Dirty Blond

Noticed all the flying monkeys circling Genoa City lately? Here's why. . .


Diane Jenkins

Ever meet someone and immediately thought to yourself, "Oh, no thank you," "Go away," "I'm not interested"? Ever met Diane Jenkins?

Citizens of Genoa City, lock up your men, your fairy godmothers, and your little dogs, too. She's back. I'm not kidding. After seven years of civic bliss fueled by her absence, Diane Jenkins has returned to GC like a bad penny in search of a fountain.

HOMEWRECKER. ARSONIST. SPERM-THIEF. These are just a few choice words to best describe Diane. Her bio reads like a how-to manual on being an EVIL, CONNIVING, BITCH.

It all started back in the late 1800's (or the 1980's rather) when she seduced Jack Abbott the night before his wedding to innocent dupe Patty Williams. Even after the wedding, Diane and Jack carried on behind Patty's back like a couple of high-schoolers just discovering their sexuality. But there would come a time when Diane's hubris would get the better of Diane and Jack. But it would be poor Patty who would shoulder the bulk of the consequences of their duplicity. The damage would be deep, and it would be irreversible.

Somehow, despite the fact that the bulk of Jack's "energies" were devoted to catting around with Diane, Patty became pregnant. With thoughts of onesies and diapers running through her head, Patty dropped by her husband's office one afternoon and found Jack and Diane conducting business of an entirely different sort, on his father's desk. Already a fragile person, Patty was, needless to say, devastated. Feeling lightheaded, she grabbed a potted plant to steady herself, but she lost her grip and suffered an expectant mother's worst nightmare - she fell, suffering a miscarriage.

Sadly for Patty, that was just the beginning; the morning of the first anniversary of her marriage to Jack, Patty's screws came completely loose, and she shot her husband three times. Jack miraculously survived, found it in his heart to forgive Patty (it was his cheating that caused Patty's mental break, after all) and Patty, summoning what little sense she had left, wisely left town, not to resurface for over twenty years.

But when Patty did return she came back completely deranged, obsessed with Jack and obsessed with bearing his babies. Paid to alter her face and infiltrate Jack's confidence, she succeeded, until she didn't. And when Patty's ruse fell apart all hell broke loose. A dog was killed. My four-year-old daughter poisoned. A 22-year-old innocent drowned. A rival of Jack's, in a stroke of high irony, was shot three times, and only survived by the grace of God and the heart of the drowning victim. Thank you, Diane Jenkins, thank you.

Had you considered remaining vertical for once; failing that, had you exercised even the tiniest bit of discretion, none of this might have happened? But turning poor, delusional Patty Williams loose on the world was Diane's opener. Like Britney Spears opening for Metallica, the main show was yet to come.

A decade after she also wisely ceased being a resident of Genoa City, Diane returned again, inexplicably as an architect. How she accomplished this, no one knows, but we'll get to that later.

Diane is the kind of woman whose self-worth is defined by the male attention she gets. It's a common weakness among members of my sex that I try to overlook. Some say she returned with an agenda to get Jack back. But it was Victor who showed the most interest in her and predictably, she gave into his game of seduction. Ever resourceful, Diane decided to use it to her advantage, playing Victor off against Jack.

This is where the story gets truly repulsive. Victor wanted no child with Diane (who would?) and even went so far as to have a vasectomy to ensure it never happened. Every the pragmatist, though, Victor had his little swimmers frozen in a lab on Robertson just in case he ever wanted offspring sometime in the future. Diane got wind of this through illegal means, violating some postal code statutes I'm sure, stole the sperm and then found a doctor desperate enough to break the law on her behalf. But the sperm wasn't Victor's, it was Jack's.

Oh how cruel the world can be! By this time, [full disclosure] I was married to Jack myself and blissfully in love. Our only hiccup was that I was told, erroneously it later turned out, that I was unable to bear children myself. So now Jack was stuck between the woman he loved and the child he so desperately wanted. And Diane knew it. She has the survival instincts of a rat.

What followed was a complicated web of machinations, I will not try to untangle, not wanting to bore you with the gritty details of broken legs and broken pipes. Let's just say things culminated with a fire at the Abbott pool house; which Diane set and framed me for. I was found guilty of arson and attempted murder, and was on my way to prison for a very long stretch when Jack uncovered the truth and forced Diane's hand.

That should have been the last we heard of Diane, but still she stuck around making trouble before finally leaving town with her son. At the time, I hoped that would be the last of her, but I'm not a lucky woman. Neither, unfortunately, is Genoa City.

Yes, Diane is back, and it looks like she's staying. She's got a cushy new job with McCall Unlimited as an architect. How she became an architect is a mystery akin to the Lindberg kidnapping.

I did some digging into her employment history at the firm Klein and Edwin in the far off land of Canada and discovered there are some discrepancies on her CV. She didn't found the company as she boasts, in fact she isn't now, nor has she ever been, a partner. One hopes Tucker McCall proves smarter than a third grader.

As the great humorist and wit Dorothy Parker once noted, "Time wounds all heels." One can only hope.

By: Phyllis Newman