“His eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket.
—Irna Phillips, The Guiding Light
During the long learning years, I supported myself with acting jobs on-and off-Broadway and on prime-time television, and increasingly with directing and writing assignments. But the solid, steady financial mainstay of that crucial decade was the institution that has sustained some of our most celebrated actors in their formative years: soap opera. Not “daytime drama,” not “daytime serial.” No, the unadorned words for the unadorned thing: “soap opera,” so named because the monarchic cleaning-product manufacturer Procter & Gamble, aiming straight at the heart of the American housewife, elected to sponsor, own and produce some of the prime members of the species.
To put it plainly, my work in soap opera underwrote my acting, voice and dance training, and provided me with the luxury of accepting low-paying, or unpaid, theater roles that were a vital part of my education. It paid for my philosophy and literature and French and filmmaking courses. It bought my books and recorded music, and theater and ballet tickets, and concert tickets. Most important, it bought me time—to grow and grow up (I’m still trying to collect on the latter dividend).
Among the several themes that have emerged on Inside the Actors Studio, soap opera has held its own with parental loss, struggles with addiction, mentors, Oscar experiences and tattoos.
Why? Because for the actors who have elected to remain in New York to study and work in the theater, it provides a perfect fit: soap opera in the daytime, theater and classes at night. That’s been the case since prime-time television journeyed west, followed by a caravan of actors facing financial facts; and it’s safe to say that, without the soaps, the theater would be confronted with a depleted talent pool. The relationship between soap operas and the theater is one of our profession’s best-kept secrets and most important synergies.
The names of some of the Inside the Actors Studio guests who had soap opera careers might come as a surprise to anyone unfamiliar with our series—or daytime television.
In his appearance on our stage in his wheelchair, Christopher Reeve affectionately recalled his career on Love of Life, describing the experience as “taking us back to the old touring companies.”
I asked him the name of his character.
“Dan Harper. I was a bad guy.”
When I asked him whether he found that soap opera viewers can’t seem to separate the actor from the role, he replied, “I was in a restaurant and this woman came up to me, took a vicious swipe at me with her handbag and said, ‘How dare you treat your mother that way!’”
Tommy Lee Jones, an actor one doesn’t normally associate with the soaps, is an alumnus of One Life to Live. He was unequivocal about the experience.
“It was wonderful. Yeah, it was wonderful because I was able to pay rent, and I could not have done those twelve or fourteen plays that I did in the seven years I lived here if it had not been for the soap. What else did it do?” he mused. “You know, I’d never performed for over five hundred people in my life, and I remember on the first day, looking at one of the producers and saying, ‘How many people do you think will be watching us on TV today?’ She said about thirteen and a half million, and I thought, whoa! It was really hard to get your mind around that idea. It was a good way to learn to not pressure up.”
He summed it up with “It’s kept a lot of us going, kept a lot of us alive, and thank God for them. And it’s something that happens every day, which is really, really good for actors. If you believe in theater, and you believe in acting, it’s important to the quality of cultural life that our actors stay busy. I kept auditioning for plays, and the casting director would say, ‘We think you’re a really good actor, but we need more of a box-office name.’ The message was ‘You’re not famous enough to get this role.’ So, my question was ‘How do you get famous?’ And they would point to the soap opera stars who were getting jobs on Broadway.”
Lawrence Fishburne made his soap opera debut—and TV history—at the age of eleven, as a member of one of daytime’s first black families. “It was incredible for me—for a couple of reasons. First, because I was suddenly in the presence of real actors. Al Freeman Jr. used to come up to me every day and go, ‘Concentrate, kid!’ because I was goofing around. But what really impressed me was watching Tommy Lee Jones work, because Tommy Lee and I were on the same show. You’d come in in the morning, it’d be seven o’clock, we’d have these read-throughs, and Tommy would just be beside himself, ripping through the pages going, ‘I can’t possibly say this!’ And he’d rewrite the things that didn’t make sense, and demand that things be made clearer, and that his character have proper motivation. It’s something that stuck with me—that I wound up doing later on, without even realizing that I’d learned to do it there.”
Kevin Kline recalled vowing when he arrived in New York that he would never, ever do a commercial or a soap opera “because they demeaned the art of acting, and great acting comes from playing great parts in great dramatic literature. After about six months of unemployment, someone said to me, ‘You know, artists have to eat. That’s one of their first duties: to eat.’ I was offered a recurring role in a little thing called Search for Tomorrow. At three hundred dollars an episode! And it was a six-block walk from my house. I went in at eight in the morning, got out at three, and then, as my agent said, ‘You know, you can work now, off-Broadway or on-Broadway or off-off-Broadway, and be an artist. You can support that habit by doing this work which you think is so demeaning.’”
Martin Sheen was on As the World Turns and The Edge of Night. Julianne Moore also appeared in The Edge of Night, playing “Carmen Engler, a Swiss-French girl. She was Swiss-French because they couldn’t decide where she was from. First, I was French, then they said, ‘Well, if her father is Swiss, maybe she’s Swiss.’ So, the accent would kind of go back and forth. But it was so exciting. I was so happy. It was a job.”
As the World Turns offered Julianne an even greater challenge, “playing Franny Hughes, who was the daughter of the chief of staff of the hospital. The chief of staff of the hospital always has a daughter. And she’s always in trouble.”
“And on that show somebody’s always named Hughes,” I said. “That was the family—”
“Yeah. That character had been born on the show. And they wanted to bring me on and make Franny Hughes bad for the first time. And it didn’t fly! People got really upset, and they had to do a major character shift. For two months I was snapping at people and wearing sexy clothes, and then one day I came in and all my clothes were pink and white and very demure. They just changed it. And then they spun her off into her half-sister Sabrina, who was English and wore a wig and glasses and contact lenses and all that kind of thing, and I was kidnapped….” As the students responded with laughter and, by now, profound understanding, she continued, “I had amnesia, I slept with my own boyfriend, you know? Because he said it was dark and he couldn’t tell the difference. That was my favorite line. Yeah, the lights are off, how can you tell?”
“For this miraculous double role, I believe you won an award.”
“I did, I won a Daytime Emmy. It was nice.”
Perhaps the last name one would associate with soap opera is the august Morgan Freeman, but he, too, put in his time, as the architect Roy Bingham on Another World, who, as Morgan recalled, “eventually got married, and went off to Europe on a honeymoon and never came back.”
Salma Hayek occupied a prominent place as the eponymous Teresa in the torrid world of the telenovela in Mexico. If American audiences come to feel they own their soap opera characters body and soul, the Latin American audiences take it even further. “Teresa was a schemer,” Salma told us. “And she was a social climber. I am living in this house with the professor and the sister, and I have lied about my background. And my mother comes to visit me in the show, and I pretend she is my maid. And I am in a restaurant with my real mother and my family. And this woman takes her purse [clearly the weapon of choice among soap opera fanatics], comes over to my table, and starts hitting me with her purse. ‘Bad daughter! Bad daughter! You’re going to go to hell! It’s terrible, what you did to your mother—because of her background!’ And my mother is like, ‘What did she do? What did she do?’ And the woman is trying to hit me. And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. Get ahold of yourself!’”
Salma described the furor when she left the adulation she was enjoying in Mexico to begin at the bottom in Hollywood. “Why would I leave Mexico, if I was doing so well? They just couldn’t understand that I would leave a successful career in Mexico, to work in the United States as an extra. And so, they started making all kinds of theories.”
“Like what?”
“Like I was having an affair with the president of Mexico, and we had a fight, and I had to leave the country.”
Susan Sarandon valued her time on a short-lived serial called A World Apart. “I think it was great because I hadn’t studied acting, and this was kind of a combination of theater and film, because basically you’re performing live, but you’re dealing with all this equipment. On World Apart I was the one that everything happened to. I can’t even begin to tell you the things that happened to me as the character, but I learned a lot, and I worked with good people.”
“Didn’t you also do a stint on Search for Tomorrow?”
“I did. Yeah, that was a really good one because the main character, who’d been on for about fifty years, was being held captive in a cabin, and she’d lost her sight. I was always at the Laundromat, I was always calling my mom at the Laundromat. Mostly my boyfriend was the bad one. My boyfriend and I were brought in to kill the guy that was keeping her captive in this cabin. And then she ran out to get help, and fell off the cliff and got her sight back.”
“Right.” Nothing could surprise us at this point: Our soap opera suspension of disbelief was unqualified and infinite.
Susan resumed without missing a beat, as caught up in her narrative as we were. “It didn’t end there. We went into town and my boyfriend became her gardener. Now, there was something vaguely familiar about this guy to this woman, but of course she couldn’t recognize him because she’d been blind.”
“Of course.”
“It ended with a big shoot-out in a kids’ park. They made the whole set. Now, the only problem was that the guy that played my boyfriend was not used to doing soap. He was a theater actor and it was very stressful for him to learn all these lines, you know, every single day.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So, in the last episode, my boyfriend had everyone at gunpoint. He wept through the entire show. And everyone thought it was brilliant. That’s when I learned about tears, because it had nothing to do with what was going on. He was actually having a nervous breakdown. But they thought it was brilliant.”
“Sounds good to me.”
My exchange with Teri Hatcher on the subject of soap operas was the briefest in the show’s twelve-year history.
“You ever do a soap opera?”
“For about two minutes.”
“Why two minutes?”
“I was fired.”
“What was the soap opera?”
“Capitol.”
“I was writing it.”
Meg Ryan was a soap opera star of the first magnitude on As the World Turns. When I asked her her character’s name, her dazzling smile appeared, and she pronounced every syllable with evident pride. “I was Betsy Stewart Montgomery Andropoulos. That’s everyone I was ever married to.”
“Tell us about Betsy.”
Meg settled into her chair, clasping her hands as she warmed to the subject. “Well—they got me on the show, and they gave me like this little family tree, which is a very complicated kind of diagram of how everybody was related to everybody. It was insane. And then they said to me, in kind of hushed tones, ‘You know, your mother, your real mother, died falling up the stairs.’ And I thought, ‘That’s it! She’s a complicated babe, honey.’ I mean, she went up…?”
“Did they ever explain it?”
“No. It was left for me to think about—for a long time. But then every time Betsy would do something totally out of character, which happened often during the writers’ strikes, I’d go up the stairs. Up, that’s right, because her mother died going up the stairs. It explained a lot, it was useful.”
“Were you ever kidnapped?”
“I have to defer to you. Was I?”
“Well, everybody was. On a soap opera, you’re always kidnapped, eventually.”
“That’s true. True.”
“And you were pregnant.”
“Yes!”
“But not by your husband.”
Gripping the armrests, Meg came half out of her chair. “No! Because he was both sterile and impotent. But he thought I wouldn’t get it, you know? Like he thought I could just…” Meg sprawled back in her chair, overwhelmed by Andropoulos’s presumption. “It was unbelievable!”
“Wasn’t he also psychotic and a paraplegic?”
“Yes!” We were soaring side by side, caught in the same histrionic whirlwind. “He was faking the paraplegia!”
“Oh.”
“And I was pregnant!”
“Was he faking the impotence?”
“I don’t think he was faking the impotence,” Meg said, her brow knotted in serious reflection.
I’d done my homework. “But then you got pregnant.”
“Yes, by my Greek construction-worker lover. In Spain,” she added pointedly.
Meg’s wispy voice could barely be heard over the convulsive response from the students in the audience. But I was on a mission. “You got pregnant in Spain.”
She nodded emphatically. “In Spain, that’s where it happened.”
“Didn’t Mr. Andropoulos wind up in a jail in Greece?”
“Eventually, on another remote trip,” Meg said gravely.
Then, still treating the subject as seriously as she had her years of study with the famous Method teacher Peggy Feury, she observed, “You know, the other thing that happened on the soap opera…”
“What?”
“I really fell in love with actors. It was so much fun to be around these people because everybody was so out front with all their stuff. There was such a soap opera in this studio on East Seventy-sixth Street.”
When Meg recited her string of married names on our stage, I remarked wanly, “On The Guiding Light, I romanced or married everybody on the show but my mother.”
During the Stella Adler/Harold Clurman years, I joined the cast of The Guiding Light, which can be found in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running soap opera in current production and the longest-running program of any kind in television history. Since I appeared on it, it has mysteriously lost its article and become simply Guiding Light, and when I joined it, in media res, it was already an institution.
I was brought aboard for a brief romance with Kathy, the show’s ingénue, played by Susan Douglas, who introduced me breathlessly to her family and the audience as Dick Grant, her high school’s basketball star. The fact that I am five feet nine inches tall on a good-posture day didn’t deter the show’s legendary creator, Irna Phillips, who was accustomed to having her way—and had probably never seen a basketball game in her life.
Dick Grant was created casually by Irna for a single, specific dramatic purpose, to break Kathy’s heart by leaving town—and the show—in a few weeks, which I did dutifully and with some regret, since, like all the actors who testified years later on Inside the Actors Studio, I appreciated the payday.
But Irna, who lived in Chicago, in the bosom of the heartland citizens at whom her art was aimed, and who watched the show every day in her living room through their eyes and with their sensibilities, had a habit. When an actor who’d been cast in New York appealed to her on her screen in Chicago, wheels were set in motion: If she disliked the actor, he or she met an untimely and sometimes unseemly end; but if she liked the actor, intriguing things began happening to the character, and the role grew exponentially.
Irna was notorious for writing only three or four weeks (and sometimes, when she was seriously dilatory, as few as two weeks) ahead of the show’s live shoot-date. The result was that her new predilections would become quickly evident on the screen—and to the viewers, who were her unquestioning co-conspirators and collaborators.
I had caught Irna’s attention: the high school basketball star who had broken Kathy’s heart had captured Irna’s. She notified New York, and I was hastily contracted to return to the studio in a month, whereupon I, and several million viewers, were participants in what can be most generously described as a miracle as Kathy’s doorbell rang, she opened the door, innocent, unwitting and still heartsick, and gasped, with Middle America, at the sight of Dick Grant back in Springfield, explaining calmly—and in as low a vocal register as I could manage—that I’d come back to serve my surgical residency at Cedars Hospital.
No one—not Kathy, not Procter & Gamble, not the show’s devoted followers—noticed, much less complained, that the recent basketball star had graduated from high school, earned an undergraduate degree, completed med school and served an entire medical internship in four weeks. It was an Irna Phillips fait accompli, not her first, not her last, and not even her most audacious.
In Julianne’s and Susan’s and Meg’s accounts on Inside the Actors Studio, the tangled soap opera webs rival Iago’s, and no one could weave a web more tangled, ingenious and intriguing than Irna. She possessed an undeniable genius for plot—but when it came to clothing the intricate plots in dialogue, her muse fled in panic.
Since Irna created both the bible (the reverent term soap opera’s developers long ago invented for its long-term story) and every day’s script, she had no choice but to dictate the dialogue, at breakneck speed, to her longtime, long-suffering secretary, Rose Cooperman, who would arrive at Irna’s apartment each morning (in Chicago’s frigid winters in the floor-length mink coat, identical to Irna’s, that Irna had given her at some point to atone for some minor mistreatment).
When the script arrived in New York, Ted Corday, the show’s director, and the cast would assemble around a table to rewrite large chunks of it, adhering faithfully to Irna’s baroque story lines. Each day, when the show went off the air, the phone would ring in the control room, and through the glass, we could watch Ted Corday wince at some of Irna’s more caustic comments, especially when he—or the cast—had had the temerity to rewrite one of her favorite lines.
The conflict came to a head one day when the scripts that awaited us on the table required one character to describe another’s exhausted state with “Look at him. His eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket.”
“Cut it!” Ted exclaimed, and around the table, pencils were diligently plied. When the show went off the air that day, the control room phone rang instantly, and Ted looked exceptionally pained as he listened to the caller. We couldn’t hear him, but he seemed to be fighting back—a rare occurrence and, apparently, a declaration of war. Two or three weeks later, when we received the script that Irna wrote the afternoon of the contretemps with Ted, one character described another’s eyes as looking like two holes burned in a blanket. “Cut it!” Ted growled.
The battle was joined. In every day’s script, someone was charged to say, “His eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket.” Gender no longer mattered—sometimes it was “her eyes”—nor did characterization, motivation, plot or, finally, sense. Every day, someone was supposed to say it, and every day no one did. Irna no longer bothered to dispute it by phone: She simply wrote it in, relentlessly. Clearly, she considered it her “To be or not to be,” and the philistines in New York would eventually have to see the error of their ways.
What came to be known as “the battle of the blanket” raged for months—and then Easter, the season of redemption, arrived. Irna, who was not, I strongly suspect, a pious person, nonetheless honored her viewers’ beliefs with scrupulous celebrations of the important religious holidays. Initially, the title The Guiding Light had a religious connotation, since the show’s first leading character in the 1930s was a minister. So, Irna wrote an Easter episode that was restaged each year with, at its center, a lengthy sermon delivered by an authentic minister, borrowed for the sacred occasion.
The cast looked forward to it because it was what we referred to lovingly as a “brass ring,” which is to say, there was no homework, nothing to memorize the night before: All we had to do was show up for dress rehearsal, and take our designated places in the church’s pews to listen, silent and reverent, to the sermon written by Irna early in the show’s history on the Seven Last Words of the crucified Jesus.
The sermon was unvarying, and our only assignment was to look rapt as the cameras roamed our faces, since each year the director placed us strategically so that the current closeted lovers, feuding families and mortal enemies were fatefully side by side. Irna’s web was never more tightly woven than in those pews on the show’s Easter Sunday morning.
In the “battle of the blanket” year, at the dress rehearsal, we sat idly in the pews with some of the actors absorbed in books and magazines on their laps as the minister began, “And at about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”
The dress rehearsal droned on, with occasional stops as Ted, on the loudspeaker from the control room, adjusted his cameras to better reveal the scene’s tortuous subtext. None of us were paying close attention as the minister preached Irna’s version of the Seven Last Words: “At the foot of the cross, the soldiers, indifferent to the suffering of the man from Galilee, cast lots for his tattered garments. Distant thunder rumbled and on the horizon lightning flickered, causing one of the soldiers to look up. Suddenly, he grasped the arm of the soldier next to him, exclaiming, ‘Look!’ All the soldiers followed his trembling finger, which was pointed upward at the cross as he gasped, ‘Behold His eyes! They look like two holes burned in a blanket!’”
Now it was the turn of the actor playing the minister to look up in astonishment as the entire congregation shot into the air as if the pews had been booby trapped. Staring in disbelief, he watched us writhe on the floor, howling, clutching one another and gasping for breath, apparently as indifferent to the suffering of the man on the cross as the soldiers had been. Worse, we somehow found it screamingly funny!
Ted Corday’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker, reassuring the man of the cloth: “It’s okay, it’s okay. A private matter. Nothing to do with the sermon. Keep going, please. Continue the sermon. And please, people, get back in the pews. We’re running way behind schedule!” When we stared up at the control room, Ted snapped, “The ‘blanket’ line stays! So, cut the crap and cue the minister.”
The floor manager cued the shaken cleric who, eyeing the congregation warily as it struggled back into the pews, declaimed, “Then said Jesus, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’” and reeled back from the pulpit as a torrent of laughter struck him from the helpless congregation.
“Okay, okay!” the loudspeaker brayed. “I’ve got my shots. Go to makeup, and report back for air.”
We made it through the live show, barely, hoping against hope that the viewers would attribute our quivering lips to a valiant effort to control emotions evoked by the beauty of Jesus’s—and Irna’s—Seven Last Words.
In the aftermath, Ted explained to us that it was his Easter gift to Irna, but we knew that the war was over and Irna had won. Maybe Jesus’s eyes still look like two holes burned in a blanket in the annual Easter sermon, and the show’s fans—make that the show’s “addicts”—are none the wiser and all the happier for it.
And, as our soap opera alumni have indicated on Inside the Actors Studio, soap opera stars are revered by their fans in ways that even movie stars are not.
That’s how The Guiding Light provided me with one of the most prized friendships of my life, when Nina Foch, whom I’d met in a television version of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, called me from California to ask me to show her apartment to her friends Lena Horne and Lena’s husband, Lenny Hayton, who were finding it difficult to rent an apartment in New York in that still biased time.
When I lived in Paris, I’d once spotted the couple shopping on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and since I was of the firm opinion that Miss Horne was hands-down the most beautiful woman on earth, and a dazzling artist, I fore-went an entire afternoon of recruiting tourists outside the American Express office to follow the couple at a discreet distance as they strolled in and out of one elegant store after another.
Now, years later, standing on the sidewalk in front of Nina’s apartment, I was in an understandable state of excitement as the couple rounded the corner and headed toward me. I showed them the apartment, then watched them go with the same unvoiced veneration I’d felt in Paris.
The next day, I got a call from Miss Horne, who had called Nina in Los Angeles for my phone number. “Lenny said I shouldn’t bother you,” said the honeyed voice, “but I’ve got to know. You are Doctor Grant, aren’t you?” As hard as it is to believe, her voice was trembling. When I said yes, the voice at the other end of the line screeched at Lenny Hayton, “I told you so, Daddy!” Then, back in the voice I knew so well, she said, “I can’t believe I’m actually talking to you.”
Explaining that she belonged to a large circle of devoted Guiding Light viewers, she invited me to their hotel suite for drinks Saturday night, and asked if I’d mind if she invited a few friends—in my honor. Not believing my ears, I accepted.
On Saturday night, I arrived at their door, which was opened by Lena, smiling that incomparable smile, and leading me into a large living room so packed she had to force our way through it, clutching my hand and whispering that every person in the room was my devoted fan, and that none of them could believe it when she invited them to meet me.
As the awesome, awestruck crowd parted before us, an unoccupied armchair was revealed at the other end of the room, with a table next to it on which untouched hors d’oeuvres, a glass of champagne and an unopened pack of cigarettes (my brand; she must have asked Nina) waited. When Lena had seated me ceremoniously in the chair, the crowd, now silent, gathered in a large semicircle, with some of them, including Lena, the legendary cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, and Fran Allison of the inimitable Kukla, Fran and Ollie, seated on the floor, literally at my feet.
The Q & A began: “What’s Papa Bauer like?” “Will you and Kathy get back together?” Some of it was advice, offered as if we never saw any scenes but our own: “Look out for that nurse, Janet. She’s got her eye on you.” Some of it consisted of naked pleas for future story lines, with the excuse that “I’ll be in Europe for two months, and I won’t know what’s happening!” I explained that none of us in the cast knew what was happening next; it was Irna Phillips’s policy. “What’s she like?” came the chorus.
The exchange continued for more than an hour until dinner was served; and that encounter began a long and close association with Lena and Lenny, and her daughter Gail, that in time had nothing to do with The Guiding Light or Lena’s illustrious career, as it turned into a splendid friendship.
It was during the Guiding Light years that the last barrier between me and my father’s nefarious lifestyle crumbled and I began writing for the theater and prime-time television. All my ventures, and my continuing classes, were subsidized by the soap, for which, like Tommy Lee Jones and Julianne Moore, I am unequivocally, and unapologetically, grateful.
My increasing focus on writing, and the imminent production of my first Broadway musical, necessitated my leaving the shelter of The Guiding Light. Having long since completed his residency, innumerable romances and two marriages, and having become a renowned surgeon with “golden hands,” Dr. Dick Grant, like Morgan Freeman’s Roy Bingham, “went off to Europe…and never came back.”
When my dark and revelatory opening night at the Winter Garden Theater left me at rock bottom with, literally, “Nowhere to Go but Up,” and no idea how to begin the ascent, it was Bob Short and Ed Trach of P & G who appeared out of the blue with a surprising offer. Irna had expanded her CBS horizons with the phenomenally successful As the World Turns, and when she created still another soap, this time for NBC, called coyly, Another World, P & G felt she had overextended herself, and persuaded her to turn the head-writing reins over to someone she could regard as a protégé: her erstwhile favorite, Dr. Dick Grant, and, as luck would have it, me.
What followed was another period of intense, compressed and invaluable education, as I assumed the backbreaking duties of a soap opera head-writer, with Irna looking over my shoulder, at P & G’s request and mine.
Although Irna’s empire was based in New York, she remained steadfastly in Chicago, which meant that meetings, which were frequent, required hasty flights from Cincinnati for Ed Trach and Bob Short, and from New York for me. Irna usually contrived not to be feeling well when we arrived, with the result that the meetings took place in her ornate bedroom, with Irna propped coquettishly in something fluffy against a pile of pillows on her bed, and the P & G contingent and me ranged around the bed on chairs.
I was new to the process, but Ed and Bob had been observing this ritual for years. One night, after a long meeting in Irna’s bedroom, when they and I returned to the Ambassador East for dinner in the Pump Room and an appraisal of the evening’s proceedings, I asked them whether it had ever occurred to them that we were players in an elaborate charade. “You know what we are, don’t you?” I asked, and Ed nodded wearily and replied, “Sure, Irna’s boyfriends.”
“You don’t mind?”
Ed shrugged and spread his hands. “She delivers the ratings.”
In the first months of my stewardship of Another World, I made many trips to Irna’s bedside for consultation and counsel. Given the responsibility to turn out five thirty-minute episodes every five days, the equivalent in pages of a feature film a week, fifty-two films a year, the interruptions to my relentless routine could be jolting, but the discomfort was mitigated when I was invited to join the elect, with full rights and privileges, at Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, which was then located in Chicago, not far from Irna’s apartment.
On my first visit to the mansion, instructed by a liveried butler to remove my shoes and proceed across the white carpets and up the grand staircase to the massive double oaken doors, I came face to face with a brass plate that read, “Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare.” I have never been more grateful for my years of devotion to Latin, not to mention my apprenticeship on the Rue Pigalle, as “Si Non Oscillas…” dissolved to “If you don’t swing, don’t ring.”
I pressed the button with what can be conservatively described as alacrity, and the doors swung open to reveal a seraglio of bunnies and centerfolds, many of them, as I would learn, fresh from the cheerleading squads and parochial schools of Iowa, Arizona and Florida, lolling on a field of massive couches as strolling waiters and waitresses plied them and Hefner’s guests with an endless stream of food and drink, all of it presided over by a praetorian guard of suits of armor around the perimeter of the vast room.
Some mornings, when I arrived at Irna’s bedside after a late evening at the mansion, she expressed concern at the toll my writing schedule seemed to be taking on me, but I assured her I could handle the workload, quickly opened my notebook and revealed to her my latest diabolical designs for the citizens of Bay City. When Irna was particularly taken by one of my ideas, she would lean forward from her pillows to beat her little fists into the bedspread, laughing delightedly and with a mentor’s pride at the ingenuity of this chip off the crafty old block.
Irna possessed several secrets, but the key one was what she called her “squares”: a sheet of paper that had been divided by Rose, with pencil and ruler in this pre-personal-computer era, into small squares, like a game board—which is exactly what it became as Irna, giggling with glee like a Scrabble player placing a Z on a triple-letter space, filled in a square with a particularly cunning development.
The days of the week ranged across the top of the page, and the character names appeared in a column down its left side. With this system, Irna knew at any given moment what every character was doing with—and to—every other character, and this was the means by which she would weave her web, moving her characters about on the board like puppets, to suit each new, nefarious notion she came up with. The same technique, magnified, could tell the soap’s story consistently in every act and scene of each episode, enabling Irna, and every writer she trained, to keep dozens of soap opera balls aloft, to the amazement and pleasure of the daytime audience.
In the course of the decade following my service on Another World, on my own and using what Irna taught me, I head-wrote a covey of soap operas: Guiding Light in two two-year tours; Love Is a Many Splendored Thing; Return to Peyton Place; The Best of Everything, which I created for ABC; and Capitol.
In the last years of her career, Irna trained three writers, all emerging at the same time. I was the runt of the litter. The two who mattered, and whose work matters today, are William Bell and Agnes Nixon. I chose to leave the soap world, and they remained—and reigned. Bill Bell, who died in 2005, was the creator of The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. Aggie Nixon created One Life to Live, All My Children and Loving. Their five shows have been on the air collectively for 154 years, so, clearly, Irna taught them well, and they learned well.
They were right to stay, and I was right to go. But I’m deeply indebted to that world because it quite simply made everything else possible until the night in October 1976 when Leonard Bernstein called, and everything changed again.