Sex, Lies and Age in Hollywood *

I have only three words for Riley Weston: “You go, girl!” Weston, you’ll recall, is the 32-year-old who pretended to be 19 so that she could write for “Felicity,” one of television’s now-ubiquitous shows that portray teenagers as if they’re in the prime of their lives and at the center of the known universe.

Heck, I was almost 40, married, raising three kids and had been through a couple of careers when I got my first writing assignment in television. According to one contrarian theory, television is often best when it bears some resemblance to life, and it has been proven that there is occasionally life after the age of zits. So I can only smile at the shock, dismay and righteous indignation that have been showered upon Weston for lying about her age--and ruminate about how times have changed.

In my first career, you see, I pulled a reverse Riley and lied about being older to get a job on Life magazine. It was 1944, and New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey was running against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Life assigned me to the campaign. One of my first interviews was with John Foster Dulles, Dewey’s foreign-policy advisor. Feeling mature and professional, I grilled him about the domino theory and other lofty matters. Then his phone rang. “I can’t talk to you now,” Dulles told the caller, “I’m being interviewed by a little girl from Life magazine.”

Soon enough, that same little girl pulled off a journalistic coup that may have been responsible for Dewey’s defeat. Life sent me to Albany to gather background material on the challenger. As famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt shot candid pictures, I interviewed the governor in his office. When Dewey’s staff briefly summoned him, I made the Big Discovery. He had been sitting on two telephone books to appear taller, more presidential. My expose ran in Life, and every daily and popular periodical picked it up.

During this period I married writer Ellis Marcus. He worked in “live” television in New York, and when the infant TV industry relocated to Los Angeles, we followed with our kids and dog. I loved working on Life, but it was the ‘50s, and women who were married-with-children were supposed to stay home, join the PTA and bake bread. The trouble was, I could never get my bread to rise or get a rise out of baking bread, so I opted for my second career and took up acting. Briefly.

I think it was Konstantin Stanislavsky who said there are no small parts, only small actors. I was, and will always be, small and the parts weren’t getting any bigger. So I quit acting, enrolled in a playwriting course at USC and wrote an autobiographical play about a wife and mother who wants to write. By now it was the ‘60s and women were still not encouraged to have careers, so the play’s central theme played up this conflict. Since it was a comedy, it was a funny conflict; funny enough to get me my first crack at writing for television, another career move complicated--but not thwarted by--petty bias.

The producer of “The Hathaways,” a short-lived sitcom starring several chimpanzees, didn’t care how old I was. But he would give me the assignment only if my husband wrote with me. Ellis and I had a ball pounding out that first script. Every morning we’d dazzle each other with our wit and humor as we drove over Laurel Canyon from Studio City to Ellis’ office above Manny Dwork’s tailor shop on Little Santa Monica Boulevard. The writing was a breeze, a piece of cake, such a high that a couple of times we got carried away and found ourselves making love on the desk.

Our passion for the work apparently showed, because the producer liked the script and gave us two more assignments. But Ellis and I were beginning to have creative differences. By the third project, our unbridled lust had been replaced by long silences. Although our marriage flourished, we didn’t collaborate again for almost 20 years.

I don’t know when producers started checking writers’ IDs, but I didn’t have to pose as an 8-year-old to write for “Dennis the Menace” or as a collie to write for “Lassie.” Nor, come to think of it, did I need to have extramarital affairs, illegitimate children or X-rated sexual escapades to write for “Peyton Place” (although that desktop experience probably didn’t hurt). In fact, I was living the most conventional kind of suburban life--Little League, Cub Scouts, trips to the beach and Disneyland. And as the decades rolled by, my career waxed instead of waned. I wrote soap operas, pilots and TV movies, happy to be working and proud of my credits. How different it is today when writers routinely lop off of their resumes any mention of having written for classic shows such as “M*A*S*H,” “All In the Family” or “Hill Street Blues,” because those credits would give clues to their age.

Ironically, I think much of the blame can be placed on the very people most affected by ageism. Face it, boomers, it was your generation that made a cult out of being young. You told us not to trust anyone over 30. Now you’re over 30 yourselves and the Birkenstock’s on the other foot. There you are working out, getting nips and tucks and lifts and hair transplants, eating tofu and gulping St. John’s wort to look younger and live longer. But the longer you live, the less employable you seem to be.

All I can think of to help you is to remind the producers and network executives of the days when age didn’t count. I was in my 50s when I was hired by Norman Lear to co-create and be head writer for “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”--a satiric cult hit that garnered all the youthful catch phrases of its day: hip, happening, cutting edge.

What a trip it was to write for that show. I remember the day Norman came up with the show’s now-legendary death-by-chicken-soup episode. He loved acting out his ideas at meetings, and this time he wanted to suggest a way of getting rid of a character named Coach Fedders. He improvised the scene: The coach has a bad cold. He’s been home taking cold medications and sipping Jack Daniels. But Mary (the uniquely naive housewife of the title) insists he come over for a bowl of her homemade chicken soup. Talking as if through a stuffy nose, Norman bent over a huge imaginary bowl and mimed taking another Seconal and a swig of bourbon. While we writers watched mesmerized, he got drowsier and drowsier, his head dropping lower and lower despite frantic tugs at the back of his own shirt collar. Finally, with perfect timing, his face plopped into the imagined bowl of steaming broth. We all applauded. At that time, Norman was riding herd on four or five hugely successful shows. Being in his 50s didn’t slow him down at all.

I could have retired after “Mary Hartman.” But I wasn’t ready to unplug my IBM Selectric, and the Industry didn’t seem to notice that I was getting older. So I continued to work, head-writing “Days of Our Lives,” rejoining Ellis to write a TV movie, “Women at West Point,” and creating and producing another satirical soap, “The Life and Times of Eddie Roberts.” This time it was our job to hire staff, and it never occurred to us to ask how old writers were. We looked for the most talented team we could find, which wound up including writers in their 20s, writers in their 60s and others in between. I was in my 60s when I accepted a three-year development deal at Lorimar. And I was (gasp) close to 70 when I took over the writing chores on the last year and a half of “Knots Landing.”

So buck up, writers, whatever your age. Sure the ageist trend is alarming. But if it continues, there may be an upside. My 9-year-old granddaughter just wrote a, like, totally awesome composition about what she did last summer. If I can get it into the hands of the agent dude who lives next door, maybe it will generate a bidding frenzy. Maybe they’ll name my granddaughter head writer on a new series in which pre-pubescence is portrayed as the prime of life and fourth grade is seen as the chronological center of the universe. Maybe she’ll toss a few crumbs of work to old folks like Riley Weston, or even her own grandma.