A Thick Slice of My Favorite Cheese: "The Colbys"

The evening of January 12th, 1981, this thirteen year-old plunked down in front of the television set at 8:00pm and settled in for the three-hour premiere of a new prime-time soap opera, Dynasty. From that first day until its demise in May of 1989, I saw every single episode of that show but one. (Some snafu with the VCR caused me to miss the much-anticipated catfight between Joan Collins and Diahann Carroll, but I did get to see it years later, thankfully!)

I think I had to have been one of the series' most fervent followers, clipping every conceivable photo of the cast and pasting all of them into four, count 'em four, scrapbooks! (An early Underworld tribute to Dynasty can be found here.) During the 1984-85 season, when the show became the #1 series in the U.S., plans were put into motion to create a spin-off. Such a plan had already been proven successful when Dallas gave birth to Knots Landing years before. In the fall of 1985, events began to take place on Dynasty that would set the wheels in motion for its sister series, Dynasty II: The Colbys, a crowded, even more glitzy prime-time soap. I was there with goggle-eyes, watching yet another marathon of TV as the new show made its debut.

At the time of its premiere, the parent show Dynasty suddenly found itself in a bit of trouble. Unable to ride the coattails of a sensational cliffhanger involving the wedding of Amanda Carrington (Catherine Oxenberg) to a Moldavian prince, at which the church was decimated by terrorists who scattered the place with bullets, possibly killing some of the cast, ratings had taken a sudden dip. For starters, Joan Collins had not appeared in the premiere episode due to a salary/contract dispute. When she did return, her character Alexis was part of an unpopular storyline that had her absent from Denver and at one stage disguised as a nun! Furthermore, Linda Evans' character Krystle had been kidnapped and replaced by a southern-fried diner waitress and wannabe actress who was trying to bilk money out of her husband Blake Carrington, played by John Forsythe. And as it turned out, only two supporting actors had been killed in the "bloodbath."

It was in the midst of all this that the new set of Colby family members was introduced. The story was set in motion by having Forsythe take part in a joint venture (an oil pipeline deal) with Jason Colby (Charlton Heston), patriarch of a wealthy family based in Los Angeles and estranged uncle to Jeff Colby (played by John James, an original Dynasty cast member.) Simultaneously, Jeff's ex-wife Fallon, who'd been about to remarry him before disappearing about a year or so prior, had resurfaced, but with amnesia.

The role originated by Pamela Sue Martin was now inexplicably cast with English actress Emma Samms who in no way, neither looks nor manner, seemed right for the part. They tried to force some sort of familiarity filming re-done “flashbacks” with James and by putting her in a red dress in the credits such as Martin had worn and even had her put her hand up in a similar way. In a staggeringly appropriate pose, Samms' hand is the OPPOSITE of the one Martin used, further delineating (unintentionally) just how very different these two ladies were.

As a celebration ensued in Denver to launch the pipeline agreement, the Colbys swooped in and were introduced. Heston was shown enduring the news that he was dying of a terminal illness and turning to his older sister Barbara Stanwyck. His wife, a voluptuous, glamorous creature deeply in love with him, was played by the comparatively unknown Stephanie Beacham (shown below.) Their children were played by Maxwell Caulfield, Tracy Scoggins (fraternal twin of Caulfield) and Claire Yarlett, though only Scoggins (seen here with Heston) actually made it to the big party. James and Samms were set to star in the new series as well.

Completing the primary cast once the show was on its own were Katharine Ross (at right), as Beacham's sister and the long-estranged mother of James, Ken Howard, as the family lawyer and the love interest of Dynasty's Diahann Carroll, and Ricardo Montalban, as a bitter rival of Heston's, eager to get in on the pipeline deal or, if not that, than into Heston's wife Beacham! Producer Aaron Spelling had put together a glittering, good-looking cast of heavy-hitting all-stars, hoping to draw viewers in like crazy. The show's budget was a then-astronomical $1 million per episode.

Can you look at this line-up of people and say you could resist watching?? Maybe you could, but as an all-star cast lover from the age of six on, I certainly couldn't have. I HAD to be there for this.

There was a two-hour episode of Dynasty on Wednesday, November 14th, followed the Wednesday after by an hour of Dynasty, then an hour of Dynasty II. I will never, ever forget waiting for the new show to begin and having the credits start. The screen lit up and there was the by now familiar musical trill that signaled the beginning of Dynasty's theme song. I instantly thought, “Shit! They've gone and used the exact same music for the credits!” However, that was not the case. That tad bit of familiar music suddenly gave way to a rousing, sweeping new theme that swiftly became one of my all-time favorites.

Expectations for the show ran high.  See this clipping of an interview with Philip Brown (who played a record exec on The Colbys and the love interest of Tracy Scoggins.) Nowadays, a handsome, salt 'n peppery Brown can often be spotted in pain reliever commercials.

Plans to get Dynasty II running from the get-go in its own time slot (Thursdays at 9:00) got off to a rocky start when President Reagan announced that he was going to give a televised speech on the very night of Dynasty II's second episode, the first in its regular time! To avoid the disaster of having a convoluted soap opera storyline preempted (though Heston did make a personal plea first to Reagan to reschedule), it was determined that the second episode of Dynasty II: The Colbys would run at 8:00 on Wednesday of the following week, still ahead of Dynasty, but not a week ahead as intended. (In these initial days, the shows were entangled somewhat as characters crossed back and forth and the ramifications of the plot affected both shows.)

Finally, for its third episode, Dynasty II: The Colbys was placed in its Thursday night, 9:00 time slot. The bad news is that now people were already used to the show airing before or after Dynasty and Thursday nights belonged to NBC (which aired the hit sitcom Cheers at 9:00.) So there was a built-in uphill battle for ratings. Sensing that the clone factor was more of a hindrance than a help, the producers soon dropped the “Dynasty II” from the show and from then on simply called it The Colbys.

Adding to the melee was the fact that the plot line of the show was more than a little complicated. You see, Heston thought he was dying, so Stanwyck gave all her shares of their company to James in order to lure him to L.A. where he could help run (and eventually take over) the business. James had been married to Samms, but upon her return from wherever she had been, she was amnesiac and somehow met up with James' cousin Caulfield. Those two wed in Las Vegas. So when James went to Los Angeles to live with the Colby family, his cousin was married to the woman who'd once been his wife and had been about to become so again before her illness!

If that wasn't enough, Heston turned out not to be dying at all. It was a medical record-keeping error. Stanwyck's gift to James, bypassing Caulfield, Scoggins and Yarlett, had incensed Beacham so much that she tried to prove the old woman mentally incompetent. She worked overtime to have the gift overturned by law. Unfortunately, part of her scheming led to a court battle at which it was determined that James' father was, in fact, Heston and that Beacham's own sister Ross had slept with him years ago when her (as it turned out, sterile) husband was in Vietnam!

So a lot was going on and it took regular viewing to keep up. This is all apart from the side storylines that had Scoggins (shown at right) going to work at a record label owned by Dynasty's Carroll, Stanwyck darting off to canoodle with cowboy love interest Frank Campanella and Yarlett becoming involved with a young marine biologist (who, as it turned out, was the nephew of Heston's bitter rival Ricardo Montalban.)

There was an almost comical level of near-incest going on, too, with Heston still in love with his wife's sister, with whom he'd fathered a child, James turning out to be the brother, not cousin, of Caulfield, who was married to his ex-wife, and the fact that Ross had been married to Heston's brother in the first place when she'd had the one night fling with Heston all those years ago. But that wasn't enough. It was also scripted that Beacham and Ross (who couldn't be more American if she tried) were cousins of Joan Collins' Alexis, meaning that Collins' daughter Samms had been married to two men, both of whom had been born to her mother's first cousins!!! And to top it all off, it was revealed that the reason Samms had disappeared in the first place was due to some unresolved feelings with her long-lost brother Adam (Gordon Thomson), who she had flirted with and kissed prior to realizing who he was.

With all this going on, it's no surprise that viewers were either confused or appalled at the way things were turning out. Besides that, the scenes between Caulfield and Samms were often rather ugly once she found out who she was and began to have feelings for James again (sleeping with him once in a weak moment.) An enraged Caulfield raped her and she became pregnant not long after. She waffled between the two men, not being sure who the father of her child was. (Samms, herself, was disgusted with the storyline that her character would even consider a future with a man who'd raped her.)

The cast was packed with actors who'd once been considerable stars in the movies, but it soon became clear that the real draw was Stephanie Beacham. The regal, impossibly tan, glizty and shellacked actress poured every conceivable bit of emotion that she could into each line of her dialogue. Slitheringly seductive with Heston, smotheringly concerned over Caulfield, nobly reticent at the forceful romantic attentions paid her by Montalban and positively venomous at both Stanwyck and Ross, she embodied everything that was ever great about a soap opera vixen.

Stanwyck was unhappy with most everything about the show almost from the start. She had a rigid contract that stipulated no more than two days of work per week, a strict quitting time of 6:00pm and no interviews at all. She was still, at nearly age eighty, a taskmaster about professionalism on the set and laid into Caulfield once over his laxity. She also butted up against Heston over his ego even though he'd basically done the show just in order to work with her. Her role was surprisingly meaty and certainly she was treated with all due reverence, but she complained of repetitiveness in the dialogue and general shoddiness in the writing.

She also thought she'd be seeing more of her old Big Valley daughter Linda Evens, but Evans (nor Collins) ever appeared on The Colbys. (Collins felt - and rightly so - that the powers that be were splitting their interest and energy between the two shows and, as a result, diluting Dynasty's impact in the process. Evans, who never liked the long hours on the set in the first place, probably just didn't want to do it!) Most bizarrely, Stanwyck was upset that she didn't get more love scenes (!) as if anyone was lining up to see a near-octogenarian in bed. (The Golden Girls debuted this same year and was a real groundbreaker with regards to this type of thing, but even those ladies were a close to a couple of decades younger than Stanwyck!)

Regardless of her dissatisfaction, she and Beacham created some wondrous fireworks together in their combative scenes. Beacham often got the chance to stick it to Stanwyck with lines about having the keyholes raised so that she wouldn't have to hurt her back peeping through them or telling her that her wheels were turning. Slowly, but still turning. Stanwyck got a nice one back during this exchange - Beacham: What I am supposed to say, dear Constance, that I wish I had half of your integrity, half of your wisdom, half of your sense of honor? Stanwyck: But, you do, Sable, you do. Almost exactly... half.

Their rivalry and animosity provided the grand, old-school soap opera histrionics that helped to dilute the silliness of James' and Caulfield's endless fighting, the uninvolving romances of Scoggins (one of which was to blind vocalist Gary Morris, shown here with her at left) and Yarlett and the consternation of having to accept someone in the role of Fallon who, while quite attractive and amiable, had nothing in common with her predecessor! The role, as written, resembled Fallon Carrington not in the least either.

When Beacham wasn't tangling with Stanwyck, she often sunk her claws into Ross (shown at right with brief on-screen husband David Hedison.) The initial goodwill between them was not particularly believable or compelling, but once James' paternity was out in the open, things got much more interesting. Beacham reveled in calling Ross a slut, a tramp and any number of other insults. Incidentally, these two were the most unlikely sisters in TV history. The differences in their accents was explained away by having Beacham raised in England with their mummy while Ross had moved to California with daddy, but they also looked NOTHING alike.

Ross was completely ill at ease in this project. She was a new mother (at forty-five) and had her baby with her on site in her dressing room. Possibly distracted by this, somehow she always seemed to be blank in face and voice (seriously locked in robotic "Stepford Wife" mode!) when before the cameras (and her husband, Sam Elliott, thought her lighting on the series was dreadful.) Beacham chewed her up and spit her out in virtually every scene. Feeling a bit remorseful about how easy it was to take her down every time, Beacham in real life referred to Ross as “Bambi” when she was heading over to the set to lay into her once more with so little resistance back.

There was always something just a bit bizarre about having Ross playing a British woman raised as American along with Samms, Caulfield and Yarlett each playing American characters when there were English in real life. The latter two had far better luck in disguising their accents than Samms, but it just added to the already strange world of The Colbys. At least with Caulfield often shirtless and in skimpy workout shorts or swimtrunks, few people focused on his accent anyway!

As the first 24-episode season drew to a close, ratings had slid from a high of ninth place to much further down in ranking. The first season cliffhanger had Scoggins crashing her small plane after tearfully taking off once she'd found her married boyfriend in bed with his wife, Samms now married to James (after an elaborate ceremony at the mansion), but fearing she's pregnant by Caulfield, and Heston prevented from going to the Dominican Republic for a divorce by charges of attempted murder and spousal abuse from Beacham, who'd actually fallen down the stairs, but would do anything to keep him in her clutches.

Though it wasn't a “cliffhanger,” Miss Stanwyck's character headed off on an extended trip with her cowpoke. The reason was because she had decided to depart the show, giving it a kick in the head it really couldn't afford.

As season two began, Scoggins had survived her crash, but Heston was jailed by the police and a district attorney who was out to get him at seemingly any cost. Beacham was begged by the children to call off the groundless charges, but she refused. Then, when she found out that she couldn't make the attempted murder charges stick without Montalban's help (he was there when Heston had accidentally shot her in a scuffle over her), she did what she had in fact never done before, which is go to bed with Montalban.

As the season progressed, it was revealed that Scoggins had once had an affair during college with a married man and born his child out of wedlock. Stanwyck had helped to arrange an adoption, all of this without Heston or Beacham's knowledge. Now the man, played by James Houghton (at left formerly of Knots Landing), was in town and working with Heston on a space project! His alcoholic wife (played by Shanna Reed, later of Major Dad) and young son were soon in tow, only it eventually came out that the son was actually the same one Scoggins had given up, allegedly to an anonymous family.

Reed, who became far better known as a sitcom mom, managed to infuse her character with some great emotion and shading. To make any sort of real acting impression amidst all the over-the-top artifice and deliberately austere surroundings was quite a task indeed, but she rose to the occasion and helped pick up some of the slack left by Stanwyck's exit.

In other news, Caulfield, on the rebound from his failed marriage to Samms, wed a sultry magazine reporter played by Kim Morgan Greene. She was miserable almost from the start thanks to her new husband's continued fascination with his ex-wife, coupled with the fact that her unborn child might be his! He wanted her to have a baby as well, but she had a morbid fear of pregnancy thanks to her mother having died in childbirth.

The third Colby child, Yarlett, had a new love interest in the form of Russian ballet dancer Adrian Paul. He and his sister (shown at right) were there through an arrangement one of Beacham's arts organizations had made, but now they wanted to defect. This created plenty of predictable headaches for everyone as a Soviet agent hounded Paul while Heston tried to intervene with his own connections. Paul would later gain cult success for his TV series The Highlander.

The love triangle between Heston, Beacham and Ross was further complicated once the first two were finally divorced and Ross took her turn at the altar. As she and Heston were about to wed, she came face to face with his brother, and her long-thought-dead husband, Michael Parks! She fainted dead away at the ceremony and later had to admit that she still had feelings for the man, which led Beacham to think she could rekindle her marriage to Heston. Incidentally, I've mentioned it before in other posts here, but the episode (season two, episode twenty) in which Beacham finally signs her divorce papers from Heston contains one of my all-time favorite pieces of TV acting EVER. I liked her to begin with, but from that moment on she would always be etched into my own private Television Hall of Fame.

Though the writers made attempts to keep Stanwyck's character alive and quasi-involved with the storyline (mostly through one-sided phone calls), eventually she was killed off (along with her boyfriend) in a plane crash and the Colby family laid her to rest in a black-clad funeral scene. Afterwards, when Samms' baby finally arrived, it was named Lauren Constance Colby, the middle name having been that of Stanwyck's character.

Ratings had continued to drop as The Colbys went head-to-head with Cheers and nothing seemed to be able to stop the bleeding. Significant advertising dollars were still being spent, there was stunt-casting such as an appearance by Bianca (who cares?!) Jagger (and the series had even won The Peoples Choice Award for Best New Series the year before), but it just wasn't happening. ABC was threatening to cancel it, but the producers felt sure they could come up with something to either grab more viewers or, at least, be so outrageous that there would be no choice but to bring the series back in order to follow up with it.

That something happened during the season two cliffhanger. In it, Parks had basically kidnapped Ross (who was fresh off a suicide attempt over the mess she'd made with the brothers) and as Heston chased them down with his helicopter, their car crashed off a cliff, leaving their fates in the balance. Also, Beacham had gone and snatched Scoggins' young son from school, fearful that his adoptive mother was going to take him away from Scoggins for good. Most importantly, though, was Samms' car stalling in the middle of the desert. While stuck there, with no power for the car or her car phone, a glowing spaceship landed in front of her, which she entered, and which then took off into the stratosphere!

The gambit to ensure one more season of The Colbys did not work out and the series was cancelled nonetheless. By now, Dynasty the parent series had managed to piddle away some of its own ratings magic, but made room for James and Samms to return to the canvas. With Oxenberg abruptly fired and replaced with (I'm not making this up) a waitress and t-shirt salesperson who'd never once worked professionally and who bore only the most fleeting resemblance imaginable to her and who spoke with a flat American accent in stark contrast to Oxenberg's English one, the idea of a more familiar child for Forsythe and Collins to play off off was welcome. (I know... hideous run-on sentence from HELL!  LOL) She was soon fired and almost never worked again.

Samms' ride in the spaceship was addressed as something that she believed happened, but which James did not. This conflict ultimately resulted in discord and then a second divorce! Somehow, back on Dynasty, Samms was able to try, at least, to head in the direction of her more vixenish, sexually-loose predecessor Pamela Sue Martin (complete with less bouffant hair, after a while), though it was never possible for her to do so completely. They just weren't the same sort of persona.

The year after their return, the impossible happened. Somehow, someone saw the potential still left in Beacham's character and she was contracted to appear on Dynasty as well! She was brought on to bridge the absence of Evans, who'd decided to quit the show. Her segue into the series gave Collins (her character's cousin) an all-new rival, one that was jaw-droppingly bitchy and entertaining. Soon after, Scoggins moved there, too, giving Beacham a small part of her previous TV family to play off of.

Beacham's back story was tampered with a bit, which was annoying, but it did result in some hefty fireworks between Collins and her. This season was produced by someone other than Richard and Esther Shapiro and, though there were definitely some unwelcome facets to it, it signaled to many fans a return to the glory days of the show.

It was too little, too late, though, because ABC changed its night and placed the series into the slot that had killed off The Colbys! Now up against the juggernaut NBC Thursday night slate of sitcoms, Dynasty had virtually no chance. It was put to rest in May of '89 with several story threads left up in the air (literally - Collins and Michael Nader were left falling off a balcony!)

In 1991, a much-anticipated, but ultimately rather ghastly, TV miniseries gave closure to the show and its characters. Everyone looked great (though Thomson wasn't included, so a very poor substitution was made for his role) and it was nice to have things ended with a degree of finality, but the sets had all been long-destroyed and there was a slapdash quality to it all. Worse still, the old producers were back and decided to practically ignore the entire last season which hadn't been “theirs.”

So we never really got to know what happened to Beacham and they ignored the fact that Samms and James were already divorced, making a pending divorce part of the miniseries' storyline! Then, to top it all off, they had Samms licking her wounds in the arms of Caulfield, the man who'd raped her and made her life so miserable on The Colbys. (We never did learn what happened to his other wife and unborn child, nor the child Beacham was carrying by Nader at the time of the original show's demise...)

Though they never appeared all together at any point in the series, the four older Colby siblings made an oddball group indeed. Can you imagine a husband and wife giving birth to Barbara Stanwyck (Constance), Charlton Heston (Jason), Lloyd Bochner (Cecil) and Michael Parks (Phillip)?? Stanwyck was born seventeen years before Heston and Parks was born sixteen years after Bochner! What a womb Mama Colby, whoever she was, had. Heston and Stanwyck (shown above right in their younger days with California governor Ronald Reagan) had never worked together, but had met at industry functions.

Stanwyck had worked with Bochner in her 1964 film The Night Walker (as shown here.) Heston, amazingly enough, had played Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff in a 1950 episode of Studio One in Hollywood with Bochner as Edgar! (In an even more bizarre twist, John Forsythe is allegedly in the same episode, though I haven't seen it to confirm that.)

Heston had worked alongside Parks in his 1976 film The Last Hard Men. So, in the biggest little town in the world, most of these folks had bumped up against one another before.

Scoggins had heretofore been seen primarily as a bikini-clad, blonde bimbo (on a show called Hawaiian Heat), but was given a brunette makeover and an image overhaul for her lawyer character. Contrary to what some folks might think, she went on to a career in cult favorite TV shows like Babylon 5 and Dante's Cove and did NOT retire to New Jersey and change her name to Kathy Wakile of The Real Housewives of New Jersey! Ha! The resemblance is sometimes striking, however...

The decision to cast Beacham in the role of Sabella Scott Colby (or Sable, as she was hilariously known to all) made it somewhat more reasonable for the character to be related to Joan Collins' Alexis. However, early on, Faye Dunaway had been offered the role and if, cast, she and Ross would have been American all along. Dunaway (shown here as she looked at the time) wanted more money than the producers were willing to pay, so they next went to Angie Dickinson (who, in my opinion, would have been dreadful in the part) and next to Elizabeth Ashley, but finally – and wisely – settled on Beacham.

The Colbys was an expensive failure, but for this young fan it was a memorable experience. Even bigger and bolder than Dynasty in its scope and cast, the show presented a life of unbelievable glamour. That sort of thing would soon be on the way out, however, as Seattle grunge and “dressing down” began to emerge. (I can still recall a tabloid article on how the ladies of Dynasty were going to be shown wearing more jeans and casual clothes instead of the show-stopping ensembles that helped to make the show famous! That plan went right out the window in the final season, though.) Believe it or not, until The Colbys officially tanked, there was actually talk of a "Dynasty III: The Fallmonts," which would have starred Richard Anderson, Pat Crowley and Ted McGinley, among others.

I was a very active fan, as I said, and wrote letters to Samms (of encouragement!) and Beacham (of worship!) They both responded with “signed” photos. Samms' was preprinted, but Beacham's was inscribed to me personally, which meant a lot to me at the time. I just loved her so much and still do. You can read more about her here in this tribute. When The Colbys was cancelled, I figured I would never again get to see the show or even hear its theme song again, but fortunately it was unearthed after close to fifteen years and rerun on SoapNet, where I was able to capture all 49 episodes on video.

The late-in-the-game pairing of Beacham and Collins was deemed memorable enough to warrant a recent Snickers candy bar commercial featuring the two of them all gussied up to the nines, though sadly it is only run in the U.K. and not in America where their television series originated! (You can see it on youtube.com, though.) These photos were taken twenty-two years apart, but I think the gals still look terrific and would watch them together in a show even now!