Here is my summary of the All My Children chapter of All My Afternoons, by Annie Gilbert. This section is 20 pages long and broken into five parts.
The first section gives the history of All My Children. On the first page there is a full size picture of Ruth Warrick as Phoebe, pouring herself a drink. There is a quote “Phoebe Tyler is awful but she’s also loving. She really does think she knows best, and she is desperately trying to steer her children the way she thinks they should go.” According to the author what made AMC different in the world of soaps as it would be “socially relevant” and Pine Valley unlike other fictional towns it would be one hour’s train ride from New York City. Even with the location, AMC was “still at heart a soap opera that looked backward, exalting small town isolation in nearly religious terms.”
How Agnes Nixon started in soap writing is also mentioned. Her father wanted to discourage her, and had her meet a working writer. That person happened to be Irna Phillips who hired her to immediately write for a show called “Woman in White.” The fact this backfired on Ms. Nixon’s father is a great story. She spent six months with Phillips in Chicago learning the business and writing dialogue. Eventually she ended up in New York writing for Guiding Light.
A paragraph explains how the uterine cancer story on Guiding Light came to be. Agnes lost a friend to the disease, and that’s why Bert Bauer (that program’s matriarch) showed symptoms and had a Pap smear. In 1965, most of the words that would be used today to explain the action weren’t allowed due to not only CBS, but also Procter & Gamble. For six months, this story ran which ultimately helped a lot of women and learn about the disease.
The genesis of All My Children is also discussed, how the initial scripts and outlines were lost in a suitcase, P&G later decided they didn’t want it, so she put it back in a drawer along with her hopes of becoming a creator which was more lucrative. She was giving Another World to write, which Irna also created by P&G. She came up with the Steve, Rachel, Alice triangle, and made the show a success. ABC approached her for a new soap, and instead of giving them her AMC proposal she gave them One Life to Live. Once that worked out, she did give them the AMC scripts.
Then the author goes into the stories of All My Children. They talk about the late Mary Fickett (more on her later) and how she won the first Emmy for a daytime TV for a speech protesting Vietnam. The people in Pine Valley believed Phillip Brent was MIA, after being drafted. Phillip was actually was taken in by a Vietnamese family that nursed him back to health. The show taped outside at the Connecticut River with Vietnamese actors playing the family who helped Phillip.
Other topics that are mentioned were the legal abortion that happened (which as we know years later was undone), male infertility, sexually transmitted diseases, and child abuse. Then the relevancy of AMC with college students was mentioned. How at the deKalb campus of Northern Illinois University, a person told a reporter fro the Chicago Sun Times that two out of three students can share the plot. In Boston, students came up with a petition to “save” a character. The author says perhaps the program like Y&R is popular with college students as it airs over lunch and can be watched in student unions. Another is the topical nature, and the third is love tangles of young people.
The Phil, Tara, and Chuck triangle is referenced. Tara is Joe Martin’s daughter, Phil believed he was Ruth’s son, though he was really her sister’s Amy’s child. Phil and Tara were in love throughout high school, but Erica told Phil about his paternity and he ran. Later in the book the character of Erica (Susan Lucci) was called a bitch extraordinaire, which is appropriate. When Phil was away, Tara turned to Phil’s best friend Chuck. They nearly got married, but Chuck collapsed with a kidney disease. Phil came home and Tara’s feelings had not disappeared. Before Philip went to Vietnam, he and Tara had a spiritual wedding and made love. After thinking Phil was dead, she and Chuck agreed to be married with Chuck raising little Philip as his own. When Phil came back alive, he had an affair with Erica, got her pregnant and then married her. She miscarried their baby, and they divorced. Little Philip got sick, and he found out the boy was his eventually Chuck and Tara divorced and Tara married Phil. Little Philip saw Chuck as his father, which kept Chuck and Tara in each other’s orbits, but Chuck had moved onto and married Donna.
The stories of Phoebe and her children, who disappointed her due to their romantic relationships, are discussed. Ann married the dashing, lowlife Nick Davis, who was a dance teacher and also a bar owner. Her second husband was a lawyer named Paul Martin, though that marriage fell apart due to the crib death of their daughter. Meanwhile son Lincoln (Linc) married Amy, who also had an affair with Nick Davis. Amy left Pine Valley after it was revealed she was Phil’s mother. This was explained due to Rosemary Prinz (Amy) agreeing to appear on AMC for only six months as a favor to Agnes Nixon. Linc than became involved with a former wife of Nick Davis, Kitty Shea. Phoebe hired a woman to play Kitty’s long lost mother to convince her to leave Linc. This actually brought Linc and Kitty closer until Kitty died. Phoebe also is Chuck’s grandmother, and she caused problems for Donna. Donna was a prostitute, and she enlisted the help of Donna’s former pimp. Phoebe stole, blackmailed and faked a bout of “paralysis” to keep her husband Charles (Hugh Franklin) married to her. Charles had wanted to leave Phoebe for Erica’s mother Mona.
All My Children had two families, of four generations living in Pine Valley in those days: the Tylers and the Martins. There are some pictures throughout the section I also want to write about. There are four large shots of various sets, Kate Martin’s living room, Mona’s office, Mona’s living room, and Pine Valley hospital. There is another photo of Bud Kloss one of the producers and Felicia Behr (who was an associate producer at the time, but ended up as an executive producer years later). There is a quote from Mr. Kloss “It’s really sort of an X-ray machine, the TV. It tells you what the personality is like of the person who is on the other side. We cast that way. We cast toward the personality of the actor. Family feeling is what we try to project, in the story and in the cast as well.” There are also photos of Ray MacDonnell and Mary Fickett talking about the stability of the marriage of Joe and Ruth except for when she fell for much younger David, two of Brooke English (Julia Barr) and Benny Sago (Larry Fleischman) whose characters dated, but are now adversarial in a way, Mona (Fra Heflin) and Charles, Francesca James and how her character of Kitty went into therapy after a request from James along with getting a new apartment and job. Eventually Francesca James returned to AMC as her long lost twin Kelly. Eventually Francesca went on to work successfully behind the scenes at ABC daytime.
There were other photos of Paul Gleason who played David Thorton. His character died when he accidentally killed himself trying to kill his wife Edna. At the time of the picture, David was involved with Christina Karras played by Robin Strasser. There is also a picture of Ann Martin and her husband Paul, played by Judith Barcroft and William Mooney. It says in real life Barcroft is married to AMC scriptwriter Wisner Washam, and their son Ian played little Philip when he was a baby. There are also photos with Tara (Karen Gorney), Richard Van Vleet (Chuck), directors Del Hughes and Henry Kaplan, and Susan Lucci.
One section is called Who’s Who by Mary Fickett, where she writes about her life on and off screen. Mary had gotten a phone call from her daughter Bronwyn, while at work. Bronwyn got hit by volleyball at school, and now at the nurse’s office with a headache. Later, she got a second phone call from the dentist’s office about her son Kenyon who has six cavities even though he had fluoride treatments. Also on this day, Mary lost her key to her dressing room door getting help to find it from the prop guys. According to Mary, both her and the character tend to run instead of walk, tends to cope, cry and tries to be honest with herself. The character of Ruth as stated from what Agnes Nixon wrote in the bio said that she was a nurse, and well Mary “faints at the sight of blood.” She lives in a small town Mary has always lived in or around New York City. At the start of the show, Ruth had a teenager, while Mary’s children were nine months and three and a half. Ruth had a sister and Mary was an only child. She ends the paragraph with “She was a “good” person. Me—no comment!” She said Agnes watches performers in writers their personalities into the scripts. Over the years, she and Agnes became friends and even subconscious gestures would appear in scripts done the line. She says if you are a long term performer, who you are and the character you play become intertwined.
A fan remembers is about one fan from Boston named Martha N, who is 33 and has two children. She started watching during its first episode. Her one-year old daughter was sick with a lung infection, and she was staying at home for the first time in her life during the day. Martha had begun to become depressed napping all day and started to watch the AMC after reading about it. While it sounded “more sophisticated” than other soaps, it really wasn’t, but she was hooked. She was a closet fan for a long time, as she lied to people about it. It also tied into her ambivalence about being a housewife who stays at home. She admits she isn’t objective about the program, but the acting being good is what makes it tolerable. Martha found issues with the story and how it made her impatient that all the drama is based upon deception. Of course, that may be true to life, but she gets upset with “sex role stereotyping”. She wishes it had at least “one gutsy woman who wasn’t also bitchy—and who wouldn’t sell her grandfather for a man.” She said she doesn’t even know why she watches it, but it is part of her life. There is also a quote from Byrna Laub who did the Daytime Serial Newsletter. She says how up until the early 1950s people tended to be live within a fifty-mile radius their entire lives, and families were three and four generations. Now people have love ones, three thousand miles away, and that soaps provide the continuity that was lost in that change.
Fan Magazines is about publications on soaps. This section mentions at the time there are sixteen different ones. The author talks to three different people Paul Denis of Daytime TV, Milburn Smith of Afternoon TV and Bryna Laub of Daytime Serial Newsletter. Since mainstream press tends to ignore soaps, the magazines took over that. At this particular time, the average circulation is about 340,00, but readership is twice that. Also there are the nationally syndicated newspaper columns. Smith started the first awards for daytime television, predated the daytime Emmys. They hold a secret ballot with their staff, and announce winners at a banquet in New York City. Denis talks about how 12 years earlier he started Daytime TV, which was the first magazine. He was the television editor for the New York Post, and along with his wife and using her name wrote soap opera summaries for TV Picture Life. He supervises the monthly magazine, along with a bimonthly and several annuals. Denis saw people wanted information about soaps and nothing was available. People from the industry come to his office for information and research. Stars will call him to chat.
Laub on the other hand advocates soaps through a newsletter summarizing soap plot lines on a monthly basis. She was in grade school and listened to soaps, in college, she watched them in the student union. When she taught school, she watched them while grading papers as a television was in the classroom. She quit teaching after having her first child. Her working friends were worried she would become a hausfrau, as women’s liberation was a big deal in those days. After lecturing her, they would ask about their favorite show, whatever it was. Bryna’s husband joked you could get paid to do this, and four years later she was. According to one report, she was grossing 250,000 a year watching soaps. The newsletter goes to 85,000 readers, from students who can’t watch, women who work and families overseas. Their home had seven televisions and video equipment records the stories. A staff of ten watches the shows and writes summaries. Bryna at the time was a regular on AM San Francisco answering questions about show histories and even interjecting her opinions.
The last section is called Soaps go to College. It talks about how the Modern Language Association (for English college teachers), presented a session on soap operas at an annual gathering in New York. There is a long section with the opinions of a college teacher who devoted time to studying soap operas named Margot Norris.
Ms. Norris talks about how she finds soaps fascinating as they have long and complicated narratives like in 18th and 19th century novels. “I am convinced that the appeal of soap opera is not its content, but its form. In other words, what keeps women (and men, it seems) riveted to their favorite shows is probably less their sympathy with the sad plight of the character than the carefully controlled suspense and irony which result from combining the intricate, novelistic plot with the dramatic revelation. For example, illegitimate pregnancies and illicit affairs are less interesting as sociological facts than because they provide instant secrets which promise a dramatic revelation.” She goes into detail about the Another World story between Barbara and John and how it was banal on paper a lawyer and colleague having an affair. What was interesting was how Barbara was able to manipulate John’s wife Pat into believing she was seeing other people and not sleeping with her husband. Other times there are stories that would mean something to a long term viewer and a short term viewer would get nothing from like seeing Russ and Rachel interact due to their past history. She also mentions the misconception that many soap scenes are emotional and hysterical. Most characters are in crisis professions for maximum impact and dramatic potential like doctors, lawyers and the press. She ends it with the soap opera must keep alive the fantasy of a repressed Victorian society for their own survival. That’s interesting, as people to this day bristle over that concept of becoming progressive.
So that was the All My Children section of All My Afternoons. Reading it, I got a quick glimpse of what the program was like back in its first decade.
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