DAYS’S ex-isabella
Staci Greason’s life has taken several dramatic twists since her Salem days.
It’s been nine years since Staci Greason last appeared on DAYS as the ghost of Isabella Toscano Black and, to be perfectly honest, she has no desire to make another return to the town of Salem. “I was at my mother-in-law’s memorial recently, and one of my husband’s cousins came up to me and said, ‘They’ve got this doctor on the show who’s bringing everybody back to life. You should ask him to bring you back to life,’ ” recounts Greason with a chuckle. “I said, ‘Steve, I’m not interested.’ ”
Greason, in fact, received a call about a year ago, asking if she’d consider making a DAYS comeback and responded with a polite, “No, thank you.” Since her initial run on the soap from 1989-92, when Isabella succumbed to pancreatic cancer, Greason has been invited back a few times. However, it was only for limited stints as an apparition appearing to her character’s son, Brady. “That’s just not very challenging,” asserts Greason. “It wasn’t the same. I wasn’t interested in showing up twice a year and saying a few lines in the corner.”
Returning now, at the age of 56, holds even less appeal. “Honestly, I don’t really want to have any work done, and I don’t know how great I would look without it on camera,” concedes Greason bluntly. “I remember when I came back to the show in [2000]. I was so excited to be on it, again, but I remember people posting some really cruel things about my face. I thought, ‘Goodness gracious.’ And I was only 37 at the time. I am literally all about the imperfections. I am very happy that I am still alive and that my face is aging.”
Greason’s been able to embrace
those imperfections, as well as the fine lines that have crept up over the years, since leaving the soap to pursue a career in writing. “It was a great job ... a good experience,” recalls Greason. “I was very fortunate that I studied acting and moved out to Los Angeles and within two years was working. For someone in their mid-20s, it was like fantasy land. I loved the people I worked with. I loved working with Drake [Hogestyn, John]. He was like a big brother and took such good care of me, and we laughed all the time. I loved working with Matthew Ashford [Jack], because we’re fellow Buddhists. Makeup, wardrobe, the crew ... everyone was so supportive and fun. I was this little girl out of the woods. I didn’t have any street smarts or anything. I found that people were very protective of me and showed me the way.”
What Greason didn’t like “was being in front of the camera,” she says matter-offactly. “It didn’t work for me. I was always so nervous being seen.”
Behind the scenes, she was writing poetry and short stories in her dressing room. “I had a friend, who wrote the Terminator movies, read some of my stories,” shares Greason. “He was like, ‘Oh, my God, Staci. You’re a writer.’ So I went, ‘I’m leaving the show to be a writer.’ I was so funny. Did I think I was going to make money off my poetry?”
DAYS opted to usher out her character with a major tearjerker storyline — having Isabella die shortly after giving birth to her son, Brady. While Greason “was happy” about the big send-off, “as it progressed and I got closer to leaving the show, it occurred to me what I was letting go of, and I was very, very sad,” she confesses.
Unfortunately, that sadness continued. “I went from living in a house in Beachwood Canyon with my best girlfriend and being surrounded by art 24/7 to choosing to go live alone on this mountaintop [in Topanga Canyon]” explains Greason. “I was young and hadn’t really thought [leaving DAYS] through. So the first couple of years, I was very lonely and very lost. I thought, ‘Oh, my God. What have I done?’ I spent a lot of years really hating myself for that decision, because my ass was broke.”
Although Greason toyed with the idea of going back to school, “that just didn’t feel right to me after having had this career,” she admits. “So I started reading and taught myself how to write. And I took classes within groups. It was a good experience for me. I wrote a novel and then a second novel in my 30s that was about to be published when 9/11 happened. The publisher dumped it, because it felt like a very un-american book to them. It was about two people who joined a survival group called Take Back America, which was very prescient considering what’s happening now.”
Greason continued writing while tackling “a million different day jobs” to make ends meet. “I’ve had every job you could possibly imagine,” she says. “I was a massage therapist. I went to massage school. I wrapped women in cellulite treatment. I cleaned houses. And there’s nothing wrong with any of them. In the lean years you work. I had also gotten fibromyalgia by then and another autoimmune disorder. I had all kinds of illnesses and not enough money to pay for everything. I was very depressed, and I had stopped practicing Buddhism.”
Ultimately, things came to a head when Greason decided to leave Los Angeles. “My dad picked me up, and we drove home with my three cats,” she remembers. “It was really hard. I turned 40 in my parents’ unfinished basement in Colorado. I worked for the state and had a lot of jobs as I tried to get myself out of medical debt.”
Looking back on those years of hardship and her continuing quest to make it as a writer, Greason proclaims, “It’s all been a good experience for me to learn that, if you don’t quit, eventually things do come to fruition. You just can’t be impatient. The artist’s journey is the artist’s journey.”
Greason has had success with many of her writing endeavors. “I just finished my
fourth novel, Love & Other Disasters,” she announces proudly. “It’s out there making the rounds. I wrote it before #Metoo happened, but it is a #Metoo novel told in the voices of three different women. I’m also going to the Austin Film Festival in a couple of weeks with a script I wrote called Treed. My producer and I are going to pitch it. Right now, it’s at the Oaxaca Film Festival in Mexico and is up for the Best Global Script of 2019. I had another script up for Best Global Script at Oaxaca, last year, called The Hero of the World. It won 18 festivals, and we’re still trying to sell it. I write TV as well. I wrote BOBBI AND OLIVIA, which won best TV pilot at the Studio City Film Festival last year.”
In between all of the above, Greason started the company The Write Muse to help people who were famous for something create a brand or literary vehicle. “In fact, one of my clients just got a book deal, and they’re making a documentary,” says Greason. “I’m shying away from that now, because then I don’t work on my own projects. But it was really a great joy to brainstorm, help people develop, and see them be so excited to get agents and deals.”
Greason has since moved back to California. “I got hired by film producer Paul Corvino out of Fox to run his development company,” she explains. “He paid for me to come back to LA. We made a couple of movies, Aquamarine, Idiocracy ...”
The move paved the way for Greason, a self-professed “late bloomer,” to finally meet the man of her dreams. “I turned 50 and my girlfriend Jody fixed me up on a blind date,” Greason recounts. “I was not looking to go on the blind date. I showed up late with no makeup on. I was like, ‘Uh, he lives in Orange County. He’s been married multiple times. No, thank you.’ I was looking forward to
growing old in a cabin in the woods. My life didn’t look like anybody’s life. I had tried to foster, to adopt, twice, and it didn’t work out. I was just going to be a crazy old cat lady. I was just going to do it.”
Fate, obviously, had other plans. Greason and Larry, a former publisher who’s now in ad sales, decided to meet again. “We both agreed on our second date that I never wanted to be married, and he didn’t want to be married again,” delivers Greason with a laugh. “Then we got married [on October 8, 2017]. He’s great. I’m really glad I waited for the right guy. And I got an instant family — three kids, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren.”
Greason’s life couldn’t be happier or more different than it was decades ago, when she debuted on the daytime scene as a 20-something newbie. For one thing, she never gets recognized. “Oh, God, no! I’m 56 years old,” she contends. And instead of reporting to a studio at 5 a.m. every morning, she now works at home as a writer. “That’s my day job,” says Greason. “I get to my desk at 9, and I write until about 4. Then I go for a hike or a bike ride.”
Yet Greason still has many fond memories of her years as Isabella. “I made some lasting friendships on that show,” notes Greason. “Shannon Sturgess [ex-molly] and I are still very close. And I’m still in touch with Robert Mailhouse [ex-brian] and Matt Ashford sometimes.”
As for storylines that stand out, Greason recalls “the cancer stuff, because it was so real, and going on location to Mexico. That’s when Isabella told John she was pregnant,” she notes.
But perhaps what stands out most of all, was Isabella famously giving birth during her wedding to John. “That was a hilarious scene,” she chuckles. “I gave birth at the altar at my wedding in a pink bustier. That’s what I was wearing under my wedding gown. I think Crystal Chappell [ex-carly] and Richard Biggs [ex-marcus], who was the nicest guy in the world and may he rest in peace, delivered the baby.
“I remember telling Mary Beth Evans [Kayla] beforehand, ‘I don’t know how to give birth. What do I do?’ ” continues Greason. “And she told me that before she had babies and had to pretend to be giving birth, she watched Elizabeth Mcgovern in She’s Having a Baby. So that’s what I did. I went to Blockbuster, rented the video, and watched that scene over and over.”
All of the above helped Greason “bloom from a person super-grateful for the job with little self-esteem into a person who realized, ‘I actually have a craft. I’m a good actor. I do bring things to the table. I don’t have to feel insecure,’ ” she reflects. “I was able to grow up in that sense and started seeing myself as an artist with something of value and to start hearing my own voice.”