Vicki's Mother

[michael c]

this has turned into quite the topic hasn't it.

but let me add this...

as i said i'm with those who don't go for this theory despite behind the scenes discussions that would seem to support it.

is it really in the "character" of the character we all know and love to dump her first born child on the steps of some godforsaken orphanage in the dead of winter?

why would she do it?for starters the numbers don't add up.for the situation to make sense liz would have had to have been an extremely young,vulnerable girl.but when the series opened liz was in her late fifties and vicki was twenty.meaning she would have been in her thirties at the time of vicki's birth.why would a well off woman in her thirties do such a thing?

if liz had been vicki's mother and for some reason couldn't publicly claim her i'd like to think she would have kept her closer to home.perhaps "adopting" her and passing her off as the discarded child of poor unwed housemaid.

[Joeytrom]

People do things in haste and when they are younger that they wouldn't do later on when they have matured.  Liz may have been a different person at a younger age.

[Julianka7]

People do things in haste and when they are younger that they wouldn't do later on when they have matured.  Liz may have been a different person at a younger age.

You make a good point Joeytrom. Elizabeth went thru some life altering times.
Including the huge one of [spoiler]thinking she killed her husband.[/spoiler] Giving birth, marriage,
death of a parent - all these could have a huge effect on a person.
Also, we must not forget at the time of Vicki's birth giving birth out of wedlock would
effect both the mother and the child. Both would be social outcasts.
And I don't mean just not being invited to parties. Finger pointing, whispers,
name calling - Collinsport is a small town.
Giving up such a child would be looked on then as for the child's own good. And who
is say what the leaving of Vicki on the doorstep was like. We don't know what the
weather or temps were like, how well bundled she was, if someone watched for the
door to be opened, or made sure that someone would be at the door by ringing a bell
or knocking.

[quentincollins]

Vicki was found in the winter, hence her last name, so winter in New York, it's hard to imagien the scen without it being bitter cold, snow coming down hard and fast, a teary eyed Elizabeth watching from around the corner to make sure baby Victoria was taken in.
It is worth noting how old Liz was at the time. A woman in her 30's, before she married in the 1940's, a very different time, unforgiving of a woman who had a child out of wedlock, and the stigma of bastard would have marked Vicki all her life if the truth were known. She may have belived that Vicki would be quickly adopted. And why wasn't Vicki adopted?
 I think the social stigma and family honor alone would hav ebeen reason enough to giv eup a baby, but this is DS. Who knows what sort of villain or monster Vicky's father was. For all we know Liz may have discovered her lover had sworn to sacrifice his first born to the Devil.
As for Liz seeming to be on the verge of firing Vicki early in the series...my take on that was that Liz was getting cold feet about bringing Vicki into the family and was overwhelmed with how persistant Vicki was in seeking out the truth of her past, and how close Vikci was getting to the truth. Her anger and willingness to fire Vicki could have stemmed from her own fear of having her secrets exposed. We saw later how far she'd go when Jason McGuire blackmailed her.

[Miss_Winthrop]

If I was to suspend my belief that Liz is not Victoria's mother the following scenario could have been that Liz had communicated with the orphanage that she would be putting the baby up for adoption and provide monetary support for her until that she was adopted.  Perhaps Victoria was told that she was left on the doorstep in the middle of winter as a way of keeping her from finding out the truth about her mother.  But then once Vicki was at Collinwood, I believe that Liz would have told her the truth. 

[Mysterious Benefactor]

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. 

[alwaysdavid]

Vickie may never have been put up for adoption because they thought that her mother may have returned when she was able to care for her and then they were getting paid to keep her from the  mysterious benefactor.   The fact that nothing was known of Vickie's parents would have been a deterent to her adoption in those times.