August 20, 2024 • 40 mins
We are continuing our summer tradition at Here’s The Thing, where members of the staff select their favorite interviews from the archives. This week, we revisit Alec Baldwin’s 2021 conversation with actress and activist Marlo Thomas, who has been breaking barriers for women for more than five decades. She first became a household name as Ann-Marie, the lead in the television show “That Girl,” a woman who, in the late 60s, wanted a career more than a family. An outspoken feminist, Marlo then launched “Free to Be...You and Me,” which was first an album, then a book, and eventually, an Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning TV show for children that challenged gender norms and became a touchstone for a generation of feminists. Her best-selling books include a memoir about growing up an adored daughter of TV star Danny Thomas. In 2020, she released a book, “What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life,” and a podcast, “Double Date,” with her late husband Phil Donahue. All in all, quite a life for That Girl.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio. It's summer and that means
it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing. Will
the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
our summer staff picks series? Next up? As executive producer
Kathy Russo.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Thanks Alec White, go go boots, fishnet stockings, fake eyelashes,
mini dresses, and that hair with the bangs and the
flip at the end. That was That Girl, the series
I watched on my black and white TV in Upstate
New York when I was six years old in nineteen
sixty six. That was Marlo Thomas playing an independent would
(00:43):
be actress named Anne Marie. The show is about a
woman from Bruster, New York that moves to the big
city to chase her dreams and I couldn't wait to
watch every week. Marlo Thomas is my summer pick for
archive episode.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
This week.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
In the interview, Alec discusses Mallo's acting career from That
Girl to Friends. They also talk about her political activism,
her children's books, and her longtime marriage to talk show
host Phil Donahue. But most importantly, they discussed her work
with Saint Jude's Children's Hospital, started by her father, the
actor Danny Thomas. At Saint Jude's, no parent pays for
(01:22):
medical care for their child. I loved this interview because
with Marlowe, what you see is what you get, a
warm and loving woman who cares deeply and takes action
to do good in the world, all while chasing her dreams.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Over the course of her illustrious career, Marlo Thomas has
broken barriers for women as an award winning actress. Marlowe
became a household name from her portrayal of Anne Marie,
the lead in the television show That Girl, a woman
who in the late sixties wanted a career more than
(02:01):
a family. An outspoken feminist, Marlowe then used her fame
to launch Free to Be You and Me, which was
first an album, then a book, and eventually an Emmy
(02:24):
and Peabody Award winning TV show for children that challenged
gender norms and became a touchstone for a generation of
feminists and Her best selling books include a memoir about
(02:48):
growing up the adored daughter of TV star Danny Thomas,
and just last year, she and her husband Phil Donahue
released a book and podcast of marriage advice called from
interviews with other happy, long lasting couples. As a philanthropist,
she's continued her family's support for Saint Jude's Children's Research
(03:11):
Hospital in Memphis, which her father founded in nineteen sixty two.
All in all, quite a life for that girl. Growing
up in Beverly Hills. Marlowe says she and her siblings
spent a lot of time on the set of The
Danny Thomas Show, her father's TV series, which ran for
eleven seasons between nineteen fifty three to nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
We all used to work at the studio in the summer,
you know, running film back and forth, and when we
could drive, we'd drop off scripts. So we were kind
of like interns, and my dad would pay us an
allowance to keep us off the street. And my dad
was a kind of guy, and I have a feeling
here this way. He loved having his kids around him.
(03:55):
He just loved it. And when we were children, we
were allowed to see in on writers meetings. We'd sit
on the floor and the writers would all be talking
about coming up stories or my dad's act in Las Vegas,
and I would laugh and Dad would say, Oh, my
kid loves it. Why'd you like that, honey? What was
funny about that?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
To you? He was interested.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
And then sometimes I'd say something and he'd say, my
kids are so funny.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
They are funnier than I am. So he gave us
this feeling. He kind of empowered us.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I mean, I always thought I was brilliant, and I
have no idea if I am or I am not,
but I think I am because he said I was right,
and he did that for all of us.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
He gave us that.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
It's like Lauren Michaels would always say that his kids
were like his focus group.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I used to say to Lauren, you know, you're a
couple generations removed from some of the musical acts that
are starring on the show. Now, his daughter Sophie is older.
Now she's graduating college. But when Sophie was a teenager,
when going to school in New York, I'd say to Laurene,
how do you determine who the musical acts are on
the show? And he'd say, who's ever in Sophie's iPod?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
That's right exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Muse extremely to see.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Who she was listening to exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
But tell people how the studio. What studio was he
at Desi Lou He was at Desilu, Yeah, and that
was like what like Sunset Gower or somewhere in like Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, it was below Sunset on Gower.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
But you were born in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, but for five minutes, I was born in Detroit.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Now, why was the family in Detroit?
Speaker 4 (05:23):
My mom had a radio show there, the Sweet Singer
of Sweet Songs, and my dad came on as her
announcer and they fell in love. And then he wanted
to go to Chicago, where the bigger nightclubs were. He
was really a nightclub performer. So she had to make
the decision in those days, give up the show and
go with the guy she loved to Chicago. She got
pregnant and that was the decision, and off they went
(05:46):
to Chicago for a couple of years. And then Abe
last Wogel was coming through on the whatever that was
that Pacific Railroad. He represented Sinatra and Danny Kay and
Judy Garland, so he was very well known. He was
told that there was a great comic he should stop
and see on his way to New York, and he
saw my father and he signed him up and brought
(06:08):
him to Hollywood right away, and he said to my father,
you know, you're a star, you should come to come.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
To La So that's a pattern in your family, the
women in your family marrying men that they meet on
radio shows and TV shows.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
So you're out there in the fifties, you moved to California.
Where did you go to school out there? Beverly Hills
High School?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
No, Marymount went to mary She went.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
To a Catholic school. Yeah, your father's an old school Lebanese.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
I went to Marymount. My husband went to Notre Dame.
So we were raised the same way. Actually, and he's
from Cleveland and I'm from Beverly Hills. But we have
the same upbringing.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Really strict Catholic upbringing.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
And when the time comes for you to launch your
own career, you start that girl in nineteen sixty six,
sixty six, and you're a young woman. You're very young, right.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Well, I had done a pilot.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You know, everything in this business is wonderfully progressive. I
had bumped around doing seventy seven Sunset Strip and Dobie
Gillis and all these terrible shows. Laura Badi did Adobe Gillis.
I didn't know, mister d Not that bad, but pretty bad.
I did all those shows. I played a Chinese girl
on Bonanza. Nobody knew what to do with me. I
(07:21):
was a Chinese girl. I played a Hawaiian girl. I
played an Arabian girl. They never saw me as the
girl next door.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
You wouldn't get cast as the Chinese girl now, right, But.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
With my coloring, I'm out of complexion, dark hair, dark eyes,
so they could only They never saw me as the
girl next door. But I was cast in a pilot
at Universal called Two's Company, which was an adorable show
by a young couple, and it didn't sell. But the
head of the network called me, Edgar Sharrick, and he said,
Claire al almost bought the show because they think you
(07:53):
can be a TV star, so we'd like to talk
to you.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
So I went in.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
I was disappointed the show didn't sell because I loved
and they said we want to do a show starring you.
And they gave me a whole bunch of scripts to read.
And I called them up and I said, all the
shows you've given me to read, the girl is the
wife of somebody, the secretary of somebody, the daughter of somebody.
Have you ever thought about doing a show where the
girl is the somebody? And he said, would anybody watch
(08:20):
a show like that? I said, I think so. When
I gave him a book Feminine Mystique, I said, read this.
He called me up and he said, this is what's
going to happen to my wife. And it did, actually,
So we built a show based on that. A girl
like me graduated from college, didn't want to get married,
wanted to be an actress, wanted to move to the
big city, and everybody said it wouldn't succeed.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And that first night, Wow, it got a forty share
on ABC.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Yeah, and all of a sudden, I was the ultimate
girl next door, which was so funny because I could
never get cast like that. And then I became the
girl next door so much in people's minds that it's
very hard for me to play meaner people.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
The murderous. Yeah, I have a script for you where
you play a woman that murders people.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
That's what I want.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm having trouble raising money for the film that would
attached as a.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Murderers and I'll do it for nothing.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
A lot of the financiers, a lot of the investors
I'm talking to aren't buying you as a murderist. But
I'll work on it.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I can do it.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
But let me ask you this. Obviously, in the sixties,
the looming cultural reality is the Vietnam War, and a
lot of programming and a lot of music and things
are things that help us to forget and feminism, in
my mind, doesn't really get rolling till the seventies. And
your show's over by seventy one. We're going to talk
later on about Free to Be You and Me. But
(09:33):
at the moment that you do the show, you were
doing Barefoot in the Park in London.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And I often tell people that when a company is
kind of mounting up their slate, it's a relatively new company.
So when HBO decides it wants to do original program
and they get Sarah Jessica to do Sex in the City,
they get Jimmy Guandolfini and David Chase to do the Sopranos,
and they pay these people a lot of money to
(09:59):
stay with the show and do the hit show for
a long long time. And really, ABC was a fledgling
network in the sixties. I mean there was CBS that
was NBC and ABC was like the red headed step
child behind the two of them, and Leonard Goldberg and
all those people were building the company during that time.
Did you feel that was a part of their faith
in you and their needed you were part of building
(10:20):
that network.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
Money doesn't talk, it it speaks obscenities, right, Clara was
willing to put up all the money for my show.
They wanted a woman, a young woman, to sell shampoo,
and I was their girl. I mean, there wasn't another
girl they could see yet, and I'm sure there were many,
but there wasn't one. They saw me as I could
sell the shampoo and a conditioner and the makeup and everything,
(10:44):
and so they fixated on me, and that gave me
tremendous power to get my show done. And so as
we embarked on how to get this show written and created,
I used to play charades with Bill Persky and Sam Denoff,
who had won a couple of Emmy for the Dick
Van Dyke Show. And so I said to them ABC
wants to do a show with me, and we're looking
(11:06):
for writers. Would you ever consider writing a show about
a girl? Because they'd only written guy shows, And they
said that'd be great. We'd love to.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Talk about it.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Mike nicholsond cast me in Barefoot in London. They came
to London to see my Opening Night and then they
decided to do it, and so they wrote the pilot
and when it sold, they weren't willing to sign up
for five years. Nobody really wants to sign a five
year contract, as you know, everybody, you know, we cringe
when we see a five year contract. And Danny Arnold
(11:39):
was going to be the producer. He only wanted to
sign up for two years. Billy and Sam. So the
only person who said I'll be here for five years
was me, So I became the producer. Otherwise, had they
said it, they probably would have been the producer. So
not only did I become the producer, I own the negative.
I own the whole thing. And that only happened because
(12:00):
I was the only one who said I'll do it,
and I had learned so much working from my father
at the studio. Nothing was a mystery. And you know,
in every profession, whether it's show business or law or
interior design or whatever it is, it's mysterious. But when
you know the language, it isn't. I mean, I knew
(12:21):
what a scrim was. I knew what dailies where. I
knew what the editing machine with the three heads looked like.
I knew what musical scoring was. I knew what a
red tape was.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I knew it all.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
So because I had just been a bug on the
wall and been the one who carried the film from
one end of the studio to the other, and been
interested in sat in and watched people, I was very knowledgeable.
And I certainly was knowledgeable about comedy. I mean I
knew comedy. I'd done Barefoot in the Park, I'd done
under the ummem Tree, I had done Blotsmanagerie. I had
(12:52):
done a million plays by then. I was only twenty
five years old. But as you know, when you start out,
you're just doing stopuck, you know, or three city plays.
I did two for the Seesaw and three cities. So
I was very good on the stage. I mean I
had my sea legs, so I was ready.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Whenever I speak at colleges and stuff, and people ask me,
you know, how do I get started? I said, start
in a little theater. Get into little theater and do
as many plays as you can do. Because I believe
everybody gets a shot, but not everybody gets a second shot.
But if you're ready for your first shot. I was
when I was cast by Mike and Barefoot. I auditioned
(13:31):
for him with about, I don't know, one hundred people.
They gave me Marty Milner as my partner. We said
how do you do and got up on stuff twelve
see yeah, And I got the part. And Mike said
to me later, who are you? What have you done?
And I told him, for a kid, I was pretty seasoned,
and so I was ready. So when I came back
from Barefoot, I was really strong. I've been a year
(13:53):
there and I was very strong and so and by
strong I mean not scared, knowing how to do it
and trusting my instincts. I love working with actors. I
love being a part of a company, and we had
a great company.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Ted Bessel was aces.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Apropos of what you said about, you know, being in
the theater. I always tell people when they're younger, I
say do anything. I said, don't have a lot of
pride about what you do. Don't say no to anything.
You got to put that energy out there and give
it up. You know what I mean? Now I know
that the world was much smaller than it is now.
Now there's so many shows. There's too many shows. There's
(14:32):
no way we can have everything be good. I mean,
there's just too much content out there. And everybody's chasing
the same actors. Everybody's chasing the same writers, right and
for you back then, Perski and these famous writers, I'm
imagining that the television landscape was very finite back then.
So finding good writers, there weren't a.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Lot of them, were there, right, right, No, they weren't. No,
they were pretty stellar. The show was that good because
they were so good, you know, as you Danny Arnold
later created Barney Miller, which is fantastic show. Sure, and
Billy went on to do Kate n Ally and a
whole lot of very good women's shows. He got to
become a real guru for women's shows. They were very
(15:10):
gifted people. And the thing is is they would rewrite everything.
You know, We'd get a script and it would be
kind of so so, but it had a good premise,
and they'd rewrite the hell out of it and bring
it back to the table and it was fantastic.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
And then the person.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Whose name was on it would win an Emmy for it,
and then somebody like you would call and say, is
this the same Joe blow that you had because his
script is not very good, but our guys had completely
redone it.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Actress and activist Marlo Thomas Her push for equal rights
was part of the larger conversation about gender equality in
the seventies. Feminism was also a heated topic in my
twenty twelve conversation with author Erica Jong and her daughter
Molli jang Fast.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
I think that women who are fourteen fifteen are in
the most difficult position they have ever been in modern society.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
I think it's not explained to young girls in.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
A way very confusing, Molly.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
But I think that's a legacy of the feminist movement.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
I mean, we said we want not a legacy of
the feminist movement. It is a legacy, and here I
really feel fierce. It is the legacy of a distortion
of women's desire for equal rights.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Equal rights are not platforms shoes.
Speaker 5 (16:35):
You can't and naked clothes equal rights.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
But you can't blow up an ad Am bomb and
then choose how it's going to go.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Here more of my conversation with Erica Jong and Mali
Jang Fast and Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break,
marlow Thomas explains why she went to New York to
study acting with Lee Strasberg after her success on TV.
(17:12):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
As executive producer and star of That Girl, Marlowe Thomas
worked closely with the writers to make her character Anne
Marie more believable.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, it's a regular company. You know.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
You sit around and say, let's do an arc where
she's looking for a job and she gets these four jobs.
Or let's do an arc where her father wants her
to move back home, you know, and so you talk
about the arc, and then we'd read to have a
table read, and everybody would give their comments. There were
very few times where, you know, there were any huge debates.
(17:52):
You know, I've always felt about story that what's right
always wins.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
You know.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
The first year was a little difficult because I was
the only girl on the staff. You know, they staffed
the show. I didn't staff the show. I didn't know
any writers.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
I was a kid. How would I know writers.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
So they staffed the show with a lot of terrific
guy writers, in which I would say, I don't think
a girl would say that to her father, or I
don't know that's the way a girl would end an
argument with her boyfriend. So we'd have these debates. So
finally Danny Arnold, who was one of the smartest guys
in the world, said, you know what we need. We
need a female story editor. You can't be the only
(18:30):
girl in the room. And so the female story editor
came on and that was heaven because she was able
from her expertise and her ability to write, to say,
you know, let's go this way. The only real debate
we ever had was they wanted to be a wedding.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
For the last show.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Clara al wanted a wedding. ABC wanted a wedding. The
producers wanted a wedding, and I said, we can't do
a wedding. We can't end the show with a wedding.
If we end the show with a wedding, this audience,
which has followed this character for five years, she's independent,
she doesn't want to get married, she's not sure she
(19:08):
wants to get married. She wants a career. We've had
so many of those conversations. To have a wedding is
to betray them. I think we're saying that's the only
happy ending, and lots of shows end with weddings. I
don't want this show to end with a wedding. And
that was a problem. That was the only one. And
the interesting thing is, I mean, obviously they let me
(19:30):
have it that way, and then a couple years later
Billy and Sambo said to me that was such a
right idea because it had gone into syndication.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That way, the show is over.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Once you see the show run through and you see
the wedding, then you know how the story ends. But
I would have felt it would have been a wrong
message to say this is the only happy ending. And Alec,
I'll tell you the mail that poured in about that.
Thank you, thank you Marlon for not coming out, thank you,
thank you for ending with a wedding. I mean, they
(20:01):
really they wanted to see it. They've been hanging on
to the fact that this is the one single girl
on television. Had never been a single girl before. There's
this one single girl and she doesn't get married at
the end. And I always had a thing growing up,
which is why I did Free to Be You and Me.
That every princess married the prince. That was the only
(20:21):
happy ending of a fairy tale. And I hope your children,
in fact, I'm going to send you Free to Be
this week. Your children should listen to Free to Be
You and Me, because there is no one happy ending.
Your boys and your girls will have the happy ending
that they create for themselves, not one that goes along
(20:42):
with what every other boy and every other girl has done.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So when the show is over, when did you go
to the actors studio after that? Because you were in
Hollywood doing the show. So when the show's of a
you moved to New York.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Right, Well, they wanted us to do two more years,
and they wanted me and Chatty to get married. I
didn't want to get married, but they said, well then
just two two more years because they really needed that girl.
I mean, there weren't a lot of hits on ABC,
as you remember, And I said, I just can't. I
was a girl when we started. I'm a woman now.
I can't be the same little girl running around trying
to get a job. I mean it's I'm too old now,
(21:16):
you know, I'm thirty one, decided to move on and
I got a script. It was called Crackers. It was
about a woman who was a drunk, and it was
a very touching story. And I read it and I thought,
I don't know how to do this. Everything I had
done had been in this comedic vein Barefoot in the Park,
and all the stuff i'd done, I mean, even Glass
(21:39):
Menagerie didn't have that kind of character that you had to,
you know, to play a good drunk and to have
come out of that, and all the would come from
the withdrawal to.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Ring yourself out. You got to ring yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
So I called Ellen Berson, who I had met a
few times. So she said, you got to go to
Lee Strasford. So I called him. He said he'd meet
me at FU to New York. And he said to me,
you're a big star. You got a lot of awards.
What do you want to come to class for. I said,
because I only know how to do what I know
how to do, and I've gotten by on a lot
(22:12):
of charm and comedy instinct. He said, don't look at
gift horse in the mouth, my dear, I said, I'm
not complaining. I'm just saying that's what I got. That's
my whole bag. So he said okay, And after that
I started doing work. I mean, I want an Emmy
as Best Dramatic Actress playing a schizophrenic. After that that
(22:37):
Lee Grant cast me in it was called Nobody's Child,
and I don't I'm not saying this to toot my
own horn, but I'm saying this to prove what acting
classes do for you. I was up against Vanessa Redgrave,
Catherine Hepburn, Jenna Rollins, and Mayor Winningham and I won
that Emmy. And I would not have won that had
(22:59):
I not stop my career and worked on my work
for three years. And I say often to people, sometimes
your career gets in the way.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Of your work. You've got to stop and do your
work and figure out what it is you want.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I've been there.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
When I quit that girl, my father said to me,
you have to be crazy. You are the heir apparent
to Lucille Ball. I said, Daddy, I know that's a
great compliment, but I don't want to be Lucille Ball.
I respect Lucille Ball. She's a genius. That's just not
where I'm headed. I want to be a lot of
(23:36):
other people.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Now now free to be you and me. How did
that start?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
It really happened because of my niece.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
As you know, and as you can hear from what
I'm saying, I was born a feminist.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
I mean I really was.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
My father used to call me misindependence. As a child,
I always had an idea of what I wanted to do,
and I wanted to do a single girl on television.
I gave feminine mystique to the head of the network.
I was obviously always going in that to and when
I was doing that girl, I got a lot of
male from young women that was shocking. I get a
(24:08):
letter from a sixteen year old girl who said, I'm pregnant.
I can't tell my father. Where can I go? I'm
twenty two years old and I have two children and
my husband beats me up. Where could I go? So
I said to my secretaries we called them at the time,
I had two of them. I said, I don't know
where the hell is somebody going in Duluth if they're pregnant.
Where does somebody go in Salt Lake City if they're
(24:31):
being beaten up? As I'd looked around and we looked around.
There wasn't any place. There were no legal advisors. There's
no place for a woman or a girl to go
for safety or counsel or anything which politicized me. That's
how I met Gloria Steinem and all these women and
created the misfoundation for women. All that happened because of
(24:53):
the male I got, because there was no place for
women to go. But then my sister had a baby,
the first grandchild in our family, and she was about
four and a half or so, and I was reading
the books in her bedroom and they were all the
thing about the boys do this, and the girls do that,
and the Princess Mary is the prince at the end
of the thing. And I said to my sister, this
(25:14):
is such rubbish. It took us thirty years to get
over this. You got to get her something else. So
I went to the bookstore to find something else, and
there wasn't anything. So I decided to do one of
my own. So I created Free to Be You and
Me for her. I really had no intention of becoming
a big franchise. I just wanted to do something that
(25:34):
would have stories for boys and girls that said they
could be anything. They wanted to be that it'd be
non racist and non sexist, and so I got together
with friends like Schelle Silverstein and Herb Gardner and Kleeband
who had done the music and lyrics for a chorus line,
and Patty Chayevsky who was a friend of Herbie's, and
a bunch of people. We sat around and said, I said, okay,
(25:57):
let's rewrite our childhood. What would you have like to
have heard when you were a kid. And Herb Gardner said,
I would have liked to have heard that it was
okay for a boy to cry and that it wasn't sissy.
And Carol Hall wrote that wonderful song It's all Right
to Cry, which has become a classic, and we got
Rosie Grier to sing it, which was great. And then
I and then I said, I want there to be
(26:20):
a story where the princess does not marry the prince
at the end and goes on to her own life,
and she's not a blonde, she's a brunette like me
with olive skin. We did that one. We did Atalanta
where she runs in the race and chooses her own life.
So we rewrote all the things and the company was
called Bill Records at the.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Time, you know, I was a big shot.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
And so they made the record and Alan al directed
the written pieces, got Mel Brooks to play one of
the babies with me. That the two Babies who don't
Know Who's a boy and Who's a Girl? And Mel
and Carl Reiner wrote it.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
It was hilariously funny.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
We did the whole thing and he said, you know,
you're not going to sell more than fifteen thousand.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I said, that's okay.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
We're not doing this for the money. We want to
change the world, one five year old at a time. Well,
it went gold and it went platinum, and then we
did the book and it was number one on the
best seller list. So we did the special one on
Emmy and a Peabody. I mean, it's just because there's
been nothing like it. And just last week it was
inducted into the Library of Congress with albums, along with
(27:23):
Janet Jackson, Kermit the Frog, and Thomas Edison, of all people.
So when an idea is right, and it wasn't, you know,
I didn't write the pieces. I conceived the idea and
assigned the pieces. But I'm not that kind of writer.
I couldn't write a song. But you know, Alec, I'm
(27:44):
sure you feel this in your work. If something comes
organically from you, as that girl did, as Free to
Be did, it's something you really believe in, you want
to do. It does touch other people, you know. It
isn't like, oh, I think it would be really commercial.
If I did a show about this, that's probably not
going to be successful. But if it comes out of
(28:05):
your own desire to right or wrong, or change the world,
or express this thing that's so on fire inside of you,
that has a very good chance, I believe of being successful.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Actress and activist Marlo Thomas. This is It's all Right
to Cry, sung by Rosie Greer from Free to Be,
You and Me. That's right, Rosie Greer, the NFL defensive tackle.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
It's alright to cry. Ry the sad out of of you.
It's all right cry.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
It might make you feel better when we come back. Marlowe.
Thomas talks about her forty year marriage to talk show
host Phil Donahue. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow. Here's the thing on
(29:07):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing.
For much of the seventies, Marlowe Thomas was a proud
single woman with no interest in getting married, and then
a guest appearance on a daytime talk show in nineteen
(29:30):
seventy seven changed everything.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I just never wanted to be married, you know, it
just wasn't for me. I had an idea of what
I wanted to do. I wanted to go to London
and do a play. I wanted to be free to
take any opportunity that and I don't mean in a
romantic way. I had a lot of fabulous boyfriends, but
I just wanted to experience so much. And my husband
(29:56):
got married at twenty one, and he said to me, one,
how the hell did you have the guts not to
get married early? I said, because I'm a girl. I
knew damn well, if I got married, I'd be responsible
for the babies, for the house, for the husband, for
the everything. I grew up with that I know.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I'm of a.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Lebanese family and an Italian family, and they're a lot
like the Irish, as you and Phil are. You know,
the mother runs the roost. She takes care of the children,
and she has a thousand of them. My father's one
of ten, my mother's one of five. My mother gave
up her career and followed my father around the country
and really supported him in his career, and that was
her choice. I looked at that choice and said, that's
(30:38):
not for me. I wanted to be my father. I
wanted to be on stage. I used to see my
father in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and his
eyes would be shining and he was having a ball,
and I'm so happy.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
And that was it.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
I think I discovered what you say you're discovering now.
I discovered work made me happy, made me happy and
my husband. In the last about six years, I did
a play off Broadway, in a play on Broadway. One
was Elaine May on Broadway and one was Jojo Petro
off Broadway. And Phil said to me, you're so happy
(31:13):
when you do a play. As far as I've ben thurned,
you can do a play every year. I'm the happiest
when I'm on stage. And so I made that decision.
I hadn't expected to meet Phil. It was beyond my control.
It's like a gag. I mean, he walked in the
green room and it was like a shampoo commercial.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
I mean, his big blue eyes and.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
That shock of white hair, and I thought, oh my god.
And I was dating like three men at the time.
Phil said the same thing. He said, I walked down
the hall after her, and I thought, my god, she's
a bad thought. And then we flirted for an hour
on his show. He asked me out the next night
(31:57):
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
But what changed, meaning you said in interviews that you
had a couple different types of boyfriends. You had the
hunky boyfriend, you know, you had the leading man boyfriend.
Then you had the smart, funny boyfriend to keep you interested.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Well, you're very right.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
My comment was that I, you know, the the you know,
the gorgeous guy, the hunk and everything. That guy was,
you know, a sexy turn on. And the other guy,
he was so smart that he taught me things. I
was very attracted to men like that who kind of
(32:32):
you know, just taught me about business or taught me
about life, who were just very smart, which the hunky
guy didn't really have that right, And this was the
first time I met a man who had it all.
Phil was hunky and sexy and real smart, and it
just was. It was a great package. And so at
first the first thing that brings you together is the hunky,
(32:54):
sexy part. And then the more I got to know him,
just so wise and he always does the right thing.
He always ends up with the right spot. And Phil
moved his show, his show, his whole show, all the
producers and everything, to New York. I was living in LA.
He was living in Chicago. I had a big production company.
(33:16):
I had made twelve movies for television in a row.
He had his own show, and he was raising four
boys on his own. He was getting his boys through school.
His show every day at nine am. Our lives were insane,
and I said to him, he said, he wanted me
to move to Chicago. And I said, look at this
point in my career, I really can't live in Chicago.
I could live in New York or LA. He said,
(33:39):
I can't live in LA. I'm not interested. He said,
no offense, but I'm not interested in interviewing actors. So
we picked New York and we moved everything to New York,
including his show. He said, let me just get my
boys through high school, which was like another two three years.
He got his boys whore. We bought an apartment, We
got married, the boys, got through high school. He moved
his show and everything, and we made a life in
(34:01):
New York, where neither of us lived. We bought an apartment,
we bought a house in Connecticut. We invented a life.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Now. Obviously, another enormous part of your family's legacy, your
Dad's legacy and your legacy, is Saint Jude's. Talk to
me about the genesis of that and why Memphis.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
My father grew up very poor, an immigrant family. My
grandparents were from Lebanon. They had no money. They came
here with all their belongings in cloth bags and arranged marriage.
Had ten babies, nine boys, and a girl without a doctor,
hot water and her sister. So everybody in the neighborhood.
(34:41):
They were everybody. They were Polish, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, whatever,
And they never went to a doctor, and they all
had jobs on consignment. I mean, it was real, real
dirt poor people. And my father had little friends who
died of things like influenza and appendicia, this which are
(35:01):
manageable situations, but they died because they never could see
a doctor. So he had a very first hand look
at the inequity of health care in this country, and
that always was in his mind. And so when he
made a promise to Saint Jude, show me a sign
that I can make it in my career, because he
was my father was terrified at being poor and not
(35:21):
being able to raise his children the way his father was.
So he was willing to give up show business if
he knew what got assign you to something else. Anyway,
he got a sign, and he continued on his way,
and when he got very successful and quite wealthy, he
decided it was time to pay back, and he wanted
to build a hospital for very ill children where nobody
(35:45):
would be turned away, not for race or religion, and
no one would pay for anything, not treatment, travel, housing,
or food. And he picked the South because and this
was a wonderful story. My father carried this little piece
of paper in his pocket for men years. He read
in the paper that a black boy eight years old
(36:05):
in Mississippi was hit by a car. A white guy
hit him on his bike. The white guy picked him
up and tried to get him to a hospital, but
no emergency room would take him because he was black.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
And he died.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
So my father decided, I'm putting it in the South.
I want the kids from the South to be able
to get here too, And so he did.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Interesting and it was the first solely integrated hospital in
the South.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
And we have the largest program for sickle cell We
have eight hundred sickle cell patients and we have a black, white, Hispanic.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
They come from all over the world. We even have.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Amish people, which so stunned me because here are these
people won't even have a zipper. But when it comes
to saving your kid, if your child to sick, god forbid,
you'd sell your arm to get your kid. Well, these
parents come terrified. They're gonna have to sell their house,
that everything else. They don't have to sell anything. They
just have to there. And we put them up in
(37:01):
beautiful housing, which by the way, I do most of
the decorating. We can put up four hundred families for years,
two years at a time.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
It's an incredible place.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Well, let me just say this to you. I want
you to tell your husband that we'd love to have
him on the show. I didn't want you together because
I feel like a show with Phil Donague. That's four
segments we need to do four hours before down here
because I respect him and I admire him, and he's
got a lot to say. We'd love to have him
on because I'm a huge fan of your husband's show.
Really tell him and what I love about your husband
was is that his political views, though they tilted in
(37:32):
a certain way, they weren't partisan. Do you think that
you agree with that?
Speaker 4 (37:35):
Through most of his career, Yes, he got hit in
the head, got fired from MSNBC because he opposed the
war in Iraq, and it was an interesting time for him.
Here's a guy who'd been on the air for twenty
nine years in syndication and when I first met him,
he said, I've got the best job in television. And
I said why. He said, because I can say anything
(37:55):
I want to say. And if you don't want to
run it in Detroit, you don't have But I'm in
two hundred and fifty cities, so don't run it. So
he wasn't used to any kind of censorship overview. He
just did what he wanted. He went on MSNBC and
the war was ramping up against Iraq, so he put
(38:16):
on fathers who had lost their sons, both from Israel
and Palestine to talk about what war really does. And
these are men who were opposite each other in their beliefs,
but they had both lost sons in these wars. And
he had on all the people that were against the war,
the Colin Powells and all the people, and they were
(38:37):
all the generals who were against the war. And NBC
told his producer, you've got to get filled to get
off the war thing. You know, NBC is run by
General Electric. General Electric makes things that go boom. So
he didn't stop. He felt it was not only he
wasn't being defiant, he was being a journalist, was saying,
(39:01):
he was showing the other side of this, and all
the other shows everywhere actually were for the war.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Yeah. I just want to say this to you, and
that is you probably should go back on TV because
you'd still be the funniest, most sophisticated, gorgeous woman on TV.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
That line from Lucy to you and Mary Tyler Moore
hovering around the same time onto Murphy Brown, those great,
great leading ladies of network television. God, I would love
to work with you one day. What enjoy that.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Thank you. We'll give me a call, Ale anytime.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
We will call you. We book. This was fun, love you,
thank you, my very best to you, and thank you.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
My thanks to Marlow Thomas. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening.
This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
the Thing from iHeart Radio. It's summer and that means
it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing. Will
the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
our summer staff picks series? Next up? As executive producer
Kathy Russo.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Thanks Alec White, go go boots, fishnet stockings, fake eyelashes,
mini dresses, and that hair with the bangs and the
flip at the end. That was That Girl, the series
I watched on my black and white TV in Upstate
New York when I was six years old in nineteen
sixty six. That was Marlo Thomas playing an independent would
(00:43):
be actress named Anne Marie. The show is about a
woman from Bruster, New York that moves to the big
city to chase her dreams and I couldn't wait to
watch every week. Marlo Thomas is my summer pick for
archive episode.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
This week.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
In the interview, Alec discusses Mallo's acting career from That
Girl to Friends. They also talk about her political activism,
her children's books, and her longtime marriage to talk show
host Phil Donahue. But most importantly, they discussed her work
with Saint Jude's Children's Hospital, started by her father, the
actor Danny Thomas. At Saint Jude's, no parent pays for
(01:22):
medical care for their child. I loved this interview because
with Marlowe, what you see is what you get, a
warm and loving woman who cares deeply and takes action
to do good in the world, all while chasing her dreams.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Over the course of her illustrious career, Marlo Thomas has
broken barriers for women as an award winning actress. Marlowe
became a household name from her portrayal of Anne Marie,
the lead in the television show That Girl, a woman
who in the late sixties wanted a career more than
(02:01):
a family. An outspoken feminist, Marlowe then used her fame
to launch Free to Be You and Me, which was
first an album, then a book, and eventually an Emmy
(02:24):
and Peabody Award winning TV show for children that challenged
gender norms and became a touchstone for a generation of
feminists and Her best selling books include a memoir about
(02:48):
growing up the adored daughter of TV star Danny Thomas,
and just last year, she and her husband Phil Donahue
released a book and podcast of marriage advice called from
interviews with other happy, long lasting couples. As a philanthropist,
she's continued her family's support for Saint Jude's Children's Research
(03:11):
Hospital in Memphis, which her father founded in nineteen sixty two.
All in all, quite a life for that girl. Growing
up in Beverly Hills. Marlowe says she and her siblings
spent a lot of time on the set of The
Danny Thomas Show, her father's TV series, which ran for
eleven seasons between nineteen fifty three to nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
We all used to work at the studio in the summer,
you know, running film back and forth, and when we
could drive, we'd drop off scripts. So we were kind
of like interns, and my dad would pay us an
allowance to keep us off the street. And my dad
was a kind of guy, and I have a feeling
here this way. He loved having his kids around him.
(03:55):
He just loved it. And when we were children, we
were allowed to see in on writers meetings. We'd sit
on the floor and the writers would all be talking
about coming up stories or my dad's act in Las Vegas,
and I would laugh and Dad would say, Oh, my
kid loves it. Why'd you like that, honey? What was
funny about that?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
To you? He was interested.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
And then sometimes I'd say something and he'd say, my
kids are so funny.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
They are funnier than I am. So he gave us
this feeling. He kind of empowered us.
Speaker 4 (04:24):
I mean, I always thought I was brilliant, and I
have no idea if I am or I am not,
but I think I am because he said I was right,
and he did that for all of us.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
He gave us that.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
It's like Lauren Michaels would always say that his kids
were like his focus group.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
I used to say to Lauren, you know, you're a
couple generations removed from some of the musical acts that
are starring on the show. Now, his daughter Sophie is older.
Now she's graduating college. But when Sophie was a teenager,
when going to school in New York, I'd say to Laurene,
how do you determine who the musical acts are on
the show? And he'd say, who's ever in Sophie's iPod?
Speaker 3 (04:58):
That's right exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Muse extremely to see.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Who she was listening to exactly.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
But tell people how the studio. What studio was he
at Desi Lou He was at Desilu, Yeah, and that
was like what like Sunset Gower or somewhere in like Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
Yeah, it was below Sunset on Gower.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
But you were born in Michigan.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, but for five minutes, I was born in Detroit.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Now, why was the family in Detroit?
Speaker 4 (05:23):
My mom had a radio show there, the Sweet Singer
of Sweet Songs, and my dad came on as her
announcer and they fell in love. And then he wanted
to go to Chicago, where the bigger nightclubs were. He
was really a nightclub performer. So she had to make
the decision in those days, give up the show and
go with the guy she loved to Chicago. She got
pregnant and that was the decision, and off they went
(05:46):
to Chicago for a couple of years. And then Abe
last Wogel was coming through on the whatever that was
that Pacific Railroad. He represented Sinatra and Danny Kay and
Judy Garland, so he was very well known. He was
told that there was a great comic he should stop
and see on his way to New York, and he
saw my father and he signed him up and brought
(06:08):
him to Hollywood right away, and he said to my father,
you know, you're a star, you should come to come.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
To La So that's a pattern in your family, the
women in your family marrying men that they meet on
radio shows and TV shows.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
So you're out there in the fifties, you moved to California.
Where did you go to school out there? Beverly Hills
High School?
Speaker 3 (06:25):
No, Marymount went to mary She went.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
To a Catholic school. Yeah, your father's an old school Lebanese.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
I went to Marymount. My husband went to Notre Dame.
So we were raised the same way. Actually, and he's
from Cleveland and I'm from Beverly Hills. But we have
the same upbringing.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Really strict Catholic upbringing.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
And when the time comes for you to launch your
own career, you start that girl in nineteen sixty six,
sixty six, and you're a young woman. You're very young, right.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Well, I had done a pilot.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
You know, everything in this business is wonderfully progressive. I
had bumped around doing seventy seven Sunset Strip and Dobie
Gillis and all these terrible shows. Laura Badi did Adobe Gillis.
I didn't know, mister d Not that bad, but pretty bad.
I did all those shows. I played a Chinese girl
on Bonanza. Nobody knew what to do with me. I
(07:21):
was a Chinese girl. I played a Hawaiian girl. I
played an Arabian girl. They never saw me as the
girl next door.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
You wouldn't get cast as the Chinese girl now, right, But.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
With my coloring, I'm out of complexion, dark hair, dark eyes,
so they could only They never saw me as the
girl next door. But I was cast in a pilot
at Universal called Two's Company, which was an adorable show
by a young couple, and it didn't sell. But the
head of the network called me, Edgar Sharrick, and he said,
Claire al almost bought the show because they think you
(07:53):
can be a TV star, so we'd like to talk
to you.
Speaker 3 (07:56):
So I went in.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
I was disappointed the show didn't sell because I loved
and they said we want to do a show starring you.
And they gave me a whole bunch of scripts to read.
And I called them up and I said, all the
shows you've given me to read, the girl is the
wife of somebody, the secretary of somebody, the daughter of somebody.
Have you ever thought about doing a show where the
girl is the somebody? And he said, would anybody watch
(08:20):
a show like that? I said, I think so. When
I gave him a book Feminine Mystique, I said, read this.
He called me up and he said, this is what's
going to happen to my wife. And it did, actually,
So we built a show based on that. A girl
like me graduated from college, didn't want to get married,
wanted to be an actress, wanted to move to the
big city, and everybody said it wouldn't succeed.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And that first night, Wow, it got a forty share
on ABC.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
Yeah, and all of a sudden, I was the ultimate
girl next door, which was so funny because I could
never get cast like that. And then I became the
girl next door so much in people's minds that it's
very hard for me to play meaner people.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
The murderous. Yeah, I have a script for you where
you play a woman that murders people.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
That's what I want.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm having trouble raising money for the film that would
attached as a.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Murderers and I'll do it for nothing.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
A lot of the financiers, a lot of the investors
I'm talking to aren't buying you as a murderist. But
I'll work on it.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
I can do it.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
But let me ask you this. Obviously, in the sixties,
the looming cultural reality is the Vietnam War, and a
lot of programming and a lot of music and things
are things that help us to forget and feminism, in
my mind, doesn't really get rolling till the seventies. And
your show's over by seventy one. We're going to talk
later on about Free to Be You and Me. But
(09:33):
at the moment that you do the show, you were
doing Barefoot in the Park in London.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, right.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
And I often tell people that when a company is
kind of mounting up their slate, it's a relatively new company.
So when HBO decides it wants to do original program
and they get Sarah Jessica to do Sex in the City,
they get Jimmy Guandolfini and David Chase to do the Sopranos,
and they pay these people a lot of money to
(09:59):
stay with the show and do the hit show for
a long long time. And really, ABC was a fledgling
network in the sixties. I mean there was CBS that
was NBC and ABC was like the red headed step
child behind the two of them, and Leonard Goldberg and
all those people were building the company during that time.
Did you feel that was a part of their faith
in you and their needed you were part of building
(10:20):
that network.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:22):
Money doesn't talk, it it speaks obscenities, right, Clara was
willing to put up all the money for my show.
They wanted a woman, a young woman, to sell shampoo,
and I was their girl. I mean, there wasn't another
girl they could see yet, and I'm sure there were many,
but there wasn't one. They saw me as I could
sell the shampoo and a conditioner and the makeup and everything,
(10:44):
and so they fixated on me, and that gave me
tremendous power to get my show done. And so as
we embarked on how to get this show written and created,
I used to play charades with Bill Persky and Sam Denoff,
who had won a couple of Emmy for the Dick
Van Dyke Show. And so I said to them ABC
wants to do a show with me, and we're looking
(11:06):
for writers. Would you ever consider writing a show about
a girl? Because they'd only written guy shows, And they
said that'd be great. We'd love to.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Talk about it.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Mike nicholsond cast me in Barefoot in London. They came
to London to see my Opening Night and then they
decided to do it, and so they wrote the pilot
and when it sold, they weren't willing to sign up
for five years. Nobody really wants to sign a five
year contract, as you know, everybody, you know, we cringe
when we see a five year contract. And Danny Arnold
(11:39):
was going to be the producer. He only wanted to
sign up for two years. Billy and Sam. So the
only person who said I'll be here for five years
was me, So I became the producer. Otherwise, had they
said it, they probably would have been the producer. So
not only did I become the producer, I own the negative.
I own the whole thing. And that only happened because
(12:00):
I was the only one who said I'll do it,
and I had learned so much working from my father
at the studio. Nothing was a mystery. And you know,
in every profession, whether it's show business or law or
interior design or whatever it is, it's mysterious. But when
you know the language, it isn't. I mean, I knew
(12:21):
what a scrim was. I knew what dailies where. I
knew what the editing machine with the three heads looked like.
I knew what musical scoring was. I knew what a
red tape was.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
I knew it all.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
So because I had just been a bug on the
wall and been the one who carried the film from
one end of the studio to the other, and been
interested in sat in and watched people, I was very knowledgeable.
And I certainly was knowledgeable about comedy. I mean I
knew comedy. I'd done Barefoot in the Park, I'd done
under the ummem Tree, I had done Blotsmanagerie. I had
(12:52):
done a million plays by then. I was only twenty
five years old. But as you know, when you start out,
you're just doing stopuck, you know, or three city plays.
I did two for the Seesaw and three cities. So
I was very good on the stage. I mean I
had my sea legs, so I was ready.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
You know.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
Whenever I speak at colleges and stuff, and people ask me,
you know, how do I get started? I said, start
in a little theater. Get into little theater and do
as many plays as you can do. Because I believe
everybody gets a shot, but not everybody gets a second shot.
But if you're ready for your first shot. I was
when I was cast by Mike and Barefoot. I auditioned
(13:31):
for him with about, I don't know, one hundred people.
They gave me Marty Milner as my partner. We said
how do you do and got up on stuff twelve
see yeah, And I got the part. And Mike said
to me later, who are you? What have you done?
And I told him, for a kid, I was pretty seasoned,
and so I was ready. So when I came back
from Barefoot, I was really strong. I've been a year
(13:53):
there and I was very strong and so and by
strong I mean not scared, knowing how to do it
and trusting my instincts. I love working with actors. I
love being a part of a company, and we had
a great company.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
Ted Bessel was aces.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Apropos of what you said about, you know, being in
the theater. I always tell people when they're younger, I
say do anything. I said, don't have a lot of
pride about what you do. Don't say no to anything.
You got to put that energy out there and give
it up. You know what I mean? Now I know
that the world was much smaller than it is now.
Now there's so many shows. There's too many shows. There's
(14:32):
no way we can have everything be good. I mean,
there's just too much content out there. And everybody's chasing
the same actors. Everybody's chasing the same writers, right and
for you back then, Perski and these famous writers, I'm
imagining that the television landscape was very finite back then.
So finding good writers, there weren't a.
Speaker 4 (14:48):
Lot of them, were there, right, right, No, they weren't. No,
they were pretty stellar. The show was that good because
they were so good, you know, as you Danny Arnold
later created Barney Miller, which is fantastic show. Sure, and
Billy went on to do Kate n Ally and a
whole lot of very good women's shows. He got to
become a real guru for women's shows. They were very
(15:10):
gifted people. And the thing is is they would rewrite everything.
You know, We'd get a script and it would be
kind of so so, but it had a good premise,
and they'd rewrite the hell out of it and bring
it back to the table and it was fantastic.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
And then the person.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Whose name was on it would win an Emmy for it,
and then somebody like you would call and say, is
this the same Joe blow that you had because his
script is not very good, but our guys had completely
redone it.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Actress and activist Marlo Thomas Her push for equal rights
was part of the larger conversation about gender equality in
the seventies. Feminism was also a heated topic in my
twenty twelve conversation with author Erica Jong and her daughter
Molli jang Fast.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
I think that women who are fourteen fifteen are in
the most difficult position they have ever been in modern society.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 4 (16:09):
I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
I think it's not explained to young girls in.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
A way very confusing, Molly.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
But I think that's a legacy of the feminist movement.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
I mean, we said we want not a legacy of
the feminist movement. It is a legacy, and here I
really feel fierce. It is the legacy of a distortion
of women's desire for equal rights.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Equal rights are not platforms shoes.
Speaker 5 (16:35):
You can't and naked clothes equal rights.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
But you can't blow up an ad Am bomb and
then choose how it's going to go.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Here more of my conversation with Erica Jong and Mali
Jang Fast and Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break,
marlow Thomas explains why she went to New York to
study acting with Lee Strasberg after her success on TV.
(17:12):
I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
As executive producer and star of That Girl, Marlowe Thomas
worked closely with the writers to make her character Anne
Marie more believable.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, it's a regular company. You know.
Speaker 4 (17:28):
You sit around and say, let's do an arc where
she's looking for a job and she gets these four jobs.
Or let's do an arc where her father wants her
to move back home, you know, and so you talk
about the arc, and then we'd read to have a
table read, and everybody would give their comments. There were
very few times where, you know, there were any huge debates.
(17:52):
You know, I've always felt about story that what's right
always wins.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
You know.
Speaker 4 (17:59):
The first year was a little difficult because I was
the only girl on the staff. You know, they staffed
the show. I didn't staff the show. I didn't know
any writers.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
I was a kid. How would I know writers.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
So they staffed the show with a lot of terrific
guy writers, in which I would say, I don't think
a girl would say that to her father, or I
don't know that's the way a girl would end an
argument with her boyfriend. So we'd have these debates. So
finally Danny Arnold, who was one of the smartest guys
in the world, said, you know what we need. We
need a female story editor. You can't be the only
(18:30):
girl in the room. And so the female story editor
came on and that was heaven because she was able
from her expertise and her ability to write, to say,
you know, let's go this way. The only real debate
we ever had was they wanted to be a wedding.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
For the last show.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
Clara al wanted a wedding. ABC wanted a wedding. The
producers wanted a wedding, and I said, we can't do
a wedding. We can't end the show with a wedding.
If we end the show with a wedding, this audience,
which has followed this character for five years, she's independent,
she doesn't want to get married, she's not sure she
(19:08):
wants to get married. She wants a career. We've had
so many of those conversations. To have a wedding is
to betray them. I think we're saying that's the only
happy ending, and lots of shows end with weddings. I
don't want this show to end with a wedding. And
that was a problem. That was the only one. And
the interesting thing is, I mean, obviously they let me
(19:30):
have it that way, and then a couple years later
Billy and Sambo said to me that was such a
right idea because it had gone into syndication.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
That way, the show is over.
Speaker 4 (19:40):
Once you see the show run through and you see
the wedding, then you know how the story ends. But
I would have felt it would have been a wrong
message to say this is the only happy ending. And Alec,
I'll tell you the mail that poured in about that.
Thank you, thank you Marlon for not coming out, thank you,
thank you for ending with a wedding. I mean, they
(20:01):
really they wanted to see it. They've been hanging on
to the fact that this is the one single girl
on television. Had never been a single girl before. There's
this one single girl and she doesn't get married at
the end. And I always had a thing growing up,
which is why I did Free to Be You and Me.
That every princess married the prince. That was the only
(20:21):
happy ending of a fairy tale. And I hope your children,
in fact, I'm going to send you Free to Be
this week. Your children should listen to Free to Be
You and Me, because there is no one happy ending.
Your boys and your girls will have the happy ending
that they create for themselves, not one that goes along
(20:42):
with what every other boy and every other girl has done.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So when the show is over, when did you go
to the actors studio after that? Because you were in
Hollywood doing the show. So when the show's of a
you moved to New York.
Speaker 4 (20:54):
Right, Well, they wanted us to do two more years,
and they wanted me and Chatty to get married. I
didn't want to get married, but they said, well then
just two two more years because they really needed that girl.
I mean, there weren't a lot of hits on ABC,
as you remember, And I said, I just can't. I
was a girl when we started. I'm a woman now.
I can't be the same little girl running around trying
to get a job. I mean it's I'm too old now,
(21:16):
you know, I'm thirty one, decided to move on and
I got a script. It was called Crackers. It was
about a woman who was a drunk, and it was
a very touching story. And I read it and I thought,
I don't know how to do this. Everything I had
done had been in this comedic vein Barefoot in the Park,
and all the stuff i'd done, I mean, even Glass
(21:39):
Menagerie didn't have that kind of character that you had to,
you know, to play a good drunk and to have
come out of that, and all the would come from
the withdrawal to.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Ring yourself out. You got to ring yourself out there.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
I didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
So I called Ellen Berson, who I had met a
few times. So she said, you got to go to
Lee Strasford. So I called him. He said he'd meet
me at FU to New York. And he said to me,
you're a big star. You got a lot of awards.
What do you want to come to class for. I said,
because I only know how to do what I know
how to do, and I've gotten by on a lot
(22:12):
of charm and comedy instinct. He said, don't look at
gift horse in the mouth, my dear, I said, I'm
not complaining. I'm just saying that's what I got. That's
my whole bag. So he said okay, And after that
I started doing work. I mean, I want an Emmy
as Best Dramatic Actress playing a schizophrenic. After that that
(22:37):
Lee Grant cast me in it was called Nobody's Child,
and I don't I'm not saying this to toot my
own horn, but I'm saying this to prove what acting
classes do for you. I was up against Vanessa Redgrave,
Catherine Hepburn, Jenna Rollins, and Mayor Winningham and I won
that Emmy. And I would not have won that had
(22:59):
I not stop my career and worked on my work
for three years. And I say often to people, sometimes
your career gets in the way.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
Of your work. You've got to stop and do your
work and figure out what it is you want.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
I've been there.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
When I quit that girl, my father said to me,
you have to be crazy. You are the heir apparent
to Lucille Ball. I said, Daddy, I know that's a
great compliment, but I don't want to be Lucille Ball.
I respect Lucille Ball. She's a genius. That's just not
where I'm headed. I want to be a lot of
(23:36):
other people.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Now now free to be you and me. How did
that start?
Speaker 3 (23:40):
It really happened because of my niece.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
As you know, and as you can hear from what
I'm saying, I was born a feminist.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
I mean I really was.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
My father used to call me misindependence. As a child,
I always had an idea of what I wanted to do,
and I wanted to do a single girl on television.
I gave feminine mystique to the head of the network.
I was obviously always going in that to and when
I was doing that girl, I got a lot of
male from young women that was shocking. I get a
(24:08):
letter from a sixteen year old girl who said, I'm pregnant.
I can't tell my father. Where can I go? I'm
twenty two years old and I have two children and
my husband beats me up. Where could I go? So
I said to my secretaries we called them at the time,
I had two of them. I said, I don't know
where the hell is somebody going in Duluth if they're pregnant.
Where does somebody go in Salt Lake City if they're
(24:31):
being beaten up? As I'd looked around and we looked around.
There wasn't any place. There were no legal advisors. There's
no place for a woman or a girl to go
for safety or counsel or anything which politicized me. That's
how I met Gloria Steinem and all these women and
created the misfoundation for women. All that happened because of
(24:53):
the male I got, because there was no place for
women to go. But then my sister had a baby,
the first grandchild in our family, and she was about
four and a half or so, and I was reading
the books in her bedroom and they were all the
thing about the boys do this, and the girls do that,
and the Princess Mary is the prince at the end
of the thing. And I said to my sister, this
(25:14):
is such rubbish. It took us thirty years to get
over this. You got to get her something else. So
I went to the bookstore to find something else, and
there wasn't anything. So I decided to do one of
my own. So I created Free to Be You and
Me for her. I really had no intention of becoming
a big franchise. I just wanted to do something that
(25:34):
would have stories for boys and girls that said they
could be anything. They wanted to be that it'd be
non racist and non sexist, and so I got together
with friends like Schelle Silverstein and Herb Gardner and Kleeband
who had done the music and lyrics for a chorus line,
and Patty Chayevsky who was a friend of Herbie's, and
a bunch of people. We sat around and said, I said, okay,
(25:57):
let's rewrite our childhood. What would you have like to
have heard when you were a kid. And Herb Gardner said,
I would have liked to have heard that it was
okay for a boy to cry and that it wasn't sissy.
And Carol Hall wrote that wonderful song It's all Right
to Cry, which has become a classic, and we got
Rosie Grier to sing it, which was great. And then
I and then I said, I want there to be
(26:20):
a story where the princess does not marry the prince
at the end and goes on to her own life,
and she's not a blonde, she's a brunette like me
with olive skin. We did that one. We did Atalanta
where she runs in the race and chooses her own life.
So we rewrote all the things and the company was
called Bill Records at the.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Time, you know, I was a big shot.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
And so they made the record and Alan al directed
the written pieces, got Mel Brooks to play one of
the babies with me. That the two Babies who don't
Know Who's a boy and Who's a Girl? And Mel
and Carl Reiner wrote it.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
It was hilariously funny.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
We did the whole thing and he said, you know,
you're not going to sell more than fifteen thousand.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I said, that's okay.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
We're not doing this for the money. We want to
change the world, one five year old at a time. Well,
it went gold and it went platinum, and then we
did the book and it was number one on the
best seller list. So we did the special one on
Emmy and a Peabody. I mean, it's just because there's
been nothing like it. And just last week it was
inducted into the Library of Congress with albums, along with
(27:23):
Janet Jackson, Kermit the Frog, and Thomas Edison, of all people.
So when an idea is right, and it wasn't, you know,
I didn't write the pieces. I conceived the idea and
assigned the pieces. But I'm not that kind of writer.
I couldn't write a song. But you know, Alec, I'm
(27:44):
sure you feel this in your work. If something comes
organically from you, as that girl did, as Free to
Be did, it's something you really believe in, you want
to do. It does touch other people, you know. It
isn't like, oh, I think it would be really commercial.
If I did a show about this, that's probably not
going to be successful. But if it comes out of
(28:05):
your own desire to right or wrong, or change the world,
or express this thing that's so on fire inside of you,
that has a very good chance, I believe of being successful.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
Actress and activist Marlo Thomas. This is It's all Right
to Cry, sung by Rosie Greer from Free to Be,
You and Me. That's right, Rosie Greer, the NFL defensive tackle.
Speaker 6 (28:34):
It's alright to cry. Ry the sad out of of you.
It's all right cry.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
It might make you feel better when we come back. Marlowe.
Thomas talks about her forty year marriage to talk show
host Phil Donahue. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow. Here's the thing on
(29:07):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing.
For much of the seventies, Marlowe Thomas was a proud
single woman with no interest in getting married, and then
a guest appearance on a daytime talk show in nineteen
(29:30):
seventy seven changed everything.
Speaker 4 (29:34):
I just never wanted to be married, you know, it
just wasn't for me. I had an idea of what
I wanted to do. I wanted to go to London
and do a play. I wanted to be free to
take any opportunity that and I don't mean in a
romantic way. I had a lot of fabulous boyfriends, but
I just wanted to experience so much. And my husband
(29:56):
got married at twenty one, and he said to me, one,
how the hell did you have the guts not to
get married early? I said, because I'm a girl. I
knew damn well, if I got married, I'd be responsible
for the babies, for the house, for the husband, for
the everything. I grew up with that I know.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I'm of a.
Speaker 4 (30:15):
Lebanese family and an Italian family, and they're a lot
like the Irish, as you and Phil are. You know,
the mother runs the roost. She takes care of the children,
and she has a thousand of them. My father's one
of ten, my mother's one of five. My mother gave
up her career and followed my father around the country
and really supported him in his career, and that was
her choice. I looked at that choice and said, that's
(30:38):
not for me. I wanted to be my father. I
wanted to be on stage. I used to see my
father in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and his
eyes would be shining and he was having a ball,
and I'm so happy.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
And that was it.
Speaker 4 (30:52):
I think I discovered what you say you're discovering now.
I discovered work made me happy, made me happy and
my husband. In the last about six years, I did
a play off Broadway, in a play on Broadway. One
was Elaine May on Broadway and one was Jojo Petro
off Broadway. And Phil said to me, you're so happy
(31:13):
when you do a play. As far as I've ben thurned,
you can do a play every year. I'm the happiest
when I'm on stage. And so I made that decision.
I hadn't expected to meet Phil. It was beyond my control.
It's like a gag. I mean, he walked in the
green room and it was like a shampoo commercial.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
I mean, his big blue eyes and.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
That shock of white hair, and I thought, oh my god.
And I was dating like three men at the time.
Phil said the same thing. He said, I walked down
the hall after her, and I thought, my god, she's
a bad thought. And then we flirted for an hour
on his show. He asked me out the next night
(31:57):
and that was it.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
But what changed, meaning you said in interviews that you
had a couple different types of boyfriends. You had the
hunky boyfriend, you know, you had the leading man boyfriend.
Then you had the smart, funny boyfriend to keep you interested.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Well, you're very right.
Speaker 4 (32:12):
My comment was that I, you know, the the you know,
the gorgeous guy, the hunk and everything. That guy was,
you know, a sexy turn on. And the other guy,
he was so smart that he taught me things. I
was very attracted to men like that who kind of
(32:32):
you know, just taught me about business or taught me
about life, who were just very smart, which the hunky
guy didn't really have that right, And this was the
first time I met a man who had it all.
Phil was hunky and sexy and real smart, and it
just was. It was a great package. And so at
first the first thing that brings you together is the hunky,
(32:54):
sexy part. And then the more I got to know him,
just so wise and he always does the right thing.
He always ends up with the right spot. And Phil
moved his show, his show, his whole show, all the
producers and everything, to New York. I was living in LA.
He was living in Chicago. I had a big production company.
(33:16):
I had made twelve movies for television in a row.
He had his own show, and he was raising four
boys on his own. He was getting his boys through school.
His show every day at nine am. Our lives were insane,
and I said to him, he said, he wanted me
to move to Chicago. And I said, look at this
point in my career, I really can't live in Chicago.
I could live in New York or LA. He said,
(33:39):
I can't live in LA. I'm not interested. He said,
no offense, but I'm not interested in interviewing actors. So
we picked New York and we moved everything to New York,
including his show. He said, let me just get my
boys through high school, which was like another two three years.
He got his boys whore. We bought an apartment, We
got married, the boys, got through high school. He moved
his show and everything, and we made a life in
(34:01):
New York, where neither of us lived. We bought an apartment,
we bought a house in Connecticut. We invented a life.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Now. Obviously, another enormous part of your family's legacy, your
Dad's legacy and your legacy, is Saint Jude's. Talk to
me about the genesis of that and why Memphis.
Speaker 4 (34:20):
My father grew up very poor, an immigrant family. My
grandparents were from Lebanon. They had no money. They came
here with all their belongings in cloth bags and arranged marriage.
Had ten babies, nine boys, and a girl without a doctor,
hot water and her sister. So everybody in the neighborhood.
(34:41):
They were everybody. They were Polish, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, whatever,
And they never went to a doctor, and they all
had jobs on consignment. I mean, it was real, real
dirt poor people. And my father had little friends who
died of things like influenza and appendicia, this which are
(35:01):
manageable situations, but they died because they never could see
a doctor. So he had a very first hand look
at the inequity of health care in this country, and
that always was in his mind. And so when he
made a promise to Saint Jude, show me a sign
that I can make it in my career, because he
was my father was terrified at being poor and not
(35:21):
being able to raise his children the way his father was.
So he was willing to give up show business if
he knew what got assign you to something else. Anyway,
he got a sign, and he continued on his way,
and when he got very successful and quite wealthy, he
decided it was time to pay back, and he wanted
to build a hospital for very ill children where nobody
(35:45):
would be turned away, not for race or religion, and
no one would pay for anything, not treatment, travel, housing,
or food. And he picked the South because and this
was a wonderful story. My father carried this little piece
of paper in his pocket for men years. He read
in the paper that a black boy eight years old
(36:05):
in Mississippi was hit by a car. A white guy
hit him on his bike. The white guy picked him
up and tried to get him to a hospital, but
no emergency room would take him because he was black.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
And he died.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
So my father decided, I'm putting it in the South.
I want the kids from the South to be able
to get here too, And so he did.
Speaker 3 (36:25):
Interesting and it was the first solely integrated hospital in
the South.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
And we have the largest program for sickle cell We
have eight hundred sickle cell patients and we have a black, white, Hispanic.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
They come from all over the world. We even have.
Speaker 4 (36:39):
Amish people, which so stunned me because here are these
people won't even have a zipper. But when it comes
to saving your kid, if your child to sick, god forbid,
you'd sell your arm to get your kid. Well, these
parents come terrified. They're gonna have to sell their house,
that everything else. They don't have to sell anything. They
just have to there. And we put them up in
(37:01):
beautiful housing, which by the way, I do most of
the decorating. We can put up four hundred families for years,
two years at a time.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
It's an incredible place.
Speaker 1 (37:10):
Well, let me just say this to you. I want
you to tell your husband that we'd love to have
him on the show. I didn't want you together because
I feel like a show with Phil Donague. That's four
segments we need to do four hours before down here
because I respect him and I admire him, and he's
got a lot to say. We'd love to have him
on because I'm a huge fan of your husband's show.
Really tell him and what I love about your husband
was is that his political views, though they tilted in
(37:32):
a certain way, they weren't partisan. Do you think that
you agree with that?
Speaker 4 (37:35):
Through most of his career, Yes, he got hit in
the head, got fired from MSNBC because he opposed the
war in Iraq, and it was an interesting time for him.
Here's a guy who'd been on the air for twenty
nine years in syndication and when I first met him,
he said, I've got the best job in television. And
I said why. He said, because I can say anything
(37:55):
I want to say. And if you don't want to
run it in Detroit, you don't have But I'm in
two hundred and fifty cities, so don't run it. So
he wasn't used to any kind of censorship overview. He
just did what he wanted. He went on MSNBC and
the war was ramping up against Iraq, so he put
(38:16):
on fathers who had lost their sons, both from Israel
and Palestine to talk about what war really does. And
these are men who were opposite each other in their beliefs,
but they had both lost sons in these wars. And
he had on all the people that were against the war,
the Colin Powells and all the people, and they were
(38:37):
all the generals who were against the war. And NBC
told his producer, you've got to get filled to get
off the war thing. You know, NBC is run by
General Electric. General Electric makes things that go boom. So
he didn't stop. He felt it was not only he
wasn't being defiant, he was being a journalist, was saying,
(39:01):
he was showing the other side of this, and all
the other shows everywhere actually were for the war.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Yeah. I just want to say this to you, and
that is you probably should go back on TV because
you'd still be the funniest, most sophisticated, gorgeous woman on TV.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
That line from Lucy to you and Mary Tyler Moore
hovering around the same time onto Murphy Brown, those great,
great leading ladies of network television. God, I would love
to work with you one day. What enjoy that.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Thank you. We'll give me a call, Ale anytime.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
We will call you. We book. This was fun, love you,
thank you, my very best to you, and thank you.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
My thanks to Marlow Thomas. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. We're produced
by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer
is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening.
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