"Don't worry about me! It's Janet! Rachel is going to make Paul kill her!" - Blake Hedison
Blake Hedison is the heir and later chief executive of Hedison Pharmaceuticals and the son of Carter and Monica Hedison of Ashford Falls, New York. He has one sister, Rachel Hedison, and a step-brother, Ty Hedison.
Born in Ashford Falls, New York, Blake is the daughter of pharmaceutical magnate Carter Hedison and hotel heiress Monica Winchester, daughter of Gage Winchester, who built the Winchester Hotel north of Ashford Falls in 1908. A widow with an infant son named Tyler, Monica met Carter during a party at her father's hotel in 1958. Her father encouraged the relationship, and the two married the following year. They had two children, Blake, who was born in 1959 with Rachel born in 1960.
Although Monica had encouraged Carter to adopt her son and give him his name, Carter never cared much for the boy as much as he did for Blake and Rachel. Eventually, Monica started to suspect her marriage to Carter wasn’t as genuine as she wanted, believing Carter only married her to conceive a male heir. As Ty retaliated against having Carter as his step-father, Carter eventually responded by sending the boy off to reform school. Monica then abandoned Carter and left Ashford Falls, flying to England where she had relatives, but Carter hired former detective Dash Andrews to abduct young Blake back, his lawyers complicating their following divorce and custody procedures for several years.
While Rachel was raised in England, Blake attended the Caldwell School For Boys in Vermont. Meanwhile, in England, Rachel’s contempt for her father increased and she began to fear losing her inheritance to her brothers, particularly Blake. Monica also feared she was losing any and all maternal link with Blake and returned to Ashford Falls to try and make amends. Meanwhile, Carter was already in a deal to extract controlling shares in the BloMart Medical Company in Albany run by Phillip Martin, who found himself increasingly attracted to Monica and started courting her, expecting her marriage to Carter to be ending. Monica, meanwhile, thought her marriage was leading to reconciliation, but when Martin realized Carter was planning a hostile takeover of his company, he threatened to take him to court. To avoid court, Carter hired Dash Andrews, a soured detective, to deal with Martin for him, but he murdered both Monica and Philip, staging it as a murder-suicide. For several years, Blake accepted his father’s version of the deaths as a fatal love triangle.
Before Monica had died, she had enrolled Blake and Rachel at the local Ashford Falls High School alongside Janet DuBois, Len Snedeker and Lisa Caldwell's daughter, Helen Caldwell. Never feeling suited for private school, Blake learned to appreciate public school and resisted being returned to Caldwell. He excelled in sports and dated several girls, including Tricia Caldwell, Debbie Nordoff, Chloe Waverly and briefly Tricia’s sister, Helen Caldwell. Blake also became friends with Danny Featherstone, Russell Coleman and Len Snedeker among several other classmates. During his time in high school, Blake was reunited with Ty, but they never really bonded as brothers. As Carter praised Blake for his accomplishments, Ty struggled to get accepted by him, and the two remained estranged for years.
Attending college in Connecticut, Blake dated and romanced Danny’s sister, Caitlin Featherstone, whose father, Nate Featherstone, was a business rival of Carter Hedison. Although Nate gave his blessing when Blake started dating Caitlin, Carter did not and when Blake finished college announcing he and Caitlin were engaged to be married, Carter encouraged Rachel to do what she could to ruin their courtship. Rachel also drafted Ty into her schemes to entangle Blake and Caitlin. Learning not to trust the Hedisons, Danny also had a problem with Blake planning to marry his sister. Blake’s relationship was also tempered by Nicole Browne, who tried romancing him to gain his interest and get her hands on the Hedison fortune.
During these romantic entanglements, Rachel in her ploys for money and power, Rachel rewrote the terms of her mother's will, gaining half custody of her grandfather's old hotel, which had closed down years before, from Blake. His relationship with Caitlin becoming estranged, Blake struggled to save their relationship. When Rachel tried to use a check from Nate Featherstone as a means to end Blake’s relationship with Caitlin, he instead used it to help Len buy a local garage. However, when Carter suffered a mild stroke, Blake moved in to help manage his father’s business at Hedison Pharmaceuticals. At this point, Caitlin finally had enough with the obstructions in her relationship with Blake, and she broke off their engagement.
Heartbroken, Blake worked to keep Hedison Pharmaceuticals prosperous, lowering prices on its medications and expanding to medical equipment to further its stocks. Many of these business dealings as well as the plan to build a larger facility on Haverstraw Road worked their way into Carter’s dreams during his resulting coma as well as Blake’s effort to re-engage his old romance with Tricia Caldwell. Meanwhile, Rachel had been seeing Dr. Paul Kirkwood, the local physician, intermittently to the disdain of Tricia’s sister, Helen Caldwell, who had feelings for Paul. Helen’s enmity for Rachel affected Blake’s interest in Tricia, resulting in several battles between them.
After Carter recovered and once again took control of the company, Blake once again took the role of doting son to his father, a role that continued to frustrate Ty. During Blake’s control of the company, he had tried to lure biochemist Fletcher DuBois to working for their company from Biomart Medical Company, but the news of his development of the Meta-Pill encouraged Carter to try and buy the formula from Fletcher. Blake continued to be unaware of his father’s unscrupulous ways to acquire the pill, and once again tried dating Janet Dubois unaware his father was using their relationship to get the formula. Rachel, meanwhile, convinced Paul to administer one of Fletcher’s remedies to Blake to kill him and make it look like an accident. In addition to his headaches, Blake started having heat flashes, tightening of his joints and watching his teeth and hair fall out as a result of the unapproved remedy. Watching Blake degenerate, however, encouraged Paul to stand up to Rachel out of his personal ethics, and when Paul told Blake about Rachel’s treachery, Blake attempted to confront her with a pistol. At the time, Rachel was also cavorting with writer Jack Gable, who fought Blake for the gun, although Janet in attendance was shot as a result. Blake warned Jack of Rachel’s complicity to have Rachel killed, but, invariably, it was Paul who saved Janet.
As Rachel lost her control over Paul, she became more determined to kill Blake, and she tried to deter his recovery from the fake remedy pills. Her success was cut short after she was struck and injured by Danny Featherstone driving Jack Gable's old Ferrari left in town. Blake later heard that Rachel was in a coma, sent to a private hospital by her father on Long Island.
Without Rachel’s interference, Blake continued to have more of a role in Hedison Pharmaceuticals, trying to encourage his father to retire. After another health crisis, Carter eventually left full control of the company to Blake and even made an effort to make his peace with Ty, leaving him a trust fund that would support him for the rest of his life.
Over the years, Blake continued seeing Tricia for some time before finally dating Jessica Witherspoon, a former actress. In 1995, when Carter started endorsing Carl Griggs as mayor, Blake was negotiating with the Dynasty Foundation to take their business abroad, but he was shocked to learn that the Dynasty Foundation was owned and run by Rachel who had created the company in absentia to order to stage a take-over of the family business. Rachel was also secretly backing mayoral candidate Sabrina Collins to oppose her father while revealing details of her mother and Philip Martin's murders to the press, complicating Carter from fully endorsing Griggs and allowing Rachel to seize the company. To block her, Blake joined forces with Janet Dubois to force Rachel to sell more shares in Hedison Pharmaceuticals which they then bought. Although Rachel had by now seized control of her father's company, she soon became aware she was no longer the chief stockholder. With Janet and Paul's stocks rising, they now had control of the company and ousted Rachel from control with Blake once again taking control of the company.
