Magazine for Those Who Follow the Soaps
By Claudia Rowe
New York Times
March 14, 1999
David Cone, the quietly intense pitcher of the New York Yankees, shares something private and personal with Charles Barkley, the outspoken forward on the Houston Rockets. It is neither a love of sports nor of winning that specifically unites these two. It is ALL MY CHILDREN, the soap opera.
Cone and Barkley are only two among dozens of professional athletes who are faithful viewers of daytime drama, said Lynn Leahey, editor in chief of Soap Opera Digest, a weekly magazine. She named others: the New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza, who likes THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL; the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre and the New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing, all of whom follow THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS.
"Sports stars are notorious soap opera fans," Ms. Leahey said in an interview at her home here. "We have football players -- major quarterbacks -- calling up and asking for tickets to the Soap Opera Awards each year. It's not like, 'Oh, they're watching because of their wives.' No, they really are fans. They're really into it."
Anyone who has a free hour during the day is at risk, she said.
"I watched soap operas from the time I was a little girl with my mom," Ms. Leahey said. "And when I got older and became a teen-ager who wanted less and less to do with my mother, soap operas became the one thing we could share. We'd sit down with a bag of potato chips and watch GUIDING LIGHT. That was our time together."
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By the time she went to Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., Ms. Leahey was arranging her class schedule around GUIDING LIGHT, and when she graduated with a degree in English in 1981, one career path cried out above all others. A resume to Soap Opera Digest was soon in the mail.
Though there may have been few other college graduates who could reel off the characters and plot lines from a half-dozen soap operas, Ms. Leahey was turned down -- twice -- and had to settle for writing about making Christmas ornaments for McCall's Needlework and Crafts magazine. By the time Soap Opera Digest called again in 1984 she was thrilled to work there, even though it meant answering phones and taking coffee to editors.
"There aren't too many entry-level jobs where you get to watch TV all day," she said. "It was just a lark. I thought, 'What would be something really just fun to do?' For me, it was the perfect job."
By 1991 Ms. Leahey had leaped from assistant editor to managing editor to editor in chief, and now 15 years later since she walked through the magazine's doors. She presides over a magazine where the circulation has doubled, with a readership of a little more than a million today. Ms. Leahey, 39, attributes the increase to soap opera fans having less time to view their favorite shows, so they to turn to the magazine to keep up.
"Other people have hobbies," she said. "My husband watches the Yankees -- he'll sit there and watch a game and every single show about it and then he'll read every single article about the same game in three different newspapers."
For Ms. Leahey, soap operas hold her in the same thrall. She explained: "They're a lot like reading a really good book, a page-turner. You're curious about the characters and you want to find out what will happen to them, and the longer you watch, the more connected you become. Like the Monica Lewinsky story -- didn't we all want to see what would happen?" But she added quickly, "A soap opera would not be caught dead doing some of the things they did."
As she spoke, Ms. Leahey was curled up on a sofa in front of a flickering fire in the study she shares with her husband, Michael, an administrator at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. With its soft tones and shelves of old books lining the walls (Fitzgerald, Dickens and Austen for her, Hemingway for him), the setting was not unlike that of a classier soap opera. But Ms. Leahey's life is hardly the stuff of daytime drama. She has a decidedly wholesome air and makes sure that her 3-year-old son, Jack, is kept far from the torrid daytime affairs that frame her working life.
"To be honest, I just don't want to answer the questions," she said.
One of the best indicators of a future fan, however, is a person who watches with his or her mother, Ms. Leahey said. And whether it is because more mothers work or because there is a general sense that life itself is more compelling drama, soap opera ratings have declined in the last decade. Yet, the circulation of Ms. Leahey's magazine, which provides high-gloss crib notes for fans who cannot keep up with each episode -- has increased. Readers weigh in on plot lines and characters, often with a sense of outrage over changes to their favorite shows. The magazine's Web site is www.soapdigest.com, and fans send E-mail regularly.
"I am really concerned about where things are going on ALL MY CHILDREN," wrote a fan from Texas in a recent issue. "I can understand why the show's ratings are slipping. The writers make mistake after mistake.
"The new faces brought in this year have done nothing to boost the already floundering characters."
Others complain about story lines that run for years with no end in sight. And a fan from Ohio who has been watching ALL MY CHILDREN since it was first broadcast in 1970, complained: "It has always been a beautiful escape from my daily problems -- until now. Over the last year there has been nothing but gloom and doom. Enough is enough!"
Of course, soap operas are not for everyone. Ms. Leahey has hired writers who were secretly watching baseball games when they were supposed to have been monitoring ANOTHER WORLD.
And she has met many more who claimed to know nothing about daytime programs while surreptitiously tuning in whenever they could. Her own brother is a case in point. One summer, he agreed to paint the family home in New Jersey and the job was progressing smoothly. But every afternoon at 3 he would disappear. Ms. Leahey and her mother were baffled. Could it be a secret girlfriend? No, it was GENERAL HOSPITAL.
"He never talked about himself as a soap fan," Ms. Leahey said, laughing. "We had no idea."
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