Mary Beth on The Donny & Marie Show
December 3, 1998
(All below commentary by Emkid4)
Donny: She spent six years as part of a daytime supercouple on Days of Our Lives and now she’s heating up the screen as Katherine Bell on General Hospital. Take a look at this.
(Clip of Kat & Nik. This is right after Nik tells her that Stefan said he loves Laura.)
K: I’m a liar.
N: No you’re not.
K: Every time I lie to myself and say this time, someone will love me. But it never happens.
N: I love you. (Nik kisses her. Audience goes – wooo-hoo.)
D: Will you please welcome Mary Beth Evans.
(Applause) (Out comes Mary Beth – she looks great [no big surprise] shakes hands with D&M. Throughout the interview Mary Beth is quick with a laugh, while reading this fill in laughter wherever you want. She is very energetic and has a very easy conversation style, but she talks at a mile a minute. Which means I got most of it but I’m sure I missed some.)
Mary Beth (to Marie): I think he’s only 18.
Marie: How are you doing?
MB: I tell you….
D: Heating up the screen.
MB: I know, it’s very scary.
M: I love it she walks out and says to me, I think he’s 18.
MB: He’s supposed to be 18. That’s very scary.
D: Who?
MB: That guy that I was kissing, yeah. Luckily, he’s not. He’s really like 37. The funniest thing happened to me (laughter) when I was in the dressing room… Did I say 37? 27…He’d kill me for that… No, I was in the dressing room and I was putting my lipstick on and I started breaking out in hives…
D: Uh oh.
MB: …all over my face, and you know why?
D: Why?
MB: Because I’ve been in love with you since I was in the fourth grade. (Audience cheers) My whole family will love this. When I was in the fourth grade, I used to listen to the 45 “This is Not a Puppy Love” over and over again. I used to say to my mom, ‘Can’t we move to Utah? I want to just meet him over the fence. We can get a place right by theirs,’ wherever that was. So anyway, (stands and shakes Donny’s hand) this is a big honor. Great to meet you.
D: Nice to meet you too. Thank you.
(Marie stands)
M: Please, let me move.
(Donny and Marie switch places)
D: That’s okay. I’ll move.
M: (takes cushion from her chair- says something I can’t make out)
D: So you played “Puppy Love?”
MB: All the time.
D: Do you still have the 45?
MB: No.
M: I have… You see, I heard this story and I want you to know something. (Pulls 45 from under her chair- crushing all illusion of the spontaneity of switching seats) I got you this for you.
D: I signed it for you. (Apparently Donny heard the story too)
MB: Now if only I had a record player. (MB pushing her luck on free gifts)
D: That’s the problem, there’s no more record players. Doesn’t fit in the CD.
MB: There was this rap thing going the other day with that shsshshhsh (Jam Master Mary Beth is spinning her 45 imitating a DJ’s scratching technique) with that backwards record thing going and I said to my daughter, ‘Do you know what that is?’ and she said, ‘No‘. I go, ‘It’s a record when they go backwards‘, and she said, ‘Record? What’s a record?’
D: That makes you feel old.
MB: So she’s in love with some guy from the Backstreet Boys, Nick or something.
D&M: Oh yeah, right, right. (General agreement type noises)
MB: So I told her coming to see you was like her with Nick. Very exciting.
D: Now you’re working really hard on a soap.
MB: Very hard.
D: On, um, General Hospital.
MB: Lot of kissing….very hard.
D: Lot of kissing, but you do so many shows at one time.
MB: We do. It’s really the lines, the lines. I have three kids. I’m not with you guys, but… who is? (To Donny) Good thing we didn’t get married, I don’t know about five boys. It would have pushed me over the top. But I have the kids and you guys know kids and job and all that memorization. It’s like thirty pages a day and sometimes we do two shows.
M: How do you do it?
MB: It’s hard. It’s flying by the seat of your pants. It’s learning the lines in the car. (MB pantomimes driving while flipping pages of a book) Don’t anyone get behind me, and you know, just scrambling…
D: Do you ever forget your lines, or any mishaps?
MB: You do, but they edit as they go, it’s a three camera thing and they, the producer, the director taps the table when he wants the cameras to switch — so if you don’t say what’s written, then they can’t follow along, and if you don’t learn how it’s written and they come up to you, in the pinch, and say you need to say it like this, and you didn’t learn it like that, then under the pressure you could lose your mind. So I just learn it as is.
M: Now you had some interesting things happen too, little mishaps during certain scenes.
MB: Love scenes.
D: Oh, Yes, I heard about this. (Donny says this as if he were discussing it over lunch, rather than hearing about it from one of his producers in prep for the interview – but I digress)
MB: If my husband watches, I’m going to get in trouble, but I did this love scene with Stephen and we had this thing where we were sort of roaming around the room loving each other, whatever, and he kind of crashes me into the wall and the wainscoting is really high and it hits the back of my head, and then we go on this bed and it falls. They have to do the whole thing over obviously; but I get home that night and my husband….(all the while Marie has this priceless expression of amazement on her face, she is sitting forward in her chair and follows MB’s words intently)
M: The bed fell?
MB: Yeah, the whole mattress fell…
D&M: It broke?
MB: Uh huh — like with real life, real life.
D: Yeah, okay we won’t get into that one. Yeah, it happens all the time.
MB: So, I went home that night and we were going to go out to the movies or something and I said to my husband, I have such a headache. I have to get some Tylenol before we go, and he said, ‘Why do you have a headache?‘ and I said, ‘I, I uh, uh.. no reason, never mind’ (indiscernible). So sometimes work carries over.
D: On Days of Our Lives, you played Kayla?
MB: Yes.
D: And she was a nice good girl…
MB: No Pollyanna though.
D: Not a Pollyanna.
MB: No.
D: Okay, but now on General Hospital, you are kind of moving into more of an edgier woman. How’s that?
MB: It was hard at first. Days of Our Lives was like a family to me and I sort of grew up there, and had my kids when I was there, and I had left the show and had just had another baby, and the producer on General Hospital said, ‘Why don’t you come here? We have a great part for you. She’s a villain’, and I said, ‘A villain? I can’t play a villain’, and she said, ‘You can’ – and for the first two years that I was there, I was terrified and thought I was horrible, and brought in all my tired little old plaque awards like from the early 80’s like ‘best actress’ for something, just to remind myself that I could do this. And I think I just didn’t feel like I was in the in crowd. Everyone there had been there forever; 15 years or something. So now I feel like after six years, I’m equal time, and so now, I’m happy.
D: That’s great.
MB: And I was working with Stephen. Stephen came on to General Hospital about three years ago, too.
M: Now you did something really interesting, you dropped your whole career. You gave everything up early on and you moved to Chicago. Tell everybody why you did that.
MB: I was in a play at Southcoast Reperatory Theatre in Orange County and a girl that I met in the play said that her fiancé’s friend was in from Chicago. They were medical school friends and she was going to bring him down for the day or whatever, and my husband and I fell madly in love. He wasn’t my husband at the time obviously, but we fell madly in love and I dropped everything and moved to Chicago where he was in school.
M: But you had only known him a short time?
MB: I had met him that day. We had a couple of dates and moved there three months later.
M: See, I love that.
D: Where did you live in Chicago?
MB: Lincoln Park.
D: Lincoln Park. I lived in Wilmette.
MB: We could have met there, too.
D: We could have met.
M: Okay, I’m really not wanted here.
MB: No, I’m kidding.
M: I think that’s cute.
MB: It was 18 years or 19 years ago.
M: How did he propose to you?
MB: Well, we had lived together for five years before we got married and so I think he felt that he needed to do something special. So he rented a whole knight in shining armor costume and we went out to dinner and he said he had to use the phone, and he left and I was just sitting there, and the matrie’d said that there was someone out on the patio who wants to see you, and I walked out there and he was… I wish I had brought a picture.
D: That would have been fun.
M: That’s sweet.
MB: Had a big cross. It’s been blissful — pretty much.
D: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
MB: Thanks for having me, this has been great.
D: And I’m glad we could do that…. (to audience) Mary Beth Evans!
Behind the Scenes
‘This Is Not Puppy Love’ – Soap Opera Magazine – January 19, 1998
If you caught Mary Beth Evans (Katherine) on Donny and Marie recently, you might have figured out it had been her childhood dream to meet Donny Osmond. Well, not exactly just to meet him…
“When I was in the fourth grade, I used to sit in a chair in my living room listening to Donny Osmond sing and daydream that we’d move to Utah, and I’d meet him across the fence,” she says. “I was so in love with him. At the show, right before I was about to go on and meet him, I had a total break out of hives. I was so nervous. He was very sweet, though, but you know what I thought of? He has six sons, so it’s a good thing I didn’t marry him. What’s funny is that his oldest son is a punk rocker- what could be more opposite his father?” Evans came away with a precious memento,-an autographed record: “To Mary Beth, this is not a puppy love, Donny Osmond.”
Gallery: Click on a picture to view a larger version. Click on the picture again to close the large view screen.
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