MORE REMEMBRANCES FROM:

BILLIE HAYES WSB Agent O'Reilly 1981

"I asked Gloria (Monty, GH's then executive producer) why she killed me off, and Gloria said, 'To tell you the truth, Billie, we really hemmed and hawed at it. But I decided to do it for selfish reasons. I knew if I killed O'Reilly there'd be such an abundance of sympathy and love for Scorpio that his stock would go up. And he's my new leading man!' I understand why Gloria knocked me off, but I would have loved to have gone on with it because I feel it could have been developed into a fascinating character."

BRIAN PATRICK CLARKE
DVX Agent Grant Putnam (a.k.a. Andre Chernin)
1983-1985; 1987-1988

Clarke and co-star Sherilyn Wolter (ex-Celia Quartermaine) were so well-received for the roles in GH's first major espionage storyline that their celebrity often took on a life of its own -- especially when the two went out to make personal appearances on behalf of the show. "We ended up in D.C. one night after doing a parade," Clarke recalls. "They took us to the Palm restaurant. The maitre d' came over, presented us with the menus, and said, 'This is the biggest reaction we've had out of people who are accustomed to seeing familiar faces since Hoffman and Redford were in town doing All The President's Men."

JOHN REILLY
WSB Chief Sean Donely
1984-1994

"I remember one time that Sean and Robert were facing a firing squad, and we asked for a long cigarette. And I said to Tris (Rogers), 'Do you remember Bing Crosby and Bob Hope and all those road pictures? And how they once did "Patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man", and then hit the guards and escaped? Well, why don't we do that?!' So we went to Gloria, and she said, 'Do it.' So we did it (laughs). She let us ad-lib. Occasionally you'd get a scene that was deadly. It wasn't the writers' fault, I mean, they're grinding these things out. Sometimes she'd come to us with a scene and say, 'What can you do to this?' We'd say, 'Give us 20 minutes.' She wanted us to infuse our own personalities, which we did. He'd throw something at me that wasn't in the script and I'd have to react, and I'd do the same thing to him. We'd put cappers on a scene, or we'd laugh when people were coming after us and shooting. The three of us tried to capture that tongue-in-cheek flavor. We had a good time. It was a job that I couldn't wait to get to work because the ideas were popping all the time."