| After having returned from what she thought would be greener pastures, Kim Zimmer is back at her old stomping grounds on GL. People say the light is already out on daytime's oldest soap, but you won't hear it from Guiding Light's Kim Zimmer. Have faith, says the irrepressible, indignant star. her eight months on a now-deceased soap taught her that once the stench of death is on a show, the people involved baby-sit the corpse until the undertakers cart it away. "That's what happened to Santa Barbara," says Zimmer. "That show was really hard because those people had written it off already. They were just there to do the work and that was it. Nobody cared. People were looking for other jobs already. It was depressing. I'm hoping that doesn't happen at Guiding Light." When Zimmer returned to the show to reprise her role as Reva Shayne Lewis --- one of GL's most popular characters of all time and one of the two or three most enduring characters on soap operas, period --- cast mates whom she won't name asked her point-blank: "So why are you here when the show's going to be canceled anyway?" Zimmer was appalled to find everyone at GL in such a funk. "People's attitudes need some adjustment," she asserts. "And I don't know how to do that if you keep talking cancellation, then, honey, that's what's going to happen." Zimmer is the eternal optimist, an out-spoken talent known to save screamingly bad storylines and infuse catatonic co-stars with actual warmth. She does it all by the sheer force of her exuberant, magnetic personality. Zimmer won't dispute the dismal ratings, but she argues that "all of the ratings are so close. There's not that big of a difference between the No. 8 show and the No. 2 show." Her convictions weaken when discussing her comeback storyline, the disastrous Amish Reva. Even she is perplexed: if she's supposed to be Reva, why was she riding around in a buggy in a bonnet-cum-ponytail, humming Simple Gifts to herself? "You know what I'm fearful of?" she asks. "That they took this Amish thing so far that that I can't possibly be the Reva I was in the past after experiencing this life for 4 1/2 years." Zimmer finds the outcome of her story completely predictable ("I'm sure they're going to have me show up just when Josh and Annie are getting married"), but everything else about her return to GL has been just the opposite. A three-time Emmy winner for Outstanding Lead Actress, she never thought it would be so hard to get her old job back. A lunch shared by Zimmer and departed executive producer Jill Farren Phelps to inquire about the possibility of returning to the show proved, to put it mildly, unappetizing. Zimmer's ice-blue eyes flash with anger and roll with disbelief as she tells the story. "I called her and said, 'Can we meet?' And she said, 'Well...I'm terribly busy. But all right.' Begrudgingly. But she was nice and everything; cordial on the phone. There has been a lot of bad press about us, which was totally fabricated. We never really knew each other. We passed on Santa Barbara; when I started she had already gone to Guiding Light. I had no problem with Jill. I like the woman a great deal, but I think she made some poor choices." Anyway, we had a great lunch; for 2 1/2 hours we just yakked and yakked and yakked," Zimmer continues. "I said, 'I would be interested, down the road --- not immediately, but somewhere down the road --- in coming back to the show.' She said, 'We're really not in the position to do that. The show has moved in a different direction.' I told her I could understand that. She was the executive producer, and she wanted it to be her show. That happens all the time. But I had seen other actors go back to other shows with new executive producers, new head writers, and they were welcomed back with open arms." Even if Phelps was trying to make her SB pals, Marcy Walker (ex-Tangie Hill) and Justin Deas (Buzz) into the stars of GL --- a move that alienated audiences --- the cold shoulder seemed inexplicable to Zimmer, given GL's steep decline in the Nielsen's. "I couldn't understand why she wouldn't want Reva back on the show," she says earnestly. "Jill said to me at our lunch, 'Well, who's on the show that Reva could be involved with?' And I said, 'The thing that was wonderful about Reva was that she could be involved with anyone. It didn't matter. You shouldn't think about that as a problem.' I ended up trying to pitch myself and I thought, 'Why am I doing this? I don't want to work in an environment where I'm not wanted anyway.' So I laid back, and then they called me, however many months later. I don't think it was because of Jill. I think it was because of many other forces." The other forces may have been Procter & Gamble, keen to have Zimmer's face on the tube just as it was set to see it's Reva-retrospective video, Reva: The Scarlet Years. The return plot, however --- a 12-week arc during which Zimmer played the dead Reva as a "spirit" --- was pretty weird. "I was a spirit who couldn't touch Josh, who couldn't feel," she says. "It was worse than being Amish. I had my hands tied. She was astrally projecting herself." Zimmer pauses for the implausibility of the scenario to register. "This story was a disaster. The only way I could make it enjoyable to myself was to vamp it. I was nasty and I was vampy. I thought, 'I'm going to have fun doing it.'" Although this story went down in flames, Zimmer was asked to stay, and signed a three-year contract. She is aware that the controversy that surrounded her return will not die as GL incorporates her into the fabric of the show again. "There are going to be some changes made at GL, and people are going to assume they're because of my return. I've read stuff about the show not turning into the Reva story again. I wouldn't want that anyway. That's why I left in the first place. I was losing my mind. I was working five days a week, and I wouldn't want that ever again. But I also don't want them thinking that the big changes that are happening are happening because I'm back. I have no control. There are a lot of people who assume I do, and I just want to set the record straight on that. I do not have the power that everybody seems to think I have." It's refreshing to talk turkey with Zimmer because she never pretends that what's going on isn't going on. Her criticisms of the show may be strong, but so is her sense of nostalgia, whether it's for the camaraderie the cast used to enjoy as they played sports together, or for the harrowing backstage moments. One of the latter occurred during the climax of the Sonni/Solita story. Zimmer was on an elevated bridge with Michelle Forbes (Sonni/Solita) and, Zimmer claims, Forbes "was having a nervous breakdown in my arms. I've never been so freaked out in my life. We were up on that bridge, and I had to get them to stop tape and get her down because she was out of her mind. She was gone. And I was drinking. I was going back in the prop cage and drinking vodka because it was so weird. Vodka straight. Vodka. Straight. To calm my nerves because she had me such a nervous wreck." Zimmer's relationship with long-time collaborator Pam Long (head writer for GL and later SB) was similarly intense. "Pam and I hated each other when she was writing on GL. We had a severe love/hate relationship," Zimmer said pointedly. "We used to have the scariest fights because I thought the stuff was ridiculous and it couldn't be played, and she would just challenge the s--- out of me. I would call her on it a lot. We would have fights where we wouldn't talk at all. I remember when Joe Willmore was executive-producing the show, he took us to dinner to try to convince me to stay for an extra six months when I was leaving the show. He got so sick from hearing the way that we talked to each other that he went outside and threw up on the curb." This famous candor and the accessibility that has made her a perennial favorite with audiences has put her in the awkward and almost impossible position of defending herself for the career she didn't have. Over the years, journalists have put her on the spot in ways they wouldn't dream of doing with other daytime stalwarts --- wondering why Zimmer didn't become a movie star after her role in Body Heat, or get her own sitcom. Or what happened with the Marilu Henner role in Evening Shade? Zimmer gives a knowing, weary nod to the familiar litany of questions. Speculation about what she calls the "failures of her career" is ultimately fruitless. "It's something that, as an actor, you can't help thinking of anyway," allows Zimmer, who calls herself a rotten audition. "Maybe I am a bad actor and I'm just able to do daytime, which is a format that I know and love. Maybe I give myself completely to that because you're allowed to push the envelope." She knows that, more than anything else, her image as a soap star has limited her. "I stayed too long at the fair," the 40-year-old actress says. "I enjoyed doing daytime and didn't leave when I probably should have. I chose to have a family. And the best place to have my children was on a soap because they write it in, they write around it. It's the easiest place in the world to have a family." After SB was canceled, Zimmer worked sporadically in TV-movies (The Disappearance of Vonnie) and sitcoms such as Seinfeld. The "lowest of the low," as she calls it, was a series of appearances on the now-defunct Models Inc. Despite the gold-plated reputation of series senior executive producer Aaron Spelling, Zimmer admits, "The show itself was just not my cup of tea. I was basically playing a woman who was supposed to be 50 or 55 years old. I was embarrassed for myself. They made me look old on the show, the way they did my hair. I was emotionally in a funk then and didn't care. It was OK. It was fine. And my agents were very excited because it was Aaron Spelling." She crosses her eyes and makes a face. Despite the professional disappointments, Zimmer describes the five years she spent living with her family in the "Leave-It-To-Beaver land" of Valencia, Calif. as a "great time for me." It was a great time for her children too. Zimmer says her children, Rachel, 13, Max, 8, and Jake, 5, have already told some of their friends that they'll be back in three years. Wisely, Zimmer and her husband of 14 years, director and teacher, A.C. Weary, are renting their home to one of Weary's colleagues from California State Institute of the Arts. Back east, their life is the same as it ever was. They moved back to their beloved Upper Montclair, N.J., where Zimmer hops a bus to work and maintains the sporting lifestyle (biking, skiing, Rollerblading) that has kept her in such great shape. Zimmer claims to have gained 40 pounds during her California funk, but as slim as she is now in a short black dress, it's hard to picture. Daytime TV has changed, perhaps too fast, in the five years Zimmer has been away. On the day we met, WNBC announced the cancellation of Donahue in New York after 28 years. In an era when soaps have landed on the endangered species list, and history is just a place where old shows are put to rest, she knows that she can't "live on memories," but is adamant about one thing --- that soaps are telling the wrong kind of stories. Zimmer's beliefs so run against the current fashion about daytime that you might thing she's a reactionary --- or a visionary. "I'm going to get myself in trouble with a lot of writers for saying this, but I think there's enough talk shows and things on the air to concentrate on the issues that face our youth and everything today. I think people watch soaps to fantasize. Certainly I think our youth these days have to be more educated than ever, but why do it on a soap? I don't think that's what soaps are there to do. I think the stories are about romance, triangles, interfamily conflict. Families vs. families. The Lewises and the Spauldings." Time will tell whether Zimmer's instincts are correct and if head-writer Megan McTavish can position Zimmer to do what nobody else has been able to do --- bring back people who have turned off the Light. Does she think she can do it? "Is GL going to make it? Yes," insists the fearless star, the Reva who can raise hell or bring Springfield to it's knees. The fire is in her eyes. "Yes," she says again. |