ATWT Head Writer Douglas Marland as well executives at Proctor & Gamble of the OLTL offer, Smith admits that a return to the scene of her greatest daytime fame “wasn’t meant to be,” although she fells she would have “loved to return home again.” She remains philosophical about this and all other career maneuvers. “I believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything happens for the best.” she says. “It’s up to you to make it for the best. If you go through life with (that attitude), then you will look for the best in every situation, instead of dwelling on the negative or what could have been or passed.” She’s also seasoned enough now to observe wryly that the entertainment business is “the only place where gravity works in reverse.”
Actually, her two-day-a-week work schedule is more in keeping with her present goal of balanced home and career. “Now I am able to have a normal life at home and be with my kids.” she says. “Go to the book fairs at school, help out at home, that sort of thing. I never had time to do that. I’m just a working mom who doesn’t happen to work as often as I used to.” While she waits for the show to develop her romance with co-star Bob Woods (Bo), she’s looking for a good Scrabble partner. Smith was queen of the word games when she was at ATWT, regularly defeating former co-star Benjamin Hendrickson (Hal) with words like “quotient” or on the first round. “It wasn’t just Scrabble– it was Boggle, it was Picitionary,” Smith laughs. “We have to get that going here. This set is much too staid. We spend too many hours here not to have some sort of entertainment or relief.”
She won’t be able to count on Woods, though. Says the OLTL vet, “if I could spell, I’d be happy to do it.”
Bob Woods is exactly the kind of leading man who suits Hillary B. Smith. Like Gregg Marx, Scott Holmes and Benjamin Hendrickson before him on AS THE WORLD TURNS, he can play down-to-earth straight man to her more electric, quirky personality. Woods noticed the chemistry immediately. “I think we complement each other,” he says. “She makes me better. She’s funny, and maybe the fact that I’m working with her makes me a little funny.” Ditto Linda Gottlieb, executive producer at OLTL. She planned a romance between these two, Bo’s first in years with a women his own age. “She has that quick-witted Katharine Hepburn-like intelligence, and he’s that kind of slow, endearing, rough-around-the-edges guy,” says Gottlieb. “Together we think they’re special.” Woods sounds like he’s ready for love with a peer. “Hillary’s certainly the first mature actress that I’ve worked with for a while,” he says. “She uses props, she uses everything in the room, she finds things to do that they’d never dream of. It’s great. Plus, they trust her upstairs.