Soap Operas Take to Print

There is the Pearl of the Piedmont, a wide-eyed innocent come to seek her fortune in bustling Charlotte, N.C., and living with her pal, the cheerleader Sis Boombah. There is Mary Ann Singleton, newly arrived in San Francisco and immediately caught up in that city's often kinky lifestyles. In Des Moines, the heroine is Farm Girl Probity Prisswillow who, knowing not what she does, takes a job in a massage parlor. Baby Jill

Sloane is another naif who leaves her West Virginia home for Washington, D.C., and some fast lessons about drinking, men and politics.

These modern-day Sister Carries are the stars of a new genre of soap-opera fiction that has been leapfrogging from the pages of one metropolitan daily to another. Featuring young singles and written with a local background that often includes real people in cameo roles. the serials are pure whipped cream in a paper's usual menu of views and service features. "One of the reasons we started Probity," explains Des Moines Tribune Managing Editor Drake Mabry, "was to broaden the appeal of the paper to a part of the audience we're not reaching now." A survey conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle revealed a heavy female readership for Tales of the City, especially in the 18-to 35-year-old bracket. The Charlotte Observer credits its serial for boosting weekend circulation by 2,000.

While city-room veterans sometimes howl at the loss of space, the writers producing the soaps argue that they report one of the biggest stories of the '70s—the ongoing breakdown of sexual taboos. "Federal Triangle tells a lot about Washington in a way that you can't always do in news copy," says Washington Star Portfolio Editor Mary Ann Dolan. "It's great to get the characters to do things that they would do in real life but would never tell us as reporters," adds Reporter Louise Logue. So that their settings and dialogues will be authentic, the seven authors of Federal Triangle, each of whom writes one episode a week under the nom de plume Hardee Mumms, do lots of old-fashioned legwork.

Armistead Maupin, the author of the often lurid, 14-month-old Tales of the City, is regarded by some as a kind of contemporary Boswell: "I haven't written anything that hasn't happened —God knows that in San Francisco you don't have to make it up." San Francisco suburbanites had their own serial in the Pacific Sun until its author, Cyra McFadden, got a book contract and published The Serial (Knopf; $4.95), a fast-selling, funny, 52-chapter account of Living Together Relationships and Creative Divorce Groups in Marin County.

The Chicago Sun-Times's Bagtime was the story of Mike Holiday, a grocery boy who got into improbable situations with local politicians and socialites. The serial ran for 5½ months before the hero was lost at sea while surfing off San Clemente. Recently revived as Bagtime II, the series has Mike meeting up with Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic and his bride in California and then heading back home to his fans.