TV Trivia
by Michael Karol
& Craig Hamrick

My Favorite Diva:
Iris Carrington on Texas
By Craig Hamrick
posted September 1, 2006

My all-time favorite soap opera was Texas, a spin-off of Another World that aired in the early 1980s. It was created at the height of the popularity of the nighttime soap Dallas, when Barbara Mandrell was suddenly considered cool and just about everyone in America was wearing Wranglers and Stetson hats. I guess NBC decided to cash in on the country craze and move one of its primary characters, Iris Corey Carrington, to Texas. I'd watched Iris on Another World for years, and I had always found her fascinating. She was a 40-something socialite, so she wore stunning ensembles and glittery jewelry, furs, and fabulous, huge blonde wigs. She had a sexy, husky, almost gravelly voice. I guess she looked and sounded sort of like a drag queen, but at the time I barely even knew what a drag queen was. Stretched out on an antique chaise lounge in her glitzy Bay City penthouse, she plotted and schemed and manipulated the lives of those around her.

Unlike most soap opera characters, Iris made lots of phone calls. Usually soap characters travel across town and make a personal visit when a phone call would suffice, because dramatic scenes are much more, well, dramatic when they're played out face to face. But Iris spent lots of time talking into a glamorous, ornate French-style phone made of gleaming brass and ivory. You can imagine how thrilled I was to find a plastic phone much like it at a garage sale one afternoon. It was a bit weathered. In fact, I had to do a little repair work involving glue, paint, and masking tape, but eventually I installed it in my bedroom. What a little gay boy in training I was.

These days, soap opera magazines give away every plot twist on the shows long before they play out on-screen. Readers know from the "comings and goings" section when an actress has been fired for having a real-life affair weeks before her character ends up being carted off to the loony bin. Back then, either the magazines did things differently, or I just didn't read them, but when a whole bunch of characters suddenly showed up on Another World, I didn't know what was going on. I had no idea of the roller coaster of drama that Iris was about to endure.

First, we met Rena Cook, a beautiful brunette spitfire who was visiting Bay City from Texas. She and Iris quickly became allies in some scheme or another, and before long the action on Another World was split between the two locations as Rena's family members, friends, and enemies joined the story line. Within a couple of weeks, Iris had decided that the situations going on in Texas were so juicy she should move there, along with her adult son, Dennis.

While Iris and Dennis were planning their move to Texas, I got some startling news of my own. My family would soon be leaving Kansas because my dad had gotten a job at a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia. I’d lived in Coffeyville from the time I was 4 (I was now about 13), and while I wasn’t the most popular kid in school, I did have lots of friends and a burgeoning social life. (I’d recently attended my very first "mixed" (boys AND girls) party, in Jeff Deil's basement, complete with a session of "spin the bottle"). And the fact that my dad was editor of the local newspaper was looked upon with some respect. I was extremely distraught to face the prospect of moving away from the only home I’d known, and all my friends. But if Iris could do it, with fabulous style, I too could muddle through somehow.

Iris's first story line on Texas was fantastic! I've now watched soaps for more than 30 years, and it has remained my all-time favorite story. Shortly after Iris' arrival in Texas, she attended a large party, dressed to the nines, of course, in a glimmery gown, with hair piled on top of her head and sparkling diamonds encircling her neck and wrists.

At the party, a mystery man spied her across the crowded room and was left breathless (who wouldn’t have been?) As the story unfolded, it turned out that this handsome stranger wasn’t a stranger at all: Alex Wheeler (as in “wheeler-dealer, big time oil millionaire) had taken dear Iris’s virginity several decades earlier, but because she was the daughter of wealthy publishing magnate Mackenzie Corey, and Alex was a lowly peasant, he felt inadequate and scurried away, leaving the deflowered maiden to wonder why Prince Charming had deserted her. (It turned out this was the emotional baggage that had turned Iris from an ingenue into a manipulative maneater.) Iris had found herself pregnant, and not knowing how to find young Alex, she’d married the next man who came along: Elliott Carrington. (If nothing else, Elliott had given Iris a spectacularly elegant last name.)

Flash forward some thirty years, and the 50ish Alex was a rich but unfulfilled businessman. He’d been haunted for a lifetime by the beautiful girl who'd been his first love, and now, to his amazement, here she was before him at last. Not knowing the burden he'd left Iris with all those years before, he approached her, and found her less-than-receptive. Eventually, of course, the truth came out, and Iris confessed that she’d never forgotten, or gotten over, Alex, and the pair planned to marry. I was enthralled by the story of these two star-crossed lovers who found their way back to each other against all odds; I thought it was the ultimate romantic tale. Little did I know, the very best was yet to come.

Elliott Carrington joined the cast of characters in Texas and was outraged to learn that Iris had lied to him, passing off Dennis as his son. On the night that Iris and Alex were finally to be married, Elliott decided to take revenge. Their wedding was in the penthouse restaurant of a towering building owned by Alex. Somehow Elliott gained access to the building next door and took a rifle there. As the wedding progressed, he muttered to himself about vengeance, and fixed his target scope on Iris and Alex. As they embraced at the end of the ceremony, Elliott squeezed the trigger! It was a Friday, and we viewers were left to wonder if Elliott’s bullet had found its mark...and because Alex and Iris were clutching each other, it seemed possible that they’d both been killed! I couldn’t wait for Monday!

When Monday finally came, Alex and Iris were both on the floor, covered in blood! I was mortified. Iris was dead! Well, of course she stirred quickly -- Alex was the only one who'd been wounded, and it was his blood that covered her fabulous beaded wedding gown.

The scene was better than an Irwin Allen movie: Elliott's bullet had shattered a window, and since the wedding ceremony was taking place atop a skyscraper, wind rushed in though the broken glass. This, along the pandemonium of guests dashing made things very dramatic. Iris was screaming and begging Alex not to leave her after all their years of separation, and in a voice-over, we were able to hear Alex’s thoughts: "If love can survive, darling Iris, so can I!" Well, even as a youngster, I knew the show's writers would never have Alex make a loaded statement like that and then kill him off. I was partly right. Things got EVEN better!

Alex had an overprotective nephew named Ryan who was some sort of security chief or something. (Obviously he wasn't a very good one, considering how the wedding turned out.) At the hospital, as Iris waited in her blood-soaked gown, Ryan stepped in and ordered Alex's doctor to inform Iris and the rest of the world that Alex hadn't survived the sniper's bullet. Ryan thought this was the best way to keep Alex safe while he recovered. Iris was distraught, to say the least. She'd longed for Alex for decades, only to have him snatched away at their happiest moment. It was a story worthy of Greek myth.

Though it was sad to watch Iris going through mourning, one had to admit she was doing it in a fabulous style that only she could pull off. Her widow's weeds were tailored, snazzy, and perfectly accessorized. For weeks, Iris moped around the homes, restaurants, and offices of Texas, bursting into tears and chewing up scenery. Hard-hearted Ryan listened to his new aunt mourn Alex, knowing all along that she wasn’t actually a widow--that Alex was still hovering in a coma. He argued with the doctor about keeping Iris in the dark. He reasoned that if she knew the truth, she wasn’t a good enough actress to convince Alex's would-be killer that he'd finished the oilman off.

Finally, at Alex's office, Iris happened across a hospital bill. "Why," she wondered aloud, in true soap diva style, "would Wheeler Oil be paying for a hospital room?" She went to the hospital to investigate, and pushed her way past Ryan to find out whose room she was paying for. The double take, near-faint she did when she saw her "dead" husband in the bed is something I've never forgotten. The writers had strung the story out just long enough, and the payoff of seeing Iris finally reunited, again, with her long-lost love was spectacular. (Of course, about three months later, the actor who played Alex must've wanted out of his contract, because he was quickly and uneventfully killed off anyway.)

Texas was a grand distraction at a time that I desperately needed it. Things weren't going well for me in Winchester. I was considered a pretty dorky eighth-grader at Daniel Morgan Middle School, where most of the kids' parents were millionaires, sports heros, and/or politicians. My dad was just a journalist. The kids wore shirts adorned with tiny alligators, and penny loafers, and khaki slacks. I was more accustomed to flannel shirts and blue jeans and cowboy boots. And while the western craze did mean some of my classmates occasionally wore Wranglers and boots, it wasn't considered "cool" to wear that combination every day.

I eventually made friends, but I couldn't wait to get off the school bus and race home to catch Iris' latest schemes.