'Yoo-Hoo': Sitcom Pioneer Comes Calling
Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
July 17, 2009
Gertrude Berg was a remarkable mid-20th-century figure: a prodigious radio and TV writer and producer, an entrepreneur, a Tony and Emmy winner, a star of stage and screen. As radio journalist Susan Stamberg says early on in "Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg," an admirable new documentary by District filmmaker Aviva Kempner, Berg was "the Oprah Winfrey of her time."
Even that might undersell Berg's accomplishments as an artist and businesswoman. Starting just after the Crash of 1929, Berg created and starred in "The Goldbergs," a radio sitcom about a working-class family whose matriarch -- Berg as Molly Goldberg -- counseled and cajoled her family and neighbors in a crowded Bronx tenement. Berg later moved the show to the new medium of television, where it became the first successful domestic sitcom, predating "I Love Lucy."
Whether this means Berg "invented" the sitcom, as friends and relatives of Berg's assert in "Yoo-Hoo" ("The Goldbergs' " signature greeting), is debatable. Although it's possible to spot some of "The Goldbergs' " DNA in "All in the Family" and "Seinfeld," there isn't much here to back up the mother-of-all-sitcoms claim.
There's no question, however, that Berg, the imaginative daughter of a Catskills hotel proprietor, achieved something extraordinary. In the depths of the Depression, with the Nazis on the march in Europe and anti-Semitism plentiful at home, Berg managed to turn the semi-autobiographical stories of a distinctly ethnic family (she and the other adult actors on the show spoke with feigned Yiddish-inflected accents) into something both quintessentially American and universally appealing. At its peak, "The Goldbergs" was among the most popular radio programs in the nation, rivaling another "ethnic" show, "Amos 'n' Andy."
From the look and sound of the video and audio clips contained in the documentary, "The Goldbergs" wasn't exactly fall-down funny. But it does seem warmhearted, gentle and even wise. The matronly Berg was its heart and soul and brain; over the course of its 20-plus years on radio and TV, she wrote, starred in and produced virtually all of its thousands of episodes.
As in "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg," Kempner's 1998 documentary about the great baseball slugger, the filmaker's themes are assimilation and Jewish-American achievement. "Yoo-Hoo" also adds the obvious feminist context: Berg was far ahead of her time as a career woman, and took on powerful men (NBC's David Sarnoff, CBS's William Paley) to maintain control of her creation.
The film dwells perhaps a little too long on the fate of Philip Loeb, the actor who played Berg's first TV husband, Jake. When Loeb was suspected of communist sympathies (never proven) during the McCarthy era, his presence on the show led sponsor General Foods to pull its support, temporarily forcing "The Goldbergs" off the air. Berg initially stood by Loeb, but eventually she or Loeb -- it's not clear who -- caved and the part was recast. One of Loeb's relatives, interviewed in the documentary, calls the blacklisting of Loeb and others "the most shameful period in American history," a bit of hyperbole that overlooks the many far more shameful episodes and eras in American history.
For all her dogged research and interviewing, Kempner doesn't explore one important question: Why, for all her popularity and apparent influence, is Gertrude Berg so little remembered today? Could it be because "The Goldbergs" never enjoyed the rerun afterlife that made some early TV stars -- Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Roy Rogers, etc. -- familiar to later generations? Could it also be that Berg, who died at age 68 in 1966, didn't bother to preserve more of her show, thereby shortchanging her own legacy? If so, it would be one of the few angles that Berg missed in her otherwise shrewdly managed career.
As is, this generally excellent portrait does much to fill the void, restoring an unfortunately forgotten figure to her rightful place among broadcasting's trailblazers.
