in Nashville, Tennessee, much the same way that Sadie on One Life initially worked as a maid for the Lord family. Nixon's childhood maid was named Sadie Gay. Lillian Hayman had won a Tony Award in April 1968 for her role as Momma in the musical Hallelujah, Baby!, and immediately afterward, One Life to Live'''s casting department offered her the role of Sadie Gray. The character of Carla (despite debuting in episode 61, broadcast on October 7, 1968, months after the show's premiere) was conceptualized in Agnes Nixon's original show Bible, and as such is considered part of the story of Llanview from the beginning. Nixon based Carla and Sadie's original story on the film Imitation of Life, in which a light-skinned Black woman denies her heritage and her darker-complected mother, and enters white society by passing. Ellen Holly was quickly cast in the role of Carla after Agnes Nixon read her op-ed piece which ran in The New York Times on September 15, 1968, called "How Black Do You Have to Be?", in which she decried press coverage of actor Percy Rodriguez allegedly not looking "black enough" to be an acceptable Black addition to the cast of Peyton Place, and detailed her struggles and views as a light-skinned Black actress who could pass for white and chooses not to because she was raised in the Black experience and identifies as Black. A photograph of Holly ran alongside the op-ed with the caption "Ellen Holly — Not black enough?" Holly was initially hired to appear on One Life to Live for one year. Holly originally had reservations about working on a soap opera, as the bulk of her acting roles up to that point had been in the New York theater scene, but she took the job anyway, believing that her storyline with Lillian Hayman's Sadie Gray was very important and should be told on television, while also not wanting to turn down one year's worth of work and steady pay. Holly wrote a follow-up op-ed called "Living a White Life — For a While", which was published in the Times on August 10, 1969; in the op-ed Holly writes at length about her experiences as a lighter-skinned Black actress as well as her experiences after she was cast on One Life to Live. Of note in the 1969 follow-up op-ed is Holly's (and also ABC's) insistence on using the