with the story line." She had confided in Phelps previously that she was frustrated enough to quit, and was told in response that perhaps she should read her contract. McKinsey later quipped that perhaps it was Phelps and the rest of the Guiding Light production team who should have read the contract. "They didn't read the contract! I read it very closely. I knew every word. The next day, they were all combing over the contract. Somebody said, 'Maybe Beverlee's not familiar with the contract.' Well, of course she was! She wrote it, you bozos. She wrote it! I've had this out clause since 1986. I asked for it and it was P&G that determined how much notice they wanted me to give – and they chose eight weeks." In addition to her issues with storytelling, which she said would not have motivated her to leave if her working environment had been happier, McKinsey noted that acting had simply stopped being fun for her. "The hours just made me crazy. They were too long," she explained. Personal life and death She was married three times, and had one son, Scott McKinsey from her marriage to Mark McKinsey. Her son is a director on the soap opera General Hospital (on which she briefly appeared in 1994). McKinsey married Berkeley Harris, a co-star from Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, in 1971, and cared for him during his illness from terminal brain cancer prior to his death in 1984. In 1994, she made a brief appearance as Myrna Slaughter on General Hospital. In an interview, she said she took the role to qualify for her medical insurance, but otherwise adamantly considered herself retired from soaps from that moment in 1992 when she last left the set of Guiding Light. She had resisted all entreaties to return to daytime television. After some health issues, including a kidney transplant, McKinsey retired to Southern California and made few public appearances. Michael Logan famously described McKinsey as "[making] Greta Garbo look like a chatterbox!". Logan, TV Guide's soap columnist, once called McKinsey "…the greatest actress ever to grace daytime drama." Beverlee McKinsey died on May 2, 2008, at the Olympic Medical Center in Los Angeles, from complications due to a kidney transplant, which she had undergone in 1998. Filmography Film Television Theatre Awards and nominations References External links Beverlee McKinsey Archive 1992 TV Guide interview with