DAYS Exclusive: Gloria Loring Shares The Highlights Of Her Return As Liz Chandler

We Meet Again: Loring (r.) with Deidre Hall (Marlena) on the DAYS set.

Nearly four decades after Gloria Loring’s initial run on Days of Our Lives, her Salem alter ego, Liz Chandler, returned to town to pay her respects to the late Doug Williams and sing at his memorial service. Loring’s Liz, who had a six-year run on DAYS, came to town as the estranged wife of Tony DiMera, had an affair with Marlena’s ex-husband, Don Craig, and eventually found love with Neil Curtis. Along the way, she befriended Doug, sang at his club, Doug’s Place, and recorded “Friends and Lovers”, the hit song that became Shane and Kimberly’s love theme.

“I left the show in September of 1986,” recounts Loring, who made her Salem debut back in 1980. “So it’s been almost 40 years. Oh my goodness.”

An Unexpected Surprise

After that long a period, Loring “did not expect” she’d ever return to the soap. “But I was very honored to come back to pay my respects and add a little something to the recognition of Bill Hayes [ex-Doug],” she notes. “They were very kind to invite me to Bill’s service, and it was very moving. I got to see some folks and hug some people I hadn’t seen in many years, and it was really fun. Then the call came that they were going to do this [memorial for Doug], and would I want to do it?”

Loring immediately agreed and quickly found upon her return to the set that filming the show was a totally different experience from the one she had remembered. “None of it was familiar,” she contends. “We’re in a completely different studio, and there’s a completely different cast. I mean, almost completely different, 90% different. There were few people that I knew. It was just wonderful to see Suzanne Rogers [Maggie]. She’s had some challenges along the way, so to see her as beautiful and healthy as ever was just a great joy for my heart. And, of course, Deidre [Hall, Marlena]. It was great fun to see her. I loved it.”

Then there was the soap’s current production process. “A challenge for me was we used to have a certain way we filmed,” explains Loring. “We blocked, and then we came back and did a run-through with cameras. It was a whole day for one show, but this is very piecemeal. You walk through it in the morning, and that’s like at 7:30 or 8 o’clock. Then you may not be back on set until 2 in the afternoon, so there’s all this time. If I was used to that, then it would have been, ‘Oh yeah, this is how we do it.’ But it was just a little disconcerting. But it all worked out well. I missed one or two little entrance things, and I was like, ‘Oh, rats.’ But I remembered my lines!”

Loring describes the whole experience as “very different. We had a very different feeling when we worked back then, for me,” she says. “But again, I was walking into an entirely new set-up and a new way of doing things. So it was like, ‘Huh? What do I? Where do I go now?’ Then I kept getting lost on the stage. They have all these rooms. We used to have a big warehouse sort of thing at NBC. The sets were evenly distributed on either side, so you could walk down the center and see all the sets. The configuration now is that the sets are sort of like puzzle pieces. You walk, then you make a right turn, and there’s another set there. Then you go around the corner and it was like, ‘Where am I now?’ I had to ask people, ‘How do I get off the stage?’ ”

Enter Liz

Loring’s DAYS visit begins with a reunion with Marlena when Liz shows up on her old friend’s doorstep out of the blue. “It was wonderful that that was the first scene,” says Loring. “Like, ‘Hi, I’m here.’ It was very sweet and really nice.”

She shares screen time with Susan Seaforth Hayes (Julie), too. “We had a little interchange, and I got to sing a song honoring Bill and Susan. Well, their characters, Doug and Julie,” recounts Loring, referring to the Irving Berlin classic, “Always.” “Actually, that had also been sung at Bill’s funeral service. So it was very much already in my heart and very lovely to do. I was really happy.”

During Loring’s original run on DAYS, familiar songs were often performed and were a large part of the show’s fabric. However, with escalating licensing costs, that’s rarely if ever the case nowadays. “It’s just ridiculous,” scoffs Loring of the hefty licensing fees. “It bars a lot of shows from using any music.”

Hence, Loring feels “it was such a loving thing” for DAYS to make sure “Always” was incorporated into Doug’s tribute. “Julie was sitting right there and listening to it,” recalls Loring. “And, of course, it was extremely touching for her and for all of us. It was infused with a lot of feeling from just having been sung at Bill’s funeral. Pieces of music bring up experiences and highlights in your life. So that was very present for me, the feeling as we were all in that church where there was a lot of music and a lot of singing. It was just extraordinary. There was just so much love and so much respect. It was such a lovely experience.”

Sweet Sorrow: Liz paying her respects to Bill’s widow, Julie (Susan Seaforth Hayes).

Nemeses Reunited

Another highlight from Loring’s return to DAYS is a scene between Liz and her longtime nemesis, Marie. Decades ago, the two characters were both involved with same man, Neil Curtis. “It was so much fun, because I got to be snarky, and she was fabulous,” says Loring of co-star Maree Cheatham (Marie), who brought her A game during their confrontation. “There was so much energy and so much focus, and she was just perfection. Actually, I had never met her before, because she wasn’t playing Marie when I did that storyline.” The late Lanna Saunders played Marie from 1979 to 1985.)

While Loring and Cheatham were thrust into playing adversaries on screen, they quickly bonded off camera. “I said, ‘I would love to sit and talk with you a little more off set,’ ” shares Loring. “So we did that. We decided we wanted to get together, and I went to her house. She has beautiful pottery and has all these amazing collections. Then we went to lunch and just had a wonderful visit. It was really nice.”

Suffice it to say that Loring had a wonderful time during her DAYS return, and she’d consider popping back into Salem again for a visit. “If it was a one-day sort of thing, sure,” says the actress. “But I started supporting myself because I had to when I was 18. And so by the time I got to a certain point and I had been working for 54 years, I went, ‘You know what? That’s enough already.’ I have six grandchildren now. I want to be there to pick them up after school. I worked through one of my children’s [sons Brennan Thicke and Robin Thicke of Masked Singer fame, with her late ex-husband, sitcom star Alan Thicke] Christmases on Days of Our Lives, because we didn’t get any days off. So I remember not being there for my family, because of certain commitments I made to the show. But I’d do another quick thing like this where I could come into town and stir something up.”