Carrington, Elaine Sterne

Elaine Sterne Carrington was a highly successful writer of radio soap operas that reflected her personal philosophy, moral vision and the hopes of her time. Flourishing from the 1930s through the 1950s, and basing her stories on her own experiences, she saw the state of marriage as perfect happiness for a woman (any problems within it were her own fault) and viewed the family as the bedrock institution for American life.

A writer and storyteller since childhood, Carrington sold her first short story, The King of the Christmas Feast, to St. Nicholas Magazine at age thirteen. At age nineteen her movie scenario, Sins of the Mothers, won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Vitagraph Company and the New York Evening Sun . By her early twenties, her stories were appearing in numerous magazines including Harper's, Colliers, Good Housekeeping, Pictorial Review, Woman's Home Companion, McCall's, Red Book and The Saturday Evening Post . She co-wrote a Broadway play, Nightstick, which was made into the movie, Alibi, and she wrote a number of one-act plays for vaudeville including A Good Provider, The Red Hat, Five Minutes from the Station, and Fear .

Carrington's career really took off in 1932 when NBC bought her first daytime serial, Red Adams, which became Red Davis with Burgess Meredith in 1934 and was renamed Pepper Young's Family in 1936, each name change reflecting a change of corporate sponsorship. In 1939 she began When a Girl Marries, also for NBC. This was followed in 1944 by Rosemary for CBS. In 1946 she was the highest paid scriptwriter on radio earning $200,000 a year for three soap operas. Called the queen of the soaps, she had a combined daily audience estimated at nine million in 1948, later revised upward to eleven million. Each show ran five times a week for fifteen minutes. Carrington outlined her stories three weeks in advance and then dictated her scripts into a dictaphone with her secretary, Elsie Frank, transcribing them. Apparently, they required little revision.

Carrington also published a novel, The Road of Ambition (1917) and a collection of her short stories, All Things Considered (1939). Her full-length plays, produced in summer theaters, include Villa at Cannes (1933), Remember Me? (1953), Maggie, Pack Your Bags (1954), and The Empress, a comedy produced in Westport, Connecticut in 1955 with Geraldine Page. In 1946 she sponsored The Carrington Playhouse which produced original plays by new writers. She also wrote patriotic scripts for the Treasury Department during the war and comedies and dramas for television programs such as the Robert Montgomery Playhouse in the postwar period.

Carrington was born Elaine Sterne in New York City on June 14, 1891 and was educated at Columbia University. Her parents were Marie Louise Henriques and Theodore Sterne, a tobacco importer. She married George Dart Carrington, a lawyer and army major, on March 23, 1920. He died in 1945. They had two children, Patricia and Robert, and lived in Brooklyn Heights and Bridgehampton, Long Island. Elaine Sterne Carrington died on May 4, 1958 in New York City.

From the guide to the Elaine Sterne Carrington papers, 1903-1959, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)