If events did transpire as (Robert) Costello apparently said, then why didn't Dan Curtis, in the apparently recent interview I quoted above (which I haven't seen but was transcribed from one of the DVD releases), affirm this? I do remember that Mark Rainey has said that DC told him and his co-writer to make Elizabeth as Vicki's mother in their novel "Dreams of the Dark." DC's directive to them wouldn't necessarily mean that was always the case with the TV show, though.
Sadly, I've learned not to put stock in much of anything DC might or might not have said when it came to his older projects. As has been documented on the forum in several different topics, he made way too many misstatements and jumbled up too many facts.
The other questions I have are: if Art Wallace did change his mind on this regard, did he ever confirm this in an interview - or was he ever even asked about Vicki's parentage?
I've only seen one interview with Wallace, and the interviewer didn't ask him.
I'm not trying to play the devil's advocate, but I just wonder if there is anything in writing anywhere, where any of these people are concerned. A rather curious (to me) thought is whether Robert Costello's remarks are so widely known that this is the reason why the "Elizabeth is Vicki's mother" is the prevaiiling view. I had never heard this anywhere except in the previous online discussion (which I had completely forgotten). And so far in the present discussion, no one else had pointed to Robert Costello as the source or evidence for this point of view.
Costello's and Bennett's remarks were all made at various appearances at conventions/Fests. Video tapes of them probably exist, though I don't have copies. What I do have copies of are the transcripts of these appearances. They appeared in various '80s fanzines and also online in the mid '90s. However, I combed through several of my fanzines from the time and couldn't locate them. Nor could I find the transcripts online. Though I didn't have much hope of finding them online because, quite sadly, many of the DS sites that were in existence in the early-to-mid '90s have completely disappeared.
Hopefully one day I'll come across the printed transcripts when I'm looking for something completely different (because doesn't it always happen that way?
).
As for a possible scenario as to how the Liz we came to know could simply leave her baby on the doorstep of a foundling home, well, who's to say Liz did? People have posted some plausible theories that might have made that action possible - but there are some tried and true soap alternatives that haven't been mentioned - and we can't forget that back when Art Wallace probably conceived the explanation for how Liz was Vicki's mother, he was plotting DS as a soap (part of me is still somewhat disappointed that, in true soap tradition, Vicki was never put on trial for Laura's murder, as Wallace had conceived in the Shadows on the Wall bible - but I digress...). In the soap universe, the tried and true backstory is most often that the mother was told her baby had died. The baby was then spirited away by 1) the mother's father who most often didn't want a scandal, 2) the baby's father who didn't want a scandal and/or didn't want a child, and/or 3) an unscrupulous doctor who was working with either of those two or even both. Soaps have relied on various versions of those scenarios for numerous backstories. And it's only after the child shows up on his/her own and announces his/herself or some sort of documentation surfaces after years of being hidden (sometimes even in secret rooms
) that the mother is even made aware of what really happened. That way the mother is never seen in a bad light by the audience but as a victim - and the blame is squarely placed on someone else's shoulders. It's quite possible that Wallace may have come up with his own variation. I suppose we'll never know because one would assume that if he had written it all down as he did Shadows on the Wall, it would have surfaced by now - but who knows? And it's also possible that after Wallace left and DS shifted its focus more toward the supernatural, TPTB didn't really like what Wallace had conceived and/or they didn't think it would fit in with the direction of the show any longer, but they couldn't come up with a satisfactory alternative themselves, so the storyline was simply left in limbo and the mystery of Vicki's parentage was never solved on screen. Though in an odd way that may have been a good thing because the mystery of Vicki's past just might be the single most speculated about dangling thread from the original show and something many fans will probably never tire of speculating about.