The grand dame of daytime television drama, Agnes Nixon liked to say that “everyone’s life is a soap opera.” For proof, she offered up her own.
She had an “abandonment complex” because her parents divorced soon after she was born. Growing up in an Irish Catholic enclave in Nashville, Tenn., in the 1930s and 1940s, she felt painfully different because the other children all seemed to have fathers. Hers was “nearly psychotic” and schemed to crush her post-collegiate dream of being a writer.
He wanted his daughter to follow him into his burial garments business and arranged for her to meet Irna Phillips, a pioneering writer of radio serials who her father was certain would “set me straight” regarding the foolishness of a writing career, Nixon often said.
And then Nixon invariably inserted a soap opera staple into the story – the plot twist. During the meeting, Phillips looked up from reading the sample script that was Nixon’s resume and asked, “How would you like to work for me?”
“It was one of the greatest moments of my life,” Nixon later said. “It was freedom.”