Saturday's Child (14 page)

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanikuh
,

Robin

Dear Diary
,

Well it's the New Year which is 1951. Happy New Year! It still feels funny to be living in the 1950s, even if we already did that for a whole year. That's because I've spent almost my whole life in the 1940s, Mommie says. What is even more funny is to think way ahead to the 1970s and 1990s and even the 2000s. They don't seem real. They seem like science fiction, and it's funny to think that unless I die or there's a war and they drop the atom bomb and I don't have time to duck and cover under a desk or table in time like we're taught to do in school, then I'll actually be a grown-up and have my own room or maybe even my own apartment or house and not be living with Mommie and Aunt Sally anymore. Of course I would miss Mommie. But probably I'd see her a lot so it would be OK. I think about that, especially around my birthday and New Year's.

I didn't make it through 1950 perfect on the chart and now there's all of 1951 ahead to try and get perfect again and stay that way. I don't know why but that makes me depressed. But I'll try to be positive and have faith, like Mommie!

Happy New Year!

Robin

P.S. I read all the Stuart Little books and loved them. I'm reading W. H. Hudson's
Little Boy Lost
now. I wish there was a
Little Girl Lost
.

Dear Diary
,

Life is very busy so you still have to not complain that I write so little or with such long times in between. I lie in bed sometimes and think about what I would write in you. If I wasn't too tired to write it down, I mean. I made up an imaginary (
looked it up
, Mommie!) friend named Bunker who is half girl and half boy and goes with me everywhere. Mommie doesn't mind and says that shows imagination (
L.i.u.M!
) but it shouldn't go too far and carry me away. Bunker is only a kid too and not strong enough to carry me, so I don't worry about it. Anyway, at night I tell Bunker things I would write in you. I hope that doesn't make you jealous, Diary. I hope you understand.

Still your friend
,

Robin

Dear Diary
,

It's the night before my 9th birthday and I'm excited to see what my presents will be. I can tell you what I got Mommie because she won't read you until tomorrow and by then she'll have it. I saved up my allowance money since July (when I spent the
old
saved-up money to get Mommie
her
birthday present for her
own
birthday). Anyway, I gave the money to Papa in secret at rehearsal and told him what to get and he got her a
magnificent
pink silk scarf from Saks 5th Avenue, all wrapped and perfect.

That reminds me. I didn't want to repeat myself this year by doing the Perfect Chart again. You should never repeat yourself (which is why it's so good I'm doing other parts and not just Dagmar) because it is
death
my new agent Mr. Stephen Draper always says for an actor to get typecast. So I don't think I'll do the chart ever again.

Tomorrow will be my last birthday ever in a single number. The one after that will already be my 10th birthday and I'll be in two numbers then and stay that way for the rest of my whole life, unless I live to be 100 years old. Aunt Sally would be dead by then, and even Mommie. It's hard to imagine the rest of my life. But I guess it will really happen. I made up another poem. It goes:

Some like it hot, some like it cold

But I am afraid of 9 years old.

Happy Birthday to you dear Diary, you're almost one year old. I apologize that I'm so busy I hardly tell you things anymore. Please understand. That's how it is. I loved you anyway. For real.

Your friend
,

with love
,

Robin Morgan
.

FIVE

All That Glitters

It was the best of times and the worst of times
.

—C
HARLES
D
ICKENS

Imagine that every night in prime time you have your choice of viewing two or more, hour-long or longer, original, written-for-TV plays. Imagine that intermixed with these anthologies of serious dramas and witty comedies are some skillful adaptations of novels, plus an elegant sampling of classics and revivals: Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, Brecht, Pirandello, Anouilh, O'Casey, O'Neill, Isherwood, Williams.

Now imagine the creative energy of certain young, as yet only moderately known writers, busy at their clunky manual typewriters, turning out those original plays: Rod Serling (“Patterns,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” and
The Twilight Zone
series—all teleplays before becoming movies, although Serling would later write such screenplays as
Planet of the Apes
and
Seven Days in May
); Paddy Chayefsky (“Marty,” a teleplay before it became a movie, after which he wrote the films
Network
and
The Americanization of Emily
); Reginald Rose (
Twelve Angry Men
, written for TV, later revised for the film and the remake); Gore Vidal (“Visit to a Small Planet,” “The Death of Billy the Kid,” plus teleplay adaptations from novels by William Faulkner and Henry James); and some guy named Gene
Roddenberry, a television script editor who was always trying to pitch his idea for a science-fiction series. Imagine, too, on a periodic or regular basis, enjoying the written-for-TV work of Orson Welles, Molly Goldberg, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Robert Sherwood, and Sam Peckinpah (before he took up directing as being apparently less violent).

Now imagine that the casts of these nightly plays are composed of generally first-rate actors and fine craftspeople—tomorrow's stars, many of them—doing their jobs at a high level of professionalism. Professionalism was crucial, because preparation was bracingly short: rehearsal time for a one-hour drama averaged only five six-hour-long days, and by the second day lines already had to be memorized so the cast could be on its feet to begin floor “blocking”—the director's choreographing of actors' moves, camera shots, and “boom” (elevated microphone) positions. Rehearsals, in various venues around Manhattan, were conducted in large, loft-like halls (sometimes old dance studios with one long mirrored wall), with masking tape stuck on the floor by the production assistant to outline imaginary doors, staircases, windows, and walls of the eventual set, plus a few tables and folding chairs as makeshift furniture. There were also costume fittings and makeup and hair tryout sessions. But there was only one day ever in the studio itself, with the actual set, lights, props, and costumes: Air Day. Imagine, then, all those disciplined, hard-working, up-and-coming actors, desperately eager to land a consistent job in a nighttime series or daytime soap, but grateful for one-shots, under-five-liners (minimum pay), or even walk-ons. Just a sampling is astounding: Paul Newman, Jane Alexander (and her older sister Denise, who several times a year played Dagmar's sometimes best friend), Lee J. Cobb, Joanne Woodward, Sally Field, Marlon Brando, Cicely Tyson, Ben Gazzara, Bill Cosby, Candice Bergen, Warren Beatty, Mia Farrow, Valerie Harper, Jack Lemmon, Robert Shaw, George C. Scott, Andy Griffith, Leslie Nielsen, Julie Harris, Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer, John Cassavetes (before he took up directing), Lee Grant (before
she
took up directing). Imagine, too, frequent appearances by established stars of theater and film: Laurence Olivier, the Lunts, Helen Hayes, Charles Boyer, Lillian Gish. …

Now imagine such literary and thespian talent working under the directorial gaze of the young hawks learning their flight patterns in between television test patterns: Robert Altman (who would eventually give us
Nashville
and
M*A*S*H
); Sidney Lumet (who would direct such film classics as
Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon
, and
Twelve Angry Men
); John Frankenheimer (
Andersonville, Days of Wine and Roses, The Manchurian Candidate
); George Roy Hill (
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting
); Ralph Nelson (
Lillies of the Field, Requiem for a Heavyweight
); Franklin Schaffner (
The Best Man, Planet of the Apes
); and Delbert Mann (
Separate Tables, All Quiet on the Western Front
). These men—and directors were, back then, all men—worked as omnipresent “jobbers,” freelancing from show to show, since few were so fortunate as Nelson to be contracted to a steady series with the same cast. They earned their rent and learned their craft by substituting for a vacationing or sick steady director on such a same-cast series as
Mama
, by directing one-shots on such “theme” series as
Danger, Suspense
, or
The Twilight Zone
(all of which had different casts each show), and of course by directing the nightly anthology plays.

Those anthologies offered a feast of work. Nor did anyone yet complain that, in a brazen display of capitalist aesthetics, they were mostly named after the companies sponsoring them, in much the same way as Mobil Oil and Xerox would later come to be identified with quality programming on PBS.
¹
In the late 1940s and the 1950s it was
Armstrong Circle Theater, Alcoa Presents, The Hallmark Hall of Fame, Kraft Television Theatre, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Ford Star Jubilee, General Electric Theater, Buick Electra Playhouse, U.S. Steel Hour, The DuPont Show of the Month, Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, Studio One, Omnibus, Playhouse 90. …

Now. Here's the most amazing part. Imagine that every one of these plays is telecast
live
.

And that's not counting the presence of what forty years later would be termed “classic” comedy: Jack Paar, Lucille Ball, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason. …

And
not counting the news—when it was more news than “infotainment.” The standard had been set by the visionary news producer Fred Friendly and his on-screen colleague, Edward R. Murrow. It was continued by Murrow's protégé, Eric Sevareid, and
his
protégé, the young Walter Cronkite. These were the folks who created such documentaries as the great “Harvest of Shame.”

And
that's
not counting what today is (usually derisively) termed “culture”: telecasts of concerts, operas, and ballets not exiled to public television but on mainstream
network
TV; Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic “Concerts for Young People,” for example, were on CBS.

Virtually all of it live
. No retakes. No second chances.

No wonder they call it the Golden Age of Television. But that's in retrospect, of course.

At the time it all seemed perfectly normal, though exciting in its freshness—as the Elizabethan Age might have felt to Londoners of that period, or the Renaissance to Florentines living through it. The present always masquerades as a beginning; maybe we couldn't endure it if we realized at the time that it was a peak, or even an ending. Writers, actors, and directors became disciplined in and enthusiastic about this demanding new medium, which combined the challenge of live theater with the thrill of a then unimaginably enormous audience. That audience was a fraction of what was yet to come: as late as 1948, only 9 percent of the U.S. public had television sets.

I worked hard, on
Mama
and on every one-shot my agents could book. The scrapbooks bear witness—both the crumbling ones reverently assembled by Aunt Sally and the slick, laminated one later compiled by the public-relations professional my mother hired. Brittle clippings of reviews, features, cover stories, and interviews flutter forth from the
New York Times, Daily News, Post, Sun, Journal American, World Telegram
, and
Herald Tribune
(yes, dear reader, there were that many major dailies in New York alone). Also
Time, Newsweek, Look, Life, McCall's, Variety, Silver Screen
, two
TV Guide
cover stories, and the
Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald
, and
Minneapolis Tribune
,
as well as the London
Times
, the
Bombay
(India)
Standard
, and the wire services. More: the creator of the daily comic strip “The Phantom” wrote me in by name as a character for six weeks. Now I was not only a drink but a cartoon. I definitely got around.

On radio (subsequent to the two years—from age five to seven—of
The Little Robin Morgan Show
and
Juvenile Jury
), I did a three-year run as a featured player on
Hilltop House
(a radio soap opera), and guest-starred on, among others,
DuPont Theatre of the Air, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Cavalcade of America, The Shadow
(“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men …”), and
Let's Pretend
—whose sponsor, Cream of Wheat cereal, had a jingle so maddeningly catchy that Gloria Steinem, then an avid listener, can still sing every word, all these years later.

Radio was easy and fun. For one thing, there were no lines to memorize; all you had to remember was not to rustle your script pages too close to the mike. For another, different accents came in handy, and you could play older or younger than you were by pitching your voice accordingly; when I was around age twelve, I could and did play “down” to age seven and “up” to age twenty-five. I liked watching the way radio sound effects got made (hollowed-out coconut halves clomped by the sound man across plywood for a horse's gallop, cellophane crinkled to mimic a crackling fire, liquid pouring from a jug to sound like liquid pouring from a jug). My child's sense of mischief relished the joke that few radio actors looked the way they sounded: a fairy princess on
Let's Pretend
could be voiced by a grey-haired woman wearing wedgies and a housedress; the guy playing the Shadow's heroic, handsome self was in his mid-fifties, short, balding, plump, and given to snapping his suspenders absentmindedly when off mike.