Soap Tackles the Ultimate Taboo: Father-Son Incest : Television: Character accuses his father of sexual abuse on ‘Bold and the Beautiful.’ Viewer response has been very positive, producer says.

Young Jake, the tennis pro at the club, is the perfect romantic lead--tall, dark, handsome. But something is amiss; he’s haunted, tormented. The gorgeous Felicia is likewise troubled because Jake won’t or can’t make love, and he won’t tell her what’s wrong. He won’t tell his sister Margo either.

Even after several eternities on the afternoon CBS serial “The Bold and the Beautiful,” Jake wouldn’t tell anybody . . . until a recent day when he confronted his father: “All these years I was tortured. Those nights, the darkness, your voice, your hands. . . . In my little boy’s mind I thought it was love. . . .”

Soap operas are the stuff of human frailty and perversion, in mixed amounts, and in their twisted histories you would be hard-pressed to find some small variation of anguish that has been somehow overlooked, except perhaps for this one: father-son incest.

This story line, which has been winding in and around “The Bold and the Beautiful” since fall, comes to its resolve over the next several days.

You wonder what aberrations are left for daytime dramas: “Good question,” says one of the veterans of veterans of the genre, Bill Bell, “B&B;’s” co-creator, executive producer and writer. “Until we did this, we thought everything had been exploited.”

In the plot, Jake (Todd McKee) claims he was molested at age 4 by his father, Ben (John Brandon), ran away from home at age 14 and was missing for 10 years.

The story has spun off in a variety of directions: unconsumed love, screaming confrontations, Jake strangling his father, Ben’s suicidal tendencies, his heart attack and infinite complications.

Think about the dilemma for Jake’s mother, Helen (Tippi Hedren): Should she believe her husband or her son? Then there was the arrival of Ben’s brother Charlie (Chuck Walling), who still wears his Army dog tags after all these years. What’s he all about?

The idea came from Bell’s son, Brad, who also writes for the show. He saw TV specials on child abuse and began research. “We couldn’t believe the numbers of people who were sexually abused--and especially at a younger age!” he says.

Asserts Bill Bell: “Our whole approach is that we certainly want to entertain our audience, but we also want to have an impact on our audience. I don’t know that everyone can deal with sexual abuse, but it’s a story that should be told, we felt, and hadn’t been told.”

It has drawn more reaction than any other story in “B&B;’s” four years, Bell reports, and viewer mail has been passionately supportive.

Brandon, whose career goes back to “The Defenders” and “Hazel” in the ‘60s, thought at first that this would be a picnic role: “I was told that it was sexual child abuse,” he recalls. “I thought I’d be the cop to come in and arrest the guy.” Then, without getting any details, he was told that he was the accused offender.

“I thought, ‘Geez, what could this to do me in the business?’ (But) the desire to do it overcame everything. I’m an actor.”

He recalls that on his first day at the studio, as he was entering Makeup, another actor joked, “Oh, here’s the pervert.” Brandon returned, “I’m here to win an Emmy!”

He reflects: “You do a lot of different things in television. Sometimes it’s small parts, a few lines. But nothing has absorbed me like this.”

Brandon, who won prime-time soap opera fame as the dirty cop who plugged Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) in the last shootout of “Dynasty,” insists that it’s only “alleged” that Ben did the molesting.

Brandon has always played the role innocent, he says--although he can’t be certain Ben is innocent, of course, because soap actors aren’t told where their characters are heading until they get the daily scripts.

McKee had spent five years in what he calls “back burner” stories on “Santa Barbara,” and, while eager to develop a career in sitcoms, he was attracted to “B&B;” on the promise of major stories for his Jake. He didn’t know what sort. At first McKee was hesitant to read the mail generated by the incest story: “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is pretty heavy here.’ Then I started reading it and it’s surprising how many people out there have these actual experiences.”

Several young men wrote warm and unusually frank letters to him about their own molestations, thanking him and the show for their sensitivity. One said that McKee’s character was lucky to have “such a great sis as Margo. . . . With myself, my sister turned it all against me.”

One young man with “a very low self-esteem” wrote about trying “to move on with my life. . . . It’s not easy fighting this dark past I have for the rest of my life.” He hoped his experience would help the actor get “more understanding on how a sexually abused kid actually felt inside.”

Another described his molesting with some sense of pain and rage--but told McKee not to worry about him. He’s a survivor, he wrote, and “I will make it.”