The Only Girl: My Life and Times on the Masthead of Rolling Stone

by Robin Green

  I’d been watching TV one day and seen a show in which one character calls to another, “Emergency! Emergency! Get the truck!” For the first time, it had occurred to me that someone had actually written those lines and I’d thought, I could do that, I could write that. “Emergency! Emergency! Get the truck!”

  I had two weeks to write the script and I did. I sent it in and waited and fretted until word came a couple of days later—it stank. John said, however, that I’d have another chance, that he knew from my short stories at Iowa that I could do this, that I should come in and they’d give me notes.

  What they told me changed everything. What I’d written had no subtext, they said, it was all, as they called it, “on the nose.” What they wanted was the tone I’d find in Updike’s short stories; I should read “Here Come the Maples,” among others, and take my cue from those. They’d take over the A story, they said, and I would rewrite the other two. I left with my tail between my legs.

  I bought a collection of Updike’s short stories at Book Soup on Sunset, read them, and spent the next weekend in my office at California, focusing as I had rarely focused before. I was desperate to succeed. I did what I had done in college when I aped Hemingway to write my first short story: I wrote the scenes as I felt Updike, an astute observer of suburban subtext, would have done.

  In the B story I wrote, a young couple is looking for a nanny for their new baby. No one is good enough, for good reasons. Finally, a candidate appears who’s educated, experienced—perfect. The young father is delighted, but the new mother says the young woman seemed hostile. “Hostile?” the exasperated husband (Adam Arkin) says. “Did she say anything hostile? Did she do anything hostile?” The wife sticks to her guns but the husband realizes that she is having trouble relinquishing the care of their baby to someone else. His understanding and compassion loosen her resistance, and in the last scene we see the lovely nanny in place with their baby.

  Okay, it wasn’t Ibsen, but it wasn’t “Emergency! Emergency! Get the truck!” either. It was subtext. And the word hostile itself was funny, reflecting psychobabblic jargon current to the times and funny, too, repeated so often. My education in TV had begun.

  I messengered the rewritten half-script to Josh and John on Monday morning (no e-mail then) and the call came in a few hours: they loved it! I was hired! They needed me right away! When could I start?

  On that same phone call, John asked me what I made at the magazine, and I told him, about forty thousand a year. I’d be making three times that, he said, and in only twenty weeks. That’s got to feel pretty good, he said, and it did. But not as good as when California publisher/editor Alan Bennett came by my cubicle to congratulate me—begrudgingly, I thought—and asked what I’d be making. I told him and added, knowing it would gall him, that the ironic thing was, I wasn’t doing it for the money at all.

  Which actually proved to be true. I loved this work so much I would have done it for free, though of course I never mentioned as much during negotiations for a new contract.

  There would be a ten-week trial period on the show, after which John and Josh would decide whether to keep me on. I was directed to the building across from theirs, a squat, sixties-era motel-type structure that housed my office, which turned out to be a dark, dank room with shag carpet, a crappy old desk, and a ratty couch. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. An office with a couch? Actual walls and a door that shut? What more could a person want?

  I left my few things there—purse, Updike book, half-script—and went down the dark inner hallway to introduce myself, as I’d been told to do, to the only other writer on the show. And there she was, Barbara Hall, a small blond woman in priestly clothes—black cardigan with a white chemise at the V-neck—sitting ramrod straight, her hands clasped before her on her own bare desk, a stern expression on her face.

  My immediate response was fear. She looked severe, forbidding, reminding me of no one more than the mean-ass mother in the film of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, whom we also come upon at her desk. But when I said hi, Barbara snapped to as if coming out of a trance and welcomed me in with a radiant smile.

  We’d have lunch together every day after that, Barbara and I, and not in the commissary, with its cafeteria line, institutional tables, and trays, but in the real restaurant next door where Lew Wasserman and Sidney Sheinberg took their lunch, where Harrison Ford or Michael Douglas could be sitting in the next booth. That was Barbara’s style.

  I learned she was a Southern girl, born, raised, and schooled in Virginia, who had come out to LA after college to join her older sister, Karen, a writer on the sitcom Newhart. Whip-smart and drop-dead funny, Barbara was fifteen years my junior, but, as supervising producer, she was my boss. An actual female, a tough little number, seemingly fearless—though she admitted that it was partly fear I’d seen that first day, her first job on an hour drama (as opposed to a half-hour, three-camera comedy), and with the exalted title of supervising producer at that. I was no longer the only girl.

  John and Josh called us the girls and we called them the boys. The boys worked out all the stories and we girls wrote a good many of them, rewriting freelance scripts when needed. We were expected on the set when our episodes were being filmed to keep watch over the tone in which our words were spoken, and we were allowed to sit in on the dailies in that pre-digital age when shows were filmed, edited, and spliced together manually with reel-to-reel equipment. Each day, the previous day’s filming would be screened in an actual theater on the lot with Josh and John, us girls, the editor for that episode, and the line producer (also female) attending.

  The first script I (half) wrote was also episode one of the series, directed by a prestigious Brit who did quality work for the BBC and PBS. We filed in and sat down to watch the first day’s dailies, which were horrible. The scenes, mine included, fell flat, and things that were supposed to be funny weren’t. There was a terrible silence. John and Josh conferred, then left the screening room. I felt my career was over before it had even begun.

  But I was wrong. The boys fired the Brit and talked their director friend and former colleague Thomas Carter into coming aboard. My stuff was suddenly good, smart, funny. They explained that a British sensibility didn’t seem to work with this material—the rhythm was wrong and Brits tended to throw jokes away. It became a guiding principle of mine in the years of hiring directors that followed: no Brits!

  I wish I’d listened to myself years later when the Brit, Stephen Frears, showed interest in directing a pilot Mitch and I had written, a charming-if-I-do-say-so-myself hour called Skip Tracer about a low-level detective in Mar Vista, California. It was a solid script, got no notes from either the studio or the network—a rarity.

  Having been nominated for an Oscar for The Queen, Frears was going to be in town anyway for the Academy Awards. He loved the script (though not so much the actor CBS had on contract and insisted we use), and who was going to say no to hiring an artist like Stephen Frears? Not, apparently, us.

  The pilot was a disaster. We were at a wedding in Topanga Canyon the day it was tested in Las Vegas (testing is a brutal process in which Americans are lured away from the slots in Vegas or off the streets of Midtown Manhattan to watch and judge new TV shows, first with manual dials that record interest or lack thereof, then in discussion groups afterward), and we got a call from CBS that there would be no conference call about the test as previously scheduled. We never heard from them about the show again.

  My second year, Barbara got a job on Moonlighting, starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, and I went to David Chase’s Almost Grown as an executive story editor with a beautiful office in a leafy part of the lot that was also on the tram route of the Universal Studios tour. I could hear the guides on their mics lowering their voices to hushed tones as they rode by. “We want to be quiet here because inside those bungalows are screenwriters busy at work and we don’t want to disturb them.”

  David had his offices in the swank building where the
boys had been, but his was a corner office downstairs overlooking the guard gate (where he and another producer were to witness just outside the office window the shooting and killing of a guard by a maniac stalking Mel Gibson). David didn’t run his show the way Josh and John had theirs, where they worked out all the stories and the writer got teleplay-by credit only. Here, the writers were expected to be part of the story process, and it was here that I first experienced the congeniality of the story room, David telling Hollywood stories so hilarious your stomach ached from laughter, writer Andy Schneider one day somehow jumping from a complete standstill to land squarely atop David’s desk—I forget in illustration of what.

  It was glorious fun and I loved the characters and the actors and even the stuff I wrote and rewrote, loved blasting music in my bungalow—the Cowboy Junkies and the beautiful Irish folk songs of Mary Black on a CD David had given me as a present. But the fun was short-lived because only ten episodes of the thirteen ordered aired before the show was canceled in February due to low ratings opposite The NBC Monday Night Movie and Monday Night Football.

  My education in television was only beginning. I was hired on a David Milch show for ABC, Capital News, about a DC newspaper, and experienced a new kind of show-runner, the archetype of the addictive personality for whom scripts were a last-minute emergency, unlike David and the boys, orderly sorts who were home every night by seven for dinner with their families.

  Milch had a reputation as a wild man, a reformed heroin junkie turned gambling addict who pissed in the potted palm in his office and later pissed away his entire TV fortune at the track. Those who worked for him were as chattel. I’d shut the door to my office; he’d open it. I—and everyone else—would write scripts and he’d use them to rewrite, not writing per se but pacing with a rolled-up script in hand, improvising dialogue while his secretary dutifully typed every precious word. He’d still be rewriting on the set.

  Network execs thought he was a genius, then and later, this despite Capital News being canceled after airing only three episodes, the first of other Milch shows to be canceled.

  Immediately after Capital News, although I’d been in the business less than three years, CBS execs in their wisdom considered me ready to create my own show and paired me with Doug Cramer, a seasoned producer who had an idea for a show and who, with Aaron Spelling and other (to me) old-timers, was responsible for bringing such (to me) creaky shows as Dynasty and The Love Boat to what was then called the small screen. What did I have to do with shows like that?

  My agent was Elliott Webb, another industry archetype memorialized in the Doonesbury cartoon as Sid Kibbitz (he was Gary Trudeau’s agent too), “widely acknowledged as the first agent to use the car fax,” according to press materials for a film version of the cartoon strip (though Barbara Hall’s sister Karen, both of them his clients then, called him Agent Orange because of the peculiar hue of his hair). I knew pairing up with Cramer was a bad idea, but I let Elliott fast-talk me into it, another example (my first of many in TV) of the chicken-shittedness of not listening to that little voice inside me.

  My experience so far had shown me that in TV, the writer was the boss—the boys, Chase, Milch—but here, in our offices far out in the broiling vastness of the San Fernando Valley near Six Flags Magic Mountain, I was anything but. I ran the writers’ room, some distance from the production office and stages, where Doug Cramer ran everything else. My worst fears were soon realized, starting with the fate of Don Novello (the hip Father Guido Sarducci on Saturday Night Live), whom we’d cast as the lead and whose hair, I was horrified to discover on the first day of shooting, Cramer had had snipped off so that he now looked like someone else entirely—a discount-shoe salesman at an Akron mall, maybe. When the network hated him in dailies, Cramer happily replaced him with Dom Irrera, a (to me) square and cheesy comedian.

  All six episodes aired that summer with ratings that didn’t encourage a fall renewal. That was the bad, if expected, news. But the good news, what turned out to be very, very good news, was that another summer show had made it: Northern Exposure, created by the team of Falsey and Brand. I was hired on and it was where I spent the next five years.

  Northern Exposure was a fish-out-of-water tale about a doctor from Brooklyn who’d gone to medical school on Alaska’s dime with the promise that he’d work off the debt by practicing medicine there. He’d been thinking Anchorage, but he was sent to a little town called Cicely in the middle of utter Alaskan nowhere. As soon as I saw the moose stumbling into the town and down Main Street in the opening credits and heard the calypso-y music that played over, I fell in love with it.

  I had a new used car by then, a wonderful little white two-door BMW 318i with the world’s tightest turn ratio, and I didn’t at all mind the commute from my new house in the hills of West Hollywood to the Lantana complex in Santa Monica where the writing and postproduction were done (the show was filmed near Seattle), forty-five minutes at rush hour but fourteen minutes at three o’clock in the morning, a drive I once made to pick up a script for what reason I can’t quite remember.

  At first it was mostly me and Henry Bromell and a freelancer or two, but for the second season, the boys changed their way of working. Now you were expected to meet with Josh and pitch him story ideas (John was busy launching another show, eventually taking Henry with him), and if and when the ideas were approved, you were to meet with fellow writers in the conference room downstairs to work out the beats of the A, B, and C stories, then marry them together into a script outline.

  A couple weeks in, Josh asked my opinion about some writers they were thinking of hiring: Andy Schneider, whom I knew from Almost Grown, and his wife and now writing partner, Diane Frolov, a former ballet dancer. I was familiar with their work—CBS had brought them onto my show with Cramer when its ratings began to flag—and told him what was true: they were good writers and very good with story, but he should watch out for a certain pat quality in their work.

  The team was hired and things seemed to be going smoothly when one day I was called into the producers’ suite and told that in generating stories and beating them out, I was not performing at a supervising-producer level (which, now that I had a created-by credit on my own show, had become my title). It was a horrible moment. I was told that I could leave the show or accept the lesser title of co-producer. I elected to stay, though a lesser title meant a reduction in pay of three thousand dollars an episode.

  And I was glad I’d stayed on because the demotion had, for me, unexpected and momentous consequences. It was at this time that Mitch called me up—he had seen the show that summer and knew I was working there now and wanted to know about TV writing. We agreed to meet and I told him about the trouble I was having coming up with ideas. Maybe he could help me.

  He was still working at the PR company in Century City and later recounted how he’d gone out into the plaza outside at lunch hour, sat at the edge of a tree planter, and focused with all his might, just as I’d done rewriting my first TV script years before. He came up with two really good ideas, and I took them to Josh as my own, his and one I had come up with. Josh loved all three. I saw, or imagined that I saw, the hair on his arm beneath his shirtsleeve stir with excited interest.

  At least I had started, with Mitch’s unheralded help, to redeem myself at work, and Mitch now began writing scripts with me. He proved to be great at dialogue. He was a natural. And it’s so much better to work with someone than go it alone—the other person can be up when you’re down, fluid when you’re blocked.

  It wasn’t until years and years later, after I’d been fired from The Sopranos, after Andy and Diane had come on that show for the final season, rendering me and Mitch less necessary there in David’s eyes, that I learned the truth about what had happened at Northern Exposure so many years before: not long after they’d been hired, they complained about me to the producers, said they were carrying a disproportionate share of the work, that they should be bumped up from supervising to co-executi
ve producers because they wouldn’t stay on with the same title as me. The producers, who now had two shows on the air and yet another in the works, didn’t want to set a precedent for everybody and his brother to demand higher titles, with concomitant greater pay, and they had solved the problem by simply bumping me down.

  That could be the end of a chapter on an education in television and its vicissitudes, but there is more to the Northern Exposure saga, at least, and Andy and Diane’s part in it, because of what happened when David Chase came back into the picture.

  We had done three great years of the show; it won all of us two Peabodys, two Golden Globes, and nominations for thirty-two Emmys, of which we won seven (one of them mine, shared, for Best Show, Drama). But most of it came to a screeching halt when Josh and John decided they would leave the show to pursue other projects and let other people take over. Andy and Diane were the logical candidates, but both the studio and network felt shaky about them because they had yet to executive-produce a show and Northern Exposure was prime property. Andy and Diane suggested that David Chase come on to help.

  David was free now, having worked on one of Josh and John’s other shows, I’ll Fly Away, which, after a two-year run, hadn’t been renewed. David had told me he hated Northern Exposure, that it pandered to its audience, “practically came out of the TV set to lick your face to make you like it,” but when the studio and network called, with Andy and Diane’s happy endorsement, he answered. It was to be his first million-dollar-plus yearly payday.

  What Andy and Diane hadn’t realized was that David’s condition for being hired was that he be the boss—only one captain of a ship, et cetera. They were devastated. “We invited him into our tent,” Andy said, “and he stole our camel.” Still, they accepted the situation, and we all did some good work and won a few awards and had some fun—though the show’s star, Rob Morrow, quit after a conflict with David, and without his character, the show devolved into something else not nearly as good, limping on with considerably less joy, at least for me and Mitch, for its remaining two years.