On the 55th Anniversary of His Days of Our Lives Debut as Doug, a Loving Tribute to Bill Hayes, an Actor Who Was Every Bit as ‘Warm and Wonderful’ as You’d Hope

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How did we love Bill Hayes? Let us count the ways. There was the Days of Our Lives leading man’s acting prowess, which allowed him to take Doug Williams from opportunistic con artist to altruistic family man. There was his vocal ability, which over the decades got him cast in musical after music and scored him a Billboard chart-topper with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” And then there was the fact that the showbiz vet, who passed away in January 2024 at the age of 98, radiated the sort of kindness that seems in short supply lately.

It wasn’t an act, either. “He is just warm and wonderful,” Days of Our Lives executive producer Ken Corday told Soaps.com in 2021. “He pops onto the set and is just affable and friendly and has that same great rhythm and tone we’ve all come to know and love.

“The man you see on screen,” he added, “is very much the man Bill is off screen.”

Funny, then, to think how close Hayes came to never knowing that Salem existed, much less becoming an integral part of it.

His Early Days

After earning a gold record for “Davy Crockett,” Hayes was a hot commodity, touring with musicals and livening up the conversation on talk shows like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (and, much more recently, Jimmy Fallon). Which was great for his career, not so great for his marriage to Mary Hobbs. “One day she left, and that was a huge, huge disappointment to me,” he told Soap Opera Digest in 2017. “I thought, ‘Surely, we can work it out,’ but it didn’t happen. We had five kids, and it was too much for her.

“Show business is a traveling business,” he continued. “You do theater, you travel. You work on a film, you travel. You work in clubs, you travel. Show business was too much for her and she just left, and suddenly I needed a job where I stayed home. My kids needed me here, and so I’ve been in this house I’m sitting in ever since.”

On and off since February 9, 1970, Hayes also appeared on Days of Our Lives.

Life Imitates Art

Though Hayes said that he didn’t know diddly about soaps when he was cast as Doug, he learned — and quickly. So by the time lightning struck — and then-headwriter William J. Bell noticed that he had chemistry with Susan Seaforth as Julie Olson — he was ready. The future co-creator of The Young and the Restless “loved so much what was between the two of us that he scrapped my story and he scrapped Julie’s story,” Hayes told Digest, “and he did a long, long, long wonderful arc-ing story for Doug and Julie, and it was the best.”

Making that time even sweeter for Hayes was the fact that he and his leading lady were falling in love for real. They married two years before their characters followed suit in a 1976 wedding that was a real daytime rarity — in that the actors were allowed to write their own vows (and used the same ones from their own nuptials). The whole thing, Hayes told TVInsider in 2015, “was the epitome of what Days of Our Lives has always done best. We give our audience hope for the future!”

The couple even wrote a book that draws back the curtain on their off-screen romance; you can pick up a copy here.