Stealing the Show

by Joy Press

  Candice Bergen began to identify so strongly with her character that even her husband, director Louis Malle, noticed changes, such as the daredevil way she behaved behind the steering wheel. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen my husband hold on to the handle and put his foot on the floor [bracing himself] when I’ve been driving,” she told the Washington Post in 1989. “I insist I’ve always driven that way, but he said, ‘What’s happened to you? You’re driving like a commando. This character is really taking you over.’ ”

  Although Murphy Brown wasn’t an instant hit—it lurked somewhere around number thirty-six on the list of top shows that first season—the critics adored it. Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times declared Bergen’s character “tyrannical-but-vulnerable too.” In contrast, Rolling Stone’s Bill Zehme emphasized Murphy’s invincibility, calling her “a zesty ballbuster who stomps through doors, rattling hinges loose, trailing a wake of high-octane wisecracks.” Reviews and features often noted what a long way we’d come from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  Yet Murphy wasn’t actually that far removed from Mary Richards generationally—in the show’s backstory, Murphy arrived at FYI the same year Mary left WJM: 1977. English’s staff had been deeply influenced by that series; in fact, Korby Siamis taught herself to write scripts by watching and analyzing Mary Tyler Moore episodes. The Murphy Brown writers’ room even had the words THEY DID THAT ON MARY posted on the wall, a reminder not to recycle the beloved show’s single-working-woman-in-the-media story lines.

  English saw Murphy as part of a continuum: “There was a chain that started with Marlo Thomas on That Girl, which then begat The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and then we were the next link.” Each show nudged independent womanhood as far as it could within the constraints of mainstream entertainment, something parodied in Murphy’s season-two episode “TV or Not TV.” Its opening sequence features a goofy, pratfalling Murphy capering to a sugary That Girl-ish theme song that asks “Who’s that girl? You think you know her, she’s a real live wire . . . It’s Murphy, Murphy, Murphy Brown!” (The parody would be echoed seventeen years later in the opening minutes of 30 Rock’s pilot, a fake-out sequence where we meet Liz Lemon capering through the streets of Manhattan accompanied by a chipper theme song cooing, “That’s her, that’s her!”)

  As for English herself, Kellman says, “She kind of merged with Murphy, and Murphy kind of merged with her over the course of the first few years. Diane was inside that Murphy character. All the problems, all the issues were things that Diane deeply cared about.” He notes that English adored men (“She was certainly heteronormative, as my daughter at Vassar would call it”) while also maintaining a feminist mind-set. “I think she felt that there was a job to be done for herself and for women, but she never gave a sense that men were actively keeping her down. It was the way of the world, and it needed to be changed.” But, Kellman points out, “Diane didn’t want to deprive Murphy of certain vulnerabilities that are specific to women. That was what the [town house] was about. That was the place where Murphy didn’t have it all. She had the fine furniture and all that, but . . . clearly the problem was there was no guy at home,” he says with a grin. “That was the thing; it was hard to have it all.”

  “Having it all” slid into American women’s vocabulary circa 1982, thanks to that guru of swinging singletons Helen Gurley Brown and her aspirational self-help book Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money—Even If You’re Starting with Nothing. A phrase that initially sounded utopian soon became a truncheon used to clobber women who couldn’t perfectly balance work and family life (especially with no help from men). Whether you were a single working woman, a stay-at-home mom, or a working parent, you were doing it wrong. As former National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland once put it, having it all had “come to carry with it a sense of being overwhelmed, as you see on the T-shirt in the NOW store that says: I AM WOMAN. I AM INVINCIBLE. I AM EXHAUSTED.”

  Articles, books, and real TV news magazines much like FYI relentlessly picked over the idea that ambition for women came at a devastating cost. This anxiety hovered over Murphy, who at the start of the series struggles to find equilibrium without alcohol. The pilot episode, “Respect” (which won Diane English an Emmy), opens with that Aretha Franklin song playing as the camera pans over framed magazine covers hanging in Murphy’s office. “Move Over, Mike Wallace!” screams Time Newsweek boasts an image of Murphy and Ronald Reagan under the headline “Head to Head with the President,” while Esquire, as if voicing the subliminal fear inspired by powerful women everywhere, features a sexy image of Bergen accompanied by the words “Who Is Man Enough for This Woman?”

  In the episode, returning to work after a month in rehab, Murphy flings herself back into the fray via a live interview with Bobby Powell, a handsome young man who allegedly had an affair with a married woman running for vice president of the United States—an inverted riff on the then-recent Gary Hart–Donna Rice scandal. After work, Murphy heads back to her empty, luxurious Georgetown home, where she kicks off her heels and belts out an off-key rendition of another Aretha Franklin song to bookend the episode: “Natural Woman.” In the world of Murphy Brown, there is no reason that a demand for respect can’t coexist with the desire to be a natural woman.

  That song returned as a coda two seasons later, in one of the series’ most infamous episodes: the one where Murphy gives birth.

  * * *

  The specter of motherhood so often looms over TV’s single career women, inducing in characters such as Murphy Brown (and, later, in 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon and Girls’s Hannah Horvath) a mixture of longing, panic, and shame. As a narrative device, it makes perfect sense: like real women who have the financial resources to make choices about their lives, female characters of childbearing age are faced with choices about whether to devote themselves to working, parenting, or both. They’re forced to consider the scope of their ambition and the compromises required. Contemplating motherhood also taps into a rich vein of anxiety over their ability to nurture and of ambivalent memories of their own moms (in Murphy’s case, an aloof, patrician figure played by Colleen Dewhurst).

  Murphy Brown started flirting with the idea of motherhood shockingly early. In the sixth episode, “Baby Love,” a pregnant friend urges Murphy to join the club: “Do not miss this experience or you’ll regret it til the day you die.” By the end of the episode, Murphy is swathed in a scarf and dark glasses while paying a research visit to a sperm bank and asking best friend and colleague Frank if he’d consider donating some of his swimmers. (Frank has his own existential panic when he finds out he has low-motility sperm.)

  Like the 1987 movie Baby Boom, in which Diane Keaton plays a high-powered lady executive who suddenly inherits a baby, Murphy Brown coaxed laughs from the fish-out-of-water scenario. In “Brown Like Me,” Murphy is left alone with her father’s infant son. As the baby wails inconsolably, Murphy, clad in black velvet for an awards ceremony where she will be honored, lectures him, “I know your type! You think you can just snap your fingers and we come running? Let me tell you something, buster, those days are over. Ever heard of Gloria Steinem? Does the name Betty Friedan ring a bell?” Of course, within minutes she is rocking him like . . . a natural.

  The idea of Murphy getting knocked up had been percolating since the earliest days of the show. Bergen adored being a mother to her young daughter, Chloe, and she told the Los Angeles Times, “I thought it would be too tragic if Murphy didn’t have a child . . . Going into her late 40s in a career in which she was an aging success, with no friends, no relationship, and no child, I thought there was not too much funny stuff to be gotten out of that.” English herself did not have kids, but she thought an unwieldy new challenge would be good for Murphy. Some of the show’s writers worried that it would be a show killer, but English fended them off. “I always thought that there was a way for her to have this baby and be a very irreverent mother.”

  English recalls visiting the New York office
of a magazine editor friend who had just had a baby. “She opened a drawer, and she had put bunting in the drawer, and she put the baby in the drawer,” English says. “I thought: That is something Murphy would do. That would be so great! Bringing the baby to work when women weren’t supposed to do that.”

  By this point, Murphy Brown had a couple of successful seasons under its belt and seven Emmys, including for Best Comedy Series and Best Actress. (The show would ultimately rake in eighteen Emmy statues and sixty-two nominations.) Although network execs had sought to defang Murphy at the start, now the top brass pretty much left the series to its own devices. Cagney & Lacey creator Barbara Corday, who had become a CBS executive by this time, says, “I would call Diane every week on the morning after the show was on and say, ‘Great show, thank you!’ I never gave her a single note, that I recall.” So there was little to no pushback on Murphy’s pregnancy.

  “It never occurred to me in one million years that a woman who was forty-two and had a one-night stand with her ex-husband and got pregnant and decided to go forward with the pregnancy—that that would somehow become controversial,” English says emphatically.

  CBS’s standards had loosened substantially since the Mary Tyler Moore Show era, when the network insisted that viewers would not accept a divorcee as their heroine. And there were recent precedents: the female leads in Moonlighting and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. Besides, 1.2 million babies were born to unmarried American women in 1990 alone. Even so, the writers took some precautions: they decided that the baby would be the product of a one-night stand with Murphy’s ex-husband, during a brief reconciliation, and the couple even had blood tests to make sure neither of them had AIDS, which was very much in the news then.

  So it was, during the season-three finale, that a disheveled Murphy walks into her bathroom and gazes with horror at a plastic stick that has turned blue.

  The May 1991 episode was the number one show of its week, and newspapers reported that “there wasn’t even a ripple” of controversy. Ratings remained high during summer reruns of the season, and fans speculated: would she opt for motherhood or an abortion? “It’s not an easy choice for her,” English told a reporter at the time. “Serious consideration is given to both sides, the right to life and the pro-choice. This is not something you can sidestep. And we’re prepared for whatever flak we get.”

  The true gravity of her situation cushioned by humor, Murphy tries to imagine squeezing a baby into the life of a journalist. “What am I going to say: ‘Excuse me, Mister President, could you speak a little louder, I can’t hear you over my breast pump’?” she howls anxiously. Meanwhile, her boss Miles worries that he’ll be jumped in a dark alley by religious culture warrior Reverend Donald Wildmon. “How many unmarried pregnant role models have you ever seen on prime time?” he squeals. “None! Zero!” The fictional head of the news division is even more nervous. “Brownie,” he says gruffly, “I’m responsible for a multimillion-dollar operation that does not thrive on taking risks. I don’t see that I have any choice but to take you off the air.” (He eventually changes his mind.)

  That scene had been inspired by a real-world kerfuffle in which 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt, who served as a consultant to Murphy Brown, refused to accommodate correspondent Meredith Vieira’s desire to work part-time after she had had two babies in quick succession. The question of how a newswoman could juggle an all-consuming job and family life was increasingly topical: the year before, Connie Chung, one of the first female network anchors, announced she was quitting her newsmagazine to focus on getting pregnant.

  By the time Murphy Brown returned in the fall, viewers were on tenterhooks waiting to see what she would do. CBS acknowledged that the network had lost some advertisers, and there was pushback from the religious right. In its newsletter, the conservative Media Research Center protested the season opener’s “pro-choice rhetoric—[Murphy] and her co-workers made over 15 references to the ‘choice’ or ‘decision’ she had to make. Throughout the show, all arguments regarding the decision centered on the impact a baby would have on Murphy’s career and the quality of the child’s life, ignoring the child’s right to life.”

  Fans had other worries: they wrote and called the producers expressing concern that their favorite warrior would be domesticated. Murphy worried right alongside them. In the baby-shower episode—guest-starring real-world newscasters such as Katie Couric and written by young screenwriter Michael Patrick King, later known for Sex and the City—Murphy recoils at her colleagues’ tales of changing diapers in airplane bathrooms and accidentally lapsing into baby talk with workmates. NBC anchor Mary Alice Williams quips, “I once asked [newsman] Garrick Utley if he had to make a boom boom.”

  Approximately two-thirds of American network TV viewers, a massive proportion even by 1992 standards, watched Murphy Brown’s water break at the end of season four. One minute she’s grilling a tobacco company shill about liability lawsuits, the next she’s in a hospital with a tiny infant, terrified by her animal nature. “My body is making milk,” she exclaims, part horrified and part awestruck. “It’s like one day you find out you can get bacon out of your elbow!” Korby Siamis, then a relatively new mother, cowrote the episode (called “Birth 101”) with English. “I could never have written that line if I hadn’t lived it,” she says. The episode concludes with Murphy awkwardly trying to bond with her baby boy by cooing an off-key rendition of “Natural Woman,” a blissful callback to the final moment of the series’ pilot.

  Bergen has said that singing to the baby was her idea: “I wanted to sing [the song] again but mean it.” The idea that only childbirth made Murphy a “natural woman” inevitably offended some feminists. Siamis recalls being surprised to hear from women who were disappointed, or who felt the show cast judgment on those who didn’t have babies. “I never wrote thinking, Now I’m for this segment of the population. It was one character. We were not trying to change the world.”

  But independent women pissed off by Murphy’s maternal instincts turned out to be the least of the show’s problems.

  * * *

  On May 18, 1992, English was celebrating her forty-fourth birthday with an afternoon of horseback riding. Murphy Brown had just aired its fourth-season finale; it was to be English’s last episode running the show. She and Joel had decided to leave the series in the hands of the show’s writers to work on other projects and build their television empire.

  “I went for a ride thinking about how amazing the last four years were,” she says.

  The next day, her office was plunged into chaos. Vice President Dan Quayle, campaigning on the West Coast on behalf of George H. W. Bush’s reelection, made a speech aimed at shoring up the conservative Republican base. In the aftermath of the LA riots following the beating of Rodney King, Quayle attributed the violence to a collapse of “family values” in inner cities. Along with the impoverished black unwed mothers whom he accused of breeding this “lawless anarchy,” Quayle blamed unwed mother Murphy Brown for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.”

  Suddenly, Murphy Brown was more than a popular TV character; she was at the center of both the presidential campaign and the culture wars.

  As the story gripped the American media and public alike, English rejected requests to be interviewed by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News and to debate Quayle on 60 Minutes. The New York Daily News headlined its front-page story “Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp!” A retiring Johnny Carson quipped in his Tonight Show monologue that he had finally decided on his next career move: “I am going to join the cast of Murphy Brown and become a surrogate father to that kid.” The New York Times front page featuring a photo of Murphy and baby still has pride of place on English’s office wall.

  In its initial news report on the kerfuffle, the Los Angeles Times noted, “Told of Quayle’s comments, a senior Bush campaign official replied only, ‘Oh, de
ar.’ ” Governor Bill Clinton’s camp moved quickly to take advantage of the incident, with press secretary Dee Dee Myers declaring that “the world is a much more complicated place than Dan Quayle wants to believe. He should watch a few episodes before he decides to pop off.”

  Although English must have known the series was making a striking statement at a time of cultural retrenchment, she recalls being stunned by the massive public response to Murphy’s private (not to mention completely fictional) decision. “Seeing Dan Quayle doing a tour of the aftermath of the LA riots and basically blaming it on me, saying, ‘That show, that character—that’s why we are up in flames!’ I remember sitting in front of the television watching that, thinking, I’m just trying to make a show.”

  CBS News president Howard Stringer advised English to make a single statement. It was a powerful one: “If the vice president thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.” At that very moment, the Supreme Court was deciding Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a pivotal case that upheld the core of Roe v. Wade but also opened the door for states to pass new restrictions on abortion.

  Instead of letting the Murphy Brown controversy subside, Quayle decided to crank it up. At a visit to a junior high school in postriot South Central LA later that week, Quayle lectured one hundred Latino and black students about having children out of wedlock. “What would you prefer,” a fourteen-year-old girl in attendance asked a reporter, “a single mom, or a dad who gets drunk and beats your mom?” After the event, Quayle elaborated on his issues with Murphy Brown, dragging the whole entertainment industry into the battle: “My complaint is that Hollywood thinks it’s cute to glamorize illegitimacy,” he said. “Hollywood just doesn’t get it.”