emmy®extra June 2008 • more emmy®extra features
TV Salutes It's Moms
From Mrs. Cunningham of Happy Days to Mrs. Harper
of Two and a Half Men and more great Hollywood mothers
By Libby Slate
Mother’s Day came a few days early this year at the Television Academy, when actresses noted for their maternal roles on several notable series gathered at the Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre.
Moderated by Jim Longworth, author of TV Creators, May event A Mother’s Day Salute to TV Moms featured an evening of candid discussion laced with nostalgia and brought together
- Tichina Arnold (Everybody Hates Chris)
- Meredith Baxter (Family Ties)
- Diahann Carroll (Julia, A Different World)
- Bonnie Franklin (One Day at a Time)
- Catherine Hicks (7th Heaven)
- Cloris Leachman (Lassie, Phyllis)
- Marjorie Lord (Make Room for Daddy)
- Marion Ross (Happy Days, Brooklyn Bridge)
- Holland Taylor (Two and a Half Men).
The very first mothers on a nationally televised show were Judy Parrish and Elaine Stritch, on a 1948 series called The Growing Paynes, Longworth noted.
Gertrude Berg in The Goldbergs played TV’s first Jewish mother the following year.
It would take almost two more decades for the first African-American mother, Carroll’s Julia, to have her own series, in 1968.
And in 1975, Franklin began playing a mother who was single through divorce, rather than the customary widowhood, in One Day at a Time.
One Day afforded a unique connection among two of the evening’s panelists: Baxter’s mother Whitney Blake, herself a TV mom on Hazel, created the series with husband Allan Manings, based on her years as a single parent raising a teenage daughter. (Producer Norman Lear added a second teenager because he had two daughters.)
One Day was progressive in ways beyond depicting a divorced mom, focusing on such issues as equal pay for women and allowing cast members to work with the writers to portray characters and issues realistically. That wasn’t always the case for the other panelists.
“My male co-star [Stephen Collins] made more than I did,” Hicks said of 7th Heaven. “It bugged me to death. We did equal work–I wasn’t just carrying the soup in.”
For Baxter’s series, “I made less on Bridget Loves Bernie–for no reason,” she said. “On Family Ties, we had parity. On Family, I wanted a raise. They were balking. So I said, ‘I want a car, please.’ A Datsun wagon, because I had all these kids to drive around. I showed them!”
As for Ross, who was “thrilled,” she said, to be working on Happy Days as she was a single mother of two, “About a year into it, a producer said, ‘Marion, you’re not getting paid enough.’ I decided to stay out. Pretty soon [TV son] Ron Howard called and said, ‘Marion, they’re going to replace you.’ I said, ‘I’ll be right in!’”
Though she was paid equally on Family Ties, Baxter said she didn’t feel the staff was writing “in service of the female characters. Nobody but me was concerned that [her character] Elyse was an architect. I said ‘Damn it, I’m carrying blueprints [during scenes], not a laundry basket!’”
Hicks, a real-life working mom, asked 7th Heaven creator Brenda Hampton if her character could perhaps attend law school at night rather than be a stay-at-home mom, but was refused.
“Her thing was, she wanted to show a functional family,” Hicks related. “I was sort of embarrassed about it at the beginning of the show. But people are doing that. It validated that it’s okay to be devoted to your kids for a while.”
For Carroll, working on the groundbreaking Julia meant educating series creator-producer-writer Hal Kanter about the African-American community rather than women specifically.
“I had to worry constantly that I keep Hal aware of my son, and what he would say to people in America,” she recalled. “[For instance] Hal wanted him to idolize John Wayne. He and I clicked–we were definitely able to say what we had to to each other.”
Television continues to influence–and reflect–its viewers. And that’s why, Taylor opined of her character, drawing perhaps the evening’s biggest laugh, “Someone has to carry the flag for being a bad mother, a wholly inadequate mother. … I’m very well equipped to play the role, because I didn’t have children – and I didn’t notice!”
Following the panel discussion, the evening’s salute continued with a reunion of most of the TV moms with the performers who’d played their children, accompanied in some cases by real-life offspring, offering deep-felt comments and hugs aplenty.
Delighting moms and audiences alike were, for
- Arnold: Tyler James Williams
- Baxter: Kathryn Morris (Baxter recurred as her Cold Case mom) and real daughter Eva
- Carroll: Marc Copage (Julia) and Jasmine Guy (A Different World)
- Franklin: Mackenzie Phillips, Valerie Bertinelli and Pat Harrington, Jr.
- Leachman: Jon Provost (Lassie) and real son George
- Lord: Angela Cartwright and real daughter Anne Archer
- Ross: Erin Moran
- Taylor: Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen
Leave It to Beaver sons Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, whose ailing TV mom Barbara Billingsley had had to cancel her attendance, brought with them a message from the actress: “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Longworth produced the evening. Rocci Chatfield is chair and Pete Hammond vice chair of the activities committee. Robert O’Donnell is director of activities for the Television Academy. Visit the Salute to TV Moms Photo Gallery.•
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