B004YENES8 EBOK (4 page)

Thirty years ago with three of the most beautiful women in the solar system, making me the envy of all the guys at my weekly poker game.

Photo: Rosenzweig Personal Collection

Christmas had come. I received my corporate gift from the company. It was a large glass urn filled with walnuts—perhaps a hundred pounds’ worth. I removed the card, replaced it with one of my own, and sent the vase to agent Broder. The new card read: “
Spelling and Goldberg have been chipping away at my nuts for the past four months; here’s your commission
.”

My life there was a misery, yet now as I get older and have run a company of my own, I do understand Spelling and Goldberg a bit better than I did. It is difficult to let go, to give authority to someone else on a project you have created and nurtured. It wasn’t entirely their fault. There is plenty of evidence that some men and women have had a real talent for working with these two. Many stayed with Spelling for years and profited substantially in the process. I was unable to make whatever adjustments were necessary. I do not say this proudly. It is simply a matter of fact. Neither Leonard nor Aaron were evil men. They had their eccentricities as I, in the years that have gone by, have developed mine. I didn’t see that so clearly then. I
did
hate working there and regard it as one of the worst, if not
the
worst, experiences of my professional life in Hollywood.

I never wanted to be in that situation again. I needed to analyze what to do. I was honest, hardworking, and loyal—all good qualities for an employee, though not necessarily such a hot combo for an entrepreneur. I really didn’t mind being a hired hand and felt I had few entrepreneurial skills. I had, however, recently discovered that the primary problem with being an employee is the possibility of getting a Leonard Goldberg for an employer. I needed help. I decided I would seek out a partner, someone with some muscle and clout who could run the business, keep a lot of administrative stuff off my back, and allow me to do what I do. That’s when I met Mace Neufeld.

Chapter 5 

“WE HAVE FOUND 

CHRISTINE CAGNEY …” 

Mace Neufeld wanted to expand into television production. His talent management company, BNB,
²
was a major success. With his partner, Sherwin Bash, BNB had been built into one of the premiere boutiques in the industry. Singers, rock groups, and other performers came under their protective wing. Now he was offering me the opportunity to lead this expansion into TV.

The doorway to the reception room of their impressive Beverly Hills suite of offices announced not only the housing of BNB, but of a record company, a music publishing house, a motion picture enterprise, and something called Buckmace Productions, a joint venture between writer-director-actor Buck Henry and Mr. Neufeld (this last resulting in
Quork
, an unsuccessful television series produced by David Gerber).

Bob Broder had received an offer for my services at Universal for a new series based on the comic book heroine
Wonder Woman
, so it was easy for my agent to voice disapproval of Mace’s offer (at $40,000 per year it was less than half of what Universal would pay for my services). I overruled my agent, believing this was my opportunity to fulfill a dream.

We had little credibility and no talent under contract or projects on the shelves. There was no staff, only my secretary, Dorothy Blass, and myself. We were at ground zero. I told Mace it would take two years to make BNB Productions a reality.

I hustled. I haunted libraries; I read incessantly. I wound up with something like thirty hours in various stages of development among the three networks. I was constantly meeting with someone in middle management at ABC, CBS, and NBC, or working with a writer on material for one of those companies. I had a miniseries in development, as well as several movies for television, a three-hour special, a daytime soap, one-hour dramatic shows, half-hour comedy shows, and an after-school special. My mandate was to get something made, to get some show on the air.

In those days, networks made very few of the shows they broadcast. Most were contracted for and licensed from studios or independent producers such as Spelling/Goldberg. This was all before the U.S. Congress abandoned the financial interest and syndication rules and the resultant vertical integration of the entertainment industry, which not so long ago led to Disney acquiring ABC, Viacom CBS, and GE taking over NBC and Universal. Unlike today, fortunes could then still be made by independent companies in the television business; Mace wanted a piece of that action. Our overhead was small, and we were one
Waltons
away from becoming a Lorimar.
³

Despite his lofty ambitions, Mace was, in my view, a bit of a dilettante. He attended a total of three network meetings in the two and a half years we were together. At the last of these he arrived late; his avowed purpose was to take pictures of the auspicious moment when Brandon Stoddard gave us a go to film our miniseries of
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
.

The previous meeting had been in Jonathan Axelrod’s office at a critical moment with our one-hour dramatic series pilot
American Dream
. There he made but one single statement. I was in a battle royal for the life of my favorite project of all time. We were on our third major rewrite. While Avedon had taken a much-needed vacation, I had teamed Corday with comedy writer Ken Hecht to create this show when it was to be developed as a half-hour comedy. Now we were attempting to go forward as a dramatic series, which had brought about substantial changes in format, along with changes in the creative team. I had followed network executive Jonathan Axelrod’s instructions, and now the pilot script was in deep trouble. I was determined to turn things around at this meeting, to go the way I wanted to go in the first place: to hire the writer I had initially fought for in vain. Finally, I wanted to undo yet another piece of Axelrod meddling by resetting the locale. The network executive had insisted on New York City as the backdrop, and I wanted to return the concept to its original locale: Los Angeles.

Axelrod had been through a rough afternoon. Our meeting with him, as luck would have it, had been scheduled right behind one with the irrepressible David Gerber. “The Gerb” was one of the best salesmen in the business. His vocabulary ranged from the colorful to the fanciful. (I think he actually made up words and phrases as he went along, but who could know? That would require actually being able to keep up, not only with the syntax of what was being said, but the manic delivery as well.) Axelrod, the network executive on the receiving end of this verbal onslaught, was a beaten man before I even entered the room. Thanks to Gerber wearing out the exec about some project of his own, I was winning point after point on
American Dream
.

OK, go back to the original concept. OK, get rid of the writer they had foisted on me. OK, hire Ronald M. Cohen to rewrite the fine original (but too soft) script by Barbara Corday and Ken Hecht. The only point that remained was locale.
American Dream
was my story. The kids were my kids. The hero of this piece was me. I wanted it set in Los Angeles. After all, it was conceived by me, an L.A. native, while trying to find an alternate route to the Coliseum to watch a USC football game. Axelrod wanted the same story set in the East—his place of origin. This was an urban tale, and to Axelrod urban meant the vertical landscape of an eastern city, not the low-profiled megalopolis that dominates the West Coast.

It was the only issue unresolved between us; I had won everything else. I didn’t want to give in on this. Not only did I have passion and creativity on my side, I had economics as well. Los Angeles is the capital of the entertainment industry.

In those days, the show could be more economically produced there than in any other city in the country. Besides, it is where I lived and where my family lived. Why be on location for six months of the year when you could come home to your own bed every night?

Axelrod just might have been wavering. It was at this juncture that Mace decided to speak up. “Philadelphia’s a nice town,” he said.

If looks could kill, Mace’s grave would now have more than a quarter century of overgrowth.

Axelrod gained strength from this division. The result was a compromise.
American Dream
would be set in Chicago. Unlike Philadelphia, Chicago at least had a semblance of a film production community. It was also (unlike Philadelphia) outside of the expensive New York unions’ jurisdiction. Finally, it was the hometown of then-writer-elect Ronald M. Cohen.

Mace had attended just one other meeting, in the early days of our association, and it had involved
Cagney & Lacey
. Here, it helps to know that Mace is what I would term a twitcher. He is not unattractive, in sort of an older, Garry Shandling way, but he is, well, I think, sort of a nervous type. I remember him constantly pulling on his cheek, his cuticles, and his ears. He appeared to me to be uncomfortable in a chair. So it was not too great a surprise when, at a CBS pitch, in the first of the three meetings he attended during our association, Mace sat down on the couch and promptly spilled coffee all over himself.

It was all really OK, all except the line about Philadelphia, that is. What I must say, however, is that he did finance my passion. He did capitalize my dream.

Furthermore, in the days of 1978 and 1979, when the Captain would tell Tennille that he no longer wanted to pay six figures in annual commissions and the rock group known as
Kansas
threatened to join the already-defected
Carpenters
, Mace held firm against his partners’ wishes to further cut costs by adding television to their already abandoned or disbanded record and publishing companies.

Mace believed in his vision and ultimately broke off his partnership and the business that he knew to form BNB Productions. We would no longer be a part of the original BNB, nor would we be in the talent management business.

Cagney & Lacey
, meanwhile, had been languishing on the shelves at Filmways for a couple of years. The last action had occurred with Leonard Goldberg some months before—before our relationship irreparably deteriorated. I had given the script by Avedon & Corday to Goldberg as an illustration of my position regarding the depiction of female relationships. He not only liked it but indicated he would be interested in acquiring an equity position to produce it as a motion picture. I had agent Broder pull the project as my relationship with Goldberg fell apart.

Now, with the forthcoming release of films such as
Julia
and
The Turning Point
, I feared my concept of making a female buddy movie might again be one of my too-little-too-late moments. Corday urged me to make the project for television before the women’s movement totally passed us by.

My friend Ed Feldman had left Filmways. I inquired of the company about having the rights to
Cagney & Lacey
revert to me. They had no interest in that. Would they sell me the rights? They countered with the proposal that I develop the project and that, if I were successful in selling it, we could form a joint venture with my new alliance at BNB. That’s what we did.

I now had control of the Avedon & Corday screenplay but had to face the TV industry conundrum that you can’t submit a completed work to television development executives. To do so would give them little to “develop” and imply they were not very necessary. My solution was to turn what already existed as a theatrical screenplay into a television presentation. First, I excised the plot from the manuscript. Much of it was then too risqué for television or too expensive. Some of the jokes were now dated as well. Without the plot, I was left with some thirty plus pages of character relationship and some damn good dialogue. I turned those pages into a blueprint for a television series, bridging gaps where necessary with simple narrative devices such as, “Here’s how they are at work,” or “at home,” or “
Newman and Redford
, watch out!” It began its rounds of submissions to each of the networks—twice (once to each network as a drama with comedy, then back again to each of the comedy development departments as a comedy with drama).

The partnership twixt Avedon & Corday was proving, at this time, to be less than stable. Avedon wanted to spend less time at the office, to approach the work on a more leisurely basis. Corday loved the action of being on staff of a television series and enjoyed the team play, the structure of the workplace, and its attendant camaraderie, including
Turnabout
, the Universal comedy starring John Schuck and Sharon Gless, created by Steven Bochco from a concept put forth by Michael Rhodes based on a Hal Roach 1940s comedy of the same name. It was from that studio, at that time, that the two Barbaras called to tell me, referring to Ms. Gless, “We have found Christine Cagney.”

I was not all that impressed until some months later when, in Corday’s Beverly Hills den, I saw a beautiful blonde playing Carole Lombard in the television miniseries
Moviola: The Scarlett O’Hara War
on NBC.

“That’s Cagney!” I bellowed.

Corday nodded knowingly. “That’s Sharon Gless. ”

Did someone say better late than never?

At this time I had nearly a dozen different projects in one stage or another in development at the various networks—all under serious consideration and all at little or no cost to my employer. I was working hard, and I was as prolific and creative as I have ever been in my life. The problem was nothing was getting made.

The two years I had told Mace it would take to become a viable production entity were coming to an end. We were very close, but, as yet, no cigar. Mace would prove to be patient.

Corday and I got married in the backyard of our new home in L.A.’s Hancock Park. Having begun this partnership, Corday decided to sever her old one. She would end the team of Avedon & Corday and do so in order to take a job as a comedy development executive at ABC. It was a major career change and one I advised against. Fortunately, Corday took her own counsel. She quickly moved to vice president in charge of comedy at ABC, parlayed that period in the spotlight to an indy-prod deal at Columbia Studios, which led to her being asked to move to the executive suite at that studio as president of their television division. She weathered the first of two major corporate mergers and then was terminated by Columbia, only to land on her feet once more as the executive vice president in charge of prime-time programming at the CBS network. She thrived in the spotlight and for a very short while was arguably the most powerful woman in the television industry.

I could have used some of that clout in 1979. By the time of our marriage,
Cagney & Lacey
had been turned down by every drama and comedy department in town.

Jeff Sagansky, then at NBC, liked it, but he and his assistant, Bob Singer, bowed to their boss, Fred Silverman, who ordered a different female cop show to be developed by another producer. By reading and liking
Cagney & Lacey
months before Silverman’s brainstorm, Sagansky and Singer had me frozen in the marketplace.