Sometimes it seems that there is no escape from the world of soap opera. Eileen Fulton, who has played the wicked Lisa on As the World Turns for 16 years, was punched in front of Manhattan's Lord & Taylor by an irate fellow shopper who had confused the TV screen with real life. Said Fulton: "At first I thought she wanted my autograph."
An actor on the mystery soap Edge of Night was asked by a physician to stop killing off characters. One of the doctor's patients, a 94-year-old woman, was suffering agony over the deaths of so many people whom she felt she knew.
A few years ago, CBS was obliged to eliminate soap opera characters who were poor because the network was receiving piles of CARE packages. When Susan Seaforth Hayes as Julie of Days of Our Lives mulled over an abortion, she was mailed pictures of fetuses. And the endlessly frustrated romance of Alice Matthews and Steve Frame drove fans of Another World crazy.
"Why don't you let them get married?" wailed one viewer. "Four times I've bought a new dress for the wedding. Four times I've bought champagne."
There are worse problems. After "Squeaky" Fromme's attempted assassination of President Ford, CBS affiliate WTVJ in Miami pre-empted five minutes of Edge of Night for a news program. The station's switchboard was immediately ablaze with calls. NBC Miami affiliate WCKT had a similar experience recently when Barbara Walters Visits the Royal Lovers pre-empted The Doctors and Days of Our Lives. Sighed an employee:
"Finally we had to say, 'Hey, lady, it's just a story.' " Just a story? Tell that to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who slips away from deliberations to ponder Days of Our Lives; to Sammy Davis Jr., who is such a fan of Love of Life that he made a guest appearance on it; to former Texas Governor John Connally or Andy Warhol, who are among the 10 million followers of As the World Turns, or to Novelist Dan Wakefield, who often bursts into tears at 12:30 when the plangent music of All My Children wells up. At Princeton, something like a quarter of the student body drops everything to watch The Young and the Restless each afternoon. When Agnes Nixon, who created a campus favorite, All My Children, asked a group of Duke University students why they watched the soaps, a young man replied: "It's the only constant in our lives."
In fact, there is a separate nation of more than 20 million Americans who weekly follow, or rather participate in, the soaps.
Critic Renata Adler, who became addicted to Another World six years ago while ill with laryngitis, explains their loyalty: