Helen Wagner is soap world's grande dame

August 17, 1998

BY JAMES BARRON
New York Times

NEW YORK -- Organ music, please. Cut to a shot of a woman in a comfortable-looking kitchen. She pours coffee and says, "Good morning, dear." Never mind that it is really midafternoon: We are watching a soap opera here, and she is the first character the world hears on "As the World Turns."

Fast-forward 42 years: same station, same program, same actress. Helen Wagner is still playing Nancy Hughes.

"I outlasted Cronkite, I outlasted the one who wrote those wonderful travel programs -- what was his name? Charles Kuralt," Wagner says off camera. She also outlived two on-camera husbands and became, in her words, "the longest continually running item on TV."

Johnny Carson put in 29 years on the "Tonight" show, Walter Cronkite a mere 19 as anchor of "CBS Evening News." On "As the World Turns," Wagner was, and is, the gravitational force, a three-P character: proper, prim and even prissy. In the days of black-and-white television, she was idolized, not only by housewives who gave "World" world-beating ratings, but also by school-age children who were banished from the living room when "World" came on but who sneaked a few looks anyway.

In the beginning, Nancy and On-Camera Husband No. 1 inhabited a surprisingly imperfect world, the world of live television. Doors stuck when they were supposed to open, chairs crumbled when actors sat down or a train rumbled by. For years "World" originated from what Wagner calls "the square-wheeled-train studio," a sound stage in Grand Central Terminal. The 1:55 to Pelham or Poughkeepsie rattled the china in Nancy Hughes' cabinet almost every day until CBS moved to West 57th Street in the mid-1960s. And following the rules of the time, Nancy and her husband slept in separate beds.

Off camera, Wagner's voice is more Texas than Illinois -- her father was a doctor in Lubbock. "I guess I get some of my drama from him," she said after telling a story of soap- if not grand-opera proportions about his removing a bullet from an Indian chief, saving his life, which is why the doctor lived to tell her about it. But she did spend time in Illinois, at Monmouth College, which cannot be too far from Nancy Hughes McClosky's beloved Oakdale. Wagner studied music and drama and, diploma in hand, moved to New York, where, among other things, she was a paid soloist in church choirs.

Even after all this time, Nancy and Helen have not merged into one personality. "I don't think Nancy would have disapproved of Helen," Wagner said, "but she wouldn't have been interested."

Last week, Nancy was treated to a surprise 80th-birthday party aboard a cruise ship retracing the route of the Titanic.

Wagner herself will not turn 80 until next month. Her husband, Robert Willey, who was an actor and theatrical producer, is sitting next to her in a restaurant where the noise from the next table almost drowns her out.

A conversation with Hughes leaves one with the impression that she is not terribly comfortable with the way the world has turned. She thinks that "World" writers rushed Nancy into her second marriage too quickly after her first husband died, and that "the present writers are so full of romance, they don't let you get to know the characters," she said.

And what of that other preoccupation of writers, scenes too steamy (and, on a show like "As the World Turns," too complicated) to describe in the newspaper? In the '90s, grand jury testimony can be racier than tomorrow's script.

"Heaving, sweaty bodies is not romance," she said. "It's just sex. Sex is great, but it's momentary. This other stuff is lasting. I don't think young women are all that interested in sex. Sure, it's great, but there are other things."