I named the the CWC writers conference I was cooking up "Laugh All the Way to a Best Seller" and I then I bit my nails over who I could get that was funny and a best seller, until Stellasue Lee Ph.D. called me. So a week later when I was walking up the driveway to Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey's house, I felt like pinching my arm to make sure I was real. Her house is simply marvelous. Everything you look at has a story and not just any story because Elizabeth has crafted her life like a finely written book, like her books. I remembered seeing Sally Field perform in the mini series made from "A Woman of Independent Means." It changed my life as Elizabeth's words has done for many women. Suddenly it was okay to be both a mother and a liberated woman. Suddenly we could be just who we were and it was okay and that didn't mean we weren't strong. That was important to hear. I'm grateful for Elizabeth for that. Her life is like that, meaningful. Premeditated with honorable thoughts and a lot of fun. Walking in her front hall, I was wowed. She has beautiful paintings on the walls and I asked her to tell me about them. She giggled like Stellasue and said, "Well, I was into Feng Shui for awhile and you are supposed to get your power from the entrance to your house. It's supposed to be the source of your power. So this is a picture of my grandmother that my daughter drew and this is a painting of my mother and this is my grandmother." She smiled. "This is the source of all my strength." Now wouldn't you just like to have your daughter say that about you? What a woman. What a writer. What a wonderful daughter. The day I chose to visit her was a day she needed distraction. One member of her family was very ill and her own daughter was about to give birth. "I'm at the crossroads," she said. Everything I pointed to had a story to tell and Elizabeth is still writing them. There is more to this article than is written here, or even more that I will eventually get included in this, but I have been very ill myself and have not been able to do much work at all, so I decided to post what I have written up. I hope you enjoy this and come back because I will update it further and include more of Elizabeth's story. |
A. I was about eight. I was in the second grade. We were writing poems. I went to elementary school, a public school in Dallas called “Steven J. Hay.” They would mimeograph a little sheet of literary offerings called The Haystack. And I saw my name in print in second grade, and that was it. Q. Most people think of A Woman of Independent Means when they hear your name or GoodSearch or Google your name. I know your play is currently running at the Freemont theatre in Pasadena based on your book Joanna’s Husband, David’s Wife. And I know that you have a much longer list of credits. You started out writing comedy bits for television personalities, is that right? A. No. Q. That broke ground. There was nobody that was gay on television, till Billy Crystal came “out.” A. It’s interesting that you say that because Oliver was good friends with Dick Levinson and Bill Link who did a movie of the week called “That Certain Summer,” remember that with Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen as a gay couple? And that was the first prime time television. Not too long after that Tony Randall came to Oliver with an idea for a movie of the week called “Sidney Shorr.” About a gay man in New York, who takes in a girl who has gotten herself pregnant with a married lover. And subsequently became a series called “Love, Sidney.” And Oliver wrote that. He was always very much ahead of his time. The reason we got involved with “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” was because… I was not writing professionally at all at that time. I hadn’t published anything and I hadn’t worked officially in television. We had a brief fling as head writers for “Love of Life” the soap opera. That was the only thing that recommended me. But I always say that Norman Lear brought me out of the closet. Norman was like a lot of cosmopolitan,
sophisticated and wonderful producers in Hollywood. You know, I think the stereo type of the crass, cigar chomping, Hollywood mogul is so wrong
because Norman Lear and Leonard Stern were very sophisticated, intelligent and classy gentlemen who… Q. Now did you work with him? A. I always say that “MacMillan and Wife” was my apprenticeship. Because I was not officially hired on “Macmillan and Wife.” I really had done nothing. Except I had the newspaper background. Q. I wondered about that show because the relationship between the two of them was so… on. It was dead on and funny!
Q. Royalty? A. Credit. My first credit on television was flowers from the producer. Q. The best lines are the real ones. A. Absolutely. Q. Where did you meet?
Q. Were you talking to your husband about this before or after you wrote A Woman of Independent Means? A. Oh no, this was after and our roles had shifted since the first novel and suddenly I was a professional writer and I was getting attention. I was no longer just a wife. That just always stuck in my craw. “Just a wife,” I mean, is there anything harder? Is there anything harder than being just a wife? Q. Well maybe if you add, “and mother?” A. Yeah, exactly! |
Carol Wood pictured left, is a writer, photographer and editor who resides in Winnetka, CA with her dog Lionel otherwise known as the "DOORBELL! GET THE DOORBELL!" dog and her cats Sparky, Baby and Chippy and her husband Glenn who she simply adores. You can contact her via email at Carol@HazelSt.com She hopes to meet all of you at the CWC, SFV conference "Laugh All the Way to a Best Seller!"
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Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey 
Q. 
A. Well that’s inspired by “The Thin Man,” that wonderful kind of relationship. This was a milder television
version of “The Thin Man.” But the relationship was the heart of the series. The mystery was kind of the background. Oliver would say to me sometimes... because he worked as a story editor. He was on staff for that the first year. When he was drafted to editing the script, he’d say, “I’ll do the chase scenes but try your hand at the Mac and Sally scenes, the domestic stuff.” I would do it, and I always said it was a no fault apprenticeship because I had no pretensions to being any good. It was like, If it was bad, who said I could do better? But if it was good—GREAT! At one point, I really did a whole scene that Oliver liked enough and when the producer commented on it, a wonderful man named Paul Mason, Oliver said “Oh Betsy wrote that one.” So he sent me a bouquet of flowers. So that was my first …
A. I met my husband while I was working in the Dallas newsroom for the paper. Some of that is in Joanna’s Husband, David’s Wife. I used my life as much as I used my grandmother’s life as a spring board for A Woman of Independent Means. I, finally with my third book, used part of my own life. And again that was Oliver. I wanted to write a novel about a marriage that took place in our time frame. We married in 1960 when all the roles and rules were changing. But I wasn’t going to get near our own life. And I wrote about a hundred pages alternating chapters between the husband and the wife but fictional characters, you know, different circumstances. And Oliver read the early draft and he said, “These people are very boring.”
Come back in a week or two and hopefully I will finish posting the entire interview.