ANNE HUMMERT, 91, DIES;
CREATOR OF SOAP OPERAS
Can a career woman who sacrificed her leisure to keep a nation of enthralled housewives glued to their radios for the better part of two decades survive a heart-wrenching regimen of producing as many as 90 cliff-hanging episodes a week to live a full, rich and long life?
No need to stay tuned or wait for a toothpaste commercial. It can now be revealed that when she died in bed at her Fifth Avenue apartment on July 5, Anne Hummert, the woman widely credited with creating the radio soap opera and spinning out many of the classics of the 1930’s and 40’s, was a 91-year-old multimillionaire who had maintained a vigorous life almost to the end.
At a time when televised soap operas have become a postfeminist cultural sideshow, it is hard to imagine the era when “Stella Dallas,” “Helen Trent,” “Ma Perkins” and “Lorenzo Jones” were more than household names, and when virtually every woman in America knew that Mary Noble was the “Backstage Wife” and were familiar with every detail of the anguished but inspiring lives of “John’s Other Wife” and “Young Widow Brown.”
It is even harder to imagine that all of these plus more than a dozen others were the creations of a diminutive dynamo from Baltimore and the man she kept at bay for seven years after taking a job as his assistant at a Chicago advertising agency.
By the time she met E. Frank Hummert in 1927, the former Anne Schumacher had lived something of a soap opera herself. A brilliant student who graduated magna cum laude from Goucher College at age 20 in 1925, she had begun her career as a college correspondent for The Sun, then worked as a Sun reporter before going to Paris in 1926.
She became a reporter for the precursor of The International Herald Tribune her first day in the city, but within a year she had married and divorced a fellow reporter, John Ashenhurst, and was back in the United States with an infant son.
Settling in Chicago, she failed to get a newspaper job but became an assistant to Mr. Hummert, a former St. Louis newspaperman who had become a renowned copywriter and a partner in the Chicago agency Blackett, Sample & Hummert.
He was some two decades older than she and a confirmed bachelor, but then he had never met a woman quite like his captivating 22-year-old assistant with the tinkling voice, who was such a fount of ideas and organized efficiency that she became a vice president just two years later.
She, on the other hand, had already been married to one newspaperman, thank you, and was in no hurry to marry another. The couple didn’t marry until 1934, when they began what friends recall as one of the great love matches, which lasted until Mr. Hummert’s death in 1966.
At a time when commercial programming in the infant medium concentrated on working people who returned home to sit in front of their radios at night, advertisers were dimly aware that the housewives who stayed home all day were the nation’s primary purchasing agents. But these women were considered too busy to pay more than cursory attention to the family radio.
The Hummerts didn’t argue with the theory of the distracted housewife. They simply seized her attention and changed the pattern of her life. After “Just Plain Bill” hit the daytime airwaves in 1933, housewives arranged their work so they would never miss an episode of the small-town barber who married above himself.
Although a short-lived 1930 program, “Painted Lives” by Irna Phillips, is regarded as the first radio soap opera, it was “Just Plain Bill,” which began at night in 1932, that created the culturaljuggernaut that would eventually be nicknamed for the product that often sponsored it.
Within months the show had spawned many copycats, few as successful as those turned out by the Hummerts themselves, who had as many as 18 separate 15-minute serials running at a time for a total of 90 episodes a week, each ending with an unresolved crisis that was heightened for the Friday episode.
The couple, who formed their own company, Hummert Productions, and moved to New York in the mid-1930’s, farmed out the writing after they had dreamed up the original idea and mapped out the initial story line. But they were deeply involved in every aspect of each production, from casting to script editing.
Mrs. Hummert, who had a photographic memory, was renowned in the industry for her ability to remember each intricate twist of every one of their creations.
It was a reflection of the grip the Hummerts had on their audience that their programs generated more than five million letters a year, and it was a measure of their commercial success that by 1939 Hummert programs accounted for more than half the advertising revenues generated by daytime radio.
The Hummerts were also well rewarded. At a time when the average doctor made less than $5,000 a year and the average lawyer half that, they were each making $100,000 a year from their enterprise, which included several evening musical programs, like “Waltz Time,” and mysteries, including the haunting “Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.”
When television began to displace radio, the couple simply retired and enjoyed a well-traveled life of leisure. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Hummert gave up their Park Avenue triplex and cut down a bit on her travels, but she continued her active life, which until a few months ago included daily three-mile walks.
Mrs. Hummert, whose son died several years ago, is survived by two granddaughters, Pamela Pigoni of Hinckley, Ill., and Anne Jeskey of Park Ridge, Ill., and two great-grandchildren.
July 21, 1996