Saturday's Child (17 page)

I suspect that Peggy (I called her Miss Wood or Mama until I was twelve) never quite forgave television for putting her in the position where she would choose to sacrifice her patrician, “legit” image for the sake of earning considerable money and stooping to become a household word. She seemed to harbor a mild, chronic resentment of the situation, although she was probably nicer to me than to anyone else in the company. I was unthreatening; I couldn't sing (she had starred in operettas); I gratefully overachieved when she decided to teach me how to knit; I was
a
child
, after all. In fact, Peggy was one of the few people who actually encouraged my scribbling of poetry—that encouragement a legacy, no doubt, from her first marriage and great love, the not particularly inspired American poet John V. A. Weaver, by whom she had a grown son. Compensating for her bargain with the populist demon TV, Peggy consolidated her power in real life. Shuttling between the Connecticut estate and the Park Avenue apartment she shared with her second husband, William Walling, a wealthy printer (not an oxymoron in those days), she was a vice president of the American National Theater and Academy and of the Episcopal Actors' Guild, a council member of Actors' Equity—
and
a board member of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

AFTRA was our union. I was a charter member, in fact, since I'd already been a member of AFRA—American Federation of Radio Artists—at age four, before the
T
for television was added. During the worst years of the blacklist, AFTRA apparently was in a state of internal agony, caught between trying to protect its members on the one hand and on the other trying to protect itself from the McCarthyite suspicion that all unions were hotbeds of “Commie symps.” There was consequently an
Aware
contingent
within
AFTRA: arch-conservatives who argued strongly for purging the union of “undesirable elements” who might “threaten its survival.” This faction—of which Peggy was a leader—urged cooperation with the blacklist, including suggesting names for addition to it, even if the guilt of those hapless candidates was based only on rumor or the random Stevenson button.

So Peggy was very much part of the problem. She also must have spread powerfully protective wings—and political censorship—over the cast and company of
Mama
in her Torquemadan capacity, because to my knowledge none of us were ever listed.

Between the pages of an old script, I've come across a one-scene spoof written by Gabrielson and Nelson, to be read at a cast party during this period. It parodies the individual character clichés that had become company running jokes (Dagmar's mantra line was “Mama, can I have a cookie?”; Nels's was “I'm hungry, when do we eat?”; Papa's was always something about his boss, Mr. Jenkins; Aunt Jenny's was reporting gossip, and so forth). But the Gabrielson-Nelson one-scene spoof also tweaks
blacklisting, and Peggy's role in it. Here's an excerpt from what they titled “Russian Roulette”:

Papa: Marta, I just discovered.

Mama: What, Lars?

Papa: That Jenkins is a capitalist. Come the revolution—

Nels: Papa. The revolution has already come.

Papa: Oh. Yah.

Jenny: Marta, guess what I heard from Mrs. Johnsrud!

Mama: Don't mention that woman's name in this house.

Jenny: Why not?

Mama: She has been listed in Red, White, and Blue Channels.

Papa: For what?

Mama: Accepting Lenin-lease.

Katrin: Golly, Mama, what will happen to her?

Nels: What do you think, stupid? She'll starve.

Dagmar: Why should she be different from the rest of us?

Nels: Yeah, I'm hungry.

Katrin: So am I.

Dagmar: Me too. Mama, can I have a cookie?

Long after I'd left
Mama
,
⁸
I ran for office as a delegate to the AFTRA annual convention. By that time I was grown, out of the business, writing, and married. But I'd kept my membership out of a sentimental union loyalty and, when urged by some members to bring my by then activist politics home to my own union, decided I'd run for delegate. I remember that
Peggy had invited me and my husband, Kenneth Pitchford, to a cast-and-company reunion at her apartment. I also remember that we left early, reeling out onto Park Avenue after Peggy's eruptive attack on my having
dared
to run for AFTRA delegate when I was so clearly “pinko” as to be active in the civil-rights movement and against the war in Vietnam. She would see to it, Peggy warned, that I would lose. She fulfilled her threat. Elected AFTRA delegates that year included Peggy herself, and even the sweet, mild-mannered, apolitical Dick Van Patten. But not me.

That was as late as 1965.

The Museum of Radio and Television, formerly the Museum of Broadcasting, has—god help us—Robin Morgan archives.

In the early 1990s, when I was editor of
Ms
., one of the odd time warps that sometimes hiccup through my life occurred. The Museum, then based only in New York, now with a California branch as well, wanted to do a
Mama
retrospective. Museum officials were assembling those members of the company still alive and presumably coherent for a public panel, and hoped I would join them.

In the Sixties and Seventies, I'd spent considerable energy ignoring although not denying, my working childhood. I'd refused to discuss it when I was being interviewed as a writer or feminist spokeswoman, because I'd learned that it tended to overshadow and trivialize any real content in the interview. By the Eighties, though, I'd opened the skeleton-closet door to play with the notion of writing a quasi-autobiographical novel, eventually published by Doubleday in 1987 as
Dry Your Smile
. So by the early Nineties, the thought of appearing at the Museum with the
Mama
cast and reminiscing in public, while hardly an idea I'd have dreamt up myself, didn't provoke acute indigestion. Peggy was dead by then, as were Jud, Ruth Gates, Carol Irwin, and Frank Gabrielson. But I was curious about what was left of my TV family. And I had an agenda of my own.

Reviewing the tape of that panel, still in the Museum archives, reminds me that I rather like the woman little Robin Morgan had become, at least that day. I didn't trash anybody, didn't dwell overlong on how we, as an
“ideal” family, were just as dysfunctional as other American families.
⁹
I even joined in (with restraint) to some of the ecstatic reminiscing: all that “Yes, I was a flower girl at Dickie's real-life wedding” stuff.
¹⁰
I noted that if one's childhood had to be laid on a performance altar, I was glad much of mine had at least been spent on a program with a female lead, strong women characters, and an immigrant, working-class setting—as opposed to, say,
Ozzie and Harriet, Life with Father
, or (bite your tongue!)
Father Knows Best
. With writerly loyalty, I praised Gabrielson, Webber, and the series' other writers for trying to inject real issues into the show—World War I fears, discrimination against non-native English speakers, kids' shame at their father's being a manual laborer. I urged Jac Venza to take a bow from the audience, as
Mama
's former set designer who's gone on to produce most of PBS's major cultural events, including
Live from Lincoln Center
and
Live from the Met
. I'm particularly glad I got to pay tribute to the present but ailing Ralph Nelson, who would die not long after, publicly honoring not only his directorial skill but his political courage. And, while everyone else there was waxing misty-eyed over the dearly departed Peggy Wood (for whom most of the panel would have privately wished a stake in the heart), I paid due respect to Peggy's acting craft—then “outed” her as a blacklister.

They say that radio and television signals are long-lived. They say that the waves broadcast all those years ago are still beaming out into the universe, standing an excellent chance of becoming the first communications ever received from our planet by intelligent life elsewhere—especially since
deliberate SETI communiqués from high-powered radio transmitters and satellites antedate them by decades. I find it a horrifying notion that someday when I'm ashes and only my books can speak for me, some intelligent life-form might be trying to understand our species by viewing me flip back my braids and whine for a cookie. I hope to god they at least also screen the
Tales of Tomorrow
episode about the child scientist trying to save Earth; hope they receive more Serling and Rose teleplays than episodes of
Leave It to Beaver
. But I know that sheer volume favors the worst assumption. It's a sobering thought that we'd approach programming differently even today if we regarded what beams over the airwaves not just as hypnotism for the largest share of a lowest-common-denominator market but as ambassadorial signals to intelligent creatures, describing who we as human beings really are—and who we might yet become.

Since the retrospective, I've been back to the Museum only a few times. Both Dr. Robert Batscha, president, and Ron Simon, curator, have been warmly welcoming in helping me whenever I've needed to … well, I guess, access myself. Nevertheless, whenever I visit the Museum I feel like an ambulatory potsherd.

It's passing strange to sit in a carrel, re-tapes of kinescopes at hand, earphones on, watching little Dagmar, and Annie Oakley, and Alice, and other incarnations of this small professional self doing her job: a child playing at being a child. Her eyes are sharp and older than her years, but her face is round with chubby cheeks. Those “baby fat” cheeks were a plague in childhood (I used to think I'd get cancer from so many people apparently feeling free to pinch them) and remained so into adulthood (when I smile broadly, I still look like a squirrel storing nuts for the winter). Watching the wee actor with a critical eye, I tend to think she overacts—too breathy, too eager. But I also recall being directed that way, and find I think other people's performances on the tapes are similarly over the top, so maybe that was the style of the period. I know this child intimately, and at the same time she's utterly foreign to me. Her energy is high, her intelligence obvious. She doesn't ever fluff, forget a line, use a teleprompter, or steal a glance at the camera. The absolute
control
, in one so young, brings tears to my eyes—more of sorrow than pride. Once in a while, I'll stop a tape, rewind, and replay in slow motion, as some detail flashes by that shocks a recognition up from memory's depths: how Edgar
Bergen made Charlie McCarthy try (but fail) to break me up into laughter during
Alice;
or how, though you'd never know it from my serene expression during the barn scene of our annual Christmas show “The Night the Animals Talked,” I was desperately trying to ignore the stink of a cowpat freshly deposited on my foot.

Then again, it wasn't only on-screen that you'd never have known from my expression what was really happening. With each passing year I grew, my internal subterranean landscape expanded. This is true for everyone, but was unusually intense for a child trained to inhabit differing realities. By age thirteen, I regarded the internal me as an alternate universe forced to coexist with the antimatter of my external, daily life. I couldn't see how the two would ever somehow come together and merge, or even come into balance, without an explosion. I didn't yet know the word “implosion.”

¹
At the time, the real power lay with the sponsors and their ad agencies, not the networks. It wasn't until 1961 that Newton Minnow, the new director of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), openly declared war on the sponsors' greedy reign over the medium; it was thought that the networks would exercise more benign control. Ironically, the first thing the networks did was to pull many of the anthology dramas from the air as being insufficiently competitive and profitable.

²
A format in use before videotape became common; the program was “filmed” off a TV monitor, making it only barely fit for rebroadcast.

³
This was distinct from the earlier John Van Druten play
I Remember Mama
, which had starred Mady Christians on Broadway (with a young Marlon Brando playing Nels), and which had been a direct adaptation of the Kathryn Forbes book
Mama's Bank Account
. The Van Druten play was adapted for film, and Irene Dunne starred in the movie by the same name. Later, there was an attempt to make a musical of the material starring Liv Ullmann, but it failed because Richard Rodgers, who'd written the music, became fatally ill. The only actor who worked in the original Van Druten play, the TV series, and also
Here's Mama
was Ruth Gates, who brought a consistently funny fussiness to the character of gossipy Aunt Jenny.

⁴
Not one but two different New York
Daily News
full-front-page photos display me on such grim missions: once accompanied by the movie starlet Gloria de Haven and by Bess Myerson (post-Miss America crown, pre-financial scandal), and once with the baseball player Monte Irvin. It was always claimed, of course, that the last wish of these terminally ill children was to meet me (or whoever was in the arranged foray). But I clearly recall that the visit to the leukemic little girl had been arranged by my PR agent and that, in the other case, the little boy with bone cancer (who really
did
want to meet Monte Irvin) had never heard of me.

⁵
See
The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961
, by Jeff Kisseloff (Penguin, 1997).

⁶
Ah, the joys of consistency. In 1990, when I returned to
Ms
., this time as editor in chief, our first ad-free issue featured a silence-breaking exposé by Gloria called “Sex, Lies, and Advertising,” in which she revealed the extent to which advertisers have for years used (and still use) their economic power to control and manipulate editorial layout and even content in magazines—women's magazines in particular. She wrote, “Procter & Gamble, one of this country's most powerful and diversified advertisers, stands out … its products were not to be placed in
any
issue that included
any
material on gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or any disparagement of religion. Caution was also demanded in any issue covering sex or drugs, even for educational purposes.” Plus ça change …