Another World: All My Afternoons

This is a summary of the Another World chapter in the 1979 book All My Afternoons by Annie Gilbert. After a summary of the show, the chapter is broken into four sections: a day in Another World, final taping begins, the mellowing of Rachel Cory and Soap Opera writers.

The chapter begins with a summary of what was going on in the soap opera world in the 1960’s when Another World began. CBS was steady and in the lead, ABC failed in some attempts and wasn’t trying that hard while NBC made an effort to compete. It mentions how both ABC and NBC started with hospital soaps (being General Hospital and The Doctors). NBC then stole Irna Phillips from CBS in 1964, and that begat Another World. She used the formula she created for As the World Turns and added “high emotion and dramatic tension instead of day to day life.”

When it premiered Another World focused on the Matthews family. Jim was poor while William his brother was rich. William had just died, and stories revolved around his widow Liz and their kids Bill and Susan. Jim and Mary had three adult children: Russ, Alice and Pat. Bill and Missy was one of the early popular pairings. Missy left for Chicago due to Liz’s interference and fell for a man named Danny who was murdered. She was blamed, but thankfully Bill came to the rescue. Sadly, he died in an accident. Before the show started Pat had an abortion, and later found out she could never get pregnant again. She killed the man who made her pregnant Tom Baxter. John Randolph fell in love with her as he defended her and they became a couple.

The other main story that is mentioned is the quadrangle of Russ, Rachel, Alice and Steve. Steve and Rachel were both from the wrong side of the tracks. Rachel wanted Steve even though she was married to Russ, while Steve wanted Alice. Eventually Russ was out of the picture, and the story revolved around the others. After finding out that Rachel’s baby was Steve’s their marriage was finished. Steve and Alice did get married, and sadly she miscarried their baby. Rachel’s father caused Alice and Steve to break up, so his daughter could marry Steve. Alice came back to town, and after finding out the truth Steve wanted to be free. He did something illegal and went to jail, and Alice lost it and went to a sanitarium. He died in a helicopter crash in Australia.

The story between Steve, Alice and Rachel ended due to real life issues. The book goes into details about George Reinholt (Steve) and Jacquie Courtney (Alice) being fired. According to the author, they developed reputations “for taking advantage of this enormous popularity by frequent outbursts on the set.” A new writer and producer took over that we know to be Rauch and Lemay. This was a historic event there were accusations and press conferences. The soap magazines tried to mediate and try to fix it. Reinholt and Courtney ended up on One Life to Live on ABC. Since AW and OLTL aired at the same time, they were trying to get some viewers. AW didn’t suffer, but OLTL went up too in the ratings. In 1976 AW got the best-produced serial. The author posits that part of the problem beyond personality issues was how George Reinholt saw Steve versus how Harding Lemay being the writer saw the character. While George didn’t create Steve, “he drew on this own background as a street kid from the slums of Philadelphia.” Lemay felt the character’s history wasn’t written out and he gave him his own background, which was “I decided that he had run away from home like I had at seventeen, that he had lived on a farm and his family had been poor, and that many of his adult problems came from not having been properly understood when he was younger.” That really sounds like a huge difference in character.

The end of Steve, Rachel and Alice started the change for Rachel Davis. In the story, Rachel fell in love and married Mackenzie Cory, who was older and wealthy. Through that relationship she became a better person, and a sculptor.

They also mention how AW was renowned for having famous stage actors on the program. The show being the first to expand to an hour and it was different from some of the other shows. There were no amnesia stories, “unmotivated melodramatic plots, ending the long speeches that had typified soaps, and introduced dialogue that emphasized conflict between characters. “

More recent stories in Bay City have been Alice falling in love with Willis Frame. Iris causing problems for her father Mac and Rachel. According to the author, while things have changed it still carries on in the same spirit of the show that Irna created.

A Day in Another World talks about what it is like to work at AW in Brooklyn. The building was brick, without windows and the street were lined with “drab coffee shops, five-and-dime stores, thrift shops and garbage.” The author got up at 5:30 am to get to the studio by 7. There were cars coming from different sides of Manhattan, Westchester, and Connecticut. The actors got out of their cars yawning and then they talk about how the director of the day was Melvin Bernhardt as in those days three directors worked at Another World. There is an early morning rehearsal that the author was not allowed to attend. The television cameras were on all day and night, due to keeping them safe. Blocking is explained, then was lunch. When camera and sound people were out, the producers and director met for notes. Around 3, they had dress rehearsal. In the morning, they looked like “ordinary people.” “They wore their own clothes—crumpled shirts and jeans, sneakers and sandals. They had ordinary human complexions with blotches, dark lines, and freckles. Now as they hurried to their places, they looked peculiarly clean and perfect. The men wore pressed suits. The women wore modest, matronly dresses. All hair was perfectly in place. Faces were perfectly toned. Dark circles and blemishes were gone. It seemed strange to me and even a bit eerie.”

During filming the author was in the control booth. Bernhardt commanded it all, and one actress lost her lines when they teleprompter was out of her field of sight. After dress rehearsal, they went again. It sounded like they went in sequence as at the end of the first act, they took a minute break for ads. When Rauch smiled, they all were relieved. Once the taping was done, the performers changed back into street clothes, and returned the costumes. They were allowed to leave once word arrived “the tapes have been cleared.” That meant the show was good for airing. At 6 the actors were able to go home with their new scripts.

The Mellowing of Rachel Cory talks about how the character changed once Victoria Wyndham played the part, which was originated by Robin Strasser. Vicky talked about how once in Bloomingdale’s a viewer went off on her. She started screaming, “I hate you” and hit her. The security guards restrained the irate fan. The origin of Mac and Rachel was mentioned. Basically Rachel interacted as she went to his home to pick up her son Jamie. Mac was watching her boy along with his grandson Dennis. Vicky chose to flirt with him, and Douglass Watson (Mac) flirted back. This little scenes changed direction, as the pairing hadn’t been planned. It took six months for Mac and Rachel to do anything physical as the show was worried some fans may find it tasteless due to the age difference. Their first kiss happened in a restaurant. The viewers wanted them to get married and stay together. And if one follows AW they spent more years together than apart until Doug passed away in real life.

In this section there is a quote from Doug Watson about soaps that I appreciate. “Soaps are highly undervalued because people who flip on the soaps just once don’t understand that the people who have been watching for years get twenty times more out of the show because they know all the history and the characters. If your brother walks into a room, for example, nothing much might be said between him and your mother, yet you know there’s a lot going on there beneath the surface. It’s not spoken, but it’s hinted at. No other art form in the history of the world gives the development of characters this way going on over a number of years.”

The last section is on soap writing and has an interview with Harding Lemay. It starts with how a lot of times head writers have protégés that eventually become head writers themselves like Irna Phillips to Agnes Nixon and Agnes trained Wisner Washam. And that Lemay was from outside the industry. He got the job after Rauch read his biography and felt it reminded him of a soap opera. Lemay watched the shows for three weeks before meeting with P&G. At the time, four shows had court trials, which were boring. He mentioned on the Doctors had her fourth brain operation in four years, amnesia plots and nurses getting pregnant without knowing about birth control.

Irna Phillips taught him the tricks of the trade called the three-burner method. Basically it was like cooking, one story was in the front burner and climaxing, another was middle burner and building up, and the third was just beginning in the back burner. I’ve seen this referenced as story cycling.

Lemay mentions how the rich people are like those he knew in publishing. The Frame family is like what he grew up with, and the Randolphs were like he and his wife when it came to their children.

Most of the time Lemay stayed home and wrote though he would answer questions on the telephone. Things like continuity errors or schedule changes were mentioned so he could write around performers. Lemay watches each episode as it airs taking notes on the script. One actor flubs lines, so he decides to make his speeches shorter, and two actors who were supposed to be paired romantically don’t click so he thinks about changing the plot.

To end this section I wanted to share this quote from Mr. Lemay. “Actors in soaps identify very strongly with the characters they play. Concurrently with their own life they’re living another life. They never play the same scene twice so it’s really like living another person’s existence. They’ll say to me, ‘I know this character better than you do and she wouldn’t do that…’ When I was new to writing the show, I was in the control booth one day and the actress reading one of the tag lines must have known I was there because she read it and then looked straight into the camera and said, ‘Yeah, and whatever that means.’ It takes a soap writer awhile to prove himself. I think of soaps as a marvelous form about day-to-day human relationships. Writing a play you deal with the highlights of a life, but in soaps you’re dealing with everyday lives. That’s what soaps should be about, showing ordinary people dealing with the problems of daily life.”

So that’s the summary of the Another World section of All My Afternoons. I watched AW, but this book enlightened me to the show in its earlier years.