One of the soap world's most clean-cut hunks—Thom Bierdz, formerly Phillip Chancellor from The Young and Restless—lathers up a real-life sudser more lurid than the wildest daytime drama. It's a nonstop orgy of murder and mayhem, sex and suicide, and life after fame.

Guzzling gin from a flask and speeding recklessly in his little red Corvette, the young and the restless Phillip Chancellor races away from his anguish over losing his true love, the cute yet clueless Cricket, and his guilt from knocking up the slutty yet shrewd Nina.

Losing his grip on reality—and then on the steering wheel—Phillip's Corvette topples over a steep cliff.

A few comatose days later, he awakens in a bouquet-strewn hospital room, surrounded by loved ones and leeches. With his last dying gasps, he reaches out to hold his newborn bastard son. And, then, he keels over.

Cut! Print! Just an average day on the set of The Young and the Restless.

Robust and effervescent, actor Thom Bierdz bounds out of Phillip's hospital bed, flings his bandages to a waiting prop man, and bids adieu to his fellow cast mates of the popular daytime soap that made him a sex symbol. He's moving on to greener pastures. With his youthful, brooding good looks, and implosive vulnerability, he's poised to conquer prime-time television and feature films.

It's 1989, and he's got the world by the tail.

What could go wrong?

Two months later:

Thom's mother, Phyllis Bierdz lies murdered in a pool of blood on her kitchen floor, bludgeoned with a baseball bat by her youngest son, Troy, a paranoid schizophrenic. This is no soap. This is real.

The kitchen wallpaper has become ghoulish abstract art. The green and yellow daisies are splattered with her blood. A baseball bat leans against a blood-drenched swinging back door, opening onto a trail of Troy's footsteps that vanish into the yard.

Who will be his next victim?

A year prior, Troy warned his brother, Thom, "I'll pull out your heart in six seconds like I learned in karate class." But Thom thought he was joking.

After Troy is captured and locked up, Thom is left to sort through the shards of his past while confronting his closeted homosexuality.

His life on the soaps seems washed up.

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Thirteen years later:
Looking as youthful as Phillip Chancellor in his Y&R glory, Thom graciously guides me through a tour of his modest rental. He now resides in a charming '20s Spanish townhouse, though hardly the glamorous lair of a soap stud.

In keeping with his rich kid image from Y&R, I pictured him in a luxurious penthouse, wearing a smoking jacket, surrounded by immaculate servants. In 1989, I had attended a highly questionable "soap opera acting class" which required watching the daytime drama that was supposedly best suited to your look. Mine was The Young and the Restless. For months, I watched Phillip Chancellor go to hell and back. Even in his darkest moments, he epitomized glamour, privilege, and a blissful immunity to the harsh realities of life. After Phillip's sudden death, it seemed inevitable that he would casually reappear without a scrape on his body, or as a long-lost twin.

But Phillip never returned, and Thom fell into relative obscurity, living out a soap opera more traumatic than anything Phillip could have imagined.

All the walls of Thom's disconcertingly humble abode are adorned with his vivid, original portraits and murals of pleasant, smiling faces as if he's trying to create the illusion of happy guests who will never leave him—unless he redecorates.

Life-size renderings of Latino Colt porn models are sprawled across the far wall of his bedroom. Two king-size beds have been shoved together to accommodate him and his lover, Doug, plus their two dogs, a shepherd/beagle mix, Bodhi, and a high-strung Chihuahua named Deen.

The room could use some sprucing up. I almost expect one of Phillip's dutiful maids to whisk in and transform the joint.

All the paintings are sensual or benign, except for a disturbing collage of glum, fractured faces, dominated by a hollow-eyed fiend.

"Originally, I thought I was painting my brother Troy who killed Mom," Thom casually mentions. "Sometimes, I think it's more of a self-portrait in my most haunted times. I wonder what a psychiatrist would have to say about it?"

Among the figures sharing the canvas is a bearded, godlike figure, representing his absent father, who walked out when Thom was 12. A psychiatrist might say his mother is a more subtle, though pervasive, presence in the painting, filling the black nothingness of the bleak backdrop.

This grim, scaled-down universe takes some getting used to compared to Phillip Chancellor's opulent lifestyle, still hopelessly ingrained in my mind since 1989.

We settle into Thom's rugged, brown leather couch in his cramped, cozy living room to discuss his rise and fall from stardom. Thom speaks in a mellow voice that sounds like he might be a roadside mechanic instead of a grieving survivor of family tragedy or a Hollywood player caught in the glare of showbiz. Deen, his manic pooch, is much more the glitzy type.

At 20, Thom fled his oppressively provincial hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin. With $5,000 in savings from bartending gigs at gay bars in Milwaukee, he moved to California, seeking fame and fortune.

"I always wanted to be a movie star from the time I was a little boy, an ambition that I've grown to question. I've had to examine why so many actors are neurotic, and not enough by themselves," he ponders, surrounded by an audience of murals looming from his living room walls.

New to L.A., Thom hooked up with Tim Wood, famed manager of pretty boy actors like Rob and Chad Lowe and Days of Our Lives' Drake Hogestyn. In 1986, after three years of acting classes and auditions, he bagged the role of Phillip, alcoholic heir to the Chancellor billions on The Young and the Restless, and was paired with fellow newcomer Lauralee Bell, the innocent, blonde, and blue-eyed daughter of the show's powerful producer, Bill Bell.

"Lauralee is like the daytime version of Tori Spelling," Thom reveals. "I hear Tori is very nice. Lauralee was very sweet too but she had no idea what it was like in the real world. After two and a half years, I told her 'I got to tell you something.' She was like, 'No, don't tell me anything.' I asked her to come to my dressing room and I told her I was gay. She was destroyed. But she knew. I was never any good at keeping secrets. I didn't want to pretend, even back then.

"Here I was this lower-middle-class gay kid from Wisconsin who had achieved soap opera stardom. It's like I visited the kings and queens for a while. Now, I'm just with the queens," he chuckles, in a rare, lighthearted mood. Like Phillip Chancellor, a shifting undercurrent of sadness flows through him.

His on-screen kissing scenes with Cricket (Bell) were heating up at the same time Rock Hudson was smooching Crystal (Linda Evans) on Dynasty. It was the height of the '80s AIDS hysteria.

"It was originally my choice to leave the show after three years," Thom muses. "They wanted to extend my contract two years into it. But, by the third year, they agreed to let me go. I've always been curious if that had something to do with the gay fear. I think the producers of the show were very concerned that I might have AIDS because I was gay, and I was kissing their daughter."

To be fair, the show also featured two other closeted gay actors, Terry Lester (the original Jack Abbott) and Michael Corbett (villainous David Kimball).

"At the peak of my popularity, I was flown around for personal appearances every other weekend, for $2000 a pop," he effuses. "I'd meet throngs of screaming girls at malls, and stay at Ritzy hotels. But there were many lonely nights. Some of the straight soap guys would pick up the girls, and sleep with them. I'd have nobody to talk to. I was too afraid to approach any guys. The weird part of being on a soap is that it looks like straight guys are interested in you but they're only interested in you because you're on TV. It's very confusing.

"One time, I got daring and invited a hotel security guard back to my suite. I laid there on my bed with a boner stretching out my Speedo. He pretended not to see and nothing happened at all.

"My promoters were advising me to keep my sexuality under wraps. I knew it was in my best interest not to say anything," he frowns.

Although Thom exudes quiet masculinity, the show's flirty florist knew a pansy when he saw one.

"Dante knew I was gay," Thom smirks, arching a thick black eyebrow. "He was a cherub who looked like a young Paul Newman. One day, he brought an orchid to my dressing room with his phone number. We started to date and he fell way in love with me. Within three months, he insisted we buy a house together under both of our names or else he was never going to see me again. By the time we moved in, I had fallen out of love. He took it very hard. Once, he slugged me and I showed up at work with a black eye. I think everyone knew what was going on."

Like many of Thom's friends, Dante has died from AIDS, as have the soap's head wardrobe, prop, and makeup men. Thom remains, gratefully, HIV-negative.

While living in Dante's inferno, Thom's younger brothers, Craig and Troy, moved in. Thom went out of his way to find a security guard job at CBS for Troy, but he never bothered to show up for his shift. "Troy was staying with me one of those times that Dante got violent, and Troy threatened to beat him up. I didn't even think Troy could beat somebody up. He was too gentle."

A mere twelve months later, on the morning of July 15, 1989, their mother's body lay smashed in sections over her linoleum kitchen floor.

Thom hopes to parlay his family's nightmare into a lucrative documentary, film and book deal.

"Brillstein-Gray is repping my book," he bubbles. "They're sending it out to five super agents who make million dollar deals all the time. I have a real good feeling about this."

Luckily, paranoid schizophrenia is in vogue, if the box-office numbers for A Beautiful Mind are any indicator.

"My mother had taken Troy to at least 40 psychiatrists between the time he was 15 and started to act out, and 19, when he killed her. Very few of those psychiatrists thought he had a mental problem. They thought he was functional, and just mean. In fact, there was one point that my mother found out that Troy had a book about paranoid schizophrenia. She didn't know if he was researching it to fake it or if he was concerned about himself. Before the murder, I thought he was just lazy. It only became clear that Troy was paranoid schizophrenic when I reunited with him five years after the murder."

As part of a proposed documentary, Thom plays a videotape excerpt from his recent prison visit with twitchy, medicated Troy. During their encounter, Thom vows unconditional love to his homicidal brother. Insanely, Troy refused to plead insanity at his murder trial. Consequently, he became the first person in Wisconsin history to be sentenced to life without parole.

Once a year for five days, Thom visits Troy in prison. However, he keeps the terms of Troy's sentence a secret, pretending that his release is imminent.

Initially, it took every ounce of compassion and understanding for Thom to forgive his brother for the unforgivable. "When I would get parts on shows like Melrose Place or Murder, She Wrote," Tom murmurs, "it was all about me playing a murderer or playing a vulnerable young man who was coming to terms with what he's done. It was at that point that I was really searching my mind to figure out where my brother's head was."

"I discovered that Troy and I have a lot in common," he says, quivering with emotion, like he's a little boy in way over his head. "We both looked the same. We were shy, creative, and had a tendency to lose our tempers. I've come to realize my brother is not this asshole. I eventually came to terms with stuff in myself as well that I didn't like. I could relate to him and forgive him more."

His epiphany came by dredging up a particularly shameful memory.

"I had a pet monkey that I abused," he says with a shudder. His eyes snap shut as if entering a trance. "Years ago, I was in a relationship with a man I loved very much and I think I was channeling my anger at him because I knew he was cheating on me or because I was holding in the fact that I was gay and had repression. In any event, this monkey that my lover and I bought together didn't like me at all from the get-go. The monkey bonded with one person and he bonded with my ex. I couldn't get the monkey to love me no matter what. In fact, he would scream at me. After a while, I couldn't take his screaming anymore. I held his mouth closed, and pushed him under the bathroom sink faucet. I could have hurt him."

Thom lurches forward, anxiously wiping his palms across the surface of the coffee table, though it's completely clear, except for a blue vase of fresh-cut flowers.

"I didn't kill the monkey," he swears, reeling back in his seat. "But I could have killed him. Then, I had to figure out, Where this rage was coming from. What's that about? My brother had lived with that kind of torment most of his life."

Thom looks on the verge of tears. His soap alter ego had the same raw fragility. Phillip could cry at the drop of a hat. For three melodramatic years, his compelling sensitivity seduced millions of viewers who wished to kiss away his pain.

He speaks as if delivering a soliloquy. He has a way of distancing himself and yet remaining intensely intimate, pushing you away and drawing you in. Simultaneously ingenuous and calculating. He was born for lingering close-ups.

"That monkey incident was the only time in my life that I ever lost control," he says, drying an eye. "Because I'm kind of a control freak. What you learn when you are a young, gay Catholic is that you have to be in control because you can't let the elders be in control or they'll send you to hell," he says and tosses a few rubber ducky chew toys at Deen, who ferociously wrestles them to the ground.

"That's why I love Deen," Thom grins. "He's the same size as the monkey."

After the murder, Troy fled the crime scene, setting off a bone-chilling week of suspense for everyone connected to the family. "Everybody knew it was him," Thom says, nervously pinching the corners of the coffee table. "There were fingerprints all over."

Flustered, Thom's eyes glaze over. He stares off at an arrangement of portraits that watch like silent witnesses.

"Troy had threatened many times that there was going to be a bloodbath," Thom recalls. "At the funeral, I hired a bodyguard because we didn't know if he'd show up and kill the rest of us. My mother worked at the Safety Building, which is a jail. So a lot of her friends were police officers and they all came to the funeral. My mother was this tiny little Italian lady who gave us three boys anything we wanted. My sister tells me every time I go back, my mother wasn't as good to her as she was to us. She was a saint to me."

Despite her sanctity, Thom chose to spend his last year in high school with his neglectful father. "Because my mother made me feel like I was suffocating," Thom grudgingly concedes. "Here I am, a 17-year-old, very independent, wanting to do things my way. She was afraid of that being a possibility—afraid for me. Also, she was sad that I would eventually leave her. In a way, she was very controlling.

"After her death, I realized what a momma's boy I was and how much I loved he." He softens, his eyes misting over, a clutch in his throat. "I felt like I owed her, I felt guilty. I felt that I had never loved her as much as she loved me."

Ironically, Phillip Chancellor from his Y&R days was trapped in a similarly smothering dilemma. For three years, his rich-bitch birth mother, Jill Abbott, and his rich-bitch stepmother, Kay Chancellor, were locked in a bitter custody battle for his affections. "After her death, I needed to hear from my mother," he confesses. "I would have séances. I contacted many psychics, many charlatans. There were probably 10 times when I did have contact with her. Not long after I left Y&R, a gay director of the soap invited me to a dinner party with James Van Prague. That morning, I had prayed to my mother for James to say 'the frosting on the birthday cake' to prove that she was there. And he did!"

As if she has just walked into the room, his face brightens, again fighting back tears. "I wasn't a bad son," he whispers, in a hushed plea. "I just didn't need her. I taught myself not to need anybody but myself. My childhood was unhappy," he adds, "Not by fault of my family. I was unhappy as a child because I was raised Catholic. Right away, it became clear that I was hated for being gay or for masturbating and I was condemned to hell. That didn't fit with my idea of what God was. I felt there was a good and loving God. So what I did was—I think a lot of gay men do this—detach and close myself off from people, for survival. I did that very early so that I would feel safe. I didn't tell too many people what was going on with me.

"I learned to be self-sufficient very early," he admits. "My other brother, Craig, never learned to be enough and feel good about himself and that was his inevitable downfall.

"Two years ago, Craig shot himself through the mouth. That was a big shock. Craig and I never had anything in common. He's the blond, the straight guy. We never understood each other, never had a clue where we were coming from. Craig and his wife would have fights. He would leave and consider going back with her. I was tired of hearing that. I wanted him to rethink his life. I had no idea that he was in a very dark depression and living in a small apartment in the Valley, which was totally blank and unfurnished," Thom says, agitated.

He speaks about that period in Craig's life as if his miserable, trapped brother should have picked himself up by the bootstraps and pulled it together. "Craig's estranged wife called me to check on him because she was worried about him. When I got there, the cops had already arrived. I kind of figured what they found by their reaction. The police officers let me look at him, which was a gift, because as soon as I saw his body, I realized, He's not there, he's somewhere else. I was grateful that I was the one who had to deal with it because I could cope best. He had two beautiful children that my brother and his wife were battling over, a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl.

"He was trapped in a bad marriage. It was unhealthy. He was trying to get out of it and she wouldn't let him. We keep reliving the parents' stuff until we get it straightened out. So you see there are similar dynamics. My mother didn't want to leave my father, either. Craig's wife wouldn't let him go. And, then, there was me and Dante."

He shrugs, defeated, as if sensing that he might have prevented a few deaths if he had heeded some of the glaring warning signals and cries for help from his needy brothers.

"When Craig killed himself, I suffered a kind of nervous breakdown and depression," he whispers. "At that time, I had to invent characters just to deal with my normal life. I was losing lost touch with reality. I realized that that in order for me to get comfortable and stay sane I had to stop pretending. I had to get ultra-real on all levels, which included total honesty about my sexuality. That's when I officially came out."

Thom has somehow endured, managing a serene six-year relationship with Doug, a waiter/photographer, though he lives less lavishly than his Y&R heyday when he had been raking in $140,000 a year. "To survive right now, I work for a friend of mine who has this company where he sells different facial cleansers," he says humbly. "I work right out of my home. This one bar of soap goes to Korea. It's a bleaching bar, and I fulfill the orders. I get these huge vats of soap and these mixes and I make them. For example, he'll say 'We have an order for 2,000 bars.' They will be shipped here and I'll make the 2,000 bars, wrap and label them, et cetera, and drop them off. It beats my job as a waiter at Canter's. It was awkward, waiting on fans and former cast members of Y&R."

A far worse humiliation was a recent bartending gig at a catered event. "I showed up at Raleigh Studios and didn't know what the event was for, which is pretty typical and then I was told, it was a pre-show for the Soap Opera Digest awards, which means all the presenters, all the big soap stars are there," he says, rolling his eyes. "It was for the dress rehearsal. I thought, I got to leave, I've got to run out of here. I was humiliated because I thought I'd look horrible, like a failure or loser. But I stayed. It was interesting to face that fear and I had a great night. It was cool. I was actually exhilarated, but other people were very uncomfortable. Some of my former cast members wouldn't even come up to my bar because they were afraid of embarrassing me."

Through all the ups and down, he has never succumbed to drugs and alcohol, sidestepped all 12-step programs, and shuns anti-depressants.
"The problem is here," he says, tapping on his noggin. "The problem is not medicine for me. I really believe God has given us everything we need to go through life. It's right there. It's all inside of you. I've gone to the lectures on Course in Miracles. I've read the Seth books. I've been to Science of the Mind. It's all the same thing. Universal God, good energy."

Despite spiritual leanings, he won't disclose his age and has undergone extensive cosmetic surgery. He still harbors hopes of resuscitating his acting career. A big fan of reality TV, however, he recently auditioned and was turned down for Big Brother 3.

"When I turned 30 a few years ago—though I won't tell you how many—I decided I wasn't where I wanted to be," he says, looking under 30. "I wanted to look better so I had a few surgeries. I got my ears pinned back. I got lyposuction. I got my teeth bonded. I got silicon around my lips, chin, and cheeks. And I got cheek buckling."

This is as shocking as anything he has described, because the surgery is completely natural and undetectable to the point of seeming unnecessary.

"In all honesty, I photograph really well, and I look really good on camera. In person, I don't think I'm that good-looking," he says, though he looks exactly like he photographs.

"Lighting is everything," he states, as he gazes lovingly at the gallery of his portraits with faces that never grow old and souls that can never be wounded.

For more about Thom Bierdz, check out www.thombierdz.com

© 2002 IN MAGAZINE LA.

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