Before Lucy or Archie, She Invented the Sitcom

[Zoneboy]

Oct. 6--Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "I wasn't the one who got us out of the Depression. It was Molly Goldberg."

Just in time, here she comes again.

The wonderfully entertaining documentary "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg" chronicles the life and times of pioneering TV actress Gertrude Berg. Since 1929 on radio, and from 1949 to 1955 on TV, she was the embodiment of the down-to-earth Jewish mother of an immigrant family in the Bronx borough of New York City. It debuted on radio two months after the stock market crash with Molly opening the show by gossiping with her neighbors, who yelled, "Yoo hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!" out the window of the tenement apartment across the alley.

The family was made up of Molly, Jake, Rosalie, Sammy and Uncle David, with the rent at $78 a month.

Berg, a savvy businesswoman, not only played the lead but wrote some 12,000 scripts, hired and fired the actors and cooked the meals seen on the show. Debuting on radio two months after the stock market crash, she reminded America that everything was going to be OK and that we all could get by on very little.

She literally invented the situation comedy as a television genre -- leading directly to "I Love Lucy," "All in the Family" and all the rest. Her window became the urban equivalent to the backyard fence across America.

Although she taught America about Jewish immigrants, the viewers came to think of the Goldbergs as any American family.

At the stage door of a Broadway theater in 1960, I saw Berg emerge to the cheers of throngs of well-wishers. The biggest rock star today would hardly surpass such attention. The TV show "The Goldbergs" had been off the air for years. She was starring in a play called "A Majority of One" as a Jewish widow opposite Sir Cedric Hardwicke as a Japanese businessman with whom she becomes romantically involved, despite her hatred of the Japanese in World War II. (When it was made into a movie, Rosalind Russell played the part).

In 2009, even more people have lost track of Gertrude Berg's place in American entertainment history. The documentary, written and directed by Aviva Kempner, will do much to correct that. Kempner has a knack for taking a life and making it a microcosm of its time. She did this brilliantly with "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" in the world of baseball. She does it again here.

Born Gertrude Edelstein in New York City in 1899, the woman who was to become Molly Goldberg had a father who insisted she help him manage hotels in the Catskills and Florida. She wanted to be an actress. It didn't hurt that her husband became a millionaire via his instant-coffee business. (The film errs, however, in claiming he invented instant coffee.)

Her radio show, and subsequent TV incarnation, was totally her own creation. She wrote the radio show that ran 15 minutes Mondays through Fridays and then the weekly, 30-minute TV show. She got up at 6 a.m. to write the day's script, often at a New York library where she was eventually thrown out because she acted out the parts as she wrote them. She planned to hire another actress to play Molly, but thousands of letters poured in when it was announced. She had a hit, and she was the star.

Although she was folksy and plain on the show, Berg liked to shop at major department stores in real life. She became the Oprah of her time as her empire expanded to a daily newspaper column, jigsaw puzzles and other merchandise. Actors like Steve McQueen and Anne Bancroft broke through with small parts on her show.

She was off the air for more than a year, and "I Love Lucy" took her time slot, but she eventually came back.

Disaster hit when Philip Loeb, the actor who played her TV husband, was blacklisted from film and TV during the 1950s Red Scare hysteria. When she stuck by him, believing he was unjustly accused, she also was listed as a "Red sympathizer." The 1976 movie "The Front," starring Woody Allen, included a character based on Loeb.

When she returned to the air with a newly cast husband, the public failed to adjust. Further trouble came when the network insisted the Goldbergs follow the trend in America and move from the Bronx to the suburbs. It was never the same.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is among those who explain what this show meant to them during their growing-up years. Others include Norman Lear and, more cynically, Edward Asner.

Gertrude Berg changed the way America thought as well as the way it looked at television.

When Molly Goldberg was told her family would someday be eating off gold plates, she replied: "Very nice -- but will it taste any better?"


http://www.californiachronicle.com/a...s/yb/136135297

[catlover79]

I'd love to see "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg" - it sounds awesome. It's just a shame that Philip Loeb later killed himself as a result of the Red scare. Good for Gertrude Berg for standing by him.

[OH Nuts!]

Thank you for this very informative and interesting article Charles! You are always doing nice & helpful things like this, & I for one appreciate it!

[catlover79]

Originally Posted by OH Nuts!

Thank you for this very informative and interesting article Charles! You are always doing nice & helpful things like this, & I for one appreciate it!

I second that!!

[Mr. Television]

Great article Charles. It's too bad more people don't remember her today. I've always been interested in the true pioneers of television and Gertrude Berg was certainly one of them.

[TV Knowledge Fan]

...wasn't a "traditional" situation comedy in the sense of what we know the form to be these days; when it began as a nightly 15 minute radio series in 1929 (and later as a daytime "soap opera" hybrid, until 1945), it was basically a serialized drama with "humorous" moments inbetween the crisises and emotional situations the Goldberg family faced every day. There was never a studio audience or "laugh track", as Gertrude Berg insisted listeners and viewers could do the reacting themselves in their living rooms. When the show was brought to TV in 1949 in a half-hour format, it was still a "dramedy", and performed live. This is why very few examples of the series from 1949 through '54 exist: nobody was rebroadcasting "kinescopes" of the episodes after they were seen only once on stations that couldn't carry the original live telecasts, and were either thrown out or eventually destroyed by the network.

When Philip Loeb was "blacklisted" in 1951, Gertrude Berg refused to release him from the show, and General Foods {Sanka} dropped the series on CBS after two seasons as a result, as did the network {"I LOVE LUCY" did not replace "THE GOLDBERGS", as it aired on Mondays at 9:00pm(et) in the fall of '51; Berg's series was on at 9:30 Monday nights from 1949 through '51, and General Foods replaced it in the fall of '51 with a current events panel show, "IT'S NEWS TO ME"}. When NBC was interested in carrying "THE GOLDBERGS" a year later, they warned Gertrude that either Philip Loeb be dropped from the cast, or she and the show would never appear on TV again. To save the show, Loeb "quit", but Mrs. Berg paid him a full season's salary as he had trouble finding other employment because of the "blacklist". He committed suicide in the summer of 1955 because NOBODY would give him a job, and became despondent over his situation.

By the time Robert H. Harris "officially" replaced Loeb as "Jake Goldberg" in 1953, the series was in trouble. It wasn't a success as an early evening 15 minute three nights a week on NBC, and DuMont couldn't find a sponsor when it aired on their network in 1954 (their financial situation was such that they couldn't afford to "sustain" the show for a long period, and it went off after six months).

It was then that Gertrude Berg made a fatal mistake: she decided to film the show for syndication [through Guild Films] in the 1955-'56 season, and move the focus of the storyline by having the Goldbergs move from the Bronx to the suburban community of "Haverville". The problem was, situation comedies had become so "homogenized" by 1955 {with the inclusion of "laugh tracks"}, there wasn't any room for an "ethnic" family to exist in suburbia. In fact, some local stations carried the 39 filmed episodes of the show under the title "MOLLY", claiming the original title was "too ethnic". In an era of 'THE ADVENTURES OF OZZIE & HARRIET" and "FATHER KNOWS BEST", there was no room on TV for "THE GOLDBERGS" anymore...and the ratings confirmed it. Gertrude Berg knew it, and quietly ended the series in 1956.

[born2late]

I only recently have seen some episodes of The Goldbergs. They were the later episodes. I enjoyed the flavor of the show, and want to see the older episodes before they moved. She was truly a pioneer, ahead of her time.

[Marvo301]

Great article! Gertrude Berg truly was a pioneer both in radio and television! I'm glad this documentary was made. Gertrude Berg's contribution to both radio and television should be documented and remembered.

[Coffeecup]

Born in 1899 and the radio series started in 1929. As a 30 year old woman, she had a lot of drive.