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Constructing a week's shows requires the concentration of a Bobby Fischer. Charts of the characters and the available actors (each actor is guaranteed a minimum number of appearances a week) guide the writers as they work. It is an axiom among writers that leading characters' personalities change every two years —that is to say, under their same name. The head writer breaks down the bible's dense plot into brief outlines, which are then turned into scripts by the writers. The dialogue must be virtually flub-proof. Actors move ceaselessly—with the equipment and with their colleagues — so syllables are few and speeches short and clear.
The shows themselves are usually taped only a week in advance. Says Falken-Smith: "If a rival show suddenly pulls a big rating, you've got to be able to counter it with a shift in plot of your own."
Under such pressures, it is not surprising that writers suffer from amnesia too.
It has happened that a woman who underwent a hysterectomy years ago suddenly becomes a mother; nor has it been unknown for a man to marry his sister, revealed years before to have been his father's illegitimate child. Days of Our Lives writers literally abandoned Dr. Tom's eldest son, an amnesiac who lusted openly but unknowingly after his sister Marie, finally driving her to a nunnery. Then he went upstairs to bed. That was more than two years ago. Last month he came downstairs. Days' cast expected him to say: "What's for breakfast? I'm famished."
Writers often lose a character for a while or injure him for plot purposes or to test popularity. Last spring Millionaire Mack Corey, the indulgent husband of Rachel on Another World, was injured in a polo match and temporarily paralyzed from the waist down so his wife would be tempted to fool around. A similar ploy was used by Bell on The Young and the Restless. When Jennifer Brooks went off with a lover, she went out of focus. Says Bell: "I knew I had to pull back. How more dramatically than to put her on center stage?" Jennifer left her lover and got breast cancer.
Viewers have been writing to Jennifer Brooks about her operation. Actress Dorothy Green has received the letters some what nervously: "It's creepy. I almost feel I had the mastectomy." To be a soap star is to live a double life. "I was paged in an airport by my real name," says Edward Mallory, who has played the troubled Dr. Bill Horton on Days of Our Lives for the past ten years, "and I ignored the page. Most of my life I am Bill Horton." Sometimes this goes beyond a joke. David Rounds, who played a suspected child molester, Phil Donnelley, on Love of Life for two years, suffered a hiatal hernia brought on by the strain of acting a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown.