BIRTH OF THE SOAP OPERA
Irna Phillips wrote prototype of what became the theatrical form for WGN radio
In 1931, Irna Phillips stood before a microphone in WGN’s studio and read the part of Sue in a script she had written. Another staffer, Irene Wicker, played Irene. IRENE: I tell you, Sue, it won’t work. I’ve never worn that shade of orchid in my life. I’d look like a perfect washout. Besides that’s your very best special occasion dress. I wouldn’t think of taking it.
SUE: Don’t be silly. A wedding is a special occasion, isn’t it? And as long as I won’t need to wear it, you might just as well. If you are a bridesmaid, you’ve got to look the part, kid.”
The audience had no inkling of what Wicker or Phillips looked like. They were elsewhere, sitting in front of radio sets and listening to the 25th episode of “Painted Dreams.” Phillips’ brainchild was broadcast from the Drake Hotel on Michigan Avenue by WGN, the Chicago Tribune’s radio station.
The previous year, Phillips had been assigned to write the prototype of a dramatic series. In fact, she created brand-new theatrical form that would become the soap opera.
The name was derived from advertisers of laundry products eager to reach housewives taking a break from their chores. “Painted Dreams” was sponsored by Lever Brothers, the makers of Super Suds.
The show’s plot lines reflected an advertising executive’s understanding of women’s issues. “Painted Dreams” revolved around Mother Moynihan, a widow who dispenses old-fashioned wisdom to the two young women who live with her:
“Irene is her daughter, frivolous and thoughtless, a cigar counter clerk who has ambitions for a career upon the stage or in radio, and Sue Morton, an orphan, whom life has given some hard knocks,” the Tribune explained on Oct. 4, 1931, the show’s first anniversary.
“What started out as a dialogue between two working girls has become in a year a sketch with seven distinct character parts, and as many more persons who, although they have never entered the story as speaking characters, have become such a vital part of it that listeners regard them as real persons.”
All of the characters were played by Wicker and Phillips, who also created the sound effects. Later in life, Phillips set down her soap-opera philosophy in an unpublished memoir preserved in the Library of Congress.
“The critics say, ‘But why then do soap operas convey such a sense of overwhelming tragedy, of lives gone wrong?’ ” she wrote. “I can only point out that unrelenting bliss can be (in dramatic terms) as tedious as unrelenting misery.”
Like her character Irene, Phillips was raised by a widowed mother. Her writing career began, as it would end, on a melodramatic note.
Upon the initial success of her soap opera, Phillips wanted to take it to a national network, but WGN’s management balked. She sued claiming she owned the rights to “Painted Dreams” and lost a long, bitterly fought courtroom battle.
“The courts have found that she was a salaried employee of WGN and that the idea of the script was conceived by the station manager,” the Tribune reported after the Illinois Supreme Court denied her appeal in 1941. “After a sponsor was found, however, she copyrighted the first 10 scripts without advising her employer.”
She had long since sold a new soap opera to WGN’s rival, WMAQ. The show’s sponsor offered a guide to “Today’s Children.” Thousands of fans sent in a label from Pillsbury Flour to get one.
By the 1940s, Phillips had five shows running simultaneously on various stations. She earned more than $250,000 a year, enabling her to live at 1335 Astor St., in Chicago’s posh Gold Coast neighborhood. Yet Phillips couldn’t type so many scripts.
“Like Scheherazade, I work best before a live audience,” she explained, invoking the putative narrator of the “Arabian Nights,” who told a sultan a tale every night. “And so I dictate to a secretary”
Part of her workday was devoted to keeping tabs on the rivals her success created.
“I often listen to other soap operas, not to imitate but to avoid imitation,” she noted. “In many cases, I have shuffled entire synopses because other programs anticipated a plot line that I was considering.”
Phillips was born in 1901, one of 10 children in a German-Jewish family. Her father died when she was 8 years old, and she grew up wearing hand-me-down clothing. Lonely, she dreamed up stories and enacted them with her dolls, which became the origin of her compositional technique.
“When I dictate, I in fact act out the entire episode,” Phillips recalled. “People who have watched me have commented that when dictating I change my voice to fit each character, that I use certain gestures when speaking the lines intended for this character or that.”
After high school, she enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wanted to be an actress, but was discouraged by teachers saying she wasn’t pretty enough for Hollywood or Broadway. So she went on to the University of Wisconsin, where she got a master’s degree in journalism.
For seven years, she taught drama and English at an Ohio teachers college and a Missouri junior college before being hired as a writer on a WGN talk show. Then came the assignment to write a drama, and being among the first to do so for radio, she pioneered the tricks of the trade, such as: an organ to echo a character’s emotion or indicate a change of scene the audience couldn’t see; ending an episode with a cliffhanger, an unresolved twist of plot that entices listeners to tune in the following day; or the use of plot twists such as characters with amnesia.
In her memoir, Phillips specified the essential ingredient of a soap-opera script: “There must be that element of universality in everything — that something that causes the listener to say, ‘Yes, I have felt that way,’ or ‘I have known someone very much like that.’ ”
Her characters were often modeled on people she’d known.
Dr. John Rutledge, the nonjudgmental pastor of “Guiding Light,” resembled Dr. Preston Bradley the nondogmatic Chicago minister in whose radio broadcasts Phillips found comfort when troubled.
Yet Phillips was harshly judgmental of the actors who appeared in her soap operas. When Jane House did a nude scene in the Broadway play “Lenny” in the early 1970s, Phillips tried to kill off her character on “As the World Turns.”
In one instance, Phillips’ art imitated life. “Today’s Children” was the story of a widowed mother trying to keep her family afloat. Upon the death of her own mother, who had similarly struggled, Phillips closed the curtain on “Today’s Children.”
When television leapfrogged over radio she easily made the transition to telling a story with moving images. Her successes continued until 1973, when she drew on a painful chapter of her life for an episode of “As The World Turns.”
At 19, she’d been head over heels in love with an English doctor. When she got pregnant, he turned his back on her and she miscarried. Never married, she adopted two boys.
In the soap opera version, she drew up a character who seduces her brother-in-law and becomes pregnant.
Proctor and Gamble didn’t want their soap associated with a dismal tale of adultery. Phillips stood her ground and was fired. A few months later, she died. The doctor said she had a heart attack.
If a soap opera writer were to tell the tale, the script would instruct an organist to play somber chords as a fitting endnote for fans who’d be convinced that Phillips died of a broken heart.
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