A Career of Love and Tragedy

After hundreds of unexplained illnesses, dozens of mysterious deaths in the family and thousands of illicit and/or steamy love affairs, you’d think it was time for Agnes Nixon to slow down a little.

But the 70-year-old Nixon, the doyenne of soap operas, can still be found inventing even more tragedies and wonders daily at ABC studios in New York City, where one of her creations, “One Life to Live,” is celebrating its 30th year on the air this summer while another, “All My Children,” is in the middle of year 28.

“When I think of those numbers, all I can say is, ‘What hath God wrought?’ It’s just amazing that such a long time has gone by,” Nixon said from her Manhattan office recently. “When I started, I worked from home and soap operas were a cottage industry. Now the network really depends on us and, of course, so do the audiences.”

Actors on prime-time shows feel fortunate if they last five years, which produces enough episodes for syndicating reruns. Even great series last only a few years longer; “Seinfeld,” for instance, wrapped it up after nine. But daytime soap operas seem to last forever.

“One Life to Live” and “All My Children” aren’t even the oldest shows on the air on which Nixon has worked. She collaborated with her mentor, Irna Phillips, working as head writer at various times on the Phillips-created soaps “Another World,” now in its 34th year; “As the World Turns,” in its 42nd season; and the grandma of all soaps at 47 years, “Guiding Light,” on which Nixon started in 1952, when the show began.

“It was fun then and it’s fun now. I have never regretted it and never thought I wanted to do any other kind of writing,” said Nixon, who did, though, admit to thinking about writing a memoir. “Besides, it is enough, isn’t it? I mean, nighttime does maybe 26 episodes in a year and we do 260.”

As Agnes Eckhardt, she was interested in acting as well as writing when she was at Northwestern University in the late 1940s. Phillips worked out of Chicago at that time doing radio soap operas, and a family friend got the young graduate an interview with her.

“I gave her a script I had written for a Northwestern play workshop and she hired me [for a radio soap called ‘Woman in White’]. How lucky was I?” asked Nixon, sounding not at all jaded, even after all those vile marriages she has put Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) through on “All My Children.”

Nixon stayed with Phillips for eight months then went to New York to write nighttime dramas on such live shows as “Robert Montgomery Presents,” “Studio One” and “Playhouse 90.” It was a perfect indoctrination for her future career.

“It wasn’t so much the pace of doing it quickly. It was that they were live, which made the writing and acting hard,” she said. “But we were like Hemingway said, ‘Young, immortal and invulnerable.’ It was a wonderful time in television.”

Then she met an automobile executive named Robert Nixon. They married in 1951 and came to settle in Rosemont, a suburb west of Philadelphia and the presumptive real-life equivalent for Llanview in “One Life to Live” and Pine Valley in “All My Children.” She still lives in the home there where she raised her four children.

“Procter & Gamble asked me to write for them [in the mid-1950s] with Irna [Phillips], and that was very good,” Nixon said. “I didn’t have to go to New York for story conferences and was essentially doing the work freelance while my children were young. It worked very nicely.”

Procter & Gamble approached Nixon about coming up with a new soap opera in 1968, her first creation without Phillips. That became “One Life to Live,” still considered the first of the “modern” soaps. It had ethnic tensions from the beginning, with Jews, WASPs, Catholics and blacks all mingling. There were pregnant teenagers, premarital sex, drug addiction and even a somewhat sympathetic child abuser.

“One Life to Live” became a hit and ABC asked Nixon for another one, which became “All My Children,” Nixon’s favorite. And her favorite character is the bitchy-but-lovable Kane, played by Lucci since the show’s inception. Nixon said Kane is the character who intrigues even the soap opera skeptics.

“The people who think soaps are second-class dramas don’t tell me directly,” she said. “They say things like, ‘Oh, they are wonderful for shut-ins.’ But you get the message. And then they ask me, ‘So tell me, really, about Erica.’ So I can’t pay attention much to the denegrations.”

Since her husband died a year and a half ago, Nixon spends a little more time in New York, where she has an apartment. One daughter lives in New Rochelle, in the northern New York suburbs, and two others live in the western Philadelphia suburbs near her 20-room Rosemont home. Her son and daughter-in-law live in Washington, D.C.

Though Nixon and her husband originally supervised the entire production of the soaps she created (“Loving,” no longer on the air, was one of hers as well), they sold them to ABC in the mid-1970s. She still spends her days in New York writing long-range script outlines, sometimes plotting a year in advance. She is also involved in casting, editing and other production details, but she leaves the dialogue to a staff of writers and freelancers.

“I loved the writing and I hated the business. It may have been less lucrative [to sell], but I got to do the part I wanted and I’ve never suffered,” said Nixon, who is reported to earn more than $1 million a year.

Nixon said she seems to work a bit less than she did in the past and credits it to having a rhythm.

“You have to have your bearings and have pacing,” she said. “The work is continued every day. On ‘NYPD Blue,’ they can stay up a couple of nights and then collapse on a beach in Malibu. We can’t do that, because we have to have a new show every day. You get your staff and you all do your job. And it is all wonderful in the end.”

Nixon expresses surprise that anyone would express surprise that she lives what she feels is a normal grandmotherly life.

“I don’t live a frazzled life,” she reports. “I live a good one. And I suppose I’ll die with my boots on, hopefully thinking up new intrigues for Erica Kane and the rest.”

* “All My Children” airs weekdays at noon, followed by “One Life to Live” at 1 p.m., on ABC (Channel 7).