Meredith Baxter Birney article from 1985 People

[TJ]

Source: People Weekly, Feb 4, 1985 v23 p88(3).

Title: For new mom Meredith Baxter Birney there's nothing like a baby boom to strengthen Family Ties.
Author: Steven Dougherty

Magazine Collection: 28K0560
Electronic Collection: A3631909
RN: A3631909

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1985 Time, Inc.

When last seen, Elyse Keaton, former whole-earth mother on TV's Family ties, has gone into labor at a most unmanageable moment--while crooning on camera during a fund raiser at her husband's public television station, WKS. A blizzard has stranded spouse Steve at home, where he witnessed his wife's labor on TV. With pledge-week calls lighting up the WKS switchboards, Elyse found herself surrounded by folks who knew nothing about the birthing of babies, apparently having missed an earlier episode of Family Ties in which Elyse's Lamaze class was invited to the Keaton living room for a workout. This week's episode of Family Ties promises to bring Elyse's two-part labor to a happy conclusion: Andrew Keaton is born in what No. 1 Keaton son Alex calls the "non-medical, nonprofessional, nonprofit" setting of his father's office at WKS. The pledge-week birth helped raise $70,000 for the station. And NBC, the very-much-for-its-own-profit network that is promoting Family Ties, hopes for a windfall rating of its own. As executive producer Gary David Goldberg
says, "We knew this was going to be a fertile area for us, so to speak."

In her third season as Elyse, Meredith Baxter Birney knows all about the ties that bind families. When her character gives birth on January 31, the prime-time event amounts to a rerun of reality. Just four months ago Meredith, 37, and real-life husband David Birney, 45, star of the stillborn ABC series Glitter, became parents of twins: Peter David Edwin and his younger-by-a-minute sister, Mollie Elizabeth. A baby boomer herself, Birney is doting on her maternal role. She brings her infants to the set daily; she even nursed them during an interview conducted between Family Ties takes. The prospect of autumn parentage doesn't daunt Meredith or David. "We had children at every other stage. Why not this one?" says Meredith. Particularly when the couple has enlisted the services of a full-time governess, Donna Holloran, 26.
"Donna does the work, I have the fun," acknowledges Meredith.

Like a lot of things in Meredith's life, the October 2 birth of her real-life twins can be traced to television. She and husband David met in 1972 as co-stars of the long defunct CBS sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie. The actors "got together right away" off set and were married in 1974. the long-running marriage has produced one other spin-off--10-year-old daughter Kate. The Birney brood also includes Meredith's two children from a previous marriage,
Ted, 17, and Eva, 15. As a woman who was first pregnant at 19, Meredith says, "Being older [and a new mother], I find myself less selfish with my time than when I was a young girl."

The birth of Peter and Mollie was not fraught with blizzards or stranded husbands, but with a dramatic buildup for the twins' cesarean section birth at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. A blood test early in pregnancy revealed high protein levels, suggesting risk of brain damage or spina bifida. Then a sonogram showed that the protein levels signaled not birth defects, but
that Meredith was carrying two, and possibly three, babies.

While Meredith passes lightly over the problems of her pregnancy, David Birney is downright Donahue in his sensitive enactment of the modern American father. Taking the part seriously from the start, David launched an exhaustive research project, which convinced him that "we were clearly involved in a
high-risk situation. All twins are high risk." In the seventh month of his wife's pregnancy, David called a family meeting to share the results of his study, and the doctor's conclusion--that to avoid a premature birth, Meredith should spend the last two months in bed. But her absence literally brought a
change of climate to the set. During her pregnancy Meredith has requested that the studio be kept extremely cool. "The stage was like a meat locker," Ties co-star Justine Bateman says. "We all wore down parkas and stuff. But when she was gone, we really missed her."

What David Birney missed was sleep. Toward the end of those two months, he came home from the Glitter set to a series of false alarms. "For about a week," he recalls, "Meredith would wake me up, we would go to the hospital at 2 a.m. She'd be released at 5. We'd go home. I would go to work, come home and start the whole thing over again. I was a basket case." The hours after the birth were a different story. "After I went in the nursery and changed Peter for the first time and held Mollie, I left the hospital, got into my car, put on a Vivaldi tape and cried all the way home," he says.

For Meredith the twins have become a priority project. "I would rather be here in the blue room," she says while breast-feeding them in a nursery erected near the Family Ties set. "I have to work harder on the set because so much of my mind is back here. I feel I'm missing something when I leave." As she nurses, Meredith pries Peter's fist from Mollie's face.

Having lost 12-1/2 pounds, Meredith was obliged to wear special padding for the two-part Family Ties labor. A pair of twin boys, Tyler James Merriman and Garrett Joseph Merriman, have been hired alternately to play newborn Andrew. Born last November 30, the twins were sought out by a casting director who heard of their imminent birth from a member of the Los Angeles club called
Mothers of Twins. Each is paid $141 per show and by law spends only two hours a day on the lot. But judging from the reaction on the set, the pair could well have earned overtime. After receiving news of Birney's pregnancy, the writers sent her congratulatory flowers with a note that read: "Thanks for all the new story possibilities."

[FamilyTiesFan]

This is a really good article. Where do you get these articles from?