Big Emotions<i> ,</i> Little Screen : Custody Struggle in Surrogate Case Hits TV Screen

The tug-of-war over the child known as “Baby M” was a complex chain of emotional and legal events that have been the subject of intense news media examination for almost two years.

The two formerly obscure New Jersey couples at the center of the case--the Whiteheads and the Sterns--have undergone the kind of public scrutiny usually reserved for presidential candidates and movie stars.

ABC’s 4-hour tale of the housewife and the childless couple for whom she bore a baby adds no new facts or insights and downplays the roles of some significant people. Yet the movie is an even-handed treatment of the main characters.

The TV movie, which was done without the cooperation of the main characters, neither takes the point of view of surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead nor the Sterns, for whom Whitehead bore a child in return for $10,000. Neither the actors nor the project’s staff met any of the principals in the case, and none attended the trial last year, according to Ilene Amy Berg, the show’s executive producer.

Instead, they studied hours of news footage and newspaper reports about the case and interviewed reporters who covered it. James S. Sadwith, who wrote and directed the movie, worked from transcripts of the two-month trial and studied psychiatric reports, Berg said.

The result is a thoughtful compilation of what is publicly known about the Whiteheads and the Sterns. “Baby M” sets out the facts in a careful chronology, touching on most key events of the first court test of surrogate-parent contracts.

The movie explores the awkward relationship between the Whiteheads and the Sterns, two couples who could hardly have been more different but who strained politely to get along with each other for the year-and-a-half between the first attempts at artificial insemination and the birth of the baby.

Actor John Shea captures the fussy sweetness of William Stern, a biochemist and only child who lost most of his relatives in World War II concentration camps. Elizabeth Stern, a pediatrician played by Robin Strasser, emerges with both the steely public persona she displayed to reporters and the warmth and intelligence described by her husband and friends.

Intensely private people, the Sterns won custody of the little girl and want to be left alone to raise her in whatever degree of obscurity is possible.

More is known about Mary Beth Whitehead (now Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould), who divorced her husband Richard and married Dean Gould, whose child she is carrying. Whitehead, through her mother, first brought press attention to the case after the Sterns hunted her down in Florida and had the baby seized. She is said to be working on a book about the case.

JoBeth Williams bears a striking physical resemblance to Whitehead. Whitehead’s immaturity and her tendency to let her emotions lead her through life come through, but so does her sense of humor and the fun-loving nature that seemed lacking in the more cautious Sterns. Bruce Weitz plays a helpless and befuddled Richard Whitehead, accurately reflecting the character’s fifth-wheel role in real-life drama.

If the production has a lapse in accuracy, it comes in Monday’s second installment, which focuses on the trial in Hackensack, N.J. The judge, the lawyers and the psychiatrists played key roles in shaping the events and the eventual outcome of the case, yet little of their significance comes through. Judge Harvey R. Sorkow is virtually a background character. It was, after all, Sorkow’s decision to seize the infant baby from the unsuspecting Whiteheads that set off the chain of events.

When the baby was only a few weeks old, the Sterns, frustrated in their attempts to deal with Whitehead, hired a lawyer and secretly went to court to ask for immediate custody of the baby, claiming they thought the baby was in danger. Without hearing Whitehead’s side, Sorkow granted the request and sent police officers to her home to take the baby away. Whitehead passed the baby out a window to her husband and they fled to Florida.

To many who sat through the trial it often seemed that Sorkow could barely tolerate Whitehead and seemed to have little use for her lawyer. The deference Sorkow displayed toward the Sterns was in marked contrast.

Sorkow’s behavior toward the Whitehead side was a matter of nuance, however, a cumulative effect not easily translated into the pared-down television version. But the significance of his attitude became apparent in his decision, in which he praised the Sterns, insulted Whitehead and ordered her cut off from the child forever.

In what amounted to nearly a complete vindication of Whitehead, the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed Sorkow last February and outlawed surrogacy-for-pay contracts. A new judge was assigned to the case, but it was too late for Whitehead to have much of a chance of regaining custody of the child, who had been living with the Sterns for more than a year.

Also largely missing from the television version is the brutal attack launched on Whitehead and her family by the Sterns’ savvy lawyer, Gary Skoloff, played by Dabney Coleman. No personal detail was off limits to Skoloff, including the fact that Whitehead had briefly worked as a dancer in a New Jersey club and that her sister had bounced a $15 check.

Despite the flaws in emphasis, the ABC production may help straighten out the facts for viewers who had a hard time following last year’s daily press and television dispatches from Hackensack.