Mrs. Chancellor

The news that Jeanne Cooper, who played Mrs. Chancellor on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless" has died took me back over fifty years when, strange as it may seem, I had been invited to be a faculty adviser to the Delta Chi fraternity at Stanford University.  It was a culture utterly foreign to me, these energetic, butch, athletic, happy-go-lucky young males with whom I ate lunch most weekdays, and tried to match them in their exuberant conversation on subjects of which I knew nothing, specifically sporting events or sporting prowess of every kind.  But what was truly unusual about my experience at the fraternity house was the daily ritual of retiring after lunch to a kind of lounge set up with a for-those-days large television screen on which we all lounged about to watch "The Young and the Restless." If it had been a group of gay male students, not that such a group would have self identified in the sixties, I could easily have understood it, imagining the high camp comments that the program would have generated. But, no, these young men watched with utter seriousness, for some reason entirely engrossed in the daily turmoil and challenges faced by the women in the drama.  I have always wondered how the ritual derived and I have to believe that when these guys were little tykes, they sat at their mother's knee watching the program, a cultural habit reinforced over the years when they stayed home from school sick, and watched it while lying in bed, just as I a couple of generations earlier listened to things like "The Romance of Helen Trent," while suffering colds and sore throats.  As i watched Cooper play Mrs. Chancellor I was always struck by what seemed to me a great difference in the lines and attitudes given her.  The other women clearly did not like her much; she was rich which made her different, but they also ascribed to her a malevolence that they so rigorously and so righteously eschewed in their own personal relationships.  I saw it quite otherwise. She was smart, it seemed to me, whereas the others were always slipping into behaviors and emotions which led them from one compromising situation to another.  They were as a group all losers, and in that respect, I imagine mirrored the interior sense of failure housewives had back then.  Mrs. Chancellor was in a certain sense the villain of the piece, but with that went the understanding that she was a successful problem solver, had sharp, well defined opinions on everything.  In my eyes, and in male terms, she was a success, and they were failures. She seemed to me to be the magnet for condemnation to deflect attention away from the other women's intellectual laziness and indulgence in the porn of cheap emotion.  It sometimes surprised me that none of the boys with whom I watched this got my reading of it, and I wondered if I was just projecting.  I never discussed Mrs. Chancellor with any woman because I never ran across a woman in our social world who watched the program.  My film viewing experience with the guys extended one night to a porno film they rented and projected for the group to which I was invited.  It was my first time, at age thirty one, seeing porno, and my reaction was to laugh uproariously, at the distorted plot line, the stilted dialogue, the abrupt, awkward, and what I could only imagine as uncomfortable contortions of the bodies in their filmed ecstasy. The boys were offended. It was a night to remember, and here again, I was on some completely different wave length.  I guess I never would have made it as a fraternity man.