FLASHBACK: Malone Is Daytime's Dickens 1994

As head writer of ONE LIFE TO LIVE, Michael Malone is daytime's Dickens

By Karen Heller
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
June 29, 1994

NEW YORK -- Outside, it's just another dismal Tuesday in Manhattan. Inside, downstairs, it is 15 days from now in beautiful Llanview, Pa., a place impervious to poverty, pestilence and fat (but not divorce, deceit and mayhem). Ace defender Nora Gannon is doing what she does best, getting indignant, objecting all over the place. The district attorney, Hank Gannon, is coming close to nailing her client, Dorian Lord, for the ancient murder of her husband, Victor, who hasn't even been a character on the show in 18 years.

Hank happens to be Nora's ex-husband. Nora hates Dorian, but loves to win. Nora loves Hank's ally in the trial, police chief, Bo Buchanan, of the Texas oil-rich Buchanans. (What they're doing on the less-than-oil-rich Main Line is another matter.)

Upstairs, ONE LIFE TO LIVE's head writer Michael Malone is nine weeks into the future, discussing the outcome of the trial (guilty! guilty! guilty!), plotting what is to become of Nora, Hank and 28 other major characters with Jean Passanante, Chris Whitesell and Josh Griffith. Life at the West Side studio isn't always easy, and to keep matters straight, Malone has taped up a family tree and a detailed map of fictional Llanview.

"Haven't we already done this?" says Passanante. "It seems like Dorian has freaked out several times."

"How about if we have Cassie freaking out?" Malone says calmly. "She's good at freaking out alone."

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Good enough. But here's the real question: Why in the world did Malone, who completed his doctoral studies at Harvard and has taught at Penn, Swarthmore and Yale, give up a successful, respected and even, rare as this is, profitable career as a novelist to become chief writer on ONE LFIE TO LIVE? Yes, a sudser, one of those big ABC afternoon soaps, the one that's set in a Philadelphia suburb Malone labels "Bryn Mawrish," featuring big-haired women in tight suits and large-chested men in no shirts.

We are waiting for Charles Dickens.

Sooner or later, when speaking with Malone, Dickens tends to make an appearance. When he won the Emmy for best writing on a daytime soap last month, he mentioned Dickens as the father of all soaps. Sure enough, right on schedule, the 19th-century master strolls into the conversation. "I'm convinced, if Dickens were alive today, this is what he'd be doing," Malone says. "What's so different from what I'm doing now and he did then?"
Well, a lot.

For one thing, Malone does not work in isolation but with a coterie of Evian-swilling scribes, who worry about everything from the vagaries of Pennyslvania's death penalty to how often they can let a certain character have breakdowns.

As far as we know, Dickens never contended with ratings periods, network censors, commercial interruptions, set limitations, actresses with great looks but talent restrictions, and two teen rapist heroes (don't ask), both vying for the love of a comely virgin and ex-evangelist.

Malone, 51, is the author of the marvelously entertaining "Foolscap," "Handling Sin," "Dingley Falls," "Time's Witness" and three other novels, plus two works of nonfiction. They are thick books set in small towns, thronging with characters and overflowing with plot.

This soft-spoken, outgoing North Carolinian by birth, Philadelphian by residence, tries to act as if it's no big deal: There's no difference between working alone with a blank screen, and hammering out sometimes absurd story lines months in advance with three others in Manhattan, then having five more writers construct the dialogue within the strict parameters of his story line. Malone is almost convincing - until you meet up with his wife, Maureen Quilligan.

"I call it ONE LIFE TO LOSE," she says, sitting in their elegant Philadelphia townhouse, explaining that whatever life they once had was lost three years ago when Malone signed up to do television.

She doesn't watch the soap: "I don't like television, period." And they don't talk much about the show, either. "He's got 300 people to talk to about the soap."

During the week, Malone lives in New York, apart from Quilligan and their 18-year-old daughter, Maggie, and two blocks from the office. His first year on the job, "I looked horrible. I looked like I was going to have a heart attack every week." Running an office that churns out 500 pages in five days, as opposed to crafting that much every two years, can do such things to a person.

Now, he's got the routine down cold. Malone says he loves the speed of soap-writing, a staff churning out five hours of programming each week, the equivalent of 2 1/2 feature films. "I'm not interested in reflection. I never reread my novels," he says. "I have very little patience for analysis."

His wife of 19 years is a bit incredulous at this. Quilligan, whom Malone met at Harvard, is an authority on Renaissance English, the Howard and Judith Steinberg Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. All she does is reflect and analyze.

It cannot be easy that Malone's spouse and friends labor in the world's two haughtiest arenas, academia and serious publishing, or that they do not refrain from carping.

"It's disgraceful. I'm incredulous and offended," says Malone's good friend, Otto Penzler, who owns the shop Mysterious Books in Manhattan. Penzler is only half joking. "One of his great goals is to be taught in the universities. That's clearly incompatible with spending your life writing for television."

"Selfishly, I wish he was writing books for me," says Roger Donald, editorial director at Little, Brown, who published three Malone novels. "I sort of had a sigh of despair when he did this."

Ask Malone the hardest lesson he has learned from giving up novels for soaps, and he doesn't hesitate: "It's disposable and it doesn't end. It violates everything we know about art having a beginning, middle and end, that it's supposed to be treasured. You're doing the best you can do as hard and as fast as you can and there's always more."

Gee, Michael, doesn't sound like Dickens at all.

During the writers' meeting, when there's a question about the state's appeals process, Malone asks his assistant to call a Philadelphia lawyer who is the show's ad-hoc consultant. OLTL may not be real, but, under Malone's watch, it does try to be accurately surreal. "I've made every effort to make the show more about Philadelphia and its area," says Malone, who moved to Philadelphia from Connecticut in 1985, after Quilligan left Yale for Penn. "When I started at the show, the opening shots were of Harrisburg."

The characters came out of his startlingly fecund imagination, onto the tube, and into the living rooms of six million people loyally involved with them every week. Now what novelist can claim that?

Nora and Hank, as well as half the other characters, are his creations. Three OLTL actors won Emmys last month, all of their parts invented by Malone.

When the show had its 25th anniversary bash at the Plaza last July, Malone recalls looking at the actors all dolled up for a photo. "They were all so beautiful and shiny. They were like these beautiful pieces of fiction, my fiction," he says, the wonder blooming in his smile.

And there is the money. His pal Penzler carps that Malone is "wasting his time and getting rich." Malone's annual earnings tripled when he traded in literature for the soaps. It has helped him give freely to the arts, which are his passion, and save for Maggie's college education, when she enters Yale in the fall. Quilligan and Malone have a penchant for the good life, with her quipping, "Now, we just spend three times as much."

But beyond that, there's the sheer joy of the job. "He never says he misses writing novels," says Susan Bedsow Horgan, one of his writers who was elevated to the show's executive producer in March. "This is a challenge that just doesn't stop. Eventually, the novel is finished."

It was Linda Gottlieb who found Malone, and Gottlieb who wooed him. OLTL's former executive producer, a fan of Malone's novels, had dealt with him on a movie project that never got off the ground. When she came to the network, OLTL was about as dead as a soap could be, near the dust heap in the ratings, saddled by horrible story lines - the Old West, an underground city called Eterna - that were ludicrous, even by soap standards.

Daytime dramas are more than a world of obscenely good-looking actors. Without winning story lines, you are what OLTL was: nowhere in the hearts of viewers or the wallets of advertisers. "I wanted the best writer I could get. Michael writes novels about communities with lots of people and plenty of plot," Gottlieb says. Because Malone had never written for television, she hired Griffith, the associate head writer of the now-dead SANTA BARBARA, so "I could afford the luxury of Michael."

It wasn't easy getting him. She eventually flew to Paris, where Malone was attending a conference, to sign him up. Whatever reluctance he once had is now as distant as Eterna. "Michael loves it. He's like a little boy in a candy store," Gottlieb says. "He knows that this job is very, very powerful in reaching people, and that it's an artistic vision he has a strong role in creating."

In the three years Malone has been with OLTL, the soap has gone from being No. 9 in the Nielsens, to No. 6 out of 10 daytime dramas. His first year, Malone and his staff were nominated for an Emmy for best writing. The second year, OLTL won the Writers Guild of America award for daytime drama. When his name was called this year at the Emmys, Malone jumped out his chair, kissed a visibly excited Quilligan, and ran to the stage.

"He has done a lot of innovative things," says Robin Sloane, senior editor at Soap Opera Digest. "It has a lot of interesting, untraditional story lines." Malone has been the architect of two important, acclaimed story lines, of which he is as proud as any of his novels: one about homophobia, in which a minister refused to answer false charges about his sexuality, arguing that sexual orientation is not cause for condemnation. The second revolved around a fraternity gang rape; the victim had a sullied reputation and was disbelieved at first.

"I have no tolerance for the art-house mentality. If you have a moral and social responsibility, there is no better form for powerfully addressing issues," argues Malone.

As a child, one of six, the son of a Chapel Hill psychiatrist, Malone would concoct plays with an absurd number of characters. As an adult, he and Maureen act in amateur theatricals. Now, he gets to live out the dreams of his childhood in what he equated with the last vestiges of the Hollywood studio system: a staff of 250, a cast of 30 contract players, everyone contained in one company, one building.

Malone is fond of arguing that, ever since the creation of the novel, "popular culture has always been sneered at by high art. First the novel, then movies. Movies looked down on television, and almost everyone looks down on daytime."

The more time you spend with Malone, the more his case makes sense, even to Quilligan. "My days are spent making fiction," Malone says, proudly, and who can argue with that?

Like every other author, Malone has had his problems with the publishing business, keeping his books in print, alive, so readers could discover them. A while back, he got his wish. Washington Square Press started putting out handsome paperback editions of his novels, eventually five in all.

Such joy. Readers could find Malone's best books.

Of course, the irony was that then Malone was no longer writing novels.

This winter, Malone's contract came up. Re-signing, for two more years, was a relatively easy decision. With Maggie heading to college, Maureen has more freedom to join him in New York. Plus new executive producer Bedsow Horgan has big plans: She wants to push the ratings higher with Malone's help, plus the addition of a much-needed cast hunk and "super couple" that OLTL now lacks.

But Malone's current happiness abates when literature is brought up. He spends the weekends catching up with his family and friends, and has no time to finish a book review, let alone the novel he's under contract to write.

Sometimes Malone watches the show, when he has the time, and realizes he can't rightfully claim ownership of the dialogue. Quilligan speaks of "the loss of the exquisite surface of the sentence." That was once part of their partnership: She would read back his writing, helping him craft his fictional world.

Maybe in two years, when his contract runs out, Malone will honor his readers, though they hardly number six million, and return to the printed word. "I'm sure I'll write faster, and with more precision."

As always, with the frightening alacrity of Malone's imagination, he has an idea for not one novel, but two. He's confident that television has taught him more than a few tricks: "I have dialogue stored up for years."

When he first started with soaps, "I thought I was going too fast, telling this story and that story. I was warned, `You'd better watch out. You're going to run out of stories.' I am never going to run out of stories."

So the novels are still there. The third-floor study is ready. There's only one problem, he adds sheepishly, almost at interview's end.

"I have this idea," he says, almost in a whisper. "It's for a new soap opera."

How will Maureen ever forgive him?