ALL: General Retro Soap Discussion

[Contessa Donatella]

THANKS!!! So much!! 

[Contessa Donatella]

CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT: Essays on Politics and Media. by Renata Adler. St. Martin’s Press. New York. © 2001. “Afternoon Television: Unhappiness Enough, and Time” “You have to tolerate extremes of hatred and loneliness to follow, Monday through Friday every week. through a still undetermined period of months, the story of an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder. Yet there is an audience of at least six million at two-thirty every afternoon New York time (other times across the country) prepared to watch this plot line, among other plot lines, develop on “The Doctors,” a television program of the genre soap opera, or daytime dramatic serial.” And, this is no joke. It is for fiction a single act of rage and isolation like this imploded revenge, a suicide caroming across the board. “This contriver of his own death to make it look like someone else’s literal crime has, …detonated incalculable threats in other lives.” “The Doctors plays this all out”. For all I know, this might happen all the time. But “The Doctors” has a special instance here. Now, no one writes high drama. But in a time of violent death, individuals in dire straits look tabloid. “Most fiction keeps its personal crises low profile and small; writers with serious claims upon the desperate dramatic themes seem to have crossed further out of tragedy and into melodrama than writers of soaps going the other way.” The term ‘pop culture , never of much use or elegance, is empty now. “There is almost no culture of any other kind.” People with a taste or instinct for the arts are thrown back on the classics or must bide their time. “The arts, first-rate, second-rate (the creative enterprise is not a horse race, after all), are just not much in evidence.” Painting is a kind of caricature: ribbons, billboards, commercials are not simply the inspiration—they are *better* than this incessant, humorless joke that passes through museums and galleries in the name of art. In writing, one would never have found a Kafka on symposiums or on the Johnny Carson show. “But, in all the modern strategies of fame, it becomes harder than ever to know where to look.” “And then there are the soaps. They are pure plot.” Maybe the grand oral tradition rambled on but we had “Iliad” and/or “Nibelungenlied”. For months the audience wasn’t told —the characters did not yet suspect—that Dr. Allison killed Dr. Allison. “But the audience knew. Everyone knew.” In line with the characters and their motivations over the last several years the only question would come out when Dr. Aldrich’s murder trial would begin. if it began and how it would come out. Conviction. Acquittal. Conviction —and perhaps months later—acquittal. “All this was not conventional suspense. Too much was known. It was more like sustained morbidity and dread. Things were going to get worse before they got better. –if they ever did.” White housewives, black housewives, children home from school, men unemployed, the aged, the preschool young, the idle, the ladies at the ironing board—there was no telling, even from the commercials, who was watching this, except that they were millions, across the country, and that they were, and are, willing to endure what has become the perfected medium of daily, inexorable, and almost unrelieved depression. “It takes about five days to catch on to the plot of a soap opera in apogee. It takes five one of these years for one of these fictions, whose beginnings and ends are as obscure as the first question of the universe, to capture and maintain an audience. There seems to be no reason for whole generations of adults still to have strong, clear memories of Helen Trent and other characters from the radio soaps.” Surely we might’ve been homesick or have ‘amnesia’ be a first word for us to call out. “But the television soap operas (the radio ones now defunct), in addition to being in the afternoon, have brought their stories far closer to home.” “As sands through the hourglass,” says a voice, over music, each day at the start of a daytime serial, “so are the days of our lives.” “The program happens to be called ‘Days of our Lives’.” In all of the time that the show has been on the air top half of the logo has never emptied and the bottom half of the logo has never filled. Fidelity, betrayal, rape, murder,, amnesia, alienation, misunderstanding, literal misconception (wives pregnant by their husbands’ brothers or by the fiance`s of their husband’s sisters), hostages, adoptions, suicides, loves, wars, friendships, deceit, insanity, operations, villains, tea—whose sands and hourglasses are these? A lot of people’s evidently. The serial “Search for Tomorrow”, which is just now floundering a bit (writers of soap operas burn out, shift programs, lose their touch, endure, go mad, or simply vanish with their own dramatic frequency), has been on television continuously for more than twenty years. “The serial ‘Another World’ became so popular and full of plot (also so pressed by NBC’s need for another loved half hour) that it split in two; the old ‘Another World’, at its usual 3 p.m., and ‘Another World'(Somerset)—later renamed simply ‘Somerset—with many of the same characters, at 4 p.m.” “The Doctors itself, at two-thirty, is NBC’s competitor with CBS’s ‘The Guiding Light’, which was once one of the most watched programs in daytime television. No more. ‘The Doctors’ was just a better-written, better-acted epic of despair. “My happiest moment on an of the soap I have watched with anything like constancy occurred some years ago, when Andrea Whiting, of “Search for Tomorrow, cracked up on the witness stand.. Her villainy had been relentless, undiscovered, pathological, for years. She had broken the engagement of her son , Len Whiting, to Pam Tate. She had refused to divorce her estranged husband, Sam Reynolds, so that he could marry his true love, Joanne Tate., Patti’s mother and the program’s heroine. Andrea Whiting had been responsible years before for the death by fire of Len’s twin. She had blamed the death on her husband, Sam, thereby estranging Sam the father from Len the son. She had tried to kill several people in the intervening years—most recently Sam—-but she had contrived to make it look like Sam had actually been trying to kill her instead. Sam was on trial. He was being defended by Doug Martin, the father of Scott Phillips, who was going to marry Lauri Something, the mother of an illegitimate child. Names have little to do with paternity on soaps. Few legitimate children have their real father’s names, for overly complicated reasons. Doug Martin, Scott’s father, was about to marry someone else. Doug had overcome a severe breakdown only recently, and his marriage, his confidence, his relationship with his own son (Scott having just returned home from Vietnam) was depending on the success of his defense of Sam! Anyway, under questioning, Andrea cracked up. The truth about the fire death came out!The truth about everything else came out!in flashbacks spanning years . Andrea was carried out. I stopped watching for many months, quitting while I was just a bit ahead, I thought. Now it turns out that while I was away Andrea returned. Sam Reynolds is in prison in Africa. Joanne, having gone blind for awhile, and thinking Sam dead, has fallen in love with her neurosurgeon. Len’s wife, Patti, has had a miscarriage, and his girl, Grace (I can’t explain about Grace), had a child and died herself. It is such a misery. I’m almost glad the writers are troubled now with quite other problems I don’t care about. Andrea is scheming again. “Nobody can match Andrea in the scheming department,” a CBS plot summary says. I do see that.) I simply don’t understand “Search for Tomorrow” now. Some characters seem to be buying a house. My second-happiest moment on a soap was a mistake. Several years ago, a girl named Rachel had, by the most unscrupulous means, ensnared Russ Matthews, son of one of the most decent families on “Another World.” They married. Many months later, a very rich self-made young man called Steven Frame came into town and fell in love with Russ’s sister, Alice. Alice Matthews loved Steven, too, but so did Rachel (by this time Mrs. Russ Matthews), in her own unscrupulous way. Rachel seduced Steve. She became pregnant, and claimed the child was Steve’s. Her husband, Russ, was naturally upset, as was his sister, Alice, who immediately broke it off with Steve. For several months I stopped watching. Then one recent soap afternoon (recent in soap terms, —that is, around July), when I was on the telephone, I had “Another World” on, with the sound off. The scene was a christening. The characters were Lenore and Walter Curtin (who had a difficult history of their own) , a chaplain, a baby, Alice, and Steve. I thought —I truly hoped—that Alice and Steve had been reconciled and married along the way and that the child was theirs. All wrong. The baby was Lenore and Walter’s although Walter had grave doubts at this time. Alice and Steve were the godparents. Since then, Alice and Steve have really married. I missed that scene, but they have passed their honeymoon, and so I know. Russ and Rachel have divorced. Rachel has remarried —a young man whose business is now being financed by Steven Frame. Russ is engaged to Rachel’s new husband’s sister. Or he was, until a few weeks ago. People have to keep meeting at parties, where there are so many problems about previous marriages and affairs and present babies. Now Rachel’s husband has been in a coma and has made sordid revelations about his past. Walter Curtin has vanished, under mysterious circumstances. Lenore has received, by messenger, a scarf. Walter has confessed by phone to the murder, in a jealous rage. of Steve’s secretary’s former husband, whom he suspected of having slept with his (Walter’s) wife, Lenore. Most recently—in fact tomorrow, as I write this—Walter has died. But om the whole such sudden acceleration of the plot are better on quick, episodic soaps, like “Edge of Night”, which are akin to close, formed, Aristotelian thrillers, which I never watch. There are moments when some aesthetic things, all art set aside are simply so. People know it, without any impulse or attempt to argue: Something is on. Such a moment, years back, protracted over many months, was the Moon Maid episode in the “Dick Tracy” comic strip. Long before the slogan “Black is beautiful” appeared in and receded from the news, longer before the astronauts reached the moon, Dick Tracy’s son, Junior, returned from the moon with Moon Maid, pleaded with her not to remove her horns or try to conceal them with a beehive hairdo, married her, and delighted in their little baby’s little horns. The word would not even be miscegenation now. Junior was light years beyond the country’s perception of its race relations problems then. The McCarthy time of “Pogo” was less golden. It was one of those finest hours that “Peanuts,” in another key, has sustained over many years with genius consistency. Something was touched. The same was true for years of the talk shows on television. They were on. They meant something. Now, regardless of Nielsen ratings, watchers, they are off. One knows it. They simply do not matter in the sense they did. It is also true, oddly enough, of television coverage of the news. It had its years and faces. Then it had the instant thing it was perfectly designed for: the shooting through the head of a man by the chief of Saigon’s national police; the moon landing. Then it lost its purchase on events and, no matter how many people watched it, it faded. The anchorman would mention an event, switch to the local correspondent, who would mention it again, then interview its source, who would mention in in his own idiom. No depth, no time, and lots of waste of time. McLuhanism was wrong. The mind needs print. Perhaps the news as captured by TV will matter again. Maybe tomorrow. The soap operas, which have endured as long as anything in television, have their own rhythms, fade, recur. It was on “Another World”, some years ago that there was a moment— or, rather, nearly a half hour—of dramatic brilliance. It was just after Rachel, still married then to Russ, had slept with Steve and spent a weekend searching for her father. Russ naturally knew that she had been away, but not where or with whom. Suddenly Russ insisted that he and Rachel pay a call that night on everyone they knew in town—to keep up appearances. Rachel resisted, in her usual sulky way, and then gave in. They made the tour. It was a masterpiece of compression. Russ and Rachel acted out their drama in such a way (by concealing it, and pretending that all was well) that all the other dramas on the program—and there were many, and of long standing— were called to mind, as though the audience were going through an Andrea flashback on the witness stand. They went to visit, for example, Walter Curtin and Lenore. Walter Curtin had been the prosecutor, several years before, in a case in which Missy Fargo was mistakenly convicted of the murder of her husband, Dan. She mad married Danny Fargo, in the first place, because Liz Matthews (another unrelenting villainess) had tried to prevent the love match of Missy and Lee’s son, Bill. Liz, the mother, had decided at the time that her son Bill should marry Lenore (now Curtin but then single and in love with Bill.) Walter, the prosecutor, and Lenore all had an interest in seeing Missy go to prison. Several years later, Missy was sprung and married Bill. Then Walter, anyhow, repentant, and in love, married Lenore. Liz, the villainess, was hysterically distressed, but she had other lives to wreck, including a long-lost daughter’s, and she did. Russ and Rachel, in their tour, met others, —-several generations of the Randolph family, for example, and Rachel’s mother, Ada, of humble origins but of major significance in solving the Missy case. What had happened since Missy’s trial (Can I go on with this?) was an interminable riveting episode in which Lee Randolph, a daughter of the Randolphs (who are related to the Matthewses by innumerable ties of blood and misunderstanding), being in love with Sam Lucas, a relative of the humble Ada’s, had, under the influence of LSD, killed someone, whose name I don’t remember, of the criminal element. This business of not remembering has an importance of its own, although insanity has replaced amnesia as the soaps operas’ most common infirmity. The files of the soaps are so sketchy that their history is almost irretrievable. “Laura comforts Susan, and Scott is surprised by a statement from Julie,” for example, is NBC’s plot note for the March 13, 1970, “Days of our Lives”. And “Nick and Althea did make it to the Powers apartment, and the dinner did not burn” was NBC’s summary of two weeks on “The Doctors” during the AFTRA strike of 1967. The only true archivists of the whole history of a soap are the perpetual watchers, the loyal audience, whom, out of a truly decent sense of tradition and constancy, the ever-changing writers try not to betray. This requires careful and intuitive examination of those files, and an attempt to avoid anything that might violate the truth of the story as it existed before a given writer’s time. Only the audience knows, and yet there are so many Scotts and Steves and Lees on various programs that even the most loyal audience can get mixed up. Anyway, Sam Lucas took the blame for Lee Randolph’s having murdered, under LSD, a thug. Everyone was acquitted in the end. Of course, there is no end. But, Lee, thinking that LSD had impaired her chromosomes, kept far away from Sam, who misunderstood her motives as having to do with the milieu from which he came. Sam Lucas married a girl named Lahoma, an earthy character who was meant to appear only briefly in the plot but who was so good she had to stay. Lee Randolph eventually killed herself. Sam, Lahoma, Missy, (now widowed again) and Missy’s baby by Danny Fargo have all moved to “Somerset.” Strangely, none of the catastrophes on soaps —and nearly every soap event is a catastrophe— are set up with much sentiment. I do not think the audience ever cries, except at Christmas, anniversaries, and other holidays, all of which are celebrated on their proper day. The celebrations are bleak enough, but it is the purest gloom to find oneself on December 25 or January 1 watching a soap or, if the football games are on, deprived of one. The other days are just alterations of being miserable and being bored, or both, and knowing that the characters are the same. Well, there were Russ and Rachel, visiting all these people on “Another World”. To someone who had not been watching, it did all come back. It is not necessary technically to *watch* Since most of the characters address each other incessantly by name, one can catch it all from another room, like radio. On the other hand, one needn’t listen either. I would have found out about my mistake about the christening soon enough. There are the most extravagant visual and aural flashbacks, ranging from “Have I told you what Russ said to me last night?” (answer:”Well, Russ did tell me”: both characters retell it anyway) to visual flashbacks that would have done credit to the cinema. In the case of the temporarily misunderstood christening, it was my telephone that had turned the set on with the sound off. The ring of a telephone is often on the same frequency as the remote control device that operates some television sets; many households have this strange mechanical rapport. A pin dropped on a table will sometimes do it, or the clicking of a belt buckle. One things one is alone. and suddenly the room is full of voices, or faces, or both, from “Another World”. Another moment, this one from “Days of our Lives.” It takes, as the whole addiction does, some bearing with Mickey Horton we know —though he does not —is infertile. Tom Horton , Mickey’s brother, returned several years ago from Korea, face changed, memory gone. His memory came back. About three years ago, Bill Horton, another brother, made pregnant Mickey’s wife, Laura, a psychiatrist. Tom Horton, before he went to Korea, had a ghastly wife, extremely ghastly. When his memory returned, she returned also. Dr. Horton, the father of Tom, Mickey and Bill knows—as Bill found out by accident, as Laura knows, as we have always known—that Laura’s offspring cannot be her husband Mickey’s. Mickey does not know. Last year, there occurred the following episode: Tom’s ghastly wife was at the senior Hortons’, trying to be nice. The senior Hortons of “Days of our Lives,” like the senior Randolphs and Matthewses of “Another World,” or the Tates of “Search for Tomorrow,” are technically known by soap writers as “tentpole characters.” on which the tragedies are raised. Anyway, as she set the table for dinner that evening at the senior Hortons’, Tom’s ghastly wife was singing. The elder Mrs. Horton said that she had a lovely voice, that she ought to make a professional thing of it. The ghastly wife went directly to Dr. Horton’s study and made a tape recording of her singing voice in song. Later that evening, Dr. Horton had a chat with his daughter-in-law Laura about her child, her husband’s infertility, and her brother-in-law’s fatherhood. The tape recorder was still on. Tom’s ghastly wife, trying later to recapture her own singing voice on tape, heard all the rest. It was unbearable. Months of blackmail, we all knew. It might have been a lifelong downer. I turned off for several years. The present moment—since July, I mean—as far as I can tell, is this. The tape incident seems nearly over. Mickey Horton, however, was believed by everyone. including himself, to have made pregnant a girl other than his wife. Even I knew this was impossible, unless Mickey’s medical tests had been in error—in which case he might be the father of Laura’s baby after all—or unless the writers, and Laura and her father-in-law, had forgotten the whole thing. When Mickey’s girl’s baby was born, it did turn out through blood tests, that the baby could not have been Mickey’s. Of course not. Anybody who had watched even five days two years ago knew that. Meanwhile, a friend of the Horton family, Susan, who had a terrible life, has been raped in the park, and is being treated by Laura, the psychiatrist. Well. One thing about a work of art is that it ends. One may wish to know what happens after the last page of “Pride and Prejudice.” Some writers give signs of wishing the reader to abide with a given novel; one of the century’s great prose works, after all, ends in such a way that the reader is obliged to begin again. But narrative time in art is closed. The soaps, although they have their own formal limitations (how many times, for example, a major character is required by contract to appear each week on-screen) are eternal and free. One can have a heart attack during a performance of “King Lear” or fall in love listening to “Mozart” but the quotidian, running-right-along-side-life quality of soaps means that whole audiences can grow up, marry, breed, divorce, leave a mark on history, and die while a single program is still on the air. Aristotle would not have cared for it. The soaps can, and sometimes do, adopt the conventional thriller form, which has a different sort of dialect altogether: the solvers, the classicists who demand a beginning, a middle and an end. There was a superb many-month conventional kidnapping episode on “The Doctors,” once, when a trustee of the hospital abducted a nurse, under enthralling circumstances, and the only one who gradually caught on was the nurse’s roommate, Carolee Simpson, a character who, like “Another World”s Lahoma was meant to stay jut briefly but has ever been so good that she is essential to the plot—particularly in the recent matter of Dr. Allison. There was also a young lady physical therapist who thought herself widowed in the Six Day War (her husband had been a correspondent in the Middle East) and who fell in love with the son of the chief of all the doctors. The son was in love with her. Then it turned out that an Israeli girl had been nursing a blind American. He was rude to her for ages. She was kind to him. He turned out, after months, to be the lady therapist’s thought-dead husband, and things were resolved. Such episodes do occur. But they are rare. They are too self-contained. Now the wife of the chief of all the doctors, having been kidnapped and returned some months ago, thinks she is going mad. Her paternal uncle was a schizophrenic in his time. There does not seem to be a single sense in which soap operas can be construed as an escapist form. There is unhappiness enough and time to occupy a real lifetime of afternoons. There is no release: not the scream, shudder, and return to real life that some people get from horror films; not the anxiety, violence, and satisfactory conclusion of detective, spy, or cowboy shows; certainly not the laughing chapters of fantasy home, like “Lucy,” “Bachelor Father,” or the “Mothers-in-law,” There is no escape except, either, from political realities. The allegations that the soaps avoid the topical are simply in error: Vietnam, psychosis, poverty, class, and generational problems—all are there. One thing that soap operas do not do is flinch. They simply bring things home, not as issues but as part of the manic-depressive cycle of the television set. And what they bring home is the most steady, open-ended sadness to be found outside life itself. No one can look forward to a soap unless he looks forward to the day, in which case he is not likely to be a watcher of soaps at all. Watchers resign themselves. There are seventeen soaps on television now [1972], some obviously less good than others ( a soap that fails is not simply dropped from the air; it is, for the audience’s sake, quickly wrapped up: The hero, for example is run over by a truck), and in their uncompromisingly funereal misery there is obviously some sort of key. Most sentimental or suspense forms —dog, horse, or spy stories, for instance—have a plotted curve. Things are briefly fine, then they’re down for a long time, then they rise for a brief finale. There is some reward. The soap line goes along almost straight, though inextricably tangled, down. The soaps are probably more true to the life of their own audience than they appear to be; certainly they are truer in pace, in content, and in subjects of concern than any other kind of television is. Not that there is much amnesia or that much insanity out here. Not that each woman’s secret fear, or hope, is that she is bearing the child of inappropriate member of her family. But the despair, the treachery, the being trapped in a community with people whom one hates and who mean one ill, the secrets one cannot expose—except once or twice — in the course of years when changes and revelations occur in sudden jumps: These must be the days of a lot of lives. This is not the evening’s entertainment, which one watches, presumably, with members of the family; not the shared family situation comedies, which (with the important exception of “All in the Family”) are comfortable distortions of what family life is like. Soap operas are watched in solitude. This is the daytime world of the Randolphs, the Matthewses, the Hortons, the Tates —a daily one-way encounter group, a mirror, an eavesdropping or the apparent depression of being just folks for more than twenty years. It is even entering the commercials now—the utter joylessness. There are still the cheery, inane commercials with white tornadoes and whiter wash. But there are beginning to be hopeless underdogs; unpretty, sarcastic Madge, who, as a manicurist, deals with actors who look as though they knew about life in cold-water flats. the emphasis on cold-water products. The view of life as a bitter, sad, dangerous ordeal, with a few seconds reprieve before the next long jolt to decent souls, cannot be confined to one side of the screen. Not on seventeen daytime serials. When, for millions, a credible villain is a suicide, dead, and well out of it. And, a hero is a man compelled to live his drama out, the daylight view of what life is like is far less sunny on television, anyway, than the view by night.

[Contessa Donatella]

Women Pioneers in Television: Biographies of Fifteen Industry Leaders by Cary O'Dell. McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers. Jefferson, NC © 1997. 

Irna Phillips pg. 181-193

    In 1991 TV GUIDE published a special commemmorative magazine celebrating its 2,000th issue. Included in its pages was a special section on television visionaries, "The Creators." Of the twenty names there (among whom were Pat Weaver, Norman Lear, David Sarnoff, William Paley, and Leonard Goldenson), only one belonged to a woman.(1) That woman was almost single-handedly responsible for creating one of the most enduring and most profitable television genres in history. As Dan Wakefield wrote in 1976, she "is to soap opera what Edison is to the light bulb and Fulton to the steamboat."(2) She founded the industry of the television soap opera and for forty years was its single greatest writer, producer, guardian angel, and guiding light. The name? Irna Phillips. 
    Irna Phillips was born July 1, 1901, (some sources give 1903) in Chicago, Illinois, the tenth and last child of William S. and Betty Phillips (who was 42 years old when she gave birth to Irna). Few of her brothers and sisters survived to maturity. Her parents owned a small grocery store in Chicago and the family  lived above it. Her father died when Irna was eight, and her mother took on the task of caring for the family; years later, Phillips said of her mother, "{She} had the sturdiness befitting a pioneer."(3) By Phillips own account, he4r childhood was a sad and lonely one. In 65 she remembered herself as a "plain, sickly, silent child, with hand-me-down clothes and no friends," forced to sleep on a cot in the family's dining room because space was scarce. Phillips's only pleasure came from books and her own imagination, from which she fashioned cartons into stages and created make-believe families with large homes, wonderful clothes, and plenty of money.(4) 
    Irna's early school was uneven. She refused to go to school unless someoine came in to dress her. Sometimes, as she remembered, no one bothered.(5) Nevertheless, she went on to graduate from Seen High School in Chicago in three years. After a short spell at Northwestern, Phillipa transferred to the University of Illinois, where she indulged a love for acting. Though her professor thought her talented, she never landed a major role in a school production and was finally told she had neither "the looks nor the stature for professional success."(6) 
    Devastated by this news, Phillips, on her mother's advice, decided on a career in teaching. After graduation she taught for a year in a Fulton, Missouri, community college. Later she did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, taking courses in speech, drama, and psychology. She then taught for five years in Dayton, Ohio.(7)
    How Irna Phillips got back to Chicago is open to debate. Some sources say she returned to visit a newly born niece; others say that a tiff with a boyfriend sent her packing.(8) Others say she was only on vacation.(9) What *is*  known is that she returned to the Windy City in 1930 and that she seldom left it again.(10) Exactly how Phillips got her first radio job is not known either. Two stories survive. In the first she was on a tour of WGN studios when someone mistook her for a radio actress applying for a job and handed her a script. Though they considered her voice too low for a woman, they were impressed enough with her reading of a poem by Eugene Field, "The Bowleg Boy," that they hired her.(11) The second story of Phillips's entrance into radio is that she walked into the station and asked point-blank for an audition. Either way, she ended up with a nonpaying job on WGN, broadcasting a daily trifle called THOUGHT FOR THE DAY, which consisted of Phillips reading poetry and adlibbing insprational commentary.(12) 
    After two weeks Phillips was promptly let go only to be almost immediately rehired in a different capacity after she allegedly protested to her ex-boss. In her new job she was asked to write an act daily (six days a week) "radio strip," or serialized story. WGN had already been running the continuing story of GASOLINE ALLEY, based on Frank King's comic strip about small-town America, and  now wanted another daily show; this one "about a family."(13) 
     Irna Phillips responded with what many consider the first "soap opera." It was titled PAINTED DREAMS and began on October 20, 1930, running in short, ten-minute installments.(14)
    The show had six characters but only two actors. Phillips played the main character, Mother Monahan (a role based on Phillips's own mother), and the "mystery character," Kay. Actress Ireene Wicker (later "Kellogg'sSinging Lady") played all the other parts - including the family's barking dog, Mikey. The two women got by without male voices by only referring to the men in their lives, never by having them present.(15)
    PAINTED DREAMS had run for two years o n WGN when Phillips tried to create radio network interest in it. WGN refused the idea, saying that it owned the show outright and that it could not be moved to another broadcaster. Phillips quit the station and began what was to become a long, bitter court battle with the station over ownership of the series. The case dragged on in the courts for ten years, finally being decided against Phillips. By then, though, she had moved on to other things. She had also learned a lesson: All future shows and scripts she worked on would be copyrighted in her name alone.(16)
    In 1932 Phillips bounced back with her second soap, title TODAY'S CHILDREN. It ran on WGN's chief rival WMAQ (at first unsponsored and with Phillips footing all costs in order to retain ownership). It was a thinly disguised version of DREAMS: Mother Monahan was now Mother Moran, and the other characters of the show were similarly redesigned. For a time Phillips acted in the serial but eventually found the dual work of acting and writing too taxing. She resigned herself to writing only.(17) Soon after, "the Phillips impulse" for creating new sows began. She created a short-lived soap, MASQUERADE - the story of a painter involved with different glamorous women. Devised as a way to sell the sponsor's cosmetics, it lasted three months.(18)
    TODAY'S CHILDREN ended in 1938, partly because the death of Phillips's mother made work on a mother-centered show too difficult for her emotionally, and partly because, as Phillips said, "I had exhausted all the problems of these people."(19)
    These two failures and the demise of CHILDREN were balanced by two other Phillips creations that survived and prospered: THE GUIDING LIGHT (debuting in 1937) and THE ROAD OF LIFE (debuting in 1938).(20)
    ROAD OF LIFE centered on the life of noble surgeon Dr. Jim Brent, who "mends broken legs and broken hearts with equal ease."(21) GUIDING LIGHT was the story of Dr. John Ruthledge, a small-town minister. The character was based on a friend of Phillips. Sometimes during the early years an entire fifteen-minute episode was devoted to a Ruthledge sermon. Collected into book form, the character's many sermons sold 290,000 copies nationwide.(22) 
    Irna Phillips also created another hospital-based drama around this time, WOMAN IN WHITE. And when a group of characters from GUIDING LIGHT, the Kransky family, developed enough, she spun them off into their own show, THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS, in 1939. It ran until 1960.(23)
    Along the way, creating, writing, and controlling her series, Phillips pioneered many of the staples of soap operas today. She was the first to incorporate professional people into her stories: lawyers, ministers, and doctors replaced minimum-wage, blue-collar workers as heroes.(24) Phillips was the first to use such soap devices as organ music (provided by Bernice Yanocek) for dramatic effect, and cliff-hanger endings to keep audiences coming back.(25) 
    Phillips was the first to bring a higher social consciousness to the world of soaps. In 1945, after using THE GUIDING LIGHT to help sell war bonds and after realizing she had been "subconsciously" educating her listeners in various areas for years, Phillips decided to take a more uniform approach to the idea of "social significance." Phillips and staff sent letters to a variety of agencies around the country (the Red Cross, the American Legion), asking a simple question: "What is your problem and what can we do to help you with it on one of our programs?" From their responses, Phillips devised soap story lines intended to further those agencies' causes.(26)
    Quite ingeniously, Irna Phillips also tailored her shows to her predominantly housewife audience. She slowed the pace so that women doing housework could answer the door, vacuum, or see to the baby and still not miss anything. She rationed ideas and story lines by doing the same thing.(27)
    Phillips, herself, was a highly eccentric woman, possibly more than any of the thousands of characters she created during her career.She consulted fortune tellers from time to ti me and changed the spelling of her name from the original Erna to Irna when a numerologist said it would ease her life.(28)
    She was also a hypochondriac. She visited doctors nearly every day of her life. A physician who lived in her apartment building in Chicago stopped by several times a day to listen to her complaints and take her temperature.(29) Her trips to New York City were often mixed in with trips to different hospitals and specialists in Manhattan. Once, while staying in her suite at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, she insisted that storm windows be installed to end the drafts. The windows are still there.(30) Frequently, she asked to be pushed around in a wheelchair.(31) 
    Not surprisingly, Phillips's preoccupation with illness and disease became evident in her work. Doctors and nurse as characters, hospitals as settings, and illnesses as subjects for drama were vintage Phillips characteristics.(32)
Phillips's treatment of actors who worked on her shows was rather odd as well. She seldom bothered to learn the names of the performers, knowing them only as the characters they portrayed.(33) Actress Helen Wagner, who has played Nancy Hughes (now McClowsky) on AS THE WORLD TURNS since it premiered in 1956, was a friend of Irna's and remembers just how typical that was, "I was always Nancy to her. Any reference to my husband always meant Chris, my on-screen husband, not my real-life husband. I never became 'Helen' until very late in her career, after knowing her many, many years."(34)
    Similarly, Phillips did not like the off-screen lives of her actors to interfere with the on-screen lives of their characters. Helen Wagner, whose character of Nancy was in the early days something of a homebody, was for many years denied a vacation from the show because it would mean writing the character out for a few weeks. Phillips told Ms. Wagner, "Nancy is a housewife, Nancy does not travel." It was several years before Nancy was allowed to go visit a sister out of state so that actress Helen Wagner could have a few days off.(35)
    Like her characters' lives and her plots, Phillips rigidly controlled her home life and went to great lengths to keep it simple. She lived far away from the network TV industry in her Chicago apartment. Until she was in her late thirties, Phillips shared a bedroom with her mother, and she never learned how to drive. Though her sponsor once gave her a 1940 Plymouth to celebrate ten years in radio (and Phillips named it Sheila), it is doubtful she ever drove it.(36) Even her weekly menus were preset: on Sunday there was leg of lamb; Monday, chicken; Tuesday, steak; Wednesday, meatloaf; Thursday, lamb chops; Friday, spaghetti; and Saturday, stew.(37)
    Phillips seldom had anything to do with the press, which she believed (perhaps rightly) dismissed soap operas as second-class subculture, snickering at her success and her fans' loyalty. She permitted few interviews during her entire career.(38)
    Also not surprising was Phillips's flair for melodrama. In 1960 interviewer Peter Wyden related the story of the day Phillips's son Tom arrived late to meet her: "She does not just become vaguely uneasy. Her concern is translated into imaginary but stark disaster - he's been run over, his body is lying at the curb, he is bleeding badly."(39) Irna Phillips labeled herself a compulsive worrier and believed she would never get an ulcer because she turned all her worries into scripts.(40) "I do quite a bit of projecting," ahe told an interviewer.(41)
    To oversee her programs, Phillips moved in 1940 to New York City. After seeing the toll the war was influcting on the country in 1941, she fashioned the serial WOMEN ALONE to dramatize the plight of women left on the home front. Her experiences in New York also served as the model for yet another new drama, LONELY WOMEN, which had a short on-air lifespan beginning in 1942 before Phillips recycled an old title and the show became known as TODAY'S CHILDREN in 1943. After six  months, though, New York was not to Phillips's liking, and she soon returned to Chicago. A similar move to California in 1943 did not work out either, and she returned to Chicago after only nine months.(42)
    With so many shows on the air at the same time, and wielding as much power as she did, Irna Phillips put forth a revolutionary idea for soap opera broadcasting in 1943. THE GENERAL MILLS HOUR, as she foresaw it, would consist of three ofher shows running back-to-back - each in different lengths, from fifteen to twenty minutes depending on the plot - with characters from each occasionally overlapping and interacting. A narrating voice-over would navigate proceedings. It endured for a few months until Phillips abandoned the concept.(43)
    By 1943, only a little over ten years after she began, Phillips was single-handedly responsible for five different daily dramas. Her total income from them was $250,000, and her literary output was estimated at two million words per year, the equivalent of forty novels.(44) She had established such a factory by this time that she found it necessary to have a lawyer and two doctors on retainer just to act as consultants.(45)
    It was only later that Phillips reached the need for support writers, or "dialoguers," who filled out the basic story lines she devised. Many young writers who began with Phillips went on to successes of their own. In 1946 she hired a young recently graduated writer named Agnes Eckhardt, who later married and changed her name to Agnes Nixon.(46) Nixon would go on to create ALL MY CHILDREN and LOVING. Phillips also had a longtime collaborator in writer William Bell. After cocreating ANOTHER WORLD with Phillips, he went on to found with his wife Lee Phillip Bell two of the most successful soaps of recent years, THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS and, later, THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL.
    Also in 1943, at near the same age her mother was when she herself was born, Phillips, unmarried and a career woman, adopted a child, Thomas Dirk. A year and a half later, Phillips adopted Katherine Louise.(47)
    Throughout the 1940s Irna Phillips reigned as the undisputed queen of the radio soap opera. By the end of the decade a new medium was on the horizon and it would be that medium that Phillips (somewhat reluctantly) would conquer next. 
    By all accounts Irna Phillips was not anxious to move her shows from radio to television. With television, a fog horn could no longer substitute for the deck of a ship, and actors could no longer be brought in and replaced so easily. So reluctant was she to give up radio that after THE GUIDING LIGHT debuted on television on July 30, 1952, the scripts were rebroadcast that same day on radio. The two GUIDING LIGHTS ran concurrently on the two media for several years until finally the incredible success of the television version made the radio outlet obsolete.(48)
    Around this time Proctor and Gamble [sic: My Note: This book spelled Procter and Gamble wrong over & over.], the soap manufacturer and a longtime force in soap opera broadcasting, began its long association with Phillips. Phillips sold the ownership of her current TV dramas to Proctor and Gamble Productions. Between the two of them (Phillips and P&G) they formed the biggest, toughest alliance daytime television had ever seen.(49)
    In 1956 Phillips, in association with Proctor and Gamble, stormed onto television with what was to become her most popular (and some say, personal favorite) creation, AS THE WORLD TURNS. The continuing story of the Hughes and Lowell clans of Oakdale, Illinois, began on April 2, 1956, as TV's first half-hour soap. It was produced live until 1975 when it was lengthened to a hour. The show revolutionized daytime drama by gaining more viewers than ever before in the history of the genre (sometimes as high as a fifty percent share of the audience), and it launched soapdom's first all-out lying, scheming villainess, Lisa Miller (later, after marriage/s, Lisa Hughes, then Coleman, then Mitchell, then others). She was played by actress Eileen Fulton, who continues on the show to this day. Fulton's and the show's fame were so intense in the mid-1960s that CBS created a nighttime spin-off titled OUR PRIVATE WORLD. It, however, would only last a few  months.(50)
    Irna Phillips's actual writing for her series, radio and television, was rather unusual. Every day at  nine in the morning Phillips sat down at a rickety, brown card table - the same one she had used for years - and began to devise that day's scripts from projected story lines often set down months in advance. From there she would dictate dialogue to her secretary and close friend, Rose Cooperman. "I really don't think I write," she said "I act."(51) Occasionally sitting still and occasionally moving around the room, moving as the character would, Phillips assumed all the characters in the scene - male, female, adult, child - changing her voice to indicate a change in speaker.(52) This process worked so well for Phillips it was later adopted by many of her proteges, including William Bell.(53)
    As Phillips would talk, "Rosie," her secretary, would take down every word, following the various characters by following changes in Irna's voice and gestures. Rosie filled in the punctuation along the way. Both women became so involved with the story line they were creating that they found themselves in tears.(54)
    The average time for Irna Phillips to dictate a half-hour script was about an hour and forty-five minutes. It usually took longer to type the finished manuscript than it did for Phillips to dream it up.(55) During Phillips's "writing" she seldom lost her place or became confused.  If she did, she could always consult one of her various genealogical charts she created for each show. They consisted of squares containing characters' names with solid lines connecting relatives, dotted lines connecting in-laws, and "X"'s over names of dead or missing family members.(56)
    After the writing was finished Phillips would sit down and watch not only her shows but those of her competitors as well. While viewing her own shows, if she found something she did not like in script, performance, or production, it was switched immediately. This often meant a phone call to New York and a list of demands. A few times actors found themselves jobless after a phone call from Phillips. Not surprisingly, many actors, writers, and crew members feared Phillips's wrath. Once, when an actor playing what many thought an indispensable character asked for a raise in salary, Phillips refused and solved the whole problem by simply killing off the character. The show went on without him.(57) Don Hastings, who has played Dr. Bob Hughes on AS THE WORLD TURNS since 1960 (and wrote for the show for many years under the name J.J. Mathews), remembers Phillips as a tough but fair mother lion, ferocious in protecting her creation: "She was very tough on her writers but would protect them if the network or the producers criticized them. She always said that if she okayed a script it was as good as her writing it herself."(58)
    Though Irna Phillips could be difficult, and a great many lived in constant fear of her, nobody would deny her skill. Don Hastings remembers a time when AS THE WORLD TURNS ratings had slipped. Owners Proctor and Gamble asked Phillips - then at work on another Proctor and Gamble show - to return and help WORLD. "Can you bring us up to a thirty share by the end of the year?" they asked. Phillips delivered the thirty share in thirteen weeks.(59)
    Additionally, Phillips was not as difficult on a personal level as she might first appear. Throughout her career she was instrumental in starting other writers in their careers. Agnes Nixon, Bill Bell, and many other names benefitted from her support and guidance. Phillips was also known to take many young actors under her wing, sheltering and encouraging them.
    In her life in Chicago, Phillips had a small but tight-knit group of friends and a fiercely devoted household staff. They admired and respected her enough to overlook her dramatic nature and her many pseudo-illnesses. Producer Lee Bell, who with her husband Bill created THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS and THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, was a friend and coworker of Irna's for many years; she remembers an eccentric but likable person. "She was a genius," Bell said, "A brilliant, intelligent woman. You wanted to be around her. Whatever eccentricities [she had] didn't matter."(60) 
    In 1964 Phillips formulated a new series for NBC titled ANOTHER WORLD. The title referred to the separate "psychological worlds" of its characters and the two separate economic worlds of the show's two major families. Not accidently, it also drew comparison with the previous Phillips creation AS THE WORLD TURNS.(61)
    ANOTHER WORLD was the first daytime soap to run one hour. It was also the first daytime show to address the topic of abortion.(62) Phillips invited controversy again in 1967 when she attempted to introduce an interracial story line into LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, a show she was also writing at the time. When the network bosses balked at the idea, Phillips walked out. She abandoned the show, and it was canceled in 1973.(63)
    Despite Phillips forward thinking, however, she did not always approve of the direction daytime shows were taking. She said in 1972: "The daytime serial is destroying itself, eating itself up with rape, abortion, illegitimacy, men falling in love with other men's wives, all of which is often topped by a murder, followed by a long, drawn-out murder trial.(64)
    In 1964 ABC-TV put Irna Phillips, at age 63, on the payroll as a special consultant for its primetime soaper PEYTON PLACE, the serialized twice-weekly program based on the book by Grace Metalious. By taking the PEYTON PLACE job, Phillips achieved a rare triple play: she now had her hand in, and was receiving paychecks from, shows running on all three major networks.(65)
    In 1965 Phillips cocreated DAYS OF OUR LIVES and composed what has since become arguably the most famous opening line for any show in television's history: "Like sands through the hour glass ..."(66)
    All did not always flow smoothly, however. The early years of ANOTHER WORLD were filled with complications: major characters were thrown out with little explanation, and actors were replacedal,ost weekly. Frustrated, Phillips left ANOTHER WORLD to concentrate on a show for ABC that she was cocreating with her daughter (and was based on Irna's own life). That show would only air for a few months when it premiered. Agnes Nixon was later brought into ANOTHER WORLD as head writer to whip the show into shape.(67)
    Since Irna Phillips had almost single-handedly created soap operas as a dramatic form years ago in radio, they had begun to change. The incedible success of her own AS THE WORLD TURNS made daytime soap operas an important, highly profitable part of the network schedule. To gain viewers and therefore money, soaps became more and more sensational. Gradually they became more scandalous, sexual, and action-oriented; Irna Phillips's stories of women sitting around the breakfast table were becoming passe. Phillips found herself being left behind by the genre she had created. Allen Potter, who worked on ANOTHER WORLD with Phillips during its difficult years, summed up the problem: "She was from a different era. [She was] still writing kids going down to the malt shop."(68)
    Phillips was asked to rejoin AS THE WORLD TURNS in 1972.(69) She simplified some of the plots but failed to turn the recent ratings dip around. Proctor and Gamble, the show's producer, fired Phillips in 1973. Back in Chicago she began work on an autobiography, but nothing was ever published.(70)
    On December 23, 1973, Irna Phillips died in her sleep at her home in Chicago. She was seventy-two. In accordance with her wishes news of her death was kept from the press for several weeks.(71)
    What made Phillips a success - the Queen of the Soaps, as she was often called - is somewhat difficult to answer. Helen Wagner recently explained it this way: "We [AS THE WORLD TURNS] premiered the same day as EDGE OF NIGHT [a now defunct mystery-based soap on ABC]. What was important on that show was the story. For AS THE WORLD TURNS what was important was the character.(72) Phillips realized early in her career that the success of serialized stories depended on her audience becoming involved and knowledgeable about the characters on the show. She told BROADCASTING in 1972: "Characters have to be multidimensional. The story has to come from the characters, to the point where your viewers will get to know a character so well they can predict his or her behavior in a given dramatic situation."(73)
    Phillips believes there were several reasons for her success, not the least of which was her self-described limited vocabulary ("my greatest asset"), which, she believed, made her programs universal. She also attempted in her writing to appeal to the basic instincts of self-preservation, sex, and family.(74)
    Perhaps Phillips's greatest personal achievement, however, was creating a world. fully and believably, that she did not really know herself. Though she never married; nor did she give birth; nor did she ever own a  home. But somehow Irna Phillips knew enough about all those qualities to entertain millions for generations - to spin endlessly involving tales of day-to-day life; tales about the simple joys and daily dramas of paying the bills, raising children, belonging to a family, and falling in love. 
    Irna Phillips wrote in McCALL'S magazine in 1965, "None of us is different, except in degree. None of us is a stranger to success and failure, life and death, the need to be lovedthe struggle to communicate..."(75)
    Four of the programs Irna Phillips created - AS THE WORLD TURNS, GUIDING LIGHT, DAYS OF OUR LIVES, and ANOTHER WORLD - are still on the air today. 

IRNA PHILLIPS
July 1, 1901        Born in Chicago, Illinois
1922             Graduated with bachelor's degree in education.
1924             Graduated with master's degree in speech; began career teaching school in Missouri and, later, Ohio.
May 1930        Returned to Chicago; joined WGN as actress and ad hoc writer. 
October 20, 1930    PAINTED DREAMS, radio's first "soap opera" debuted;created by Irna Phillips. 
June 16, 1932        TODAY'S CHILDREN, second Phillips creation, premiered; departed WGN.
1934            MASQUERADE premiered. 
1935            MASQUERADE aired last broadcast.
January 25, 1937     THE GUIDING LIGHT premiered. 
1938            TODAY'S CHILDREN aired final broadcast; ROAD OF LIFE and WOMAN IN WHITE premiered.
October 16, 1939    THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS premiered. 
1940            Phillips moved briefly to New York City; would return to Chicago after six months. 
1941            WOMEN ALONE premiered; settled court suit with WGN. 
June 29, 1942        LONELY WOMEN (title later changed to TODAY'S CHILDREN) premiered. 
1943            Resided briefly in Los Angeles; adopted son, Thomas Dirk.
1944            Adopted daughter, Katherine. 
Summer 1948        WOMAN IN WHITE aired last broadcast.
October 11, 1948    THE BRIGHTER DAY premiered on radio. 
January 31, 1949    THESE ARE MY CHILDREN premiered.
March 4, 1949        THESE ARE MY CHILDREN ended.
1950            Second incarnation of TODAY'S CHILDREN ended on radio.
June 30, 1952        THE GUIDING LIGHT debuted on television.
1956            BRIGHTER DAY ended  on radio.
January 4, 1954        THE BRIGHTER DAY premiered on television. 
December 13, 1954    ROAD OF LIFE premiered on television; show ended broadcasts on radio.
July 1, 1955        ROAD OF LIFE aired last broadcast on television.
April 2, 1956        AS THE WORLD TURNS premiered.
November 25, 1960    THE RIGHT TO HAPPINESS ended on radio.
May 4, 1964        ANOTHER WORLD premiered. 
1964            Worked as consultant on primetime's PEYTON PLACE.
May 5, 1965        OUR PRIVATE WORLD, AS THE WORLD TURNS spin-off, premiered in primetime.
September 10, 1965    OUR PRIVATE WORLD aired last episode.
September 28, 1965    THE BRIGHTER DAY aired last broadcast on TV.
November 8, 1965    DAYS OF OUR LIVES premiered.
September 18, 1967    LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING, soap opera, premiered. 
March 23, 1973        LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING aired last broadcast.
Late 1973        Fired by Proctor and Gamble. 
December 23, 1974    Passed away at home in Chicago. 

NOTES
1.    "The Creators," TV GUIDE (Commemorative Edition) (July 1991), p.59.
2.    Dan Wakefield, ALL HER CHILDDREN (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p.27. 
3.    CURRENT BIOGRAPHY (1943), p.590.
4.    Irna Phillips, "Every Woman's Life Is a Soap Opera," Mccall's (March 1965), p.116
5.    Ibid.
6.    Peter Wyden, "Madam Soap Opera," SATURDAY EVENING POST (25 June 1960), p.129.
7.    Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN: THE MODERN PERIOD (Cambridge: Belknap, 1980), p.542.
8.     "Script Queen," TIME (10 June 1940), p.66.
9.    Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, p.542.
10.    "Writing On: Irna Phillips Mends With Tradition," BROADCASTING (6 November 1972), p.75
11.     Madeline Edmundson and David Rounds, THE SOAPS (New York: Stein & Day, 1973), p.43.    
12.     CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, p.590
13.    Sicherman and Green, p.542.
14.    Robert C. Allen, SPEAKING OF SOAPS (CHapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1985), p.111. 
15.     "Writing On: Irna Phillips Mends With Tradition," p.75.
16.     Edmundson and Rounds, p.44.
17.     Allen, p.112.
18.     Wyden, p.130.
19.     Ibid.
20.     CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, p.590.
21.     "Queen of the Soaps," NEWSWEEK (11 May 1964), p.66.
22.    Sicherman and Green, p.543.
23.     Wyden, p.130.
24.    Sicherman and Green, p.259.
25.    CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, p.519.
26.     "With Significance," TIME (11 June 1945), p.46.
27.     CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, p.590.
28.    Wyden, p.129.
29.    Interview with Lee Bell (4 September 1991). All other information and quotes from Mrs. Bell in this chapter were taken from this interview.
30.    Interview with Don Hastings (5 December 1991). All other information and quotes from Mr. Hastings in this chapter were taken from this interview. 
31.    Wyden, p.129.
32.    Robert LaGuardia, SOAP WORLD (New York: Arbor House, 1983), p.20.
33.    Wyden, p.129
34.    Interview with Helen Wagner (10 October 1991). All other information and quotes from Ms. Wagner in this chapter were taken from this interview.
35.     Ibid., p.130.
36.    "Script Queen," p.66.
37.    Wyden, p.127.
38.     Wagner interview.
39.    Wyden, p.127.
40.    Phillips, p.117.
41.    Wyden, p.127.
42.    Ibid., p.130.
43.    Ibid.
44.    CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, P.591.
45.    "Script Queen,"p.68.
46.    Wakefield, p.28.
47.    Sicherman and Green, p.543.
48.    Wyden, p.130. 
49.    Ibid.
50.    Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, THE COMPLETE DIRECTORY TO PRIME TIME NETWORK TV SHOWS(New York: Ballantine, 1981), p.571.
51.    Wyden, p.129.
52.    Phillips, p.168.
53.    Bell interview.
54.    Wyden, p.30.
55.    Ibid.
56.    Phillips, p.168.
57.    CURRENT BIOGRAPHY, p.591.
58.    Hastings interview.
59.    Ibid.
60.    Bell interview.
61.    LaGuardia, p.81.
62.    Ibid.
63.     Jean Rouverol, WRITING FOR THE SOAPS (Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books,1984), p.11.
64.    "Writing On: Irna Phillips Mends with Tradition," p.75.
65.    "Queen of the Soaps," NEWSWEEK (11 May 1964), p.66.
66.    Rouverol, p.11.
67.     La Guardia, p.81.
68.     Ibid.
69.    "Week's Headliners," BROADCASTING (17 January 1972), p.9.
70.    LaGuardia, p.81.
71.    Landry, p.71.
72.    Wagner interview.
73.    "Writing On: Irna Phillips Mends with Tradition," p.75.
74.    Sicherman and Green, p.542.
75.    Phillips, p.116.

[Paul Raven]

A number of errors in the above article. You wonder how with all that research,how  they slipped through.

I think they are conflating Women Alone with Lonely Women. I have never read anything of a serial called Women Alone. However,I am prepared to be proven wrong.

 

It seems Irna actually WAS interested in TV soaps as witnessed by These Are My Children airing in 1949 on NBC in the early days of TV.

 

I don't believe that was reluctance, rather simply good business sense as radio's dominance began to wane.

 

Inferring that was somehow connected to Irna who was off that show 10 years prior.

 

Again inferring that Phillips leaving 6 years prior had some connection to the eventual cancellation.

 

 

Again these two events are in fact one. Irna left ATWT only once in 1970 and returned in 72. She was not working on another P&G show at the time. So either she brought the ratings up or they dipped, depending on which above account you believe

 

Untrue. A World Apart debuted 5 years after she left AW. And AWA aired longer than a few months. Over a year in fact.

 

I believe Orin Tovrov was the writer. Irna was not involved in the creation of this show. And no mention of Masquerade an Irna serial  which was on air around this time.

 

TBD finished in 1962.

As we see over and over, these inaccuracies are published and accepted as fact.

[Contessa Donatella]

I know! It's like second verse, here we go again! 

Agreed. Certainly there was concern maybe even fear at the highest levels for the very good reason that what they had was so economically successful, so of course this risk was scary but if anyone was brave she was.

Yes, he was. I have seen her associated with getting it on the air one other place but no details nor official title. Not the writer or creator so it made me wonder if she functioned as a kind of uncredited ad hoc producer, but then maybe she just supported it. At any rate that is nothing but supposition on my part. No data!

Yes, not a surprise anymore but still so frustrating! On one hand I am appreciative that she is included in this book, but scholarship where are you?!

Edited 1 hour ago by Contessa Donatella

[Contessa Donatella]

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/DJmV5kCJpd6/
1996 Daytime Emmy Awards
Opening & 1st Emmy
In Primetime, on CBS, at Radio City Music Hall, NY, NY
Hosts: Eric Braeden & Melody Thomas Scott, featuring the Rockettes!
Best Supporting Actor nominees: GL Frank Beatty, B&B Ian Buchanan, GH Stuart Damon, AW David Forsyth, GH Michael Sutton, GL Jerry verDorn & Jerry takes home his second statue! In accepting he shouts out Bill Roerick.