Writing Real People Into Fiction: Soap Opera Edition

A Literal Literary Loser Makes Drama

The very first Broadway show my now husband and I saw together when we were dating was Ragtime. It’s the story of a WASP family, a Black family, and a Russian-Jewish immigrant family whose paths keep crossing in New York City. Hmmmm…

I own the soundtrack — on tape, on CD, and on streaming. I’ve been dying to introduce my kids to the production. A scant 26 years later, Ragtime is finally being performed at City Center this fall, and I just bought tickets for my husband and I, our older son, and our daughter. Our middle child is in college in California, so he’ll have to miss it.

Which is a shame, because as a self-proclaimed anarchist, I wanted him to see a singing Emma Goldman.

That turn of the century radical is not the only real-life figure musicalized in Ragtime. There’s also Henry Ford, Booker T. Washington, Evelyn Nesbit, Matthew Henson, Harry Houdini, etc…

The E.L. Doctorow book that the musical is based on features even more, including Emiliano Zapata, J.P. Morgan, Robert Peary, Sigmund Freud, Theodore Dreiser and others.

Which brings me to the question I’ll be exploring for the next few weeks: Is it OK to incorporate real-life people into your historical fiction?

I’m not asking if it’s done. I know it’s done. I’m asking if it’s OK to put words into the mouths of real people that they never said, have them do things they never did and, most importantly, have them take stances they may never have taken?

Case in my point: My upcoming historical fiction, Go On Pretending, begins in the world of 1950s soap-operas, just as they’re transitioning from radio to television. A major supporting character is Irna Phillips. And just who is Irna Phillips, you may ask? Let this Go On Pretending excerpt explain it for you:

The Procter & Gamble company may have operated a plant on the northwestern corner of Staten Island so massive that locals dubbed it Port Ivory – after the institution’s best known product, but their corporate offices, including their advertising division, Compton, were located in midtown Manhattan. Rose could hardly believe that, after she’d ridden the elevator to the 11th floor and given her name, the girl sitting at the front, simultaneously answering two telephones, typing, and vetting guests, didn’t so much as blink when Rose said she was there to meet with Irna Phillips. 

The Irna Phillips. The woman who had single-handedly invented radio soap operas (their nickname coming from the same product which inspired Port Ivory), and was currently the head writer of The Road of Life, Young Dr. Malone, The Brighter Day, Today’s Children, Joyce Jordan, MD, The Right To Happiness, Masquerade, The Guiding Light, and, on television, These Are My Children. Irna traditionally wrote and produced her shows out of Chicago. Three years earlier, after a lawsuit that began as copyright infringement then turned into non-payment of taxes, Irna moved The Guiding Light to CBS Radio and relocated its production to Los Angeles. But Irna was unhappy with the acting on the West Coast. She didn’t think the Hollywood types sounded authentic enough for her wholesome, midwestern characters. So The Guiding Light was moving again, this time to CBS Studios on East 58th Street. Irna being Irna, had managed to requisition Liederkrantz Hall, the larger of the second floor studios. Now she needed someone to supervise production while she returned to her other shows in Chicago.

Our heroine, Rose Janowitz, gets the producing job. And she ends up falling in love with her radio program’s leading man, Jonas Cain.

So far, so soapy.

Except that Rose is a Russian-Jewish woman. And Jonas is an African-American man. (For my obvious inspiration, click here.)

Rose assures Jonas that Irna, their boss, won’t object to their relationship. She explains:

Irna’s programs are progressive. Not on the surface, but deep down. She’s quite subversive. In her way. She gives women a voice. She speaks up for unwed mothers, girls who’ve made mistakes they can’t live down. I hate that we have to keep your face hidden. To sell soap. I’m not a tool of the capitalist machine. I’m a member of Workmen’s Circle; since I was in school. I’m on the side of the oppressed.

But when it comes time to migrate the show from radio to TV, will Irna allow Jonas to keep playing his role?

This is a situation that — as far as official history records — the real-life Irna Phillips never faced. Which means I had to make up how she would have handled it.

I did a great deal of research on the woman, using books like Guiding Light: A 50th Anniversary Celebration, Guiding Light: The Complete Family Album, and When Women Invented Television, as well as Irna’s own unpublished memoir.

But, in the end, I was still making things up. (Not just for Irna, but for a writer she hired down the line, Agnes Nixon, eventual creator of All My Children and One Life To Live. I used Agnes’ book, My Life To Live, as a resource about those days, too.)

I think I came up with an accurate guess about how Irna would have reacted and what she would have done in a state of affairs like the ones I created.

But it will always remain only a guess.

On the other hand, what if someone reading Go On Pretending takes it as fact, and assumes my made up circumstances actually did happen, and Irna did react in the way that I wrote. Will they judge a real-life woman based on a fictional event?

Do I have the right to do that to Irna Phillips’ memory?

Let me know what you think in the Comments!

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Speaking of history versus fiction, my daughter and I take a break from reviewing fiction to tackle a bit of non-fiction. Watch below: