Please Mr. Postman
Soap Opera Digest
We wanted to know what really happens when you write a soap
star -so we did! Top honors to go....OLTL's Susan Haskell (Marty), who
responded the fastest (only days before Christmas), wrote a letter that
referred to things in our letter and has a free fan club.
Last December SOD adopted the alias Theresa Piti and sent identical fan
letters to one male and one female from each of the 10 daytime shows.
Why? We just wanted to see what, if anything, we would receive in
return.
So what happens when you write to a star? We mailed out 20 letters on
December 15, 1994, and as of April 21, 1995, we had only received nine
responses. That is a 45 percent success rate - or a 35 percent failure
rate, depending on how you look at it.The nine responses varied greatly
in terms of content and style. Some actors sent personalized letters;
others sent invitations to join a fan club (some at no cost; others
with fees ranging up to $20). Eight of the nine actors mailed headshots
of varying quality (seven black-and-white photos, one color). The first
response, from OLTL's Susan Haskell (Marty), was postmarked December
22, 1994 - one week after we mailed out our requests. The ninth, from
AMC's Eva LaRue (Maria), was sent nearly four months later on March 18,
1995.
By all accounts, actors are overwhelmed by the volume of mail they
receive. Haskell agrees: "I was shocked by the number of letters I got
when I first started. It goes up and down, depending on the storyline,
but some people write 10 times a month! Even if all your friends wrote
to you all the time, it would never equal the amount of fan mail you
get."
Not that Haskell is complaining. Like most actors, she has heard the
rumors that producers compare how much mail that the actors get, and
that the actors with the most letters receive the best stories. "The
network definitely takes notice of how much mail people are getting,"
Haskell asserts. "I can't say how influential [the figures are], but
they factor in there somewhere, because the network has people counting
the mail before they give it to you."
Concurs Haskell, who received almost 3000 letters in 1994: "Writing to
everyone is very costly. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of
dollars." Still, Haskell was the only respondent whose fan club was
free. "I'd feel funny about taking money from people so they could be
in my fan club," she shrugs. "They're supporting me, and this is how I
can thank them. It's a cost I absorb."