On View : Daytime’s Dickens : ‘ONE LIFE TO LIVE’ WENT LOOKING FOR A NEW WRITER AND FOUND A NOVELIST

When ABC hired movie producer Linda Gottlieb (“Dirty Dancing”) to revitalize its ailing soap opera “One Life to Live,” she didn’t round up the usual bunch of daytime soap writers.

“What she said was, ‘I’m looking for the American Dickens,’ and what novelist could resist that?” said Michael Malone, who had published seven novels and worked with Gottlieb on a screenplay but had never watched an episode of a soap opera, not even “Dallas.”

“My wife thought the idea was so hilarious, she didn’t pass on Linda’s first phone message,” said Malone, a soft-spoken Harvard Ph.D. who looks like he could be the Pillsbury doughboy’s bearded uncle. But, as he sampled the show, Malone began to realize that soaps--or “the stories,” as he prefers to call them--had a lot in common with his work. “I write big novels with lots of characters and interlaced structure,” he said (his most recent, “Foolscap,” is a funny adventure in an academic setting). “For someone who likes to tell stories, this is heaven.”

“One Life” needed a jolt when Malone joined it last summer. Created 24 years ago by soap doyenne Agnes Nxon, the show originally centered on the push and pull between classes and races in Llanview, a fictional suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line. In recent years, plots had grown increasingly bizarre, including the introduction of an underground city called Eterna and a story featuring rap music that Malone deemed “terrible.”

“One of the dangers of this form is to try to go around what it (a soap) can do best,” he said, “which is draw viewers into the characters’ lives and emotional relationships. I wanted to re-create a sense of place and then unfold what seemed to me to be the essence of these characters.”

In taking the soap from a low of eighth place (out of 11 daytime soap operas) to a sustained rating of fourth or fifth, Malone has balanced stories about the show’s core family, the Buchanans, with quirky new characters and unexpected cameo appearances by the likes of Dick Cavett (as a sleazy radio talk-show host), Paul Bartel (as a nervous lawyer) and Wallace Shawn (as a restaurateur). “One Life” reaped high ratings and extensive publicity last winter with a week-long clip retrospective during the death throes of Megan, a popular heroine, and a Valentine’s Day show using classic lover poems to spotlight each of the show’s couples.

“He’s very clever,” Lynn Leahey, editor-in-chief of Soap Opera Digest, said of Malone, “and he takes chances with the characters in ways that might not occur to a more experienced soap writer. But he can also pull off good old cliches like ‘Wife Coming Back from the Dead’ and reposition characters that aren’t working, which is just as important.”

In one startling transformation, Malone made Alex, a run-of-the-mill blond vixen played by Tonja Walker, into a sassy, hilarious mob widow who said to her late husband’s henchman, “May I call you Bulge?” When he replied, “Only my friends call me that,” she cooed, “I’m looking forward to finding out why.” Another lovely young home wrecker turned out to be a virgin. “That’s a rare one these days, isn’t it?” Malone said with a laugh.

Without irony, Malone invokes Shakespeare and Spenser as forerunners of soap-style evil twins and orphaned heirs. He takes great exception to the idea that daytime drama represents “the basement” of TV.

“To do this well, you must never look down at the audience,” he said. “A few of my friends thought I would come in and do some sort of Monty Python version of a soap, but my work is very mainstream, and I believe deeply that there is a place where all audiences can meet. An example is Dickens himself, or from our culture, ‘Gone With the Wind.’

There are two original American art forms: musicals and soap operas. My gosh, people in cultural studies departments are teaching soap operas now!”

Even Malone’s own wife, Maureen Quilligan, a professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, has become hooked. Separations from Quilligan and the couple’s teen-age daughter have been the job’s major drawback (they live in Philadelphia; he lives in New York during the week), plus a brutal workload that includes overseeing a staff of nine outline and dialogue writers and editing every script personally, a task few other head writers take on.

“About 500 pages of material come out of this office every week,” he said, likening soap production to “a machine that works in this day when so many American machines don’t.”

For a novelist accustomed to dreaming up characters in solitude, the three-ring circus atmosphere of a soap set was a happy surprise. “It’s like having fictional characters wander into your office,” said Malone, “because the actors talk about themselves inside their characters. ‘I don’t wanna say that,’ or ‘I don’t see why I have to do this’--these are real human beings, but they are obsessed by the parts they play.” Malone confessed that he, too, finds himself intensely involved in “One Life” life: “I dream in Llanview; these people are very close to me.”

With a Daytime Emmy nomination for outstanding writing already to his credit, Malone has found ABC receptive to his ideas. “If things were a disaster, the network probably wouldn’t have been as good,” he said, adding that a story involving homosexuality has been planned for summer. Is the handsome Episcopal minister with the stern military father secretly gay? “No, but that doesn’t mean people might not accuse him of it,” Malone said mysteriously.

Though he works hard to connect plotlines and maintain the proper storytelling tempo, Malone said he never worries that his fountain of ideas will run dry. “The network people used to say, ‘Watch out, you’re burning up stories,’ which flabbergasted me.

In one of my novels, ‘Dingley Falls,’ I had planned to tell a year’s worth of story in this little town, but by the time I got to page 1,200, I’d written six days. My wife said, ‘Just make Sunday a church service--you’ve got to stop now.’ With me, there are endless things that seem to bubble out.”

“One Life to Live” airs weekdays at 1 p.m. on ABC.