B004YENES8 EBOK (32 page)

“It’s OK, honey,” he says, “its OK. It’ll never be that way again.”

She nods, remaining steadfast about her prediction. “It’ll be exactly like that,” she says.

This is good material, strong, emotional stuff, tying in the police work of our principals with their characters’ own emotional fabric. As noted earlier, “The Clinic” was by the writing team of Judy Merl & Paul Eric Myers, although to be accurate, they did not create the scene I just described. It was dictated by Barbara Corday, pretty much as she recalled it from her own life’s experience. Merl and Myers did some fine freelance work on our show, as well as other series; I do not single them out here as criticism but more to illustrate the intensity of how our team worked together, how we made it relevant and entertaining. It was involving and unpredictable as well.

Where did we get off? This wasn’t brain surgery or treating cancer. Not quite—though our multi-award-winning cancer two-parter did emphasize the importance of early detection and the sometime preference for lumpectomy (over the more radical and disfiguring mastectomy) weeks before the
New England Journal of Medicine
came out with headlines saying exactly the same thing. We did treat cigarette smoking as an addiction years prior to Surgeon General Koop coming forward with the news that it was one.

We had Mary Beth Lacey abstain from drinking alcohol and coffee during her pregnancy over a year before our government made the same recommendations. We advocated safe sex and the use of condoms (first time on prime-time TV in the United States), attempted to expose the virulent malignancy of racism in all aspects of our society (including our own series’ regulars), and regularly dealt with sexism and—most graphically—with the heartbreak of substance abuse. Film clips from our episodes were used to illustrate segments of
Nightline
,
MacNeil-Lehrer
,
CBS Evening News with Dan Rather
,
The Today Show
, and many other local and syndicated news broadcasts and informational shows.

Our awards came from many sources in addition to the
Emmys
and included citations, plaques, and trophies from such diverse sources as the National Commission on Clean Air, the National Organization for Women and other women’s groups, the Scott Newman Foundation, the National Council on Alcohol Abuse, the Media Office of the Governor of California, Women in Film, Humanitas, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Center for Population Options, New York City and State citations, as well as several from our hometown, Los Angeles.

We were touching people’s lives, effecting change both in behavior and laws. We were lauded in the nation’s
Congressional Record
.

The conceit came to us quite naturally. We believed we were doing something important and the Mace Neufeld phrase that “it’s only television” never occurred to a single one of us.

A Washington DC speaking engagement when I was NARAL’s “Man of the Year.” That’s Gloria Steinem with the gorgeous profile.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Barbara Corday and I were the recipients of Couple of the Year Award from the ACLU on this festive night in Los Angeles. Georg Stanford Brown is on the left, then Barbara, me, Sharon, Tyne, and John Karlen.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Many, besides the aforementioned Ms. Petrie, wanted to know how we did it. More recently, the British, now in the days of the economic unification of Europe and all that it will mean to their exploding television industry, have asked how many writers we used on staff. Wrong question. We did it with two, and we did it with five—and all the numbers in between. We did it with men only and with a staff made up of a majority of women. It didn’t matter. Were they superstars? None of the writers or directors have gone on to great individual success, as have the alumni of many other hit series.
⁶²

First-time directors didn’t get spirited away to success as they have on other shows. Some of the writers went on to make big time/big money deals in development, only to disappoint.

I believe that with
Cagney & Lacey
, their devotion, their energy, and their time (to the exclusion of nearly all else) was a much bigger factor than their talent, no matter how considerable.

“Series nun,” Ms. Fisher would call herself. It also referred to the other females on my staff. Why not? Lacy Street was our church, and we were all devoted to what it was we were doing there.

Chapter 37 

HERMAN, THE REACHER 

Annual writers meetings were held at the close of every season to discuss the character arcs of Cagney and Lacey for the coming year and the direction the series would take in the event of renewal. The meeting in 1985 was different for many reasons, not the least of which was the exhaustion factor, made even more acute by the announcement of Tyne’s pregnancy and the realization by the writers that—having just completed a season’s work—they were now being asked to immediately go right back in harness on yet another season without a break.

Tyne was due to deliver in the fall (October 1, 1985, to be precise), near the time of our season opener. Since we were photographing months ahead and were not on the air with first-run programming in the summer to track the pregnancy, Mary Beth would have to give birth months after the woman who portrayed her.

I opted for a February 1986 delivery. That was a Nielsen sweeps month, and such a noteworthy occurrence, I reasoned, couldn’t hurt our ratings. Keeping Lacey pregnant longer than the actress who played her created more challenges than simply having to order an inordinate amount of birdseed to fill the pouch Ms. Daly would wear to simulate her actual pregnancy. It would further require that, only months after delivering her own very healthy child, Tyne Daly would have to reenact labor pains and the birthing process all over again.

Back at our dining room table meeting, it was quickly decided that the baby would be healthy and that it would be a girl. (What else?) The bad news was it would force us to put the episodes on the air in pretty much the same order in which they were made (to properly follow the pregnancy and Tyne’s anticipated growing corpulence). This would not allow me to creatively readjust our release schedule to put strong episodes up front or against perceived weak competition. It meant I could not bury faulty segments, which I would normally try to place opposite some blockbuster M.O.W., and it also forced the staff to be a bit more careful where the stringing of story and character beads was concerned.

To protect ourselves during the latter part of Tyne’s pregnancy—and her time of delivery and recovery—we had to design a period of block shooting (a couple of weeks in this case toward the end of summer, where we would consolidate all the Tyne Daly material we had left and film it—without regard for continuity—in order to bank this material for inclusion in episodes we would subsequently complete when Ms. Daly’s pregnancy made her no longer available to us. This, too, put an additional burden on the staff, as we needed material well in advance of the norm to accommodate this accelerated production schedule.

A similar period of maternity leave would have to be invented for Mrs. Lacey, and that would necessitate a change in the modus operandi for a Lacey-less Christine Cagney. This would then require quite a format adjustment, the possible invention of some new characters to temporarily fill the void, and the expansion of already-existing roles.

Uppermost in all of our minds was how long we could conceal Tyne’s girth. Corday felt we were kidding ourselves, in that she believed Tyne was going to begin showing very fast. Just how realistic was it to think we could photograph her behind desks or sofas and not have the audience be distracted by this obvious device? “Obvious,” in that by airtime our fans would already know of the pregnancy, courtesy of the tabloid press.

We debated over the so-called obligatory scenes that we had all seen hundreds of times before: The telling of “the news” to the husband, to the adolescent children. We discussed when Cagney would find out (before Harvey or after?). Even if we had these scenes play as early in the season as possible (say, October 1), how could she deliver as early as February? Wouldn’t Lacey therefore have to remain pregnant throughout the entire season? (That’s Tyne Daly carrying around pounds of birdseed for nearly seven months!) Even if we wanted to have her pregnant throughout the better part of the year, it was quickly conceded that this was a fantasy. There was no way Tyne would not be showing by the earliest date we could start filming.

“You know,” I said to the assemblage of writers gathered around the dining room of Barbara’s and my Hancock Park home, located in the heart of one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles, “if I really had the courage of my convictions, we wouldn’t do any of this obvious stuff.”

All heads were turned toward me. “Let’s stay with Lacey giving birth in February,” I began. “That means at season’s start Lacey is four to five months pregnant. Harvey already knows; the kids know; Cagney knows; so does the whole damn precinct. We shoot Tyne as she is, with no attempt to hide anything.” I went on:

“The first episode of the season opens with Coleman” (our desk sergeant who was known to “make book” on almost anything). “He is preparing the Lacey Baby Quinella—odds on boy, girl, weight, color of hair, eyes. Lacey doesn’t like it, but it’s the talk of the precinct. That’s how we open; that’s how we tell everyone Lacey’s pregnant. All the so-called obligatory scenes will have been played during the summer—off-stage. All those familiar scenes are missed ’cause we’re not gonna tell ’em. America would quickly get it and say, ‘Ain’t that just perfect
Cagney & Lacey
?’ ”

I can’t recall if there was applause or not. There should have been. It was a terrific save.

Over a year later, with Jonathan Estrin and Shelley List then leading the writing staff and in attendance, we had another such meeting—again around that same large dining room table. This time there was no pregnancy. The Laceys, cramped in their apartment, would move at long last to their own home and that—plus the new baby—would provide us with plenty of stuff for them. But what about Cagney?

“Let me give you the last line of dialogue from the last scene of the forthcoming season’s final episode,” I began. It was admittedly an odd and dramatic way for such a meeting to convene.

“We are in a tight two-shot of our stars, and they are seated. We don’t know where they are. Finally, after a long beat, Cagney stands and says, ‘My name is Christine, and I’m an alcoholic.’ We pull back into a wide shot revealing we’re at an AA meeting: freeze-frame, the end.”

This time I did get my applause.

“Now,” I said, beaming at the writing staff, “your job is to backtrack over the twenty-one episodes that will precede this and figure out a way to get us to that moment.”

The idea for all this had its germination quite by accident in the season that had just ended—the one focusing on Lacey’s pregnancy. Originally we had, in creating Cagney’s father, descended to stereotype. He was written as a retired Irish cop, and naturally he liked to drink. It provided us with some good material over the years, usually of a comic or sometimes-poignant nature. We never dealt with it as a serious problem. Then, in 1985, we made an episode called “Filial Duty” (written by Richard Gollance and directed by Sharron Miller) in which, as a subplot, Charlie Cagney was hospitalized with pneumonia.

As the title of the episode implies, we were going to introduce the problem, so prevalent in our society today, of adults having to deal with their aging parents. This issue had been on my mind, as my own Grandmother Fanny was deteriorating rapidly and—in the process—heavily impacting the quality of the lives of my parents. Such a thing would now become Cagney’s burden and, we hoped—in addition to her problems in the workplace or her adventures as a healthy, heterosexual, single female in a major urban environment—humanize her in a recognizably dramatic way.

Pneumonia, of course, doesn’t last indefinitely, and we were looking for something that would not go away—a problem that Cagney could see herself having to deal with for the rest of her father’s life. We had already done a show on cancer, and we didn’t necessarily want Charlie bedridden.

“Y’know,” I said one day sort of casually, “he sure drinks a lot.” That was it. A touch of cirrhosis and the news that nearly floored our heroine:

“Your father is an alcoholic.”

The two Cagneys did all the classic things, beginning with denial, but eventually Christine saw the truth of the doctor’s diagnosis.

Many weeks later, we were in production on yet another episode, “DWI,” (“Driving While Intoxicated,” written by Les Carter and Susan Sisko, directed by Al Waxman). Within the body of the show was an argument between Cagney and her partner who was—by then—on maternity leave.

It was a good script and a good episode, but this particular scene was not—as I read it anyway—one of the high points of the hour. The day it was shot, I had heard from several of the noncombatants that the juices were really flowing on the stage that day and the two women were definitely showing off their acting chops. I drifted by the set, and Tyne cornered me.

“Good stuff today,” she said. “Are we really gonna get into this alcoholism thing with Cagney?”

I believe I covered my surprise at the question. The script was about a home-bound, very pregnant Lacey, who was witness to a hit-and-run accident perpetuated by a drunk driver. Nero Wolfe–like, Lacey tries to solve the case from the confines of her apartment and, out of necessity, enlists the aid of her partner. Cagney thus finds herself working night shift for the city and for Lacey by day.

As a consequence of the disruption of her sleep habits and her time off, Cagney— in the story—is understandably irritable, leading to an argument or two with her partner. I wasn’t sure what Tyne was talking about, but it didn’t stop me from responding positively to my star’s obvious enthusiasm.

“Of course,” I countered. “Whaddaya think, this stuff happens by accident?”

I avoided any other contact with the set until the next day when I could view the film of the scene under discussion so as to get a better handle on what was being talked about.

Sure enough, the viewing of dailies made it clear. Sharon and Tyne had brought a dimension to the scene that I had not realized was there. They had not altered the dialogue (you just don’t do that on one of my shows without permission); the change was achieved with intensity of performance and emphasis, and the results were there for anyone to see: Cagney’s defensiveness on the subject of her own drinking and that of her father’s, in an episode ostensibly about something else entirely, convinced me we were onto something that would ultimately be more fully explored in the following season.

That season began in New York, where we picked up shots with our principals all over Manhattan. As had become our practice, these would be used to pepper throughout several episodes to be filmed at our home base in Los Angeles. The New York crowds loved Sharon and Tyne, recognizing them wherever we went. It was hard to believe that only a few years earlier, when we would tell folks on the Manhattan streets we were filming
Cagney & Lacey
, all anyone wanted to know was where was the
Yankee Doodle Dandy
?
⁶³

It was a heady time, a time where others in my peer group opportunistically franchised themselves by becoming involved with other ventures. I, on the other hand, remained on the course I had set for myself of concentrating only on
Cagney & Lacey
. Not an easy (or particularly astute) decision, as Steve Brown, Tyne, Sharon, and the Orion penny-pinchers kept driving me more than a little nuts. Still, I remember being in basically a good mood. Do you think the six-figure check I received in late May of that year as the first of several guaranteed advances against foreign income on
Cagney & Lacey
had anything to do with this? Bet your ass!

In the midst of all this, Herman Rush came back into my life. The chairman of Columbia Pictures Television leaned across the narrow breakfast table close to my oatmeal and asked, “What do you want?”

What a tough question. My goals have always been short-term—my answer always the same as the Jack Lemmon character in
Save The Tiger
⁶⁴
: “One more season.”

I had been trained from childhood to dream small. It was the Cabots, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Kennedys, and Bushes who talked to their children about running corporate empires or the country. That didn’t happen in any Montebello, California, household I had ever been around.

What did I want? Herman Rush was a reacher, a creative deal-maker. He helped me think about what I might want by structuring an unheard-of (by me anyway) and fabulous deal. What really put it over was
TV Guide
.

In August, we received ten
Emmy
nominations—our most ever—but there was no joy at Lacy Street. The
TV Guide
piece on Sharon referenced earlier came out the same day as the Academy announcement (August 1985), and both La Gless and Ms. Daly saw it as a disaster and me as the villain of the piece. The facts were that our ladies and, in fact our show had, over the years, a very checkered relationship with
TV Guide
, and so my two stars had a tendency to be super sensitive about that particular publication (as opposed to being just very sensitive as they were with every other outlet). I came from the school of “if you spell my name right, there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

When we were new, this most popular TV publication practiced a tougher kind of journalism than it does today. Over the years, we had been treated relatively well by the
Guide
, but more than once they had crossed the line and published something gratuitously hurtful or nasty. As a consequence, Tyne refused to cooperate with them—ever—and Sharon was a bit leery of them as well. I was probably less than smart to have been as open and candid with their reporter as I was.