The Lady Is Insecure

"When I helped Anna White I had no idea of getting something back," mused Portia. "But now, at a time when I need her most, she comes to me offering to try to get the facts I need to break Steve Ward's alibi. God has a strange and wonderful way of knowing what He's doing . . ."

Thus, for the 2,462nd time, Portia Faces Life (Mon. through Fri., 5:15 p.m. E.D.T., NBC) brings to its avid listeners the innermost thoughts and self-sacrificial impulses of its heroine. Considerably less bemused at Portia's unflagging nobility is her creator; in fact, tall, tense Mona Kent, writer of Portia Faces Life, is betraying her stainless heroine for the first time. In a novel to be published next week (Mirror, Mirror on the Wall; Rinehart; $3), Scripter Kent tells the story of "a girl who wrote soap operas and tried to live her life according to the sacrificial formula of her heroine." The end result: "She destroyed the lives of her husband, lover and son."

Swayed by Love. Miss Kent explains her novel and its denial of the virtues she has preached for years as "a kind of protest. I kept being torn between the nice living I've made out of radio and the sense of shame I have at turning out the kind of stuff women listeners demand." Whenever she tried making Portia "more rounded," a sliding Hooperating and a cascade of angry letters sent her scurrying back to the shelter of the nearest clump of cliches.

Last week Iowa-born Scripter-Novelist Kent explained to the New York Herald Tribune what makes Portia and other sudsy heroines click: "Every soap-opera heroine ... is, by definition, a much stronger person than her husband or any man in her orbit . . . Possibly the Amen can woman feels actually so dependent, economically and emotionally, on her husband that she has to appease her insecurity by identifying herself with one or more soap-opera heroines whose husbands can have no secrets from them . . . [This heroine], swayed, as she is always saying, only by her love for her husband and children . . . may, and usually does, have a succession of men friends who feel a passionate attraction for her, but arouse in her own breast no unvirtuous emotion."

Big Ear. Scripter Kent added, wistfully: "When I think of that big, listening ear out there, I think how wonderful it would be if some writer could find a formula for giving women the substance and not the shadow of life."

Since Portia is always on the air--five days a week, 52 weeks out of the year--Mona Kent had to lead a double life to get her novel written. For two weeks at a time she would concentrate on her radio show and get far enough ahead so that she could put in one week's work on the book. As a result: "The novel's slick, too, in places. Whenever I got to a dramatic point I found myself letting go with everything I learned in soap opera."

Now, awaiting the verdict of the book reviewers, Miss Kent is again back at her typewriter, leading Portia into (and successfully out of) a new maze of troubles. "This is my tenth year of writing Portia Faces Life" she says. Then, glancing nervously at her novel: "Or it will be if I still have my job."

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