FALCON CREST: An Oral History

[James from London]

There's a lot of it so I'll post it a chunk at a time.

I've grouped it roughly into years, but that's just to make it easier to read, rather than to get bogged down in continuity.

Pre-1600s

Julia Cumson: Tuscany in Italy, where our family first began.

Frank Agretti: Nobody, from Day One, has been in the right about all this.

Chase Gioberti, on "The Family of Joseph Gioberti”, a family bible: Even with all the missing pages, it reads like the Giobertis led the Crusades and then went on to bigger and better things.

1600s

Chase on Falcon Crest: Some of the grapes in this vineyard have been ten generations in the making.

1700s

Francesca Gioberti, speaking in 1984: This vineyard [in Tuscany, Italy] has lived for more than two hundred years.

Late 1800s

An extract from Melissa Agretti’s will, read in 1988: “To my Uncle Frank, I leave the sword that Granddad swore blind belonged to Garibaldi.”

Professor McCloud, American historian: Hobart California, gold-mining town. Established, 1851.
Melissa: Gold — lots of it?

McCloud: For a while. Then it was all mined out. Most of the townspeople moved away.

Franco Agretti Born 1870

Melissa, reading old records in 1988: This is dated December 1873 and it says my key [bequeathed to her by Chase in 1988] is for one of six dozen strong boxes Wells Fargo ordered for the use on its stagecoach line.

Melissa on the key: This belonged to a Wells Fargo strongbox and that strongbox was on a stagecoach that just happened to go through Hobart.
Frank: My granddaddy told me there was something that went with the map and the Giobertis had it. He hated the Giobertis. There was a bank robbery in Hobart. The thieves tunnelled under the town up into the bank into the vault.

Chase on his ancestors: An industrious group.
Angela: Most of them hardened criminals.

Chase on the Tuscany Valley: From the first settlers, this has been an agricultural area. It’s a natural for vineyards.

Frank: Years ago, long before any Agrettis came to the [Tuscany] valley, they figured there was gold right here. There was a gold rush and all these prospectors came pouring in, but it turned out literally to be a flash in the pan.
Ben Agretti, his grandson: You mean they didn’t find any gold?

Frank: No, but some of these old guys stayed on. They found something much better — dirt, the best possible soil for growing grapes, and a perfect climate.

Angela to her great-nephew Cole: Your great-great-grandfather Joseph was an Italian immigrant and he found this valley when he was prospecting for gold.

Richard Channing, Angela’s son, speaking in 1989: I was telling my sons about their great-grandparents and how they’d come over from Italy and had relied on the settlement houses. The settlement house was where they learned English, found their jobs, made friends.

Angela on Joseph: He came to America a little bit late for the gold rush, but at least he had the sense to bring some of the old family vines. That was gold to Joseph.

Chase on Joseph: My great grandfather came to this valley with cuttings from some of the same vines his great grandfather planted in Northern Italy.

Angela, speaking to her grandson Lance in 1981: Sometimes when I stand here [on the Falcon Crest porch], I can visualise your great-great-grandfather walking into this valley for the first time. They grazed sheep here. He thought of vineyards.

Angela, speaking in 1990: Grandfather, how long has it been since you came to the valley and planted your first vine from Italy?

Chase on the falcons nesting in the Tuscany Valley: They were obviously an inspiration for my grandfather in naming this place.

Frank: The Giobertis built Falcon Crest.

Angela: This valley was built by the Giobertis.

Angela to Cole: Your ancestors dedicated their lives to building Falcon Crest.

Angela: All of Falcon Crest was built on the courage to take chances.

Richard: Falcon Crest is the oldest winery in this valley.

Angela: Falcon Crest has always been a leader.

Angela: Falcon Crest always has been the gem of the Tuscany Valley.

Carl Reed to Chase: Your great-grandfather pioneered in this valley and this industry.

Angela: My grandfather built most of the reservoirs in this valley.

Angela: Falcon Crest has survived stiff competition for a hundred years.

Melissa: Five generations of Agrettis have worked this land.

Angela on Falcon Crest: That land has been in our family for three generations.

Angela to Justin Nash: You and your family have been in the valley for three generations.

Mario Nunuoz: I'm a picker, three generations back.

Angela on Falcon Crest: My grandfather paid for this land with his sweat and his blood. Every generation since has sacrificed themselves in order to keep that legacy alive.

Angela: My grandfather planted most of these vines and every generation has tended them and kept them alive.

Angela: My grandfather built Falcon Crest, but he didn't do it alone. In those days, the manual labour in the vineyards were Chinese. It was their gateway to America.

Charles Fong: For the Chinese in this valley, life has never been easy.

Emma Channing: In the old days, all wineries had storage rooms dug deep into the hills. They had hired Chinese labour gangs to do the digging. Someone told me that they paid them twenty-five cents a week. Falcon Crest is honeycombed with all these tunnels. I don’t remember much about them but I do remember that there’s an old goldmine somewhere.

Lance on immigrant workers at Falcon Crest: These are unskilled people. Hiring them part-time means three things — we pay minimum wage, no health, no pension. It saves us thousands of dollars a year. Nobody’s forcing them to work here. If they don’t like it, they’re free to leave. It’s the way it’s always been.

Chase on labour inequities in the valley: The ideas and situations that have created this situation are of longstanding and they’re deeply embedded.

Gus Nunuoz: As long as there's people without work-permits willing to do more for less, they're going to be exploited. The men who do this are usually undocumented themselves. You can stop them for a while, but they always come back, like parasites feeding on their own kind.

Mary Gianini: Most of the people in this valley have been here for generations.

Chase: Most of the people of this valley have lived here for generations because this is their home.

Gabrielle Short: This land’s been in my family for over a century. It’s the only home I’ve ever known.

Angela on a bottle of Falcon Crest Cabernet Sauvignon: That is history, Cole. It was bottled by your great-great-grandfather.

Angela on Joseph: His wife's name was Tessa. She was a Swede and very stubborn. It's a strange combination — a passionate Italian and a mystical Swede. They produce strange people — us.

Francesca Gioberti to her grandmother: I have never understood why you are so bitter about [the Californian Giobertis].

Maggie Gioberti on Joseph: From what I've heard, he and Tessa practically did everything themselves.

Angela: Joseph had a violent temper, particularly with Tessa. Chao Li’s grandfather used to tell me horror stories about their marriage. She put up a very good fight, but Joseph always won.

Phillip Erickson: Otis McKay established his vineyards in 1875. Shortly after that, he imported a wife from back east.
Emma: His first mistake. He could have found someone out here.
Angela: Nell was a feisty little thing. She didn’t fit into the valley. She wouldn’t play by the rules.
Phillip: They found her mangled body in a grape press.

Angela on Joseph: His first child's name was Jasper. That was my father.

Jasper Gioberti born 1888

Chase on the Gioberti house: My great-grandfather built this house with his bare hands. My father and his father were born here. It's withstood earthquakes and fires and every kind of weather you can imagine.

Early 1900s

Frank Agretti: The Agrettis and the Giobertis spent their whole lives fighting. Not living, fighting.

Frank: My great-granddaddy, Franco, won Falcon Crest from Paolo Gioberti by cheating him in a poker game. I guess Franco was a hothead and Paolo hated him because he was an Agretti.

Melissa to Angela: Your grandfather, your precious Joseph Gioberti, he stole Falcon Crest from the Agrettis.

Frank: Then Paolo got mad and murdered Franco.

Franco Agretti Died 1905.

Professor McCloud on the town of Hobart: The place caved in during the 1906 quake.

Maggie, speaking in 1982: I found this old party dress of your Great Aunt Vesta’s.
Chase: She’s been dead seventy-five years.

Paolo Bellini: When I was a boy, my father and Joseph Gioberti shared a passion for gambling. There was a card game, accusations of cheating. A gun was fired. My father was dead, murdered. I vowed then that I would never do business with a member of the Gioberti family.

Angela on Jasper Gioberti: He was a strong man. They say he could lift a grown bull. He killed two men in San Francisco over a gambling dispute. Then he met and fell in love with Lily Travers.

Angela on Lily: She wanted me to call her “Mama". I couldn't quite do that.

Angela on Lily: She was the only Creole woman in the world that didn’t know how to cook, but my, could she flirt.
Vicky Gioberti: Didn’t that bother you?
Angela: Endlessly. It bothered my father too, but he deserved it.

Angela: I’ve lived in this valley all of my life.

Angela: There was a brother, Jason.

Chase on Jason: Lily was his mother. Anyway, she gave birth to him. I don't think she was much of a mother to Angie or my father.

Angela: It’s an old family tradition — every newborn Gioberti is entitled to a precious family heirloom.

Emma: It’s a family tradition, the oldest son always gets a Gioberti heirloom, [a silver spoon]. Paul Revere made it.

Angela on Falcon Crest: My grandfather and his father built all of these vats.

Angela: My father carried me into the vineyard before I could walk.

Angela: We’ve known each other since we were children in this valley.
Elliot McKay: We’ve never been particularly civil, much less friendly.

Angela: When I was a little girl learning how to ride, my father told me that if I had a firm grip, I would never fall off. Neither Falcon Crest nor my family would have survived any other way.

Angela, speaking to her grandfather in 1990: I remember how you used to hold me on the saddle, riding through the fields and teaching me about the land and the vineyards and how precious they are together.

Angela, speaking to her grandson in 1989: Michael, when I was a little girl, just about your size, my grandfather used to put me on the front of his saddle and we’d ride all over the vineyards and the valley.
Michael Channing: Didn’t you have your own pony?

Angela: Yes, I had a pony. It was much more fun to ride with my grandfather. When I was a very very good little girl, sometimes we’d stop and we would have a sandwich together.
Michael: Did you have peanut butter?
Angela: No, I think we had chicken.

Paolo Visconti: I pressed my first grapes when I was five years old. I’ve not stopped since.

Angela on a brown teddy bear: I found this in the attic. I used to play with it when I was a little girl. It’s so soft and cuddly.

The Prohibition-era: 1920-1932


Lauren Daniels, speaking about her brother Michael in 1990: He is knee-deep in some of the most amoral, shameless business deals since the Teapot Dome scandal.
Michael Sharpe: I wish I had a piece of that Teapot Dome action.

Rocky Cresant of Cresant Trucking, speaking in 1988: I’ve been waiting sixty-five years to retire.

Eddy McDowell “Dusty” born 1923

Chase on Carl Beck: Hanging in there, season after season through flood and drought, even Prohibition.

Douglas Channing: Prohibition almost ruined Falcon Crest.

Emma: In the old days, all wineries had storage rooms dug deep into the hills. During the prohibition, they used them to run illegal wine and brandy.

Lance, speaking about brandy in 1986: We used to make this stuff about sixty years ago. It's how my family stayed alive during Prohibition. We have criminal heritage.
Eric Stavros: You're not alone. The stories I could tell about Stavros Shipping.

Frank Agretti on the town of Hobart: They used to hide illegal whisky somewhere around here during Prohibition. Years ago, there was a big heist …

Professor McCloud: As far as I know, no-one’s checked out Hobart since the Depression.

Mary Gianini on the Tuscany Valley: My husband and I have lived here all our lives.

Angela on Jacqueline Perrault: She was born in France. American parents.

Jason’s diary: “Lily Gioberti was so often gone that the boy Jason gave his maternal affection to his Mexican nurse who, of all people, treated him kindest."

Angela on herself and Jason: We were both raised in the vineyards of Falcon Crest.

Angela to Diane “Cookie” Nash: Your father and I were raised not to waste time.

Angela: Jason Gioberti was my brother, but he was more than that to me. He was my friend. He was my dearest friend.

Jason’s diary: "Even as a child, Angela ruled as if by divine right. She did not play games with the boy, she directed play."
Cole: "The boy"? He must mean himself.
Jason: "There were two games only - grape growing and winemaking. The boy began to hate them both at an early age."
Chase: I wonder why he didn't say "I" and "me”?
Maggie: He didn't feel part of the family. He didn't feel he really belonged.

Vicky to her father Chase: Your grandmother took off.

Jason’s diary: ”Queen Angela inherited the absent mother's place at the table and occupied her father's full attention.”

Cole showing an old photograph to Angela: It's a picture of you and Jason when you were both kids.. Dad told me you and Grandpa never got along very well, but you'd never know it from this picture.

Angela: I’ve always had a difficulty expressing my feelings. I’m so much like my father. He was stubborn and so am I. Ambitious.
Julia, her daughter: And controlling and devious.
Angela: If the circumstances call for it, yes.

Maggie to Angela: My God, woman, you haven’t done a decent thing in your life.

Jason’s diary: ”The boy filled his thoughts with the secret walks he would take and with fishing, and he would think too, of Elizabeth Bradbury … Beautiful, gentle Elizabeth … laughing Elizabeth."

Lance: You knew Uncle Jason?
Elizabeth Bradbury: Many years ago.

Gus Nunuoz: Elizabeth Bradbury was the kind of girl that made an impression.

Elizabeth on Jason: He didn't talk a great deal, you know? He was shy. I'm not sure I knew that then.

Phillip Erickson: When I was a little boy, I wanted a dog desperately, but I knew my father wasn’t very keen on the idea. So I told him what I really wanted for my birthday was a purebred Arabian stallion. He was very happy to give me a puppy instead.

Angela: Douglas came from a poor background. He was smart and he pulled himself up by the bootstraps.

Douglas Channing: I was a stacker for two years. I worked as a mechanic in the press room for three. I earned everybody’s loyalty in this paper [The San Francisco Globe] from the guys in the pits to the film critics.

Maggie: Jacqueline and your mother didn’t really get along that well.
Michael Ranson, Jacqueline’s nephew: Yeah, I think that had to with the boyfriend that she stole from my mother when they were kids.
Terry Hartford: Sounds like somebody was a sore loser.
Maggie: Maybe in those days people didn’t take relationships quite so casually.
Terry: What an uptight world it must have been.

Extract from a letter from Jasper Gioberti: “Dear Angela and Jason … Many years ago, during a visit to our native village in Italy, I met and fell in love with a beautiful Italian girl.”

Angela on Jasper: He was a big man, strong as an ox and just as stubborn, but flawed.
Vicky: Women?
Angela: Runs in the genes.

Richard: Your mother must have been a gipsy.
Francesca: Not really. She was just a woman who loved unwisely as I have myself many times.

Extracts from the letter from Jasper: “It was with reluctance that I left her to return to my family in America, but I vowed I would never forget her nor the great happiness she brought into my life … your sister, Francesca Anna Maria Gioberti, born to my Italian lover and raised by the Gioberti family in Italy.”

 

[James from London]

1933

TV newscaster, speaking in 1982: Today's election marks the end of a well-oiled political machine that has dominated Tuscany County since the repeal of Prohibition.

Paolo Visconti, speaking in 1983: I paid Elliot McKay’s father for that easement road [on the McKay property] fifty years ago.

Extract from a newspaper article: "Elizabeth Bradbury, aged eighteen, was struck down and run over by a car yesterday afternoon. Doctors at Valley Hospital report severe damage to her back and legs. The driver of the car did not stop. There were no witnesses to the accident."

Angela on Elizabeth: We were all very sad for her. The entire valley was devastated.
Chase: Yet no one ever stepped forward, ever admitted guilt.

Chase on writings found in Jason’s fireplace in 1982: "Damn Angie and her deadly blue convertible." It says, "Elizabeth". The rest of it's burnt away.

Chase to Angela: You were driving that convertible.

Angela on Elizabeth: She's an obligation from the past, started by my father.

Gus Nunuoz on Elizabeth: Old Jasper Gioberti paid all of her hospital bills.

Angela on the Tuscany Valley Hospital: My father was one of the original founders of this hospital.
Dr Arthur Hooks: Yes, your family has shown its generosity to us for years.

Elizabeth Bradbury: I never saw Jason after [the accident]. He never once came to see me and that nearly broke my heart because I was madly in love with him.
Maggie: Why wouldn't he come?
Elizabeth: Things were very different then. A girl in a wheelchair didn't date very much. In those days, a physical handicap was just that - a physical handicap.

Gus on Elizabeth: Jason was a young man, but he never forgot about her.

Elizabeth on Jason: Then he met Jacqueline.

Angela on Jacqueline Perrault: She was educated in England.
Lance: A real European then?
Angela: Not necessarily.

Jacqueline: I left my parents' home in France as soon as I found something better.
Vicky: Was Jason that something better for you?
Jacqueline: Jason was a wonderful man.

Angela on Jason: He was a good man, but definitely flawed. He was a Gioberti.
Vicky: What was his problem?
Angela: Women.

Emma: Uncle Jason told me about the time he met you first in Paris. It must have been so romantic.
Jacqueline: It was.

Angela on Jacqueline: She picked up enough of the culture [in Europe] to attract Jason.

Julia on Jason: He was always interested in continental things. I think that's what attracted Jacqueline to Jason to begin with.

Jacqueline on Jason: He was a connoisseur of the best things in life. He spoke all the romance languages as though they were his own. And music, oh how he loved music.
Vicky: It sounds like you were really in love.
Jacqueline: Yes. He was a man worth loving.

Peter Stavros on Angela: The smile that won my heart how many years ago? I can still remember our first meeting at the Prado in Madrid. I ran into you and your father in the neo-classics, I believe.
Angela: What tricks the mind plays! My father and I almost fell over you and your drunken buddies on the outside of the Prado.
Peter: No matter. What’s important is, we met.

Angela, speaking to Claude, Peter Stavros’s receptionist, in 1985: I’ve known Peter Stavros longer than you’ve known how to brush your teeth.

Angela on Peter: He’s always been a very special man in my life.

Peter to Angela: There was a time when we were considered weirdos. You were the first to wear a two-piece bathing suit and learn all the latest dance steps. Remember the Lambeth Walk?

Peter to Angela: We always enjoyed a picnic so much.

Peter: I should never have let you go after that summer.
Angela: There are times I have regretted leaving.
Peter: Oh Angela, the things we could have achieved together, the wars we could have won, the children we could have had. We’ve always been a bit in love, Angela. You were sixteen, beautiful and vibrant.

Sofia Stavros on Peter: A fool for love, but he always was when it came to Angela Channing.

Peter to Angela: We’ve been friends for many years. More than friends, wouldn’t you say?

1934

Maggie on Jacqueline: She came here [the Tuscany Valley] in the year of the great drought.
Angela: Yes, she did. Disasters seem to come in pairs. She cared only for money and power.

Angela on Jacqueline: She was always a ruthlessly ambitious woman.
Lance: She sounds threatening.
Angela: Only to the weak.
Lance: Like Jason?
Angela: It was pitiful to watch him with her.

Angela on Jacqueline: She was an attractive young woman, I suppose.

Elizabeth Bradbury on Jacqueline: I heard how beautiful she was, how much she loved Jason, and I was very happy for him. I learned about his doings through Angela. What a faithful friend she's always been.

Angela on Elizabeth: My father and I have always seen to it that she's never wanted for anything.
Chase: Except a life.

1935

Angela on a timepiece: It was my grandfather's. It was passed on to my father, Jasper.

Francesca Gioberti: Jasper Gioberti — it must have been some experience to grow up in the shadow of such a man.
Angela: He taught me a great deal.

Chao Li Chi to Angela: Your father had a forbidding expression.

Chase on Jasper: From what I've heard, he was judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one.

Francesca: I had only my mother to influence me. I never knew my father.

Angela: The first and the last time I saw you was when my father took me to where he was born. You were such a little girl. You looked so forlorn in that huge old house.
Francesca: You were so elegant in your summer hat and pretty dress.
Angela: We didn’t understand one word each other said.

Chao Li: I grew up here [America]. Since my father’s time, my family has served this house.

Angela: Chao Li has been with me longer than any of my husbands.

Chao Li: When I was a little boy, Angela defended me.

Chase, speaking in 1985: Fascinating what one can see in an old and special wine. I see my grandfather who bottled this. I see my father who kept in for a special occasion.

1936

Dan Fixx: You never made mistakes when you were [nineteen]?
Angela: Not one.

Carly Fixx, speaking about in Angela 1987: I bet she raised hell at my age.

Angela: My father used to call me a hellcat.

Angela, speaking to Giles Taylor in 1986: Do you remember that hayride we went on on your father’s farm? You said that my wish was your command.
Giles: That was fifty years ago. You always could wrap me around your finger, Angela.

1937

Angela: It always makes me laugh when I think of a United States senator called Bunny.
Senator Bundy “Bunny” Silverlake: You called me Bunny long before I was elected to office. You remember that first campaign?
Angela: Oh yes I do. “Have Bundy Silverlake vote for you in the United States Senate.”
Bunny: You made up that slogan and boy, it worked time and again.
Angela: … A little pressure here and your firm but tender touch there.
Bunny: You haven’t forgotten, have you, Angela? I remember it well.

Angela to Richard: I’ve been handling [men like] Carlton Travis since before you were born.

Angela to Carlton Travis, formerly known as Carl Brock: Do you remember the girl your brother was dating?

Lilian Nash: I never loved anyone but Adam Brock. We had such wonderful plans until little Angela Gioberti turned his head.

Angela on Adam Brock and Lilian: He told her it was over between them because, well, he was in love with me.

Lilian on Adam: He threw it all away.

Angela to Carlton Travis: [You were called Carl] Brock the night we announced our engagement. A woman never forgets her first love. You walked out on me.
Carlton Travis: My brother and I had a very public fight over you at the engagement party. After the party, he came looking for me. He was very drunk. In fact, we were both drunk. We argued, we fought.

Angela on Lilian: It was she who found both of you behind the fraternity house and as Adam came to, she picked up a brick.

Angela to Lilian: It was in extremely bad taste when you beat in Adam Brock’s head.

Lilian: I was so young, Carl. I don’t know to this day how it happened.

Carlton: When I came to, he was dead.
Angela: Did you kill him?

Carlton: Probably.

Carlton: When I killed my brother, I killed Carl Brock.
Angela: You didn’t kill him. You came to and thought he was dead. Well, he wasn’t.

Angela: You just ran away.
Carlton: It seemed the prudent choice at the time.
Angela: You could have told me. You could have asked me to go with you.
Carlton: Would you have come?

Angela: I don’t know.
Carlton: Angela, you could never leave this valley.

Angela on Adam: I asked him what had happened. His voice was so faint, at first, I couldn’t hear him.

Carlton: Why didn’t they arrest the girl?

Angela: I called the police and they thought I was covering for you. She had an alibi, but by that time you had disappeared.

Angela: Where did you go?

Carlton: Europe.

Angela: Lilian Nash married a supreme court justice.

Lilian: That was a marriage made in Heaven and consummated in Hell.

1938

Chase on Jason’s house: I was born here, like my father and his father.

Peter Stavros: My beginnings as a simple fisherman. I often made my best catch at daybreak.

Peter: My very first boat, polished till it glowed, loved like a child.

Peter: I'm a man who does his homework. That’s why I was able to take my little fishing boat and turn it into an empire.

Cesar Ortega: When I was a boy, we only had one room. There were ten of us.

1939

Douglas Channing: Someone warned me once not to work too hard for what I wanted because I might get it.
Angela: And you did.

Father Bob: Douglas Channing was an empire builder. His newspaper grew to become one of the major social forces of our day.

Angela to Douglas: Your newspaper was your whole life.

Sidney Maxwell: Douglas Channing, one of the co-founders of Helios [a private men's club].

Douglas to Angela: You’ve never done anything without an ulterior motive.

Ambassador Casey: In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never had a motive that wasn’t ulterior.
Angela: You’ve had a few yourself if my memory’s correct.

Douglas to Angela: When we first met, all you saw in me was a young publisher with a bright future and lots of money.

Angela: When I first met Doug, he was like Lance, full of drive, but in the wrong direction, and before you knew it, he was running the most powerful newspaper in San Francisco.
Vicky: Thanks to you?
Angela: Well, it didn’t happen overnight. I had to bring him along. I never gave up on him and, more important, I didn’t give up on myself.

Angela on Douglas: He always resented the fact that I came from a wealthy family.
Emma: Why did he resent it? Your father loaned him the money to start the newspaper.
Angela: He spent half his life resenting that too.

Emma on Ralph Delaney: My father hired him right out of journalism school.

Ralph Delaney on The Globe: I started in the printing room. I worked there seven long years.

Emma on Arthur Masefield, painter: He used to be in love with Mother.

Arthur Masefield on Douglas: I remember an entrepreneurial man with a lot more hair.

Arthur: You never did lack ambition.
Douglas: Neither did you.

Angela on Douglas and Arthur: The two of them were rivals.

Douglas to Angela: You were never interested in him [Arthur].

Jacqueline to Richard: The first time I met your father was in this office [at the Globe].

Angela to Emma: I loved your father with all of my heart. We thought that was enough to carry us through the trials of marriage, but we were so different it was a disaster from the beginning.

Angela on money: Now Douglas, you know that’s not the reason I married you.
Douglas: What I’m sure of is that Prohibition almost ruined Falcon Crest and without my money, it would have been impossible …

Angela: I never depended upon a man.

Angela to Emma: My mother gave me [a string of pearls} when I married your father. They’re very lucky.

Angela: Italy was always such a joy to me.

Douglas: We went to Tuscany once.
Angela: On our honeymoon. I took one look at the vineyard ...
Douglas: She got homesick.
Angela: I did not.
Douglas: Oh yes, you did.
Angela: I certainly did not.
Douglas: You had the vineyard on your mind right through the honeymoon.

Angela: Douglas, when we were married, all we ever did was fight and argue.
Douglas: Of course we did. It was healthy.

Chao Li on Angela: When she became Mrs Channing, I served her.

Angela: I remember my first pregnancy, those first awful months, and then one day I felt life and I knew it was all worth it. That was Julia.

 

[James from London]

1940

Angela on Julia: She was such a good baby.

Julia to Angela: You controlled every minute of my life.

Julia on Angela: All my life, she’s had this power over me.

Angela to Julia: I’ve never been a mother to you.

Douglas on Falcon Crest: It seems as if everyone was spellbound by that place.
Lance: Well, you weren’t spellbound.
Douglas: Oh yes, I was for a while, and enchanted by your grandmother.

Richard on the Tuscany Valley: My father once lived there. He may have been in love with a woman in that valley, my mother, who lived there.

Richard: Why did you get involved [with Douglas] in the first place?
Jacqueline: Jason and Angela were spending a lot of time in Washington, lobbying for agricultural subsidies.
Richard: So you and my father fell into each other’s lonely arms?
Jacqueline: No. No, we fought the attraction, but both our marriages were in trouble.

Angela: Jacqueline came between my husband and me. Douglas and I might have stayed together if it hadn’t been for her.

Douglas: Have I ever let you down?
Angela: Only once.

Angela: My husband was unfaithful to me.

Angela on Jacqueline: When she seduced Douglas Channing, she became accountable to me.

Jacqueline: Unlike your relationship [with Douglas], ours was quite beautiful.
Angela: I don’t see anything beautiful about an unwanted pregnancy.
Jacqueline: Ill-timed, perhaps, but not unwanted.

Richard: You yourself, Angela, [were] the source of my father's marital failings.
Angela: How could I be the source of Douglas’ infidelities?
Richard: I’m sure if you had treated my father like a husband, if you had shown him any feelings at all, he never would have strayed. So in a way, Angela, I have you to thank for my ever being born at all.

1941

Angela, speaking in 1987: I bought this [bracelet] forty-five years ago for my unborn child.

Peter: Angela my dear, Douglas and his mistress hated you so much they did a terrible thing. The first child, the one before Julia and Emma, the little baby who was born healthy and yet died so mysteriously …

Angela’s doctor, speaking about her newborn son in 1941: He seemed all right and then suddenly, early this morning … We did everything possible for him.

Peter on Angela’s baby: … He didn’t die. Douglas and Jacqueline Perrault stole him to hurt you. They faked the death certificate and sent him off to be raised in Europe. The boy grew up fed on hate. Richard Channing is your son.

Richard: I was born damned.

Angela to Carlton Travis: He [Richard] is my son. If things had been different, he would probably be our son.

Angela in 1987: I gave you birth [but] as far as I’m concerned, my son died forty-five years ago.

Richard on Jacqueline: The fact that she gave birth to me does not make her my mother.

Angela: If you’d been my child, I’d have drowned you at birth.
Richard: I'd have been grateful.

Angela to Richard: Your birth was an unfortunate accident, the result of Douglas Channing's weakness.

Angela to Richard: You are the bastard son of my late husband.

Angela to Richard: No one knows better than you what it feels like to be a bastard in this world.

Danny Sharpe on Richard: What’s up with that guy, was he born on the wrong side of the bed?
Lance: No, he was just born on the wrong side of Michael Sharpe.

Angela on Richard: He was born in Paris.

Phillip on the Convent of Lorraine: You [Richard] were born there.

Angela on the Convent of Lorraine: The convent Richard spent the first two years of his life in. [Jacqueline] abandoned him there.

Richard: Why did you put me in an orphanage?
Jacqueline: It was only supposed to be temporary. I had to come back here [the Tuscany Valley] to try and save my marriage, but it was too late.
Richard: Angela had already turned Jason against you?
Jacqueline: Yes.

Carl Brock/Carlton Travis: It was during the war I became Carlton Travis. I tried my damnedest to get myself killed. Got a chest full of medals instead.
Angela: And the rest is history — move over Howard Hughes, welcome Carlton Travis.

Eli, Del Ora Spa barman: And I’ll tell you why I got shot. Well, you see, we hit one of those islands where the Japs had dug in, and who did they send in first? The suave Ethiopians, the Black Division. See, we were the metal detectors.

1942

Chase on Jason’s house: I remember in the heat of the summer, the only cool place in the valley was in this house. And very cosy in the winter.

Peter Burns, speaking in 1982: The [water rights] system has been in operation for over four decades in this valley.

Angela: Gus Nunuoz has been a part of this valley all of his life.

Angela: The Nunouz families have always been so closely tied to the Gioberti families.

1943

Maggie, speaking in 1983: How long have you been working with horses?
Teddy Eubanks, groom at the Bayside Downs racetrack: Forty years. I wanted to be a jockey. I just could never get past the colour line, but then again, I never could stop growing either! Anyway, I like being a groom so everything turned out just fine.
Maggie: I bet you’ve seen a lot of great horses in the forty years you’ve been working here.
Teddy: Sure have. And most of them were stabled right here in Barn 10, the lucky barn - Seabiscuit, Swab, Citation, Seattle Slew.
Maggie: Has racing changed a lot since you’ve been working in it?
Teddy: It sure has. In the old days, owners were born and bred just like their horses.

Sister Marie Therese: Henri Denault, always able to turn to profit the misery of others. The Third Reich knew him as the Dark Angel.
Angela: Henri Denault was a Nazi?
Sister Marie Therese: And a traitor who sold secrets to the Germans. He built his empire on the blood of Europe.

Jay Benson “Ben” Landale: Henri Denault was famous in France, or infamous, as a Nazi collaborator.

Henri Denault: I was a pragmatist. The opportunities were too great for me to allow archaic notions of morality and patriotism to stand in my way.

Colonel Ashok Anand, Carlton Travis's friend: Mr Denault and Mr Travis were friends many years ago.
Richard: Business friends? What - they built empires together?
Anand: Exactly. Mr Denault did not like competition. He eventually decided to double-cross Mr Travis. By the end of it, my friend had lost his family and his fortune. He became obsessed with revenge.

1944

Maggie: Johann Reibmann was stationed in Paris from October ’43 to May ’44.

Maggie on Johann Reibmann: He was head of the Gestapo in Paris.

Chase: The Germans had control of everything.

Johann Reibmann, speaking in 1984: Forty years ago I amassed a fortune in jewels and artefacts taken from museums, churches and temples all across Europe.

Maggie to Chase: Your mother met him in probably around January of ‘44.

Chase: How could my mother ever meet a man like that?
Maggie: Probably through Henri Denault. They took a great many precautions to keep their relationship a secret.

Chase: So it wasn’t exactly a long term relationship?
Maggie: No but long enough. As head of the Gestapo in Paris, he was able to open a lot of doors for Jacqueline.
Chase: Including those of France’s finest art museums.

Maggie on Reibmann: Then he was called back to Berlin.

Sister Jeannette of the Convent of Lorraine on Jacqueline: During the first years of the occupation, she made frequent visits to our convent, always bringing valuable antiques and works of art. She claimed she was protecting them from the Nazis.
Maggie: And then you hid them for her.

Richard on Jacqueline: She was responsible for saving much of the great art of Europe from falling into Nazi hands.

Maggie: Jacqueline confiscated valuable works of art which she hid at the convent and then used to acquire power and money from the Nazis during the occupation of Paris.

Mike Harris, private investigator, to Maggie: Your father’s name was Oliver Donovan.

Charlotte Pershing: Your father was a fine man. Commander in the Navy. You should have seen him in uniform - handsome, dashing, all of that, and yet so gentle, so kind. Tall and slender and blond like you. He was a real charmer.
Maggie: How did you meet?
Charlotte: In the South Pacific. I was a singer with a USO show. He was in charge of our transportation, getting us from base to base and entertainment GIs. Well, we fell in love.
Maggie: Must have been very romantic.
Charlotte: Oliver was shipped out. The USO troupe came home. I heard from him once, a very loving letter.

Mike Harris: His PT boat was hit by a Kamikaze pilot in the battle to retake the Philippines. His body was never recovered. Oliver Donavan died a hero.

Francesca: I grew up believing that my father was a soldier in the war, a hero.

1945

Vicky: I hope your family was normal.
Maggie: Reasonably.

Angela: Maggie's name was Hartford, wasn't it? From Maryland? And I think her mother was a Griffith.

Maggie on Oliver Donovan: I know that he was killed in action.
Charlotte: I found that out just before you were born. My parents wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I mean it was shameful, having a daughter unmarried, pregnant. I wanted to die. I thought I was going to. Such a difficult birth. They kept me doped up because of the pain. The hospital had it all set up. They told me it was for the best. Even the chaplain there said that. I was nineteen. So much I didn’t know. And you, all of a sudden, were gone. I wanted to hold you just once more but it was too late. You’ve been gone ever since.

Paul Hartford: Margaret and I were worried that we couldn’t have children so we adopted Maggie.

Paul to Maggie: Your mother and I got you from the Farrow County Adoption Agency in New York.

Mike Harris, private investigator, to Maggie: Your birth certificate was amended, changed after you were adopted. That’s when the name Hartford was added.

Maggie on a baby blanket: My grandmother quilted it for me when I was a baby.

Jacqueline: Europe was another world then. The war had just ended.

Phillip on Jacqueline. She was having a rough time. She was trying to raise Chase on her own, Richard was being brought up in a convent.

Angela: There was a Sister Maria Therese in a convent right outside of Paris.

Angela to Sister Marie Therese: You were in charge of the Convent in Lorraine. In 1945, there was a woman named Jacqueline Charbonne and she brought her infant son to you.

Angela on Jacqueline: It seems that she didn’t feel she could raise the child.

Angela: Henri Denault and his wife were living in the outskirts of Paris. I understand he was desperate for a son.

Jacqueline: Oh Richard, I never wanted to choose between my sons.
Richard: But you did. You made your choice and it was not me.

Jacqueline: I never intended to give you up. Certain circumstances were beyond my control. I wanted both of my sons with me.
Richard: But by then Henri Denault had already swooped in and adopted me.

Angela on Richard: She sold him to a man named Henri Denault.

Ben Landale on Henri Denault: The Vichy official who adopted Jacqueline’s infant son. This convent arranged the adoption.

Sister Marie Therese: Unfortunately, I knew nothing of [Henri Denault’s Nazi past] until after the adoption of the child.
Angela: Why didn’t you say something?
Sister Marie Therese: Because I feared for my family’s safety.

Henri Denault to Richard: You were nothing but a blank slate when I adopted you. I created you.

Henri: Richard, when I adopted you, I was the only one on earth to give a damn about you.
Richard: I don’t think you really cared. I mean, you never truly loved me.

Angela: You sold your son.
Jacqueline: That’s not true.
Angela: The truth is there was never an adoption by Henri Denault. You traded Richard for what — wealth? What did Charbone promise you in return?
Jacqueline: I had no choice.

Maggie on Jacqueline: She sold her son Richard to Henri Denault.
Sister Jeannette: That is what first led us to believe that she was not whom she seemed. When we found out she was using her infant son to barter for power we became suspicious. A woman does not worry about pictures or statues while giving away her flesh and blood unless …
Maggie: Unless she wasn’t really hiding them from the Nazis at all.

Angela on Jacqueline; [She] sold her son. I wonder what she got in return?
Phillip: A life of ease. Money, position.
Angela: She was a very beautiful woman. She could have married anyone she wanted to.

Jacqueline: Denault wanted a baby boy and I needed money.
Richard: Then you did sell me?
Jacqueline: We all make compromises. We had to.
Richard: You abandoned me!

Chase: Angela claims that Jacqueline got her start by selling Richard when he was an infant to Henri Denault and then got Denault to cut her in on his empire by blackmailing him.

Richard on Johann Reibmann: He and my mother founded the Cartel but he fell out of favour.

Maggie: After the war, nobody knows what happened to Reibmann. He just vanished.

Richard: Johann Reibmann? He was tried and executed as a Nazi war criminal.
Spheeris: Perhaps the news of his death was exaggerated. He’s kept tabs on you since you were a boy.

Gustav Reibmann, Johann’s son: Mother was happy with you and me.
Johann: Yes she was.

Richard: I never got to enjoy my mother’s warmth or any family life, for that matter.

Richard: I grew up not knowing who my real father was.

Richard: I always wanted a sister.

Richard: A home, it establishes roots for you. It gives you a sense of belonging, of community. That’s something I never had.

Pamela Lynch to Richard: I’ve heard enough about your loveless beginnings.

Maggie: Richard, for your entire life you have been wrestling with the demons of your own heritage. You have been obsessed with gaining the approval of people who are just barely your family.

 

[Franko]

Damn. To see it all written out like this ... it really is quite riveting.

 

[James from London]

1946

Eric Stavros: My father owes a lot of his success to World War II salvage, being able to triple the size of his fleet for less than the cost of one new ship.

Dwayne Cooley, speaking about Angela and Peter in 1986: It’s just a shame it’s taken them forty years to get together.

Chase on his father's harmonica: I almost learned how to play ‘Little Brown Jug’ on this.

Chase: When we played hooky, we'd go up on that ridge and watch the falcons nesting, dozens of them. We could sit there all day. It was magnificent, scary.

Chase: Childhood memories - vineyards that stretched out to the end of the world, that big house my aunt Angela lived in. I used to think it was haunted.

Chase: I remember Falcon Crest covering five hundred or more [acres].
Phillip Erickson: You're absolutely right, Chase.

Angela to Cole: I remember when your father wanted to be an airline pilot.

Jacqueline: Jason used to love Founder’s Day. Why, he’d start looking forward to it weeks’ ahead.

Jacqueline on Jason: I spent over twelve years here and I know what Falcon Crest can do to you. It took a decent, creative, loving man and destroyed him.

Angela, speaking about Jason and Jacqueline in 1982: I stood by for twelve years and watched her wear him down.
Lance: That doesn't sound like you, standing by for anything.
Angela: She was my brother's wife. What else could I do? That was thirty years ago. Things are a lot less genteel than they were then, and far below her standards.

Jacqueline: You dominated everything and everyone you ever met. You live by taking the life of everyone around you, just like you tried to do to me. You constantly undermined [Jason].
Angela: Jason wasn't fit for the life here. Jason was weak. He just wasn't a vineyardist.

Jacqueline on Jason: You never gave him a chance, did you?
Angela: I gave him every chance.
Jacqueline: He was a man of culture, a man with style. He could have been a great man, but you'd have killed him with your bare hands before you'd have let him have any part of Falcon Crest.

Julia to Angela: The whole time [Jacqueline] and Uncle Jason lived here, all you ever did was fight like cats and dogs.

Angela, speaking to Melissa in 1984: Since I was your age, I resented having to go to sleep. It’s just a waste of time, time you could spend on something very important.

Terry Hartford, Maggie's younger sister: Dad, was I adopted too?
Paul: No. It was the same old story. Margaret and I were worried that we couldn’t have children so we adopted Maggie and then, true to form, she got pregnant and there you were.
Maggie: No, Dad, there we were - the Hartford girls.

Ralph Delaney on The Globe: I was a reporter for more than a decade. I’ve never been handed anything.

1947

Renee Davenport: In 1947, Angela sold the mineral rights [to a goldmine on Falcon Crest property] to Marina Mining Company.
Gustav Reibmann: 1947, that’s about the time the [Nazi] treasure was brought here.

Angela on the goldmine: It’s worthless. I got a lot of money for it and she spent thousands but she didn’t take one ounce of gold out of it.
Gustav: Who?
Angela: Jacqueline Perrault.

Johann Reibmann on his collection of Nazi treasure: After its disappearance, I knew at once who had taken it. Jacqueline Perrault was the only other person who knew about it.
Gustav Reibmann: She and Henri Denault smuggled the treasure out and buried it somewhere beneath Gioberti lands, using all the resources of the Cartel of course.

Gustav on the secret of Falcon Crest: Not even the people who live there know that they are sitting on a horde of gold and diamonds and objects of art removed from Germany shortly after World War II.

1948

Cassandra Wilder born 1948

Carlo Agretti, showing an old photograph to his daughter Melissa: That was me and my little brother - your Uncle Augie - Augustino. I was twelve and he was ten.

Maggie to her father Paul: You taught me how to clean fish by the time I was eight.

1949

Ken Lone, lawyer, speaking in 1989: How long have you worked for Mrs Channing?
Chao Li: Forty years.

Chase on Angela: I remember how she resented my mother. I was just a kid, but I'll never forget the bitterness between them.

1950

Greg Reardon, speaking in 1985: Angela’s been using the same advertising agency for thirty-five years.

Lauren Daniels on her brother Michael Sharpe: I’ve loved and hated him since the day he was born.

Richard to Michael: You should know all about Hell. That’s the only place a twisted perverted demon like you could be born.

Lance on Michael: Some men are born to get what they want.

Walker Daniels: I was in the wrong line when God handed out luck.

Angela on Emma: I am convinced they switched babies on me in the hospital.

Emma: I have always had everything that I have ever wanted.

Angela to Emma: You’ve never been good at revenge. That makes you the black sheep of the family.

Emma on Falcon Crest: This is the only home I’ve ever known.

Julia on Angela: She’s worked very hard for us, Emma.

Michael Sharpe on Angela: Her way of doing business goes back to the days of selling cases of wine out of the trunk of a car. What a woman.

Angela: Falcon Crest has been my whole life. I guess I loved the land more than I loved my own children.

Jacqueline: Power, that's all you love.
Angela: Love? What do you know about love? The one time you had it, you turned it away.
Jacqueline: That's not what happened and you know it. I knew what you were up to. I knew that you were out to take over all of Falcon Crest.
Angela: Jason never had the raw guts to take it away from me. And neither [did] you. That's why you ran away.

Chase: I guess my mother got fed up with it [her feud with Angela] and took off with me.

Jacqueline: I filed for divorce, took Chase and went back to Europe for good.

Angela: Why [did] you run away to Europe?
Jacqueline: I did it to spare you. Had I returned with Douglas’s child, it would have destroyed your marriage, something you managed quite well on your own.

Jacqueline to Angela: The only reason I took Chase away was to keep you from ruining his life.

Chase looking at an old photograph dated July 11th, 1950: That's me and my father. This must have been taken shortly before my mother left him and took me to Paris. We hardly had a chance to get to know one another.

Chase on the photograph: My father and I were standing right over there [points to Jason's vineyard] when my mother took it.
Cole: You don't exactly look too thrilled to be there.
Chase: I know, I wasn't. I must have eaten three pounds of grapes that afternoon. I swore I'd never look at another one as long as I lived.

Angela, looking an old photograph: How young and innocent Chase looks.

Jacqueline: When Chase was small, we had to leave.

Cole to Chase: You were twelve when your mother took you away.

Jacqueline: Chase, I had no choice. I was only trying to protect you.

Jacqueline: Neither Jason nor Chase ever belonged here, Angela.
Angela: I agree with you.

Angela on Chase: When he left his father, he left the vineyards.

Angela on Chase: Where was he when I was trying to rebuild the vineyards after Prohibition? And where was he when I was trying to pull all of this land together?

Jason: "I will raise my son at my side. He will know my love by all we share together. He will know my pride in him because I'll tell him so."
Chase: It never happened. It's a fantasy. I wasn't here to be raised at his side.

Angela to Jacqueline: When you deserted [Jason], he became a drunk.

Chase: Almost every one of those letters from my grandfather to his family back in Italy mentions something negative about the relationship between Angie and my father.
Maggie: How they fought, how they argued. There’s no doubt that the two of them had a lifelong rivalry.

Chase: This is from my grandfather Jasper to Maria in Lucca. "Dear Maria, I am an old man now. I am deeply troubled. My children, Jason and Angela, are bitter enemies. I fear for the future of this family."

Angela: It isn’t any wonder that Jason was so distraught over all those years. Your mother destroyed him.
Chase: And you had nothing to do with it, of course.
Angela: Well, he certainly didn’t drink because of me. She took care of that.

Chase: It all seemed so unreal then. I tried to stay close to [Jason] even after my mother and I left, but it just didn't work. I wrote letters to my father for twenty years, but we never even sat down and talked.

Cole on Jacqueline: She and Dad were never very close, were they?

Chase to Jacqueline: I resented you for so long for taking me away [from Falcon Crest].

Chase on Jacqueline: Whenever she told me I shouldn't do something, I usually went ahead and did it anyway.

Jacqueline to Chase: I suppose we didn't like each other very much. We never gave each other a chance.

Chase: My mother rarely mentioned Angela.

Chase: Mother, you have always amazed me.

Angela: I’ve always had Christmas dinner for my children.

1951

Peter Stavros on himself: Three times married, twice divorced and now a widower.

Peter to Angela: I’ve had three wives and more lovers than I can count, but I’ve always had a place in my heart for you.

Philip Erickson: Jacqueline Perrault has in fact been married three times since her divorce from Jason in 1951.

Angela: Dear Jacqueline, she never wasted an ounce of her talents, did she?

Emma on Jacqueline: She wasn’t a saint. She had a whole string of husbands.

Angela: Isn’t it true that the man you married after you left Jason was Jean Pierre Charbone?
Jacqueline: That marriage was annulled.
Angela: Whose half-brother was childless, and that half-brother was Henri Denault.

Sheriff Tobias: The old water rights wars that used to take place around here when I was growing up.
Chase, speaking in 1981: That was thirty years ago.

1952

Paul Hartford on birthday presents: I always counted on your mother to do that kind of thing.

Maggie to Paul: You have been such a wonderful father.

Maggie: Terry and I got everything we ever asked for. All we had to do was say, “Hey Dad, we’d like that” and he delivered.

Terry: I had my own horse growing up.

Terry to Maggie: We used to take riding lessons together.

Sofia Stavros on her father Peter: Ever since I was a girl, Father promised me the world.

Julia: Were you always given everything you wanted?
Carlo Agretti: Oh yes.

Carlo: I’ve never liked being second to anyone.

Carlo on his brother Augustino: He died [aged fourteen]. He was coming home from school one day and he took a shortcut through another neighbourhood. There was a fight, some boys wanted his jacket and he wouldn’t give it to them. So they hit him. They beat him with sticks.
Melissa, Carlo’s daughter: Why didn’t he just give it to the other boys?
Carlo: In those days, people had pride. They fought for what they believed in. [Looks at a photograph.] Those are the neighbourhood boys. They are all dead now too.
Melissa: How did you escape that?
Carlo: It was a life I wanted no part of. I came to California with nothing, to be a success - but on my own terms, by my own sweat, not on the backs of others.

Carlo: I came to this valley with nothing.

Frank Agretti, Carlo’s brother: My grandfather was a senile old codger when he passed the map [of Hobart] onto my dad. He kept raving and raving about the fact that this would change our whole lives.

Frank: I always loved the musty old smell of a wine cellar. Being around a winery always gave me a sense of history.

Frank to Melissa: When we were kids, your father and I snuck down here to the cellar and got into Dad’s prize burgundy. We were so sick he didn’t have the heart to punish us.

Angela: Your father wanted you boys to take care of the Agretti vineyards.
Frank: He didn’t get his wish though, did he?

Melissa to Frank: My father never had anything to say to you.

Carlo, speaking in 1982: It has taken me thirty years to make the Agretti vineyards what they are.

Henri Denault, speaking in 1982: It’s taken me thirty years to bring the company to this point. Brazilian timber, African diamonds, Indonesian copra, American wheat, Japanese steel — those things were easy compared to the European money markets.

Richard, speaking in 1982: How long have you been with the Globe?
Herb Talmadge: Almost from the beginning. I came here after Korea, out of the army. Nearly thirty years.

Diana Hunter: Herb Talmadge, honourable discharge, 1952, Silver Star, Purple Heart.

Emma: Some of these rose bushes [at Falcon Crest] are almost as old as I am. It must be awful to be so beautiful and yet to be rooted to one spot.

Douglas Channing to Emma: When you were a little girl, you couldn’t wait to take a drive with the top down, feel the wind going through your hair.

Angela: You’ve always had such lovely hair.
Emma: Oh Mother, when I was a little girl, you always used to brush my hair.
Angela: Well I tried to make things easy for you.
Emma: Even when you didn’t need to.

Angela: Oh Emma, you’ve always been my sweet adorable favourite little girl.

Emma to Dr Hyle: You were my very first doctor. I never told you this but when I was a child, I used to pretend I was sick just so I could come to see you.

Emma: I remember when I was little and we were in school together and the other children used to tease me, Julia always protected me.

Emma to Julia: Remember when we were in school together and I could never seem to do things as fast as the other children? They used to make fun of me and you would tell them that I wasn’t slow, I was just careful. It made all the difference, not just because they believed you but because I did too. It gave me something to hang on to, something that no one could ever take away from me.

Emma: That old tyre that Uncle Jason used to tie to the oak tree, remember? We used to get so dizzy swinging on that. Oh, everything was wonderful then, wasn’t it, Julia? Summer never seemed to end. Nothing ever went wrong.

Julia: I wish I could have gotten to know Uncle Jason better, but Emma was always his favourite. She and Uncle Jason were awfully close.

Lance, speaking in 1982: This is the springhouse. My Uncle Jason built it thirty years ago.

Emma on the springhouse: Uncle Jason built it for me when I was a little girl. Uncle Jason said they used to keep places like this to keep things cool and fresh like buttermilk and apples. He thought it was sad that there weren't places like this anymore.

Julia on the tunnel under the springhouse: That one was secret. My Uncle Jason showed it to my sister and me when we were little and he made us promise never to tell anyone.

Emma: Uncle Jason always let me drink wine.

Emma on a French song: Uncle Jason always loved that song. It tells about being young and beautiful and in love. My uncle taught it to me.

Emma: Oh Julia, do you remember when we were little girls and we used to sing together? I played my autoharp. We were so happy then. [sings] “Oh, we ain’t got a barrel of money …” Of course, we did!

Peter: I’ve always loved the big band music.

Charlotte Pershing: Years ago, I was singing at a little club in Miami. Since my time off was during the day I started going to Higher Lear. It was fun. I met a lot of night people there.

Emma: Chicken cacciatore, that's Uncle Jason's favourite.

 

[stevew]

That was the best read on this site ever. Thank you.

 

[James from London]

1953

Angela on Arthur Masefield: He painted my father's portrait.

Angela: My father was pleased with his portrait. He loved the drama of it.
Arthur Maefield: I tried to capture his character. He was a fascinating combination of moods, light and darkness.
Angela: He was a very complex man, just like his wines.

Tony Cumson: My grandfather never spent more money than he had in the mattress.

Tony: My father was a vineyard worker, and his father before him. My father longed for a piece of land of his own so that we could work together, father and son. He died sweating for somebody else.

Frank Agretti, speaking about Cesar Ortega in 1988: He’s been [working at Falcon Crest] thirty-five years.

Pilar Ortega to her father Cesar: You’ve worked at Falcon Crest since you were a boy.

Cesar Ortega: The Channings have always been good to the Ortegas.
Pilar: Pop, the Channings are only good to those who stay in their place and that’s it.

Richard: I’ve been in trouble my whole life.

Pamela Lynch: I bet you were spoilt as a child.
Richard: On the contrary.

Richard: You’ve been a good father to me.
Henri Denault: As your adoptive father, I only wanted to be a good teacher, that's all. I never was anything more.

Richard: My stepfather gave me these [toy] soldiers. He said I was always to be a professional, like a soldier. I never had a childhood.

Richard: When I was growing up, I was taught - told - never to trust anyone and so that’s how I grew up.

Richard: All my life, I have been driven by everything, coming from every which angle, but I never knew who was doing the driving.

Richard: I know how hard it is to be in the dark about your origins.

Henri to Richard: When you were twelve years old, you contacted every adoption agency in the country. In spite of the fact that your records had been … that I had them destroyed, you discovered your real name was Channing. You took that name for yourself.

Phillip Erickson on Richard: He took the Channing name as a twelve-year-old boy in spite of his adoption by the Denault family in New York.

Richard: I wanted my own name, my identity.

Richard on Douglas Channing: I’ve had a rather intense interest in him all my life.

Richard: When did Douglas Channing find out I was his son?
Jacqueline: It was long after the adoption.

Richard: I’ve spent my life searching for my mother. I suppose I’ve rehearsed reunion scenes thousands of times in my mind. As a kid, I always dreamed of greeting her with open arms.

Charlotte Pershing to Maggie: I’ve dreamed of seeing you for such a long long time.

Charlotte to Maggie: I used to imagine coming to a park with you and I'd catch you when you came down the slide and swing you as high as you wanted to go.

Maggie: I remember my first rollercoaster ride. I was seven, eight, I don’t know. I screamed for them to let me off.
Richard: But you made it, didn’t you?
Maggie: Well, barely.

Charlotte: I guess I just wasn't cut out to be a mother.

Charlotte: A social worker’s salary has not made me rich.

Charlotte: I’ve never written a bad cheque in my life.

Emma: I bet you were cute when you were a little boy.
Damon Ross: My parents thought so.
Emma: What were your parents like?
Damon: Good. Good parents. Mother was wonderful. All I remember about my dad was his voice, his laugh. Mother used to tell us he was a good man. Too good, people took advantage of him.

Emma on the facts of life: We never had that talk.
Angela: I tried, but you locked yourself in your room.

Anna Rossini: The Channing children, they’ve always been impossible.

Angela: You and I used to be friends.
Anna: That was a long time ago, before I lost my husband and my rightful inheritance.
Angela: You’ve always been such a crybaby.

Angela to Lance: A long time ago before you were born, your mother was just a mere child, but she fell in love with a man in the valley who was married. He had a family of his own.

Julia: I was very young. I fell in love with an older man. We had an affair.

Anna: Dominic never had an affair with anyone. He was devoted to me.
Greg Reardon: And one other.
Angela: My daughter, Julia.

Greg: Did Anna know that her husband was having an affair with your daughter?
Angela: Well of course.

Greg to Angela: [Anna] blamed you for allowing [the affair] to happen.

Angela on Julia: She became pregnant.

Anna to Julia’s son Christopher: It’s well known that Julia was very generous with her favours. Your father could have been any one of several men in the valley.

Angela: [Julia] insisted upon carrying Dominic’s child. They even made arrangements to run away together.

Julia: After Mother found out about the affair, she tried every way she could to drive Dominic out of the valley.

Angela on Julia: There was a lot of mistakes made in those days by her and by me.

Angela: Dominic was going to divorce Anna.

Greg on Dominic: He wanted to marry Julia and that made Anna very, very angry.

Anna to Cassandra: Julia was so beautiful, so young, so easy. I threatened your father. I said I would take you and your brother far away. He swore he’d stop me. He said I was crazy if I couldn’t see that it was over between us. He kept saying I was crazy. I couldn’t let anyone take my Dominic away from me. I saw him first. He was mine.

Anna to Cassandra: Angela used Julia to control your father.

Anna to Angela: You coveted my husband’s vineyards. You were willing to destroy him to get them. You controlled the reservoirs in the valley. You shut off all the water supply. Our vineyards died. Everything was lost.

Chase: I don't understand how the county let Angela get control [of the water supply] in the first place.

Lance to Angela: You had [the County Board of Supervisors] in your back pocket.

Carl Reed on Angela: Then she got the board to condemn all the property in the county that could ever be developed as reservoirs. She bought it up, she built earth dams and she filled it with water that would have gone as natural runoff to everyone in the valley.

Anna to Angela: Rather than surrender our home to you, Dominic set fire to it.

Greg to Angela: Why [would] Dominic set fire to his own home? Anna convinced Cassandra that it was because you stole his lands.

Greg: How did the fire start?
Frank O’Neill, former employee of the Tuscany County fire department: It was deliberate. There was no doubt about that. I know Anna said that Dominic was smoking in bed. I guess she was trying to protect his good name, but I don’t know why. He was guilty as hell.

Cassandra on Dominic: He was drunk. He thought we were still out of town.

Greg: You said that the fire started in the stairwell.
O’Neill: That’s right, yes - gasoline and lots of it.

Greg: Dominic was on the second floor with Cass and Damon when the fire started and Anna was downstairs. No-one in their right mind would stand at the top of a stairway, empty a can of gasoline and set a match to it, thus cutting off his only hope of escape.
Angela: Unless he had a death wish?
Greg: We know Dominic didn’t want to die. Dominic Rossini didn’t set that fire. Anna did.

Angela to Anna: Dominic told you that Julia was carrying his child and you set the fire that killed him.

Anna: I had to set that fire. There was no other way.

Anna to Cassandra: I was crying when I set that fire. I never meant to hurt you or Damon, but I had no choice.

Cassandra: When I awoke, the flames were everywhere. I could hear my little brother crying for help. I found him and we looked for a way out.

Anna: I was outside the house. I tried to get back in to rescue my children. Then I heard my husband screaming and then I fell.

Anna: I couldn’t get to my babies. I was sure they were going to die.
Cassandra: All I wanted to do was get to my parents and I knew we would be safe. Then I saw my father. He tried to get to us, but he never made it.

Frank O’Neill: The call came in sometime before midnight. That was a real inferno. Two of us managed to climb through a second-storey window and we pulled the two children to safety.

Greg: And Anna was outside the house when you all arrived?
O’Neill: Yes. She was in shock. She had torn her leg up pretty badly trying to escape from the house.

Cassandra: We finally made it outside to Mother, put our arms around each other and watched our house burn.

O’Neill: We went back after Dominic. Before we could get to him, the whole roof had collapsed.

Cassandra on Dominic: I watched him burn to death.

Angela to Christopher: Your father died in a tragic fire before you were born.

Anna to Angela: You killed my husband.

Anna: The sheriff’s report made it quite clear that Dominic set the fire.

Greg: Every [Globe] article I’ve found quotes the sheriff’s report chapter and verse - Dominic started the fire, the motive was suicide.

Ralph Delaney: Looks like the reporter on the story neglected to include all the facts. It seems that the sheriff was Anna Rossini’s first cousin.

Greg to Anna: I doubt it took many dollars to protect the family name.

Greg: When Julia was still a comparatively young girl, Angela sent her off to live in a small town in Connecticut.
Emma: Marysville. I remember that. Julia was sick and Mother wanted her to see some kind of specialist.
Greg: And she was gone for nearly a year.
Emma: I think she had a breakdown.
Greg: Julia left the day after Dominic Rossini perished in that fire.

Julia: There was the fire and he was killed. Mother immediately took me back east.

Emma: Julia did go away, but I never knew why.
Angela: Julia could never talk about that part of her life.

Julia: I went to Connecticut to have Dominic Rossini’s child.

Anna to Angela: You took our lands.

Cassandra to Angela: You expanded Falcon Crest over my father’s [dead body].

Cassandra: You took over everything my father worked for and left us with nothing.
Angela: That was business. If I hadn’t bought the land, somebody else would have.
Cassandra: But somebody else didn’t. You did. You cashed in on our grief.

Damon on his mother: My father died when we were very young so she had to raise us alone. The strain was too much for her.

Damon: Angela Channing hurt us. It has always been Mother’s obsession to destroy Falcon Crest.

Cassandra: Mother raised me to fight her battles with Angela.

Damon: All we’ve ever been taught is to hate.

Damon to Cassandra: You always taught me to be cautious.

Diana Hunter: Herb Talmadge, San Francisco Globe pressman, 1953

1954

Diana Hunter: Herb Talmadge, San Francisco Globe copyboy, ’54.

Angela on Julia: I don’t think we were ever closer [than] during her [first] pregnancy.

Greg Reardon: And the baby?
Julia: It was stillborn. I guess it was for the best. I was very young.

Angela: The baby didn’t die, but to protect Julia, I let her think he did.

Angela: Julia was in no condition to raise a child.

Angela: I did what I thought was best, Julia.

Julia: There wasn’t anything temporary about my insanity. It went on for years.

Greg: And of course the child was put up for adoption?
Angela: No, he was raised right here [a Catholic Church in Marysville, Connecticut] in the orphanage by the fathers.

Angela: In those days, it was unheard of for an unwed mother to keep her child so I placed him with the fathers and he was raised at the orphanage.
Christopher, Julia’s son: You’re talking about me, aren’t you? The story of a pregnant teenager, the months she spent at the [parish] — this is exactly what I was told about my own mother.

Father Christopher to Angela: I had a mother and you gave me to the priests. I had a family and you gave me to an institution. I had a faith in God and now I don’t know what I have.

Father Christopher: I like helping people. I think that’s what I was born to do.

Angela on Christopher: All these years, I thought I was protecting him.

Emma: Mother lied to us all these years.

Angela: How could I tell Father Bob [about Christopher]? He wasn’t even here at the time.

Angela: Father Matthew used to work in the Tuscany Valley. He’s an excellent fundraiser.
Father Matthew: Only because we had you as a good friend.

Father Christopher to Angela: You have done so much for me, for all of Marysville.

Angela: I suppose I did get carried away with my generosity [towards the church], but I did it for [Christopher].

Greg to Angela: Julia gives birth to a son and you build him a church.

Elizabeth Bradbury: I wouldn't have a life at all if it weren't for Angela's kindness and generosity.

Julia on Elizabeth: Mother goes to visit her every week religiously. She used to take me with her and then she took Emma for a while, but it just upset Emma terribly.

Angela, speaking in 1985: I’ve always treated my workers better than anyone in the valley.
Father Christopher: Mrs Channing, a lot of them don’t even have indoor plumbing.
Emma: Mother, you have known about that for years.

Corinne Powers: I’ve known you and that royal family of yours for a long time. You never noticed me in school. I was the fat kid in the hand-me-downs that you and the other rich kids made fun of. My daddy Ben used to work at the vineyards up at Falcon Crest - that is until he had his first heart attack.
Julia: We employed hundreds of people up there.
Corinne: After he recovered, your mommy didn’t hire him back so he died broke.

Corinne on Falcon Crest: Always wondered what the inside of this house looked like.

Lance on Chase: He spent most of his life avoiding this place [Falcon Crest].

Chase: One of my mother’s husbands, Alexander Nikolai. They were married when I was in high school and college. They were married while she was up to her neck in Cartel business. Either he was kept in the dark or he was very discreet.

Alexander Nikolau on Chase: That skinny adolescent who used to spend all of his spare time over at the airport.

Chase on a Tiger Moth biplane: I haven’t flown in a plane like that since I was a kid.

Paul Salinger, Chase’s friend: The first time I went up in a trainer, I was hooked.
Chase: For me, it was the first time I soloed. Being up there all alone, I knew that was the place to be.

Chase: You were there the first time I soloed.
Alexander: Yes with your mother clinging to my arm as you taxied down the runway. I could feel her trembling through her coat.
Chase: I never knew that.
Alexander: Of course you didn't. Jacqueline never allowed anyone to see her weaknesses.

Alexander: I was just one of many men who passed through your mother's life. I was the only one who really loved her. Jacqueline kept her affairs to herself.
Chase: Surely during ten years of marriage you must have known she was involved in the banking business, for instance?
Alexander: Yes, in Geneva I believe.
Chase: The Standard Credit Bank of Switzerland.
Alexander: Your mother was a fascinating woman - beautiful, intelligent and totally unprincipled. Certain areas of her life would not bear close scrutiny. There were certain dealings that were legitimate no doubt but the Swiss bank was merely a cover, a means of laundering and distributing Cartel profits which were considerable.
Chase: How does Johann Reibmann fit into all this?
Alexander: He wanted to control all of those profits, was willing to do anything to gain it, anything at all. Even Jacqueline was terrified of him.

Chase looking at old photographs of himself: High school graduation — what a nerd.

Jacqueline on Chase: He's never been a quitter.

Chase: Maggie, you have always been a fighter.

Paul Hartford to Maggie: You were never one to accept anything but the raw truth.

Maggie: When I was a little girl, I always imagined I’d marry a man who looked just like my father.
Chase: Your father is short and very bald.

Chase to Maggie: Your dad always has been independent.

Maggie to Paul: My memory of you, you’re either rushing off to class or you’re up all night doing a research paper. Remember that summer we went up to Arizona on the camping trip and you were on a dig for Indian ceremonial objects?
Paul: Seems like it was just yesterday. You’ve always been my very special little girl. You were always very handy on the dig.

Maggie: Mother - I always felt we were so close. I even thought we looked alike.
Paul: You were close, Maggie. We loved you as much as we would a natural daughter.
Maggie: I’ve always felt loved by you, Dad. Always.

Michael Sharpe to his sister Lauren: You were a distant relation to Maggie.

Maggie: I remember when I was growing up, the woman next door had nine kids. They all had different little jobs to do. She had it made. I always thought I'd have a family like that.

Maggie: I didn’t come from a rich family so I think I did my travelling by reading. One day you could be in Australia, the next day Victorian England. So it was a form of escape.

Maggie: "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot drawing near." It's [from] a poem I memorised in high school by Andrew Marvell. It's about growing old.

Maggie: I grew up real fast and I thought I was so smart and I never had a chance to be a kid.

Terry: My older sister was always the glue that held the family together.
Maggie: "Sticky Maggie"!

Terry to Maggie: You used to have a nickname for me when we were little. It was “Termite”, for little Terry.

Terry: I don’t know what I would have done without you.
Maggie: We took care of each other.
Terry: No, it was you. You always took care of me.

Maggie to Terry: You’ve taken advantage of everybody who’s ever tried to help you.

Terry: Maggie, who’d always been there for me, Maggie who always forgave me.

Carl Beck: You and I, we’ve had our differences, Angela.

Chase on Carl: A man Angela's been trying to destroy all of her life.

Chase on Angela: A woman who had a lifelong feud with Carlo Agretti.

Angela to Carlo Agretti: You’ve been plotting for years to get your hands on Falcon Crest.

Melissa Agretti, Carlo’s daughter: Falcon Crest is something my father always dreamed of having.

Angela: Carlo Agretti's vineyard is one of the finest in the valley. Almost as good as ours. They belong together.
Lance: So you've always said.

Julia: The Agretti vineyards have always been a very important part of Falcon Crest’s winery.

Melissa on Angela: For several years, she’s wanted to buy my father’s vineyards. He would never sell.

Carlo to Angela: Each of us has always wanted what the other has.

Angela: Like I always said, "The joining of young vines is a far better investment."

Frank Agretti to Melissa: Your grandfather used to say, “If you don’t sample the competition, you don’t know what you’re up against.”

Francesca: My grandmother used to say, “A man that has no pride in his land is not a man.”

Richard: We’ll just have to stir the waters, as my step-daddy used to say, and see what comes floating to the top.

Liz “Stretch” McDowell: Dad always said things got better in the morning.

Richard to Stretch: That ball club was your daddy’s life.

Stretch: My father loved the ball club more than his own life.

Richard to Stretch: Your daddy was very special to me.

Stretch: I remember how fond you were of each other. You were the only boy in the whole of baseball camp he let stay up after lights out.
Richard: I think I was the only kid who didn’t mind staying up all night, listening to his stories.
Stretch: I think that was the happiest time of his life. Maybe it was for all of us.

Richard on Stretch: When we were children, she was my best friend.

Stretch to Richard: Do you remember when we used to go skinny-dipping in the moonlight?

Stretch on her and Richard: We have known each other since we were kids and we were always fighting then.

Stretch: I used to have the best arm in camp, boy or girl.
Richard: I remember. You used to throw enough rocks at me.

Stretch: You know what I remember about you? You were very mysterious.
Richard: I was fourteen years old. How could I be mysterious?
Stretch: You were. You used to come in every summer from Europe speaking, what, I don’t know, twenty languages? Seven? How many did you speak?
Richard: I don’t know — four, maybe.
Stretch: I was so jealous of you. I couldn’t wait to get to Europe. I still think that’s the reason I moved to London.

Richard to Stretch: I was always jealous of you. You got to have Dusty McDowell for a father.

Emma: I remember when the Johnsons' boy fell down Brinkman's well, everyone was looking for him for days and days, and then he was right there all along.

Angela on her and Frank Agretti: We shared a lifelong friendship together.

Damn. To see it all written out like this ... it really is quite riveting.

That was the best read on this site ever. Thank you.

Oh great, thanks! I'm glad to know it all hangs together!

 

[stevew]

You inspired me to buy Falcon Crest on line. I know it won’t be more than the 1st four seasons and unlike some I did like the shadowy government stuff, but would be nice if seasons 5-8 at least showed up. Though I could live without 9. Lol. Thanks for the inspiration.

 

[James from London]

1955

Emma on the nuclear fallout shelter at Falcon Crest: My father built this place during the fifties. He thought the whole world was going to blow up.

Angela: Were we here [Rome] in midsummer before?
Douglas: I thought it was winter.
Angela: You would. There was a juggler on this corner. He used to juggle five balls in the air and not miss a beat.

Douglas on Angela: She had only one passion in life, Falcon Crest.

Lance: You created Falcon Crest in your own image, Grandmother.

Douglas to Angela: Falcon Crest always was your first love. I could never compete.
Angela: What about your newspaper? You were just as involved in your work as I was with mine.
Douglas: Guilty as charged.
Angela: We had some good times, Doug, but it just couldn't work out.

Lance on Angela: She chose Falcon Crest over love.

Angela: Every time I’ve ever cared for anyone I’ve lived to regret it.

Angela to Douglas: We could have had so much together, but maybe I couldn’t make you love the land any more than you could make me leave it. I guess we’re both damn fools — or we made each other what we are.

Angela to Douglas: You gave up [any parental] rights the moment you walked out of this house.

Julia: My parents were divorced when I was very young.

Julia to Angela: You taught us all exquisite taste.

Julia: I remember my first formal dinner party, how nervous and excited I was.

Julia on the Tuscany Valley Inn: I’ve always loved this place. Mother used to put visiting relatives up here, thinking that then they wouldn’t be so insulted at not being asked to stay at Falcon Crest.

Angela on the Falcon Crest guest cottage: No-one’s stayed in that cottage for years.

Michael Ranson on himself and Chase: He’s my cousin. We grew up together.

Michael: Chase and I used to talk for hours on end years ago. My folks had this wonderful summer house in the Hamptons in Long Island and Jacqueline used to drop Chase off for a few weeks in the summer when she went to Europe. She liked to travel light. Mom thought that was awful. She’d tell her about it too. She was the only one in the family who wasn’t afraid to. Maybe that’s why they never saw each other after Chase went to prep school.

Michael: Chase’s mother and my mother were always feuding, but they were still sisters.

Michael on Jacqueline: She always seemed too dignified to me. Maybe it was all that European exposure.

Dr Lilian Heller: You’re still the same workaholic you always were.
Michael: You’re prettier now than you were in research. I always thought you and I would make a good team. We had something special, didn’t we?
Lilian: We were just kids then, Michael.

Lilian: What did we used to call that one guy?
Michael: Musclehead.
Lilian: Yes! And remember the girl that sat behind us in embryology?
Michael: Oh yeah, Frog Lady!

Peter Stavros: Years ago, I was fishing off of Crete when a storm hit. We took shelter on an island so small it wasn’t even on our charts. What a feast the islanders prepared, calamari like you’ve never tasted. I bought the island.

Peter on an abstract painting: Pablo gave it to me one summer when we were fishing in France.

Peter, mid-anecdote: ... So I closed the deal that afternoon and had the entire shipping fleet in my back pocket. The King was angry but there was nothing he could do.

Anna Rossini: Is it true about you and the princess?
Peter: Every word.

Frank Agretti: I’ve been kind of messing up with women all my life.

Frank: There wasn’t any money on the [tennis] circuit in those days but it was a lot of fun. I knew them all - Rosewall, Frankie Sedgeman, Trabit, Lew Hoad. On a given day, Lou was about the best.

1956

Angela: A letter I received a long time ago.
Lance: From Mom?
Angela: When she was away at college.
Lance, reading the letter: “Dear Mother, there are so many opportunities here. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. I can hardly wait for you to come down for parents’ weekend so I can show you around.” Did you go?
Angela: I was too busy.
Lance: Even for a weekend?
Angela: I was a businesswoman before it became fashionable and I didn’t have time to do the things I wanted to do.
Lance: A weekend doesn’t seem like much.
Angela: Julia understood. She had such promise, only …
Lance: Everything went wrong.

Angela: Skylar was only your stepdaughter.
Peter: I thought of her as my own flesh and blood.

Peter: When Skylar was small, I took my meals with a telephone attached to my ear. One night, she crawled under the table and pulled the plug right out of the wall. After that, I quit talking business at the dinner table and paid more attention to my family.

Peter: Your mother always complained that I spoiled you. She was right, of course. I just couldn’t help myself.
Kit Marlowe, in the guise of Skylar Kimble: Were you happy then?
Peter: For a while.

Skylar on Peter: All the time I was growing up, I thought he loved me.

1957

Julia: Tony and I really did love each other.

Angela to Tony: You always did go for lost causes.

Julia to Angela: You always hate anyone who falls in love because it never happened to you.

Julia: I was pregnant and I wasn't married. In those days, being pregnant and unmarried was a disgrace to the whole family, and so my mother punished me by taking away the only two things I ever felt were mine.

Tony: I married into this damn family and I felt like an outsider until the day I left.

Angela on Tony: He married Julia for her money.

Father Bob to Angela: Our relationship has always been based on trust.

1958

Chase: In 1958, a court ruled that Michael Blake, a cement contractor and a member of the [Tuscany Valley] board of supervisors, had been unduly denied his right to vote because of an apparent conflict of interests. It seems Mr Blake was prepared to cast his ballot for a competitor in a county construction project and the simple fact that he opened a cement company should not have disqualified him.
Max Hartman, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors: Supervisor Blake won a rather substantial settlement from the county, didn't he?

Angela on Julia: I watched her grow up and marry and have a baby. I thought I was doing a good job with Julia.

Julia, speaking to Lance in 1982: It was a rainy night twenty-two years ago in this very hospital when you were born and I had such hopes, such dreams.

Pilar to Lance: You were just born on the wrong side of the tracks.

Julia: Everything I’ve ever done in my whole life has been for Lance.

Lance on Julia: I'm the heir to Falcon Crest, not her.
Tony: I knew that the day you were born. Your grandmother made it very clear what she really wanted was a male heir.

Angela: Lance was weak to begin with. Came with the genes of his father.

Lance on Tony: He was never a father to me.

Angela on Lance: I've always thought of him as a Gioberti.

Lance on Falcon Crest: It's the only home I've ever had.

Angela to Melissa: You, my dear, were born without a heart.

Frank on Melissa: She sure takes after her mother, doesn’t she?
Angela: No, she’s worse.

Father Bob to Lance and Melissa: I [have] known you both since you were babies.

Melissa: In my entire life, nobody has ever let me be myself, be my own person.

Lance: It was you who turned me over to [Angela] when I was a baby.
Julia: Is that what you think, that I just turned you over to her?
Lance: Yeah. I've always had the impression that I was given away. Does the fact that I was born so soon after the wedding have anything to do with that?

Lance: Mother, you're the one who gave me to [Angela] in the first place.
Dorcas (Julia): That's not the way it was at all. She took you like she takes everything.
Lance: Didn't you have anything to say about that? Didn't Father?
Dorcas: Your father tried. At first, we had hopes. She made promises, but nothing ever materialised.

Julia on Angela: She forced me to give you [Lance] up when you were a baby.

Julia, speaking to Lance in 1981: Twenty-three years ago, she took you.

Melissa on Angela: She took Lance away from you when he was just a little baby, didn’t she?
Julia: Yes. She wouldn’t even let me raise my own son.

Lance: All my life, I’ve been manipulated by women.

Lance: All my life, I’ve been doing what’s right for number one.

Angela to Tony: You were very good at your work when you wanted to be.

Chase to Tony: Angela never gave you enough credit for what you did at the winery. The wines at Falcon Crest when you were there were the best.

Tony: I used to talk tough - the boss, in control - but scared to death to feel anything.

Tony: I was never much good at playing games.

Maggie, looking at a blue Thunderbird: This is my high school fantasy car. There was a time in high school I would have done anything for a ride in this car.
Chase: Anything?
Maggie: Anything except go out with Buddy Klauser and he was the only one who had this kind of car.

Maggie: I haven’t laughed so much since my prom. Did I ever tell you about my prom?
Richard: Senior prom?
Maggie: Yeah. Oh, this guy, I don’t know what he’d been doing, syphoning gasoline all day, I guess. Anyway, I kissed him and I thought, “What is this, a gasoline pump or what?”

Cole: Dad, you left home at eighteen. So did you, Mom. And it didn't hurt either of you.
Chase: We had both finished high school.

Phillip on Jacqueline: When Chase left her in Paris in 1958 to join the Air Force, she moved to Monaco where she met and married her second husband.

Maggie on Jacqueline: Her second husband was a Nazi sympathiser who made his fortune by looting the French art museums during the occupation.
Chase: Maybe that’s why she divorced him.
Maggie: She didn’t want to divorce him. He wanted to divorce her. He never got the opportunity. He was murdered and she inherited everything.

Philip on Jacqueline’s second husband: When he died, she was left with six oil tankers.

Norton Crane, member of the Cartel crime syndicate: The company has always been involved in oil.

Chase looking at old photographs of himself: Air Force Academy - how noble, huh?
Maggie: That I remember.

Chase: If I hadn't shoved you in that cold shower, you never would have passed the first flight test.
Paul Salinger: I passed - but then I got pneumonia!

Richard: I had a paper route as a kid. I saved my nickels.

Father Christopher: I’ve spent most of my life wishing for a family.

Father Christopher: Mother - when I was a child, I used to dream of being able to call somebody that.

Father Christopher: When you’re an orphan, you always try to imagine what your parents look like - whether they’re tall, short, dark hair, light hair.

Father Christopher: My life was fine. At least, I think it was. I really didn’t have much to compare it to.

Angela on Father Christopher: I did keep in touch with birthdays and Christmas. I loved him as if he were being raised in my own home.

Father Christopher to Angela: I’ve been calling you Mrs Channing for as long as I can remember.

Angela on Father Christopher: He doesn’t know I’m his grandmother.

Father Christopher: All these years, I thought I was an orphan. I had a family, one that didn’t even want me. Angela kept my family from me.

Father Christopher to Cassandra: Weren’t we both nurtured on a diet of half-truths and outright lies?

Cassandra to Christopher: I don’t know who’s worse off — the little girl who lost her father or the little boy who never had one. Angela hid you away, denied your very existence.

Angela on Christopher: Ever since he was a little boy, he wanted to be a priest and I didn’t feel Falcon Crest was the right place to raise him.

Angela on Christopher: He was raised to be a priest.

Angela on Christopher: I encouraged him to become a priest.

Cassandra to Father Christopher: Would you have chosen to become a priest if you’d been raised as Angela’s grandson?

Kit Marlowe, in the guise of Skylar Kimble: Father was just reminding me of my tenth birthday when he took me and all my friends on a cruise to Corsica.
Peter Stavros: Those were good days.

 

[James from London]

1959

Chase, speaking in 1982: How long have you been medical examiner here [the Tuscany Valley], Dr Cook?
Dr Cook: Twenty-three years.

Mr Blair, speaking in 1982: I’ve been with this paper [the Globe] twenty-three years.

A letter from Jasper Gioberti: “Dear Angela and Jason, I know you will understand and accept what I am about to tell you. Many years ago, during a visit to our native village in Italy, I met and fell in love with a beautiful Italian girl. It was with reluctance that I left her to return to my family in America, but I vowed I would never forget her nor the great happiness she brought into my life. It is to this end that I have included a codicil to my last will and testament, date 6th June 1959. This document indicates that my estate is to be divided equally among my children, Jason Robert Gioberti, Angela Gioberti Channing and your sister, Francesca Anna Maria Gioberti, born to my Italian lover and raised by the Gioberti family in Italy. I trust that you will share your love as well as your land with Francesca. I love you all equally. Your father.”

Angela: I’ve never been overly fond of surprises.

Francesca: It was a shock to me to find out that I was illegitimate, that I was not who I thought I was. I can’t help feeling that Jasper Gioberti cheated me out of a part of my life.

Chase: My grandfather’s whole life revolved around Falcon Crest. He wanted to keep it intact forever.

Angela on Falcon Crest: My father thought of this as a kingdom and I promised him I'd keep it that way.

Jasper Gioberti, died 1959

Jacqueline: Jason's fate was sealed the day his father died.

Angela on a timepiece: It was my grandfather's. It was passed onto my father Jasper and Jason's had it ever since Jasper died.

Gus on Jasper: He left [Elizabeth Bradbury] some money when he died.

Phillip Erickson to Chase: In his will, your grandfather stipulated that the original fifty acres settled by him here at Falcon Crest would pass to the heirs of the first of his children, Angela or Jason, to die. The balance of his estate, this house and the five hundred acres around it, are left to his surviving child, either Angela or Jason. The only other provision of your grandfather's will is that his surviving child would only retain Falcon Crest in the event of the natural death of the other.
Angela: You see, my father's greatest concern was that Falcon Crest remain in the immediate family and he wrote a will to protect us all. The only thing that could jeopardise Falcon Crest's unity would be the death of one of his children under suspicious circumstances - in which case, the victim's heirs will inherit what is rightfully theirs.

Angela: This house was given to me separately to the winery.

Angela: My father's dreams for Falcon Crest became Jason's and mine.

Angela: I carried Lance into the vineyard before he could walk just like my father did with me.

Maggie: When you were nineteen, you came back to visit your father.
Chase: He wanted me to come back and help me run the place. I was in college. I had my sights on a career. He couldn't see my needs.

Chase, speaking about Lance in 1981: The last time I saw him, he was only a year old.

Julia, speaking in 1981: I haven't spoken to Chase in years.

Terry: Chase and I have never really gotten along.

Chase to his son Cole: I don't think I've smiled so much since I met your mother's parents.
Maggie: That's funny, I don't remember you smiling.

Maggie, mid-anecdote: ... Then he said, “If you won’t marry me, my life will be only a trail of tears.”
Vicky: Dad said that?!
Maggie: Yes he did and a lot more, and I’m not going to tell you any of it!

Vicky, speaking to her parents in 1983: Now I know this isn’t exactly what you want to hear, but please try to get used to it because it’s the way I feel.
Chase to Maggie: I recall you saying something similar to that to your father when we wanted to get married.

Terry: You and Chase came to Dad to tell him you were getting married.
Maggie: We didn’t exactly tell him. We asked him.
Terry: Of course — but you always were the kind to need permission, weren’t you?

Paul to Maggie: I wanted to tell you [about your adoption] many times, your sixteenth birthday, when you were twenty-one, just before you got married, but Margaret and I disagreed about when you should be told.

Maggie to Chase: You and I were married by the time I was [nineteen].

Maggie on her wedding: I didn’t really have a dress and a veil and all.

Maggie: I went from my father’s house to Chase’s house. I have never felt independent in my entire life.

Michael Ranson to Maggie: I always said that Chase would never lose with you beside him.

Maggie: Chase was an airline pilot when I married him. How stable is that?

Maggie to Chase: In all the years that we’ve been married, I have never even come close to being unfaithful to you.

1960

B. Reilly Wicker, attorney, to Chase: Did business with your father some years ago. I liked Jason.

Carl Beck, vineyardist neighbour of the Giobertis, to Chase: Chase, for all his life, your father told me to replant, but the old vines kept baring so well, I never thought [an infestation] would happen. Your father and I were best friends.

Chase: Gus Nunuoz, my father's vineyardist and loyal friend.

Angela: Gus hasn’t worked at Falcon Crest since my father died.

Chase, speaking in 1981: Gus was with my father for over twenty years. They kept each other going.

Gus Nunuoz on Jason: He was a rare breed. Jason was like a father to me.

Gus to Chase on the main bedroom in the Gioberti house: We built a wall right along here, with a door someplace about there. Your father had a new room. Said he needed a place to himself.
Chase: He had a whole houseful of rooms.
Gus: He did a lot of things I never understood, but this room was special for him.

Gus on Jason’s room: Nobody else ever went in there. He'd spend hours on end in there, reading - writing sometimes.

Chase on ‘The Family of Joseph Gioberti’: It looks like a family bible.
Maggie: You think Angela wrote it?
Chase: Or had it written.
Chase: I don't think my father thought much of ‘The Family of Joseph Gioberti’. You'll find his comments written all over it.
Maggie, reading: ‘The Gospel According to St. Angela’?
Chase: Oh he would have changed the title too.
Maggie: There are lots of pages missing, huh?
Chase: Yeah and lots of others defaced.
Maggie: Ripped out.
Chase: Yeah. Funny little drawings, cryptic notes to the author.
Maggie, reading: "The self-anointed queen at the head of the table"?
Chase: 'Queen Angela the First'. He alternates between that and 'Saint Angela'. He writes about [Elizabeth Bradbury] often.
Maggie, reading: "What happened to Elizabeth Bradbury, Angela? Where's Elizabeth now?"
Chase: He seemed to feel that she belonged in the book.

Chase on Elizabeth: Was my father in love with her?
Gus: It was hard not to be. She meant something to him. He spoke of her often, asked if I'd seen her, how she was doing.
Chase: He wrote about her a lot, all through his writings.

Chase to Elizabeth: My father wrote of you many times in his diaries. "Beautiful Elizabeth … lovely, gentle Elizabeth."

Gus: One day he stopped writing. From then on, he sat in there alone and drank. Sometimes he cried.

Maggie on Jason's secret room: It's almost as if this is where Jason really died.
Gus: I guess part of him did. He hurt himself mostly. We talked about everything in life, especially when he drank.

Gus: Then the time came when he said to me, "Gus, wall the door shut." And I did. I left some open framing in case he ever wanted to reopen it.
Chase: Gus, why did he go to so much trouble?
Gus: He was unhappy.
Chase: You don't make a room and then cover it up just because you're unhappy.
Gus: When your father sealed off this room, he sealed off his life the same way.

Angela: Jason's horrible room.

Emma on Lance’s bedroom: The room Lance lived in since he was a little boy.

Angela on Lance: I’ve lived with that boy all of his life and I’ve heard some very odd things.

Lance to Angela: You’ve been trying to run my life ever since I was a kid.

Angela on Lance: He was never very good at saying thank-you.

Mario Nunuoz, Gus’s son: My father, he had a real feeling for his people, but he could never do anything for them, not really. He had the feelings, but he didn’t have the education.

Alicia Nunuoz, Gus’s wife, on college: Nobody in the family ever had such doors open to them.

Maggie: I have a degree in journalism I never thought I'd even get a chance to use.

Angela on Terry: A high school drop out.

Lauren Daniels: I’ve been around money all my life. I don’t think I’m any happier for it.

Walker Daniels to Lauren: To you, there’s no relationship between business and work, and eating. It’s always been there for you — Daddy, Mikey, me.

Michael Sharpe: What’s a father? I had one, a scared little man, a three dollar an hour bookkeeper. He taught fear by example. His life scared the hell out of me.

Lauren, speaking in 1990: You think I’m going to move in and take care of you like when we were kids?
Michael: You take care of me? I think you’ve got that turned around.

Michael: I have been cocky all my life.

Michael: Remember that place we used to go for fresh pistachio nuts when we were kids?
Lauren: Down in Monterey?

Paul Salinger, speaking in 1981: What about our charter operation?
Chase: We've been kicking that dream around for twenty years.

Diana Hunter: Herb Talmadge, San Francisco Globe reporter, international affairs editor, editor in chief since 1960.

1961

Phillip Erickson, speaking to Chase about Jason’s will in 1981: He left me a handwritten document nearly twenty years ago, but he was careful to reaffirm it every year since then. Your father left you everything in his estate, which I'm afraid wasn't much.

Angela: I'm afraid Jason just wasn't a vineyardist. He depleted the value out of the soil.

Julia to Angela: You ruined Uncle Jason.

Emma on Angela: She drove Uncle Jason out of his mind.

Julia: Compassion has never been Angela's forte.

Emma: Uncle Jason taught me how to drive his truck.

Peter Stavros: It wasn't so long ago Sofia was just a little girl. I used to come home from a business trip, throw off my coat, we'd get down on the floor and play silly games. She used to love to be tickled.

Sofia to Peter: You loved those damn boats than you ever loved me.

Peter to his stepdaughter Skylar: Remember that portrait you gave me for my birthday?

Peter on Skylar: In some ways, she’s the one I regret the most. Maybe it’s because I had to win her love and then lost it.
Angela: Oh Peter, it couldn’t have been your fault.
Peter: It was my fault because I let it happen.

Sofia on Peter: He and my mother fought constantly. She wasn't nearly as strong-willed as Angela.

Peter on Sofia: I took custody of her when I divorced her mother.
Angela: I remember that scandal. “Rich playboy leaves wife for Austrian countess.”

Peter on Skylar: When her mother and I divorced, I don’t know, she must have turned Skylar against me.

Eric Stavros, Peter’s son, on Peter and Skylar: They haven’t seen each other since before I was born.

Skylar on Peter: He hasn’t seen me since I was fourteen years old.

Peter on Skylar: The last time I looked into those big hazel eyes, they were filled with tears.

Skylar on Peter: After he divorced my mother, he never called me, never wrote, nothing.

Peter on Skylar: I wrote her so many letters. She never answered. I’ve always known where she is.

Peter: Eric was born and Sofia had what she's always wanted, a little brother.

Angela: We have met. You were only five years old. You and your father had gone to visit your grandfather and I was there.
Anna Cellini: I remember my grandfather telling me about Falcon Crest and its magnificent vineyards.

Angela to Anna: Your grandfather was very sweet to me when I was in Italy.

 

[James from London]

1962

Maggie, speaking about Chase in 1987: I was married to the man for twenty-five years.

Maggie to Chase: Do you remember how thrilled we were when I was pregnant with Cole and Vicky?

Maggie on pregnancy cravings: With Cole, it was caviar.

Maggie on Cole and Vicky: They're born and bred New Yorkers.

Maggie to Cole: I used to take over [assembling the crib] after your father gave up.

Maggie to Cole: Hospitals have changed since I had you. I think it was something like a week before your father was even allowed to hold you.

Maggie to Chase: Do you remember after Cole was born, how special he was? And how we loved him so much we were almost afraid to have another, as if somehow having another might interfere?

Nicole Sauget to Maggie: You tried to get your daughter aborted. You were already waiting at the doctor’s office when [Chase] found you.

Nicole to Vicky: Your father was going to divorce her, the way she tried to get rid of you.

Nicole to Vicky: Your father hated the sight of your mother.

Mr Caproni to his daughter Linda: When your mother and I first came to California, I was just out of the army. There were not many jobs. I was a trained baker and all I could find was a field hand’s job in the vineyards, Falcon Crest vineyards. Angela Channing was a young strong-willed woman. Falcon Crest prospered that year. After the harvest, the migrant workers moved south to pick oranges and lemons, but your mother and I, we wanted to stay, to raise our children here. Angela Channing burned the migrant shacks we lived in to plant more vines. Your mother and I with a baby, we had to sleep in a tent that winter. Your mother began to cough. For three months she never stopped coughing - till the day she died. Falcon Crest, Angela Channing, that whole family, they killed your mother, my Maria.

Cole on Linda: You raised her all by yourself, Mr Caproni.

Melissa on the Agretti house: My father patterned it after his birthplace in Italy.

Frank, looking over the Agretti property: I built that fence, you know that?

Melissa: The hell you did. My father built it.
Frank: No, he didn’t. He built that part over there. We had a bet with each other — who’d finish his half first. Your daddy won.

Frank on wine distributor Ned Vogel: He’s a bottom line player. He always has been.

Joey Walts on himself and Michael Sharpe: We’ve been friends since we were twelve.

1963

Maggie on maternity wear: Styles have changed since I was pregnant with [Vicky]. Then you had a choice of large tent and larger tent.

Maggie: When Vicky was born, it was such a happy time.

Chase: I don't think we even had a baby-sitter until after Vicky was born.

Maggie: Do you think you loved Vicky as much [as Cole] when she was a baby?
Chase: Of course I did.
Maggie: Well, if she'd have been a boy, let's say?
Chase: Wouldn't have made any difference.
Maggie: If she had been a boy, would you have wanted to try again for a little girl?
Chase: We got to have one of each!

Chase: Remember when the only thing that kept us awake at nights was crying babies?
Maggie: Didn’t keep you awake as I recall. Sometimes I miss those days. All I want then was to be a good wife and mother, roll out a flaky pie crust.

Maggie: I always thought I'd have a [big] family.
Vicky: What stopped you?
Maggie: I don't know. Everything. Your father's flying, apartments, New York City.
Vicky: You and Dad barely had time for Cole and I.

Lance to Julia: Do you remember my First Communion?

1964

Chao Li on his wife: It was an arranged marriage, a marriage that was not happy to her. It didn’t last long.

Angela on Chao Li: When his wife went back to China with his unborn child, it broke his heart.

Lance: Chao Li never told me he had a daughter.

Angela to Lance: Chao Li a better father to you than [Tony was].

Emma on a bracelet: Father gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday.

Cole, speaking about Jacqueline in 1984: Twenty years ago she was already quite the heavyweight in Europe. She was into all this for the money?
Maggie: No, I think it was the power.
Cole: I thought she was just my nice little grandmother.
Maggie: She was anything but nice. Ruthless was one man’s opinion.

Maggie on Jacqueline: She seemed to make a career out of ruining people’s lives.

Chase to his stepfather Alexander Nikolau: You left without saying goodbye.

Joey Walts, speaking about Michael Sharpe’s success in 1990: Who would have thought that a kid who never had a clutch-free throw in his life would end up with all this?
Michael: Yeah well, the problem with you guys in the team is you took those jump shots too damn seriously. I could have told you back then they wouldn’t amount to squat.

Michael Sharpe: When I was fourteen, when all my friends were still collecting baseball cards and smoking cigarettes in the boys' room, I was devising complex market strategies based on studies guys had done fifty years ago.
Danny Sharpe: Sounds real exciting.

Michael: What was it — five seconds left, champion game, down by a point? Joey Walts steals the ball, shoots from forty-two feet at the buzzer — swish! We all just stood there staring at you, wishing we were you. It was biblical.
Joey: Yeah, yeah it really was.
Michael: That one shot got you more girls than any single act in the history of high school. I really wished I was in your shoes right then — or whatever piece of clothing was still left on your body. You were a beauty, man. I’m glad I was there to see it.

Joey on Lauren: That goofy little girl who used to watch us play basketball. I’ve been hitting on her a lot longer than even you [Michael] know.

Michael to Lauren: You’re the only one I’ve ever loved. When we were kids, I used to idolise you. I dreamt about you. You were perfect. I wanted so much to find somebody just like you, but I couldn’t.

Michael to Lauren: You know what I used to wish when we were teenagers? Sometimes I used to wish that we weren’t brother and sister, that we were both adopted from different families and thrown into the same house, that it was God’s way of putting us together.

1965

Mr Plenn, attorney: How long have you known Lance Cumson?
Mr Hobson, tailor: All his life. I sold him his first pair of long pants.

Angela on Lance: He’s been doing something foolish all his life.

Angela: When you were a little boy, you were stranded in a tree and I told you to stay there until I could find someone with a ladder.
Lance: Did I?
Angela: No. You fell out and broke your arm.

Lance: I was in my first horse show when I was seven. I won a blue ribbon for it. I was so small and the horse was so big, but you know, I did it all by myself.

Lance to Chao Li: All my life, you told me there was no disgrace in losing a battle, that the only disgrace was to surrender without fighting back.

Richard: I once knew a lion tamer who went into the cage with [a cocksure] attitude. He came out in the belly of the lion.

Richard on his stepdaughter Lorraine Prescott: Lorraine comes from a rather illustrious family. Her grandfather’s Eric Hoffman.

1966

DA Deering: You’re the medical examiner for this county, Dr Cook?
Dr Cook, speaking in 1982: I have been for sixteen years.
DA Deering: And how did you get your job?
Dr Cook: Sheriff Tobias appointed me.

Chase on Jason: He kept all my letters, a box for every year. Sometimes I didn't write very much, but then, he never wrote back at all, not since I went to the Air Force Academy. I kept writing, but he never wrote back. I wrote to tell him I'd gone into the Air Force. He must have been very hurt that I never came back here [Tuscany] to help him run this place.
Maggie: You had your own life to live, Chase.
Chase: But it did have its cost.

A tape recording of Jason's voice: "You are a rich man, Gus. A rich man is a man who has a son to grow with and fish with and travel with and share so much. I don't have a son."
Gus: "But, Jason, you have Chase. He writes to you all the time."
Jason: "No, no, he left me."
Gus: "His mother took him away. He was a little boy."
Jason: "Well he's a man now and he hasn't come back. Damn him. Who in hell needs Chase Gioberti?"
Gus: "You don't mean all this, Jason. You love Chase. You know you do."
Jason: "Yes I do. I do love my son. I need him. I need my son. I want him with me, Gus. I love him.”

Angela: Gus tried to convince me that Jason needed some kind of help. So I asked him to make that recording.
Chase: You never gave him that help.

Extract from a letter from Chase, to be read after his death: “Melissa, in your hand you’re holding the key to Angela. It was given to me by my father who, as you know, disliked Angela intensely. Family legend had it that this key would lead to the downfall of the Gioberti fortune.”

Gus on Chase's return: It's what your father lived for.

Chase, speaking about Jason in 1981: I cut him loose. I'm afraid I did it a long time ago.

Chase on his former stepfather Alexander Nikolau: I haven’t heard from him in years. Last I heard he was running a shipping line out of Athens.

Maggie on Jacqueline: She didn't visit us for years.

Vicky, speaking about Jacqueline in 1982: I haven't seen her since I was three.

Cole, looking at Chase's old photograph from 1966: So who's the lady in-between you and Paul [Salinger]?
Chase: Whoever she was, she was with Paul.
Maggie: And if she was with Paul, she was no lady!

1967

Amos Clark, the Tuscany Valley health inspector, speaking in 1982: I’ve been in this office for fifteen years.

Dan Fixx: I was just a kid when my old man took off. The only thing I remember about him was his expertise with a belt strap. He was a real home run hitter.

Tucker Fixx, Dan’s father: I never was much of a family man.

Dan: I was ten years old. You told me with tears running down your face that it wasn’t my fault, that you just weren’t cut out to be a father.
Tucker: And I meant it.
Dan: Right. And less than a year later, you started a whole new family.
Tucker: I didn’t do that to hurt you. It was just something that happened.
Dan: But you stayed with them. I bet you didn’t even tell them about me.

Tucker to his “daughter” Carly: I’m not your father. Your mom was pregnant when we met. We just never found the right time to tell you.

Dan to Tucker: I’ve been fine for twenty years without you in my life.

Dan: I wrote off my family a long time ago.

Dan: I’ve been running from relationships all my life.

Dan: It’s true I have been in trouble all my life and maybe I’ve hurt a few people. I learned a long time ago I’ve got to follow my heart even if that means dancing with the devil.

Phillip Erickson on Richard: He graduated with honours from an Ivy League law school. Then he dropped out of public sight to work on the business interests of the Denault family’s international cartel.

Richard on the Cartel: I was being groomed to run that organisation.

Lydia Boulanger, Interpol agent, to Chase: Richard was the heir apparent to the Cartel. Your mother, as founder of the Cartel, saw to his education herself even though she concealed her identity from him.

Richard on himself and Armand Debaux: We had the same background, he and I. Educated at the Cartel’s expense, trained to run the organisation, but filled with defiance, the kind of defiance that gets you killed if you’re not careful.

Richard to Pamela Lynch: I bet you won a lot of spelling bees.

Maggie: Do you remember in New York once, you were about four or five years old, we went to this very, very fancy restaurant and we ordered lobster?
Cole: Right, and they let you select the lobster right out of the tank, right?
Maggie: Right. And you named your lobster Larry! So anyway, the waiter brings this poor lobster to the table, it’s quite dead obviously, you take one look at Larry the Lobster and you started to shriek, to cry to beat the band.
Cole: Of course. Larry the Lobster was a goner and it was all my fault.
Maggie: Yeah well, we were all so upset I think everybody ended up eating hamburgers.

Chase to Cole: When you were little, just a little guy, we used to wrestle over the floor. You were the strongest damn little five-year old I’d ever seen.

Nicole Sauget: My family lived in Indo-China for many years.

Chase: My father gave me this [a lucky coin] when I went to Vietnam. I like to think it kept me flying.

Chase: [I spent] three years in Vietnam.

Nicole: During the Vietnam War, the Americans turned my home into a hospital. Chase flew in soldiers, children, anyone who needed medical attention.

Nicole on Chase: The man who saved little children — that was the man I loved.

Angela: I hear you two [Nicole and Chase] had quite a fling in Vietnam.
Nicole: Yes, quite a fling indeed.

Nicole: When Chase was in Vietnam, we were lovers. For five years, Chase was like a husband to me.

Nicole on Chase: He loved me.
Maggie: He may have used you, he was a long way from home, but if he did, it was because he wanted to save himself the five dollars every night.
Nicole: I’ll tell you what he used to say about you — poor little Maggie who would never fit in with his social class.

An extract from a letter dated July 30th, 1967: “Darling, the hour is late and I’m alone with thoughts of you. I pray for this awful war to be over. I miss you, but even though we are far away from each other, right now I am not lonely. I feel you with me in my thoughts, in my heart, where you have been with me since the day we met. Please come home to me. Love, Maggie."
Chase: ’67, I [was in] ‘Nam. I carried those letters with me throughout my tour of duty.

Maggie: You and Chase were never lovers. He never loved you. He didn’t even like you very much.
Nicole: Then why did he give me his dog tags?
Maggie: You stole them, I’m sure.

Paul Salinger: So there I was in the middle of a rice paddy, mud up to my eyeballs, pinned down by a whole platoon of Vietnam infantry. My co-pilot's been shot, I can't get to my chopper and all of a sudden, like an itch, I'm starting to get religion. I mean, I thought I was a goner.
Cole: I take it you survived?
Paul: Thanks to my old buddy here [Chase]. He swooped down in his chopper, plucked me out of the crossfire. I was so busy saying my Hail Marys I didn't even know we were airborne.

Paul on Chase: The only man I ever knew who could fly a chopper like it was a fighter plane.

Chase: I used to think I was invulnerable in the air. Vietnam, I never even came close to ditching a plane.

Paul on Chase: You should have seen him in the air. He was a master behind the controls. He could fly anything — choppers, gliders, jumbo jets.

Ben Landale: "Now hear this, Blue Eagle. Warm up the chopper, we have an ETD at 0400 …” I guess I got hooked on the job in ‘Nam.
Chase: I never got a chance to thank you for saving my life over there. I was in pretty bad shape after that ambush.

Chase to Ben Landale: Oh Ben, don’t give me your old line about the communists moving in!

Chase: I didn’t see any hand-to-hand combat, but I saw enough horror and violence to last me the rest of my life. One day in Saigon, just before the monsoon season, I watched a Vietcong officer walk up to a Vietnamese prisoner and blow his brains out. That POW couldn’t have been seventeen years old. When the gun went off, he screamed and gasped for air at the same time and cried out for help. He hit the ground, the life just drained out of him. It’s hard to forget images like that. They stick with you forever.

Paul: Hey Chase, you remember that first Christmas in Saigon? I swiped a quart of thirty-year-old scotch from the American Embassy and we knocked it off by midnight. I mean, we were so drunk the MPs had to tuck is in.
Chase: I got drunk because there were some things I wanted to forget.

Pamela Lynch, speaking in 1984: Your drunk act was a command performance.
Richard: God knows I rehearsed it enough in the old days.

Chase: I’ve run for miles at a time, swim, shout, scream, even pounded a few walls.
Cole: What are you talking about?
Chase: Vietnam.
Cole: How many people you airlifted out of there were friends of yours?
Chase: It got to the point where I decided it wasn’t worth having friends anymore, not if they were going to get themselves killed, not if I was going to have to pick up the pieces.
Cole: Did you ever kill anybody?
Chase: I was a medivac pilot, not a gunner.
Cole: All right, but did anyone ever die because of you?
Chase: There was a morning. There was a little village about thirty miles south of the DMZ. It was shelled. There were dozens of casualties. We didn’t have time to take them all out. So the medics and I decided which ones we were going to save. We decided who was going to live and who was going to die. Lots of other times, too — more than I care to remember.

 

[James from London]

1968

Angela: When Dan Fixx was a little boy, his mother was almost killed in an automobile accident. I was the one who was driving that speeding car. She lived, but she never walked again. There was no husband, no relatives to take care of her and her son. With no means of support, the state was going to put him in a foster home. Now maybe the speeding car didn’t kill her but losing her son would have. So I took over their financial obligations.

Tucker Fixx to Dan: As I recall, Angela Channing is a woman to keep away from. I know she took care of your mother, I just never trusted her.

Angela on Dan: I watched him grow up.

Julia on Dan: He always had a dangerous look about him.

Angela to Dan: I’ve known you since you were a little boy and you’ve pulled wool over many people’s eyes, but not mine.

Lance to Dan: I never liked you, Fixx.

Rocky Cresant: I’ve always liked you, Dan. You’re like me. We’ve both got a little rebel in us.

Angela to Frank: Since she [Melissa] was a child, [Carlo] told her insidious lies about you.

Melissa: You tried to steal everything that belonged to my father.
Frank: Melissa, that’s not so.

Melissa: My father warned me about you, how you tried to cheat him out of everything he owned.

Melissa to Frank: You’re just as rude and arrogant as my father said you were.

Angela to Frank: Carlo robbed you of your half of the Agretti vineyards and threw you out of the valley.

Frank to Melissa: I never thought I’d see you again.

Frank in 1988: You haven’t forgotten me, huh?
Angela: Not even after twenty years.
Frank: You look exactly the same as the day they crowned you Raisin Queen of Tuscany Valley.

Dan Fixx to Melissa: I thought you always wanted to be the Queen of Tuscany Valley.

Melissa: When I was a little girl, I used to dream about becoming a nun.
Angela: It’s a pity you didn’t.

Melissa: When I was a little girl, my father always told me I was a thoroughbred. I believed him.

Pilar Ortega: I was a poor kid who had nothing. I wasn’t lucky enough to be born into Falcon Crest.

Richard to Pilar: You must have been quite a child — beautiful, proud, precocious — and poor, of course. What kind of fantasies does a child like that have? You fantasised that a prince will come along and rescue you and carry you off to his castle and you’ll live happily ever after?

Pilar to Lance: When I was little and working in the fields, I’d watch your family up in this big house and I’d dream that one day I’d live here too. Why not? Money, servants, fancy clothes. And I dreamed of having the handsomest man in the valley too. So I studied and I scraped and I worked my way up from the fields.

Pilar on Falcon Crest: When I was little, I used to pretend it was mine.

Lance to Pilar: You grew up here. You know how important the land is to these growers.

Pilar, speaking to Lance in 1989: I know your grandmother still sees me as a little peasant girl down the road, running around in bare feet and a torn dirty dress.

Lance on the Helios Club: I remember when I was a little boy, my grandfather used to bring me here. I always equated the smell of pipes and cigars with power.
Sidney “Max” Maxwell: As I remember, even as a little boy, you were always more Angela Channing’s grandson than Douglas’s.

Douglas to Lance: As far as I can remember, you’ve shunned this place [the Globe].

Angela: All little boys are drawn to power. Lance was.

Angela to Lance: I had plans for you, magnificent plans.

Angela on Falcon Crest: I had planned on leaving all this to Lance.

Pilar on Falcon Crest: Sometimes when I was a kid, I’d come up here [a hilltop] and sit and just look at it for hours.
Lance: When my grandmother first told me I was going to inherit Falcon Crest, I came up here to this very same spot.

Lance on Angela: I’ve always had her wrapped around my little finger.

Douglas to Lance: I’ve always envied your grandmother, having someone to take over for her.

Angela on Lance: I spent every waking hour coaching him, teaching him and grooming him to treasure what we have here. He was my young dark prince.

Lance: I had a good teacher.
Angela: Too bad you weren’t a better student.

Lori Chapman on Lance: You got him too early, Mrs Channing, moulded him early, obligated him early.
Angela: His heritage obligated him.

Lance: I didn’t grow up under Angela Channing’s wing for nothing.

Lance: Grandmother, you taught me everything I know about decency and fairness.

Lance to Angela: You taught me [to] take advantage of my circumstances.

Angela to Lance: You've had more opportunities than anyone.

Angela: Quaint as it may seem, Lance was raised to keep his word.

Lance to Julia: The one time in my life when I was happy was on that trip to Italy with you and dad, remember?

Lance to Julia: Remember that camping trip the three of us took up Russian River, you and Father and I? We camped out on some river bank and laughed and sang some old song together. It was about the last time I can remember feeling anything.

Tony to Angela: You took a fine young man and you twisted him.

Melissa on Lance: You totally dominated his life.
Angela: Of course I did. I had to.

Lance to Angela: My mother and I are the way we are because of you.

Angela on Lance: I created the monster.
Peter Stavros: It’s no-one’s fault. He chose his own path.

Lance on Angela: She's always told me I have to stand alone. I can't live like other people. I have to be able to make judgements without being influenced by anyone or anything.

Emma: Oh Lance, you've always been too suspicious for your own good.

Dan: I used to be a boy scout.

Apollonia: You were never a scout, Lance.
Lance: This is true.

Julia: Lance, I remember when you were a little boy, you used to be afraid to play in the winery.

Dorcas (Julia) to Lance: I remember when you were a little boy, you were afraid to play down there [the tasting room].

Cookie Nash to Angela: I used to be a little afraid of you when I was growing up, Mrs Channing, but I always admired you.

Father Christopher: I’ve never been afraid of getting my hands dirty.

Julia on Lance: He never even liked bicycles when he was growing up.

Richard: I used to ride [a motorbike]. Somehow riding in the back of a limousine doesn’t give you quite the same sense of freedom.

Diana Hunter, speaking about Katherine Demery in 1982: Originally from St Louis. Married Tom Demery fourteen years ago.

John Remick nee Ryder: My brother Peter had a little problem with drugs.
Maggie: Peter the senator?
John: I was the do-gooder, Mr Perfect. Peter liked to live on the edge, but he was ambitious so when he was about to get busted, I took the rap.

Lance to Senator Peter Ryder: John Remick saved your butt.

Richard: The name Remick did not exist before the Vietnam War.

Senator Peter Ryder, John Remick’s brother, speaking in 1988: I’ve only seen John a couple of times since he changed his name twenty years ago.

John: I was a very close friend of your husband’s.
Maggie: He never mentioned your name.
John: I’m sure he had his reasons.

John on Chase: It was a death pact we made in Vietnam. We were as close as brothers.
Maggie: So close he never bothered to tell me about you?

John to George Latham: You used to brag about every whorehouse in Saigon knowing you as Mike Berenson.

John: … And that’s when you changed your name to George Latham?
George Latham: Yes.
John: You hijacked the medical convoys?
George: Yes.
John: And then faked these invoices so it looked like you got the supplies in Europe?
George: Yes.
John: And then you sold them back to the Americans, the same people you stole them from?
George: Yes.
John: Do you know how many men died because they couldn’t get medicine, George?
George: I knew we were killing people. I finally went to the police, but Nicole found out and she burnt down the warehouses before they could be searched. Then she came after me. I was lucky that time.
John: How was Chase Gioberti involved in all this?
George: He was a friend of Nicole’s from the medivac. She used to get the convoy routes from him.
John: And he gave them to her?
George: No. She used to visit him in his office and look at his papers.

Angela to Nicole Sauget: You made your fortune by letting American soldiers die.

John to Nicole: Some of those guys you killed were my friends.

Nicole: I’ve spent my entire life trying to make up for this.
Angela: No, you haven’t. You haven’t been a model citizen.

John: I loved Chase. Chase once took a stomach full of shrapnel meant for me. He had a scar.

Maggie: You two must have been something together.
John on Chase: He was a hell of a guy.

1969

Julia: Mother pulled me out of the only relationship I ever had.

Angela: I never once interfered with your marriage.
Julia: You made me jealous of any woman he [Tony] even looked at. You made me feel like a failure.

Angela to Julia: Your marriage to Tony wasn’t my failure.

Tony: I tried. We both tried.
Julia: But we failed.

Angela on Julia and Tony: It was a dreadful union. He drove her to drink.

Tony on coping with Julia’s alcohol problem: There are just so many times you can rescue somebody.
Lance: How did you get through it?
Tony: Not as well as I might have. I ran away.
Lance: I guess I was too young to understand.

Lance: School picnic. I was eleven years old. I told you I wanted you to die.
Tony: Angela’s words, not yours.
Lance: I grew up in a snake pit, Dad. I wish to God somebody had pulled me out of there when I was a kid.
Tony: I tried. Angela fought me all the way.
Lance: I know.

Lance: I’ve never known my father to come through when it counted.

Julia on Angela: She made life so hard for my husband that he left.

Julia to Angela: Tony didn't leave me for another woman or because of my weaknesses. He left me because of you.

Melissa on Angela: She drove Tony away from you, didn’t she?
Julia: Yes.

Julia on Tony: He went out into the vineyard one morning and he didn't come back.

Lance on Tony: Why didn't you go with him?
Julia: Because he never asked me.

Julia to Lance: I loved your father [more than Falcon Crest], but I could never get up enough courage to leave here.

Julia on Tony: Twelve years without a letter, not even a phone call.

Lance: Where the hell were you when I needed you?
Tony: I left here because I had to, not because I wanted to get rich but because I needed some self-respect.

Tony: When I walked out on Julia, our problems seemed like more than I could handle. Then I had to live with the regret, which was a whole lot worse.

Tony, speaking in 1982: I’ve spent the last fifteen years on offshore oil rigs.

Lance: I remember when I was about eleven, Grandmother took me to my first opera. Remember, Chao Li? Seemed like it went on for weeks.
Emma: You fell asleep and started to snore.
Lance: She took my allowance away for a whole month.
Emma: We had such wonderful times.

Angela: The most wonderful pas de deux I’ve ever seen in my life was Nureyev and Fonteyn in Romeo and Juliet. It was just delightful.

Maggie to Vicky: I’ve watched you rush into things your whole life.

Vicky: We Giobertis are a strong breed. We learn very young how to take care of ourselves.

Maggie to Chase: Do you remember that vacation we took in Maine? Cole was about seven, Vicky was four, and that lake was so cold. I don’t think you and I ever went into it. Of course, the kids, they were in and out all the time. How much fun we used to have. We really had a good time, didn’t we?

Danny Sharpe, speaking in 1990: What about when you were my age [nineteen]?
Michael Sharpe: I was never your age.

Michael: Remember when I was nineteen years old? I cut a swathe through Wall Street like nobody had ever seen before. I brought the game to a new level.

Michael on Lauren: The sixties are never gonna end for that chick.

Richard: In the past, I’ve always enjoyed the energy and the content and the style that has been a trademark of The Globe.

Ralph Delaney: It took me thirty years to break out of the sports department and into feature writing.

Ralph: I’ve always picked my own staff.

 

[James from London]

1970

DA Fred Wilkerson on Falcon Crest: All the years I’ve been district attorney I’ve never been invited here to dinner.

Angela: Every time I think of your sister, I remember the beautiful roses she used to grow. She won prizes for then, didn’t she?
DA Wilkerson: Yes, many prizes.

Angela: This is a 1970 Cabernet Sauvignon. It's the first wine Julia made for Falcon Crest. Julia, why don't you tell [us] how you gave this wine such a rich bouquet?
Julia: Well, you must blend in some grapes from a soil with a very high limestone content.
Angela: Like the soil on [Jason's] property.

Lance to Julia: You taught me everything I know about winemaking.

Maggie: I was never particularly interested in wine. Before I moved here [the valley], I guess I hardly knew the difference between Chardonnay and Cabernet.

Michael Sharpe: I never used to think much about wine. I never drank the stuff. Occasionally, I’d look over in a restaurant and see people performing this silly ritual. I never quite got it. I mean, we’re Americans. We don’t care. We’re into Steak 'n Shake. Then it dawned on me. There’s something quite dainty and civilised about wine and cheese and apples. Maybe those French know something after all.

Julia: Lance just seemed to grow overnight.

Curtis Esterbrook: What was it like growing up at Falcon Crest?
Lance: Just like any other family except we dressed for dinner.
Curtis: Black tie?
Lance: Shoulder holsters.

Tony on Lance: He grew up without ever learning that actions have consequences.
Julia: He grew up without a father.

Julia: After Tony left and I was alone, I felt [Lance needed a father].

Phillip on Jacqueline: She married her next husband, a Belgian art dealer.

Diana Hunter, speaking about Katherine Demery in 1982: She has a twelve-year-old son, Tyler.

George Buckman, speaking in 1987: I’ve worked this land seventeen years.

Anne Bowen to Michael Sharpe: Your courage is the one thing about you I always admired.

Anne to Michael: When you want to be, you’re the most charming man in the world. The charm dazzled me once.

Richard: I know how charming Michael can be. We were business partners for years. We made each other rich.

Richard on Michael: I know how he operates. I taught him.

Michael to Richard: The first deal you and I ever made together, what was it? A paper bag company. I floated a million in junk to raise the capital. The first time anybody had ever done it, long before Milken. We made our bones on that deal. That’s when we thought it was about money.

Sal Tortino to Richard: That LBO back in Harveston — a work of art how you and Sharpe pulled it off. Everybody getting on your case about shutting that plant down, all that “widows and orphans on the street” crap. If history proves one thing, it’s that the little guys always get left behind. It’s the movers and shakers like yourself that we’ve got to follow.

Anne on Richard: I didn’t know him well at all, really. He was just one of Michael’s business partners.

Anne on Lauren: It’s funny you never knew her in the old days.
Richard: Sharpe was never one to mix family and business. Actually, it was an accident I ever met you.
Anne: Yeah, I remember.

Anne to Michael: Before we were married, I was seeing someone else.

Lauren to Danny Sharpe: Before your mom and dad got married, your mother had a relationship with Richard. Anne went on to marry Michael.

Anne on Richard: Afterwards, I kept on seeing him. I wasn’t proud of it but I did.

Lauren on Richard and Anne: The two of you were in love.

Anne, speaking to Richard in 1990: Twenty years ago, I bounced back and forth between the two of you and almost didn’t recover. We used to have a lot of conversations, remember? “Are you in love with Michael? Will you leave him? Do you love me?”

1971

Elliot McKay, speaking to Chase in 1982: You have the same spit and fire my son [Ed] had when he ran for that seat [on the Tuscany Valley County Board of Supervisors] eleven years ago.

Angela: Elliot never did know how to manage money.

Angela: McKay’s crops have always been of the very best.
Chase: He’s fought you for years.

Melissa: I was just thinking of the time Liz Vosberg called me a nerd and then she fell off the ski lift.
Lance: Oh yeah, back in eighth grade.

Angela to Cookie Nash: You and Lance used to play up here [Falcon Crest] all the time when you were children.

Pilar: Remember when I used to play with Lance and Melissa? I never once got invited to their homes.

Pilar: I remember once the three of us were playing together, you, Melissa and me, and you two left to go to her birthday party. I wasn’t invited.
Lance: You didn’t miss anything.
Pilar: Yeah, I did — a lot.

Pilar: Oh Lance, I have loved you longer than you’ll ever know.

Angela to Lance: You always did have the worst taste in women.

Nicole Sauget to Maggie: We [her and Chase] didn’t stop loving each other just because he came home to you.

Cole to Chase: We haven't been off camping since I was nine.

Cole: All my life, I always thought you could do anything. There I was, always bringing up the rear, always screwing up.
Chase: That's funny, I never saw you that way at all.
Cole: I never thought I could measure up to you.

Lauren: I remember the last time the three of us were together in a hospital.
Michael Sharpe: The day Danny was born.
Anne Bowen: Yeah, that was a good day.
Michael: Do you realise we were the same age then that Danny is now [nineteen]?
Lauren: I remember how cold it was, even for Boston in February.
Anne: Ten below zero.
Lauren: And there was this power failure and your apartment was freezing.
Anne: I was all bundled up like an Eskimo.
Lauren: And we couldn’t get the car started, we couldn’t find a taxi.
Anne to Michael: You practically carried me to the hospital.
Michael: It was only three blocks.
Anne: It would have been easier if I’d walked, you know.
Michael: No wife of mine is going to walk herself to the hospital to have a baby.
Anne: I was holding onto you for dear life and you were slipping all over the ice.
Michael: I only fell twice.
Anne: That was the peak, that day. As miserable as I was, I really felt like you loved me.
Michael: Did you ever tell Danny that story?

Anne: No, I don’t think I did.

Michael: Danny, I have loved you since the moment you were born.

Michael to Danny: You never went a day without some gratuitous pampering because you were my son.

Anne to Michael: When Danny was born, I had some tests taken. They confirmed my suspicions. Danny isn’t your child. He’s Richard Channing’s.

Lauren to Danny: Richard is your father. Only Anne knew. She had you tested as a baby. It was conclusive.

Anne: I still remember the last time I saw you. You were trying to make peace between me and Michael. There was a huge shouting match and Michael stormed out and you went after him.
Lauren: I was all he had. I couldn’t desert him even if I knew he was wrong. I’m sorry.
Anna: Oh no, I understood.

Michael: I’ll tell you what was exciting. It was being twenty years old and having Wall Street titans twice my age pulling out all the stops just to get next to me, hanging on my every word, throwing money at me.
Danny: That’s how old you were when I was born. How does that compare?
Michael: I was too young to be your father. I couldn’t fathom what it meant. I was neck-deep in the soup.

Michael: You got to admit, that was one good thing about being married to me — I never chased after women.
Anne: Yeah, including me. You barely knew I was there.
Michael: I had an agenda. There were things I had to do. You never understood that.
Anne: I never understood how you could be gone so much and still expect to have a marriage.
Michael: It was work, always work.
Anne: Other men work too, Michael. They don’t walk out on their wives and three-month-old child.
Michael: It was wrong to leave you, I admit it. I was just a kid.

Michael on a framed picture of him, Anne and Danny: You threw it at me when we split up. You had a wicked right arm.

Michael to Danny: I should never have run out on you when you were little.

Michael on Anne: There’s so much she’s never forgiven me for.

Anne, speaking about Michael in 1990: For twenty years, I’ve had this image of him as a kind of monster with the soul of a devil and the mind of a cash register.
Lauren: Michael’s always had another side.

Lauren to Michael: I always thought [Anne] was the best partner for you.

Anne on Michael: I doubt he’s given me one thought in twenty years.

Frank Agretti on his son Nick: I wasn’t there when he needed a father.

Melissa: You must have been one hell of a rotten father, Uncle Frank.

Frank Agretti to Nick: I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I’ve always loved you.

Nick Agretti to his father Frank: You took me on that trip, the city was New York — the Empire State Building, Bronx Zoo, the Mets at Shea Stadium — and then you’d leave town.

Nick to Frank: There was never a deal you could pass up.

Frank, speaking in 1988: We haven’t seen each other in years.
Nick: Seventeen years to be exact. Where the hell were you — some emerald mine, some country thousands of miles away from me?
Frank: I saw you whenever I could, whenever I was allowed to, whenever I was in New York.
Nick: Well, once every three years does not exactly establish a father/son relationship.
Frank: I know that. I just didn’t stay anywhere too long in those days. Your mother made it very clear she didn’t want me around. Doesn’t mean I didn’t love you.
Nick: You were a vagabond, Frank.

Frank: Angie, you know damn well I tried. Over and over, I tried to patch things up with Nick.

Frank: Your dad and I — well, he could never really accept the kind of man I am and I could certainly never be the kind of man he wanted me to be.
Ben Agretti, Nick’s son: I think he just wanted you to be there for him.
Frank: Well, his mother was certainly there for him. He had one good parent. I made mistakes he can’t forgive me for. Hell, I made a lot of mistakes I can’t forgive me for.

1972

Jacqueline, speaking in 1982: You've come a long way since your father's Chiantis, Angela.
Angela: We were making good vintages when that winemaker you were married to was still stomping grapes with his feet.

Julia: Jacqueline's been living in France all of these years enjoying the finest things that life has to offer [while Angela's] been here, obsessed with Falcon Crest.

Angela: Have you been happy all these years?
Jacqueline: Happier than if I'd stayed here at Falcon Crest.
Angela: I doubt if you'd have been happy here. After all, we have to fight for what we have.

Angela speaking to Chase in 1987: Where were you fifteen years ago when it didn’t rain for six months and I watched all the vines wither?

Phillip Erickson, speaking in 1982: Richard Channing has spent over half a million dollars over the past ten years looking for his mother and not finding her.

Richard: I’ve spent my life searching for my mother. I suppose I’ve rehearsed reunion scenes thousands of times in my mind. As a kid, I always dreamed of greeting her with open arms, but as I got older, my resentment grew to the point where the only excuse I’d accept was death. I wanted my search to lead to my mother’s grave.

Jacqueline to Richard: My last husband’s fortune gave me enough to push Denault aside and I took over [the Cartel], knowing I could be closer to you.

Richard: Why didn’t you tell me my mother was the head of the Cartel?
John Osborne: I was her attorney. I was sworn to secrecy.

Richard to his assistant, Diana Hunter: You have been telling me lies from Day One, lady.

Henri Denault: In all my years with the company, I’ve only seen my boss twice.
Richard: I always thought you were the highest level.

Richard on Henri: He never cared for me. All the time I was his deputy lieutenant.

Richard: All you wanted was a talisman in your own image, somebody to do your dirty work.
Henri: That’s not true.
Richard: It is, and I did it and it was dirty.

Phillip, speaking about Richard in 1982: Over the past several years, he’s been working as a power broker wherever large sums of money have changed hands - from energy cartels to world banking, from Asian refugee transport to war in the Middle East.

Richard: I was involved with evil, the worst kind of evil. They wouldn’t let me go. They wanted to take my soul.

Richard: Someone told me once that a truly good offer is accepted even before it’s made.

Richard: I have always, always kept my private and my professional lives separate. Always.

Stephanie Hoffman: When I met Richard, I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. My father was grooming him to take over the business. I was used. Richard used me like a pawn in his power game.

Cassandra Wilder: You were married. Why didn’t you ever have children?
Richard: There was Lorraine and she was like my own.

Richard on Lorraine: Her real father abandoned the family. I raised her. I had to. I used to take her across the street to Central Park and we’d fly a kite all day long till it got so dark you couldn’t see it.

Richard to Lorraine: I always wanted you to be proud of me.

Lance on Angela: All I’ve ever wanted is for her to be proud of me.

Julia to Lance: All I ever wanted from you was love.

Richard: I’ve always been afraid to take a chance on love, always held a part of myself back.

Richard, speaking in 1986: I had a vasectomy years ago.

Lorraine to Richard: When I was a little child, I always ran to you for help. You were always there for me.

Lorraine: My lucky shilling. I found it outside Westminster Abbey when I was just a little girl.

Richard on Henri: He gave me [a pocket watch] years ago.
Diana: He said it was a momento, a symbol of his support.

Richard: For years, I have been searching for an authentic colonial marionette.

Melissa: When I was a kid, I used to love reading Nancy Drew. Every month, I used to get another one of her books in the mail. I always thought my father sent them, but he’d never admit it.
Frank: Your father wouldn’t know the difference between Nancy Drew and Betty Boop.
Melissa: OK, so who sent me those books, huh?
Frank: My guess is that that nice old uncle was teaching you to be a real Agretti.

Melissa on Robin Agretti: She was very sweet. Growing up we were more like sisters than cousins.

Melissa on Robin: I remember when we were kids, I used to dress her up in all my cast-off things and fix her hair. She adored me. She used to follow me around like a little puppy dog. This used to be my doll but I used to let her sleep with it whenever she came over. Do you know what she used to call it? Missy — my nickname.

Robin: All the fantastic things you’ve done for me.
Melissa: What fantastic things? Just a few old toys and clothes I didn’t even need anymore. Most of the time I didn’t even know about it.
Robin: Well, when you aren’t used to nice things, hand-me-downs can make a big difference. To me, you were like some movie star, rich and beautiful, living in this huge old house. I remember every one of your birthday parties. I felt so lucky to be your cousin.

Melissa: Did I ever tell on you when we were kids?
Robin: Never.

Dan on Melissa: The same little bossy boots I used to sit next to in high school. Same little flirt too.

Melissa to Dan: We almost got things going a couple of times when we were kids.

Melissa to Dan: You’ve been turning me down all my life.

Lance: You were a jerk in high school.
Dan: You know, I was the only kid who wasn’t impressed with your money.
Lance: That’s crap.
Dan: I know. I just liked yanking your chain. You never could keep your temper.

Michael Ranson, speaking to Dr Lilian Heller in 1984: [It’s been] twelve years [since we last met].

George Buckman, speaking in 1987: It’s been fifteen years since I was a deputy [sheriff].

Richard, speaking in 1982: The [Tuscany Valley] railroad spur ran from the main tracks down to the old Davalos Winery.
Diana: The Davalos Siding. That was torn up about ten years ago after the winery burnt down

Carl Reed on Chase: Decorated for heroism in Vietnam.

John Remick: After Vietnam, I just moved to another country, another war. Maybe that’s what I do best, fight other people’s battles.

Richard on John Remick: Ten years in the jungle could turn any man into a snake in the grass.

Nicole Sauget to Maggie: When the war was over and I had nothing left, I returned to France and for the next five years I waited for Chase to divorce you and return to me. And for the next ten years, I waited for you to die.

Angela: Did your family own the Corsalt Chemicals?
Nicole: It was a long while back. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of the company.
Angela: Well I should, I bought stock in it. And I lost a great deal of money when it went bankrupt. I recouped, but whatever happened to your board of directors? They were such charming men. Have you heard from Pierre Charbieur?
Nicole: He was killed in a car crash some years ago.
Angela: What about Howard Jeffers?
Nicole: He died too.
Angela: And then there was that fellow, George Latham.

Nick Agretti, speaking in 1988: Your mother and I were just kids, a couple of years older than you are now [fifteen]. I was in school in Northern Italy. Her father owned a vineyard nearby. He was rich and very powerful.
Ben Agretti: Did she have a name?

Nick: Anna. Anna Cellini.

Angela on Ben’s parents: How did they meet?
Ben: My dad was going to school in Italy, learning about wine and stuff. She just lived nearby.

Ben: How did you and my dad meet?
Anna: At the Festival of St Antonio. There was dancing in the street and all the girls wanted to dance with him.
Ben: How come?

Anna: He was handsome and the only American we knew. Very exotic. I fell in love with him that moment.

Nick on him and Anna: We fell in love.

Anna: Remember how you would sneak into the house and up to my room at night?
Nick: I’d wait until I saw the lights go out in your parents’ room.
Anna: Lucia found out once and threatened to tell Papa, but I made her promise not to.
Nick: I never knew that.
Anna: I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d stop coming.
Nick: Nothing would have stopped me.
Anna: Every time you entered my room, I would look at you and think it was not possible to love someone as much as I loved you. There is one night that I recall more than all the others. We had the picnic on the hillside overlooking Torino and then we made love. The lights from down below made it seem like a fairy tale. Do you remember?

Nick: It was the most special night of my life. I didn’t want the morning to ever come.

Nick: She got pregnant.
Ben: And you weren’t married?
Nick: No. Her father was outraged. He had a few of his men “teach me a lesson,” as he called it.

 

[James from London]

1973

Chase, speaking about Maggie in 1982: She's been freelancing [as a writer] for eight and a half years.

Dr Hooks, speaking in 1983: [Dr] Hal Lantry has given ten years of his life to this [Tuscany Valley] hospital.

Nick Hogan, speaking in 1983: I’ve been with Sheila for ten years.

Nick Hogan: Remember that weekend we spent at Mount Shasta, right after we were married? Took a little house down by the lake.
Sheila Hogan: And it snowed.
Nick: Yeah, middle of October, who would’ve believed it? No firewood.
Sheila: So you broke up the kitchen table and chairs.
Nick: Burned everything but the bed.
Sheila: That’s only because I wouldn’t get out of it. You kept tickling me.

Ed Meyers, attorney, speaking in 1990: I’ve known Michael [Sharpe] for seventeen years.

Danny Sharpe, speaking about Michael in 1990: What are we, his slaves? If he makes all the decisions, what does he need us for?
Ed: When I first went to work for Michael Sharpe, I asked myself the same questions and I’m old enough to be his father, but I quickly realised something. This was no ordinary smart-mouthed kid. This was a genius.

Angela: Where were you born — in France?
Ben Agretti: No, I was born in Italy — somewhere up north, I guess.

Nick Agretti on Anna’s father: He sent Anna to a convent. That’s where you were born. They were going to put you up for adoption, but Anna got word to me and I tried to get her to take you and run away with me.
Ben: Why didn’t you two just get married?

Nick: Cellini said no and Anna was afraid of her father. I was too. I couldn’t stand up against him. I was just a kid.

Frank Agretti to Ben: [Nick] was only a kid himself when you were born. He didn’t have to accept that responsibility, but he did. At that age, I don’t think I would have done.

Anna Cellini: Ben, the day they took you away from me, it was the worst day of my life. That day and the day Tonio died.

Ben: How did you get me away from the nuns then?

Nick: One day I walked into the convent yard and there you were, laying on a blanket on the grass. A nun was trimming roses nearby and then she stepped into the potting shed and I made my move.
Ben: You kidnapped me?

Nick: Sounds incredible, but it’s the truth. I was desperate. I wasn’t going to let you slip away. You were my son.

Nick: Nothing on earth could have made me give up my child, but I walked away from Anna.

Nick on Anna: She was just a kid. She was afraid of her father, afraid of responsibility.
Ben: What was wrong with me?
Nick: Oh Ben, it wasn’t you.
Ben: Why didn’t she want me then? Why did she leave me?
Nick: She was a wonderful girl — beautiful, smart — but scared. We both were.

Nick to Ben: I wasn’t going to take any chances so I took you to France.

Nick on Anna’s father: For years, I’ve been running from that bastard.

Nick on Anna’s father: He made her marry another vineyard owner. They had a son.

Anna Cellini: For years, I wondered what you were like and hoped you were just like Nick.
Ben: Why didn’t you ever try to look for us?
Anna: I didn’t have a father like yours. My mother is dead. I had no-one to talk to. He made me believe I had done something wrong by loving your father. It wasn’t until years later when I realised it was the only good thing I had done in my life.

Nick: Years ago when this whole thing started, I made a choice not to tell you the truth until you were old enough to understand. I was certain that I was making the right choice, to protect you.
Ben: Why?
Nick: Fear.

Ben: You lied to me. You let me grow up all these years thinking [Anna] was dead.
Nick: I was only seventeen, I was scared and I’ve been living with that fear ever since.
Ben: I deserved to know. Didn’t you think that I might want to see my mother, to see her, to touch her, to know that I had a mom? You were cheating your own son.

Nick: It’s not as if I wanted to hurt you, but if you’d known she was alive you’d have wanted to see her. That wasn’t possible.
Ben: You lied to me.
Nick: Yes, but to me, it was as if she had died. I never lied to you before, but I did what I thought was right.

Nick on him and Ben: All we’ve ever had was each other. I’ve done my best but it’s been hard on him.

Ben to Anna: I always thought that I’d done something wrong and that’s why I didn’t have a mom. I mean I wanted you so much, I didn’t know if I could ever forgive you for leaving me.

Connie Giannini: I’ve got a fairly consistent track record with men. I have been put down, stood up and stuck with the cheque most of my life.

Connie on Larry Michaelson: I [dealt with him] first in person when I was a very young girl - I was impressionable, trusting - and then as a memory that was awfully hard to erase. We had an affair. I was so much in love with him. He was so charming. He was a man of the world to me. Even though I knew that he was married and that he had children, he told me that he had intended to leave his marriage long before he ever met me. Well, he never did of course. Mother and Father never knew about it. On the other hand, they didn’t quite understand why I went to Paris.

Connie: I left this valley to forget about you and I did just that, Larry, after a few terrible years I might add.

Larry to Connie: I never stopped loving you.

Genele Ericson to Danny Sharpe: I don’t need you to tell me what I am. Believe me, I’ve had a lot of help getting this way. Men have been coming on to me every day of my life since I was thirteen years old. They say they want me, but they don’t. They don’t see me, they don’t know me, they don’t care about me, just my body, and when they’re finished with it, they move on. You get used often enough, you become a user yourself.

Genele: All my life I’ve belonged to one man or another.

1974

Roberts, vintner, speaking in 1986: Twelve years I’ve sold to Falcon Crest.

Angela: We're so much alike, so independent.
Douglas Channing: And what has this independence gotten us?
Angela: A lovely dinner four or five times a year with a dear friend.

Angela: I've watched your career over all the years, Arthur.
Arthur Masefield: Why didn't you ever come to see me in Vermont?
Angela: Well, I had a business to run and my family needed me here.
Arthur: You weren't just a little afraid we might become involved again?
Angela: Of course not.

Peter Stavros, speaking in 1985: How long has it been — ten years, eleven?
Angela: A lot longer than I wanted it to be.
Peter: You broke my heart.

Lance: I never thought I'd fall in love.

Lance on the Falcon Crest lake: When we were kids, we all used to come down here and spend hours — talk, swim all day long. When Melissa and I were teenagers, this used to be our favourite spot.

Pilar: Do you remember when we were kids and we used to come here swimming?
Lance: Yeah, I remember.

Angela on Lance when he was sixteen: He was such fun and full of life.

Melissa on a lakeside gazebo: This is my favourite place in the whole world. My father had it built for my sixteenth birthday.

Melissa: My father built this [gazebo] for my mother. They used to have all their intimate dinners right there.

Carlo on Melissa: She is just like her mother was. She has a mind of her own.

Vicky: I was eleven. My mother and I had “the talk”. I remember every word. She said, “Vicky, one of these days, boys are going to …”

Genele Ericson: My relationship with my father was not very good. That must be the understatement of the year. We hated each other. When I was fifteen years old, he caught me parked with my boyfriend so what does he do? Throws me out of the house. No discussions, I’m just out on the street. I haven’t spoken to him since.
Danny: That’s really sad.
Genele: Well, it’s not just sad and it’s not just tragic. It’s a lifetime spent wondering “why, what did I do wrong?” A lifetime of self-destruction to make up for that lack of love.

John Remick on his ambassador father: I haven’t spoken to him in years.

Michael Ranson in 1984: I haven’t played [the piano] in ten years.

Dr Arthur Hooks: Michael Ranson was one of the best neurosurgeons in the country.

Chase to Michael: You practically wrote the book on neurosurgery.

Dr Roderick: Michael and I were on staff in Baltimore and we came to depend on each other’s opinion, professionally and otherwise.

Maggie on Michael’s wife: Annie. They were devoted to each other.

Michael speaking in 1984: Ten years ago my wife and I were driving through a small town in western Massachusetts. A truck ran a red light and ploughed into us. I was OK but they took Ann away in an ambulance to a small hospital in town. The doctor on duty was a young guy with no neurosurgical experience. She had an epidural haemorrhage. She was bleeding internally. She was dying and she needed surgery and I was the only one qualified to perform an operation so I went inside and I lost her.

Chase to Michael: What happened to Ann was not your fault.

Maggie on Michael and Annie: When she died it just shattered him.

Sheriff Robbins: My father died on the operating table.

Francesca Gioberti, speaking in 1984: I’ve been without a husband for ten years.

Michael: Ever since Ann’s death. I’ve known I could never be a surgeon again.

Michael, speaking in 1983: I haven’t practised [medicine] in almost ten years.
Arthur: You threw in the towel, you went to research.

Michael, speaking in 1984: I’ve been away for ten years doing research.
Chase: Valuable and necessary work.
Michael: I’ve been hiding from myself and from the fear that I would ever have to operate on another human being and fail.

Mr Spheeris, Cartel henchman, to Richard: You worked with Mr Crane at the Van Enger Shipping offices in Geneva, didn’t you?

Richard: Geneva, 1974. As I recall, you weren’t too happy about being assigned to work for me.
Norton Crane: Frankly, I should have managed the operation but my mother wasn’t the head of the Cartel.
Richard: I didn’t even know who my mother was back then, let alone that she ran things here [New York].
Norton: That didn’t stop her from sending you to the head of the class. I worked hard to get to the top.

Richard on Norton: He managed to juggle Van Enger’s books to his advantage.

Richard: I watched you in Geneva, Norton, routing money in and out of the country, always managing to siphon off a little for yourself.
Norton: That’s a lie.
Richard: Logging ships in dry dock when actually they were working the high seas carrying oil out of the Persian Gulf, your oil. You even managed to do business with the Iranians during the Great Boycott - a federal offence.

Norton on Richard: You’ve always had an obstinate streak in you. It’s served you well in the past.

Pamela Lynch on Terry: She lived in Florida.

Pamela on Joel McCarthy: A mechanic who raced stock cars.

Pamela: You sound like you spent a little time in the UK.
Joel McCarthy: Yeah, I raced stock cars there.

Terry on Joel: He was such a sweet guy when I met him.

Joel to Terry: How great it was for us the first time, for both of us.

Joel: First love - it’s never like that again.
Terry: It was something special, wasn’t it?

Joel to Terry: We had something really great going once.

Joel to Terry: I remember nights you couldn’t wait to leave a party and go home with me.

Joel: Remember how much fun we used to have, cruising through Florida up and down the coast?
Terry: That was before you fell in love with cocaine.
Joel: But I’ve always been in love with you.

Terry to Joel: You were such a sweet guy before you got strung out on that lousy stuff. I really loved you then.

Terry on Joel: I was married to him a long time ago in Florida.

Terry on Joel: He got hooked on cocaine, even starting peddling it.

Terry to Joel: You made a fool out of me.

Terry to Joel: I know how you operate. That’s why I left you.

Pamela on Terry: She split from him, filed for divorce and ran off to New York for a bigger and better life.

Terry: I paid a lawyer five hundred bucks to have our marriage annulled when you got busted, Joel.

Joel to Terry: Your attorney never bothered to file the final papers. You put your trust in the wrong guy.

Pamela: The divorce never became final.

Angela on Terry: A series of menial jobs for several years.

Melissa to Joel: You have a real nice criminal record in Florida.

 

[Franko]

Something I'm noticing (or think I'm noticing) about this particular oral history: it feels like there's many more participants. With Dynasty, the players were more than happy to tell their own stories. That's certainly true here, but we're also getting many more vineyard employees, doctors, etc. I loved the Dynasty one so much because of its scale, but I like this one so much because it feels like something deeper's going on. It might not be canon, but the idea of Julia being a mother in her early adolescence is a good example of this.

Also, I'm getting excited for the inevitable (I hope) Dallas and Knots Landing histories.

 

[James from London]

1975

Chase, speaking in 1982: August 1975 - that’s a long time for a man of Carlo Agretti’s stature to go without paying his property taxes.

Cassandra Wilder, speaking about Helios Foods in 1985: I’ve been handling their advertising for years.

Cookie Nash: My name is Diane. I stopped being Cookie when I graduated from Miss Barclay’s.

1976

Chase: [Charles] Fong used his uncle as a reference when he went to work for Agretti [as a gardener].

Charles Fong: Mr Agretti was a powerful figure, a rich man, but he had no heart. To him, we were nothing. My mother was never allowed to leave China.

Melissa to Carlo: You’ve always said that power is land.

Richard: Power’s always been a substitute for people in my life.

Michael Sharpe: I used to hate firing people. It’s like I was crushing their skulls or something. I could see their eyes pop out of their head, that look of panic of their face when they started gasping for breath, the lame excuse, “b-b-but Mr Sharpe, I …” You feel bad, but you know it’s got to be done. Then one day I realised, firing people’s a good thing. Not for them, of course, but for me, Makes you stronger.

Angela on Jim Ruddick: He thought the whole world should be a national park. Didn't believe in developing the land. When Jim bought his property, three hundred acres of undeveloped land, there was a sizeable reservoir. He didn't maintain it very well.

Angela, mid-anecdote: … So I told him to move the factory or I'd blow it up.

Lance: My grandmother built this [tennis] club,
Terry Hartford: Is there anything in this town your grandmother didn’t build?
Lance: No.

Phillip on Angela: A woman who has by her devotion, her dedication, her brilliance, established this valley as one of the great wine growing centres of the world.

Carl Reed, vintner, on Angela: She's certainly been important for the valley.

Sheriff Turk on Angela: She’s done an awful lot for this county.

Sheriff Turk: Jason was a big part of this community.

Sheriff Turk to Chase: Your father had a reputation of tying one on every now and then.

Emma: Jason and I always used to drink brandy together.

District Attorney Martin Deering: It was a matter of common knowledge that Jason Gioberti was a heavy drinker?
Sheriff Turk: I would say so, yes.

Lance on Jason: He knew his limits.

Sheriff Tobias to Chase: As I recall, your dad was pretty strange.

Gus on Jason: Well, they can say he was crazy, but I know better. He was just lonely.
Maggie: How could he be lonely? He must have known everyone in the valley.
Gus: That's true. He knew everyone, but here in this house, he had no one.

Chase on Jason: He really must have been unhappy to let this place [his house] get so rundown.

Mario Nunuoz, Gus’s son, on Jason: I liked him very much.

Mr Lomax: I bet I must have sold old Jason at least three transmissions [for his truck], a couple of clutches, maybe some wheel bearings.
Chase: You mean the truck never ran very well?
Mr Lomax: Let’s just say it was lucky to get up enough compression to do thirty-five on an open road.

Chase: I’ve logged commercial time on any kind of jet you can name.

Chase on Chicago: When I was flying here with the airline, I would go with the crew to a little place just near the Loop. It has the best pizza on the planet.

Chase: When I first started flying to Europe, I thought it was the most exciting thing anybody could do.

Chase: When I was flying, occasionally a malfunctioning instrument would act perfectly normal - no red lights, no alarms, no indication - and I’d get a feeling, an instinctual gut-level thing that something wasn’t quite right. And if I’d trusted that instrument, instead of my feelings …

Chase: All the thousands of people I’ve flown, I’ve flown safely.

Chase to Maggie: Remember Doug Everhart? We flew with Transatlantic together.

Chase: When we lived in New York, I was away most of the time.

Chase: I was always away when Vicky and Cole were little.

Chase Gioberti, speaking in 1981: I haven't been home for a birthday in years. They [his children] live through it.

Chase, speaking about Vicky in 1981: Seems like yesterday she wouldn't even talk to boys.

Cole to Chase: You'd walk out of the house and you'd pat me on the head and you'd say, "Take care of things, son." And I'd do my damnedest to take care of things, to be the man of the house till you got home. Then I'd just be a kid again, someone for you to order around.

Cole: I always wanted to be an archaeologist.

Maggie: When the kids were growing up and I didn’t have time to cook, everybody would do their own and it gave new definition to the word hodge-podge!

Mario Nunuoz: My grandmother taught us how to [make stained-glass windows].

Bill Reed, Carl's son, on river rafting: Did I ever tell you about the time I took a float trip by myself? It was late and on my way home, I stopped by Dad’s cabin out on the river. It was warm, I wanted to cool off so I grabbed an inner tube and went floating off down the river. There was a moon out and some stars up above and they floated along with me. I had some kind of an experience. I was moving along with the flow of the river and I slid into something like I was part of the river, floating along with every living thing.

Frank Agretti watching an old recording of a tennis match: That’s Queen’s Cup, seniors.
Genele Ericson, his sister-in-law: That was the year we met.
Frank: Those were good times. Those were innocent times.
Genele: Yes they were. We should have stayed that way. God, you were something on that court, Frank. I don’t think I was ever happier than when I was sitting courtside watching you play.

Frank: I was on the tour. I was one of the best. The tennis circuit. I broke the top ten four years in a row. Everybody knew I had what it took to be number one but they hadn’t counted on Genele and neither had I. I had Rosewell two sets to love in the Australian Open and I lost it in five. You want to know why I lost? That’s when she started playing her games with me. That’s when she made her move, coming to the matches with Renee, hanging around the locker room, tagging along with us everywhere we went. She was only a kid but even then she was a killer.

Philippe Hubert, speaking to Sofia Stavros in 1986: I’ve worked with your father for a decade now, but I never realised what a fool he could be.

Tommy Ortega, Cesar's eldest son: I’ve lived with prejudice all my life.

Gabriel Ortega, Cesar's youngest son, to Tommy: You never did any homework in your life.

Tommy: Pop was always tough with me. “You’ve got to be a man,” he would always say, but my mom was different. She was gentle, she was kind. She told me I was really smart and I could do anything I wanted to.

Pilar on Christmas cookies: We [her and her mother] used to make them together ever since I was old enough to mix the batter.
Gabriel: Did Mama let me help?
Pilar: “The girls cooked and the boys ate whatever the girls cooked.” That’s what Mama taught us.
Gabriel: She never heard of equal rights?
Cesar: She heard of it. She just never thought it applied to her.

Gus: I remember the time Alicia got a job in town. It was real hard getting used to her being away.
Chase: How did you feel deep down?
Gus: Angry. I never could figure out why — I'm not one of those guys who has to be waited on all day.

1977

Angela, speaking to Chase in 1987: Where were you ten years ago when we had that killer frost that made me the Raisin Queen of Tuscany?

Andrew Levitt: Years ago, Angela Channing and I had a verbal agreement. She wanted me to distribute Falcon Crest wines on the east coast so I reorganised my entire operation. At the last minute, she pulled out and went with Kleeger. No explanation, no apology. Kleeger and I have always been rivals.

Lance, speaking to a group of Falcon Crest workers in 1989: You guys have been working for Falcon Crest for twelve years now. I’ve never short-changed you.

Tony Cumson, speaking in 1982: I’ve spent the last five years as general manager of Optoco’s Alaskan fields.

Paul Hartford, speaking in 1984: I lost my wife seven years ago and it’s never easy picking up the pieces.

Paul on his wife: Suddenly she was gone.

Lauren: Walker, when I met you, you were the kindest, most decent person that I had ever met.

Lauren on Walker: We were together for five years before [we got married].

Michael Sharpe: Women are great, but don’t let them fool you. I met this one, married her and divorced her in a year and a half. Felt like a one night stand.

Lauren on Michael: I don’t think he’s ever gotten over you.
Anne Bowen: Oh come on, he’s been married three times since me!
Lauren: That’s the whole point. All the other wives had the same problem. They weren’t you.
Anne: Then why didn’t I get a letter or a phone call all these years?
Lauren: Because Michael knew he couldn’t control you and he’s terrified of anyone he can’t control.

Lauren: Why didn’t you ever get remarried?
Anne: Lots of reasons. I had to raise Danny, get a degree, build my career.

Anne: It was a struggle. I was young and I had Danny. When Michael moved to the West Coast, I stayed back east. He offered me money but I wouldn’t take any.
Lauren: That was foolish.
Anne: Yeah. It seems silly now, I suppose. Back then, I thought it was a matter of principle. Anyway, I hung in there and got my degree and then my doctorate. By that time, life at university was all I really knew so I became a professor. History.
Lauren: You never remarried?
Anne: After Michael, once was plenty.

1978

Lance, speaking to distributor Ned Vogel in 1989: Ned, we’ve been doing business for over ten years together.

Pamela Lynch on Lesley Perkins, a prostitute: She's a world-class professional. When I worked at European headquarters, [Jacqueline] hired her to blackmail a prime minister.

Maggie on Jacqueline: Cargo airlines, copper mines, goldmines, silver syndicates, hamburger franchises. [She] was certainly diversified.

Pamela: When I was with the Brussels office [of the Cartel], I fell in love with a French businessman. When the company found out our plans to marry, they told Armand to leave the country. He refused. He defied them.

Pamela on Armand Debaux, her fiancee: Jacqueline didn’t like his penchant for independence.

Pamela on Armand: One day he slipped and fell on the tracks of the metro. He was killed instantly.
Richard: An unfortunate accident.
Pamela: Armand had a limousine. He never took the metro. It was no accident.
Richard: Then I’m curious as to why you've stayed with the company.

Pamela: What happened between you and Stephanie?
Richard: The Cartel happened.
Pamela: And ruined everything, huh?
Richard: And it cost me a little girl.

Stephanie on Richard: He was beloved and adored and trusted by my family until one day we discovered he was an impostor stealing trade secrets for his adoptive father Henri Denault. They were planning to take over the business, a business my father wanted to give to him one day.

Lorraine Prescott on Richard: I wouldn’t call what he and my mother had a marriage.

Stephanie: The marriage was dissolved and I was devastated.

Richard: Your mother learned her mistake the hard way.
Lorraine: My mother’s parents weren’t exactly thrilled with you.
Richard: They were right.

Richard speaking to Lorraine in 1984: Stephanie and I were divorced six years ago. I think that was the last time I saw you.

Richard on Lorraine: The little girl in pigtails I left behind.

Richard: Why don’t you keep your bitter memories to yourself?
Stephanie: I did, for many years.

Peter Stavros on Sofia: I don't know when it happened, but she lost her innocence and I lost my Sofia.

Peter to Skylar: I never lost track of you, not once. I’ve always known where you’ve been, everything you’ve done. I gave up trying to contact you years ago — all those letters and no replies. I guess your mother did a pretty good job of running interference.

Kit Marlowe: You were the first person to buy one of my paintings, ‘A Woman with a Dream'. You had as much talent as I did. You know what I think your problem was? You were just never hungry.
Skylar: And you never knew how to pick your friends. That’s something I’ve never understood about you, how you could have such sensitivity for your art and so little sense about your life.

Melissa, speaking about her cousin Robin in 1984: I haven’t seen her since her family moved from Tuscany about six years ago.

Senator Peter Ryder on John Remick: He sent me this [a poison dart blow pipe] about ten years ago, a souvenir of two weeks he spent in Borneo paralysed. Got hit with a poison dart. Kind of like a bad Tarzan movie.

Nick Agretti on Ben: He’s been wanting to go to Disneyland since he was five years old.

Pilar on Gabriel: When he was five, he ran away from home. He took the kitchen stool with him, just in case he got tired and he wanted to sit down. But after a few yards, he got tired of lugging the kitchen stool so he came home.

Pilar: Gabriel was only five when our mother passed away. We thought with him being so young, he’d get over it fast, but he didn’t.

Tommy: When Mom died, I wouldn’t talk for months. Couldn’t sleep. It was never the same after that.

Pilar: For years after my mother died, I thought I kept seeing her in crowds because she was always on my mind.

Lance: I sometimes think of us going out together in high school. Then I remember we didn’t even go to the same school.
Pilar: My father would not have let me go out with you anyway. He said you were in with a fast crowd.
Lance: Yeah well, your dad was right.

Pilar, speaking in 1988: I think I’m old enough to choose my own friends.
Cesar: That’s what you thought ten years ago. I should have stopped it then. I was too easy. I trusted you.

Genele, speaking in 1990: Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been twelve years since my last confession. I’ve done so many things that I’m ashamed of, I don’t even know where to begin.

Something I'm noticing (or think I'm noticing) about this particular oral history: it feels like there's many more participants. With Dynasty, the players were more than happy to tell their own stories. That's certainly true here, but we're also getting many more vineyard employees, doctors, etc.

I know what you mean. I think it's because FC, however superficially, was about a wider community as well as a family. The Carringtons and Colbys didn't live and grow up around the people they did business with the way the Giobertis and Channings did.

I loved the Dynasty one so much because of its scale, but I like this one so much because it feels like something deeper's going on.

That's interesting. Putting this one together, it felt more fragmented than the DYNASTY history. That had more of a narrative throughline -- Adam's kidnapping, for example, is such a defining incident, which then has so many repercussions throughout the years. This saga felt harder to pin down somehow, but perhaps that makes it more mysterious.

the idea of Julia being a mother in her early adolescence is a good example of this.

Yes, it certainly adds another dimension to that story and that character.

Also, I'm getting excited for the inevitable (I hope) Dallas and Knots Landing histories.

Ha! Well, that won't be for a while yet!

 

[Franko]

That's interesting. Putting this one together, it felt more fragmented than the DYNASTY history. That had more of a narrative throughline -- Adam's kidnapping, for example, is such a defining incident, which then has so many repercussions throughout the years. This saga felt harder to pin down somehow, but perhaps that makes it more mysterious.

Oh, I definitely noticed the fragmenting, yes. It can be a little awkward, getting sections devoted to characters that are peripherally related to the main cast. On the other hand, it adds a feeling of inevitability in some cases, what happened is happening again. I came to this realization specifically with Nick, Ben and Anna, another set of players in a complicated baby storyline (a la Richard's early years, Julia and Christopher, Maggie to an extent).

 

[Gioberti84]

So fascinating! James you are doing the memory of FC proud. This must be such a grind nonetheless.

 

[James from London]

1979

Julia on Gino Vitelli: I cured the fungus in his vineyard.

Angela: I’ve done business with [ship owner] Peter Carssus for many years.

Simon Whittaker, vineyardist: I’ve been doing business with Angela for years. She’s always treated me fairly. Nobody has ever been more generous.

Lance, speaking in 1989: I’ve been groomed for this job [running Falcon Crest] for the past ten years.

Katherine Demery on her vineyards: You should have seen them when my husband was alive. We used to have a premium crop.

Vicky, speaking about Katherine in 1982: Her husband died three to four years ago.

Cesar Ortega: Your own kind was never good enough for you. That was always your problem. That’s what got you into trouble.
Pilar: What got me into trouble, Pop, was being young and stupid.

Pilar, speaking in 1989: Do you remember the party at the roadhouse about ten years ago? I was sixteen at the time.
Lance: Yeah, sure. I showed up with a couple of friends. I remember it because I was surprised to see you there.
Pilar: Yeah, I sneaked out of the house that night. My father would never let me go to parties alone. When you got to the party, you started drinking a lot.
Lance: I used to drink a lot in those days.
Pilar: You insisted on driving me home that night. I was stupid enough to let you, but I had this terrible crush on you and I was afraid I’d offend you. Anyway, on the way home, we stopped off at the pond. You said you needed some fresh air and I thought it might help to sober you up. You kissed me. It was a fantasy come true and then one thing led to another and we made love.
Lance: Why can’t I remember?
Pilar: Because you were drunk. You were very, very drunk.

Lance to Pilar: The first time we made love, how natural it seemed, how right it felt.

Pilar: I became pregnant that night. That’s why I had to leave Tuscany.

Pilar: When I needed you the most, you sent me away, Pop. How could you do that to me?

Cesar: I did what I thought was best.
Pilar: Best for whom?

Angela: Pilar ran away when she was sixteen. Cesar didn’t say why.

Tommy to Pilar: It’s some big dark secret why you had to leave Tuscany, but I remember the old man wasn’t too happy about it then.

Pilar to Cesar: I gave up on [making you happy] a long time ago.

Cesar, talking about Pilar in 1988: It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her.

Lance: That’s when you disappeared, just before you started college.
Pilar: I’m surprised you even noticed I was gone.
Lance: I did. I asked your father where you were and he said you were visiting your aunt.

Pilar: I went to live with my Aunt Mercedes.

Mercedes to Pilar: I took you in when you needed me, when you had nowhere else to go.

Lance: You had no right to keep [the pregnancy] to yourself all these years.
Pilar: What good would it have done to tell you? Were you ready then to become a father and a husband?
Lance: I had a right to know.
Pilar: Maybe you did. I thought I was doing what was best for all of us.

Pilar to Lance: I wanted you to love me, not marry me because you felt it was the right thing to do.

Melissa: Must be seven years since you escaped from this valley.
Dan Fixx: Six years and four months. You never could pick 'em [men], even back then.

Angela to Dan: I didn't think you would come back.

Dan: I was married a long time ago in Oklahoma.

Sheriff Ridley on Dan: He swept into town about six, seven years ago and married a local girl named Suzanne Burton.

Dan: Suzanne and I had something great once. She gave me love and respect when I had none.

Dan on Suzanne: She was trouble. She was also my wife.

Dan: I learned a long time ago there are all kind of bad addictions — drinking, drugs, gambling.

Melissa on Suzanne: You did everything you could for her.
Dan: There was nothing I could do for her.

Dan: I lived with a woman for a lot of years without really knowing her. It cost me.

Dan: I stayed with Suzanne long after I should have walked away. I had so much invested in it, I didn’t even know what it was doing to me.

Vicky, looking at her old school yearbook: Did I really look this hideous?
Maggie: That was the summer you bleached your hair.
Vicky: And all my hair fell out! You wanted to buy me a wig.
Maggie: I did and your father said, “No, no. She’ll look great bald. I’ll love her anyway.”
Vicky: Of course, whenever a guy came by he was subject to the Gioberti third degree. “Young man, where do you plan on taking my daughter this evening and what does your father do for a living?”
Maggie: My favourite was, “What kind of car do you drive and does it have bucket seats?”
Vicky: That never stopped some of them!

Terry on men: I have known some of the slimiest.

Angela on Terry: An affair with an older man who provided you with social contacts and a taste for the good life.

Terry: I was a call girl in New York.

Michael Ranson to Terry: When you were on the east coast you were a call girl, weren’t you? You know Norm Harris, David Raymond, Frank Scott.

Pamela Lynch on Terry: She was a very high-priced call girl back east and on the continent.

Father Christopher: I got cold feet the night before my ordination. Mrs Channing was here on retreat. She gave me a little pep talk, encouraged me to go through with it.

Angela on Christopher: He made a vow to become a priest.

Father Christopher: One of the reasons I became a priest was to try and help people.

Father Christopher: When I was ordained, I thought I had all the answers.

Father Christopher: When I was in the seminary, everything seemed so clear cut. It was so easy.

Father Christopher on his religious vows: When I made them, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted. I thought I was an orphan.

Cassandra Wilder: We were always better friends than lovers.
Brad Linton: You were always just out of my reach. We were so close, Cass, and then you’d just drift away.

Richard, speaking in 1989: Ten years ago, Glenbraddoch bought up every distillery they could lay their hands on. They consolidated. They merged the manufacturing, the advertising and the marketing into one neat package.

Malcolm St Clare: I built Glenbraddoch. I turned lots of place into industrial goldmines. I’ve made a lot of people rich. Nobody’s complained yet.

1980

Julia, speaking about Falcon Crest 1978 Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve Selection in 1982: That wine was bottled over a year ago.

Gus Nunuoz to Chase: These things [explosions at the pump house] happened all the time when your father was alive. We never found out who was doing it.

Chase: I don't understand how the county let Angela get control [of the water supply] in the first place.

Lance to Angela: You had McKay, Costello and Williams [the County Board of Supervisors] in your back pocket.

Carl Reed on Angela: She stacked the board with guys like McKay and then she got them to condemn all the property in the county that could ever be developed as reservoirs. She bought it up, she built earth dams and she filled it with water that would have gone as natural runoff to everyone in the valley.
Chase: But can't the board do anything, say, form a public utility and force her to sell the reservoirs?
Carl: Max Hartman and I have been trying to do that ever since we got elected to the board, but McKay, Johnson and Costello always voted exactly the way Angela told them to. Every single time. We never had a chance.

Carl Reed: Ed McKay and I never saw eye to eye on much of anything.

Ed McKay’s father Elliot: When I discovered [Ed] had accepted a series of gifts from Angela Channing in exchange for his political integrity, I never spoke to him again.

Phil Eberhardt, speaking in 1982: About a year and a half ago, I was a dairy farmer in Northern Michigan, but the winters were too hard on my wife so we yanked the kids out of school, packed everything up and came out here [California]. I worked for a while in the city, but it just wasn't right. I missed being out on a farm too much. And then we found this little vineyard.

Angela on Phil Eberhardt: He bought the vineyard at the top of Skylar Road.
Julia: Didn't you make a bid on that property at one time, Mother?

Phil: I put every dime I had into it, hoping to make a go of it.

Maggie: What reservoir were you getting your water from?
Phil: Skylar Creek, that's one of Angela Channing's dams.

Angela: It's a shame the county couldn't get the water up there to get it started.

Phil: And then Mrs Channing came along and decided to turn off the water.

Maggie: Did you ever speak to Mrs Channing about your problems?
Phil: Sure I did, but she told me they needed the water for Falcon Crest. Of course, she was lying. She's never drawn off any of that water. She wanted my land. I believed in the system. Elected public officials are supposed to protect you from people like Angela Channing.

Phil: That's when I went to Ed McKay and ask him what he could do and he said he could help, but he never so much as brought the matter up before the board of supervisors for a vote. In the meantime, my vineyard died.
Maggie: What about your wife?
Phil: She took the kids back to her mother's in Houston. Last time I heard from her, she'd found another man. I lost my wife, my kids, my land - I lost everything I had because of [Ed McKay] and Angela Channing.

Cole, speaking to Chase in 1981: A year ago, I wouldn't have believed we could be talking this way.
Chase: A year ago, we weren't talking very much at all, were we?
Cole: Whenever you were home. Mostly you weren't around much to speak to. Either you were on a flight or you were resting up from one.

Vicky, speaking to Bob Harris in 1981: Bob, we've been going together all semester.

Angela: I only bought those grapes [at harvest] as a favour to Jason at $400 a ton.

Gus on Angela, speaking in 1981: That's what she paid last year. I think [Jason] was just too old and tired to fight her. Carl Reed, a vintner over at Stone Briar Winery - he's been interested in buying these grapes for years.
Chase: Why hasn't he?
Gus: Because Jason always sold them to Angie.

Chase on Carl Reed: Hanging in there, season after season through flood and drought.
Maggie: I can imagine Angela’s manipulations.
Chase: She did try to get the bank to foreclose on him.

Chase on Turner Bates: He worked for my father?
Gus: Off and on.

Turner Bates: I used to work here [Jason's vineyard]. I'd help with the harvest and whatever, and old Jason, he'd let me sleep there [the pump house].

Gus to Chase: Your father finally gave him the boot.

Jason Gioberti to Turner Bates: You clear out of here like I told you.

Emma: You hated Turner.
Angela: I didn't hate him. I just didn't think that he was good enough for you.
Emma: Mother, you didn't really know him. I loved him so much.

Emma on Turner: We used to come here [the springhouse] sometimes.

Emma on Turner: One night, I promised to meet him here [the springhouse] and then at the last minute, I got cold feet and I wouldn't let him in.

Cole to Linda Caproni’s father: You worked your whole life for [her graduation] day.

Pilar: I gave birth to a baby girl.

Pilar on Lisa: I was in San Jose with my aunt when she was born.

Pilar: I named her Lisa.

Cesar: The birth certificate said “Father unknown”.

Cesar on Lisa: You gave her up.
Pilar: Because I was sixteen years old and I was scared and I didn’t have any other choice.

Pilar to Mercedes: I let you and Pop convince me that giving up my baby was the only thing I could do.

Mercedes on Lisa: She’s lived with Steve and me since she was born. We’re the only parents that she’s ever known.

Pilar: I was staying with them for a while, long enough to fall in love with Lisa.

Pilar: I ran away to Chicago when I was sixteen.

Pilar on Mooshy Tucker: Part-time waitress, part-time hooker and a full-tine survivor. I knew a lot of Mooshy Tuckers in my day. I wasn’t too far from one myself.

Pilar: I lived in the streets, in the dirt.

Lance to Pilar: Then you started college.

Pilar to Lance: All the years I was away, I used to dream about the valley all the time, about Falcon Crest and you. You never once even thought about me, not once.

Frank Agretti: There’s one thing I learned and that’s how important family is.

Genele to Frank: [Renee] wasn’t such a bad sister really. Remember how much she liked to sail? She was an extraordinary woman but you didn’t love her.

Genele: You know the best line of poetry a man ever wrote to me? “Chew me up and spit me out, leave nothing but a wet spot.” And here’s the author himself — Frank, take a bow!

Genele: You always did know how to make me feel good, Frank.

Genele: Frank, you’re the only man I ever really loved.
Frank: You are not capable of love, my darling, but I know what you mean and I thank you.

Vicky: I was in love once and I got really hurt.

Genele: I loved someone once, so much that it hurt — to be that vulnerable, that out of control. The man I loved was married. I was willing to do anything to get him, anything, and when he saw how far I went, it fell apart. I got control, all right, but it destroyed our lives.

Genele, speaking about Renee in 1990: She disappeared ten years ago.

Frank on Renee: I didn’t commit murder, dammit. You killed her all by yourself.
Genele: With your gun.

Frank on Genele: She shot her. I wasn’t there. Then she came to me. All I did was cover up.

Genele: I did it because I knew you loved me. You proved it after we buried her which, by the way, makes you an accessory.
Frank: It’s the greatest mistake of my life.

Michael Sharpe to Savannah, his fourth wife: We never starred in the greatest love story ever told, but we understood each other. We shared a vision of what our life could be together. I never promised there wouldn’t be a few bumps along the way.

Michael, speaking in 1990: I have not had dinner at home in years.

Joey Walts: What happened to that place with the formal gardens and the trout pond?
Michael: I had all that and you know what? It wasn’t worth diddly squat, just a bunch of extra people roaming around that you don’t trust.

Michael: Whatever happened to that drug store chain you were syndicating the last time I saw you?
Joey: That would have worked. My partner just —
Michael: So what you’re telling me is you went belly up.

Dan Fixx on his wife Suzanne: I lost her. Drugs ate her liver, ate her brain. She was getting the stuff from this off-duty cop.

Ben Crawley, lawyer: Dan’s wife had a problem with drugs. Chief Ridley’s nephew made sure she always had a steady supply.

Dan on Sheriff Ridley’s nephew: He was swiping it from the evidence room.

Ben on Sheriff Ridley’s nephew: He took care of her. In return, you could say she took care of him.

Dan: Sexual favours, that was the going rate. I don’t know anything about it.

Vicky: How could your wife keep something like that from you for so long?
Dan: I guess I really never knew her.

Dan: I walked in on them one day. I found them in my bed. He went for his gun.

Ben: Nephew went after Dan with his service revolver. Dan was only defending himself.

Dan: I dove on him, the gun went off.

Dr Ridley, Sheriff Ridley’s brother, on Dan: That trash killed my son.

Lance: Did you or did you not murder a police officer?
Dan: What I did was right. At least it seemed right at the time. I killed someone who called himself a cop, but it wasn’t murder.

Dan on the killing: I did it to save the life of someone I love.

Sheriff Ridley on Suzanne: She disappeared about a week after the arrest. Hasn’t been heard from since.

Mable Burton, Suzanne’s mother: It wasn’t Dan’s fault, none of it. A lawyer named Ben Crawley, he defended Dan.

Dan: Things were twisted at the trial.

Chase: What I don’t understand is why none of this came out in court?
Ben: Because Dan had this damn fool idea he was going to protect his wife’s good name. He refused to let her take the stand. He refused to take the stand in his own defence.
Chase: But you knew. You could have done something.
Ben: You think it’s easy to defend someone who doesn’t want to be defended? I’m telling you, mister, Clarence Darrow himself couldn’t have done any better. But there were a whole lot of people named Ridley dealing the cards. The deck was stacked. The whole thing literally made me sick.

Sheriff Ridley: Damn judge called it second-degree murder.

Vicky to Dan: You went to prison.

Dan to Suzanne: You made me a promise. You told me you’d straighten up. You told me you’d be waiting for me when I got out of prison. We could have beaten it, Suzanne, if they hadn’t locked me up. We could have beaten it together. God, I loved you.

Ben: After the trial, Chief Ridley made it very clear that my practice and my health would improve substantially if I left town and never came back.

Mabel on Ben: He left town the day Dan went to prison.

Dan: I went to prison for a reason.

Ben on Dan: Boy shouldn’t have spent even one minute in jail for it.

Mable: We never wanted you to find out [that Suzanne was in a coma]. We thought it would be easier for you that way.
Dan: How long has she been like this?
Mable: It happened just after your trial. The drugs she took killed off her brain.

Dan to Suzanne: They told me you were dead.

Dan: All these years, I thought Suzanne was dead. I buried her, inside.

Dan: Once you get labelled as a cop killer, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. No-one cares who you are. The warden thought I had a bad attitude. He was going to make an example of me for the other boys, but I kept my cool and kept my eye on him every step of the way. Warden Grant ran that prison like clockwork.

This must be such a grind nonetheless

No, it's fun!

 

[James from London]

1981

Lance to Angela: All I’ve ever done for you is your dirty work. I’m the guy you sent to local vintners when they needed to be put in place.

Lance to Jack Sloane, wine distributor: The last “good business deal” you involved my grandmother in almost put you in jail.

Chase, speaking about Jack Sloane in 1982: I heard he had a run-in with Angela last year.
Julia: Yes, he's had trouble with most of the better wineries in the valley.

Lance: I understand you were working for Jack Sloane before you became winery foreman here [Falcon Crest].
Paul Esponoza: Yeah. Guy's a real prince. Half of his paycheques were late and the other half bounced.

Gus: Friday night, I drove down to the Cold Duck to pick Jason up, like I always did on Fridays. Friday was Jason’s drinking night. He knew he’d be in no shape to drive. I always took him by our house for some coffee before I took him to his place, but that night he wanted to walk home. Said he had to stop at the winery and pick up some more wine. That was the last time I ever saw Jason.

Emma: It wasn’t very late that night when I met Turner Bates on the verandah of the house. He suggested that we go for a walk. Turner was a very romantic man. We always had a lot of difficulty finding a place to be alone together so we decided to go into the vineyards.

Vicky: Before we ever left New York, I wanted to be a dancer. It’s always been my dream.

Maggie, speaking to Vicky in 1981: I called your dance workshop. You haven't been there in two weeks and you've been out every night past ten.

Cole to Vicky: You could get away with cutting classes in New York.

Maggie on Vicky: Punctuality's never been her strong suit.

Chase to Maggie: The kids were both in trouble, you and I were drifting apart.

Chase to Maggie: You knew how much I loved to fly. I never realised I was losing all of you.

Chase: On the surface, I had a full life but there was something missing. I wasn’t being true to myself, to my heritage so it was sort of like going through the motions.

Angela on Chase: He didn’t give a damn about Falcon Crest until he learned it was an empire.

Nicole Sauget, speaking in 1987: Six years ago, Chase came to see me in Paris. He was moving to California and needed money to start a new business. I loaned him thirty million dollars. I waited many years for Chase to come back to me and when he did, all he wanted was my money.

Nicole to Maggie: He came to me for the money and he didn’t tell you.

Nicole on Chase: He put up his holdings as collateral. It was an agreement between friends. Look at the small print, “The remainder of the loan is payable upon request.”

Diana Hunter, speaking about Katherine Demery’s husband in 1982: He died last year after a lengthy illness.

Melissa on her father: Where the hell were you at his funeral?

Frank: Carlo and I said our goodbyes long before that.

Anne Bowen: … After that, I didn’t do any work for almost two years. That’s when I met Pierre. He was a researcher, neurolinguistics, a real renaissance man. We were together off and on for almost four years.
Michael Sharpe: Did Danny like him?

Anne: At first. He liked everyone at first, but then he’d always start to resent them. No-one ever lived up to his mythical real father.

Danny Sharpe: I don’t care what some blood test says. You’re my dad. You’re the one I grew up believing …
Michael: Hating, resenting. The father who was never there. There was nothing there to begin with.
Danny: That’s not true. I mean, sure, I was resentful but at least I still had a father — you. You were in my head. I used to ache for you. If I heard about you or read about you or saw you on the news, I was proud. I was proud of my dad. Even though you thought you were hiding, I was still there. I was still your son.

Genele Ericson, speaking about Danny in 1990: Michael, he loves you.
Michael: That love is based on a lie, not because I ever did anything for him.

Michael to Anne: [Danny is] a hell of a kid. It’s because of you. It’s because of the way you raised him. In a way, it’s probably a good thing I wasn’t around. He’s turned out a lot better than if I had been.

Danny to Michael: All I ever wanted to do was to make you proud of me, to please you.

Danny: How do you think I felt — growing up knowing you were too busy to give a damn?
Michael: I gave a damn. I did. I just didn’t think that you’d want to see me again.

Lauren: When did your feelings about your father change?

Danny: Oh, you mean that resentment thing. Well, I was young.

Anne on Danny: He lost interest in the cub scouts when he realised there were no girls.

1982

Maggie to her father, Paul: Nobody thought you’d ever retire.

Maggie to Terry: The twenty-five thousand dollars we sent to Dad that he was going to travel with, for a vacation that the poor man desperately needed - you talked him out of going and you took the money yourself.
Terry: I didn’t talk him out of anything. He just didn’t want to go.
Maggie: From the moment he got that cheque, you were all over him for it.

Charlotte Pershing: I was off the horses for almost two years. I helped other people give it up. I thought I was cured, I was fine.

Greg Reardon, speaking about Anna Rossini in 1985: She’s been hospitalised several times in the past few years.

Lauren Daniels, speaking in 1990: I was married to Walker for eight years.

Walker Daniels: I built this house with my own hands.

Lauren: Walker built it from the ground up and I helped and we planned everything. I used to love this house. We were going to live here forever.

1983

Terry’s older man friend on his wife: I left her for you.
Terry: That was your idea. You’re the one who always had to make everything so serious.

Kate Mars, prostitute, on her and Terry: We used to live together.

Kate on Terry’s little black book: All the guys' specialities are listed after their phone numbers. She sold it to me right before she left, on the condition that someday I return it.

Angela to Terry: You came [to the Tuscany Valley] from a Park Avenue hotel lobby.

Pamela Lynch on the Cartel: I took this job [as Richard's assistant] because I knew it was my only way to get out from under them.

Lee Ying, Chao Li’s daughter, speaking in 1986: Mother died three years ago.

Detective Farrell, New York City Police Department: Kit Marlowe had connections with organised crime. Forgery was her speciality. Johnny Kent was her boyfriend.

Kit Marlowe on California: I hated it.
Johnny Kent: Yeah, I remember how much you hated it.
Kit: I liked the house. I liked having a garden, but that’s the only thing I liked about it.

Skylar Kimble, speaking to Kit in 1986: Three years ago, you promised you were going to stop seeing [Johnny].

Senator Peter Ryder, speaking in 1988: I’ve been working on this white collar organised crime thing for five years now. You’re the one who taught me to do the best job no matter what I was doing.
John Remick: No, I never told you to walk all over people doing it.

Mercenary, speaking in 1988: I was with John Remick about five years ago in South America. There was somebody else with us, a guy by the name of George Westcott. Weird guy, a real loner. Really liked Remick. Followed him around like a big dog. He went to Africa with Remick.

1984

Richard: Lorraine went to school in Chicago.

Lorraine Prescott: I’ve been studying journalism.

Robin Agretti: I sort of dropped out [of college]. I tried, I tried, I really did. I’m just not cut out for higher education, at least not the type they teach in class.

Melissa on Robin: She’s only worked as a waitress.

Peter Stavros on Phillipe: If you'd only listened to me when I first warned you about him.
Sofia Stavros: He cared about me, you were a stranger. Why should I have listened to you?

Sofia to Peter: I was wrong from the start, wrong about Philippe and wrong about you.

Lance on Philippe: He didn’t marry Sofia just for her looks.

Sofia: Just because I married Philippe, you cut me out of your life.
Peter: Not to mention my will.
Sofia: You had no right to take away my birthright.

Cassandra Wilder to Damon: Mother didn’t force me into this [vendetta against Angela] and she didn’t force you.

Angela to Cookie Nash: You’re a champion rider. You’ve been to the Olympics.

Michael Sharpe, speaking in 1989: Now I remember why we haven’t spoken in two years.
Lauren: It’s been five.

1985

Stretch McDowell, speaking in 1987: I was with someone for a long time and he died in a plane crash two and a half years ago.

Paolo Bellini, speaking in 1986: My wife, I lost her a year ago.

Peter Stavros on himself: Now a widower.

Peter: Where were you?
Eric Stavros: Nepal, climbing Annapurna.

Angela: Where were you all this time?
Frank Agretti: Just about everywhere. Did some exploring. Spent a lot of time in South America. I even tracked all over Burma looking for rubies. And I staked a claim to an Alaskan goldmine.

Libby Gardens, Frank’s girlfriend: I know when I’ve made a mistake and I made a big one that day I walked out you in Burma. We put two years and a lot of money into the Brandenburg Emerald Mine. We were so close when the lease ran out.
Frank: Libby, it was always a long shot.

Stretch: We only had a cup of water a day until the rebels got through to us. I went twenty-three days without a bath. That’s when I decided I’d better get out of the Sudan.

Michael Sharpe to his chauffeur and hitman, Nick Masood: You came here as an immigrant to take care of your family. If you’d have stayed in your own country, they’d have stood you up in front of a firing squad, isn’t that right? This has been a whole new lease on life for you, hasn’t it?

Nick: Yeah, sure.
Michael: I’ve always liked you, Nick. You’ve got a good attitude.

Frank: I’ve had a hell of a life. I’ve done some things some men only dream about and I’ve done them in places people only read about. I’ve made fortunes and I’ve lost them and I’ve made them back again and you know what it’s gotten me? Nothing. No wife, no kid, nothing.

Genele, speaking about Renee in 1989: I dug her up a long time ago. She’s in a box, safe and sound.

Dan Fixx on Red: We spent two years in adjoining cells at Oklahoma State Pen. He went on to make a million bucks in the transportation business.

Dan: I was in prison long enough to figure out a few things.

Dan on himself: A guy who spent six years in state prison.

Sheriff Ridley on Dan: He gets out of state pen for good behaviour. Kind of makes you wish lynch mobs hadn’t gone out of style.

Dan: I served my time. The state of Oklahoma’s happy.

Maggie on Dan: He came back here [the Tuscany Valley] straight from prison.

Nick Agretti, speaking in 1984: A couple of years ago, Anna and her son were in a car accident. Her son died. She lived.

Anna Celinni: It was the worst day of my life, the day Tonio died.

Anna: When Tonio died, my marriage was ended. I felt I had nothing left.

Nick to Ben: Shortly after the accident, friends told me that people were asking questions, trying to find us. Then I noticed that somebody had been following us. I figured that Cellini wanted you back. You were now his only grandson, so then we started travelling round Europe.

Frank: Your dad really kept you moving around, didn’t he?
Ben: Yeah.

Ben: Dad didn’t like to stay in one place too long. Said he had itchy feet.

Frank: What did you do about school?

Ben: Well, most places we went we stayed for a year or two so I didn’t really miss much. I learned a lot from Dad anyway. I think he’s done a pretty good job raising me on his own.

Pilar, speaking in 1989: I worked so hard for years to get where I am.
Angela: You worked? You mean schemed.
Pilar: No dammit, I mean worked.

Malcolm St Clare to Pilar: I handpicked you. I trained you.

Malcolm, after proposing to Pilar in 1989: Three years ago, this is what you wanted.

Pilar to Malcolm: You’re the one who wouldn’t leave your marriage.

Malcolm: Did you ever really love me?

Pilar: I was young, Malcolm. You were very powerful and I was very impressed.
Malcolm: Then you were only interested in what you could get from me.

Richard: The last time you slept with St Clare, Pilar, he made you Vice-President of Tuscany Interstate.

1987

Eddy McDowell “Dusty”, died 1987

Carly Fixx: When I first found out I had a brother, I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. I was so happy.

Pilar: The Richard Channing I knew only had one priority — himself.
Richard: Well, you didn’t know me very well, did you?

Pilar: Richard and I were involved once. It wasn’t about love. He was like a big brother to me. He made me realise certain things.

Richard on Pilar: Not only is she filled with ambition but she has such perception!
Pilar: That was one of the things you liked best about me.

Cesar Ortega, talking about Pilar in 1988: The boys went to visit her in Chicago last year.
Gabriel: Yeah, she lives in this great building with big chandeliers in the lobby and a doorman.
Carly: What was she doing in Chicago?
Tommy: Working in a bank. She’s a big executive, my sister.

Lauren, speaking in 1990: A few years ago, my life was perfect. I had my boys.

Walker on his children: It was nobody’s fault, at least according to the cops. A semi was coming down the hill, the brakes failed and suddenly, the two most important things in the world were gone. You lose your children, you don’t think you can go on living, you don’t even want to, but you do. Your marriage starts to go bad, but you go on. Your career comes apart at the seams, you lose everything you worked for for fifteen years, but you go on.

Lauren: I had two children of my own once and I loved them very much and this was their room. They died in an accident and I was very sad. I wanted to keep this room just the way … This room was locked for a reason.

Lauren: My life has been hell.

1988

Cookie Nash, speaking in February 1989: Jean Claude left me. That was six months ago.

Richard to Pilar: I went to a lot of trouble, young lady, to bring you back to this valley and set you up with a job at that bank.

Malcolm St Clair: The only reason I agreed to let Pilar go back to Tuscany was to create goodwill in the Hispanic community.

Pilar: Thanks for putting that wall-hanging in my room, Pop. I remember it was Mama’s favourite.
Cesar: It was Gabriel’s idea. Why did you come home, Pilar?

Pilar: Not to make you happy.

Danny Sharpe: College was a bigger waste of time to me than adolescence. That’s why I dropped out.

1989

Anna Cellini to Ben: You called; I had a reason to live.

Walker: When we first put in to adopt, I was just going through the motions.
Lauren: I know, so was I.
Walker: Honey, we were told it might take two years to get kids so it was never real. But then after a month to get the phone call and realise that we have two little boys coming to live with us — that’s a lot to get straight.

Michael Sharpe: You were supposed to be in Europe.
Danny Sharpe: I was. There were too many old buildings and the women don’t shave their pits.

Michael to Anne: You probably weren’t too thrilled when Danny decided to come out here [the Tuscany Valley].

Danny: My mom tried to stop me.

Danny to Michael: I heard you needed some [money]. I came here to help out.

Danny on Michael: I came out here to be with him.

The end!