My favorite things to do as a kid were forbidden. There was always a Stephen King novel hidden under my mattress; probably why I have degenerative disc disease today. My best friend taught me shoplifting at the department store where we worked, and we pulled off swiping our prom gowns: an impressive feat smiling at the guards we had to walk past when we left at night. Soap operas were also forbidden, so I snuck over to my grandmother’s house in our apartment complex to get Young and the Restless hometown Genoa City dirt.
The show debuted in 1973, when I was four, and provided a glimpse into a world that was far more glamorous than my own, and badly-behaved in different, better-funded ways. Presiding over much of it was the Grand Duchess of daytime television: Katherine Chancellor. Wealthy, imperious, complicated.
Jeanne Cooper played Katherine for nearly 40 years, but didn’t arrive on that set as a novice, she worked in film and on shows like Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone. By the time I met her, on a day off from my plaid Catholic school jumpsuits, she was royalty in her breezy chiffon caftans, clinking her crystal carafe of bourbon and commanding the attention of whoever crossed the threshold of Chancellor Manor. Her life was chaos, and as a 10-year-old learning to diagram sentences from nuns, I lived for it. Alcoholism, widowhood, kidnappings, at least five husbands left by the roadside, elaborate identity swaps, the works. Katherine Chancellor had been there, bitch-slapped the extensions off her rival Jill Abbott, and done it in high heels, drunk.
My grandmother looked just like her. She was like (what my sister called us) the “upper white trash” version of Mrs. Chancellor. Replace the highbrow chiffon caftans with polyester jumpsuits, the classy salon bouffant with Jersey-bottle bleach blonde and the crystal decanter with cheap scotch, and there we were, in an apartment outside Philly, watching tv while Nanny cheated at double solitaire. I didn’t care, because I learned just as much how to win at double solitaire by watching her. And when I ordered my first legal drink at 21, it was Scotch on the rocks to a befuddled bartender, because my grandmother let me sip her watered-down drinks when she was done with them.
In 1984, Cooper had a face lift and instead of hiding it, the show filmed the surgery and wrote it into Katherine’s story. I mean, daytime TV in the 1980s, a real surgery, bandages coming off, that’s pretty nutso. What’s stayed with me isn’t any specific plot twist, but a sense of sitting beside my grandmother, watching a world my mother forbade, feeling like I’d slipped into a secret life. Every once in awhile I’ll see a meme that reminds me Katherine Chancellor, whose lesbian subplot started in the late-1970s but got cut because they were worried it might not play well with audiences. She died five days after her last of 40 years’ worth of appearances on Young and the Restless. And I think of afternoons at my Nanny’s, a little defiance, and a woman on a screen who somehow made misbehaving look pretty magnificent.