- Writer, Woman in White
- Co-Creator/Head Writer, Search For Tomorrow
- Writer, As The World Turns
- Head Writer, The Guiding Light
- Head Writer, Another World
- Head Writer/Executive Producer/Creator, One Life To Live
- Head Writer/Executive Producer/Creator/Story Consultant, All My Children
- Head Writer/Creator/Story Consultant, Loving
- Co-Creator/Story Consultant, The City
- ABC Daytime Overall Story Consultant
- Agnes Eckhart, All My Children
- Agnes Eckhardt, One Life To Live
- Aggie, All My Children
Often termed the "queen" of contemporary soap opera, Williams Agnes Eckhardt Nixon, better known simply as Agnes Nixon, was born December 10, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois. She is often called the most respected and influential writer in daytime drama. She is best known, and most honored, for introducing social issues into the soaps.
Shortly after her birth, her parents divorced. Nixon's mother returned to Nashville with her. They lived with Nixon's grandmother and invalid aunt. Her grandmother was said to be a difficult woman, and Nixon's mother strived to give Nixon as normal a life as possible. As a child she cut out pictures from comic stips such as Etta Kent and Tillie the Toiler, and played with them as if they were paper dolls, moving them about and creating her own variations of the stories. As she grew older she became enchanted with the novels of Louisa May Alcott, followed the serial Little Orphan Annie on radio, and took drama lessons.
Nixon was gifted and petite; a vivacious and beautiful blond. These attributes caused her to suffer a great deal of envy and spitefulness from her peers. She attended St. Cecilia Academy of Dominican sisters in Nashville. During that time, she studied privately with Eleanor Dubuission Fossick, who first identified her as gifted, and taught her "expression" and music. Nixon was "Miss Eleanor's" delightful protégé, and she wanted to attend Northwestern University. Her father, who had a company that provided materials for funeral businesses, refused to underwrite this, and instead wanted her to work for him. Nixon was distraught. She disclosed this situation to her teacher. "Miss Eleanor" told her to write to her father as though she had not received his letter refusing Northwestern, and tell him how wonderful he was and how all her friends were jealous that her father was going to pay for this. Shortly after, her father wrote her, saying "he was in a bad mood" when he wrote his letter of denial, and of course he would pay for Northwestern.
At Northwestern she majored in speech and drama. In her class were such luminaries as Charlton Heston, Patricia Neal, Martha Hyer and Cloris Leachman. She is said to have observed the enormous talent pool there, and instead of pursuing acting, opted instead to write.
She had been engaged to a young World War II pilot, Hank. Hank went missing in action. This was devastating for young Nixon. She dated again, and once had a semi-long distance relationship with a young Frenchman named Etienne. It was said to be fascinating to hear her prattle in French, long distance, with him. She was also friends with one of Hank's buddies, Robert "Bob" Nixon, an executive with the Chrysler Corporation. "Miss Eleanor" remarked to her that her eyes only sparkled when she spoke of Bob, and not when she spoke of Etienne. In the end, she married Bob Nixon on April 6, 1951. Together, they had four children. Her oldest daughter, Cathy Chicos, became a dialogue writer for All My Children. Nixon was loyal to her mentors, and visited "Miss Eleanor" several times during her last illness and attended her funeral. "Miss Eleanor" had directed seven roses be placed on her casket. The first six were for members of her family, and the seventh was for Nixon, symbolizing "All My Children" she had taught throughout the years. Nixon had always said she wanted to write the great American novel. She did this as a collaborative effort, and the book was made into a mini series in the 1980s called Manions of America. It is believed it was loosely based on her own ancestry.
While still at Northwestern, she sold a radio play, and to avoid working in her father's burial-garment business, went to see soap opera queen Irna Phillips with dreams of becoming a professional writer.
The formidable Phillips took Eckhardt's script and, to the shock of the young writer, read every word of it aloud. After she finished reading, Phillips turned to the trembling author and asked, "Would you like to work for me?"
Under Phillips' tutelage, Eckhardt began her job as a dialogue writer for the radio soap opera Woman in White at $100 per week.
Later she struck out on her own, free-lancing in New York during television's Golden Age of live drama -- a golden age that, she said, "lasted fifteen minutes." She wrote teleplays for Studio One, Playhouse 90, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, and My True Story.
In 1951, the same year of her marriage and move to Pennsylvania, she created the NBC soap opera Search For Tomorrow with Roy Winsor. She stayed with the series, writing the first three-month cycle. It became the first successful daytime television soap opera, and would for awhile hold the honor of the longest-running serial in the history of televison.
A few years later, she was reunited with Irna Phillips, and became a writer for The Guiding Light. After co-creating As The World Turns with Phillips in 1956, she became head writer at The Guiding Light in 1958. There she began her much-heralded "relevance" campaign, mixing social issues and education crusades into the story.
A friend of Nixon's had died from cervical cancer, and Nixon wanted to do something to educate women about getting a Pap smear. She wrote it into The Guiding Light by having the lead character, Bert Bauer, encounter a cancer scare. This storyline aired in 1962; Nixon had to work around some difficulties of getting this storyline to air, as she could not make use of the words “cancer,” “uterus,” and “Pap test”. However, after this storyline the number of women who took a Pap smear surged dramatically. The studio and Nixon both received numerous letters from appreciative women, some of whom said that the story had saved their lives by prodding them to seek regular checkups. In 2002 she received a special Sentinel for Health "pioneer award" for her work on The Guiding Light.
In 1965, Nixon, while on vacation in St. Croix, completed the first proposal/Bible for her future soap opera All My Children. Procter & Gamble at first optioned the series, but could not find any room for the series at the time.
Instead of shopping the new series around to another network, Nixon was convinced by the rejection that the new series wasn’t any good, she went back to TGL. P&G decided that Nixon might just be what the struggling NBC soap opera Another World needed and moved her over to head write the struggling soap. She took the job as a challenge. She met the challenge and ended up turning AW into a certifiable hit.
Her first order of business was getting rid of the previous writer's new family and returning the Matthews family to prominence. To accomplish this, she simply killed off the entire Gregory family in a plane crash. She then crafted a compelling storyline for Bill & Missy where Missy married the dastardly Danny Fargo (Antony Ponzini) out of convenience, was raped and impregnated by him, and then put on trial for Danny’s eventual murder, bringing Bill & Missy back together. Nixon also moved TGL characters Mike Bauer and young daughter Hope to AW and plunged Mike into a romantic triangle with rivals Pat Randolph and Lee Randolph while hooking up Lenore Moore (Judith Barcroft, and later Susan Sullivan), a former girlfriend of Bill’s and who’d been much more socially acceptable to Liz, with social climbing attorney Walter Curtin (Val Dufour). In the end, Nixon’s take on the show worked! Viewers couldn’t wait to see what twists and turns would befall the residents of Bay City and the ratings began to rise. Then Nixon would introduce two new characters and a storyline that would send the ratings through the roof.
She was intensely invested in a conniving character in her rejected soap opera named Erica Kane and wanted, if nothing else, for that character to see realization on screen. To this end, she created the character of Rachel Davis along with her long-suffering mother Ada. Rachel & Ada (Robin Strasser and Constance Ford) had been abandoned years earlier by Ada’s husband and Rachel’s father Gerald. Ada was determined to make up for the abandonment and indulged Rachel’s every whim, leaving the poor young girl immensely spoiled. A conniver and social climber of the highest order, Rachel set her sights on her doctor – intern Russ Matthews – and married him in secret. Shortly thereafter, Agnes introduced the wealthy and rakish Steve Frame (George Reinholt) who was taken with Russ’s sister Alice. As Steve & Alice fell in love, Rachel grew dismayed with the life of a doctor’s wife and took a liking to Steve. Before long, Steve had slept with Rachel (who was still married to Russ) and got her pregnant, but Rachel attempted to pass the baby off as Russ’s. The Russ/Rachel/Steve/Alice quadrangle was a smash! Viewers swooned to Steve & Alice, sympathized with Russ, and loved to hate Rachel.
Ratings skyrocketed. AW, once in danger of cancellation, was the first soap opera to break through CBS’s ratings dominance. For the 1966-1967 TV season, AW ranked 7th behind all of CBS’s soaps. For the 1967-1968 season, AW had shot up to 2nd, right behind ATWT.
Her success at AW didn’t go unnoticed. ABC, seeing the magic she’d worked, lured her away to create a hit soap for their own struggling line-up and Nixon jumped at the chance, leaving Irna Phillips and P&G for good.
ABC executives passed on the earlier program she created, but asked her to create a show that would reflect a more "contemporary" tone; that creation was One Life to Live. Nixon, "tired of the restraints imposed by the WASPy, non-controversial nature of daytime drama, presented the network with a startingly original premise and cast of characters. Although the show was built along the classic soap formula of a rich family and a poor family, One Life to Live emphasized the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the people of Llanview, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.
The real beginning for her presentation of issues in television soap opera was One Life to Live. In 1968 social structures and attitudes were changing, and One Life was rich in issue stories and characters: leads who were Jewish, up-from-poverty Irish-American, Polish, and the first African-American leads, Carla Gray (Ellen Holly), doctor-to-be, and Ed Hall (Al Freeman, Jr.). Gray's story, for example, had her develop from a character who was passing as white to one who embodied black pride, with white and black loves along the way, to antagonize racists. When Carla kissed the black intern she had become engaged to, one affiliate in Texas cancelled the program immediately. Ironically, when Holly and Freeman brought Carla and Ed back to One Life in the mid-1980s, they seemed out of place in by-then WASP-ish Llanview, Pennsylvania. "Color" in this era was created not by race, but by style, in the persons of the nouveau riche, Dallas-style oil family, the Buchanans. By the Democratic mid-1990s, however, interracial and Hispanic families had become central characters.
Agnes Nixon created One Life to Live for ABC in order to obtain the opportunity to write her "dream" story, All My Children. It all happened in 1970. Based on her success with OLTL, ABC decided they wanted the project P&G had passed on. AMC was more personal than OLTL, but social issues were still tackled: child abuse (again tied to a real organization in Philadelphia, and again drawing a strong and practical response); the Vietnam War; and the first legal abortion, Erica Kane's, in May 1971. Assuming the audience would be shocked, AMC's writers gave Erica a "bad" motive (she wanted a modeling job), and, following the abortion, septicemia (planned as educational as well as "poetic justice"). But Susan Lucci's fan mail cheered Erica on, and urged her to take the modeling job in spite of the objections of her then-husband.
Other issues pioneered by Nixon include political nonconformity, very rare in prime-time television, rarer still in daytime drama. When All My Children debuted in 1970, it featured Amy Tyler (Rosemary Prinz) as a peace activist. Next Nixon had the young hero, Phillip Brent, drafted against his will and later missing in action. Political pages in U.S. newspapers took note of a speech against the war by Ruth Martin (Mary Fickett), who had raised Phillip as her son: even the mothers on those escapist soap operas were against the war, the newspapers said. Fickett won the first Emmy given to a daytime performer, for her work during the 1972-73 season. In 1987, Agnes Nixon remembered simply, "I didn't feel that took so much courage. It was like a mother speaking. Like Friendly Fire." But Friendly Fire was not published until 1976. In 1974, Nixon turned to humanizing the Vietnamese, showing Phillip, in one of the few war scenes on TV soap opera, being rescued by a young Vietnamese (played by a man who had been adopted one of Nixon's friends).
Nixon's stories characteristically show both sides of the issues on which she focuses: of the teenage prostitute, the drug addict, even the wife beater. When she feels there should be no sympathy for the other side, she works toward empathy--as in the 1988 AIDS story in which she had a lead character, Skye Cudahy (Robin Christopher) become so irrational with AIDS fear that she almost killed Cindy (Ellen Wheeler). Nixon sees both sides, and usually has a third type of character--perhaps in a position similar to that of most viewers--who is pulled in both directions.
Characteristic of Nixon's soaps, AMC hooked young people and men. The focus on young adult characters included not only romance--and sex--but also their growing pains. AMC, from its earliest days, presented Erica Kane, the willful but winningly vulnerable teenager who, in the hands of Agnes Nixon and Susan Lucci, has grown through multiple lovers (usually husbands) and careers. She has found her "lost" father, a surprise daughter and in the 1990s--even some women friends. In the early 1980s, AMC's popularity soared as young people raced home (or to their dormitory lounges) at lunch time to watch the classic star-crossed romance of Jenny Gardner (Kim Delaney) and Greg Nelson (Laurence Lau). The issue was class: Jenny was from a troubled, lower-class family; Greg's mother, Enid Nelson, was Pine Valley's stereotypical snob. Equally popular were Angie Baxter (Debbi Morgan) and Jesse Hubbard (Darnell Williams), soap opera's first African-American super-couple.
Delaney and Williams, an Emmy winner, were given daytime drama's highest honor when they left AMC. Their characters were killed off so no other actor could play them. Jenny Gardner's kid brother Tad (Michael Knight)--flirting, cheating on girls, and otherwise adventuring--epitomized another Agnes Nixon gift to soap opera: humor, the "lighter" moment amid the Sturm und Drang. A waif-foundling, Tad is an archetypal character, his story a myth, or fairy-folk tale. He has two sets of parents. His biological parents consist of an evil father, Ray Gardner (dead since the 1980s), and a loving but ditzy mother, Nixon's famed comic creation, Opal Gardner. But Tad was raised by Joe and Ruth Martin (Ray MacDonnell and Mary Fickett, retired in the mid-1990s and replaced by Lee Meriwether), after his father abandoned him in a park. Joe and Ruth Martin are the central father and mother of AMC, and in folk-myth terms, they are the good parents, as steadfast as Tad's blood parents are unreliable and frightening.
Nixon's other archetypal creations include "tentpole" characters, usually older women such as Erica's mother Mona Tyler (the late Frances Heflin) and Myrtle Fargate (the late Eileen Herlie). Tentpole characters, says Nixon, are "the Greek chorus, in a sense ..., telling the audience how to feel."
Besides folk myth, Nixon also draws on the religious and mystical. One of her favorite tales is from the third soap opera she created (with the late Douglas Marland), Loving (ABC, 1983; later changed to The City). Archetypal good-bad twins Keith and Jonathan (John O'Hurley) battle, and in one twist, evil Jonathan, fallen from Golden Gate Bridge, returns with supernatural powers. Nixon says Jonathan made a pact with a devil. Wisely, the pact-making was not shown, and the evil one, though shown, was unlabelled--he left the Bridge area, slithering away as a snake. For this story, she cites as sources Faust and C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters.
Loving also allowed Nixon to break one of daytime's last taboos. That was her story of a father sexually abusing his daughter. Other shows had done similar stories but the abuser was always a step-father, never a blood relation. Nixon and Marland broke that taboo with the story of Garth Slater abusing his daughter Lily. Even with that story, it was only one of the many issues that Loving tackled in its first year and entire run.
Agnes Nixon, in her long and much-honored tenure as queen of soap opera, has created a treasure trove of characters and stories as rich as Aladdin's, tales from the deepest depths of our fears and the starriest heights of our dreams. She is indeed "the storyteller."
Through the years, she has been a member of the International Radio and TV Society; National Academy of TV Arts and Sciences; The Friars Club; and the Board of Harvard Foundation. She has been the recipient of the National Academy of TV Arts and Sciences Trustees Award, 1981; Junior Diabetes Foundation Super Achiever Award; Wilmer Eye Institute Award; American Women In Radio and TV Communicator Award, 1984; American Academy of Achievement Gold Plate Award, 1993; TV Hall of Fame, 1993; Soap Opera Weekly's Soap Opera Hall of Fame, 1994; Editor's Choice Award from Soap Opera Digest, 1996; and The Innovator Award (SoapsWEB), 2008.
She has received five Writer's Guild of America Awards; one primetime Emmy Award; five Daytime Emmy Awards, and numerous nominations.
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