by Robert Rorke
SOAP OPERA DIGEST: 1990

She's a good girl. She's honest. She's sincere. She has a big heart that keeps on giving. For all her generosity, she gets kicked around, put upon, dumped on, lied to, humiliated, raped, kidnapped, but guess what? She can take it. Why? She's a soap opera sweetheart. No matter what misfortune befalls her, she is always ready to forgive, let bygones be bygones and carry on. Audiences hate to see her treated so mean and they rally behind her. Wake up, Frannie, they say. Poor Adrienne, they sigh. Will Beth ever get a break? they cry. As durable as the villain and the hero, the soap opera sweetheart is a staple of the medium. Her trials and tribulations are the stuff of long-term stories, and playing these characters who triumph over as many obstacles as they encounter is a challenge for the actresses involved.

Among the best-known of the current crop of sweethearts is Lauralee Bell. As Cricket Blair on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS, she's wise beyond her years, solving the problems of people twice her age with aphorisms, "reassuring hugs" and lots of lecturing, such as the weekly warnings she gave Nina Chancellor (Tricia Cast) about fortune-hunter David Kimble (Michael Corbett). She started playing the role eight years ago when she was fourteen, but only during summer vacations from school. Since then, she's emerged as a full-fledged star of the show. While some of Cricket's goodwill duty has verged on the ridiculous, she has been served her own full plate of misery: her former fiance was killed in an auto accident, her mother died of AIDS, and she was raped by a date.

Such tests of character have made Cricket a role model for viewers, according to Bell: "I had so much mail on the date rape story," she says. "I got mail from mothers and friends saying it helped them understand. I got mail on the AIDS story, the teen storyline. Every time I think Cricket is too good to be true, mothers come up to me on personal appearances and say to me what a wonderful role model I am for children and I forget about everything else." She herself loves the emotional workout. "I like the crying scenes," Lauralee says. "I can't wait for them."

In traditional soap opera thinking, the trick to characterizing sweethearts is to keep pulling out the rug from underneath them so that they never can be too happy. While embracing her lover, he should be shot in the back. While fixing everyone else's life, her own should fall apart. Mary Ellen Stuart, who took over the role of Frannie Hughes on AS THE WORLD TURNS from Emmy-winner Julianne Moore, says her character embodies these dichotomies. "Frannie is Miss Fixer-Upper," Stuart laughs. "Her relationships have been one disaster after another. I'm great at telling others what to do with their lives, but lousy at fixing my own."

For the soap opera sweetheart, there is no relief from trap doors. Beth Raines from GUIDING LIGHT has fallen through several of them in the years she has been played by Judi Evans (1983-86) and Beth Chamberlin (1990-present). Chamberlin says Beth has "never had a break. She has a hard time understanding the concept that life is not fair. She literally rolls with the punches. I think that's why she is the way she is. People who've had a trying life either become very bitter or very strong and understanding."

Beth's latest test of character is putting up a staunch front while her husband Phillip (Grant Aleksander) fakes his own death and reappears in time for the birth of their child. Already Chamberlin senses that Phillip won't be there in the nick of time, putting Beth in certain danger, and she's more than ready to let those tear ducts flow. "I'm such a sap I start to blubber when I read the scripts," says the actress. "A producer a while ago was telling me what was about to happen to Beth and I had tears in my eyes." When she gets on the set, it only gets worse. "Sometimes I leave the studio feeling like I have the flu, just all weak, from the amount of emotion I have to expend," Beth laughs. Despite Beth's reputation as a red-eye special, Chamberlin defends her character's integrity. "Beth has a certain purity," she believes. "Even though she's gone through so much, she believes good is possible. What most people try to do is overcome adversity."

Dialogue for these too-good-to-be-true girls follows a certain pattern and has some obvious pitfalls (see The Sweetheart File, below). Sweethearts don't say, "That's enough," as they take it on the chin. They blink back the tears, reach for the Band- Aids and say, "Everything is going to be just fine." Getting these cliches out, however, presents problems for some sweethearts. Jennifer Guthrie (Dawn Winthrop, GH) recalls a scene in which she had to tell her mother, Monica Quartermaine (Leslie Charleson), "thank you for giving me life." Guthrie told Executive Producer Joe Hardy, "I don't think any eighteen-year-old would say that." Hardy's reply, the actress reports, was, "If you're good enough, it won't sound corny and people will believe it."

Mary Ellen Stuart has a similar problem over at AS THE WORLD TURNS, where "at least once every two weeks, I say, 'I can't say this. I can say the idea, but not these words.' Usually it's not a whole major problem. It's more like minor details. Because I play a psychiatrist, they tend to write me out of a school textbook. I make it more conversational, more real."

Despite the high incidence of goody-two-shoeism among these characters, many viewers actually identify with them. Judi Evans, who has cornered the market on soap sweethearts by playing not one but two of the hardiest--Beth on GL and poor, tormented Adrienne Kiriakis on DAYS--gets "a lot of positive mail. Adrienne is a real character [to them]. She's not gorgeous, but she has a gorgeous guy. And I think a lot of women identify with that. You can be a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. You don't have to be [fashion model] Carol Alt to have a gorgeous guy. Women love that."

In comparing Beth and Adrienne, Evans makes some fine points of distinction, and has a pretty good idea why she keeps getting cast in these roles. "I'm melodramatic, too," she says. "I think I play that pretty well. Beth and Adrienne are both tragedy-stricken. They rise above it." But who's stronger? "Beth has her head in the clouds, Adrienne has her feet on the ground," says Evans. "They both cry a lot. They were both raped by their stepfathers. Both fell in love with rich guys who did the wrong thing. That's an even game score. I think Beth was kidnapped more often. Beth didn't have to deal with the other woman, like Anjelica. Beth had to deal with Lujack and Darcy, the killer nurse." Which one of her two characters is more tortured in love? "I think Beth went through a little more," she says. As far as maturity is concerned, Evans contends it's an even game. "When I left Beth, she was where Adrienne is now. They both had the childhood dream of Prince Charming and know that you get what you buy. When you buy a Cadillac, you also get the bald tires."

Every sweetheart's challenge is to show some gumption, to not be such a dunderhead. Mary Ellen Stuart thinks she's got a great shot at liberating Frannie from her sweetheart mold and gives credit to ATWT for giving her some much-needed back bone in the termination of Frannie's romance with Sean Baxter (Burke Moses) after she discovered he had neglected to tell her about a child he'd fathered with an old girlfriend. "I was very pleased with the outcome of Frannie finding out about Sean," she says. "It showed what would really happen. I would like to think of her as a realistic, intelligent woman. She's a sweetheart with guts, chutzpah. That's what I go for. It's hard not to fall into a stereotype. I think you have to work against it. I hope they don't let this bad pattern of relationships continue."

GENERAL HOSPITAL's Jennifer Guthrie also thinks Dawn's estrangement from Ned shows that she's no marshmallow. "This is the first time she's been deceived," she says, "but she won't let it happen again. Viewers are dying to see her fight back. You can be a dear, but it doesn't mean you have to let it happen again. She's a strong sweetheart." After all the heartache and suffering your average sweetheart endures, she should at least be entitled to one day of departure where she gets to masquerade as a totally different person.

The actresses interviewed here all had their own ideas of how they would like their characters to shock everyone. Beth Chamberlin would like Beth to copy Reva's postpartum striptease and then become a public drunk. Lauralee Bell wants to pass Cricket off as a "male rock star" --a kind of clone of Danny Romalotti (Michael Damian). Judi Evans would do a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn as a biker girl. "I'd dress Adrienne all in leather spikes and ride around on a big old Harley hog with her little Marion Brando cap," says Evans. After pulling off both Beth and Adrienne, one gets the feeling she deserves it. "If I had to live these lives, I'd commit suicide," she says. #