Carla Gray
Carla Gray (originally appearing as Carla Benari) is a fictional character from the American soap opera "One Life to Live", played by actress Ellen Holly. Carla appeared from October 1968 through December 1980, and from May 1983 through December 1985. Carla was one of the original characters created for the show and was featured in a groundbreaking and very controversial storyline about race relations. Carla was a lighter-skinned Black American passing as a white woman (specifically an Italian American). The fact that the character of Carla was actually Black was not revealed to the show's audience  until about five months after Ellen Holly debuted in the role. The revelation was a major shock to viewers, and the series was boycotted by one Southern affiliate. Nevertheless, the controversy attracted much attention and ratings shot up for the then-fledgling soap. Carla is recognized as the first Black lead character on a U.S. daytime soap opera. Storylines. 1968–1974. At the series debut of "One Life to Live" in July 1968, Black American former housemaid Sadie Gray (Lillian Hayman) lives in an apartment next door to the white Polish American Wolek family and works as the manager of housekeeping  for Llanview Hospital. Sadie acts mainly as a confidante for troubled heroine Anna Wolek (Doris Belack) but makes several passing references to a daughter, Clara, who she vaguely says is "lost to her." Anna and the rest of the Woleks assume that Sadie's daughter Clara is dead. A few months into the series' run, Dr. Jim Craig (Robert Milli) begins treating a young woman named "Carla Benari," whose illness seems to be psychosomatic — her physical symptoms stem from some unstated mental conflict. Carla, who is assumed to be Italian American, begins working as Jim's receptionist. Very quickly, Carla  begins dating Black American resident physician Price Trainor (Peter DeAnda). ABC received several angry letters decrying the portrayal of a Black man dating a white woman. Carla soon strikes up a friendship with Anna herself. On a visit to the Wolek apartment, Carla runs into Sadie. It is abruptly revealed that "Carla Benari" is Clara Gray, who had not died but run away from home at an early age. Sadie is furious to learn that her daughter was pretending to be white, and Carla herself is mortified — but not enough to end her ruse there and then. Although heartbroken, Sadie  does not reveal her daughter's secret. In 2018, Ellen Holly spoke about these historic episodes in an interview with the Television Academy Foundation. She described the experience of the storyline building up to a head after five months by saying: While Carla and Sadie try to work out their issues, Carla becomes embroiled in a love triangle. Her employer Jim Craig also falls in love with her, and she reciprocates his feelings. Carla divulges her secret to Jim. Not only is he fine with her true racial makeup, he asks her to marry him, allowing her a chance to  continue publicly as "Carla Benari." She briefly accepts the proposal but eventually returns his ring, after realizing she would only be marrying him in order to keep perpetuating a lie. After breaking up with Jim, Carla comes clean to everyone in Llanview about her true heritage, including Price. Price is not in the least sympathetic to Carla's predicament. If anything, he is even angrier than Sadie at Carla's ruse. The revelation ruins their relationship once and for all. Price leaves town soon afterwards. Carla is able to mend fences with her mother, though. She takes the surname "Gray  but keeps the first name Carla." The show found itself in another controversy when one ABC affiliate in Lubbock, Texas went so far as to temporarily drop "One Life to Live" from its daytime lineup as a result of this storyline. In 1972, Carla finds herself in another love triangle, this time being courted by high-flying politico Bert Skelly (Herb Davis), and police lieutenant Ed Hall (Al Freeman, Jr.). Bert is a slick career politician who seems to promise the good life that Carla desires. Ed is a blue-collar, "salt of the earth" workingman who initially considers Carla  to be a stuck-up princess. In time though, Ed proves to be the love of Carla's life, and the two became engaged in 1973. However, the road to the altar is not an easy one. Ed blames himself for the death of his good friend Meredith Lord Wolek (Lynn Benesch), who is killed during a hostage crisis at the Lord family estate, Llanfair at the same time Carla finds her life on the line. This forces them to postpone the wedding as Carla is first nearly killed when her brakes fail and again when she is lured to  the jeweler's by a mysterious man who poses as a policeman. Carla meets with the man, who points a gun at her and tries to kill her until Joe Riley came to her rescue. The man after Carla is revealed to be Lester Brock, the brother of Earl Brock, who blamed Ed for the murder of his brother. Ed and Carla make it to the altar in October and, surrounded by friends and family, they are married. Carla and Ed had also make proceedings to adopt Joshua West (Laurence Fishburne), a street kid who Ed had taken in while  romancing Carla. Josh soon took the surname Hall and became a son to Ed and Carla. 1975–1980, 1983–1985. By the mid-1970s, airtime for Carla, Ed, and Josh progressively diminished. Carla appeared in a supporting capacity in the Jenny Wolek (Katherine Glass) and Tim Siegel (Tom Berenger) romance storyline as a friend of Jenny's and as the steadfast confidante of longtime friend Anna Wolek. In late 1975, Josh becomes involved with a girl, Bernice, who is a bad influence on him, asking him for expensive concert tickets he can't afford on his part-time job's wages. Ed gives  Josh the money for the concert tickets, but informs him that he won't be giving him any more money if he asks again. Josh would later get fired from his job when Bernice asks him to stay with her to study for a test instead of showing up to his work shift. Carla, tired of being the disciplinarian and afraid of Josh growing up to resent her, insists that Ed put his foot down with Josh about what a bad influence Bernice is. To distract Josh from Bernice, Ed gets him a job working construction on the new nightclub  Tony's Place, finally putting Carla's mind at ease. Toward the end of the decade, Carla did get the spotlight in one more love triangle: she divorces Ed to marry Dr. Jack Scott (Arthur Burghardt), a surgeon who arrived in Llanview in 1978 and operated on Ed to fix his heart condition. Holly, with the input of Al Freeman, Jr., wrote a 30-page outline for the two-year love triangle storyline, which was approved (albeit with some changes) by then-head of daytime programming, Fred Silverman. Carla's 1979 wedding to Jack was estimated to have been watched  by eight million viewers, and landed Holly and Burghardt on the cover of "Ebony" magazine's October 1979 issue. Jack, however, was always planned to be a short-term character by Holly's design, and was killed off in 1980. During this time, Carla and her mother Sadie found themselves in supporting roles in the storyline involving heroine Edwina Lewis (Margaret Klenck). At the end of 1980, Carla tearfully begs Ed (who by this time was running for lieutenant governor on the same ticket as Herb Callison, played by Anthony Call) to take her back. Even though he acknowledges that  he will always love and care for her, he cannot take her back after her marriage to Jack Scott. Feeling the need to start over, Carla leaves Llanview. She returns in 1983 and, after having attended law school in her absence, Carla becomes an Assistant District Attorney. In this new position, she later has to prosecute Ed on manslaughter charges for a police drug bust gone wrong. Also during this time, she is involved with another love triangle. Carla still has feelings for Ed, but she falls in love and nearly marries a football star-turned-nightclub owner Alec  Lowndes (Roger Hill). It takes time for Carla to get over that situation. After Alec is out of the picture, she eventually comes back to Ed. In September 1985, Carla accepts a job in Arizona similar to what she was doing in Llanview. After wrapping up odds and ends in town, Carla leaves with her mother Sadie and moves to Arizona. By 1987, Ed and their son Josh would also leave town and move to Arizona to be with them. Sadie dies off-screen in the 1990s. Ed returns to Llanview in 2000 after grandson Jared Hall (Herve Clermont) accepts  a job practicing law. Impact and reception. Conception and casting. "One Life to Live" creator Agnes Nixon has said she was inspired to create the Carla Gray character after seeing singer Eartha Kitt in a television interview. Kitt expressed her own frustration at facing prejudice from both white and Black audiences because of her light-skinned complexion, and the feeling of not belonging to either group. (Even Carla's surname "Gray" reflects the in-between nature of the character, not "Black" or "white".) According to actress Ellen Holly's memoir, "One Life: An Autobiography of an African American Actress", Nixon  based Carla's mother Sadie on a maid who worked for Nixon's family when she was growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, much the same way that Sadie on "One Life" initially worked as a maid for the Lord family. Nixon's childhood maid was named Sadie Gay. Lillian Hayman had won a Tony Award in April 1968 for her role as Momma in the musical "Hallelujah, Baby!", and immediately afterward, "One Life to Live"'s casting department offered her the role of Sadie Gray. The character of Carla (despite debuting in episode 61, broadcast on October 7, 1968, months  after the show's premiere) was conceptualized in Agnes Nixon's original show Bible, and as such is considered part of the story of Llanview from the beginning. Nixon based Carla and Sadie's original story on the film "Imitation of Life", in which a light-skinned Black woman denies her heritage and her darker-complected mother, and enters white society by passing. Ellen Holly was quickly cast in the role of Carla after Agnes Nixon read her op-ed piece which ran in "The New York Times" on September 15, 1968, called "How Black Do You Have to Be ?", in which she decried press coverage of actor Percy Rodriguez allegedly not looking "black enough" to be an acceptable Black addition to the cast of "Peyton Place", and detailed her struggles and views as a light-skinned Black actress who could pass for white and chooses not to because she was raised in the Black experience and identifies as Black. A photograph of Holly ran alongside the editorial with the caption "Ellen Holly — Not black enough?" Holly was initially hired to appear on "One Life to Live" for one year. Holly originally had reservations about working on a soap opera , as the bulk of her acting roles up to that point had been in the New York theater scene, but she took the job anyway, believing that her storyline with Lillian Hayman's Sadie Gray was very important and should be told on television, while also not wanting to turn down one year's worth of work and steady pay. Holly wrote a follow-up editorial called "Living a White Life — For a While", which was published in the "Times" on August 10, 1969; in the editorial Holly writes at length about her experiences as a lighter-skinned Black actress  as well as her experiences after she was cast on "One Life to Live". Of note in the 1969 follow-up editorial is Holly's (and also ABC's) insistence on using the term "Black" on-screen, as opposed to "Negro" which was still considered the correct way to refer to African Americans by many in the U.S. at this time. Holly would go on to write seven more editorials for "The New York Times" during her time on "One Life to Live". Impact on daytime television. Before Carla Gray, there had been no African American lead characters on any  daytime soap opera. Prior to creating "One Life to Live", Agnes Nixon had worked as head writer on the soap operas "The Guiding Light" and "Another World" and had attempted to integrate African American characters and actors into these shows, but with limited success. A CBS soap opera "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" featured an Asian American as a leading heroine, but the character was written out after six months on the air. ABC as a network was already committed by the late 1960s to broadcasting programming produced by and for African Americans on their five owned-and-operated  stations, and the network's vision when "One Life to Live" was making its debut was to tell stories the other two networks did not. That particular concept — to tell stories other people hadn't told or wouldn't tell — was a hallmark of Agnes Nixon's storytelling. In an editorial published in the industry journal "Television Quarterly" in 1972, Nixon wrote, "For any dramatic entertainment to be a success [in this day and age] it must be relevant...Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of "relevance" is the way it has permitted us to incorporate into our "soaps" many socially  significant issues, to educate viewers while we are entertaining them... For almost two years we told the story of a young Negro woman of light pigmentation who passed as white. This sequence was done primarily because it furnished us with an intense, absorbing drama that attracted viewers. But the mail response substantiated our belief that it was absorbing "because" it was relevant and because it explained to viewers the sociological motivations for such a denial of heritage and race due to the rejections suffered by the young woman from both the black and white communities. The ultimate tragedy we were  presenting was simply another instance of man's cruelty to man, instigated by ignorance and prejudice." As Carla's storyline played out on TV screens in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, viewers were watching the first non-white lead character to be featured in a front-burning, sustained storyline for several years on a soap opera. To that end, "One Life to Live" became the most-watched daytime soap opera among African Americans, followed closely behind by "All My Children", also created by Agnes Nixon, the only other soap opera at the time to focus consistently on providing  storylines for Black characters. By the 1980s, it was estimated that 12% of all African American households watched soap operas, twice the rate of white households, for which actress Ellen Holly was given partial credit. (In fact it was Nixon's sister soap "All My Children" that debuted daytime's second Black leading female character, Nancy Grant, played by Lisa Wilkinson, who arrived in Pine Valley in 1973 as the ex-wife of John Danelle's character Frank Grant and stayed on the canvas for 11 years. Black publications such as "Jet" featured the two actors, who were married in  real life, in cover stories.) Throughout her fourteen-and-a-half years on the program, Holly was given varying degrees of autonomy in the sculpting of the character of Carla and the storylines in which she would be involved. Holly's input was solicited at first because there were no Black writers on the "One Life to Live" writing staff; head writer Sam Hall eventually convinced ABC to hire a Black writer because he wanted to lend more authenticity to Carla's storyline. Ellen Holly's primary role on "One Life to Live" paved the way for more Black actors  and actresses to be given prominent storylines on other daytime soaps. In 1968, the year Holly debuted on "One Life to Live", only three Black actors were featured in a recurring status or higher on U.S. daytime soap operas; that number would increase to 25 by 1982, with Al Freeman, Jr., who played Carla's husband Ed Hall, becoming the first Black man to win a Daytime Emmy Award in a leading category in 1979. When asked about the cultural impact of Black storylines which aired on "One Life to Live", Holly said in a 1979 interview with "Ebony" magazine : Wedding of Ed and Carla Hall. Ed Hall and Carla Gray were initially supposed to marry in the summer of 1973. However, several news breaks chronicling the Watergate scandal were preempting daytime television. This forced "One Life to Live" to push the wedding into the fall. In its place the story of Lester Brock attempting to kill Carla on numerous occasions would test Carla and Ed's commitment to each other for a final time before they were to marry. Famous pianist and jazz singer Hazel Scott made a deal with the show's head-writers to make an appearance  on "OLTL" as well. She would play a famous aunt of Carla's who would sing a song to the newlyweds. Hazel Scott wrote the song herself and appeared in the October 3 and 4 episodes of 1973, in which Carla and Ed were to marry. The marriage ceremony itself was broadcast on October 5, 1973. The wedding was also the first on-screen wedding of two African American characters on a U.S. daytime soap. Holly leaves "One Life to Live" for the first time. Unfortunately, Holly depicts a backstage story that diverges far from the ideal storyline shown on  air. She claims that despite Carla Gray's storylines being major reasons for the series' early success (with "One Life to Live" having the highest number of non-white viewers), she faced racist attitudes behind the camera. These included being paid less than white actresses on the program (Holly was initially paid $300 per week as outlined in her 1968-69 contract, rising to only $325 per week in 1969-70 and $350 per week in 1970-71), returning from the funeral of her nephew who died of glioblastoma only to find that in the elapsed time , her dressing room was given away to a white actress, and discriminatory treatment while taking part in a feature and photoshoot on the history of "One Life to Live" for "Daytime TV" magazine which Lillian Hayman was not present for as she was not invited to take part, despite being a main cast member at the time. Holly became very attached to "One Life to Live"'s first producer, Doris Quinlan, and was emotionally impacted when she left the program in 1977, so much so that Holly and Al Freeman, Jr. wrote a letter to ABC executives on behalf of  the show's cast which attempted to lobby to keep Quinlan's job safe, but the duo were unsuccessful in their efforts. Holly would later learn that Quinlan being replaced by Joseph Stuart was agreed upon by many higher-ups in the program's hierarchy, including Agnes Nixon, who considered both producers her protégés. Quinlan's successor Stuart was tougher in critiquing Holly's acting than Quinlan had been. This was partly due to Holly's letter to ABC executives, which Stuart knew about and saw as a direct personal attack. Holly also took umbrage with Stuart's handling of  the love triangle storyline she devised, particularly the hiring of Arthur Burghardt as she explicitly voiced her disapproval over the planned casting choice and even had another actor in mind to play the role of Dr. Jack Scott, who Stuart rejected after allowing Holly's preferred actor to audition. Finally, Holly took issue with the prominence of Erika Slezak's character Victoria "Viki" Riley in Carla's 1979 wedding storyline; Holly alleged that Slezak thought her participation as matron-of-honor in Carla's wedding was an attempt to "give luster" to the storyline. Holly also alleged that the character  of Viki Riley was placed into the storyline in an attempt to endear Viki more to the African American viewership demographic. In the same interview series, when asked about this specific situation, Slezak briefly complimented Holly's ability as an actress and said that she was "strong-willed" and "intelligent". A combination of all the aforementioned examples contributed to Holly's decision to step away from "One Life to Live" in December 1980. In a 2013 interview, Holly said of her decision to leave, "I fled the show because my health was literally going down the tubes. The first two  years of "One Life" were thrilling. After that, it's just a question of being a fireplug that keeps getting pissed on by junkyard dogs." Holly decided to start a theater workshop with the ultimate goal of producing Broadway and Off-Broadway plays with Joseph Papp. Joseph Stuart's eventual replacement, Jean Arley, was interested in bringing Carla back into the canvas in Llanview. Holly's friend, casting director Mary Jo Slater, informed Holly that Agnes Nixon had moved Stuart over to "Loving", her new soap opera, to be its producer. Once Slater arranged a lunch where Arley had the  chance to meet Holly, Holly felt immediately at ease. Jean Arley would bring Holly and the character of Carla back into the show in the spring of 1983. Holly insisted on a salary of $150,000 per year, twice the amount she made when she left in 1980, despite knowing that other actors on the program were making more than $1 million at that time. Even though ABC originally tried to negotiate, the network paid Holly the amount she asked for. Treatment of Holly and Carla under Paul Rauch. After a fifteenth anniversary celebration event was held in honor  of "One Life to Live" at New York City's Tavern on the Green, in which Holly and Lillian Hayman (as the two original cast members still on the show) were front-and-center while newer and perhaps more popular actors were not, Holly alleges that ABC fired Jean Arley, the producer who brought her back to "One Life to Live" after a two-and-a-half-year absence and the person who organized the event, and replaced her with Paul Rauch. In her book, Holly is vocal about her frustration at her character being pushed into the background to  make way for new white characters, and about being summarily dismissed in 1985 by Rauch, who by that time had become executive producer and writing consultant. Rauch fired every Black lead or recurring character on the show during his 1984-91 tenure. In a 2018 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Holly said she had a feeling she would be fired from "One Life to Live" when new executive producer Rauch reprimanded Holly publicly for her choice of hairstyle in front of the crew and other actors, something that had never happened to her while working on the program before . Joseph Stuart had given Holly tough critiques toward the end of her first stint playing Carla, but those critiques always occurred privately, behind closed doors. She also intuited that storyline options for the character of Carla promised to her by Arley, like one that would have involved Carla adopting children and raising them as a single mother, would not be going forward. According to Holly, Rauch would publicly reprimand her for the slightest infractions, or even perceived infractions. In one instance, Rauch ordered Holly take voice lessons because her voice was "an offense to the public that should be taken  off the air." After Holly consulted a voice coach who was similarly puzzled by Rauch's request to change Holly's voice, Rauch informed Holly that he "couldn't quite put [his] finger" on why he disliked her voice. Holly believed that Rauch's pivot from material infractions to perceived infractions was his way of breaking her spirit, as Holly immediately changed her hairstyle upon her first reprimand, but could not change her voice as she received no constructive feedback with which she could work. Holly was eventually fired by Rauch in late 1985: