Daytime star Jeanne Cooper didn’t hide the fact that she got a facelift in 1984. She couldn’t, since footage from the procedure aired on The Young and the Restless 40 years ago, on March 28 of that year.
Cooper, who played Katherine Chancellor on the CBS soap from 1974 until just before her death in 2013, said on The Talk in 2012 that the procedure was her idea. “I walked by a mirror one day and scared the hell out of myself,” she quipped (per HuffPost). “Everything that happened in that storyline was first-hand. And you saw everything as I saw it.”
In a 2009 Television Academy interview, Cooper said that when she asked The Young and the Restless co-creator Bill Bell for time off to recover from her facelift, he thought that art could imitate life. “He came down to the dressing room one day, and he said, ‘Jeanne, how would you feel about if we put Katherine through this?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a very good idea, since I’m going through it now and I am Katherine.’”
Elizabeth Harrower — a writer for the show and a “magnificent researcher,” as Cooper said — got to work plotting Katherine’s onscreen facelift. “My cosmetic surgeon at the time said to me, ‘If she calls me one more time and asks one more thing, I’m gonna make her a cosmetic surgeon,’” Cooper remembered. “She was that thorough.”
Cooper was adamant about the details, too, telling Bell that the soap had to show the facelift in a “documentary fashion … every step of the way, the emotions that one goes through and so on and so forth.”
And so The Young and the Restless’s cameras were rolling in the operating room when Cooper went under the knife — and again in the office of Dr. Harry Glassman, Cooper’s plastic surgeon, when Cooper had her bandages removed the following day. Glassman was the one whose hands did the unwrapping as an offscreen actor read the lines of Katherine’s doctor.
CBS
But Glassman had reservations about that reveal. “He said, ‘If it’s too messy, if she bleeds a little too much, I want to clean her up, and we’ll rewrap and do it [again],’” Cooper explained in the Television Academy interview. “I said, ‘I promise you, I won’t bleed.’”
Glassman relented and agreed to go with the first take. He wasn’t supposed to speak during that scene, Cooper said, but blurted out, “Oh, Jesus, you said you wouldn’t bleed, and you didn’t.”
And that unscripted moment nearly threw off the other actors in the scene. “They were improvising [while] taking the bandages off my head because they got all caught up in Dr. Glassman’s one remark, and it played very well,” Cooper said.
Cooper had two days off after the operation and then did the rest of her recuperation on the Y&R set. “I’d start to do something, and [Katherine’s] housekeeper Elizabeth [played by Julianna McCarthy] would say, ‘Katherine, now the doctor said do not bend. You’re not to bend over. He’ll tell you when you’re ready to bend over and pick up things.’”
When the facelift episode aired on March 28, 1984, it was a milestone moment for The Young and the Restless. “We had 52 percent of the viewing audience of television that day … the highest ratings that CBS has ever had,” Cooper said. “Fifty-two percent of the people watching television was watching The Young and the Restless and this operation. And it was so successful that it broke wide open cosmetic surgery.”
Cooper started getting a sense of that episode’s importance when viewers started making appointments with her doctor. “I think that’s one of my proudest moments … that a lot of people made their lives better, not just through cosmetic surgery but reconstructive surgery,” she said. “The impact of daytime, you can’t imagine the impact that it has.”
