When Beth Maitland joined the cast in 1982, shy Traci always felt a little out of place in portraits with her fellow Abbotts. Dad John was the mega-successful founder of Jabot Cosmetics, big brother Jack (then Terry Lester) was a smooth-talking womanizer, and older sister Ashley was… Well, look at her. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Traci, but she felt like an ugly duckling next to the sibling who always appeared to have stepped off the cover of Seventeen.
Smitten with pop star Danny Romalotti, Traci became the president of his fan club and eventually a singer in his band. There was just one problem: Mean girl Lauren Fenmore wanted Danny, too, and she wasn’t above playing on her rival’s insecurities to become the girl with whom he wanted to “duet.” In the end, it was Traci on whose finger Danny put a wedding band — but only after she’d become pregnant by her two-timing Genoa City University professor, Tim Sullivan.
After love blossomed between Traci and upwardly mobile Abbott groundskeeper Brad Carlton (Don Diamont, now a Bold & Beautiful fixture as Bill Spencer), they married and put down roots in Genoa City. Until, that is, he seized an opportunity to stop hoeing and raking and start wheeling and dealing. Fed up, Traci took off for Stanford University, leaving her libidinous husband on just long enough a leash to hook up with, of all people, Lauren.
As Traci’s career as an author took off, so did her love life. Though her remarriage to Brad was briefer than his interim romance with Ashley, it did result in the birth of their daughter, Colleen. And as Traci once again picked up the pieces of her broken heart, she found that she had help: her publisher, Steve Connelly. Brad wanted to huff and puff and reclaim “his” woman, but instead, realizing that Steve made Traci happy, he stepped aside as the new couple moved to New York.
Steve just about ended his love story with Traci when she discovered in 2001 that he’d cheated on her. She was ready to begin a new chapter of her life but eventually weakened and agreed to give their marriage another go. “Not on my watch!” declared Colleen. She objected to the reunion by rebelling so enthusiastically that she got herself exiled to live with grandpa John.
Only days before Brad died starring in a much-too-literally-titled one-man show of Frozen, he admitted to Traci that she’d been “the one who got away.” Which we’d only been telling him for what? The better part of two decades? (TV characters so rarely listen!) Unfortunately, the tragedies were only beginning to pile up for Traci. She’d lost her father in 2006, she lost Brad in ’07, and in ’09, she lost… Man, this one still hurts.
After Victor Newman weaponized Patty Williams as part of his never-ending feud with Jack, Colleen became collateral damage when the madwoman’s abduction of Traci’s daughter resulted in her being pronounced braindead. Nevertheless, Traci, possessing a heart that’s bigger than the Genoa City Athletic Club, donated Colleen’s ticker to Victor, who not only metaphorically needed one but, upon being shot by Patty, legitimately needed one.
Thank heavens Traci was on hand when estranged mother Dina tried to make amends with the grown children that her abandonment had scarred for life. It wasn’t easy, what with the skeletons still rattling in Mommie Dearest’s closet and decades of resentment being brought back to a boil. But before Alzheimer’s disease robbed the Abbott siblings of their complicated matriarch, the group was able to achieve some kind of closure. Miraculous.
In 2019, Traci took inspiration for her next novel from hunk about town Cane Ashby. But when he suggested that they blur fiction and fact, she gently rejected him — which was probably a smart move. Sure, it would’ve been fun, but considering that Lily Winters’ former husband had rarely met a pair of lips to whom his weren’t drawn, Traci likely saved herself from a world of hurt that no one would believe if she put it in yet another book!
Lately, Traci has served as a calm, cool, collected kind of counterbalance to the insanity in Genoa City in general and in the Abbott mansion in particular. When the prolific writer doesn’t have to play referee between Jack (now Peter Bergman) and Ashley, who can squabble as hard as they love, she has to do her best to keep everyone’s heads from spinning Exorcist style over plot twists like nephew Keemo Volien’s sudden death and Diane Jenkins’ return from the dead.
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