Absent Ladies

Although soap operas do a fine business for their sponsors both in summer and winter, the grueling year-round grind of performing in them begins to tell on actresses when the days get hot.

A favorite device for eliminating an actress from a script is to reveal that the character she portrays has to go away to have a baby. Few weeks ago, Alice Frost, who plays the title role in CBS's Big Sister, managed to get away from it all when Scripteuse Marjorie Bartlett slammed Big Sister, over seven months gone, into an auto accident, shipped her off to "Glen Falls" to recuperate. In order to bring Big Sister back at the end of this month, Miss Bartlett is planning to have a drunken no-good set fire to a tenement, blister Big Sister's husband, Dr. Wayne, so badly that she'll have to rush home to take care of him.

A more complicated situation will occur on WOR's Meet Miss Julia in September when Helene Freeman (who plays a young matron named Sandra Wilson) intends to take a vacation. At the present time the charming Sandra is married to a loony who is being treated in a private sanatorium. In order to get Sandra off the air, her unstable spouse will be permitted to escape from the asylum. Thereupon Sandra will have to go and look for him.

Sometimes it is possible to pretend that a character is knocking around the house, even though he doesn't open his mouth. Gertrude Berg, who turns out The Goldbergs for CBS, has done this with a character named Rosie for the past five weeks. Rosie has apparently been in the next room, or on the front stoop, during the performance of The Goldbergs, but actually Roslyn Silber who plays the part has been in Hawaii.

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