I just write what I have lived and seen.
Marlena says: My colleague Michael Poirer is an ace researcher, a treasure in the world of soap opera journalism. Ever thorough and tireless, his contributions to these columns are deeply appreciated. Here he weighs in on our ongoing discussions of the state of soap opera with a collection of quotes from some of the many interviews granted to newspapers and wire services over the decades by our great pioneer, Irna Phillips. What she had to say back in the day is still very much worth hearing.
The Essential Irna Phillips
By Michael Poirier
Every soap fan has been influenced by the genius of Irna Phillips. She created many of our cherished daytime dramas and consulted on others. She trained and mentored other giants in the industry such as Agnes Nixon and Bill Bell. What were her thoughts on the ever-changing times, the soap opera industry, and her world views? Let’s look back at her words of wisdom from various newspaper interviews. A good place to start is this explanation of what she termed “personality casting” as the source of realism in radio drama.
In 1937, she was widely quoted on this subject in newspapers like The Hutchinson Kansas News Herald. Miss Phillips explained: “The movie technique of picking people that look the part, personality casting, is being used by casting directors and production men in radio today.
“This new method makes way for more actors and different ones, to be employed in other dramatizations,” she said. “Many more applicants, new to radio but true-to-life types, are being tried out. They will supplant players who have been doubling, that is, playing more than one role.”
“Personality casting makes for realism,” she asserted. “Radio demands more than the theatre does since it cannot create visual effects. Radio drama calls upon that human sixth sense, an instinct such as the blind have developed in ‘seeing’ those they hear.”
In 1939, The Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Journal reported her description of how she did it: “Well, you find a quiet spot and make a working date with your stenographer. Then you pace the floor and act out every character’s part as you declaim the dialogue. Keep this up until you finish the script.” She said she rarely went back to revise her lines once dictated, contrary to standard practice by wordsmiths who must revise, cut, and rewrite.
She further explained that her underlying philosophy boiled down to “a simple appeal to those emotions on which human life is patterned. A radio script,” she said, “is really true to life when it combines a certain amount of philosophical reflection with direct action, and not when it deals with action alone.”
That same year, The Detroit Free Press queried her on the same topic. Explaining in greater detail, she said, “I just write what I have lived and seen. If you stick to the truth and use people you’ve known as your models, you have no trouble at all.
“When I need a milkman in a show, I talk to the milkman who delivers our milk, and make a note of his conversation, his way of thinking. For Dr. Brent, the leading character in ‘Road of Life,’ I have the assistance of Dr. Albert E. Luckhardt, a practicing physician in Chicago. For my ‘Women in White,’ which tells of the life and experiences of nurses, and one Karen Adams in particular, I get my material from friends who are nurses, and from hospitals. And Dr. Rutledge, the minister to whom all the perplexed in the town of Five Points come for aid, is a composite of a few ministers I knew as a child. I rarely use my imagination. I stick to fact, sometimes with surprising results.”
In 1941, she took a rare working vacation, continuing her prodigious output as she traveled. She described the experience to The Montreal Gazette:
“British censors at Jamaica, B.W.I. relaxed this week because Irna Phillips sailed away after a two-month vacation on the island. As the creator of three daily dramatic serials on Columbia network – ‘Women in White,’ ‘Right to Happiness’ and ‘Road of Life’ — Irna Phillips’ scripts — tens of thousands of words — have flowed through the mails from Jamaica, past the censors, to the New York script editor who forwarded them to Chicago where the programs are produced. Five days was the fastest air route, and not a single script was lost, nor did any arrive too late, although several times they arrived only a few hours before rehearsal time.
“Miss Phillips has wondered if the censors might not have suspected some elaborate code when they first read some of her scripts employing a ‘voice montage’ effect, a technique she uses to permit characters to disclose their thoughts aloud.
“The telephone operators, too, have borne the strain of Miss Phillips’ work-vacation, for the complicated three-way calls, joining Kingston, New York, and Chicago, were a necessary detail of her weekly conferences.”
The Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Telegraph was equally fascinated by her story of her on-the-road page flow. She patiently explained: “I believe that a working knowledge of psychology is indispensable for a writer. It is especially valuable for a writer of radio serials. For the daily serial is the fiction form whose structure most nearly approximates life. Unlike the play, the film, the novel, or the short story, it does not pick one dramatic incident in its hero’s life, expand it, and then finish it. It continues unfolding, day after day, telling about the lives of its characters.
“Listeners are interested in hearing about reactions which they recognize as similar
to their own and their neighbors. They have met the ambitious man who is spurred on because he must disprove his own feeling of inferiority. They know the youngster unable to face the world because his mother’s apron strings have protected him too long.”
What she was talking about was more than a work process. It was a way of life, as she revealed in The Los Angeles Evening Citizen News in 1948: “There’ll always be daytime serials,” she said. “There may not be as many of them, but the daytime serial is here to stay.” Miss Phillips had established a code of her own. “I will not hop up a story, with mystery or any other exciting element, for the sake of getting a higher Hooper rating,” she declared. “I do not like scenes where a married man leaves his wife for a single woman. It often hits too close to home.”
By then, soap opera was on television and growing each year. In 1949, The Kansas City Star shared this quote with its readers: “The housewife does not have time to stop her work just to follow the television drama. Consequently, my stories are written so that just by occasionally looking at the screen, the viewer can follow story without feeling she is losing any of the plot. In other words. I do not substitute action for dialogue.”
In 1960, she assured readers of The Tampa Bay Times of her belief that “When you have happiness, you have no soap opera” and “Everybody in a serial story” has paid handsome (emotional) dividends.
By then the term “soap opera” had long become established in our culture as a dramatic medium of emotional extremes – suffering and sorrow on one end, joyous love and romantic passion on the other. Soaps’ detractors recognized only the suffering, and treated it as a source of humor.
Miss Phillips explored this subject in 1964 in an article in one of soap opera’s hometown newspapers, The Chicago Tribune. She said she did not entirely disagree with those who said the serials dealt mainly with travail and trouble. To do so was a service, she argued. She said many listeners, including men who listen mostly via car radios, wrote to her that her stories had enabled them to cope better with their family problems.
“If I have helped one person to face up to life with strength and courage,” she said, “then I think my work has been worthwhile.” She said she did not agree with the assertion that women obtain pretend emotional thrills and experiences through her dramas. “They (the soaps) are real and believable to them.”
The news peg for the story was the announcement that Miss Phillips was to join ABC and, as her first assignment, take over shaping “Peyton Place” into a new series for twice a week broadcast. She said, “Everyone has to find ‘another world’ sometimes. That is the theme of “Another World.’ I find my (‘other world’) in the characters and the stories I create.”
In 1965, she departed “Peyton Place,” assuring the press through newspapers like The Baltimore Sun and The Honolulu Star Bulletin that she was leaving of her own accord. “’I wasn’t dropped from the show,’ she said. ‘My contract ran out. I want to read you a telegram I received from a vice president of the ABC network on the night ‘Peyton Place’ began. It says: ‘As all of us at ABC sit before our sets at 9.30 tonight, we will be saying a silent prayer to Miss Irna Phillips who is responsible for (1) the fact that there is a serial form, (2) the fact that there is a nighttime version of her form, and (3) the fact that what is going to be on the home screens each Tuesday and Thursday is an imitation of that art form of which she is the master and mistress of all time. We thank you not only for all you have done but more importantly for all you tried to do. My greatest personal hope is that there will be enough of what you have done there on the screen to give the show a chance to be to night television what ‘As the World Turns’ is to daytime’.”
Miss Phillips took up that challenge again just two years later, as reported in The Courier Post of New Jersey. She imagined a daytime serial version of the hit 1955 movie, “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” And, from the outset, she found herself involved in controversy.
She began her story where the movie ended, with the blossoming romance between the characters played by William Holden and Jennifer Jones, he an American white man and she an Amerasian woman. CBS balked at the inter-racial love story, and more.
“We’ve created what was not created.” Miss Phillips said. “We created the family in San Francisco. I don’t believe there’s a daily serial that has an actual locale — they are situated either in the East somewhere or the Midwest somewhere. But this is definitely San Francisco. And think of the problems. This is the first time that the core family — the central family — is Catholic, with a daughter who is a nun considering her final vows.”
Not that Irna Phillips saw herself as a flaming radical. She told The Chicago Tribune
In 1969: “It’s a man’s world, and should be.” She seemed really to believe this, although for many years she had been spectacularly successful in an industry designed for women but still run by men.
“Women are happier if they can feel dependent and dominated,” she says, and Chris Hughes, on her long-running soap “As the World Turns,” is “clearly the boss of the Hughes family. Nancy is somewhat of a busybody, but Chris will go along with her only so far. If it’s an important issue, he’ll say, ‘that’s enough.’”
Miss Phillips’ next venture – and, as it turned out, one of her last – was “A World Apart,” working as an uncredited consultant and collaborator with her adopted daughter Katherine. The daily serial drama was autobiographical, the story of a soap opera writer whose life was based on Irna’s. Launched in 1970, it only lasted a year, but gave her the opportunity to reflect deeply, not only on her own life, but on the state of the world.
She told The Buffalo News: “I’ve tried about every church there is, including the Catholic Church, but I guess I’m a non-believer now. It’s a horrible thing to say. I think heaven and hell are right here on this earth, a little bit of heaven and a lot of hell.”
Like Irna, the central character in “A World Apart” is a soap opera writer in her late 60s who is a spinster from Chicago. Miss Phillips explained, “She is discouraged by the state of the world, but she is keeping the faith. She is trying very hard to understand the young, to keep in tune, to speak the same language. She does not doubt their sincerity. If she faults them, it is their natural, general tendency to oversimplify and look for easy solutions.”
About herself, she shared, “I started on the ground floor. There is so much tougher competition today, I don’t know if I would have been so successful if I were starting now.
I do have moments of some regret. I do often wonder if I should have stayed with my ambition to be an actress. But I didn’t have much time to waste. I had to earn money. I still do. People assume I’m a very rich woman. I’m not a millionaire and I never will be. I can sell my wares to a sponsor, but I’m not very good at bargaining. I’d be a lot richer if I’d packaged my own shows, but that has never been my interest.
“I’m not completely fulfilled. There has always been something missing in my life. I have had moments of wondering if I’d have been happier if I’d married. I don’t know. Who knows the best way, but it takes a lot of work. Nobody wants to work at it ”
By this time in her life, Irna’s interviews played like episodes from one of her moving and thoughtful soaps. She spoke several times of “A World Apart,” as she did in a piece that appeared in The Cumberland News. She called the show ”the most provocative thing I have done. It’s young against old, radicals against the establishment, black against white, rich against poor.”
Continuing in The Des Moines Register: “It’s a rapidly changing world, and daytime serials must be relevant, and keep abreast or ahead of the times. There were things I wanted to do and couldn’t — so I got out.” But she hastened to add, she was enthusiastic about “A World Apart.” She said, “It’s indeed a world apart that we live in. Race is separated from race, parents are alienated from children — and we hope to sew it up a little in ‘A World Apart’.”
In 1972, a year before her death, she spoke to The New York Daily News about the state of soap opera. “Daytime serial has been destroying itself.” she said. “The people responsible for the shows have lost sight of the most important element in them — their humanness. They are also getting repetitious and imitative. NBC got a call recently from a viewer who wanted them to know that one of the CBS serials was stealing their plots. It wasn’t theft. It was just a lack of imagination. Why, at one point last year CBS, had a murder trial going on all four of its house-produced serials. No wonder they can’t keep an audience.”
She remembered with fondness the old radio days. when things were simpler. “We were doing original things then,” she said. “We were left alone as long as our programs sold the product. We didn’t have these monstrous ratings to dictate every move we made. And we didn’t have network censors to contend with. Good taste was the rule in those days — but it left us room to originate.
One of the plot devices Miss Phillips originated was amnesia, a device she recalled “that was used indiscriminately on radio serials during their heyday in the 1930s and 40s. My amnesia was induced by a blow on the head,” she said with pride. “After a while it got so the only way people on serials got amnesia was through a psychological shock. There’s a difference.”
In The Arizona Republic that year, she imagined the role soap opera could play in a healthy future: “The trouble with the young today is that marriage is just not tested long enough, if tested at all. I’m hopeful that in our future stories we shall try to show values in Americanism as well as the home. I believe that the young people are rediscovering those older values. Their returning to nostalgia is an indication.”
Miss Phillips wanted her beloved soap opera genre to be devoted as she believed it always was to portraying the truth of life’s pain as well as its joy. At a 1972 press session in a San Francisco hotel, she was asked if she was “embarrassed by her four decades of depicting women as weepy, bitch, emotional and irrational.” Her answer, reported in The San Francisco Examiner: “’Well, aren’t they?’ she asked saucily, eyes twinkling. Among the most irrational of Miss Phillips’ stable of neurotic females, she said, is lying, scheming Lisa Shea of ‘As the World Turns.’ Lisa has some very enduring qualities. She is utterly feminine, unlike many women today. She is a trouble-maker only for herself. She never really thought out what she likes in the world, what she wants.”
So, why aren’t soaps accorded the respect they have earned, as demonstrated by their ratings? She discussed the ongoing problem in a Q and A reported in this syndicated 1972 interview in The Sheboygan Press:
“This Q and A contains the defense of the daytime serial — or soap opera — by the peppery dean of serial writers, a woman who has created 13 network serials, five of which are still on the channels of two networks:
“Q. The daytime serials seem to have no staunch defenders except their day-in, day-out viewers and even the networks do not often give them the dignity and exploitation accorded the nighttime shows. Why?
“A. Many of the dedicated writers and actors who have worked in daytime radio and television are at a loss to understand how any network can ignore the 25 million viewers a week who view daytime. Hollywood writers and actors alike are out of work… what are their agents doing about it? Pawning them off on daytime. How much money have the networks lost on these prime-time series? And who in truth pays for the losses? Daytime, the breadwinner of the networks.
“Q. The real ‘star’ of a daytime serial is likely to be the story it is telling. But why do not the actors, even the leads, get the kind of star billing given the nighttime performers?
“A. The TV daytime serial for the most part creates its own stars, many of whom find their way to Broadway and Hollywood. A network ignores a Henderson Forsythe who has appeared in a number of Albee plays, and Pinter’s as well. Every daytime viewer knows the name ’Stu Bergman’ in ‘Search for Tomorrow.’ He is playing in a Broadway production which received a Tony Award. Don Ameche, Mark Rydell, MacDonald Carey, Jeff Baker, one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. And what about the writers who wrote for these actors, wrote to their strength, who are rarely given the courtesy of being heard on a talk show? No, we are not stars. We are dedicated writers who give actors every opportunity day after day, week after week, year after year, to develop their talent.”
Also in 1972, she told The Boston Globe: Now she (referring to herself) has ‘one-and-a-half writers’ to help her with her position as head writer of ‘As the World Turns.’ ‘I did the drug scene four years ago on ‘World,’ and I leave the question of race relations to Archie Bunker, she said.”
And to The Chicago Tribune, two months before her death: “The truth is that every woman’s life is a soap opera, and the inside story of every family would make a daytime serial. When people ask me why soap opera doesn’t ever deal with a good, wholesome American family that isn’t always in trouble, my answer is ‘Name two!’”
One of our last looks at Irna comes from ‘As the World Turns’ producer Joe Willmore in Robert LaGuardia’s book, ‘The Wonderful World of TV Soap Operas.’ The chapter regarding Irna’s final return to ATWT reveals insults lobbed at directors, producers, and daily calls to the studio filled with taunts about a character’s fate. Her downfall started with a purge of several characters, and according to the sources for this book, her having the “white knight” character of Bob Hughes having an affair with his wife’s sister. LaGuardia describes an “avalanche” of angry mail, falling ratings that led to Irna’s termination. She called Joe Willmore, and asked, “Would there be any chance of my talking to Proctor and Gamble again?”
He replied, “I don’t think so, Irna. The Soderbergs have already been hired.”
On December 22, 1973, her secretary Alice saw her propped up in her bed working on her autobiography. The following day, the “Queen of Soaps,” as those who loved and respected her called her, had passed away.
Edward Hayman contributed to this report.
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