When You're a Lover, You're a Winner
'As a romance specialist, Bill Shanks finds himself giving people advice -- and money'

As Bill Shanks quickly discovered, there's a flip side to soap stardom. We know all about the fame, fortune and romance stuff -- but the bad news is once our name rolls by in the credits, those people to whom you owe delinquent student loans know exactly where to find you.

"They actually called me on the set one day," says Shanks, still bug-eyed from the shock. "I guess they're gonna make hay while the sun shines!" Indeed, after several years of post-college starvation as a struggling actor, he's finally hit it big as lusty doc Casey Peretti, on ATWT -- and got a few fans he wasn't expecting. "One lady called me up at work and gave me trouble for fifteen minutes because my check was late," he grimaces. "Then, she suddenly gets all cute and squeals, 'Iiii've beeeeen waaaaatching you on teeee-veeee!!"

While Shanks's appearance on television has given him greater visibility (and accountability), Bill has been even more amazed at the power of the press. Minutes after a supermarket tabloid revealed that Shanks was openly carrying a torch for former ATWT costar Ashley Crow (ex-Beatrice McKechnie), he got calls from people he hadn't heard from in years.

"Sometimes people believe that stuff," he announces between mouthfuls of fried calamari in an upper-west-wide Manhattan cafe.

Is this a denial?

"No, but it's just a shock to my system," Bill admits. "I didn't know that anybody gave a damn."

He's slowly introducing Crow to the rest of the family ("My mother's so relieved," he sighs. "She was forever asking, 'So, how's ya love life?'"), which began with a Thanksgiving visit to his home town, Detroit. "I showed her where I played little league," Shanks laughs. "Then there was the grocery store my Mom used to take me to, the library, all the hot spots. It took about a half-hour of her time." The pair is planning a similar back-in-time trip to Ashley's old stomping grounds, Birmingham, Alabama. "That," Bill imagines, "will probably be more historical than hysterical."

Shanks's proud parents have since left Detroit. They retired a few years ago and now play golf all day long in Colorado. Two older sisters are also enthusiasts about his stardom (one someone had him crowned the local "Homecoming King," an honor he was relieved to have received in absentia), but his two baby brothers are considerably less impressed. "They just give me endless crap about the dopey things I have to do," explains Shanks, "or, at least what they think is dopey. They don't watch soaps, so they think they whole thing's stupid."

After having supported himself with a few too many years of hors d'oeuvres-passing for a Manhattan catering company, Bill couldn't agree less. While he took well to life in New York ("After living in downtown Detroit," he exclaims, "this town is a piece of cake"), the competition made his jaw drop. "The day I realized that every waiter in New York City wanted to be an actor was very frightening." For the first two years in town, bit parts on Guiding Light and One Life To Live and a near-miss as one of the Kendall boys on Search For Tomorrow were all he had to write home about. Of course, he didn't even see himself as the leading man type. "Every time I've been up for a part like that, I've been uncomfortable with it," he says. "Ever sine college, I've been much better at playing character parts. I'm a very good middle-aged gangster. I guess I'll just have to be patient until my hair goes gray and I start packin' away the groceries and develop a paunch. Then the possibilities will be endless!"

In the meantime, Shanks crunches on a few more squid and counts his blessings. His belt tightened until those loans get paid off (he says he's lived the better part of the last month on Campbell's soup), the actor resides in an unassuming apartment on the West Side's upper nineties, an area that was once considered borderline Harlem. "It's getting very gentrified," he notes of the neighborhood. "There's a lot of guacamole restaurants, a sure sign of yuppiedom." Bill (known, by the way, as Bill to his better buddies) generally skips cabs, buses and subways in favor of his trusty racing bike.

"I took it up last spring when I needed a new sport that wouldn't kill me," he notes. A former tennis and baseball nut, he suffered a series of injuries that eventually required either surgery to reconstruct his knee completely, or the selection of a new pastime. He chose the latter, but it's hardly the stuff of pantywaists. Racing in Central Park at top speed against two dozen other competitors ("real macho-mania-type guys," he recalls), Shanks recently got thrown off his bicycle. Days later he sported a mega-scab on his back that really grossed out bystanders during an ATWT sex scene. "It looked like I had a leech crawling on me," boasts the star.

Shanks tapes those sex-in-Oakdale scenes with his favorite daytime crony, Anne Sward (Lyla Montgomery). Before they even embarked on their onscreen older woman/younger man romance, the two were immediate friends. Shanks is sure that the behind-the-scenes chemistry was noticed by the writers. "That kind of camaraderie makes you a lot looser when you do get around to having scenes together," he believes. "The notice that you have a twinkle in your eye. They see a spark that maybe isn't there when you work with other actors." Twenty-eight year-old Bill (on and off camera her barely looks twenty-two), proclaims to be a proponent of real-life cradle-robbing. "I'm all for it," he says. "In fact, I used to go out with a woman named Lyla who was ten years older than me, so there's some kind of strange, mystical déjà vu about this."

Sward, he remembers, really took newcomer Shanks under her wing upon his arrival at ATWT. "I was very nervous at first," he states. "She'd keep me off my guard by pulling stuff on me."

Well, what kind of stuff?

He clears his throat several times, tries a glass of water and blushes nearly to the color of an eggplant.

"Well..." he hems and haws, "you know... uhhh.. well.. I can't really say. It's like... uhhh... sexual-inneundo-type stuff." He clears his throat again before, finally, achieving the perfect shade of purple. Where many stars get autograph requests prefaced with an "it's really for my kid," Bill's experience (since he started up the small screen with Sward, anyway) has been different. Reveals the actor, "I have daughters writing to me to ask for a picture for their mother."

No matter the inquiry, he's practically religious about answering his mail. "This stems from the time when, as a kid, I wrote a litter to THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.," he remembers. "Instead of an answer back, I got a picture with a preprinted autograph. I was only in the eighth grade, so I didn't know who to pitch a bitch to." He gets a lot of letters from people worried about his eating habits ("They send me recipes," he says, pondering the meaning of it all) and requesting advice for the lovelorn. "This must come," he philosophizes, "from having a TV relationship with someone who wants to be with me. Before, when I was courting Frannie (Julianne Moore) and I was a loser, no one ever asked me for advice. They must think I have my head screwed on straight now."

Don't assume, thought, that all these pleas for romantic guidance come from lovesick ladies. Shanks gets his share of guys needing an older brother's shoulder to cry on.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm Wally Cleaver and the Beaver is asking me for advice," he reflects. "I just try not to give them an Eddie Haskell answer."

Photo caption: Bill gets along famously with co-star Anne Sward (Lyla), seen here blowing in his ear.

Link to Photo: Lyla & Casey

--Michael Logan