Gertrude Berg

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009)

Gertrude Berg
Born	Gertrude Edelstein October 3, 1898(1898-10-03) New York City, New York
Died	September 14, 1966 (aged 67) New York City, New York
Occupation	Actress, screenwriter
Years active	1929 – 1961
Spouse(s)	Lewis Berg

Gertrude Berg (October 3, 1898 – September 14, 1966) was an American actress and screenwriter. A pioneer of classic radio, Berg was one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit when she premiered her serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs.

Career

Berg was born Gertrude Edelstein in Harlem, New York City. She later attended public schools and then Columbia University. There she met Lewis Berg, whom she married in 1918. She learned theater in college and while producing skits at her father's Catskills Mountains resort. She later developed one of those skits, a semi-autobiographical portrait of a Jewish family in the New York tenements, into a radio show. On November 20, 1929, a 15-minute episode of The Rise of the Goldbergs was first broadcast on the NBC radio network. She started at $75 a week. Less than two years later, in the heart of the Great Depression, she let the sponsor propose a salary and was told, "Mrs. Berg, we can't pay a cent over $2,000 a week."^[1]

Americans of all stripes identified with the situations in The Goldbergs even if they weren't urban lower-middle-class Jews trying to assimilate into the new world.^{[citation needed]} The show's characters received fan mail as often as the actors who played them did, and thousands of letters poured into the show's network when Berg herself was forced to miss time on the air due to illness.

Berg became inextricably identified as Molly Goldberg, the bighearted matriarch of her fictitious New York family who moved to Connecticut as symbolic of Jewish-American upward mobility. She wrote practically all the show's radio episodes (more than 5000) plus a Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly (1948). It took considerable convincing, but Berg finally prevailed upon CBS to let her bring The Goldbergs to television in 1949. Berg won the first ever Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series her debut year on the network, her twentieth consecutive year of playing the role, and the show stayed in production for five years.

On television, The Goldbergs ran into trouble in 1951, when co-star Philip Loeb (as Molly's husband, patriarch Jake Goldberg) was one of the performers named in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and blacklisted as a result in the midst of the McCarthy Era. A strongly loyal person, Berg refused to fire Loeb. But Loeb was a strongly loyal man in his own right, loyal enough to Berg that he resigned rather than cause her trouble, and he reportedly received a generous severance from the show. It wasn't enough, however, to prevent Loeb from sinking into the depression that ultimately drove him to suicide in 1955.

The Goldbergs returned a year after Loeb departed the show and continued until 1954, during which time Berg also wrote a film version of the show. The show remained in syndicated reruns for another few years, after one year of production under the title Molly.

In 1959, Berg won the Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance in A Majority of One. In 1961 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. Berg also published a best-selling memoir, Molly and Me, in 1961. That same year, she made one last stab at television success in the Four Star Television situation comedy Mrs. G. Goes to College (retitled The Gertrude Berg Show at midseason). Her costars were Cedric Hardwicke, Mary Wickes, and Marion Ross. Berg played a 62-year-old widow who decides to attend college.

Berg was also a songwriter. Her composition "That Wonderful Someone" even found its way into the repertoire of country music singer Patsy Cline, appearing on her 1957 debut album.

Death

Berg died of heart failure at Doctors Hospital on September 14, 1966.^[2] She is buried in Clovesville Cemetery.

References

• Syracuse University: Gertrude Berg Papers

Footnotes

External links

• Gertrude Berg at the Internet Movie Database
• Gertrude Berg at the Internet Broadway Database
• Gertrude Berg at Allmovie
• Gertrude Berg on National Public Radio
• Gertrude Berg Honoree at The Paley Center for Media
• Interview with Fred Rogers Gertrude Berg on the PBS show Children's Corner, Archive of American Television interview with Fred Rogers, part 4 of 9, about ten minutes into the program.
• Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg 2009 documentary by Aviva Kempner.
• Webcast on Gertrude Berg, The Paley Center for Media, "From The Goldbergs to 2005: The Evolution of the Family Sitcom" (November 16, 2005)