From "Conversations: The Dark Shadows Collectors Guide Interviews" by Craig Hamrick, originally published by Clique Publishing.
ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHTED BY CRAIG HAMRICK.
Photographed by Bob Issel (bobubas@aol.com), at the 1997 Dark Shadows Festival in New York City.
A 1991 interview between Craig Hamrick, author of The Dark Shadows Collectors' Guide, and Lara Parker, Dark Shadows' Angelique:
Craig Hamrick: The book that I'm writing is about the Dark Shadows collectibles, like the books, magazines and games. Do you have any of that merchandise anymore, or did you ever?
Lara Parker: I had a little picture that came with bubble gum,that was about l2" by l4", a little newsprint picture of me. Um ... I had a poster. I still have one of the posters from the movie. Is that a collectible?
CH:Yeah. I've got one of those too.
LP: Angelique hanging?
CH: Yeah. Probably not too nice of a scene to have hanging in your house?
LP: Oh, I love it. You know, I'll put it up somewhere. We live in too small a house right now, but someday I'll put it up.
CH: How do your kids react to that sort of thing? Does it seem to bother them?
LP: My two boys are grown, so they could care less, but I have a 5-year-old and now that the videos are coming out, she loves it. She gets very excited about it, and she's just now learning about vampires and witches. She thinks it's all lots of fun. She gets very scared and hugs me and says, "Why are you killing Sarah?" But she's not particularly bothered by it. When I was on Dark Shadows, my two boys would watch it once in a while, but they didn't take it too seriously. They liked to go to the set and have the makeup man give them cuts and bruises, though.
CH: Is your daughter old enough to understand that that's not really you ?
LP: Not really. She sort of can, and then she can't, but she's sort of slowly getting it, in steps. When she goes to a movie, she cries because she thinks it's real, so she naturally thinks I'm really doing these things. I think she'll slowly catch on.
(She pauses.) I don't think I have anything else. I sold my fangs.
CH: Oh, really?At an auction?
LP: Yeah, it was at one of the conventions. I sold one pair, then another pair got broken. Oh, what else might I have? I just have a lot of things that the fans have sent me over the years, which really are more memorabilia than collectibles. I mean, name some of the things that I might have.
CH: Well, I was kind of thinking ... I talked to both Kathryn Scott and Jonathan Frid, and they hadn't really saved anything, but I thought it might have been different, since you have children, maybe you would save some things for them, like the bubble gum cards and that kind of stuff:
LP: Well ... I have a couple of the view finders. You know, the little thing that you put in the view finder?
CH: Viewmaster. Yeah.
LP: Viewmaster. I have a couple of those tucked away somewhere. They were neat.
CH: That's one of the rarer collectibles now.
LP: What else would I have saved?
CH: There were a lot of toys, like games and models. I don't know really that you were featured on much of that, though. It was mostly Jonathan.
LP: I never saw any of those. I don't even think I saw it. I don't know when that came out. I have a lot of the records, though.
CH: Those came out fairly recently, right?
LP: Well, no. They started putting the records out a long time ago, but, fans would just buy them and send them to me. I didn't even buy them. But I know I have them in my record collection, which I never look at anymore, because of my CDs, but they're there.
CH: Do you have any of the props from the show, besides the fangs that you did have?
LP: I have the painting. Dan (Curtis) gave me the really beautiful painting. It's almost life-size, and it was made from a photograph, so of course it looks exactly like me. It was not the first painting, and it was not the painting that was used in the movie. It was the painting that was used towards the end of the show. It was the painting that Angelique cast spells with, and it's hanging in my mother's dining room. It's really great. The dress is beautiful, and the gold necklace, and the hair. It's all done on top of a photograph, so they used it to great effect in the show. It looked so real, I could stand in front of it, and they could superimpose the live Angelique onto the painting and then back into real life again. So they could actually make the painting look alive. Anyhow, I have that. I used to have both my fangs, but now I just have one poor, broken pair.
I have an awful lot of scrapbooks of photographs the fans took outside the studio door. I have hundreds. When we would come out in the afternoon, they would take pictures, then they'd give us copies. They would give us flowers and take pictures. I have many photographs from that and from the conventions.
CH: Was that fan attention pretty overwhelming? I guess it was your first major acting job.
LP: It was my very first - my first professional job. I did summer stock and I did university theater, but I had never worked. Except for one tiny appearance on a show called NYPD, I had never worked professionally.
CH: So did it seem kind of strange to suddenly have such a huge following ?
LP: Well, it didn't suddenly happen. It seemed strange to be working professionally, but it was wonderful. I mean, I was making three-hundred-something dollars a show, which was just an absolute fortune for me at that time. Then the following for Jonathan - for Barnabas - had started, but it took a while before people really became interested in Angelique. So by the time it really happened, I had already seen the kind of attention that the other actors were getting. But, it's stranger looking back on it then than when I was experiencing it. I think that when you're young and these things are happening to you, you tend to take them for granted. Now I realize that it was sort of an exceptional experience, but at the time, I thought, "Oh, well, I'm going to go on and become a major movie star, and this is only the beginning of my career." So I sort of took it all for granted. It was fun being recognized everywhere I went in New York. Sometimes, for instance, when I'd be on the subway platform when school let out, the kids would scream and run away from me.
CH: Did you get a lot of mail like that too? I know that some of the people who play soap opera villains today do.
LP: Yeah, I got a little bit of hate mail, and a few phone calls, but mostly it was just "Dear Lara Parker, You are the most beautiful woman in the world. Would you please send me your kiss-print, your fingerprint, a photograph of you, preferably in a bathing suit." (She laughs.) So many letters are exactly alike: "I collect photographs. Please send me yours." People that write fan letters usually have an agenda, which is to get as many responses as they can get.
There were a few Christians who wrote to me to try to bring me into the fold and out of working for the devil. They were quite serious. There were some Christians that were writing to all of us, and telling us they were praying for us. You know, some devout Christians who had sort of gone over the hill, (She laughs.) and they really believed that we were real, and that we were all in real bad trouble because obviously we were all going to hell.
CH: That's kind of frightening-that there's people like that out there.
LP: Oh, no, they were harmless. It was just interesting that they responded so strongly to the show.
CH: What do you think it was about the show that garnered that kind of a following?
LP: I feel that it was a unique combination of the fact that the subject matter was very strong, supernatural and melodramatic. The performances were committed performances. Most of the people on the show were theater actors, so they were trained to act, acting fully, not to underplay. So there was a very strong energy to the performances. The stories were extremely strong and melodramatic and larger than life. This combined with the fact that every mistake we made went on the air. So there was a humor to it that came out of the fact that we were trying our best and still sort of forgetting our lines, and it was very endearing. It was really fun to watch. The storylines were enthralling and surprising and many of them were built on classic storylines of mystery and romance. I mean, proven stories that had entertained people for hundreds of years. So, for that reason, the show as very watchable. It was very beautiful. The costumes, hair and the makeup were ... (She pauses.)
CH: Unusual for that time?
LP: Well . . . it was sensual. It was a visually exciting show to look at. But I think the main thing about it is if you ever watched the other soaps of that period, when daytime television was done that way, they were at liberty to pause, to take their time, to try to figure out what they were going to say next and to play two wives sitting on the other side of the kitchen table talking about the fact that their husband had lost a job or that their kid is getting kicked out of school. I mean, that's what soap operas were. The way the actor would act the role was extremely real to life and extremely natural, so that if he forgot a line or he lost his place or if he stuttered or made a mistake, it wasn't so obvious. But we were playing for stronger emotions, at a clip. We were always being pushed to pick up the pace.
It was not only romantic, it was also strongly sexual. The whole idea of the vampire's bite was sexual. Once he had bitten you, you could no longer resist him. It had to do with obsession and the whole idea that if the vampire did fall in love with someone, his love would destroy her. There was a very strong sense of irony, in that every character sort of had a tragic element to their personality. People responded to that. Angelique, with all her power, could never find love. Barnabas, with his deep adoration for Josette, could never possess her, because he would have killed her. I suppose at various times he did turn her into a vampire.
They used every variation of the story that they could possibly come up with, but it was really unique and it was just a time in the history of show business when it worked. We were just starting in the '60s, when there were a lot of people that were . . . experimenting with hallucinogens (she laughs) ... mind-altering substances ... and they were tripping out on Dark Shadows. And then there were a lot of kids that raced home from school, and it was their show. It was so silly and so dumb and so funny and so scary and so unpredictable and at the same time, you could not watch a show when you didn't see somebody make a mistake. And so, it was a howl.
CH: You mentioned that in "The Dark Shadows Companion," that at the time the actors didn't see the humorous element as much as you see it now. Do you think the audience was viewing it that way? As humor?
I think that when we did the show, we gave it everything we had. But then when we would watch it, we would laugh, because we would go, "Oh no, I don't believe that! I don't believe I said that. I don't believe I looked like that when I said it. It took a long time for any of us to develop any objectivity over what we were doing. We were just doing our best, and we all got smarter and wiser and learned how to make the camera work for us.
I think the show got better but I don't think it got more popular. I think as it got better, it slowly lost its audience. People have said it was camp, and that's the best word for it. It was just a strange mixture of elements that worked at the time. It had its own kind of magic. Even when I see the tapes today, I realize that there was something unique about Dark Shadows and you can still see it. I think it had to do with the performances. The people who played the leading roles... their energy level was very high, and they really committed themselves to the truth of the moment very, very strongly. Nobody on that show was cool or laid-back. It was sort of "pre-cool" in society. "Cool" came in the '60s and '70s. I can remember when my kids told me, "The most important thing in the world is to be cool, Mom." And we were not cool. We were passionate. It was a hot show and everybody that watched it either got scared, or they could be sexually aroused or they could giggle. It was just something they could get off on. It broke all the rules. And it used classical stories, tried-and-true stories, with strong themes and strong plots that held people's attention, and it moved so fast. If you were off the show for a week and came back, you actually did not know what had happened. You couldn't figure out what had happened, and that wasn't true of any of the other daytime programming. In those shows hardly anything happened in a week. That's not true anymore, but back then it was decidedly different from other soap operas.
It just became a cult favorite. Kids started watching it, and it picked up steam. Everybody watched it, and you had to watch it because everybody else was watching it. It was really popular there for a while. I even went to Europe and Asia and got recognized, so it was all over the world. Almost everywhere it played, it would develop a following of people who just responded to it, even when it went into syndication and played again. At the conventions now we have people that didn't see it the first time around. They come to the conventions because they got hooked on it when it went into syndication.
CH: I never saw it until it was on video - not until 1990.
LP: Really? Well, when it first went on the air I think it was more unique than it seems today, because today there have been a lot of strange and unusual things done, but at that time it was different from anything else.
CH: How about the movie Night of Dark Shadows? How was that different from doing the show?
LP: We had more time and we could reshoot a scene until we got it right, so I think the movie was more professional. I don't know that it was any better, but I think the production values were better than you can get on a TV set. You can do things with film that you cannot do with television, you know, about making people appear and disappear and seem ghastly and seem iridescent. And I think the acting was better. I think that by the time everybody did the movies, they really knew their characters, and they knew what they were doing, and I think their performances were better. But I don't think the movies were necessarily any better, because I don't think that the stories were all that good.
CH: Do you have all the video tapes that are out?
LP: Of the movies?
CH: And the show.
LP: I don't know. I guess. I haven't watched them, but I think Jim Pierson (Chairman of the Dark Shadows Festival) has sent them to me. I don't know. I hope I do.
CH: Is that something that you think you'll want to save for your kids?
LP: Yeah. I'd like to look at it when I'm an old lady, sure. (She laughs.)
CH: Did you get to pre-approve any of the merchandise you were featured on?
LP: I had no idea they were doing it.
CH: Do you know if you got any extra money for it?
LP: I don't think I did. If I did, I don't remember. I could be wrong, but I don't remember. What did everybody else say?
CH: Kathryn said no, and Jonathan said yes, he was paid a little but not very much.
LP: Well, he was able to renegotiate his contract after his character became the pivotal (one), the real center of the piece, so he may have gotten a few dividends the rest of us didn't get.
CH: Are you still in contact with some of the actors from the show?
LP: Oh, yeah. We have conventions twice a year. We all get together. And Kate Jackson is one of my best friends, but I haven't been in contact with her for several years. I just hear from time to time, like after I moved to California, when she was on The Rookies and a few times when she was on Charlie's Angels. I worked with David Selby a couple of times. I've seen him off and on through the years. Neither one of them come to the conventions, and Nancy Barrett I have never seen. She has never come to the conventions, but everyone else has come, so...
CH: How did you get started going to the conventions? When was the first one you attended?
LP: About 15 years ago. The fans started them about 10 years after the show went off the air. They've had them in Dallas and Florida, but I've pretty consistently gone to the ones that were held in California. Then when Jim Pierson started running them, he paid our way to New York, so naturally we all go, because we get our way paid, and he puts us up in a nice hotel, so it's very nice for us. It's a very nice vacation. The conventions are very well run. In the beginning, at the conventions, we would be swarmed by fans. They would practically knock us over. Now the fans are much less impressed, (She laughs.) and much more polite. I've often said that if the show were any more popular, we wouldn't be able to go to these conventions, and if it were any less popular, we wouldn't have ever had them. So we're sort of in that strange arena of being able to have contact with the people who love the show and have really enjoyed watching us. We meet them and talk to them. A lot of them I've gotten to know. They come back every year, and they're friends of mine. I've seen them grow up and stop being pimply teenagers and go out into the real world and get real jobs, and it's been interesting.
CH: I'll bet. Do you still find yourself being recognized a lot still from your work on Dark Shadows?
LP: I still am. It's of course not as much, and it always surprises me when it happens, but it still happens.
CH: What kind of places? Like the grocery store?
LP: Anywhere. I went canoeing in Mammoth Springs, Missouri, last summer, and I stopped in this little roadside restaurant and there were only three people in there and they recognized me. It was insane. Then I went to the canoe place to rent the canoe and they put me on a bus to take me up the river so I could paddle back to where the canoe place was, and somebody on the bus, from Kansas City, recognized me. I mean, twice in one hour, in Missouri. It's not unusual. The thing about Los Angeles is when people recognize you, they don't tend to say anything, because they see so many people they recognize. Other places if they recognize you, they come up to you and they say something. I get recognized a lot in New York. People are not so immune to actors and actresses as they are in L.A. I got recognized in the theater, and at the subway the last time I was in New York, and this is 25 years later.
CH: It sounds like you couldn't get away from it if you wanted to.
LP: Oh, I don't mind it, because it's so rare now that it's a pleasant surprise. I went through a period where people would say, "You look just like somebody that used to be on television," and I'd say, "Oh, really?" They'd say "Have you ever heard of Lara Parker?" and I'd say, "No, I sure haven't." That was because I just got sick of it, but that's not true anymore.
CH: And you've done some other acting projects in recent years haven't you?
LP: I've had a very nice time. I've worked a lot. I haven't worked much in the last five years. I've done a few things, but it's definitely slowed down, and not by choice. I still have an agent, and I still try to get jobs. I take advantage of every opportunity, but there just aren't very many parts for women in my age group, and there are a lot of working actresses who have had much more visible careers than mine - movies and long-running nighttime series - and they're still in there competing for jobs. There's a lot of competition for very few parts. I've sort of outlived my type. I don't really have a type anymore. I think maybe in a few years I might turn into a grandmother or something, but I'm sort of in that in-between stage. I'm too old to play leading ladies and I don't look old enough yet to play grandmas, and the ones in the middle I don't seem to get very often. Every once in a while I get something.
CH: Do you want to continue with it?
LP: Oh, yeah. I would like to. It' s just... I don't feel very ambitious these days because I would be really unhappy, I think, if I was. (She laughs.) But I have a full life. I have a wonderful husband and a 5-year-old kid, and I'm very involved with screenwriting and trying to start a new career in that area.
CH: That sounds interesting.
LP: I haven't sold anything yet, but I've been working very hard at it. I've just gotten my kid out of being a baby. That was pretty time-consuming for the last five years. That may have something to do with the fact that I wasn't all that anxious to go out on auditions. There are a lot of things you can do that I don't do, just to try to keep the connections that you've established as an actress intact. I don't that acting is as important to me as it used to be.
CH: Does it bother you to be strongly identified with the role of Angelique more than others you've played throughout your career?
LP: Not at all. I've had a wonderful time. I've played a lot of really interesting parts on television. I've done a couple of films. I've made some very good money. I was able to buy some property. I've done better than the vast majority of the people who say they want to be actors. I never became a star, but I enjoyed it. I had a good time, and I learned a lot about how to do it. It's certainly been fun.
CH: It sounds like that's the important part - enjoying it.
LP: Yeah, but you know, movies belong to the young. The camera seeks for that face that translates itself into everyone's heart's desire. It's just not the kind of thing you can do forever. It's not like other things that you can do when you get older. You can't. If you beat yourself over the head, you're going to be miserable, so I just say, "Well, I've had a good time, and if anybody wants to hire me, I'd love to work."
CH: What about the new Dark Shadows? Do you think there's any chance of you being on that?
LP: I have no idea.
CH: Have you watched it at all?
LP: Oh, yeah. I think it's wonderful. It's not as funny, but it's very well done.
CH: They've probably got plenty of time to edit out the funny mistakes.
LP: Well, see it's an interesting thing. A lot of it is lovingly and beautifully done. I don't know. What do you think?
CH: Well... it's not the same at all. I think it's a little too slick for the subject. And the movie - the mini-series that started it - I thought wasn't very suspenseful, and I thought that had a lot to do with the way they flashed a little preview of the next scene each time they went to commercial. You saw what was going to happen in the next scene, and that ruined the suspense, I thought.
LP: Hmmm.
CH: But it's pretty good.
LP: I tried to get a writing job on it, and I think if I'd had any kind of input - which even if I'd gotten the job I wouldn't probably have had any input because I think Dan Curtis made up his mind and did what he wanted to do - but, I would have pushed it further. I would have made it stronger, especially the role of the vampire. I would have made him more kinky. I think in today's world, when you look at something like Twin Peaks and how kinky that is, some of those scenes - the scenes of violence and the murder scenes - they pull out all the stops. Those are amazing, the way they've done that. They are terrifying. I think for television, they are very successful, and the personalities are so off-beat. (With Dark Shadows) you have a vampire. You have an opportunity to do someone who is truly, uniquely weird. And Ben Cross is just a kind of Elizabethan actor with marvelous stature and not very much variety. He's not very different from scene to scene.
CH: I guess that's what I meant. I don't find it all that scary most of the time.
LP: He pulls it off. He's believable. But I don't think that was the requirement.I don't think he needed to find actors that were believable. I think he needed to find actors that had really strong... I mean the only one that for me has a sense of the old Dark Shadows is Willie. He's very different, but he makes you feel uneasy. And I think the girl who plays Victoria is exquisite, and that's really all she needs to be, because she's the one who's vulnerable.
I think all of the young people are extremely attractive, and I think it's beautifully filmed, with original cinematographic techniques. Dan is very good at that. I hope it holds on long enough to get an audience. I think if it gets an audience, it could go on a long time, and I think if it goes a long time, he will definitely have some of us make some cameo appearances at the very least. He's going to have to come up with characters for anybody that he hires, and in the original storyline there are no characters for people in their 40s. There weren't any characters that age written. So he's going to have to come up with new characters, because everyone was very young, except for Thayer (David) and Louis Edmonds and Grayson (Hall) and Joan (Bennett) and he already has those characters cast. Of course Barnabas - Jonathan - was older, but Barnabas has been cast young. The basic parts for people our age have been cast, so he'd need to come up with new ones. Well, in order to come up with new ones, he's going to have to leave the original storyline. He has five years of storyline. He doesn't have to rewrite any of it. He just has to sort of condense it and make it better, so I don't know whether any of us would ever be on it. I read for Julia. I wish that I'd gotten to play Julia.
CH: That would have been interesting.
LP: I think it would have been very interesting. (Barbara Steele) has the look he wanted; I don't have the look he wanted. She's dark, and she's brooding. I'm not physically that type. Theatricality is the thing that made Dark Shadows. You just look at the things Louis Edmonds or Thayer or Grayson did. They're so strong and corny and campy ... way, way ... very full. You know what I'm talking about?
CH: Yes. Excessive, but not too much.
LP: But that was what made it so entertaining. Everybody just gave it their all, and we were encouraged to do that. We were directed to do that. I mean that's one of the things I said in my chapter (in "The Dark Shadows Companion"): If you didn't react, you got screamed at by the director. You had to give strong reactions. And then they'd have the musical sting, you know - "da-DUM!" And he wanted something strong in the face. With Barbara Steele, Dan is going for something that's much more realistic. I think he's trying to sort of do what they did with Beauty and the Beast. He's trying to get that horror/romance combined with reality, so that it's believable. I think that's what he's reaching for, and I think he's getting it. I'm not sure that it's going to get him the same audience that the original Dark Shadows got him, but I think he had to make a choice, and that's the choice he made. He made it strongly and definitively. He decided to do it as melodramatic romance with a vampire. I think he wants it to be romantic and heart-rending, and he wants you to just really, really care about these people, but not be scared. He's not playing up the suspense and the horror as much as we did. I think he had to make a decision where he was going to go stylistically, and what he thought would work in today's market, on TV in the '90s. I think that's the decision he made, and I understand that he had to do that. He had to make decisions how he was going to shoot it and cast it and write it. Those are all professional decisions, and he's been very successful in this business. He knows what he's doing, and he works from a kind of gut instinct, and he's been right most of the time. He's made the right decision and been very successful many, many times, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was right again and the show got some life. Plus, theyve spent a lot of money on it. They' re really committed to it at this point - the sets and the costumes. I think they'll think twice before they dump it, unless the ratings are just awful. If they're awful, of course they'll dump it.
CH: I haven't really noticed yet. Do you know how the ratings have been?
LP: I think it's too soon to tell. I don't think they've been great shakes, but I don't think they've been that bad, so it's just too soon to tell. It's a real bad break that we had to have a war. I mean nobody's watching anything but CNN, and that's just the truth. I don't turn anything else on but CNN, and it's very distracting, especially from something that's sort of silly, like Dark Shadows. The whole mood of the country changed. You see it everywhere. Theaters are not doing well, nobody's traveling. I mean, nobody is spending any money. We're in a recession. It's not the time to get hooked on some show, and that's just bad luck. That's got nothing to do with the value of the show. It's just the time, something that happened. I almost feel that he'll feel he got cheated, that he'll be one of the casualties of the war. I just don't think as many people are watching it as would have watched it otherwise.
CH: Have you gotten a chance to see the actress who plays Angelique?
Just what I've seen on the show. Apparently they go back in time tomorrow night and she makes her first appearance. I know it took them a long time to find somebody. I think Dan saw an awful lot of people, and that's got nothing to do with me. She's just an interesting character. The reason that I'm not working now is there's just not very many characters written like that. (She laughs.)
CH: What's the toughest part about playing that part?
LP: She wasn't the cliche heavy. First of all, she didn't look like the villain at all, so she could get away with looking like she was the one who was put upon and she was the one who was framed. Kind of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed . . .
CH: Kind of a "Who, me?" character?
LP: Yeah. And I think the way I played Angelique was that she really didn't believe she was doing anything wrong for a long time. It was really hard for me to do all those spells and all those mean things. I just didn't know how. (She laughs.)
CH: You didn't know how to be mean?
LP: No, I didn't know how, and that gave her a certain dimension that somebody who would just play her as a straight-forward meanie wouldn't have had. Jonathan did the same thing with the vampire. He didn't play a straightforward vampire; he played a reluctant, guilty vampire, and that gave it a depth, an irony. There was an irony, an "Oh-I-wish-it-could-be-otherwise" dimension to his character. Joan Collins (who played Alexis on Dynasty) is a perfect example. She doesn't want to be anything but a bitch. Angelique wanted to be loved. She wanted to be held. She wanted to be the first lady of Collinwood. She wanted to be cherished and treasured for who she was, and everyone knew she could never have that, because she was a witch, so no one trusted her and no one respected her. But she could have everything she wanted, through her power. So she's a tragic figure, you know? She can't achieve her dreams, and she will not let go of her dreams, so it's a very interesting character. A lot of people can identify with that. They know how she feels. She was a romantic. She longed for the simple pleasure of loving and being loved, and she could never have that. Whenever you have a character who longs for something they can never have, you get the audience responding to that character. That was the difficult part, but it was a lot of fun, especially every time I would start to do something, I could hear the reverberations all the way across the country. I mean, I could literally hear, "Oh, no, no, no! What's she going to do next?" I loved it. I really got to the point that I felt that it was fun, especially when I'd been gone for a while and would come back. Jonathan would go (She gasps dramatically.) "Oh, Angelique!" (She laughs.)
CH: Do you keep any of the memorabilia from your other movies, like lobby cards or any of that?
LP: I enjoy keeping the scripts. The parts that I've done that I've really relished and enjoyed, I've kept the scripts.
CH: Do you have any of the Dark Shadows scripts?
LP: I have Dark Shadows scripts, and I still have, as I said, a lot of mail and photographs and that kind of thing from plays I was in. I keep the clippings. I've kept all of the Daytime TV and those kinds of magazines. They did a lot of articles of us. And I have the tape of when I was on the (Johnny) Carson show.
CH: Do you ever see any of the fan publications?
LP: Oh, yes. They send me everything, and it's very sweet. There's a fan magazine that Marcy Robin does, and she sends all of us copies.
CH: Was there ever a fan club just for you?
LP: Oh, yeah, I had my own fan club.
CH: What was that like?
LP: I had someone to answer my mail. (She laughs. ) That was great.
CH: When was that?
LP: Somebody called me and asked if they could run the fan club, I think shortly after I started on the show. And I said, "Sure! Gee, me?" Then we'd get together and print up little stuff and I don't remember too many of the things we did. I didn't pay much attention. I guess she got some pictures and sent out some fan letters. I don't remember them, and I don't remember if I have any of them. I have a lot of stuff put away that I haven't looked at in a long time, because of my living situation - going from house to house. I'm married to a builder, and as soon as we get a house finished, he sells it. (She laughs.)
CH: Kind of a gypsy life, huh?
LP: Yeah.
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