irna and me: two authors in search of a character...

the iconoclastic world irna created...

When Irna Phillips died in 1973, her daughter, Kathy, chose to keep the manuscript of her mother's unfinished memoir, "All My Worlds," private. When Kathy died in 2009, her brother, Tom, added the manuscript to his mother's papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. He was also kind enough to provide me with a copy. As I read through the onion skin carbons, I soon understood why Kathy had not share the manuscript. But, it was this passage that jumped off the page and revealed the path to understanding Irna:

"In the past I had generally fictionalized my own life. But in As the World Turns I fantasized as well as fictionalized my own life. For me, the Hughes family represented what I imagined and believed the traditional family was at that time."

In 2012, I released "as the world stopped turning...," a collection of essays (available as a Kindle single) detailing the final 15 years of As the World Turns. In the preface, "the iconoclastic world irna created...", I outlined the early years of the show through which Irna Phillips fantasized the life she was never able to make for herself and her adopted children, and later, Another World, where she revealed her darkest secret.

the iconoclastic world irna created...

The final years of As the World Turns were like watching a loved one deteriorate, slowly losing their faculties, but, on occasions that become increasing rare as the end approaches, displays brief flashes of their past self. And when the end finally arrives, our grief is inevitably tempered with relief that the long nightmare is finally over. The essays that follow detail the sad decline of the show's last 15 years. But first, a little background.

As the World Turns might never have existed had Procter & Gamble permitted Irna Phillips to expand Guiding Light from 15 minutes to a half-hour in 1955. Irna didn't want a bigger cast or more story; what she believed was "that better story and characterization could be developed in the half-hour format." Since GL was in a statistical tie with Search for Tomorrow for the top spot in the daytime ratings, P&G was understandably reluctant to alter its format. So, as she had when P&G opposed her proposal to move GL from radio to television, Irna dug into her own pocket, and in collaboration with Agnes Nixon and Ted Corday, wrote and taped a pilot of the show initially called As the Earth Turns.

As The World Turns was a radical departure from the daytime soaps that preceded it: for the first year, there was virtually no plot. According to critic, Robert LaGuardia, "story to Irna was simply a vehicle; it was from the moment-to-moment emotions of her characters, expressed to each other in quiet scenes, that viewers derived vicarious pleasure." Irna knew that viewers would need time to get used this new format, and the contract included a clause requiring CBS to air the show for a full year, regardless of the ratings. It took a while for 'World Turns to find its audience, but within two years the show was at the top of the Nielsen ratings, where it would remain until 1978, when the success of General Hospital's Luke-and-Laura upended the entire soap opera genre. For readers who grew up thinking of ATWT as "their mother's (or grandmother's) soap opera," a 1957 episode (#268 part one and part two on YouTube) illustrates the show's mesmerizing power.

The truth is, no one derived more vicarious pleasure from those quiet scenes than the woman who created them. In her unfinished memoir, All My Worlds, Irna acknowledged that "in As the World Turns I fantasized as well as fictionalized my own life." But, it was more than fiction or fantasy; through ATWT, Irna, both explicitly and implicitly, played out her deepest secrets and unrealized hopes and dreams. LaGuardia took it a step further, noting, "It was quite as if for Irna Oakdale was a real place -- far more real than New York or Chicago, and far better."

The events that led to Irna's intense desire for Oakdale to be a more real, and far better, place than New York or Chicago began in the mid-1920s in Dayton, Ohio. In the summer of 1925, while visiting her brother before beginning a graduate fellowship in speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Irna met a English doctor. Eight years older than she, "not handsome," but he had charm and intelligence, and Irna, who never had a date in high school or college, "decided he was the man I was going to marry." She declined the fellowship and found a teaching job in Dayton. But, in true soap opera fashion, things did not work out as Irna had hoped. An unplanned pregnancy left her alone, with neither a baby nor the possibility of another. The ramifications of Irna's sterility, would, in the words of her adopted daughter, Kathy, "divine the path Mummy would take for the rest of her life."