I remember one Halloween evening back in the late 1980s when I tuned into the American Movie Classics Channel only to discover that they were airing not one single scary cinema treat; just regular fare–as if Halloween didn’t even exist! Back then, when my children were school kids, the holiday was something essentially celebrated just in classroom parties on October 31—if that happened to fall on a weekday. Trick-or-treating was, for various reasons, out of favor and adults almost never donned costumes.
Now America is obsessed with the holiday. It’s inescapable (not that I, for one, would wish to escape). Shops burgeon with All Hallows Eve décor for sale while summer is still blazing, there are elaborate Halloween themes in numerous TV commercials, there is blood splashing out in plenty of gory film franchises, and dependable horror classics resurface every autumn.
One of those classic cult films is Carnival of Souls (1962), a haunting little love note to fans of black and white, low-budget ingenuity. A review in The New Yorker aptly says that the film, “has the power to put you in the middle of its own distinctive nowhere. For eighty-eight minutes you’re immersed in it; when you come up, the world looks stranger.” The resourceful director was Herk Harvey, and his leading lady was Candace Hilligoss as the dazed Mary Henry.
While somewhat active onstage, the mother of two has only three credits in guest appearances in television series, and, aside from Carnival of Souls, two other movie credits. Her husband on the other hand — the father of the same two — in addition to his considerable work in films and on Broadway, had one of the most familiar faces in television. Nicolas Coster is probably most remembered for his identification with soap operas. In addition to a long run on Another World and some recurring roles on Secret Storm, As the World Turns, and One Life to Live, he appeared in nearly 600 episodes as Lionel Lockridge on Santa Barbara. His career spanned from guest appearances on such popular TV series as Naked City and The Defenders in the 1960s, to the likes of Charlie’s Angels, steadily on through Who’s the Boss, and many more on into the post-millennial Cold Case, American Crime Story, and sixty-five episodes of the current digital soap opera The Bay until his death in 2023.
Candace chronicled the experience of their 20-year marriage in her book titled The Odyssey and The Idiocy; Marriage to an Actor, A Memoir (2016). In straight-forward, conversational style, she relates tales of involvements with such notables as Jacqueline Onassis, Mel Brooks, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. But
she also lays out the road map of love, romance, and optimism deteriorating into desolating divorce. According to Hilligoss, Coster was devious in the marriage and barbaric in the break-up.
The court system made it clear that Candace was required to be “retrained” and “rehabilitated” away from acting or writing because the work of a creative was unlikely to provide enough income for her to support herself without alimony. She quotes her attorney as saying during the protracted proceedings, “The women’s movement, in their rush to embrace equality, thought that alimony was a sexist concept that had no place in a society where men and women were to be treated as equals. Alimony was an insult. That’s what the judges listened to,” and that’s what Coster banked on. The turmoil for many women of the late 20th century, her lawyer said to her, was that they became, “Women who spent twenty years of their life nurturing a family, who gave up a career and now have no pension, no health insurance. The cruel joke is that women of your generation assumed they had a contract in marriage, both implied and expressed: their husbands would share their income with them. After a woman has fulfilled her share of the bargain, it’s not fair to change the rules in the last quarter of the game.”
Harrowing stuff, which Hilligoss survived. Nicolas Coster’s large body of work makes him a good subject for an AutS Actor Profile. So, even if he turns out to be the brute I believe him to be after reading Candace’s memoir, I am on the hunt now for more of his backstory.
In the meantime, I need to pour a glass of bubbly, fluff some popcorn kernels in the microwave, and settle in for another immersion in Carnival of Souls.
~FW