Stealing the Show Read online

  Over its ten-year run, Murphy Brown inspired countless trend pieces, newspaper editorials, and college dissertations about its feminist spirit. English and her staff were hesitant to embrace the label, however. “[I]f feminism means that my female characters or my friends or myself are respected, in all walks of life, then I’m a feminist. But I don’t get involved in the politics of it very often,” English insisted back in 1989. She further suggested that her character disliked the label: “You don’t hear feminist polemic coming out of her mouth. She is what she is.”

  * * *

  Diane English didn’t grow up with dreams of being a big Hollywood writer. Born into a blue-collar Catholic family in Buffalo, New York, she faced limited options. Her father worked at the local power plant; her mother was a housewife. In school, English wrote stories and plays to drown out the complications of her life, including her father’s struggles with alcoholism. “I was part of a group that was sort of the outcast group in school,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “You know, we were the ganglies and the overweights and the ones with the thick glasses and the braces. . . . And we used to get together on the weekends at each other’s house and listen to old Elaine May and Mike Nichols records and then do our own sketches on tape. We would write little songs and plays and perform them.” At Buffalo State College, she found a mentor in Warren Enters, a cofounder of the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City, who was helping to build the college’s drama department and who encouraged English to become a playwright. In 1971, she sold her red Volkswagen Beetle for five hundred dollars and swapped her hardscrabble Buffalo existence for a hardscrabble Manhattan existence.

  “I was going to be the female Neil Simon,” English recalls now, sitting in her Sherman Oaks office wearing a crisp pinstripe blouse and dirty-blond bob. “But I didn’t know anybody in New York, and I had no money at all.” By then, she had developed an idea of who she wanted to be: the kind of person who lives on the wealthy Upper East Side rather than the cheap and bohemian downtown. “I didn’t have a phone for the first nine months of living in New York because I couldn’t afford it,” she says, laughing. “But I had this Upper East Side taste.”

  English took a job at the public television station WNET to pay the bills; instead, it changed her life. It was there that she met Joel Shukovsky, a young graphic designer from Long Island who caught her attention with his distinctive duds: bright-yellow corduroy pants, big aviator glasses, and black patent-leather clogs. He quickly became her partner in love and work.

  When asked to make suggestions on a script for PBS’s adaptation of the Ursula K. Le Guin novel The Lathe of Heaven, English took the initiative and substantially rewrote it. The resulting movie got great ratings, rave reviews, and a Writers Guild Award nomination. “Once Lathe hit the airwaves, I had agents calling and saying, ‘You have to move to Los Angeles; this is where the work is.’ ” Although she was hesitant to leave Manhattan, English says Shukovsky had taken some production classes at the New School and “had this crazy idea we were going to go to Los Angeles and start a production company and start making television shows. Nobody believed that we would do it, and we were too dumb to know we couldn’t do it. So we did it,” she says with a wry smile. English calls Shukovsky the big-picture architect and herself “the sweat equity.”

  English wrote nine TV movies in three years, most of which never made it to the screen. This was followed by an offer to develop a new sitcom for CBS about the New York District Attorney’s office. She fancied herself a more serious writer, but Shukovsky saw the series as the first step to a Hollywood empire. The script for Foley Square was greenlit immediately, with Margaret Colin starring as Alex—there’s that gender-neutral name again—a young, ambitious assistant district attorney trying to impress her grizzled male boss. Since English was a sitcom novice, she, like her show’s heroine, was overseen by veterans. Showrunners Bernie Orenstein and Saul Turteltaub knew the drill with the single-woman sitcom, having worked on That Girl decades before. The network hoped to draw young independent female viewers by running the show after Mary, Mary Tyler Moore’s 1985 return to a prime-time sitcom years after the finale of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. “The awful thing was everybody kept pointing at Margaret Colin and saying, ‘She is the new Mary Tyler Moore,’ ” says English. Neither show survived to the next season, but English was quickly granted her first solo showrunner gig. CBS brought her in to salvage My Sister Sam, a short-lived star vehicle for Mork and Mindy’s Pam Dawber.

  Shukovsky patiently waited in the wings for the moment when he could try out his mogul skills on an original show of their own devising. He knew that English “wanted to do something about a woman who broke the rules and had some parts of her own personality, for better or worse.” The idea for Murphy Brown “just literally fell into my head perfectly formed” while driving to work, English remembers. “I knew all the characters, I knew what the first season was.”

  In 1987, CBS was third in network ratings—out of three. The channel once known as the “Tiffany Network” for its quality programming had little to keep it afloat in prime time beyond Designing Women and Newhart. Standing in a daunting wood-paneled room before a throng of executives, English presented her idea for a sitcom about a single, middle-aged female broadcast journalist returning to the job after a stint in rehab.

  The executives were intrigued. They just had a few changes.

  “The request was: could she be coming back from a spa because she had been so stressed out by her job, instead of the Betty Ford Clinic?” English recalls, her voice tinged with sarcasm. “Oh, and could she be thirty instead of forty?” English refused, insisting, “ ‘Why don’t you let me write the script the way I see it, and if, after it is done, you feel like she is not somebody that anyone can relate to . . .’ ” Her voice trails off.

  “That was their concern: that nobody could relate to this woman. The word unlikable came up all the time. All . . . the . . . time,” she says irritably, waving her hand as if to swat away a bug. “They would apply those terms to female characters often, but men don’t have to be likable.”

  * * *

  English wrote the pilot script exactly the way she’d imagined it. She finished it on a Sunday night, and the next morning, March 7, 1988, the Writers Guild announced it was on strike. That meant English’s original script could not be revised. CBS execs were up against a wall: they could either go with the “middle-aged woman after rehab” version of Murphy or drop the series. There was concern that the strike could go on for a long time—it lasted five months—so they chose to film the script almost exactly as drafted. Nearly all network television shows are products of heavy compromise, with jagged edges sanded off by crews of note-giving executives. The writers’ strike allowed English’s vision to make it to air with edges, and rehab backstory, intact.

  The role had been written with Big Chill star JoBeth Williams in mind, but the actress had a new baby and didn’t want to tie herself down to a weekly TV show. The network then pushed for twenty-something Dynasty bombshell Heather Locklear. But English became convinced that Candice Bergen was the perfect Murphy. A child of old Hollywood, forty-two-year-old Bergen was a movie star with highbrow cred, married as she was to French film director Louis Malle. She exuded a kind of glacial, WASPy self-possession in movies such as The Group (as a sophisticated lesbian at a women’s college) and A Night Full of Rain, a Lina Wertmüller film in which she starred as a feminist photographer. But that didn’t mean she didn’t know how to be funny: she’d been nominated for an Oscar for playing Burt Reynolds’s ex-wife in the 1979 comedy Starting Over and had been Saturday Night Live’s first female host.

  Bergen saw Murphy Brown as a chance to tap into her “bawdiest self.” After reading the pilot script on a plane, she was drawn to the role as if to a dare, and immediately called her agent. When English met Bergen in New York, a deep connection instantly sparked between actress and showrunner, over the script but also on a personal level. The two w
omen were born nine days apart, and as English has said, “We’ve played out a lot of the same emotional beats in our lives.” They quickly discovered that they wore the same lipstick and perfume. Bergen describes English in her memoir, A Fine Romance, as “very Anglo-Saxon, alert, confident”—details just as easily applied to her.

  Convinced she’d found her Murphy, English brought Bergen to LA to meet with the execs. It should have been a shoo-in—gorgeous movie star deigns to take role on lowly small screen—but CBS boss Kim LeMasters did not trust English’s judgment. He demanded that the actress audition for him. Barnet Kellman, the distinguished theater and TV director who would help forge the look and feel of Murphy Brown, says he quickly rehearsed scenes with Bergen, now gripped by anxiety—which only worsened when they arrived at the studio: LeMasters kept them all waiting for forty-five minutes. “Bad things happen when you start thinking too much,” English says, recalling Bergen’s increasing panic.

  LeMasters finally ushered them into his office, making a grand gesture of closing the room’s curtains with a remote control. For Bergen, it felt like “an interrogation room.” In her nervousness, she blew the audition, and the imperious network president made it clear he was dismissing her from consideration.

  At this point, English did something she deems “either fearless or stupid”: she demanded that LeMasters reconsider. Says Kellman, “I have never seen a producer not immediately go silent when the network president spoke. But Diane just said, ‘We are going to talk about this right now. Not when you’re ready—you are going to deal with me now, with Candice Bergen waiting in the hall.’ That was wild. That’s an internal strength. She knew what she wanted; she felt she knew what she was worth. She believed in the work.”

  Much to everyone’s surprise, LeMasters agreed to trust English’s instincts. He then marched into the hallway so he could be the one to bestow the good news on Bergen. Afterward, the newly anointed Murphy Brown repaired to a nearby restaurant with English and ordered a round of stiff drinks. “I could see the look on her face,” English says. “It was like, What have I done?”

  Bergen relaxed when she met the rest of the cast, at a welcome dinner at English and Shukovsky’s Malibu home. The actors who would play Murphy’s colleagues on the fictional news magazine FYI were mostly unknowns. Former model Faith Ford was almost as much of a neophyte as her character Corky Sherwood, a former Miss America who was meant to be representative of the dumbing down of TV news then taking hold. Bergen was charmed by Ford’s southern naïveté: “I called her the Swamp Queen,” Bergen writes in her memoir. “She’d come in with stories about her momma and daddy and their huntin’ camp in the bayou, shootin’ gators. You just looked at her agape; how could such a person exist in Burbank?”

  Grant Shaud was a twenty-seven-year-old with few credits who flew in from New York to audition just a week before shooting on the pilot began. When he snagged the role of upstart FYI producer Miles Silverberg, Shaud had to race out to buy clothing, as he had arrived with no luggage. Robert Pastorelli, accustomed to playing rough characters onstage and on-screen, landed the part of Eldin Bernecky, Murphy’s eccentric housepainter, unofficial life coach, and (eventual) babysitter. The roles of empathetic journalist Frank Fontana and veteran newsman Jim Dial went to more seasoned players: Joe Regalbuto of prime-time soap Knots Landing and theater actor Charles Kimbrough, star of several Sondheim productions on Broadway.

  Thanks to the writers’ strike, preproduction had to be crammed into three weeks rather than the usual five months. “It’s going to be murder,” Shukovsky told a reporter back then. “Our decision is that quality will not suffer—our private lives will suffer; we will have none.”

  TV scripts are usually rewritten multiple times, sometimes up until the last second. The strike removed that option, but Barnet Kellman, primarily a theater director, saw this as an opportunity rather than a problem. “I said to the cast, ‘The way I want to approach rehearsals is that this is Shakespeare. It’s a dead playwright, and the onus is on us to find out what makes this work. We are detectives solving this riddle.’ ” Kellman injected the scripts with breakneck energy, wanting to evoke the knife-edge chaos of a live newsroom.

  “We needed people who could talk and [who] loved language,” says Kellman. “It was a fast show. Especially for then.” Both he and English were inspired by Ben Hecht’s play The Front Page and by the movie Broadcast News, which conveyed “the fanaticism of getting the show to the air.”

  Then there was FYI, the news show at the heart of Murphy Brown. “I wanted [that] to be very real,” he says, sitting in his home office, where he keeps an embroidered FYI pillow, the one memento he took from the show’s set. Bergen credits Kellman with creating the illusion of looming deadlines and frantic activity. The series was shot in front of a live audience at the Warner Bros. studio, on the same soundstage where Mildred Pierce and My Fair Lady once filmed.

  English expected actors to follow the wordy script verbatim: no improv allowed. Sometimes Bergen ended up in tears trying to memorize huge chunks of dialogue; she once hid some of her lines inside a mug as a cheat—and then forgot and poured coffee over them.

  * * *

  English describes her approach to running Murphy Brown in terms of her being a “catastrophizer,” by which she means someone able to anticipate, and avert, disasters. “I look ahead, I see what’s going to happen, I get to it before it does. I am a Virgo rising,” she offers with a hint of a smile. “All my neuroses came together in a positive way in this job.”

  Although this was English’s first time as the sole executive producer, former colleagues say she was a natural. Korby Siamis, who had worked on Foley Square and My Sister Sam before becoming English’s second in command on Murphy, goes so far as to say that the Diane English working method could be the exemplar for a well-run TV show: “You are organized, you have a clear vision, and you fight for it. You appear democratic so that everybody really feels they are contributing. But the truth is, it comes down to that singular vision.”

  As an example of that in practice, Siamis recalls an early meeting at which English pitched story lines to a roomful of CBS execs. One episode revealed that Murphy had previously been married for only six days. The president of the network wanted them to change it so that Murphy had been married at least six months or a year. “We came back to the office, and Diane was like, ‘Yeah, it’s six days,’ ” Siamis says with a chuckle. “It never came up again.”

  As tough as English could be when protecting her vision against interference from above, no one recalls her ever losing her temper on set—which is not to say there weren’t problems, such as the time Robert Pastorelli (who later died of a heroin overdose) came to a table read intoxicated. “Bobby brought demons with him,” says Kellman sadly. “He respected the hell out of Diane, but around the third episode, he came to the table read and it was clear there was something wrong. We are all looking at each other and tiptoeing around the obvious, which was that there were substances involved.” After the table read, Kellman says English took Pastorelli aside and told him if he ever came in drunk again, she would fire him. “She loved this guy . . . but she had no doubt, she had no fear, and she didn’t raise her voice. She just did the thing that everybody else was afraid to do.”

  It’s easy to imagine Murphy as a version of her creator writ large: avidly ambitious, effortlessly elegant. Yet where English worked smoothly and quietly to get what she needed, Murphy was obnoxious and noisy. It was funnier that way—and it was also something that hadn’t been seen on television before. Back in the seventies, the blunt honesty of Maude and the plucky femininity of Mary Richards had felt fresh. Then there was the southern feminist drollery of Designing Women, a comedy paired with Murphy on CBS’s schedule to compete with ABC’s Monday Night Football. Murphy’s character took it a step further, though. She was a human tempest, a ruthless dervish whirling through prime time.

  Threaded through the series are passing references to af
fairs with famous men and wild drinking sprees in Murphy’s pre-rehab days. She has been banned from the White House and jailed for refusing to reveal a source. Murphy fires a new secretary every episode because no can satisfy her standards. She regularly taunts the religious right and dresses down misogynists (such as the comedian character in one episode based on Andrew Dice Clay). Murphy wants to work, and play, as hard as the men around her—or harder. In the early episode “Soul Man,” she hears that uptight old-school anchorman Jim Dial is taking male colleagues to a formal event at his all-men’s club. “I don’t get to go for one reason and one reason only,” she fumes. “A pathetic little . . .” she pauses, holding her fingers an inch apart, “. . . Y chromosome.” Seething, she eventually schemes her way in by digging up scandalous secrets on the club’s board members. Next thing you know, she is striding into the inner sanctum wearing a houndstooth jacket, a brown silk tie, and a sly grin.

  Murphy looked like a feminist and acted like a feminist, but the writing team responsible for “Soul Man,” Tom Seeley and Norman Gunzenhauser, insisted at the time that the episode wasn’t meant to convey a political point. “We didn’t write that to make a statement. Here is this headstrong broad who wants to get into this all-men’s club, and that’s a great situation.”

  The scenario resonated with plenty of viewers who enjoyed seeing a fearless woman negotiate the minefield of daily indignities and compromises of the typical sexist eighties workplace. “I think I was writing about women I knew, I was writing about myself, I was writing about Candice,” English says now, sitting at her desk. “I didn’t see Murphy as radical, but I saw her as definitely filling a need. That character did not exist on television then, especially in comedy. Murphy was living her life without any regrets, without any guilt, without any man in her life helping her out of tough situations. This was a woman that we all wanted to be.”