Meta Rosenberg's squeaky clean LA Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
write and produce HBO's "The Sopranos," called Rosenberg "a
complete original. And totally, absolutely fearless."
(Not exactly.)
Meta Rosenberg, 89; Agent, 'Rockford Files' Producer
BYLINE: Myrna Oliver, Times Staff Writer
Meta Rosenberg, Emmy-winning executive producer of the
durable television series "The Rockford Files," talent agent
and exhibited photographer, has died. She was 89.
Rosenberg died Dec. 30 in her sleep of unspecified causes at
her Beverly Hills home.
Actor James Garner, one of Rosenberg's clients, brought her
into producing in her late 50s when he asked her to work
with him on "The Rockford Files." They created a hit series,
starring Garner as a private eye, that ran on NBC from 1974
to 1980.
"I was extremely fond of Meta," Garner said in a statement
after her death. "Our working relationship was a great
success and I will always cherish the wonderful memories."
David Chase, who wrote for "Rockford" and went on to create,
write and produce HBO's "The Sopranos," called Rosenberg "a
complete original. And totally, absolutely fearless."
"Those snarling Universal apparatchiks that had the rest of
us on the lot cowed, she ate them for breakfast," he said in
a statement. "She led an extraordinary adventure of a life
through the force of her personality, her genius and her
charm. She was a successful woman in a 'man's' industry."
One of Rosenberg's Emmys was for being executive producer of
the 1980 television movie "Off the Minnesota Strip," which
Chase wrote.
Rosenberg grew up in Los Angeles, and traced her lifelong
love of storytelling to hearing stories from "The History of
English Literature" read by her father, a real estate agent.
She graduated from Hollywood High School at the age of 15
with hopes of attending Wellesley or Smith College. When her
mother insisted that she stay closer to home and attend
UCLA, she rebelled and went to work at a Hollywood
bookstore -- learning even more about literature and
writers.
She soon landed a job as a story editor in the literary
department of 20th Century Fox and after working briefly in
a New York agency, became head of the story department at
Paramount.
"There were no women executives at that time, so I was kind
of a freak," she told The Times in 2001. "But because I was
young enough and arrogant enough, I got along."
After marrying talent agent George "Rosey" Rosenberg in
1947, she began working with him, representing writers and
actors. She also sold innovative series to television
networks, including "Julia," starring Diahann Carroll as an
African American nurse and single mother; "Hogan's Heroes,"
a comedy set in a World War II German prison camp; and "Ben
Casey," among the first series showcasing medicine as drama.
Throughout her career, Rosenberg pursued an interest in
photography -- collecting the works of internationally known
photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams and
Irving Penn and aiming her own Leica camera at street scenes
from Los Angeles to Paris.
One of her favorite subjects was children. "You get an
immediate response of a kind of humanity from small children
that you don't get from adults. They are absolutely
themselves in front of the camera. There is no facade," she
told The Times in 2001.
That year, 30 of Rosenberg's black-and-white images were
exhibited in a one-woman show at the Peter Fetterman Gallery
in Santa Monica.
Although she never considered herself a professional
photographer, her photos have sold for as much as $3,000.
Widowed in 1969, Rosenberg is survived by her daughter, Amy
Oie, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
A memorial service is pending. Contributions in her memory
may be sent to the Trinity Care Hospice Foundation, 2601
Airport Drive, Suite 230, Torrance, CA 90505, or to Helping
Our Mobile Elderly, 1020 Rose Ave., Venice, CA 90291.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: META ROSENBERG "There were no women
executives at that time, so I was kind of a freak."
PHOTOGRAPHER: Michael Tercha Los Angeles Times
Stephen Bowie
them to get into this, but I have to wonder if an outlet like the LA
Times knows about Meta's friendly witness status and doesn't deem it
newsworthy, or if they're simply not researching much beyond the press
release the family puts out. If you Google-search just "Meta
Rosenberg" you don't get much HUAC stuff since she was using the middle
name Reis (from her first husband, the director Irving Reis) back then,
so maybe it's ignorance. On the other hand, I pulled out Roy Huggins'
LA Times obit from 2002, and his informer status is not mentioned even
though I think it was more widely known. Certainly in an obit of this
length, it would be noted if the subject had been blacklisted, so I
think they could be justly accused of sanitizing it if it's a
deliberate omission.
However, as I look at the unfortunate photo that the Times has added
since this obit was first posted, along with its unintentionally (?)
hilarious caption, I do feel like Meta is receiving a little cosmic
justice:
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-rosenberg11jan11,1,4426841.story?coll=la-news-obituaries
(you have to click on the thumbnail of the photo)
Hyfler/Rosner
"Stephen Bowie" <stephe...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1105483807.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> The trades are so perfunctory with their obits that I
> wouldn't expect
> them to get into this, but I have to wonder if an outlet
> like the LA
> Times knows about Meta's friendly witness status and
> doesn't deem it
> newsworthy, or if they're simply not researching much
> beyond the press
I think you're right. I found with a little digging a
number of puff pieces about her photography and then this
little nugget in a review of Victor Navasky's book on the
blacklist in the Wash Post. (1981)
"Having heard rumors of a psychiatrist who convinced a lot
of patients to become informers, Navasky tracked down the
man, Phil Cohen, who when interviewed in 1974 was teaching
photography at an arts institute in Santa Barbara. Cohen had
many patients, including the first three who cooperated with
HUAC after Larry Parks (acter Sterling Hayden, the writer
Richard Collins and agent Meta Rosenberg) and became
informers. Cohen was not a psychiatrist, but a lay analyst
without a graduate degree, who had been a Communist Party
member but became disenchanted with it. Cohen became the
"in" analyst among the Hollywood left crowd; many of his
patients were party members who were permitted to see Cohen
despite the general party ban on any kind of bourgeois
analysis or therapy. Cohen told Navasky he neither informed
on his patients to the FBI nor convinced them to name names,
and that his later work as a police officer had nothing to
do with his work as an analyst. However, the major HUAC
investigator, William Wheeler, told Navasky that Cohen, with
whom he socialized, helped him by "conditioning any patients
supboenaed by HUAC to testify."
Here's a Tikkun article from 1995 that also mentions her:
I'll begin with the relevant paragrah, although the entire
article is fascinating and worth a read
"In the very odd way that classic film noir mixes
disillusionment with
social breakdown and exaltation of the loner, even "The
Rockford Files"--the
leading detective show in reruns by a long shot--is part of
the Jewish
blacklist diaspora. Its co-producer, Roy Huggins, and its
lead writer, Meta
Rosenberg, were among Hollywood's friendly witnesses who
decided to make peace with the witch-hunters in order to
keep working. The utterly charming JamesGarner, Noah Beery,
and the rest of the cast (especially Stuart Margolin, who
played the small-time grifter Angel Martin) face a world of
incompetent cops,
neurotic mobsters, conspiratorial CIA agents, and cruel fate
with all the
effort they can manage to create their own community of
sorts. In "Rockford"'s
better moments, we see shadows of shadows: the noir
detective of the 1940s,
continuously beaten, anti-heroic in his unwillingness to
glamorize himself and
his profession, lost but never truly forlorn in the dark
world of modern
reality"
October 31, 1995
HEADLINE: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Jew: An
Exploration of Popular Culture
BYLINE: Buhle, Paul
The Hollywood Blacklist and the Jew: An Exploration of
Popular Culture
Paul Buhle, who founded the Oral History of the American
Left at New York
University, is interviewing entertainment blacklistees for a
book about Jewish
influences on American popular culture. His latest published
volume is Images
of American Radicalism (Christopher House), a massive
pictorial history.
When Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota demanded in
February that
National Public Radio turn over the personnel files on all
its employees to the
Senate subcommittee on communications he chairs, a small
stir passed through
the ranks of civil libertarians, all the way up to The New
York Times.
Withdrawn quietly after objections, Pressler's move was
perhaps only a trial
balloon in a larger war over the use of tax monies for
agencies dubbed
"liberal" (however contradictory the real evidence) by the
new Republican
Congress. But what sequence of events might have been set in
motion if NPR had
actually turned over those dossiers?
Jewish old-timers--who remember better than anyone the
McCarthy era's
blacklist that played a central role in the film industry
and television for
several decades--heard ominously familiar signals in the
Gingrichites'
rhetoric. Pressler's offensive, together with the recent
speech by Barbra
Streisand at Harvard University defending liberalism and
asserting the right of
Hollywood celebs to speak out on political questions, evoked
some vivid
memories of 1947: Katharine Hepburn decrying the emerging
militarization of the
country and the planet, Dixiecrat J. Parnell Thomas chairing
the House
Committee on UnAmerican Activities, and the Motion Picture
Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals pronouncing a universal ban
on any writer,
actor, director, producer, or technician unwilling to sign a
loyalty oath.
One subtext of McCarthyism, nominally the pursuit of
"communist
subversion," was simply to stay in line or else. An ordinary
person resisting
the demands of the era could kiss a career, and in many
cases a secure identity
in mainstream American life, goodbye. Not very surprisingly,
at least a hundred
homosexuals were fired for every political "subversive"
discovered in civil
service. A second subtext, barely disguised, was
anti-Semitism. The
message--from rural Southern barber shops to Senate
chambers--that "Jews
control Hollywood" and that Jews were poisoning America had
a special meaning
to those faced with "investigation."
To clear oneself, to resume something like a normal life, it
was never
enough to declare personal departure from the Left (most
intellectuals had
already quit or were on their way out of the Communist
Party, disillusioned by
Stalin's tyranny and Russian anti-Semitism). One had to name
names, most
especially those of intimate associates who had shared
decades of participation
in social movements. A blacklistee recently reminded me of
the race memories
stirred by the red-hunting committees. In earlier days the
czar, caliph, or
general had demanded something strikingly similar: We let
you live, Jew, if you
inform on your friends. Otherwise...
It is an apt moment, then, to go back to the scene of the
crime (or
supposed crime, for conservative think-tankers and Christian
Coalitionists
still consider McCarthyism a healthy purge of poisonous
symptoms). Ours would
hardly be the first such trip. Since the days of The
Front--written, directed,
and acted by former blacklistees, with the notable addition
of Woody Allen--and
Barbra Streisand's more popular The Way We Were, fictional
renditions of that
era have proliferated in theater, television, and film. The
American Movie
Channel and BBC are each preparing treatments of the
Hollywood Red Scare. NPR
has planned for 1996 a drama series written by Tony Kahn,
son of Gordon Kahn
(sometime scriptwriter for Roy Rogers films and author of
Hollywood on Trial),
about the blacklist's withering day-to-day effect upon a
Jewish family.
Meanwhile, a small production company is completing a
documentary of
Hollywood's Great Survivor, Abraham Polonsky, writer for
that famous Jewish
radio show, The Goldbergs, master of the 1940s film noir,
secret scripter for
television's You Are There, and most recently film-maker of
themes both racial
(Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here) and Old World Yiddish
cultural (Romance of a
Horse Thief).
This is where I come in. An odd gentile with a taste for
Jewish culture
and a dedication to oral history field work, I've spent
years interviewing aged
union activists and Yiddish newspaper editors, as well as
Jewish poets of
various generations, summer camp employees, and theatrical
types of every
left-of-center political description. The passage of time
has lately taken me
beyond the immigrant generations to a fascinating slice of
the next one
threatened with oblivion, the Jewish creators of 1930s-'50s
popular culture. In
some ways, I've realized an old fantasy of meeting my
childhood heroes--people
like Harvey Kurtzman, the late editor of Mad Comics--and
married it to the
grown-up intellectual pursuit of popular culture's deeper
meanings.
Why Jews? And why so many of them leftish Jews, the very
people who
injected into nearly anonymous popular-culture objects of my
generation's
youngest years the otherwise scarce values of egalitarianism
and social
justice? Perhaps, as the politics and economics of the
mainstream seem further
and further from possible redemption, I'm only one more
intellectual turning in
the direction of culture. But here, nevertheless, I find my
ideal: the old
Jewish radical, full of spunk and insight.
I was listening to Abe Polonsky, spry at eighty-two and
loaded with bons
mots, in the lunchroom of Neiman-Marcus, not far from his
apartment in West Los
Angeles. While models in fabulously priced designer suits
struck poses, Abe
reminded me of an American ghetto past. Three-quarters of a
century ago, in New
York, his grandmother introduced him to the narrative: Night
after night, she
read the boy what he wryly calls "Huckleberry Finn on the
Volga," American
fiction remixed, reinterpreted, and rendered into Yiddish
language and
Yiddishkeit, the diaspora sensibility. From this origin,
Polonsky developed the
intellectual reflexivity to move from one cell of American
popular culture to
another, era after era, withstanding persecutions and
transcending changes of
political or commercial fashion.
Polonsky's recollections had special and welcome resonance
for me. I had
absorbed worlds of connections between Jewishness and
popular culture, and
between Yiddish and Jewishness, almost twenty years ago as I
ambled along the
boardwalk of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with Maurice Kish, an
elderly
painter/poet (also chairman of the Yiddish Kultur Farband's
more-or-less
defunct Art Section), asking him questions about his days as
a Catskills dance
instructor, amateur boxer, and portraiturist of vanished
Coney Island settings
like the spectacularly weird Luna Park. Like his
contemporaries, Kish did not
so much intellectualize about the Yiddish/vernacular
connection as live it. But
he managed to get the message across to me shortly before
Alzheimer's
eviscerated his memories--maybe because he knew that I was
the only one
listening.
Yiddish was, of course, the vernacular language of European
Jewry for
more than five hundred years, and the language within which
Jewish socialism
and modern Jewish literature took root simultaneously. I
call it, with some
irony, the lingua franca of popular culture, and I believe
that its very
adaptability from linguistic climate to linguistic climate
conditioned the
native Yiddish speakers to "translate" their culture into
new forms, according
to the possibilities at hand.
An endless number of show business anecdotes testify equally
to the odd
and adaptive Yiddishkeit of the generations that loved the
Yiddish stage but
also shimmied in jazz parlors, watched Charlie Chaplin, went
to Hollywood, and
created some of the strangest and most interesting popular
art objects of the
twentieth century. But before we get to Hollywood, we need
to go backward a
bit, scooping up some history along the way.
As far back as the Christian Middle Ages, the historians
tell us, bits
and pieces of folk culture and humor from the surrounding
cultures were
absorbed into Yiddishkeit, notwithstanding the efforts of
religious authorities
to keep out gentile contaminants. With the passage of time,
the Yiddish
language itself continuously grew and contracted, absorbing
and casting off
different elements as its speakers traveled, adapted, and
readapted to the
problems and possibilities around them.
This experience left a curious legacy for the modern period,
when
industrialization, urbanization, and the possibility of
out-migration suddenly
swept across the seemingly timeless Jewish world. If
cultured German Jews
declared Yiddish a mongrel tongue unfit for proper
expression, Jewish writers
like Mendel Mokher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem used the
satire and wry humor
native to its inherent ironies to make larger moral points.
The Yiddishist is
always plugged into the vernacular--and a little bit
outside.
Any close reader of Sholem Aleichem will find in the
credulousness of his
Jewish masses, the rebellion of youth, and the philistinism
of the wealthy
classes several basic plot lines of the Jewish-American
novel, film, and
television drama, from The Rise of David Levinsky to "Molly
Goldberg" to
Goodbye, Columbus and beyond. For instance: Jewish immigrant
(or descendent)
grows rich in America, but realizes that he has lost his
soul in the process.
Or: Sons and daughters seek to escape vapid materialism, and
in the process
rediscover some Jewish essence. Or again: Jewish lower-class
family gets
nowhere in the material world, but sees itself through the
comic eyes of
tolerance and survival. In the very last scene of Molly, a
film made about
radio and television's Goldbergs, actress Gertrude Berg is
in bed with Philip
Loeb, who had played her husband for decades on the radio
(and would commit
suicide shortly after the TV series left the air; Berg
bravely refused to fire
him for his past left-wing connections). A small and mostly
unsuccessful
garment manufacturer, Jake complains that they will never
conquer the world. No
matter, Molly answers: "We only want to live in it." A
Jewish, Yiddish thought
if ever one was uttered.
The plots get worked and reworked over generations and from
Manhattan to
Los Angeles, as immigrant themes increasingly give way to
those of
psychological alienation and gender conflict. But the
essence remains in many
ways unchanged.
By the time the future Hollywood writers of the 1930s and
'40s were born,
between around 1905 and 1920, a last major Yiddish literary
wave (called di
Yunge, the young ones) had taken its stand on the value of
the language and on
the historic, but also malleable, culture that language
expressed. Short-story
writers and playwrights like Leon Kobrin ("the Jewish Zola")
wrote about the
pathos of slum life, with poverty, sickness, family and
sexual longing, upward
mobility, and disappointment as features of the American
bargain. Sholem
Aleichem, who actually died in the Bronx (cared for by a
young woman, whom I
interviewed in her ninety-second year, still in the Bronx),
confirmed the
Weltschmerz of the Jewish intellectual. He described himself
as Pagliacci,
amusing the masses while crying on the inside. The
melancholiac Yunge Moshe
Nadir described going to movies and watching newsreels of
mass murder in war,
wondering how Jewishness would survive both the horrors of
the war-torn Old
World and the soul-killing, seductive attractions of
America. It's still a
relevant question.
In just this atmosphere of mixed fascination and revulsion,
movies became
an extraordinarily significant factor in the ways that Jews
would affect modern
culture at large. Jews also rewrote, popularized, and to
some degree
transformed jazz, the basic American music rooted in
African-American culture.
They became a business force and creative talent behind
comic books a
generation or so later. And they penned best-seller after
best-seller,
psychologized and tantalized readers with dozens or hundreds
of Dr. Ruths and
Jonathan Kellermans. They did marvelous things on Broadway.
But it was film
where they could be moguls and writers, scenarists and even
stars for the
masses--under gentile names, at least for the first several
generations.
Most of those who got to Hollywood in the 1930s found
disappointment
waiting. The studio system was more than a little like a
plantation.
Entrepreneurs and executives raked in enormous profits, paid
most of the help
very badly, and made it clear that "Jewish" issues were not
going to surface in
films made for the goyishe mass audience. They were also
bitterly anti-union,
although they tolerated the craft (or graft) stagehands'
organization that
shared their contempt for the contemporary industrial union
movement.
Anti-fascism and the drive for unions created a bloc of
Hollywood
progressives (mostly, but by no means entirely, aligned with
the small group of
communists, nearly all of them Jewish). It was a West Coast
commonplace to say
that social movements had real life in them, while movies
were only a way of
making a living. Yet to take only a single, contrary case in
point: Easily one
of the oddest and most remarkable of all low-budget
production Hollywood
directors, Edgar Ulmer--the real Ed Wood if Ed Wood had been
an artist--had
fled from Vienna to Hollywood and turned out one of the
outstanding horror
classics of the screen, The Black Cat (he claimed it was an
allegory about
capitalism) in 1935. Sickened by the studio system, he
embarked on a series of
independent projects, some involving the very cream of the
Yiddish stage.
Raising money from the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union and other
sources, he filmed Gruene Felder (Green Fields) in 1937,
often considered the
most artistic Yiddish-language film and certainly the most
commercially
successful ever made. (Shot in rural New Jersey, it
nevertheless won an Academy
Award for the best foreign film of the year.)
There was another sense in which Hollywood progressives
didn't give
themselves enough credit. The idea or ideal of the public
intellectual, not a
handful of noted idealists but of a mass of
artistic-intellectual toilers in
the field of popular documentation and presentation, emerged
during the later
1930s at the leftish fringes of the New Deal. Government
agencies such as the
Works Progress Administration helped make this possible. But
the driving
concept, of a radically democratic pluralism, had important
origins in the
networks of the heavily politicized Yiddish stage, and the
Yiddish backgrounds
of Left cultural figures, including painters and writers as
well as movie
people. More than anyone else, these people had the need to
envision a
multicultural, multiracial America in order to imagine a
worthy place for
themselves in it.
The war suddenly made the public intellectual, even the
Jewish left-wing
intellectual, a precious resource. As the Red Army held
Hitler's legions at bay
and powerful liberals urged an anti-fascist propaganda
campaign, Left film
writers collaborated in a string of remarkable (and
sometimes hit) features.
Films such as Action in the North Atlantic, Hitler's
Children, Edge of
Darkness, Tender Comrade, Pride of the Marines, and, yes,
Casablanca reflected
an unprecedented articulation of democratic but also
cryptically Jewish social
values. Especially in those starring John Garfield, the
Everyman struggles in
an alien world for love and community. Bogey's Rick was a
Spanish Civil War vet
and a goy with a Jewish heart, his Cafe Americain a little
piece of America
where the melting pot still contains the elements of hope in
a dark world. As
the postmodernists might put it: skepticism, but within
that, also hope.
The Jews who wrote and in some cases directed these films
were making a
career for themselves in a commercial medium, make no
mistake about it. That
was (and is) the way Hollywood works.
But consciously or unconsciously, they were reweaving the
fabric of the
past, their own past, into the present. Yiddish language
virtually never
appeared in the Hollywood film, but Yiddishkeit was not
absent.
Left-wing Hollywood came out of the war, as many Americans
did, with
remarkably naive optimism about the future. And why not?
Their films were boffo
at the box office. Director Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My
Sweet, with Dick Powell
as the beleaguered private eye, was a magnum success that
proved the commercial
possibilities of film noir with its vivid night scenes,
paranoid loners, and
cynical desperados. Dmytryck's Crossfire, a brilliant
frontal attack on
anti-Semitism (and one of the favorite targets of
congressional investigators
seeking Hollywood "subversion"), introduced Robert Ryan as
the perfect, twisted
face of hate. Till the End of Time and The House I Live In
(an award-winning
short feature, starring Frank Sinatra singing an ode to
anti-anti-Semitism)
verified the hopeful themes of postwar promise.
But the further America (and the world) got from the
optimistic,
antifascist unity days, the more noir things looked in real
life. In a brief
moment of relative artistic freedom for anti-capitalist
messages, Jewish
left-wingers made their aesthetic statement and took their
political stand.
Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil, called by Andrew Sarris
"one of the great
films of the modern American cinema" and re-released this
March in the "Martin
Scorsese Presents" video package, shows corruption at the
very heart of the
system. His John Garfield, emblematic as always ("Call me
Julie," as the Jewish
actor began private conversations, shedding his gentile
mask), is the perfected
man on the make plagued with inner doubts precisely because
something inside
him knows better.
A variety of other remarkable experiments, such as the
heavily-gendered
features I Can Get It for You Wholesale (written by
Polonsky) and The Strange
Loves of Martha Ivers (written by his sometime collaborator
Robert Rossen),
reflected women's challenges to men's world, or took up the
social themes of
postwar Jewish working-class life in transition. Jewish
left-wingers like Carl
Foreman also pressed, without much immediate luck but great
confidence of
long-run success, for serious cinematic treatment of race
relations in America.
All this bold experimentation ended with the black-list. A
host of
writers, directors, and technicians, overwhelmingly Jewish,
faced ruin. Most
never got work in films again. But to look only at the
short-run consequences
in Hollywood films would be to miss the larger significance
of the blacklistees
and the meaning of what I call their Yiddishkeit. Left to
their own devices,
and with the breakup of the big studios, they probably would
have invented the
American art film on something like the Italian neorealist
model--but a lot
more Jewish. Returning instead to disguise, they and a
younger cohort of Jewish
progressives who eluded the blacklist continued to
experiment with various
popular culture mediums, especially television. There they
reoriented their
Left/New Dealish sensibility to the changing scene. The
problem of community in
a world of cultural transitions and alienated teenagers, of
determined women,
troubled races, and continuing injustices found its answer
in an ethos of
tolerance, real justice, and an openness to learn from new
and unfamiliar
cultures.
Polonsky himself "greylisted" (wrote under pseudonyms) for
"You Are
There," television's earliest self-proclaimed "quality"
show, directed by a
former Group Theater child actor, Sidney Lumet. He and his
collaborators,
Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff (whose wife, Lee Grant,
was blacklisted for
refusing to testify against him), wrote most of the
episodes, projecting faux
"newscast" episode-dramas--"a day like all days...only you
are there"--with
heavy emphasis on the historic struggle for free speech and
assorted civil
liberties.
Fellow blacklistee Paul Jarrico, best remembered as producer
of the
classic film, Salt of the Earth, wrote for what historians
consider
television's finest early sitcom, "The Phil Silvers Show"
(or "You'll Never Get
Rich"), depicting a racially integrated troop of soldiers
led by the
sentimental (and for anyone but the culturally hard of
hearing, the
emblematically Jewish) schemer Sergeant Bilko. If a
political message would be
hard to demonstrate here, in the midst of McCarthyism, an
anti-political
message might do. The bureaucracy and stupidity and sheer
superfluousness of
military life (at the height of the Cold War) could perhaps
be read as a
subscript that those militant anti-fascists, the Marx
Brothers, would have
easily understood. The sympathetic portrayals of the
ordinary soldiers, and the
ludicrousness of visiting martinets, punctuated this
hilarious lampoon of a
peacetime army devoted to meaningless pursuits.
For a teen growing up in the 1950s, television played the
role that
movies had ten or fifteen years earlier. A viewership of
"Adventures of Robin
Hood" (1956-58), with its episodes written largely by
blacklistees and produced
by Hannah Weinstein, lead publicist of Henry Wallace's 1948
presidential
publicity campaign (and matriarch of Hollywood's current
Jewish feminist
dynasty), was far more likely than any film of the day to
drive home the
message of the system's corrupt character and the rebel's
fun-loving adventure.
For a younger child, "Lassie" might possibly provide a
maudlin version of an
idealist and animal-lovers' message, with malefactors
determined to dynamite a
lake or otherwise victimize the innocent; a few years later,
"Flipper" would go
ecological-minded writers one better, supplying an animal
protagonist literally
depending upon the survival of an endangered environment.
Both were written, in
many episodes, by Hollywood blacklistee (and former Abbott
and Costello comedy
writer) Bobby Lees in his secret return from the blacklist.
Were these animals
Jewish? Well, they had heart.
The opening of "adult" television to socially critical
content began in
the 1960s with the trickle of such weekly social dramas as
"East Side/West
Side" (1962-63) and "NYPD" (1968-70), both produced by David
Suskind and
scripted in part by Writers' Guild activist Eddie Adler, or
"The Defenders"
(1961-63) written in part by Robin Hood veteran (and later
sometime "Kojak"
scripter) Albert Ruben. Adopting what neoliberals would
later mean-spiritedly
call "victimology," these shows dealt sympathetically with
the poor and their
heroic defenders. The Vietnam War and the appearance of
grown-up but still
youthful consumers ready to purchase durables and offended
by redneck politics
prompted a new wave of "social comedies" such as "All In the
Family" and
"M*A*S*H."
Norman Lear, a former radio writer from the small milieu of
almost
exclusively Jewish, progressive professionals, had actually
been an officer in
the short-lived Television Writers of America, a union
destroyed for refusing
to accept the blacklist. Lear's auteurship began with "All
in the Family," an
adaptation of the English sitcom "Steptoe and Son," with
some of the look and
feel of ersatz Clifford Odets: a New York extended family
with large doses of
yelling. Stripped of most of the useful or sympathetic
ethnicity, family
members strive to accommodate (or to resist) the racial and
other social
changes around them. Spinoffs such as "The Jeffersons" and
"Maude" carried the
momentum forward. They had the built-in limitations of the
"problem" format
(one problem per show, from abortion to interracial sex)
which seemed to
trivialize the real issues, and a need to reconcile
conflicting characters
sentimentally. Still, Lear had opened things up.
"M*A*S*H" offered better opportunities for hard politics and
a limited
but real artistic experimentation. Based upon blacklistee
Ring Lardner, Jr.'s
co-authored Oscar-winning script for the Robert Altman film,
the television
version drove home dissenting, humanist themes, striving to
find genuine
incidents in the lives of U.S. Army medics in Korea and to
portray them
accurately. Auteur Larry Gelbart, another seasoned writer
from the Cold War
days, was best known for his playscript of A Funny Thing
Happened on the Way to
the Forum, which (until The Front) was arguably the biggest
showcase of Jewish
blacklistees. Once the half-Jewish Alan Alda had become
America's wholesomely
anti-war sweetheart, the cooperative writing and even
directing of episodes was
unprecedented in U.S. television. All told, "M*A*S*H"
offered another side of
the legacy of Abe Polonsky's Hollywood generation: truths
through entertainment
that documented the horrors of the modern world. Indeed, the
television-writing
process would never be quite so flexible again.
In the very odd way that classic film noir mixes
disillusionment with
social breakdown and exaltation of the loner, even "The
Rockford Files"--the
leading detective show in reruns by a long shot--is part of
the Jewish
blacklist diaspora. Its co-producer, Roy Huggins, and its
lead writer, Meta
Rosenberg, were among Hollywood's friendly witnesses who
decided to make peace
with the witch-hunters in order to keep working. The utterly
charming James
Garner, Noah Beery, and the rest of the cast (especially
Stuart Margolin, who
played the small-time grifter Angel Martin) face a world of
incompetent cops,
neurotic mobsters, conspiratorial CIA agents, and cruel fate
with all the
effort they can manage to create their own community of
sorts. In "Rockford"'s
better moments, we see shadows of shadows: the noir
detective of the 1940s,
continuously beaten, anti-heroic in his unwillingness to
glamorize himself and
his profession, lost but never truly forlorn in the dark
world of modern
reality.
The blacklistees had less effect upon the later world of
films, because
the field was quickly crowded with social-minded competitors
better tuned into
the generational pop scene. But they still had something
important to say. Take
the oeuvre of Martin Ritt, blacklisted as an actor and not
as a director. From
No Down Payment, a 1957 assault on middle-class apathy,
dys-functionalism,
racism, and plain greed in the 'burbs," he moved on to The
Front, Sounder, The
Molly Maguires, and Norma Rae among others, all of them
examples in one way or
another of what the classic cinematic Jewish Old Left had in
mind. Walter
Bernstein, who collaborated on several of these, wrote the
anti-nuke drama Fail
Safe and a neglected anti-fascist classic of the late 1980s,
The House on
Carroll Street, frankly admits that they are not punkish,
cartoonish, or
outside reality like, for instance, Natural Born Killers or
Pulp Fiction.
Unfashionable, perhaps, they possess a comforting solidity:
They tell the story.
There's more to the legacy, by a long shot. Next time you
wade through
hours of Malcolm X, hang on for the credits: Arnold Perl,
ten years dead and a
blacklistee to boot, is there as co-author with Spike Lee.
Who else but a
Jewish ex-red from a Yiddish background? If you've answered
that one, then try
another: What do we miss now that they're almost gone?
Perhaps Adam Gopnik, in
a New Yorker profile of Woody Allen a couple years ago, put
it right on this
score: Without the aging, Yiddish-accented scoffers who made
fun of the
contrast between popular life and artistic pretension, a
fundamental reference
point of Jewish comedy has disappeared. And without the
eschatological vision
of a cooperative society in the future, so perhaps has the
uniquely Jewish
dramatic tension.
But in our media-sogged world that has become a vast
cross-referenced
library, some crucial legacy of those traditions is not
really lost at all.
Check out a classic sci-fi flick like Creature from the
Black Lagoon, and
ruminate on the Freudian-ecological message that the Jewish
producer, a close
associate of Orson Welles in earlier years and scriptwriter
for a kids'
psychology radio show of the late '40s, claims he intended.
On another dull
night, look at "Hogan's Heroes," tinged with anti-fascist
themes scripted by
the former president of the Television Writers' Union, and
featuring a long
list of Jewish crypto-progressives. And get yourself ready
for the canon of
Jewish Left 1940s movies likely to be unleashed on the video
market soon.
As an oral historian, I bitterly regret missing
conversations with John
Garfield or Moe Howard, the cerebral member of the Three
Stooges (two of them
Jewish) who in one of his last interviews cursed Nixon and
the Vietnam War. Or
even Groucho, in his day quite a unionist and a secretive
but substantial
financial contributor to the cause of the blacklistees.
About a week after he
died, I saw Groucho clearly in a dream and pressed him about
his old left-wing
connections. He replied: I can't answer now, I'm much too
busy.
This last one is not much of a story, but goes to the heart
of my
personal pursuit. It is not really political in the way the
Old Left would
consider the term, but neither can it entirely escape the
old controversies
that raged through the Jewish community with special
passion. Murray Kempton,
decades after he savaged the blacklistees, changed his mind
about them. Dead
wrong in their views of Russia, they had nevertheless been
braver in their
convictions and their deeds, and suffered considerably more,
than those who
condemned them so easily at the time. No doubt Vietnam, and
also the passage of
time, had a lot to do with Kempton's shifting judgment. But
I think he was
ready to reclaim these American Jews, with all their
failings, for his own.
Gentile Yiddishist, television watcher, movie lover, I can't
help wanting to do
the same.
Louis Epstein
>
> Meta Rosenberg, 89; Agent, 'Rockford Files' Producer
>
> BYLINE: Myrna Oliver, Times Staff Writer
>
>
>
>
> Meta Rosenberg, Emmy-winning executive producer of the
> durable television series "The Rockford Files," talent agent
> and exhibited photographer, has died. She was 89.
>
> Rosenberg died Dec. 30 in her sleep of unspecified causes at
> her Beverly Hills home.
>
> Actor James Garner, one of Rosenberg's clients, brought her
> into producing in her late 50s when he asked her to work
> with him on "The Rockford Files." They created a hit series,
> starring Garner as a private eye, that ran on NBC from 1974
> to 1980.
I know it was the credits of the Rockford Files that introduced
me to the names of both Meta Rosenberg (Executive Producer)
and Stephen J. Cannell (Supervising Producer).Cannell went on
to a significant career as creator and runner of shows afterwards.
> "Those snarling Universal apparatchiks that had the rest of
> us on the lot cowed, she ate them for breakfast," he said in
> a statement.
What did she do,then?...overturn unpopular studio policies?
> Rosenberg grew up in Los Angeles, and traced her lifelong
> love of storytelling to hearing stories from "The History of
> English Literature" read by her father, a real estate agent.
>
> She graduated from Hollywood High School at the age of 15
Just how many famous alumni does that school have,
and how does it stack up against Stuyvesant,Bronx Science,etc?
> After marrying talent agent George "Rosey" Rosenberg in
> 1947, she began working with him, representing writers and
> actors. She also sold innovative series to television
> networks, including "Julia," starring Diahann Carroll as an
> African American nurse and single mother; "Hogan's Heroes,"
> a comedy set in a World War II German prison camp; and "Ben
> Casey," among the first series showcasing medicine as drama.
Also well known in their day,though less recent than Rockford
and she wasn't producing.So was she a "packager"?
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
Stephen Bowie
culture, much of it expanded upon in his and Dave Wagner's book "Hide
in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television,
1950-2002." The oral histories he refers to are collected in Buhle and
Pat McGilligan's terrific "Tender Comrades."
I dropped Paul an e-mail when I heard about Meta's death so that he'd
be ready if the LA Times or someone else hit him up for a quote, but
evidently that was a vain hope. One thing I regret about Paul's (and
Wagner's and McGilligan's) scholarship is that it's unapologetically
partisan, meaning that they opted not to pursue the friendly witnesses
for interviews along with the blacklistees. In the last few years I've
picked up where they left off and done oral histories with several
blacklistees who worked primarily in television, but most of the
"friendlies" from the classic TV era are deceased or haven't responded
to my inquiries. Now I wish I'd tried Meta; I didn't know much about
her pre-"Rockford Files" work before the obit was published.