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Newspaper running soap opera in printSAN FRANCISCO (AP)-Itsounds like a parody of soap opera: “Mary Ann Singleton, 25, a newcomer to San Francisco, is the secretary of Edgar Halcyon, an advertising tycoon who has learned he is terminally ill, but has told neither his alcoholic wife nor his unhappy daughter Dede. Coincidentally, the Halcyon family dog Faust also has only months to live.”Meet San Francisco’s newest heroine: Mary Ann Singleton coming to you five days a week on the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.“No other newspaper in the country would have printed it,” says Armistead Maupin, writer of Tales of the City, a soap opera in print inspired inpart by television's Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.Maupin, 32, laughs a lot lately as he considers the contract he is negotiating with The Chronicle, the possibility of a book version, and the television series his new Hollywood agent is talking about.Meanwhile, Mary Ann is recovering from a “crummy affair” with Dede’s cocaine-snorting husband, and trying to accept the homosexual next door—“He likes boys. Got it” she tells her horrified mother in Ohio.She's also getting over the shock of learning that her high school classmate Connie was a victim of the Tinkerbell strangler who likes to leave his ' victims sprinkled with blue glitter.And she's working at the Bay Area Crisis Centre, talking down would-be suicides and trying to understand a one-eared masochist named Vincent.“I think it’s just trash,” says Ed Bayley, dean of the school of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. “It’s sort of imitation pornography.Maupin says his editors balked at some bedroomscenes.Gordon Pates, managing editor of The Chronicle, said the decision to run the aerial was based on a belief that certain readers are attracted by a story of this kind rather than by news.The readers’ verdict on Tales of the City is not in yet, Pates said.“Nobody really wants to admit they like it but everybody does secretly,” agrees Sharon Stack, a San Francisco Health educationist and loyal reader. “It has to do with the San Franciscan's desire to hear about himself.“I can’t say it’s great literature. But it only takes about 30 seconds to read, so how could it hurt you?mary of the television travails of Mary Hartman and at least one other newspaper has begun a serial of its own.Bagtime is the Chicago Sun-Times’ first-person story of Mike Holiday, a supermarketbag boy who lives in OldTown with his cat Helen.Chary, his ex-wife, is involved in a bisexual thrill ring with members of the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bears. In a recent episode, Holidaywas mugged by someone dis- the City are insipid and pro-guised as John Cardinal Cody. mote damaging stereotypes.Maupin said the only criti- “Mary Ann had to be a idsra he's had has bee from wo- dingbat at the beginning be-men’s groups who say Mary cause, she’s a foil,” Maupin Ann and most of the other said. “It isn’t a political tract, female characters in Tales of It’s intended to be funny.”Pates aays editors of a dozen newspapers around the country, thinking about getting into the soap business themselves, have asked him about Tales. The New York Post is running a daily sumService at 2r10pjn.Pli ic ^ nthor Hirew^t flinhtc Haik/
Newspaper Details
Victoria Daily Colonist
Victoria, British Columbia, CA
Wed, Oct 13, 1976
Page 24
Full Page
Clipped by
Metropolitan L.
Oklahoma, USA 25 Aug 2022
Other Publications Near Victoria, British Columbia
Victoria General Conference Daily Bulletin
Victoria Evening Telegraph
Victoria New Westminster Times and Vancouver Island Guardian
Victoria New Westminster Times
Victoria Vancouver Daily Standard
