manuscript division talks about the civil war collection.

local newspaper reporter going like city council meetings writing for stories a day about the police beat and the city council being things like that, but eventually i did make my way to new york city where i am now, and with kind of

i remember actually telling my journals and professor in college when he said what's your dream job? i actually did say i said entertainment weekly or rolling stone and i cannot believe that i actually made it there. it's crazy. i still almost can't believe it and it was already 10 years ago that i left but you know just kind of through various channels kept plugging away and they actually did hire me because of my newspaper career. they love that i new how to report how to actually be a reporter and from there kind of work my way up and that was a life-changing job for me. i was there for 10 years like you mentioned it's where all of my inspiration and work and friends and everything came from and i'm so so grateful. i mean we were just talking about gray's anatomy before we started and i got to be on the set of gray's anatomy at its heights, you know all the time. i was there constantly, you know

it like i was just i was in hawaii on the set of lost when lost was at its peak. i was so so lucky and that is really where i started to focus on television and mostly women in television. and so that kind of starts to lead me toward writing books about television. i had an opportunity essentially to write the book that you mentioned about the mickey mouse club, and that was when i first realized like oh what if you could write a whole book about one show like it's a biography, but it's about a show and from there wrote books about the mary tyler moore show seinfeld and sex in the city and here we are so and i had always wanted to be an author really in the grand scheme of things. what i really wanted was to write books. so i finally got to sort of marry those two aspects of myself. that sounds so so fascinating and so lucky. i'm so envious that you've got to be on the set for lost and gray's anatomy. it was thinking of i would have

lost it. i loved i loved lost so much. that was so good. it's such a brain bender. it really was it really was i was there right before they opened the hatch. really exciting. everybody out there watching knows exactly which when women invent ed television you came to this subject and these women in particular because i'm sure there were many women who could have held a place between these covers. absolutely, and the point of the book was actually to show that there was this time between 1948 and 1955 when women did a lot more than you might think and then that it is remembered. and what happened was i stumbled on this little piece of history because i was working on my book about the mary tyler moore show, mary and lou and rhoden ted and whenever i do a book about a show i find i generally have to

go back at least a good 20 years in tv history to kind of understand what led up to it, right and why it was a big deal and one there were two things that happened in that research that kind of piqued my interest and then i filed him away until years later and those two things were one was that i asked the creators of the show james l brooks and alan burns about the inspirations for the character of rhoda who was mary's best friend and was also overtly jewish and they named a number of big jewish characters from both. sure and television in the past and one of the one of the influences that came up was gertrude berg, and i would i just thought i have no idea who that is. i don't know what that is. and so they told me a little bit that i googled it later and i got fascinated instantly because she was incredibly famous at this time. she was really had the first successful family sitcom and you

cannot overstate it's like there's many ways. i can tell you she was voted the most trusted woman in america after eleanor roosevelt. she had a line of house stresses. she had a cookbook that was successful. she had a column where she gave motherly advice. she this show was the first show. that was so successful on television. it was made into a movie like everyone knew i even interviewed someone who worked with her on the movie who played a young woman in the movie at the time and she is still with us and i asked did you know who gertrude berg was when you were going to do the movie and she said oh honey, everybody know. you who cartridge berg was? so that just tells you like this woman was incredibly famous and i didn't know i had never heard of her. so that was the first thing that kind of like i filed away in my head and the second thing from the mary tyler moore show research was that we were talking about the character that betty white played on the mary tyler moore show, which was sue ann nibbons the happy homemaker,

she great character and great performance. she was his character who had like a homemaking show on the station where mary worked and she was this very sweet. server sickly sweet character in front of the camera and where these really dresses and the minute the camera went off. she was a different person she would she was cutting and mean and hilarious and so the first part of that character the sickly sweet part what they said is they said, you know before we even cast betty we had described her in the in the script as a betty white type and i thought i have no idea what you mean, you know, i didn't know her until the 70s and this character. so i was like i what is that and so i looked it up and it did turn out. this was really a joke about her character from the 40s and 50s when she would be on she was on a los angeles daytime talk show

and she indeed was just the sweetest thing and that was kind of her deal and you liked it or you didn't but that was the way it was and she did. where were these really dresses with high necklines. and so it really i was like how interesting and that one really led me to actually kind of do a little more research and reading about tv at that time and i did start bumping into all of these women doing things and i thought wow i had no idea and that was really how i came to this idea. and then from there made it gigantic list. where i then started to narrow down and with throughout the book i a number of other women in like a paragraph or two just to at least, you know, give a nod to them. so there were lots of women who i didn't quite make it into the narrative. i thought four was about right. i went with the sex in the city rule and the golden girls rule that you know a force of is about what we can handle and you

have different. i want a different experiences of that and i wanted to show i figured if i could get for the four different experiences from these women it would kind of show the whole picture so i had you know, betty white and erna phillips who worked in daytime and i had hazel scott and gertrude burke who worked in prime time. i had hazel and gertrude who worked in new york and betty who was working in los angeles. they all had different family situations. betty was very very single. the other you know, i'm a hazel and gertrude are married with children. erna was unmarried but had adopted to children on her own so as kind of trying to like show in different genres and so there were women like faye emerson who was had a huge successful nighttime talk show. um, which i think that's shocking too, you know, just because we don't know we know about milton burrell for instance everyone mr. television. he's fine, but you know, it's

crazy to me that we know his name. so well this far out, but we don't know women like that or amanda randolph who was black woman who had her own talk show in daytime and also was actually the first i believe i'm getting this right the first the first black woman to be the star of a sitcom. so, you know, there's there's a lot of women who worked behind the scenes in front of the camera all of that stuff, but i wanted to show the complete experience and also really have four women who very much contributed to their genre. you know, who actually i wanted to call it when women invented television, so i wanted them all to have some sense of that invention in their career. sorry, let's go back to gertrude bird then and i'm gonna ask the picture to come back up and talk to us about gertrude's

contributions to tv because you said that she was a household named he was a business conglomerate martha stewart probably took cues from gertrude burr exactly. i think of martha and oprah when i think of her very much ahead of her time all these women were in their own ways. she was a workhorse first of all this woman loved to work. she loved what she did she lived for especially this character molly goldberg quintessential jewish mother character. she created her for radio and was actually on the radio with the goldbergs her show which by the way is no relation to the current sitcom the goldbergs the goldberg's was on for 17 years on the radio. and what i love about this is this woman looked at that and said that's not enough for me. kind of just wound down i what i call kind of a sitcom lifetime right you you have children on a

sitcom. they eventually grow up and move out of the house. she had lived a sitcom life time and then some she actually did a broadway version briefly right after it ended because she did not want it to end on the radio and then tv was coming up and so she really used broadway as this dry run because she saw she had such vision she saw that this was there was there was something going to happen over in those in that tv world and this is like 1948, so she just thought my god, i can reboot the thing to speak in modern terms, you know, i can start this over and start out with you know, a young with a preteen and a teenager on my show and do a whole other sitcom lifetime and so at the age of 50 having had incredible success already. she just used that power and basically i start my book with this but she kind of merged into the office. of cbs and william haley the head of cbs and said and this

was a powerful man. he was he was the guy at the time she marched right in there, and she said i think i deserve a spot on your television network. i i got you through the depression on radio and you owe me. and he thought about it for a little while. she had actually been rejected by all the other networks including him once and she was not taking that she was not taking no for an answer so she demanded this and he said, all right, let's try it. um, and that is how the goldberg started so she and this is very like i this is the kind of thing that goes on for her over and over throughout her career. she really was so dedicated to work and to this character i think in particular and in some ways, you know, it eventually turned out to be somewhat of a downfall for her. that she was so dedicated to this but really just like, you know, such a powerful woman in new it and was not afraid to use

this especially behind the scenes in in public. she really presented this image of america's mother behind the scenes. she loved to dress beautifully. she did not cook and yet she put out a line of how stresses that cost like a dollar fifty and had a successful cookbook. so, you know, she was also a master of her image. the goldberg's isn't a show that i recall seeing as a kid in constant reruns, so can you tell us a little bit about her show? what was the premise and and be able to interview any of the actors in the show. yeah, absolutely. remember, um, so the goldbergs was about a family living in a jewish family living in a bronx tenement and that's kind of it. that's why it's this is the quintessential one of the first family sitcoms and if you watch the early episodes you that is what you would call it.

that's what you recognize it as it really sets that up. so, you know the classic kind of we're in the living room. cute problems happen mom helps to solve them in 20 to 30 minutes, you know and the big hallmarks of the show just to give you a visual sense. first of all, it's always these are live shows so they would do this live even though it's a script and sitcom that's just the way television worked. that's the technology of the time. so it cut it. it makes for some mad cap kind of things that they need to do. it's very by the seat of your pants diy. she would have to wear like three dresses layered and run out. take a dress off. she's got a new one on it's a new day the next game. she had the signature that she started on radio, but people went absolutely crazy for on television, which is she had one of the first tv catchphrases. she the tenement she would have there was a window in their

apartment and it looked out on an air shaft and she would lean out the window and yell you misses blue and the neighbor would come out pop her head out the window and we would see them gossip at the window and you whoing was a big thing. sometimes the husband the tv has been able to be like you know molly they're you doing for you. it was like their telephone system. so that was a really big like people knew that and the other thing she did that was really incredible is she would deliver the ads in character? she wrote them herself. so it sank a coffee was her first sponsor, and these ads are riveting. i am telling you it's like my favorite part of the show. she would start out at the window in the beginning of the show, and she just start telling you a story in her character's voice, which was very natural. sometimes she'd stutter a little all of the stuff and you'd think like, i don't know where she's going with this. she started telling a story about like we went to the cat skills to try to get away everybody there, you know was

really tired though. they weren't sleeping. well, they were very irritable and you're thinking like what is she doing and then she'd be like i told them about saying a coffee which is decaffeinated instant coffee 95% of the sleep or 95% of the caffeine is taking out but the sleep is left in and then she turned around and start her -- like she turned around to her family. they would have been bustling around back behind her and she just start you know from there she would turn right around and often she would link even the story from the same commercial, right? to you. okay. we just got back from the catskills. we're all you know, unpacking now, and this was a huge hit she was she sold incredible amounts of sanka and this to you know, just enhanced her her power in these early days. i think you just yeah, i think you just solved a home mystery for me. why was there so much sanka in my house when i was a kid. i'm pretty certain. that's where it came from pretty certain. my grandmother is the one brought it over.

yeah, well the sleep is left in so that's all you need to know 95% of the caffeine through the sleep is left in oh and those coffee crystals. i remember those. oh, yes, we're showing our age. we don't want to do that. so let's move on to the next character. i was just gobsmacked at how beautiful the hazel scott is and how talented and her story is heartbreaking and inspiring and i was enamored that alicia keys paid homage to hazel scott. so please tell us about hazel's show and what is she doing in this photo? and she's just amazing her famous first. she really really is i keep describing her as the beyoncé of her day for a number of reasons. look at how glamor she is. i this dress. i can't everything the looks were always on point this woman

new how to put herself together. she's beautiful. she was a big star and she had a couple of big tricks that she did that people really loved as a jazz performer one. is this she would play two pianos at once and like you said alicia keys did this a few years ago when she hosted the emmys and i was so excited cuz i was already writing this book. screaming and like running around the apartment going. i just want to tell someone she just said hazel scott, um, which i just loved and the other thing that hazel did is she she swung the classics so she would start out playing like a traditional box song or whatever and then as it went on she kind of make it jazzier and jazzier and super cool and this is you know, the height of of jazz at the time. so this people love this she was selling out concert halls the country using her platform to advance civil rights was a big issue for her and so for instance, she would not play

segregated venues. she would walk out if she walked in and saw the red carpet down the middle separating the two sides she'd walk right back out and she would give you know interviews then and say i don't know why someone would want to pay to see someone who looks like me play but wouldn't want to sit next to someone who looks like me, so was this great figure an advocate and really used her platform for that. another big thing about her is that she was married to adam clayton powell jr. a congressman from harlem. who was his own gigantic star. i mean very charismatic gorgeous. debonair he was a preacher they had met in harlem. she saw him preach. he saw her perform. it was all on and they actually had kind of a scandalous beginning because he was still married at the time. so all of this just adds to their mystique right? i mean they were in ebony magazine all the time.

there's one incredible cover story about them where it's like a beautiful photo of them with their son skipper at the time and the headline is my life with hazel scott by adam clayton powell junior and he wrote all about how wonderful their lives were together. she cooks. she makes chocolate cake. she plays the piano she's gorgeous. you know, it was that kind of thing. so that's why i think of her as kind of the beyonce of her day and naturally for good. we're all of those reasons the duma network, which was the fourth network at the time offered her the chance to have her own. variety show in primetime and so she had the show first. it was just in new york city where she lived and she loved this because she could finally stay home with her son most of the time instead of traveling all over the country to perform and it was so popular at expanded to multiple nights a week in new york, and then

finally it expanded nationally and it actually made her the first black person to have a prime time show. that was national and this was 1950. so really big deal and you know mentioned segregation. this is still jim crow south. this is still of, you know, an incredible time to be making this kind of breakthrough and unfortunately, it's it burns bright and fast because she ran into the blacklist the hollywood blacklist she was listed in this publication named red channels that claimed to be telling you who might be a communist. they didn't say they were they said these people might be do what you want and she as you sort of alluded to i think heroically volunteered to go before the house on american activities committee because she wanted she thought she could clear her name by doing this but really what she was doing is is

standing up for what was right, and she really gave this incredible rousing speech. she was very good with words and it's just it's so if it's hard to overstate, you know this black woman going before these white men. in power and explaining to them what they're doing wrong, and she's completely right and really just it's it's such an incredible story. and unfortunately, i wanted to be different. i want the movie to go differently and to have everyone rally behind her and go like we can't take this anymore. let's boycott everyone who fires people because of you know, possible communists in implied communist ties, but instead she goes back home to new york and kind of soon afterwards is very unceremoniously fired. i mean, they don't really say it that way they can't find a sponsor all of a sudden for her show. it goes off the air and she was

very disillusioned and moved to paris. not that long afterwards because she felt like like there were a number of black american expatriates in paris at the time like james baldwin and she felt like the reception there was much better for her. and so i think that a long way toward telling us why we maybe don't know her name and certainly don't know her contribution to television because those tapes are lost. there's no we can't find the recordings and that is a just a travesty. did i'm rolling back just a little bit to ask did her husband congressman powell was he any help or was that a bit of a hindrance in that situation? in fact, yeah, i suspect it was a hindrance. i suspected all goes together. you can't prove any of these things with the stuff including the firing, right? they tried to like sue later and it was so hard to prove definitively what caused what his her husband, you know, it's

as her son tells it anyway her, you know, she came home and said i'm gonna go talk to them and he was like, please don't because you do what was going to happen, but she really couldn't she couldn't stand by which i think is so admirable. um, he had a number of enemies in congress i think for overtly racial reasons and you know, i have a story in the book that they they found out they were being wiretapped. when they were, you know going abroad for his trips, they found out the their own fbi was wired tapping them which was a very common practice. they did this to martin luther king jr. too. um, you know, so i think that it probably contributed it probably made her a target in addition to her there, you know, they did a lot of civil rights work together and you know, she is all just a black woman and then she's got this tv show too in addition to being in music and they were really coming for tv

at that time because they were obviously already scared of the power the tv was gonna have and what really started to happen was that? this list came out and then a woman named gene muir got successfully fired from a show that she was on because she was on the list and once that happened there was sort of this free for all of like who can we figure out how to get rid of next and so the advertisers are very emboldened to demand that these suspected communist be fired. that's terrible advertising. just deciding. nope. we don't like your politics doesn't matter that your show is going through the roof and the ratings. yeah, which is crazy. i don't and the business of this. i actually don't understand and i the only the only explanation i have is hysteria because the business end makes no sense, right? she's doing great. so why would you do that except that it's emotional. it's racism and sexism and fear

all freaking out all of the sudden. i mean we didn't talk about this yet, but basically a messier version of this not messier, you know for the person but messier in terms of more complicated version of this happens to gertrude berg her tv husband philip lowe was on the same list with hazel scott and general foods who made sanka loved her commercials her commercials were revolutionary, but all of the sudden, you know, they demanded she fired philip lobe and she refused it first and this kept the show off the air right when it was hitting it peak. it had just had its movie version happen all of the stuff. it was supposed to come back in the fall and be paired with this new show called i love lucy. and instead it got pulled off the air again, very unceremoniously when it was in the top 10. they said it was for budgetary reasons, but when i looked at the budgets it was it was very similar budget-wise to less

popular shows of its kind and you know, really that broke the momentum of her show and of her career, so she was off the air for a while. she was able to get it back on the air on nbc a little bit later, but still ended up having to fire philip lobe or stop the show altogether and all of those things. it's like they were off the air for a while and then i believe having watched the show she and philip lobe had that special chemistry that we recognize in you know tv stars. will they won't they type tv stars now they were really special. they seemed like a married couple they seemed really lived in and had a connection and so then she ends up replacing him twice because he's so hard to replace. the first one doesn't stick the second one. he's fine, but i never i don't like the later episodes with him nearly as much as i like the early episodes with full of globe and so all together this just is why i think we don't

know. not everyone knows about gertrude bird either and the similar to hazel the recordings of the show, they do exist. but especially the early versions which are the best the early episodes which are the best ones. they're very bad version. they're kind of like a copy of a copy. so i think that's why we see like an isle of lucy in endless reruns because it was this is getting nerdy now, but they they shot on film for i love lucy whereas the goldbergs was still live. and so it was just a bad photo bad copy of the show. and so i believe that this is a huge, you know factor in the end of lucy is a legend and she should be and she was a genius, but i also think they made this critical decision to film to shoot on film and thus preserve themselves into the streaming era even they didn't even think about that. i bet that's something that crossed. gertrude's mind at some point. she seems so richard and hazel. it's so so innovative and it's

almost as if they're innovation, they're thrive in their independence is what the industry didn't like to see even though the industry benefited so much from it. oh completely and i mean there are known kind of correlations to between the blacklist and working women in addition to the obvious factor, which is that we have a black woman and a jewish woman. so i think it's fascinating to that. they went after gertrude's tv husband. i mean part of it is just that he had the right resume as it were, you know, if if you hung out in certain places, they could kind of go after you so he and hazel actually both hung out at a place called cafe society. we're hazel played and was a real lefty hang out in that actually got shut down by the blacklist but so he was a big labor activists so they could go after him, but i also think it was an interesting way to go after gertrude right because she was so popular and beloved. what if we kind of just go at

her from the side here and demand that this lady listen to us and do what say and get rid of this guy and see if see if it works, you know, and i really think that all of those factors came into play there. minion power can be scary. yeah. so let's talk a little bit about erna phillips. who is my favorite out of this book and you know why you're contributions to to soap operas, but she's she's amazing and she's quiet and not quiet. but this is a name. i did not know until i encountered it in your book. i can see where i might have learned a little bit about hazel scott and gertrude berg in my classes and communications, but not earn a phillips. what did she do with her life that turned it into tv gold. she is i mean, i feel like i said, is that all like what a powerhouse and she is my only

woman who was really just behind the scene. she was not in front of the camera. she invented the daytime soap opera. she did it for radio because her boss is asked her to make something just you know sell stuff to women and yeah the it's all it's all comes notice notice what we keep coming back to the ads, right? that's what it all comes down to in both radio and television and so she made these little domestic dramas. that was what she came up with. she by the way did not like the term soap opera till, you know her entire life. she used cereal as it's a serialized drama. that's what it is and it was called soap operas because they sell soap to the ladies and it was a denigrating term and i can tell you she endured lots of bad reviews and i'm not saying that because she was mad at her job i'm saying because it was men writing reviews about the stuff and they were all like what's with these whiny women with

their problems at home? and she, you know did some really key things that we would still recognize in terms of the forum. it's like the organ the dramatic organ cues for when there's drama right and the dramatic pause. she loved a dramatic pause and was often demanding that her writers and directors use more dramatic pauses which i love and also just really key use of cliffhangers, which you and i were talking about, you know, shonda rhimes before this and i think of that and i think of just anything we want to watch on netflix now when we've been watched how we're so dependent on that cliffhanger, that's how she kept her audience coming back day after day in the daytime. and so she was she was very good at knowing her audience. she knew things down to like you have to tell the story at a certain pace because the women might be doing their housework while watching and you don't want to like make it so

dependent on just being it that they'll miss something and she brought the form from radio to television. she actually the first daytime soap opera ever on television, which was called. these are my children, which is no relation to all my children. that was a flop, but it was the first one. and so that's we learn along the way and then eventually came back with a very successful idea, which was she brought her. massive hit radio soap opera the guy it was the guiding light at the time and very this i love this detail of this. they brought up they brought it to tv in this very specific way, which was they stayed the show right going. they kept it. just the plotline just kept going. from radio to tv and then it was simulcast on radio and television so you could listen to the actors doing it or see them for a time and that was how she kind of had this really big

hit to the point where it lasted until not that long ago and was the longest running broadcast show in history because it actually predated television and you know in radio and then came to television so she then went on to have lots of other successful shows and mentored lots of people who went into the same business went into soap operas as well. she almost kind of had her finger prints on most was on television and in daytime soaps at one point, so she is just another one where really incredibly successful and was doing this while raising two children that she adopted on her own as a single woman. did she work any of her own life into her serialized drama plots? she sure did that how this is another really big thing that i think is an actual contribution to the genre if you think it the adoption plot line.

she was constantly going to her own experience with adoption in a million different ways whether it was the surprise reveal. you're adopted or the surprise reveal of this is your real father there where she had so many different variations on this. she had one that was kind of heartbreaking where she had a care a teenage character who said something like you know if i ever meet my birth mother, i'm gonna kill her and i believe it's it is that she ends up doing it in the show? her daughter had said something like that to her her kids were often acting out and using the adoption against her and she felt very guilty about her mothering and at one point said that she actually regretted adopting her children. she was very very concerned about the fact that she could not give them a father and this haunted her and so another thing that she did in her soaps where this really came out, you know,

where there was this interplay, is that she started deliberately making strong male characters. she had started out with really strong women in her early shows. early radio stuff was just women. and eventually in the 50s interestingly enough along with the rest of the country as it goes super patriarchal. she really took it in and felt guilty and started saying i'm gonna write strong men and strong marriages because i feel personally responsible for the rising divorce rate and also that i think there needs to be more strong male role models in the world because i wasn't she wasn't able to give that to her kids and especially her son that really haunted her. and so this really she really worked out a lot of stuff in her own work. wow, tell me she's not the one who gave us amnesia and evil twin. sure if she did but the radio

stuff they were already talking about the ridiculous. you know, she really it's interesting though. just as a touchstone touch point on this, you know, she started when she started these they were very grounded. it was like very normal stuff at first it was can i borrow your dress for this wedding? i have to be in and what shoes am i gonna wear and does this man love me and this sort of thing they were off and said in boarding houses and it would be that's how she would have women who were not necessarily really related interacting with each other and then it you know, i think what happened is quickly if you're doing a daytime a daily show you start realize like i gotta snap this up and so they start to really escalate and something she did actually bring to the genre is the idea of having like doctors and lawyers. she was to doctor. well, she was into both actually and she had a lot of doctors and lawyers in her own life. so i think this is telling but she she actually is a contributor to something like gray's anatomy in the sense that she saw how if you had a doctor

like on the guiding light. she had a pastor. so what that allowed was people could come to the pastor with problems and that means it made more sense that they were having constant dramatic problems because they were coming to him with problems and same thing with something like a doctor. of course, there's they see stuff because they're a doctor so she kind of brought this idea of the professional as a conduit of drama. that is that just makes me think about some of my favorite shonda shows in a totally different. yeah, exactly. exactly. well, i saved i think what some folks will consider the best for last to ask you about betty white and all of us who think about betty white now, we probably the first thing we think about is betty white the feisty senior citizen. she just turned a hundred and her snicker bar football commercials or just they're comedy gold but look at this

beautiful vibrant woman who was a lot sharper than that sue and character you were telling me about yes, and she was not me. that is the part that was not based on her at all for every i swear to god. i've never heard anyone say anything. thank god bad about betty white and i have talked to her and she is as delightful as you want her to be but yes, she was the hot young thing in the early 50s. i mean, i really loved reading these feature stories on her at the time that really were saying, you know, this is when young to watch her comedy timing is pretty good that kind of thing, and she was just incredible. so she was you know, as i mentioned she was doing this talk show in los angeles at first called hollywood on television where she and her co-host al jarvis. we're on the air five and a half hours a day six days a week ad lib in it up do it whatever they felt like, sometimes it was sketches. sometimes they talk about the news. they just banter with each other.

they also had to deliver all their commercials for those five and a half hours. can you imagine? and she liked to memorize her commercials. so that was the one part. that would be a little scripted and so she's out there, you know vacuuming stuff up to show you about this vacuum or you know, all these kinds of crazy things. it's really fascinating, but from there, you know, one of her one of their sketches really caught on and she spotted off into a sitcom called life with elizabeth. and it is delightful. you can find some clips of it on youtube and what a treat she's there from the beginning man. she is. these are just very silly little plot lines. it's really just the they'd have this announcer. come on and he'd say like incident number one and life with elizabeth and then it would be it was hurt. just her and her tv husband. that's it. was this duo and they would occasionally have like maybe one or two guest stars, but it was very tight. it was small and often they would do two or three setups in

one half hour. so they do these like 10 minute almost sketches and it would just be like elizabeth's gonna learn how to drive but she doesn't want to tell alvin, you know like that kind of very sitcoming type of thing and she is hilarious and there's kind of this gambit they do that's really a signature thing where the announcer will talk directly to her through the camera and be like elizabeth. you know, what? do you think you're doing now? and she would she wouldn't talk to him, but she'd like gesture and he his signature line was he'd say elizabeth, aren't you ashamed and then she'd go. and it is the cutest thing. it's so cute totally recommend. so that's so that's at one point. she had this and life. you know, she had the talk show and life with elizabeth going which is an insane schedule and then the talk show ended because she was actually offered the chance to have a national talk show of her own the betty white show.

and that was 1954 and so she was really like, you know, there were all these stories that were like america's sweetheart is here and it's betty white and you should pay attention to her and one of my favorite things i mentioned her fully dresses, but she was known particularly for her high necklines. because she was wanted to be very sweet and jamira similar, i think similarly to gertrude burke she was very much. very clear on managing her own image. and took some flack for it. sometimes there were some i read some mean sexist reviews of her show and that sort of thing were the men seemed basically a little disappointed that she wasn't, you know, trying to seduce them at all times and you know, people would kind of make fun of her a little bit for being so sweet and insip at it and all that stuff, but i think she is just charming when i watch these old clips. she's saying songs you guys she's saying she wanted to be a singer. she had actually wanted started out wanting to be an opera

singer. so she doesn't sing as much as she used to but she really sang a lot back in those days. that was a thing people did on tv. and yeah, she is just absolutely dripping with charm in these old clips and was really this already at that time. really a powerhouse and also very shrewd about image management, you know, she dealt a lot with constant questions. why are you single? why don't you want kids, you know, we're getting into the mid 50s at that point. everyone is suspicious of that. she was actually divorced twice before this and was living back with her parents after the two marriages. she didn't go she didn't bring it up in interviews. she would just say i just don't have time for a husband right now and i very smart right? i just want to give my full attention to him when i find him but first. i have these shows to do and she did talk a little bit about you know, no one would ever ask a man. why are you working so hard

instead of being married? so this is what i'm doing right now, and she was actually pretty about at that time. she was like, she's like, i'm never gonna get married because i i love my career too much and that's she felt like she had to choose between the two at the time. she later did get married and had one of the great hollywood marriages to the aladdin. she has a lot of albums and owls and things in her life, but she had this great marriage later on, but she really at this time was like absolutely not she was really clear in what she wanted and didn't want. i'm gonna take a moment to see if there's a couple of questions here. oh there is what ground still remains to be broken by women in tv today most of the directing for example is still being done by men, isn't it? yeah, and i mean, i think we still have plenty of room for improvement though. things are certainly better than they used to be. there's just so much opportunity and streaming.

i think the big challenge now is there's a lot the numbers are a lot bigger because every i don't know if you guys have noticed during the pandemic, especially there is a lot of television to watch there's it's just constant and so that's great and that has opened up so many more avenues, so i always say now like, isn't it great how there isn't just one or two women's shows which i think was how it was. i mean even something like sex in the city. i feel like was still supposed to be here's the latest show all the ladies watch this right and it's like well, no, that's about four rich thin white women in a very specific, you know situation. a lot of people liked it, but it wasn't representing a lot of voices now we have tons of voices. the problem is that you don't have you never gonna have that kind of hit again where lots and lots of people are watching one thing. we have some phenomenon, you know, we've we've had a little bit of that but it --'s creek is not the same as you know a sex

in the city or well it's you know, it's a little closer but like a seinfeld, you know, it's not this big cultural moment. and so it's it's like there's more women doing stuff, but they're not ever gonna have the same power that was sort of concentrated in a different time in television that can that's good in some ways because there's something for everyone, but i think we need to get more women in at least the biggest, you know, kind of places that we have these days i would say shonda rhimes is doing it, but i would like more more shonda rhimes is what we really right where it's this. she's this powerhouse and she can make something like bridgerton was as close as we're gonna get to something like a phenomenon where even if you haven't seen it, you know what it is you were at forced at some point to be like, okay, what does everyone talking about? okay, i guess it's the sexy thing with people in a different time great now i know but you

know, that's i think more of that level of power more women in that in that situation would be the next step i think. we've had a question from one of the audience members. listen to you talk about gertrude berg's live improvisation and her comedy timing. what kind of presence do you think she would have had on a show like saturday night live? oh, i think of gertrude bergen so many different. i'm just like i wish she were here. she's so it's another one. i just i mean for all these go watch some clips you can find those two and she is really interesting on camera because you know, she is not a 28 year old beauty in the way that like, you know, betty white was at the time. she was not what we think of as she was not jennifer aniston, you know, but she is has this presence that you would not even believe. i mean my god, nobody had a shot against her and if you read

reviews of her work, which i quote a lot in the book, it's very funny because she she was you know, they all the reviewers just lost it when she they didn't even like her play version of the goldbergs, but they would all be like this is kind of a mess, but my god. gertrude bird when she one of them said something incredible. she actually won a tony later in her life for a dramatic performance on broadway and the reviewer at the time said something like we are all children when gertrude berg is on the stage. and i just thought like yep. i can totally see i mean i was never in her presence obviously, but just seeing her on the show it sort of she's one of those. it doesn't matter what she did you just wanted to keep watching and having seen her on she did a number of appearances on milton berle. they were really good friends her in milton burl, and she did a lot of appearances usually in character as molly goldberg and that is the closest we can see

to her being on like an snl and she steals the show from milton berle like you don't even know anymore that it's his show. it is hilarious. she completely takes over and just the camera is like on her and she's just she was such a force and that's why i mean that's why she was such a success. i love care. i love characters like that. i love actors like that where they redeem everything anything they're in. it's just they make they elevate everything and if it's bad they redeem it. this is her. i watched some i was at the family center the nerdy haley center, which i love where you can watch both of stuff that you can't get anywhere else. i watched some stuff. she did like these movie the week what it's essentially that's the equivalent from the time of these movie of the week type things and same deal. it's like it didn't matter if the script was good. you were just in because she was so and it's it really tells you

though too. like she was so married to this character molly goldberg. i think she could have gone bigger. i think she could have done anything and was kind of doing that when she died and relatively early age in the 60s, but she had two players in the works when she died, which i love like what was already selling had already sold out because they were selling tickets and she was working on another one so she really had started on this sort of second career as a broadway star when she died. that's unfortunate. my hardest thing about what it is we might have lost and you know, like i know. someone wants to know if you would rank or just give us in any order the five most powerful influential women's characters in television history. oh god, that's so hard. okay, actually no i can do this. i'm gonna go to the easy one first because i wrote a book about it. i'll probably do too for my books. cross promotion, but it

definitely the mary tyler moore. there's no mary richards it there's you you can't overstate this in terms of women on television. i mean, you just really can't i wrote a whole book about her and the reason is she was so, you know her singleness her professional, you know, she's a single professional woman over 30 having living her best life right in front of us making us all want to be her and this was revolutionary at the time. she wasn't the first single woman. we had that girl before it which was lovely and i am super important too, but the fact that she was over 30 the fact that she was very independent and really as the show went on was not even interested in dating that i mean she dated but that was not the end game. it was really about her professional life and you know making her way alone. so she is just you cannot overstate it and when i was at entertainment weekly, i was often talking to women like tina fey mindy katelyn that sort of thing and everyone cited her as their influence. you just can't get past that.

probably lucille ball can't get past that either i mean my book sort of like. is all about a reaction to her right? she wasn't my book is basically saying she wasn't the only one but you know a lot about her. so i'll let you read about her elsewhere. i'm gonna tell you about these women, but you know, i mean she is the influence on someone like mary and going forward what i mean and probably the reason that women could do things in television like this is a woman who produced and starred starred in her show, right? and then i would say let's see trying to think. it gets harder as you go forward for the exact reasons i was talking about and you don't have these mass hits anymore, but you know, i think sex the city was big. i think carrie bradshaw was big and she's a female antihero among other things and kind of made it so that women could be super flawed like not just like

cute how she stumbles sometimes right? but like very very flawed character. i'm gonna go claire huxtable. um, i know we don't like to talk about the show anymore, but this is you just cannot deny. i mean eighties eighty sitcom moms queen of the 80s that comes my mom's. also, just seeing felicia rashad. she's still out there doing stuff all the time, and i am every time like she i i think she's the star of the show. i really do. i think she takes it and then i'm trying to think of a like current, you know ish like in the last 20 years. i mean you could talk about tina fey. it's sort of becomes more of a like panoply, right? it's like tina fey gray's anatomy. oh my god scandal, i would she was pretty you know, that's that's olivia. pope is pretty pretty big there.

i would say unlikably lovable. what a mess like i mean mess in a good way. you know what i'm talking about like what a crazy show like, i mean, oh god and even i'm just throwing stuff out there now, but easter day insecure michael cole. i may destroy you this year. i think we don't really that one to me that like shook me i was watching that show. i don't know if people have seen it. it's a lot so it's intense and it's okay if you don't want to watch it, too, but this hbo show over the summer. that was sometimes comedy sometimes drama really dark and was about a woman dealing with her sexual assault in the aftermath. and it's incredible. it's riveting and i what i kept thinking because i was writing the book while reading it or watching it and i just kept thinking my god this would blow those woman's minds they would like if they could know i think they'd love it. but if they could know this was where tv was gonna go not just the streaming factor, but the

fact that a woman that women could do this kind of thing and tell this kind of story. on the medium they were in but i think that would really blow their minds and how incredible that betty white has been there for the whole thing. so we've got a top. we've got a question. that's a little bit off topic but one of our viewers wants to hear your take on how kamala harris has been portrayed on television are the news an entertainment shows they doing an acceptable job of covering the first black woman to serve as our vice president. i mean, i feel i've enjoyed the s&l like snl thing is like the main thing i think of of course and it's my rudolph who is perfect. um, and i really have enjoyed that depiction from the beginning. i feel like it's a little bit it gets it takes us back old school a little bit and snl impressions in terms of don't think they're trying to like very deeply

comment on her if that makes sense. like i don't think they feel unnecess an urge to necessarily undercut earth. i'm glad you know, that's really good. i think they're like, let's just she's the main joke is sort of like she's very glamorous and in charge and i loved the joke they did once that was basically say she said something like, you know that she had been sort of for an nbc legal drama and she like looked at the camera and they had her hair blowing and i always think of that because that's so accurate, but it's very it's a it's a correctly gentle portrayal and i think that that's really good. it's respectful. and you know, i mean, i think we've we've all heard of incidents where the news coverage has gone less than well. but i think a lot of places also are still treading pretty lightly. so we'll see how it goes, but it'll be interesting. i think when we get further along to we get to a point, this is really weird, but you always get to a point with

administrations where eventually they're going to start being portrayed. do you know what i mean? there's going to be like an hbo movie. we're probably going to start to see us with the trump administration. um, and you know the doing the sort of as in retrospect as we start to tell it as history, i think that will be extremely interesting too. you said something just a moment ago that that set off. that set my brain spinning, but when i think about the tv shows that you and i were talking about before we started and the women that you're talking about in this book and even the the women that you referenced in your previous books. you talked about? being respectful and while these women were certainly capable of pushing the envelope. they always did it with some measure of mindfulness and respectfulness of their topics of their characters of themselves and and my rudolph is

being respectful in her portrayal of kamalars whereas, you know, there might be elements of the news whether or not and we know there are news they're not. but is that something intrinsic to the way women work in mass media? is is that a good quality? is it a bad quality? is it just a quality with good side bedside? good quite i'm like into respect. you know what i mean? like, yes, of course you stand up for yourself and justice and all of those things like hazel's a great example, right? because i don't think she was ever disrespectful, um in the way that i would describe it, you know, maybe maybe some of the white men felt that she was but i would not describe her that way. i think she was actually there's i talk about this in the book a lot. she was very very conscious of the way she portrayed herself and often if she could influence the way other black women were portrayed shares a huge incident

in her career when she stops work on a movie she was doing called the heats on where she had a scene where she was playing this military song the case on school rolling along she was in a military uniform like a women's, you know, exhilary uniform. she looked great but there were dancers. they were all black women. in her scene and they came out in their costumes that they were given and they were dirty aprons and she said no, that's not that's not happening in my scene. i will not come back to work until this is fixed. she shut the production down for days, which is a lot of money and that is not something that they enjoyed a lot harry conn who was in charge of the studio there told her she'd never work in movies again, as long as he was alive, and it was true. but she got what she wanted they finally gave in and gave them these floral dresses. so that just tells you she would and she had a big thing. she would not play what she called singing made roles. she always had to be credited as herself. she had wardrobe approval.

so she was very conscious and i think this is still this is a way of being that is both respectful, but also having boundaries and similarly. i think they were all very conscious in their own ways. gertrude's thinking about how i'm portraying a jewish family. she's also was thinking about for instance when she would have like a black guest star on how she was portraying them in her script. so i do think and you know buddy thought about this too both with herself. and she had a man named arthur duncan on her show a dancer who was black and she brought him over. she had kind of known him from la she brought him to her national show and going nationals different you're going, you know, you're suddenly gonna be in the jim croce south too. and so she got now see letters and did not back down from that. and so i think that probably as people who felt somewhat marginalized they could always think about other people who might be marginalized too. and do you know, they were also

probably respectful because that was you know, otherwise they were gonna just get ousted if they were not respectful of unfortunately the white men who were in charge, but so i think there's a little bit of that there but i think most of them were pretty skillful in trying to like stand up for what they thought was right while trying to navigate this it works sometimes not other times. so we've been at this for a little more than an hour and i'll close it out by asking you. to tell us about a piece of research and i know that you did so much research for this book. you must have found 400 women that could fit in this book. but can you tell us something that you had to leave out about any of the characters an interesting story about erna hazel, gertrude or betty? honestly, the thing that comes to mind is that i really went down this other road with philip loeb who was blacklisted you

know, who was gertrude's blacklisted husband a tv has been and part of that was that actually gertrude didn't talk a lot about him. once she had to fire him. it was very painful both to let him go and actually we didn't talk about this and it is sad and i'm sorry and done this note, but he actually killed himself in. 1955 he took an overdose of sleeping pills. so he died by suicide and was kind of known as like recognized as a suicide that was due to the blacklist and she really did not talk about this. and one can understand why so i was trying to figure out what happened essentially, you know what the details were and some of them were available, but i ended up going into his lives and looking through his letters as well and he was so funny.

he was funny and very dirty. they would not they did not allow that on the goldbergs, but he had a dirty sense of humor. and if anyone is old school and knows who's zero mistel is big broadway star and also sometimes film in the 60s just really fun guy really a big big man big presence and they were best friends. and so i found i also went into the best all archives and was reading zero mistal's letters to philip lobe as he was going through this and so much of it didn't have to do with gertrude that i it's not in the book, but, you know, just reading through they were such good friends and like reading reading men telling each other dirty jokes in letters in the 1950s is a real treat. i highly recommend it. there were so many i was like, i'm not even i'm definitely not including that and there was a story about how he was. called and was good.

they invited the nostal's offered. i invited him over for dinner. and he called and asked. well, it's something like what should i wear and oh, you know nothing. don't worry about it, and he actually supposedly came over naked so that is the kind of guy. he was not like that are on gertrude because he knew better. he was not gonna mess around with gertrude, but he had a really funny and dirty sense of humor and it was it was fun to read all of those letters and that was definitely like a road. i did not need to go down in the book. that's the great thing about research. all these marvelous rabbit holes that you find and you just can't stop yourself. absolutely and these women also just their lives outside, you know, a lot of their story tips place outside of tv. so hazel had a lot of other stuff that went on in her life that i didn't get into as much you know, that kind of thing as well because i was really focused on this time and in television, but i highly you know, i recommend all the rabbit

holes with these stories because it's very, you know, gertrude had a whole lifetime on radio before i even got so just there's so much. there's so much to enjoy about their lives and it's so inspiring to read about them. so jennifer, why don't you leave us with the name of a woman? we should all go and look up and read more about a woman who didn't make it into your book. maybe it broke your heart to have to leave her out. i mean, i think that faye emerson you can read about her. she was the talk show host and amanda randolph who i mentioned a little bit but she was fascinating as well and kind of had different philosophies about roles to take and how how to manage her career then like a hazel scott. she actually made a joke when she got her talk show her daytime talk show. she was paid very low. i care remember the exact amount and someone asked her about it in an interview and she said well for five dollars a week, what do they expect hazel scott? so you know, she she really had a sense of humor and seemed like

a very fun woman and i enjoyed reading about her but didn't get all of it in there as well. maybe the next book. yeah, you never know. i mean, there's plenty there there really is. well, thank you so much jennifer for spending your evening with us and everyone if you are if you're not enticed to read the book we're looking for. when women invented television, please order it from bookshop.org or your favorite online platform for your favorite independent bookstore. jennifer this has been a delight. we you know that you and i could probably go tv. but we have to let the folks at home. go back to doing something other than watching us maybe watching good tv. that's right. so good night e okay before we ,

let me tell you because if we're going to have a long line this evening. so if you want a book signed, but you don't want to stand in line purchase a book leave it at the information counter for with the instructions of how you would like it signed and then you can pick it up anytime after tomorrow morning. we'll get it signed for you. i'm barbara meade. i'm one of the founders of politics and prose and this evening. i want to welcome sally bedell smith. i've introduce