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Having it all by Kathryn Walsh SOW, Oct. 8th OLTL's Hillary B. Smith has successfully juggle a full-time career with motherhood. But "life" isn't perfect. Ten years ago, Hillary B. Smith was shopping for a new soap. She had left the ole of As The World Turns Margo Hughes in 1990, burned out on the soap routine after seven years and eager to try different acting venues. But while her care thrived - she starred on- and off-Broadway, appeared in the movie Love Potion No. 9 with Sandra Bullock, and did lots of prime-time - her personal life suffered. Her kids, Phips and Courtney, at the time 4 and 6, missed their mom, who was spending most of her time on the plane between New York and Los Angeles. "My suitcase used to stay out, and they'd play in it," she moans. " I had a commercial running at one point, and Phipsy ran up to the TV and said, 'That's my mommy! Give me my mommy back!' While the television set couldn't fulfill Phips' wish, his mom could. Smith put out the word that she was interested in doing another soap and One Life To Live called about the role of Nora Hanen Gannon (later Buchanan), a high-powered, headstrong attorney. In her dressing room with her daughter, Courtney, now 16, in tow, Smith recalls her audition. " I finished doing the scene, and they (executive producer Linda Gottlieb and some network executives) all sat there with their mouths hanging open. Not because I was so stellar but because I had taken a different approach. I had been doing Katherine Hepburn, and she (Gottlieb) had wanted Lauren Bacall, even though it said, “ like Katherine Hepburn” at the top. I finished it, they said thank you, I left, called my agent, and said, ‘When’s that Crest commercial audition?’ I figured there was no way.” She got the role, of course, but Gottlieb did have a couple of requests: She wanted Smith to become a redhead and show Nora’s soft side. (“Do what you want to do, just remember, sometimes you don’t know how hard you come across,” Smith recalls her saying.) Besides that, “she gave me carte blanche. The writers, Michael Malone and Josh Griffith…everything was rich. We had a wonderful directing team. It was a fabulous experience. I had been spoiled because I had come from Doug Marland (ATWT’s head writer). And Doug Marland was definitely a person who used the resources of the actors, so I had a lot of creative input. To come onto this show was a joy, and it was a magical time. I couldn’t believe my luck.” Nora was introduced slowly – “I was working one day a week or every two weeks, which is a good way to bring in a character, especially one as strong as Nora” – giving Smith more time to spend with her children and her husband, Nip. It didn’t take long, however, until Nora became front-burner. “During the rape trial I had 40 to 60 pages of dialogue every night, and they extended the trial because it was so successful. So it went from being a two-week trial to a four-week trial to a six-week trial.” Smith won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress that year (1994); her reel included the closing argument episode and the Wait Until Dark episode (Todd stalking a blind Nora at the beach house). Still, working a 7-9 job, as she puts it, was an improvement over her bicoastal days. “I wasn’t in L.A. I was home every night,” she stresses. ”And at least I have my weekends with them (the family).” A particularly “hellish” time on the show, schedulewise, was during the regime of a certain executive producer who kept the midnight oil burning. “I ended up buying this couch because it’s a pullout,” she says. “I slept in the dressing room, because we’d finish at 1, 2 o’clock in the morning and had to be back at 7:30. I didn’t even have the energy to go to a hotel. When Catherine (Hickland, Lindsay) came on the show, she said, ‘You are coming home with me.’ I wasn’t getting home at all to see the kids. I remember coming home one night at 11 o’clock, and this one (Courtney) was sitting up at the top of the stairs in tears going, ‘Why aren’t you here?’ ” While moments like that were heartbreaking and difficult, Smith never questioned her decision to work. “I want to give my kids the life that I had growing up,” she states. “It was simple to do back then because all you needed was one parent working. But I got an education and I had privileges; I got to go on fun vacations with my family. I loved that. In order to do that, you need to two working parents now. Doing films and Broadway is all well and fine, but…it didn’t work. Financially, it’s not as successful as this. If I was doing a sitcom, which I was doing in Los Angeles (starring opposite Gene Wilder in Something Wilder, in 1994), I’m not with them. And I wanted my children raised where they were raised because it’s a wonderful country place with simple, wonderful, pure values, morals and ethics. I believe in that. To come back and do a soap was the only thing I could do, but these weren’t normal hours. That’s all I could explain to her.” Did the kids get that? “I don’t know,” Smith answers, then directs the question to Courtney. “Did you get that?” “Yeah,” Courtney says quietly. “It took awhile.” Where we live, most of the mothers don’t work,” Smith adds. “And she didn’t understand: Why can’t you stay home like the other mothers?’ ‘Well, the problem is that I’m not like other mothers. Your mother is a little weird. She’s an actress. She has to work. She loves to work.’ But this was the best of both worlds for me. It all worked out in the end. Mother and daughter have a close bond, and their love and respect for each other is evident. In fact, Courtney is at the studio because she, her mom and one of Courtney’s friends are having a sleepover in Manhattan (no, not at the studio!). “Courtney and I get into entirely too much trouble together; we have too good of a time. That’s why I had children: to enjoy them and to grow with them and to explore them. That’s the beauty of it, that’s the joy of it.” The Smith women are spending some extra time together before Courtney and her brother head off to boarding school. With both kids away from home, does Smith still need a job close to home? “I have a contract, and I honor my contracts. I will be here until the duration of the contract, and then, who knows? Maybe beyond. I do love the medium. [But also], now that they’re in school, I can’t go fleeing out to California. My daughter’s been away at school for two years, and I spent a great deal of time going up to see her. [Once] she called and said, ‘I need to see you,’ and I raced up there, and we took a weekend and had a wonderful time in Boston. I can’t do that from California. I turned down a series recently because it was shot in Vancouver. They don’t have enough direct flights for me.” Smith does admit that she would like to “get back on the boards.” Besides that her plans include, “To breathe, live. After Sept. 11 your goals change a bit. I’m happy. I like the family I’m in here with, my fellow actors. We laugh ourselves silly and have a good time. I have a great attachment to the show. It’s the longest gig I’ve ever had. I’d like to see it be successful and want to nurture that.” So Smith has it all? “No one ever has it all,” she stresses. “Not all at the same time. I can have all of it, but it’s some of it some of the time, and then some of it the other part of the time. I try to work it all into rotating priorities, but the biggest priority is my children. Somewhere along the line something is going to get short-changed. You’re not going to get sleep, you’re not going to get personal time, you’re not going to get your marital time, you’re not going to get your kid time, you’re not going to get your professional time. You do what you can as best as you can.”   NORA, BO AND SAM   After playing Nora for a decade, Hillary B. Smith has a good idea of who Nora is – or at least who she should be. SOAP OPERA WEEKLY: When you look back at Nora’s life over 10 years, does it seem believable? The brain tumor, the blindness… SMITH: All that stuff I buy. I don’t buy walking into a cabana to have a baby with another man so you can present it to your husband because you love him so much. That I had a little trouble with. [From] there on, every day coming to work was a bit of a leap of faith. WEEKLY: The fans say Nora has changed: she’s not who she used to be. Do you agree with that? SMITH: They’re absolutely right. Understand something: She was in a train wreck and lost her memory. I don’t think she has a clue who she was. She remembers loving Bo. She doesn’t remember stepping into the cabana, and that’s a good thing, because if she remembered, she would not feel good about it. My character has been used to push story in certain directions. It’s a device, and you have to be careful with that device because it can cause damage to characters. There are some times when you’re asked to do things that you don’t agree with. I will be open and say there are a lot of things that my character has done that I tried to stop, that I haven’t agreed with. But bottom line is, I’m paid to do a job, and this is the job. I tell a story and it’s not my story, it’s their story, and I’m happy to do it because that’s my job. I’ve been doing it to the best of my ability, and sometimes in order to do it, you have to find a different side of the character that maybe didn’t exist before. Some fans like it, some fans don’t. WEEKLY: Where would Nora be if you wrote the show? SMITH: If I had gotten control of the show prior to the cabana, which is a story I pitched, I [would have had Nora] artificially inseminated with Asa’s sperm and have him say, “That’s it. You’re carrying a Buchanan.” She wouldn’t have had to sleep with Sam, and she wouldn’t have had to sleep with Asa. And she wouldn’t have violated her marriage. There were stretches all along the way made to promote that Sam and Nora union, to make sure that Sam had a child on the show. They wanted to break up Bo and Nora, but more importantly, they wanted to give Sam a foothold into the show…that particular administration did. WEEKLY: Do you still get a lot of letters asking for Nora and Bo to be reunited? SMITH: You tell me. WEEKLY: WE DON’T GET AS MANY ANYMORE. SMITH: I don’t know if that means they don’t care anymore, or whether they’re happy with the other pairings. I loved my days with Bo: Bo and Nora were great. As you can tell, my wall is covered with [pictures of them]. I absolutely adored it. It was a wonderful time. I have even submitted ideas for Bo and Nora, but everyone can sit there and armchair-quarterback. When you’re trying to write a show that has umpteen number of characters, and you’re trying to do what’s best for the whole show, I bow to their better judgment. It’s not my place: I have no writing control. I do what I do, which is take what they give me and try and make it as believable as I possibly can. And I get a lot of flak from the fans. WEEKLY: What do they say? SMITH: They think that one or the other of us doesn’t want to do it. I don’t think one person has that much control over anything, and I certainly don’t. I will only speak for myself – it’s not me. If you want to know anything else, go ask Bob Woods (Bo). When the time is right, maybe they’ll make a decision to put them back, or maybe they won’t. I do want to stress the difficulty in writing a show of this size, and I totally appreciate that. I don’t want to sit there and take potshots at the show. It’s simple when I haven’t had to sit up there and write it.