Carla Gray
Carla Gray is a fictional character from the American soap opera One Life to Live, played by actress Ellen Holly. Carla appeared from October 1968 through December 1980, and from May 1983 through September 1985. The role is recognized as the first Black lead character on an American daytime soap opera.
Carla was one of the original characters created for the show and was featured in a groundbreaking and very controversial storyline about race relations. Carla was a lighter-skinned Black American passing as a white woman. The fact that the character of Carla was actually Black was not revealed to the show's audience until about five months after Ellen Holly debuted in the role. The revelation was a major shock to viewers, and the series was boycotted by one Southern affiliate. Nevertheless, the controversy attracted much attention and ratings shot up for the then-fledgling soap.
Storylines
1968–1974
At the series debut of One Life to Live in July 1968, Black American former housemaid Sadie Gray lives in an apartment next door to the white Polish American Wolek family and works as the manager of housekeeping for Llanview Hospital. Sadie acts mainly as a confidante for troubled heroine Anna Wolek but makes several passing references to a daughter, Clara, who she vaguely says is "lost to her." Anna and the rest of the Woleks assume that Sadie's daughter Clara is dead.A few months into the series' run, Dr. Jim Craig begins treating a young woman named "Carla Benari," whose illness seems to be psychosomatic — her physical symptoms stem from some unstated mental conflict. Carla, who is assumed to be Italian American, begins working as Jim's receptionist. Very quickly, Carla begins dating Black American resident physician Price Trainor. ABC received several angry letters decrying the portrayal of a Black man dating a white woman.
Carla soon strikes up a friendship with Anna herself. On a visit to the Wolek apartment, Carla runs into Sadie. It is abruptly revealed that "Carla Benari" is Clara Gray, who had not died but run away from home at an early age. Sadie was furious to learn that her daughter was pretending to be white, as Sadie knew about Carla's whereabouts prior to her arrival and instead let people think Clara was dead, as opposed to actively living with the shame of a daughter who denied her heritage. Carla herself is mortified to know Sadie already knows the truth — but she's not mortified enough to end her ruse there and then. Although heartbroken after their first encounter in years, Sadie chooses not to reveal her daughter's secret.
While Carla and Sadie try to work out their issues, Carla becomes embroiled in a love triangle. Her employer Jim Craig also falls in love with her, and she reciprocates his feelings. Carla divulges her secret to Jim. Not only is he fine with her true racial makeup, he asks her to marry him, allowing her a chance to continue publicly as "Carla Benari." The show found itself in another controversy when one ABC affiliate in Lubbock, Texas, went so far as to temporarily drop One Life to Live from its daytime lineup as a result of this storyline.
Carla briefly accepts the proposal but eventually returns Jim's ring, after realizing she would only be marrying him in order to keep perpetuating a lie. After breaking up with Jim, Carla comes clean to everyone in Llanview about her true heritage, including Price. Price is not in the least sympathetic to Carla's predicament. If anything, he is even angrier than Sadie at Carla's ruse. However, he does give her one more chance after she breaks up with Jim. Price's mother ruins the relationship as she does not like Carla. Price accepts a job overseas soon afterward and leaves Llanview at the end of 1970. Carla is able to mend fences with her mother, who stresses that she must be proud of her heritage. Taking her mother's advice to heart, Carla embraces being Black, and changes her surname back to "Gray" while keeping the first name "Carla."
In 1972, Carla finds herself in another love triangle, this time being courted by high-flying politico Bert Skelly, and police lieutenant Ed Hall. Bert is a slick career politician who seems to promise the good life that Carla desires. Ed is a blue-collar, "salt of the earth" workingman who initially considers Carla to be a stuck-up princess. In time though, Ed proves to be the love of Carla's life, and the two became engaged in 1973.
However, the road to the altar is not an easy one. Ed blames himself for the death of his good friend Meredith Lord Wolek, who is killed during a hostage crisis by Earl Brock at the Lord family estate, Llanfair at the same time that Carla finds her life on the line. This forces them to postpone the wedding as Carla is first nearly killed when her brakes fail while she is driving, and again when she is lured to the jeweler's by a mysterious man who poses as a policeman. Carla meets with the man, who points a gun at her and almost shoots her, but Joe Riley comes to her rescue. The man after Carla is revealed to be Lester Brock, the brother of Earl Brock, who blamed Ed for the murder of his brother. Ed and Carla make it to the altar in October and, surrounded by friends and family, they are married. Carla and Ed also initiate proceedings to adopt Joshua West, a street kid who Ed had taken in while romancing Carla. Josh soon took the surname Hall and became a son to Ed and Carla.
1975–1980, 1983–1985
By the mid-1970s, airtime for Carla, Ed, and Josh progressively diminished. Carla appears in a supporting capacity in the Jenny Wolek and Tim Siegel romance storyline as a friend of Jenny's and as the steadfast confidante of longtime friend Anna Wolek. In late 1975, Josh becomes involved with a girl, Bernice, who is a bad influence on him, asking him for expensive concert tickets he can't afford on his part-time job's wages. Ed gives Josh the money for the concert tickets, but informs him that he won't be giving him any more money if he asks again. Josh would later get fired from his job when Bernice asks him to stay with her to study for a test instead of showing up to his work shift. Carla, tired of being the disciplinarian and afraid of Josh growing up to resent her, insists that Ed put his foot down with Josh about what a bad influence Bernice is. To distract Josh from Bernice, Ed gets him a job working construction on the new nightclub Tony's Place, finally putting Carla's mind at ease.Toward the end of the decade, Carla did get the spotlight in one more love triangle: she divorces Ed to marry Dr. Jack Scott, a surgeon who arrived in Llanview in 1978 and operated on Ed to fix his heart condition. Holly, with the input of Al Freeman, Jr., wrote a 30-page outline for the two-year love triangle storyline, which was approved by then-head of daytime programming, Fred Silverman. Carla's 1979 wedding to Jack was estimated to have been watched by eight million viewers, and landed Holly and Burghardt on the cover of Ebony magazine's October 1979 issue. Jack, however, was always planned to be a short-term character by Holly's design, and was killed off in 1980. During this time, Carla and her mother Sadie found themselves in supporting roles in the storyline involving heroine Edwina Lewis.
At the end of 1980, Carla tearfully begs Ed to take her back. Even though he acknowledges that he will always love and care for her, he cannot take her back after her marriage to Jack Scott. Feeling the need to start over, Carla leaves Llanview. She returns in 1983 and, after having attended law school in her absence, Carla becomes an Assistant District Attorney. In this new position, she later has to prosecute Ed on manslaughter charges for a police drug bust gone wrong. Also during this time, she is involved in another love triangle. Carla still has feelings for Ed, but she falls in love and nearly marries a football star-turned-nightclub owner Alec Lowndes. It takes time for Carla to get over that situation. After Alec is out of the picture, she eventually comes back to Ed.
In September 1985, Carla accepts a job in Arizona similar to what she was doing in Llanview. After wrapping up odds and ends in town, Carla leaves with her mother Sadie and moves to Arizona. By 1987, Ed and their son Josh would also leave town and move to Arizona to be with them. Sadie dies off-screen in the 1990s. Ed returns to Llanview in 2000 after grandson Jared Hall accepts a job practicing law.
Impact and reception
Conception and casting
One Life to Live creator Agnes Nixon has said she was inspired to create the Carla Gray character after seeing singer Eartha Kitt in a television interview. Kitt expressed her own frustration at facing prejudice from both white and Black audiences because of her light-skinned complexion, and the feeling of not belonging to either group.According to actress Ellen Holly's memoir, One Life: An Autobiography of an African American Actress, Nixon based Carla's mother Sadie on a maid who worked for Nixon's family when she was growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, much the same way that Sadie on One Life initially worked as a maid for the Lord family. Nixon's childhood maid was named Sadie Gay. Lillian Hayman had won a Tony Award in April 1968 for her role as Momma in the musical Hallelujah, Baby!, and immediately afterward, One Life to Live's casting department offered her the role of Sadie Gray.
The character of Carla was conceptualized in Agnes Nixon's original show Bible, and as such is considered part of the story of Llanview from the beginning. Nixon based Carla and Sadie's original story on the film Imitation of Life, in which a light-skinned Black woman denies her heritage and her darker-complected mother, and enters white society by passing.
Ellen Holly was quickly cast in the role of Carla after Agnes Nixon read her op-ed piece which ran in The New York Times on September 15, 1968, called "How Black Do You Have to Be?", in which she decried press coverage of actor Percy Rodriguez allegedly not looking "black enough" to be an acceptable Black addition to the cast of Peyton Place, and detailed her struggles and views as a light-skinned Black actress who could pass for white and chooses not to because she was raised in the Black experience and identifies as Black. A photograph of Holly ran alongside the op-ed with the caption "Ellen Holly — Not black enough?"
Holly was initially hired to appear on One Life to Live for one year. Holly originally had reservations about working on a soap opera, as the bulk of her acting roles up to that point had been in the New York theater scene, but she took the job anyway, believing that her storyline with Lillian Hayman's Sadie Gray was very important and should be told on television, while also not wanting to turn down one year's worth of work and steady pay.
Holly was intrigued by Nixon's idea to examine this mother-daughter relationship, with which Nixon said she had "the luxury of time" in setting the scene and exploring the ideological motivations of each character involved. These "ideological motivation" mini-case studies would manifest themselves in the story not just with Carla and Sadie, but also characters involved in the storyline, such as Anna Wolek, Jim Craig, Price Trainor, and even peripheral characters such as Karen Martin who served as friend to both Carla and Anna. According to Holly, in Imitation of Life, the concept of passing "is never actually examined or illuminated but merely exploited for its surface melodrama", and as a result Holly was excited to see the fresh spin Nixon would bring to this age-old tale.
Holly wrote a follow-up op-ed called "Living a White Life — For a While", which was published in the Times on August 10, 1969; in the op-ed Holly writes at length about her experiences as a lighter-skinned Black actress as well as her experiences after she was cast on One Life to Live. Of note in the 1969 follow-up op-ed is Holly's insistence on using the term "Black" on-screen, as opposed to "Negro" which was still considered the correct way to refer to African Americans by many in the U.S. at this time. Holly would go on to write seven more op-eds for The New York Times during her time on One Life to Live.