Looking Back at “Another World”

When I was a lonely teenager, soaps filled my after-school hours with surrogate friends and family.  Another World became my favorite when young vixen Rachel Davis, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, played by a very young and poignant Robin Strasser, seduced chiseled businessman Steve Frame (George Reinholt), breaking up his romance with virginal Alice Matthews (Jacqueline Courtney).

Oh, the exquisite heartbreak of this infamous love triangle!  It sent the ratings soaring.  I certainly loved it, and the rest of the show, too, which was filled with intelligent characters and storylines so interesting I was compelled to tune in every day.

This is a good a good time to revisit Another World, as we true believers look forward to the reunion said to be planned for Tarrytown, NY, in late spring.  Karen McKenny of the Another World Memories Facebook page has announced a reunion of actors that include Barbara Rodell, Judith Barcroft Washam, and Susan Keith, among others.  Details will be forthcoming, and when we get them, we will share them.

Meanwhile, Marlena’s resident soap archeologist Mike Poirier digs into the origins and 35-year history of the show, founded by the mother of all soaps, Irna Phillips, in 1964. Ms. Phillips set out to break new ground, and she did. Another World took on real issues like abortion. It was the first soap to be set in a real place – Bay City, Michigan – and the first to portray authentic working-class life. In an interview she explained: “We do not live in this world, but in a thousand other worlds – the world of events we live in, and the world of feelings and dreams we strive for.”

By Mike Poirier

When one asks long time soap opera fans which shows were their favorites, not surprisingly one of the top answers is Another World. At the height of its popularity, the show occasionally bumped As the World Turns out of the number one spot. My mother recalls that her work television was set to NBC so everyone on break could watch Rachel on Another World. My friend Floyd Elwell describes how while growing up in the Midwest, NBC was the top channel for soaps, the Lemay period of Another World being a favorite of his.

The first episode began on a rainy evening on a street lined with modest, middle-class homes. The camera peers into different windows of the house owned by Jim and Mary Matthews and briefly focuses on each member of the family. The subject of the conversation is the recent funeral of Jim’s brother Will. The only non-Matthews featured is college student Tom Baxter who, in a few months, would get young Pat Matthews into trouble when “the rabbit dies”! And so began Another World, with advertisers hoping viewers would be intrigued with “Playtex Living Stretch Bra.”

Then back to the new story. What hook did creator Irna Phillips and her associate Bill Bell use to lure curious viewers to come back? Newly widowed Liz Matthews and her daughter Susan bitterly argue, showing that the two were not close. From there, Liz heavy-handedly declares to her favorite child Bill, “Your father is gone, you can’t be a boy any longer.” The dialogue hits the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer. So much for subtext! While Bill resignedly agrees, Liz puts her arm around him and prattles on about how “grateful” she is to have him. Perhaps as a metaphor, Josephine the plumber comes in for the next commercial to extol the virtues of Comet cleanser.

By the following year, one of Irna’s protégés, James Lipton, had taken over. His stints on various soaps have been a lightning rod for controversy. People either hated or loved his writing. An intriguing piece from his days penning Another World was an audio of the July 22, 1965 episode. How did I come across this gem? One of Proctor & Gamble’s favorite daytime television directors, Len Valenta, kept a small archive of his work, which myself and others purchased from his niece. This particular episode, as soap opera historian Mark Faulkner noted, has a noir feel to it. A voice-over from Susan Trustman’s Pat tells viewers how she didn’t want to hurt her family anymore so she has taken off in her car, driving until she feels she can get to a place where she won’t be recognized. As she leaves her vehicle and walks past the denizens of this far away town, she notes they, too, didn’t belong in that “other world.”

Unfortunately, Pat only has $20 on her and must take a room in a rundown hotel. So desperate to save money, she subsists on soda from the hotel machine for three days, until she finally decides to go to a coffee shop for some actual food. While there, someone is quoting beatnik prose by Lawrence Lipton, who just happens to be the father of the current head writer. Soon a man follows Pat back to her place where she must beg him to leave her be. It’s surprisingly interesting especially since it doesn’t use the standard organ music but more of an orchestral horn and piano. Now I’m curious if many of his other episodes were as fascinating, or was this one just a fluke?

In his book Inside Inside, Lipton fondly remembers his time working with Irna. “In the first months of my stewardship of Another World, I made many trips to Irna’s bedside for consultation and counsel… 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.”

He continued: “Irna possessed several secrets, but the key one was what she called her ‘squares’: a sheet of paper that had been divided into small squares, like a game board—which is exactly what it became as Irna, giggling with glee, 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.”

The soap moved from the middle of the pack to the top spot, just below As the World Turns, shortly after Agnes Nixon took over the head writing duties on November 1, 1965. Soap opera history books and articles always point out this miraculous turnaround. One thing she did not do was take Lipton’s characters and kill them off in a plane crash, despite that story popping up in books and articles. (Thank you to Eddie Drueding for the most comprehensive list of dates and data for just about everyone attached to the show on his long running website, the Another World Homepage. Eddie has also been a source of many unique audios, video clips from Another World’s early years.)

As writers and execs have noted, the average viewer only tuned in for two or three episodes a week so not every episode was going to be riveting due to the fast-paced nature of the medium. In fact, the June 9, 1967 script I acquired from director Len Valenta’s niece shows that it was taped only five days earlier on June 4. Some major plot points are covered such as Liz seeing Walter and Lenore out on a date at a restaurant. Walter concedes he’ll be using the fact that Missy is pregnant in court as he overheard Bill and Pat talking about it on the phone. Liz is furious that Walter has subpoenaed Pat and Bill. Missy laments to Bill about how her long-lost mother could have acknowledged her and chose not to, and she’ll never do that to her child by Danny Fargo. Bill pipes up, a bit too heroically: “It’s my child. It will be my child, Missy.” One of the biggest soaps cliches for decades is the woman pregnant by some despicable man and her gallant suitor willing to step in. The rather flat dialogue throughout reminds us that this was soaps more of a recap episode for viewers who missed previous ones to catch up to speed.

Nixon continued doing an excellent job writing not only Another World, but also, simultaneously, her new creation, One Life to Live, on competing network ABC. Even though she was busy with her new show that was about to premiere, she and her associates Robert Cenedella and Ralph Ellis crafted some of her most important Another World episodes that aired the week of July 1, 1968, all about Walter Curtain and Lenore Moore’s joyous wedding.

Again, thanks to Len Valenta’s niece, we fans got to see it. I wasn’t the winning bidder of the tape when it was for sale, but she sold me a copy. No doubt thousands and thousands of Another World fans have enjoyed it thanks to tape trades and YouTube. To view Robin Strasser as the youthful, temptress Rachel (married to and pregnant by Russ) gently manipulating everyone around her is a joy. Jacquie Courtney sparkles when she’s introduced to a boyish and charming Steve Frame as played by George Reinholt. Anyone watching back then must have spotted the immediate chemistry between the two. Not to be forgotten is the genius that is Audra Lindley as the alternately comical and villainous Aunt Liz lamenting to Lenore’s mother what could have been between Lenore and Bill.

Soon, Agnes’s tenure had officially come to an end on February 17, 1969, leaving the show in the capable hands of her friend Bob Cenedella. The popularity of Another World continued to the point that, despite some ratings fluctuations, NBC gave the green light to Bob’s idea for a sister show, Somerset. As he was creating this, he placed an ad in the paper stating, “Secretary to TV writer. $150 per week. Box 0811. New York Times.” My friend Kathryn Lance answered and got the job. Back then she was known as Kathryn Barsky and three days after she answered the ad, Cenedella interviewed her. “I write soap opera,” he declared. Although not quite the start in the writing biz that the University of Arizona graduate was hoping for, she found that Bob (as he insisted she call him), “seemed to like me as much as I liked him,” and she accepted his offer.

Very quickly, Cenedella realized that Kathryn might have what it took to be a writer and, “offered me a script within weeks after I took the job. I had expected success, but never dreamed it would come so soon! All I had to do was knock out a script, and turn it in, and I was on my way. Except it just wasn’t that easy. Having a facility with words, or even making all A’s in English, simply doesn’t prepare one to be a professional TV writer. And writing for serials is one of the most demanding of all jobs. Most writers are given just a day or two to turn in a script of 15-25 pages. By the time I finally handed Bob that first script, it had been retyped so many times I almost had it memorized.”

Cenedella guided her through the process. “Over the next weeks, Bob spent a lot of time with me, helping me to learn and grow as a writer, teaching me such fundamentals of good writing as ‘don’t insult your audience’s intelligence,’ and ‘never have one character tell another something that person already knows.’”

He also began to rely on Kathryn to help with plot points and he had a major one brewing. Walter Curtain had murdered the town villain Wayne Addison. Walter’s wife Lenore was accused of the crime and the go-to town lawyer John Randolph somehow could not be her attorney so that her own husband would have to be the one who defended her in court. The two “brainstormed” about how they could sideline John.

Bob: Sick, sick … let’s see ….

Kathryn (brightly): Why don’t we give him nervous exhaustion? After all, his wife’s been complaining about how hard he works.

Bob (thinks, then): Nope. Sounds too serious. Sounds like a nervous breakdown. He’s one of our “good” characters. We can’t have him appearing unstable.

Kathryn: Well, then, uh … what about epilepsy, then? It’s serious enough to stop him till it’s diagnosed, but then it could be controlled with drugs.

Bob: No. The sponsors would never buy it.

Kathryn: Oh. Right. (I had forgotten that sponsors don’t like ailments that people have heard of, particularly frightening ailments. This is one reason that “subacute bacterial endocarditis” is such a common illness on day-time TV.)

Kathryn (thinks in silence, then): I’ve got it! Why doesn’t John break his leg?

Bob: Nice try. But we had Ted break his arm two months ago.

Kathryn continues, “And so on. We eventually got out the office medical encyclopedia (absolutely indispensable to any soap-opera writer) and, after thumbing for hours, came up with Meniere’s Syndrome. In many ways this is a perfect soap-opera disease: of unknown origin, non-contagious, non-serious, treatable with bed rest. It rendered John unable to defend Lenore, because his prime symptom was sudden, acute vertigo. It was only several weeks after Lenore was acquitted that we learned John could have defended her after all: Meniere’s Syndrome can be instantly cured by taking two Dramamine tablets every four hours.”

I was introduced to Kathryn (who insisted her friends call her “KL”) by Agnes Nixon researcher Eric Henwood-Greer. She ended up giving me her soap story and other memorabilia. She passed away in 2022, so I’m grateful for her giving me a window into an exciting era on Another World. Eventually Cenedella left both Somerset and Another World, but he gave Kathryn an introduction to Agnes Nixon and she became a script writer for both All My Children and One Life to Live.

Cenedella moved on to The Secret Storm and Harding Lemay became Another World’s next head writer. His mentor? Irna Phillips! To learn more about this much-loved period, fans of the show should pick up Lemay’s book, Eight Years in Another World, now in electronic form on Amazon Kindle. I wrote to Lemay shortly before his death. He maintained that, “it was great fun writing Another World for all those years, and I’m always happy to hear from fans of my work.” Although he admitted to me and others that he was ultimately “a one man show,” through the years he employed many talented scribes on his team such as Doug Marland, Bibi Wein, Jan Merlin, and Tom King. Years later, Bibi and Harding were reunited since both became active on Pen American Center’s Prison Writing Committee.

While the wordsmiths are a large part of a show’s success, the actors are as well. The talents of longtime Another World stars Douglas Watson, Connie Ford, Victoria Wyndham, Irene Dailey had viewers enthralled throughout its halcyon days as they brought the scripts to life. My friend, Emmy award winning writer and author Judith Donato, had written for the show in later years and had the joy of penning dialogue for those four. Like Lemay’s, you can find Donato’s books on Amazon. Yet what made it more special was that she was a fan as well. Weren’t we all as those characters bravely searched for some other world they longed to be in?