Days of Our Lives’s Doug and Julie: The Look of Love

I first started watching soaps as a lonely teenager while I was waiting for my parents to come home from work, circa the late ’60s and early ’70s. Soap characters became my ersatz family.

One of the first shows I fell in love with was “Days of Our Lives,” which was written by Bill Bell. (This was before he created “The Young and the Restless.”) “Days” revolved around the large Horton family of Salem. Dr. Tom Horton, the head of internal medicine at the local hospital, was played by the movie star Macdonald Carey. His motherly wife was Alice, played by Frances Reid. I interviewed her often in the ensuing years and found her to be a real pistol!

The Hortons had a lot of kids. There was Sister Marie (played by Maree Cheatham); Tom (played by John Lupton), who had been missing in action in Korea; Bill (played by Edward Mallory), who scandalously fell in love with Laura (played by the incomparable Susan Flannery), the wife of his brother Mickey (played by John Clarke); and Addie (played by Patricia Barry), who went off to Europe leaving behind her beautiful daughter Julie (played by Susan Seaforth).

The Bill-Mickey-Laura triangle was very hot, but soon a con man named Brent Douglas (who changed his name to Doug Williams and was played by the singer Bill Hayes, who had a gigantic hit with “The Ballad of Davey Crockett” in 1955), came to town and fell in love with Julie. Too bad he was married to Julie’s mother, Addie, who died in a car crash in 1974, and had a daughter named Hope.

But nothing could stand in the way of the love of Doug and Julie. And the magic we lucky “Days” viewers witnessed was enhanced by the knowledge that there was a real-life romance cooking between the two stars: Bill and Susan fell in love while working together and were married in 1976.  What a supercouple Julie and Doug became! Where else but on soaps could we watch co-stars fall in love on a daily basis?

Doug opened his own nightclub called Doug’s Place, and night after night he would charmingly sing “their song,” “The Look of Love” (written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David), to Julie, as well as “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” He and his sidekick, Robert LeClair (played by Robert Clary, a former concentration camp survivor who had previously played Corporal Louis LeBeau on “Hogan’s Heroes”), would put on a nightly show filled with charm and sheer delight.

Doug and Julie were so popular that Time magazine featured them on its cover in 1976 with the coverline “Television: Sex and Suffering in the Afternoon.” In a snide article, the mainstream media finally acknowledged the fine art of daytime soap opera and correctly cited its huge nationwide audience. It also noted, correctly, that the huge profits generated by soaps (back then) were responsible for financing the primetime shows of the (then) three major networks.

Meanwhile, back in Salem, Doug and Julie’s romance attracted big ratings. A lot of it was because the two actors who played the couple were so attractive and so cerebral. Years later, when I became a soap reporter, I interviewed Susan many times and found her to be a most intelligent women. (Her mother, Elizabeth Harrower, was also a onetime writer of “Days.”)

Bill had an interesting life. A Navy veteran of World War II, he appeared on a number of early TV shows like “Your Show of Shows.” He had five children by his first wife, Mary Hobbs. Later in life, he went back to school and earned a PhD. As you know, he passed away nearly a year ago, on January 12, 2024. “Days” waited until just last week — when its 15,000th episode aired — to hold his on-air memorial. And what a superb, moving episode it was!

To make the day even more special, “Days,” for the first time in 40 years, brought back Julie’s brother Steve (played by the wonderful Stephen Schnetzer, who later played Cass on “Another World”). Also in the special episode were Maree Cheatham, back as Aunt Marie, and her onetime nemesis, Liz Chandler (played once more by the noted singer Gloria Loring). The feuding characters made up during the episode.

But the highlight of the episode was Susan Seaforth Hayes’s Emmy-worthy performance delivering a beautiful eulogy straight from the heart. It was all about the true love between Julie and Doug, which was paralleled by the fabled love of the real performers.

Of course, “Days” is a soap opera, and the memorial episode ended with a cliffhanger. A young man calling himself Doug Williams III (played by Peyton Meyer) presented himself to Julie. Is he really Doug’s grandson, or is he an imposter? As usual on soaps, we will find out only if we tune in tomorrow.