‘EACH OF US HAS THAT MONSTER INSIDE OF US’ : ‘Cagney & Lacey’ Confronts Racism’s Varied Aspects

LACEY: Christine, he was the second black kid killed in that neighborhood this year.

CAGNEY: So what was he doing there?

PETRIE (the squad room’s black detective): Maybe he thought it was America.

Tonight at 10, in the second episode of its sixth season, “Cagney & Lacey” once again tackles one of the nation’s politically and socially relevant issues. From abortion and abortion-clinic bombings, medical treatment of women with breast cancer, to toxic waste dumps, the CBS series has handled a range of provocative material.

Tonight, in “The City Is Burning,” the subject is racism.

Its inspiration, though not the actual plot line, was last December’s incident at Howard Beach--the neighborhood near Kennedy Airport in Queens where a gang of white youths attacked three black men who were strangers. One of the victims, 23-year-old Michael Griffith, fled onto the Belt Parkway in the early morning darkness where he was struck by a car and killed.

As jury selection in the Howard Beach trial of four white teen-agers charged with murder or manslaughter began three weeks ago, defense lawyers moved to block the airing of tonight’s episode. N.Y. State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Demakos dismissed the motion: “I’m not going to tell a TV station not to air a show.”

“The City Is Burning” deals with what happens to the officers of “Cagney & Lacey’s” folksy squad room when the outside pressures and internal conflicts of racism intrude. The segment was written by playwright and actor Samm-Art Williams (recipient of a 1980 Tony nomination for “Home”) and directed by Helaine Head, who did two other episodes for the series last season.

Actress Tyne Daly, who plays Detective Mary Beth Lacey, suggested the episode. About a week after the Howard Beach incident, executive producer Barney Rosenzweig recalled, Daly grumbled that what they were working on was “lightweight” compared to what was “really going on” in New York. Out of that conversation, he said, came the story of “what we perceive to be the real issue of the Howard Beach syndrome: racism as a disease in America. Each of us has that monster inside of us.”

“I thought we fought all those battles in 1968 and 1972 and that these matters were resolved,” Daly said last week. “My sense of history gets disappointed by events . . . . Once you entertain some questions, you get people thinking for themselves.”

In his living room in a Los Angeles apartment complex, Williams noted that while “Burning” “certainly touches on a lot of aspects of Howard Beach,” the episode goes further and deals with “the adult mentality when these incidents occur. Not only people in the street, but even rational people become irrational when this thing is blown out of proportion.

“I mean you cannot be a cop and someone is constantly calling you a ‘dirty (this)’ and ‘dirty (that),’ and not have that affect you. When someone throws bricks at your car and is screaming ‘police brutality’ when the facts are not even in yet, that has to affect you . . . and they began to call each other the same names that the people in the street were calling each other.”

Williams’ script significantly departs from Howard Beach at the start. Detective Al Corassa’s gun is found to be the murder weapon. Although it’s clear that Corassa has the best of alibis, emotions are ignited. Racial slurs are tossed about.

And attitudes surface. Sgt. Cagney (Sharon Gless) proclaims: “Do you know what they did to Irish Catholics at the turn of the century in this country? We suffered. We were killed. We didn’t scream police cover-up and throw rocks at people . . . .”

There is also introspection. Lacey questions why she had once stopped a black lawyer with a briefcase after a bank robbery. Husband Harvey Lacey (John Karlen) suggests that perhaps she was simply following her instincts. “Yeah, but are they cop instincts,” Mary Beth responds, “or somewhere in the back of my head am I still this little girl from a lily white neighborhood in South Boston?”

“City Is Burning,” a rather strong title because there are no majorriots, makes connections to other real-life events. In Williams’ script, black civil rights attorney Joyce Richards blames the homicide of the black teen-ager on what had been happening in the case involving Bernhard Goetz. (In December, 1984, Goetz shot four black youths who accosted him in a subway car; in July, 1986, New York state’s highest court ordered him to stand trial for attempted murder; last June, Goetz was acquitted of all major charges.)

“Racism is subconscious,” suggested Williams, who attended a segregated high school in North Carolina. “You don’t have to consciously think about it. If you come from a home where someone is constantly saying it’s them and us ,” -- which he did not--”pretty soon they will begin to accept that as the truth.”

Williams blames “politicians who blow things all out of proportion for their own good. I could name a thousand, black and white,” he said, declining to cite any by name.

“I’ve never been a policeman myself, but I’ve been around a lot of cops,” Williams added. “My uncle Jimmy was a homicide detective in Philadelphia for 25 years, and cops don’t go into the street normally with racial attitudes. They go in the street with the one thing that’s foremost in their mind--trying to survive this shift without being killed.”

“When I was a kid,” said director Head, who grew up in Oakland and got her first directing assignment with American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, “everybody was militant, and I thought, ‘Oh I shouldn’t be too friendly with all these white people.’ It was right after Little Rock, and it was easy to hate because they were throwing rocks at kids who only wanted an education. And my mama said, ‘Oh that’s real interesting, but do you hate the lady next door who is white?’ ‘Of course not,’ (I said). Do you hate Miss . . . , the librarian?’ ‘No of course not.’ She listed about six or eight white people I knew, and said, ‘Oh, so you only hate white people you don’t know. That’s interesting,’ and she walked away.”

In the “Cagney & Lacey” publicist’s office, Head grinned broadly.

Head noted that throughout the filming of the episode, everyone was “very concerned about making sure that it was balanced and that it was accurate; because of the material. If you’re dealing with racism, it’s like dealing with exploitation films. Trying to find a balance so that they can do something about racism without seeming to glorify it in any way or to give it more currency than was needed. And also,” Head noted, “to do it without preaching, because it is entertainment.”

Like Tyne Daly, Head believes racism is on the increase. “When you start to look at the number of ‘random incidents,’ it’s clear it’s been on the increase rather than the decline,” Head observed. She cited the case of a young black man hanged from a tree in February, 1986, in Concord, an Oakland suburb, which police ruled as a suicide. (The incident happened less than 12 hours after a pair of white-robed white men knifed two black teen-agers a few blocks away.)

“Howard Beach and a lot of other incidents,” Head continued. “I just see there are changing attitudes. The pendulum (of civil rights) is swinging back. Just like with AIDS and all, the pendulum on sexual inhibitions is swinging back, people are becoming a little more conservative, and it seems to me less concerned (about others). Norman Mailer on television the other night, he said in the ‘60s there were things people were willing to die for . . . .”

It is hardly surprising to Head that in the “City Is Burning” episode, hip and sophisticated Cagney is the partner who exhibits more unacceptable attitudes than traditional wife and mother Lacey who lives in Queens. “Lacey is a very feeling person,” Head noted. “She deals with people on a real one-to-one level. A lot of the so-called hip sophisticated people (don’t). Ten years ago in New York I had to have the American Civil Liberties Union help get me an apartment because they didn’t want black people in the (Central Park West) building . . . .”

Head is pleased by what happened on the set as the episode was being filmed.

“At certain points when we were doing stuff in the squad room, it was very hard on the guys,” she said, “so they were not as loose as they normally are. They tended to keep a little more to themselves and be a little more focused to try and prepare themselves. No one,” she said smiling, “was able to get these lines out correctly on the first take.

“It affected Corassa (Paul Mantee) and Petrie (Carl Lumbly) the most” when they got into a key name-calling fight, she recalled. “Paul Mantee couldn’t remember the lines. He just blanked and stopped and looked up, and said, ‘I’m so sorry I can’t remember my next line.’ And everybody started laughing because we all knew what his next line was. It was funny because subconsciously he so much didn’t want to say it he blanked it out completely,” she said.

Certain lines also presented difficulties at auditions for the parts of two teen-age boys who utter racist remarks. “They were trying to slide into it,” Head remarked. “No one was able to hit it dead on, so it was, in a sense, gratifying that we say it doesn’t come this easily to people anymore.”

“There was respect for Carl and Sharon and all of us,” noted Daly. “It was hard for Paul Mantee, it was hard for all of us, and for the crew. It’s a lie to say, ‘Sticks and bones may break your bones but names will never hurt.’ We have a crew of men and women, black and white, Italian and Polish, in any given American crew, those words have stung.”