This interview was originally published in the June 25, 1991 issue of Soap Opera Digest.
John J. York puts his arm lovingly around a woman, and addresses the restaurant hostess. “Don’t we look like a happy couple? We’re engaged.’”
The hostess is impressed. “Really?”
“We’re getting married in May,” volunteers the woman.
“And we only met a month ago,” adds York.
The happy couple tells the waitress about meeting in Hawaii, falling instantly in love and blissfully planning their honeymoon. The hostess loves it. She decides, sentimentally, that she’s going to go home to hug her boyfriend.
The perfect scenario, but what’s wrong with this picture? Plenty: John York met this woman forty-five seconds ago, and he’s already married to someone else. But York is an actor and, worse, a ham. He can’t possibly resist an opportunity to tell a tall tale to a gullible hostess.
Had the waitress been a GENERAL HOSPITAL fan, she would have recognized the show’s newest arrival, Mac Scorpio. The dangerously sexy younger brother of Police Commissioner Robert Scorpio, Mac is upsetting several lives in Port Chuck. But, aside from appearance, John is nothing like Mac. York is just a regular guy who thrives on telling bad jokes and scoffs at his role as a soap heartthrob.
“I know there are these die-hard fans who get involved with the character and maybe have fantasies about this person they’re seeing on TV,” says York. “But reality has it that I’m very happily married. I love my wife and I love my baby. Acting is like playing. Being in this imaginary world with imaginary relationships; it’s just a lot of fun. But my family is the most important thing in the world to me, and I don’t care if I’m making two dollars waiting on a table, or two hundred dollars saying ten lines on some TV show, the most important thing is having the money to go buy the gallon of milk that we need in the house.”
This is John’s down-to-earth assessment of television, priorities and life. HE plunks it unhesitatingly down on the table and picks up his coffee cup, not caring if the world knows he drinks too much coffee or that he’s more concerned with maintain the image of a homebody than a hunk. He is confident in the image, having fine-tuned it for eight years, ever since he moved to Los Angeles in 1983.
It was then, during one of his first auditions, that York found himself attracted to Vicki Manners, one of the casting people for Chattanooga Choo-Choo, whom he got to know through a series of callbacks. “But how do you go about asking out a casting director?” York wondered. “What are the rules in this town? Can you do that?” He consulted his agent, who told him he could date anyone he pleased. Still, he held back. After he was eventually cast, it was Vicki — encouraged by her office mates — who found an excuse to call him, and gave him the perfect set-up to get the ball rolling. They had a romantic first date on the beach, and married in 1986.
“When we got married, I went through all these questions. Fidelity is really a guy thing. ‘Am I going to be faithful?’ After I said, ‘I do,’ instead of feeling the pressure, I felt the release. I got goose bumps. It was so cool. It was like, ‘Wow, man, we’re a team now. My life is set.’ I felt great about it instead of feeling, ‘S—t, now what do I do?’ It was just the opposite of what my expectations were.”
In some sense, York’s whole life has been directed via expectations that didn’t pan out. In his junior year of high school, a serious illness effectively nixed all his plans for a career centered on football. “In high school, I was nervous about everything. I was nervous about going to school, waking up, seeing somebody on the bus, talking to girls. I was scared to death of football practice, of taking a test. I was nervous about everything. Plus I ate. I didn’t eat a salad; I had a head of lettuce and three tomatoes and four carrots. Instead of a bowl of cereal, I ate a box of cereal. I was 210 pounds, but I was a football player, so I was stocky. I was 5’10”. But for whatever reason, I was nervous about everything and I came down with ulcerated colitis,” York recalls. “I lost sixty pounds and it changed the direction of my life. I was looking forward to playing football at a major college on scholarship, but nobody wanted to take a chance on a kid who didn’t have experience as a senior. It’s like, ‘Well, he was good then, but now he’s different.’ The colitis sent me to a smaller school.”
John became an actor when, after three semesters as a disenchanted marketing major at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, he realized a desk job wasn’t in his vision of a happy future. He abruptly quit school and announced he was going to try acting. “From growing up, watching TV, watching movies, Doris Day, the Elvis movies, the California life, I think I was born to live in California. And I knew I wanted to be in the business.” Thankfully, York’s parents were extremely supportive. But, he adds, they always were.
The next-to-youngest in a family of six kids, York lived in a blue-collar, ethnically diverse but solidly Catholic neighborhood in Chicago where, from the windows, mothers watched their children play softball around a diamond of four sewers, or fetch golf balls from the water traps. Alter, they would sell these at the first tee for fifty cents. But though his mother was a full0time mom, and his father sometimes worked several jobs to make ends meet, York recalls: “We were never hungry, we were always clothed, we went to the best schools. I don’t know how they did it; they’re the greatest influence in my life. Without saying so, they showed me that the most important thing in life is your children, and your health and your family.”
Entering “the business” forced John to decide whether he wanted to get wrapped up in the glitz of Hollywood, or keep the values with which he grew up. And, like any actor who has made the choice to put family first, he often thinks about what it would have been like if he had taken the road to stardom. “When I had a TV show — WEREWOLF — I was on top of the world, getting picked up in limousines, flying around the country doing interviews,” he says. “Of course, you like to go to all these neat places, but I’m pretty easily made happy. I got a basketball hoop, a dart board, my DICK VAN DYKE reruns [140 of them] on tape. My priorities will absolutely not change.”
Some might call such an attitude naïve, but it doesn’t matter to John. “I’m a push-over. I’m too trusting. I’m very naïve. People would take advantage of me had I not had other people to say, ‘John, these people are taking advantage of you.’ I love the way I am,” York confesses, managing somehow not to sound egotistical. “Everybody should be a pushover.”
This relaxed attitude may be the key to York’s tension-free relationship with on-screen brother Tristan Rogers (Robert Scorpio), who is reputedly difficult to work with. “Yeah, I’ve heard the stories,” says York, “but you hear them about everybody. It doesn’t get to me. Our relationship on the show is hot — it’s tense, it’s on the edge. But I don’t see [Rogers] being rude to anybody. I see him being thoughtful about his work. He’s been very nice and very professional to me.” Rogers has even been helping York with his newly acquired Aussie dialect, a sure sign he’s been won over.
But York must win most people over quickly. After only a short time on the show, fellow newcomer Cheryl Richardson (Jenny Eckert) reports that working with John is like working with her best friend. “We all do things like watch GENERAL HOSPITAL when it air. His dressing room is the unofficial sports room. He has Nerf basketball, which I always beat him at, and dart guns,” she says. “Also, he lets me steal pretzels from his dressing room.”
But though everything is going smoothly right now, York has no illusions that it will continue. “They can fire me in thirteen weeks if they want to,” he notes. “I don’t expect anything out of Hollywood. My wife and I both drive Dodge Colts and we don’t want to live in Beverly Hills.” York knows that whole game is capricious and takes it in stride, utterly relaxed, confident he has it made. But, he points out, “I had it made when I was working in a restaurant.”
JUST THE FACTS
Birthdate: Dec. 10, 1958
Middle Name: Joseph
His Daughter: Schyler Nicole, born February 9, 1991
Don’t Even Think About Borrowing: his sunglasses
Best Idea He’s Had Lately: to have his nieces in Chicago answer his fan mail
First Acting Experience: The Artful Dodger in fifth-grade production of Oliver
Favorite Snack: Entenmann’s New York coffee cake
Likes To Show Off: the pictures in his wallet of his wife and parents
