All Victor's Children

She likes Victor best in those heady months after one of his innumerable marriages. "No other women are in the picture," she says. "Everything's going good." Inevitably, other women enter the picture and everything goes bad. "I thought Victor and his fourth wife were perfect for each other," she exclaims. "And then he falls back in love with wife number two. For the next six months I hated him."

It didn't take long for number two to give way to number five This left Johnston-Forbes puzzled. "It's not like I can't understand men," she says. "I understand my husband, Foster. He's nothing like Victor. The only similarity is that Foster is real thoughtful to me."

Foster caddies for Cathy. At lunch they watch Y&R. During the show Foster has been known to pick up an imaginary phone and say, 'Hello, this is Victor Newman.' When Monday Night Football is on, Foster sometimes says, "I'm going to have a Victor drink." Then he'll straighten up, puff out his chest and pour himself a Wild Turkey and water.

"Victor Newman reminds me of Tony La Russa, the Oakland A's manager," says umpire Rocky Roe. "Tony's a good-looking, swashbuckling kind of guy who's always in charge. Unless he's arguing with me."

Ever wonder what umps talk about between innings? If you're Roe, you're asking your crewmates: "Has Dimitri found out the truth about Erica's daughter?" Roe is a dyed-in-the-gut All My Children fan. "I like Erica," he says. "She still looks good after 47 marriages."

On this dull spring day in Orlando, Roe is folded into his family room La-Z-Boy, a pouch of chaw in one hand, an empty Juicy Lucy's cup in the other. Until recently he didn't know Victor Newman from Alfred E. Newman. "I'll watch," he says, "because I like the actor who plays him. If I'm not mistaken, he was Captain Dietrich on The Rat Patrol." Roe is not mistaken.

At first Roe finds Restless as mysterious as Kabuki. But within 10 minutes he's tracking story lines as if they were forkballs on the inside corner. "After 17 years of soap watching," he explains, "I know the drill." Roe anticipates, if not relishes, every telling pause, every heartfelt stammer, every Mysterious Fatal Disease.

The camera pans the cabin of a Learjet and settles on a man in black whose face is bathed in white. "You know Victor's wealthy," Roe says. "He's making phone calls from the air." Newman speaks in a deep, rich German accent that hangs thickly on his sentences, like wet snow. "Great resonance!" says Roe, dribbling tobacco juice into his cup. "Extremely expressive face. You can see he's anguished. He doesn't even have to say a word."

Newman has flown to Kansas to persuade his blind wife to return with him to Genoa City (it would take too long to explain). "I can see why Victor wants her back in Wisconsin," cracks Roe. "The cheese is better, and the beer's colder." He reaches across his ample belly to grab an iced tea.

As surely as the world turns, Roe says he can predict how the episode will end: "Victor will be standing outside the door of a hospital room, looking in anxiously at his bedridden wife and her old boyfriend."