Actor’s plot twists thrilled ‘Days of Our Lives’ fans over 5 decades

Bill Hayes, an actor and singer whose 2,141 episodes of Days of Our Lives over 5½ decades constituted the daytime drama version of an ultramarathon, and whose top-selling 1955 single “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” remains seared into the memories of the baby boom generation, died Jan. 12 at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 98.

His wife and longtime co-star, Susan Seaforth Hayes, confirmed his death.

To soap opera fans, Hayes was a staple of weekday afternoons from the days of rabbit-ear antennas to the streaming era.

He began his tenure on the long-running NBC show in 1970. His character, Doug Williams, was a suave and slippery con artist who, after leaving prison, found himself padding through a maze of plot twists, double-crosses and big reveals that day after day drew viewers back to the fictional Midwestern town of Salem. While his character would eventually abandon his antisocial ways and become a pillar of the community, Hayes had fun playing a man with a past.

“You never knew if he was helping a lady across the street and being nice or unhooking her brassiere as they went across the street,” he was quoted as saying of his character in Days of Our Lives:

A Complete History of the Long-Running Soap Opera, by Maureen Russell.

The plot point that really got things humming was Doug’s romance with Julie Olson, a beautiful young troublemaker played by Susan Seaforth, his future wife. They would soon became a soap-world power couple, both onscreen and off. The couple married in real life in 1974, and their characters followed suit two years later, in an episode that drew 16 million viewers. It also drew thousands of fans to the show’s studio in Burbank, Calif., to greet them.

Such was their reach that in 1976 the couple, in their onscreen guise, even appeared on the cover of Time, with the tagline Soap Operas: Sex and Suffering in the Afternoon.

Hayes and his first wife, Mary, had divorced in 1969. According to the article, “It was the script that brought [Hayes and Seaforth] together. Emotionally exhausted from a messy divorce that left him to care for five teenage children, Bill arrived on Days in 1970 looking only for a friend.”

“But then,” Seaforth Hayes said in the interview, “we started to do love scenes. That was just about the ballgame.”

The couple also formed a touring nightclub act, and Time noted they were “mobbed when they appear in public,” with Hayes in particular being showered with attention from female fans.

“They treat me as if I were Robert Redford,” he said.

Over the years, Hayes popped up on other television shows, including Matlock and Frasier. He and his wife taped their final scene together on Days of our Lives just weeks before he died.

“The last scene I got to play with him is about how much we love each other,” Seaforth Hayes said in a phone interview, “and I was blessed with an opportunity to hover over the words ‘Have I ever told you how much I love you?’ And Doug answers, ‘No, you never did.’ That was something Billy and I would say frequently in life.”