Life Imitates the Soaps

The liberating thing about not following daytime or prime-time TV series--apart from having all that time to read and reorganize the button box--is that the next day, you don’t have to chat about events that never happened to people who never existed. Nobody wants to hash over episodes with someone who keeps interrupting to ask questions like, “Now, Frasier--is that his first or last name?”

So, walking past colleagues abuzz about an actress fired from a lurid nighttime soap opera because she got pregnant, I was sure I was hearing another TV plot, right down to her made-for-marquee name, Hunter Tylo. The only other Tylo I knew of was also in show biz; in the Maurice Maeterlinck play “The Blue Bird,” Tylo is the talking dog who fatuously believes that men can do no wrong.

No, no, my friends assured me. This is real--at least as real as L.A. ever gets.

I’ll try to summarize it as briefly as those TV Guide plot synopses:

Mrs. Tylo is suing Spelling Entertainment. She was fired from “Melrose Place” before making even one episode because she was pregnant. They say she was contractually obliged to make no “material change” in her looks, and pregnancy meant she could not play the sexy vixen they hired her to be.

There is more. Mrs. Tylo says she was told she could keep her role if she had an abortion; they say that is untrue and outrageous. A veteran actress on the show got her pregnancy concealed with body doubles and leopard-print bedsheets and cleavage-up camera angles, so why not do the same for the new girl? Precisely because she was the new girl, with no track record with the audience.

(This was taking place the same week that the Barbie Doll Make-Over was announced: The nation’s foot-high fun-house mirror of femininity will have a wider waist, narrower bust and hips. Pre-make-over Barbie, as a real woman, would be as much an anatomical freak as the porn star hero of the film “Boogie Nights,” a man so fearfully made that he could run a three-legged race alone.)

And so it happened that the first time I saw “Melrose Place” was in a Los Angeles civil courtroom. I was slack-jawed at what was on the video monitor; this is on TV?

And to think that “Midnight Cowboy,” the best picture of 1969, once bore an X rating.

*

From Mrs. Tylo’s testimony, I thought maybe she had never seen “Melrose Place” either.

A born-again Christian, she said her new faith wouldn’t permit her to play certain types, and she worried about what her character on the show would demand of her: “I have a problem portraying ‘disposable marriages.’ ”

She said she asked the executive producer about her character. “ ‘Is she a bitch?’ I wanted to play a character with integrity.” All our characters are pretty bitchy, the producer told her.

I had to wonder whether Mrs. Tylo believed she was being recruited by the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Melrose Place” is an Aaron Spelling production. It is bimbo and beefcake-vision, bed-hopping and backstabbing, tight clothes and loose morals. The only people such shows seem to hold in more contempt than their characters are their audiences.

Outside of court, Mrs. Tylo remarked that she is doing this not only for herself, but for other pregnant women. The 1978 U.S. pregnancy discrimination act already does that. Here is the truth of it, Mrs. Tylo:

Caltech could not fire you because you’re pregnant.

You would not lose your seat in Congress for being pregnant.

You could work at the zoo, at Denny’s, even at the law firm representing the people you’re suing, and almost certainly keep your job. So what kind of business is it that needs to fire a pregnant woman? What value are you to them that this is what matters? What should that tell you about the nature of what you signed on to do? Why do you want to work for people who want you only for a body, a look?

This matter may hinge on an exception to that 1978 law, a “bona fide occupational qualification” for a job that only someone of, say, the right skin color or age can do.

The Spelling lawyers charted her pregnancy, showing how much she weighed on such-and-such a date for what would have been her “first bikini scene.”

Frank South, the executive producer, with a Frankie Avalon head of hair and a garrulous manner, showed one “unsuccessful” scene where the other actress’ pregnancy--a slightly convex belly--evaded all their visual tricks. He sighed. “I hope maybe everyone was getting a beer then and didn’t see it. It was unfortunate.”

Mrs. Tylo has said she still could “easily” have seduced the other woman’s husband, as her role required. To prove it, she declared, to gasps of disbelief, that she is eight months pregnant. She also declared, with some logical dissonance, that “there are beautiful actresses in all shapes and sizes and you don’t have to be a pencil to seduce a man.”

I suspect the only pencils at work on the set of an Aaron Spelling production have a point on one end and an eraser on the other . . . and even more dismayingly, if Spelling had “all shapes and sizes” of actors populating his shows, he couldn’t even afford to live in his own gift-wrap room.