Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.

After we did [All In The Family], that ended up being a real love fest all around. Me and Norman, Norman [Lear] and me, Rob Reiner, everybody liked everybody. So about six or seven months later I moved out to L.A. and I got a call that Norman wanted to see me. I came in and he said "ABC has given me a property that they just optioned to make into a TV series. It's from a play called Hot L Baltimore, and I want you to be in it."

I mean God knows I've done tons of schlock during the course of my career and stuff that's been very low budget and really pressed for time, but I've never had an experience like this. I kept saying to people, "How do you do this?" I said to Susan [Lucci], "How do you do it?" I don't recall exactly what she answered me but it was something like "Close my eyes and think of England. You just do it."

She [Susan Lucci] was extraordinary. She wouldn't look at the scene until you walked in to rehearse it. It was amazing to me. That's the impression I got anyway.

I am so grateful for One Day At A Time, even though for years and years and years people would go, "Oh, you were on One Day At A Time." I [am on the show] for about seven months and then this haunts me for the rest of my life. No, I had no regrets.

Very interesting show. It's "Hotel" with the E missing. Hot L Baltimore. It was about a rundown hotel which had become kind of a residential not quite welfare but almost welfare hotel with a very bizarre collection of people.The desk clerk was played by Jamie Cromwell. That was his first big thing. Conchata Ferrell played April, the main of the two prostitutes, and my character didn't exist in the [stage] show.

I'm grateful I got the opportunity to do it because I know this now. If anybody ever asked me to do a daytime show again I would go no, no. I can't do that. Not because it's beneath me. It's above me. It's beyond my resources.