Episode 130: Molly Goldberg, America's First TV Mom [Transcript]

Narration is in bold.

Nahanni Rous: Hello everybody! It’s Nahanni Rous. Welcome to the fall season of Can We Talk?, the podcast of JWA—where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

culture meet.

Clip: [Static sound, then woman's voice] Yoohoo, is anybody? [Music plays, then male radio announcer's voice]. There she is—that’s Molly Goldberg, folks, a woman with a place in every heart and a finger in every pie. And now the makers of Duz, that new kind of soap for everything, right down your wash line! [voice fades down]

Nahanni: From 1929 until the mid-1950s, Molly Goldberg was America’s favorite Jewish mother. Her character was written, acted, and embodied by Gertrude Berg, the first female showrunner, the first woman to win an Emmy for television, and according to Good Housekeeping, the most popular woman of the era after Eleanor Roosevelt.

First on the radio, then in the early days of television, Berg, in character as Molly Goldberg, would begin her show by throwing open the window and leaning out into the airshaft of her apartment building. Wearing a flowered house dress with her dark hair up in a bun, she spoke directly to her TV audience.

Clip: [music plays, then Gertrude Berg's voice] Oy, hello. You’ll pardon my kimono, yes please, but I’m getting ready to go out tonight dancing, can you imagine? Not a teenager, but when I’m invited, it’s never no.

Nahanni: The Goldbergs debuted on TV in 1949 and ran until the mid-50s, making the working-class Molly Goldberg a household name, and Gertrude Berg a millionaire.

Clip:  You know, Mrs. Herman, my neighbor, she always says, How can you feel like going out in the middle of the week after doing the housework all day and cooking, and etcetera and etcetera—and believe me, I have plenty of etceteras. First, I was invited, and second, look—here's my answer to your question: Rybutol! You should only know how much it helps me not to feel tired, that's why I say everybody needs the important elements in Rybutol. And I know whereof I speak.

Nahanni: With her Yiddish accent and her malapropisms, Molly hawked her sponsors’ products, remade the image of the Jewish mother, and snuck lefty politics onto the screen. Meanwhile, her creator Gertrude Berg basically invented the family sitcom.

Emily Nussbaum: She was an enormously influential, famous, prominent, successful media figure along the lines of, like, Oprah Winfrey for much of the twentieth century.

Nahanni: That’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum, staff writer at the New Yorker. She recently wrote about Gertrude Berg for the magazine.

[theme music plays]

In this episode of Can We Talk?, Emily Nussbaum introduces us to Gertrude Berg and her lovable character Molly Goldberg. We talk about what made The Goldbergs so popular, how McCarthy-era persecution led to the show’s downfall, and how the show still resonates today.

[theme music plays]

Nahanni: I can’t resist. Yoohoo, Emily Nussbaum!

Emily: [laughs] Yes.

Nahanni: So why don't we just start by you introducing us to Gertrude Berg?

Emily: She was an incredibly scrappy, sort of self-created figure. She was born in New York. She grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. She was not actually very much like the character that she played. She didn't grow up speaking Yiddish, she wasn't particularly religious, and she definitely wasn't a hausfrau. She wasn't into cleaning and cooking and anything like that.

Her father was the owner of a not super successful Catskills hotel, and the beginning of her career was doing sketches and creating characters at the hotel to entertain the guests. She married very young, and a couple of years into her marriage, right after she had her second child, she made this huge leap. She was in her mid-twenties and she essentially just went out there and sold herself to radio and began writing like a maniac and creating material for herself and trying to go into show business.

And she was successful very early. Not too long after she started, she made a big breakthrough, which is that she got this show, The Goldbergs, onto the radio. And that radio show ran from 1929 to 1945.

Clip: [radio announcer's voice] And now, The Goldbergs. [Gertrude Berg singing] Oy, Rosalie, come kiss Mama—who’s happy, who? [Girl's voice] You are, Ma.

Nahanni: In this clip, Molly is kvelling because her son has gotten engaged.

Emily: Even though it was in certain ways a very, you know, corny, warm, family show, in the landscape of radio, it was unusual for having episodes in which, among other things, she would talk about, sort of, workers' rights kinds of things, about racial discrimination. And also, they started talking about what was going on with the Jews in Europe, which was not being covered in a lot of places, and certainly not on entertainment shows.

So the Goldbergs themselves were talking about, like, our cousins back in Germany, they were talking about the antisemitism rising up under Hitler. And this is, like, overtly political material that they were having on the show and also overtly Jewish material.

Nahanni: The show also explored the struggles many other American families faced in the early 1940s. Here’s an episode where Molly is seeing her son off at the train station as he’s on his way to fight in World War II.

Clip: [son's voice] OK, goodbye, Ma.

Nahanni: All the mothers are weeping on the train platform, and Molly gives a kind of speech to another mother.

Molly: Don’t cry, madam. Your son, my son ,too. This is no time for crying. Today we have to stand like rocks in the sea. We all have to face the same wave until our bodies become a wall that locks the fascists in their holes.

Emily: The show presented the Goldbergs, an immigrant family whose kids were growing up in America, as deeply patriotic, incredibly all-American, not as foreigners. Not as suspicious, not as outsiders, but as absolute Yankee Doodle Dandy Americans. That's part of what made the show so effective, so radical, in its way.

The other parts of the politics I'm describing are kind of more woven in, like little mentions of civil rights issues and certainly just the focus of the whole show on the lives of workers and the struggles of poor people. And you know, a lot of the show became successful during the Great Depression, and she got tons of letters saying, Thank you for putting on the air a struggling family, struggling with unemployment, struggling with just trying to survive under these circumstances.

___

Clip: 

Molly: How does the table look, Jake? 

Jake: Molly darling, next year this time, we’ll be eating out of golden plates. 

Molly: Oh, Jake. Will it taste any better? 

Jake: It will. 

Molly: Why? 

Jake: Because my notes will be paid off. The debt on my insurance policy will be paid. I’ll be able to rest in my grave if anything happens to me.

___

Emily: Ironically, I will say she became an absolute millionaire during the Great Depression. That was when she cemented her own success and began to live like a fancy New Yorker on Park Avenue. She was really into dressing up. She had a beautiful apartment. But even as she became very wealthy—like she made more than anyone else in entertainment—she continued on the show to really focus on expressing the lives of working people and the struggles of people during periods of unemployment.

[theme music plays]

And then right at the beginning of television, she repurposed the same material and created really the earliest family sitcom of any kind.

[theme music fades]

Emily: TV at that point was a weird experimental new medium and there's this crazy period right at the beginning from, I would say, 1947 to 1951, where it was a truly wacky experimental landscape of artists trying to figure out how to use this. Part of what people were trying to figure out was how will TV work with advertising?

Gertrude Berg, working with her sponsors General Foods, really helped create one of the most effective versions of early integrated advertising on the show. At the beginning of each episode, the camera was facing the window that she had always on the radio show—she spoke out the window and said, “Yoohoo, Mrs. Bloom,” like that. On the TV, you'd be looking at your TV— 

[theme music plays]

—and the TV outlines would frame the window of her tenement. And Gertrude Berg, in character as Molly Goldberg, would sit in the window near a little potted plant.

Nahanni: The plant was planted in an old Sanka can. That was their sponsor.

Clip: [Window opening]. Oy, hello… I don't know, hello is such a little word for such a big feeling. I want to say hello to you with all the letters in the alphabet, that would be a hello. Anyway, hello, how are you? Oy, have I stories for you from Pincus Pines.

Emily: And then she would start speaking to you in your living room as though you were her neighbor.

Clip: So that's why I didn't hesitate. The same way that I tell you about Sanka, I told them about Sanka coffee. That it's good for restlessness, and it's good for irritability. And those that didn't know, I told them that 97% of the caffeine is removed and you can drink as much as you want… and it comes in regular and it comes in instant. [voice fades down]

Emily: And then when she was finished with it, she'd kind of welcome you and then she would leave the window and then the camera would be in the living room—like, who had ever seen such a thing? It was a really, really crazy thing to have a TV in your living room. It offered you this different kind of intimacy and kind of felt like a peephole into somebody else's life—and in this case, somebody else's living room.

Nahanni: The Goldbergs debuted on CBS television in 1949. The show was an instant success.

Emily: And then the rest of her life she was the creator of The Goldbergs and also the head of the brand of Molly Goldberg. She embodied this character who was beloved to much of the American population, both as a kind of idealized mother, as a sort of mischievous, larger-than-life meddler, who was the main character on the show, who gossiped and moved people around, was kind of manipulative, but very loving. And also as this very prominent Jewish character, a Jewish mother who was the hero of the show.

Nahanni: Right. Very, very much the center of all those plot lines.

Emily: The center, the main character. So this show was also, for Jews, was this extremely meaningful thing during a period where there was massive antisemitism, this was a character who was a Jewish mother, who was not a comic character, who was not a villain, who was not a minor character, who was the main character.

Nahanni: Molly introduced her audience to a new kind of Jewish mother.

Emily: When Gertrude Berg created Molly Goldberg, there were images of Jewish mothers, but they were largely the sort of mournful, guilt-inducing figure of, like, the Yiddishe  mama, which is alluded to in songs like My Yiddishe Mama and in, like, the Jazz Singer, his mother, she's a humble figure who just desperately wants her children to be safe, sometimes to the point of smothering the child.

Gertrude Berg, by creating Molly Goldberg, kind of transformed this figure, because instead of being the main character's mother who makes them feel guilty, Molly Goldberg's the main character. Like, Molly Goldberg is the interesting figure. She's the funny one. She's still very involved in her children's lives and pushing them, but that's treated as a comic and positive thing, rather than something a little bit anxiety-provoking and dark.

Nahanni: Here’s a clip where Molly’s son Sammy has just come home from college.

—

Clip: 

Molly: Oy, mein college boy. Looks marvellous. 

Jake: Yeah, wonderful! 

Molly: How many times a person’s face changes in one lifetime… a baby’s face, and a little boy’s face, and a child’s face…]

—

Nahanni: This is something that I've been thinking about since watching these episodes. This is almost 100 years ago, right? What makes her so alive and believable to us?

Emily: Obviously she wrote thousands and thousands of scripts, but so much of it is in her charisma, like, the charisma of her as a performer, her charm, obvious intelligence and warmth. A lot of it with her was the delivery. She was speaking in this heavy Yiddish accent, and it easily could have been a cartoonish thing, which is just like making fun of an accent—there's a whole tradition of dialect humor—but that's not really how it comes across. It's like the way she uses certain phrases and the way she communicates with her family. It feels very, as you're saying, very authentic, very warm, and very engaging.

Nahanni: And very Jewish. One episode from 1954 takes place on Erev Yom Kippur when the family is getting ready to go to services. Molly is sitting at the dining room table, painting her nails.

—

Clip: 

[Molly singing]

Jake: Did Sammy get my suit before the tailor closes for the holiday? 

Molly: Yeah… So get finished early shaving so I can also get dressed. I want to be dressed before sundown.

Nahanni: Molly’s daughter Rosalie finishes her nails for her.

Clip: 

Molly: So do me something, darling, do my left hand, and leave the moons out, yes please… So did you decide what you’re going to wear tonight, for Temple?

Rosalie: Not yet.

—

Emily: A lot of Jews who were in the radio and later the television business, men who were top executives, were notably wary of putting such blunt Jewish material on TV. It made them uncomfortable for reasons I think a lot of people understand—like there was a lot of antisemitism, a lot of those guys had internal antisemitism, and also were wary of attracting negative attention.

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them this story because they're like,Wait, a woman was this very powerful, super rich showrunner slash producer, and also something so bluntly Jewish was—but I think this is true of a lot of cultural periods. Like, there are maybe larger tendencies. Obviously there was a lot of misogyny and sexism in radio and television and there was a lot of antisemitism in the country. But there were still representations and exceptional sort of achievements within that.

The Goldbergs and Molly Goldberg during, yes, a highly antisemitic period were beloved by Jewish listeners, but definitely by non-Jewish listeners who were really drawn to it as this exotic thing, which was a representation of a Jewish family. It was different than other Jewish humor, which was harsher and more joke-oriented. This was a really heimish, warm family portrait.

And she got tons of letters from non-Jewish listeners saying, you know, I love Molly. They would talk to her as Molly. They were address the letters to Molly. She was one of those celebrities who really embraced the mass audience that she had.

Nahanni: The Yom Kippur episode continues, and in the pre-holiday bustle, Molly has still not finished dressing for synagogue.

__

Clip: 

Molly: Darling, get me mein hat, yes, darling.

Rosalie: Which hat are you gonna wear, Ma? 

Molly: I didn’t decide yet which hat. Bring me the hats.

Nahanni: Molly wants some advice about which hat to wear to shul, so she goes to the window and calls to her neighbor across the airshaft.

Clip: Yoohoo, Mrs. Silvertone, yoohoo!

Nahanni: Even though they don’t use each other’s first names, there’s an easy intimacy between the women as they lean out their windows, which are just a few feet away from each other.

___

Clip: 

Molly: I just wanted to see what I'm going to wear tonight…

Neighbor: Which dress are you going to wear it with? 

Molly: With mein periwinkle, visualize. 

Neighbor: With your periwinkle,  I don’t like it, no. 

Molly: See if you like this one better. With the veil better? 

Neighbor: Mmm…a little better…I'm not crazy for it.

Molly: Me neither.

Nahanni: They end up trading hats over the airshaft.

Neighbor: Come here, try mine. 

Molly: I always look better in somebody else's hat. 

Neighbor: I always tell you, take me along when you're going to buy a hat. 

Molly: How's that? 

Neighbor: Ooh I love it, wear it. 

Molly: So what’ll you wear? 

Neighbor: Come here, let me try yours…Oy I love it.!

Nahanni: After they trade hats, Molly says to her—

Molly: Mrs. Herman darling, if I’ve said something or did something or said something during the year, I want to say I’m sorry.]

___

Nahanni: And it's just, like, wow, this is so Jewish!

Emily: Yeah, that’s so great, the combination of the dressing, the talking across the air shaft, and the Yom Kippur part of it. Yeah, that's really lovely.

Nahanni: [melody plays] The closing scene of the Yom Kippur episode takes place in an ornate synagogue with a full six-minute rendition of the Kol Nidrei prayer sung by a cantor and men’s choir. Molly sits in the women’s section wearing her neighbor’s feather-festooned hat.

[Clip: cantor singing Kol Nidrei]

Emily: So one of the plots that I talk about in this essay is one in which they get a new landlord for the building. And the landlord comes in and the building is filled with problems. Like, they need to fix the elevator and the staircase. Things are run down. There's a bunch of different problems.

And so there's this new landlord that comes in, and this strikes up a huge debate between Molly and her husband. And it is explicitly a political argument that's about strategy—left-wing versus moderate liberal, I would say. So this is a really fascinating thing. Like, this is an episode of television that is a renter's rights debate. How do you deal as a poor person, as a working person, as a renter, and, you know, do you form some kind of a union?

This comes from the politics of, I'm sure Gertrude Berg, but also the politics of Philip Loeb who played her husband, who was one of the creators of Actors' Equity and was very, very involved in union organizing.

Nahanni: So in the 1950s, McCarthyism struck television and Philip Loeb was blacklisted for some of what you were mentioning: his politics, his support for civil rights and for union organizing.

Emily: Yes. What happened is this: The show itself had aligned itself with union approaches to things. So, the show actually led a union walkout. There was a technician strike and the show actually walked out to support a technician strike. I don't know whether they had blank air go on or something.

But then what happened was in June 1950, a publication called Red Channels came out. And Red Channels was essentially just a little publication that listed names of supposed pinkos, subversives, anybody associated with communism. I mean, communism and being red was this huge umbrella thing that was, like, anyone who came out for Black civil rights, anyone who—like, there were numerous things that could mark you as a red in their eyes. And essentially they just made a list.

Red Channels came out, and two months later, the network goes to Gertrude Berg and says, You have to fire Philip Loeb. And she said no. And she kind of held them at bay for a long time. But eventually they did simply cancel the show the next June.

Now they claimed—as I will say, CBS claimed about Colbert—that this was a financial decision, but that was clearly not true. The show was successful. It was selling Sanka. There's no evidence it was anything but punishment for the politics of it. And the show went off the air in June of 1951.

Ultimately, once it went off the air and she tried to jump to a new network, she couldn't get a sponsor unless she dropped Philip Loeb. She accepted this contract with NBC without him, and she ultimately gave him, I would say, a very good deal, and he really needed the money because he had a mentally ill, sick child who was institutionalized and he was broke. He became deeply, deeply depressed, and ultimately he checked into a hotel and took an overdose, and he committed suicide.

They hired a new actor to play Jake on the air. But his suicide understandably cast a real shadow over the legacy of the show. Bit by bit, that show got worse in many ways. I mean, it's not that it got less skilled as a sitcom, but it definitely got less Jewish, certainly less political.

The sponsors and the networks insisted they move the Goldbergs from the city to the country. So they ended up moving out to Connecticut, where, you know, there was no window that you could yell out to your neighbors in the same way.

And I think the character of Molly Goldberg changed over time. Molly became more self-abnegating and neurotic and the dynamics of the show changed. I mean, it's not that there's nothing funny on it, but it does become, to me, a little more misogynist.

There's an episode where she goes to a fat farm—like, Gertrude Berg was very heavy. It's a part of the character that she was fat, but it was never an aspect of the show. Like, she was a confident character, confident in her body, in an affectionate relationship with her husband. There's just a tonal change, and definitely the Jewishness was so sanded down and watered down and eliminated that it's a little shocking to watch some of the later episodes. By the end of The Goldbergs, I think most people agree it was kind of limping as a show.

Nahanni: The last new episode of The Goldbergs ran in 1954, and nothing Berg did afterwards quite matched Molly Goldberg’s star power.

Emily: I mean, toward the end of her life, Gertrude Berg—very, very, very hard worker, talented performer—did have a few other little breakthroughs. She starred in a Broadway show called A Majority of One. She won the Tony Award for that role. So she did do some other stuff.

But I will say when she published her memoir, four years before her death, she didn't mention anything about the blacklist. She has one line about Philip Loeb. The whole thing was, I think, something that was shameful and sad and people didn't want to discuss.

And part of what I write about in that essay is how much of this reflects on what's going on nowadays, right? Like, there's the blacklist and the situation in which institutions, networks, universities, law firms just drop what are theoretically their values in order to knuckle under to powerful forces telling them to shut up, or to get rid of controversial people. Obviously that's not just something that happened in the early '50s, it's something that happens now too. So I think it's a worthwhile thing to look back on those blacklist years for certain lessons about how human beings act.

Nahanni: And what lessons do we take away from the story that are applicable to today?

Emily: There’s a part of this story that I think is really positive. I think it's important to reclaim the legacy of someone like Gertrude Berg, a fascinating, iconoclastic, hugely productive, wildly creative, deeply influential person who's been largely forgotten and who I think should be celebrated.

And there's another part of the story where it is an undeniably sad and complicated story about cowardice—I'm not saying on the part of Berg, I'm saying, you know, during the entire period, the feeling of terror people felt.

And also it's very much about the way that progress, including cultural progress, including issues of representation, don't always just move forward. They sometimes move forward and then swing back, and that's very much what happened, I feel like, with this show.

I mean, not all of this is about the blacklist. Some of this is about sexism. Some of this is about Jewishness. Some of this is about representations of Jewish mothers, which, you know, as I think many people know by the sixties, the Jewish mother—you know, Gertrude Berg played a hero—the Jewish mother became, like, a national joke and a villain in, you know, Woody Allen or Philip Roth books.

And so I see Molly Goldberg as this towering figure who transformed the role into, like, the central character, and then she's demoted and put on the side again.

And honestly, in the decades that passed, there's been a lot of improvements in this. But I think a lot of us grew up knowing the Jewish mother as kind of a, like, a comic trope, an embarrassment. And I think it's great to reclaim the version of it that comes through Molly Goldberg, which is somebody that you can love, identify with, and see as sort of heroic.

Clip: Dear friends, we wish for all of you God's blessings on this day, and greetings from our family to your family. Good night.

[The Goldbergs theme music plays]

Nahanni: Gertrude Berg died in 1966, just before her 67th birthday. You can watch episodes of The Goldbergs online today on YouTube and Amazon thanks to digitized kinescope recordings, which were created by filming a television screen.

Emily Nussbaum shared Berg’s story for this episode. Emily is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Her recent article about Gertrude Berg is called “The Forgotten Inventor of the Sitcom”.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of JWA. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. You can find us online at jwa.org/canwetalk, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Nahanni Rous.

[The Goldbergs theme music plays]