General Hospital Cast to Make House Call in Santa Ana Saturday

Will Decker put the moves on Felicia?

Will Harrison land the job of assistant chief of staff, or will Dr. Hardy give the plum to his son, Tom, instead?

Can the interracial marriage of Simone and Tom survive?

Followers of “General Hospital,” one of television’s longest-running soap operas, will get the chance to ask some of their favorite characters about life on and off camera when the Port Charles crowd comes to Santa Ana on Saturday.

Eight cast regulars, including charter member John Beradino (Dr. Steve Hardy), are scheduled to appear along with GH’s executive producer and head writer at Rancho Santiago College’s eighth annual “Tribute to a TV Classic.”

The event will feature a panel discussion among the stars, questions from the audience and the screening of clips from the show’s 26 years on ABC. A photo and autograph session will follow. Among the evening’s door prizes will be the chance to spend a day on the GH set in Hollywood.

Besides Beradino, the celebrity panel boasts a mix of cast veterans and newcomers, including, Kevin Best (Dr. Harrison Davis), Laura Carrington (Dr. Simone Hardy), Chantal Contouri (Prunella Witherspoon), Norma Connolly (Ruby Anderson), Anna Lee (Lila Quartermaine), Tonja Walker (Olivia St. John) and Sharon Wyatt (Tiffany Hill). Also scheduled to join the discussion are Wes Kenney, executive producer, and head writer Gene Palumbo.

The tribute is a fund-raiser for the college’s telecommunications department. Terry Bales, department chairman, organizes the event each year and uses the proceeds to purchase studio equipment for a student-produced cable news show that airs weekly.

Previous tributes have saluted the stars and creators of such cult favorites as “Batman,” “Mr. Ed,” “Candid Camera” and “Gilligan’s Island.”

For the sake of variety, Bales decided to break out of the comedy format this year. Choosing “General Hospital” had added appeal because some of his students have completed internships with the GH production company. Besides, he knows something of the plots. “It was my mother’s favorite soap, so I check it out every once in awhile,” he said.

Students in Bales’ “TV and Society: A Visual History” course learn that soap operas are ground-breakers. They were the first to introduce stories about drug abuse, wife beating, child abuse and interracial marriage--themes other dramatic television shows long deliberately ignored, he explains.

“I think the reason sociologists study soap operas today is because they deal with current problems in society,” Bales said. “Soaps have gotten a little more respectability, and I think they are a great training ground for actors and writers.”

Even those who claim that they never watch soap operas have heard or know the story of Luke and Laura, GH’s most famous characters.

The now-legendary plot line involving the rape-turned-romance of the mob-connected Luke (Anthony Geary) and his beautiful fair-haired victim (Genie Francis) catapulted GH to fame in the late ‘70s and onto the cover of Newsweek in 1981. The magazine dubbed it “TV’s Hottest Show” and the lovers, “the Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara of Soapland.”

At the time, GH was a ratings sensation, solidly in first place, with more than 12 million viewers glued to the tube from 2 to 3 p.m. five days a week in living rooms, college campuses and office lunch rooms across America. GH cast members were media darlings and mobbed by fans wherever they went.

Even Elizabeth Taylor was hooked. She asked for a guest spot and got one in 1981, as a widow who cast an evil curse on the young lovers.

The show became a symbol for the advances being made in daytime television. Soap watching was out of the closet, no longer the exclusive domain of housewives.

Things have calmed down a bit since then. Luke and Laura are gone, and the show is now second in the ratings behind CBS’s “Young and the Restless.”

Beradino, 72, was one of two original leading players who debuted with the soap on April 1, 1963, in the role of Dr. Steve Hardy, the paternal director of internal medicine (since promoted to chief of staff). He remembers the long climb up the ratings hill that crested with the Luke and Laura story.

Production budgets were so lean in the early days that Beradino was asked to forgo part of his reported $1,500-a-week salary for a time so that more money could be spent sprucing up the dreary sets.

“I figured it was worth the few hundred dollars, and I had no other job pending,” he recalled in a recent interview. “They appreciated it and were good to me later on.”

“We had a very good beginning, an amazing middle, then for some reason we dipped down quite a bit,” he said. “It reached a point in about 1971 where the writing got so bad the producers and actors took up a petition to dismiss the writers.”

In 1978, a new producer ushered in better scripts, nighttime production values, fresh young cast members and a bigger budget for location shoots, glitzier wardrobe and new sets.

Along the way, a parade of soon-to-be discovered nighttime television and film stars appeared before the GH cameras. Among the show’s more famous alumni are Daniel J. Travanti, Mark Hamill, Demi Moore, Emma Samms, Richard Dean Anderson and rocker Rick Springfield (remember Dr. Noah Drake?).

Yet Beradino remained, and some catastrophic events in his own life became intertwined with the show. Seven of his real-life operations, which ranged from knee surgeries to a triple bypass, were simply built into the plot. His absences for surgery and recuperation became Dr. Hardy’s.

Today, “fit as a fiddle,” but no longer a “tent pole” in the current GH story line--which sports more than 35 contract players--Beradino, a three-time Emmy nominee, is content to be taping just one to two days a week.

“It suits my life style,” he says, although he says he is disappointed that his character doesn’t have as much to do. “The older group of people on the show are being neglected,” he says, putting the blame on the youth movement that swept all the soaps a decade ago.

The ex-major league baseball player (whose team, the Cleveland Indians, won the 1948 World Series) says the light duty gives him plenty of free time to attend sporting events at Beverly Hills High, where his son and daughter play on many athletic teams. He also helps his wife, Marjorie, with her PTA and charity endeavors.

Fellow cast member Laura Carrington, who also plans to attend Saturday’s tribute, plays pediatrician Simone Ravelle Hardy. Her nuptials with Dr. Hardy’s son, Tom, marked another landmark for daytime television as the first interracial marriage.

She, too, enjoys a light shooting schedule--usually two to three days each week. “It’s the perfect situation for me as a young mother,” says Carrington, who flies back and forth from her New York home. With the flexibility to bring her real-life daughter to work, “this is the best kind of day care there is,” she notes during a noon-time break on the set, with 16-month-old Danica gurgling in the background.

Executive producer Kenney figures the show’s longevity has to do with the way the stories are told. “What sets it apart from most other soaps is that it is more of an adventure series,” he says, “and we have a great deal more sense of humor.”

Kenney also cites the popularity of the exotic location shoots, which he likes to direct, that have become GH’s stock-in-trade.

“We’ve dropped one of our lead characters out of a helicopter onto the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls . . . been to Mt. Rushmore and shot the climax of a show at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.”

When it comes to watching GH, 1940s film star Anna Lee counts herself among loyal viewers who try not to miss a single episode. Many of the other cast members, including Beradino, rely on GH staffers to help keep them abreast of the ever-changing plots and burgeoning cast of characters.

But not Lee, 76, who portrays Lila Quartermaine, an elegant, wealthy, lovable and slightly scatterbrained matriarch. Lee watches the show faithfully when she’s not on the set working. “I’ve become so addicted to it,” she admits.

Lee is tickled with the current plot twist involving her dead husband, Edward, who has returned in spirit form as a “Topper”-like ghost.

“I’m the only one who can see and hear him, and he’s always blowing cigar smoke and mixing martinis,” she says, “The rest of the family thinks mother has gone nuts.”

The British-born actress came to television from a distinguished film career playing opposite the leading men of the day in such classics as “How Green Was My Valley,” “Fort Apache,” “Flying Tigers,” “King Solomon’s Mines” and “My Life With Caroline.”

But it was the live television she did in New York and the discipline from her dramatic training in England that she says prepared her for the rigors and pace of a daytime soap.

Despite a disabling spinal injury in 1982 that requires her to wear a leg brace and walk with a cane, she, like Beradino, has no plans to retire from General Hospital.

“I want to die with my boots on,” she quipped. “English actors have a great reputation for longevity.”

So, too, does “General Hospital.”

“Tribute to a TV Classic” will be held at 7 p.m. Saturday in Cook Gym at Rancho Santiago College, 17th at Bristol streets, Santa Ana. Doors open at 6 p.m. Admission: $10 for adults, $5 for children. Information: (714) 667-3177.