Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's
Speaker 1: the Thing from iHeart Radio. It's summer and that means
Speaker 1: it's time for our tradition at Here's the Thing. Will
Speaker 1: the staff share their favorite episodes from our archives in
Speaker 1: our summer staff picks series? Next up? As executive producer
Speaker 1: Kathy Russo.
Speaker 2: Thanks Alec White, go go boots, fishnet stockings, fake eyelashes,
Speaker 2: mini dresses, and that hair with the bangs and the
Speaker 2: flip at the end. That was That Girl, the series
Speaker 2: I watched on my black and white TV in Upstate
Speaker 2: New York when I was six years old in nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty six. That was Marlo Thomas playing an independent would
Speaker 2: be actress named Anne Marie. The show is about a
Speaker 2: woman from Bruster, New York that moves to the big
Speaker 2: city to chase her dreams and I couldn't wait to
Speaker 2: watch every week. Marlo Thomas is my summer pick for
Speaker 2: archive episode.
Speaker 3: This week.
Speaker 2: In the interview, Alec discusses Mallo's acting career from That
Speaker 2: Girl to Friends. They also talk about her political activism,
Speaker 2: her children's books, and her longtime marriage to talk show
Speaker 2: host Phil Donahue. But most importantly, they discussed her work
Speaker 2: with Saint Jude's Children's Hospital, started by her father, the
Speaker 2: actor Danny Thomas. At Saint Jude's, no parent pays for
Speaker 2: medical care for their child. I loved this interview because
Speaker 2: with Marlowe, what you see is what you get, a
Speaker 2: warm and loving woman who cares deeply and takes action
Speaker 2: to do good in the world, all while chasing her dreams.
Speaker 1: Over the course of her illustrious career, Marlo Thomas has
Speaker 1: broken barriers for women as an award winning actress. Marlowe
Speaker 1: became a household name from her portrayal of Anne Marie,
Speaker 1: the lead in the television show That Girl, a woman
Speaker 1: who in the late sixties wanted a career more than
Speaker 1: a family. An outspoken feminist, Marlowe then used her fame
Speaker 1: to launch Free to Be You and Me, which was
Speaker 1: first an album, then a book, and eventually an Emmy
Speaker 1: and Peabody Award winning TV show for children that challenged
Speaker 1: gender norms and became a touchstone for a generation of
Speaker 1: feminists and Her best selling books include a memoir about
Speaker 1: growing up the adored daughter of TV star Danny Thomas,
Speaker 1: and just last year, she and her husband Phil Donahue
Speaker 1: released a book and podcast of marriage advice called from
Speaker 1: interviews with other happy, long lasting couples. As a philanthropist,
Speaker 1: she's continued her family's support for Saint Jude's Children's Research
Speaker 1: Hospital in Memphis, which her father founded in nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: All in all, quite a life for that girl. Growing
Speaker 1: up in Beverly Hills. Marlowe says she and her siblings
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time on the set of The
Speaker 1: Danny Thomas Show, her father's TV series, which ran for
Speaker 1: eleven seasons between nineteen fifty three to nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 4: We all used to work at the studio in the summer,
Speaker 4: you know, running film back and forth, and when we
Speaker 4: could drive, we'd drop off scripts. So we were kind
Speaker 4: of like interns, and my dad would pay us an
Speaker 4: allowance to keep us off the street. And my dad
Speaker 4: was a kind of guy, and I have a feeling
Speaker 4: here this way. He loved having his kids around him.
Speaker 4: He just loved it. And when we were children, we
Speaker 4: were allowed to see in on writers meetings. We'd sit
Speaker 4: on the floor and the writers would all be talking
Speaker 4: about coming up stories or my dad's act in Las Vegas,
Speaker 4: and I would laugh and Dad would say, Oh, my
Speaker 4: kid loves it. Why'd you like that, honey? What was
Speaker 4: funny about that?
Speaker 3: To you? He was interested.
Speaker 4: And then sometimes I'd say something and he'd say, my
Speaker 4: kids are so funny.
Speaker 3: They are funnier than I am. So he gave us
Speaker 3: this feeling. He kind of empowered us.
Speaker 4: I mean, I always thought I was brilliant, and I
Speaker 4: have no idea if I am or I am not,
Speaker 4: but I think I am because he said I was right,
Speaker 4: and he did that for all of us.
Speaker 3: He gave us that.
Speaker 1: It's like Lauren Michaels would always say that his kids
Speaker 1: were like his focus group.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I used to say to Lauren, you know, you're a
Speaker 1: couple generations removed from some of the musical acts that
Speaker 1: are starring on the show. Now, his daughter Sophie is older.
Speaker 1: Now she's graduating college. But when Sophie was a teenager,
Speaker 1: when going to school in New York, I'd say to Laurene,
Speaker 1: how do you determine who the musical acts are on
Speaker 1: the show? And he'd say, who's ever in Sophie's iPod?
Speaker 3: That's right exactly.
Speaker 1: Muse extremely to see.
Speaker 3: Who she was listening to exactly.
Speaker 1: But tell people how the studio. What studio was he
Speaker 1: at Desi Lou He was at Desilu, Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: was like what like Sunset Gower or somewhere in like Hollywood.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was below Sunset on Gower.
Speaker 1: But you were born in Michigan.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but for five minutes, I was born in Detroit.
Speaker 1: Now, why was the family in Detroit?
Speaker 4: My mom had a radio show there, the Sweet Singer
Speaker 4: of Sweet Songs, and my dad came on as her
Speaker 4: announcer and they fell in love. And then he wanted
Speaker 4: to go to Chicago, where the bigger nightclubs were. He
Speaker 4: was really a nightclub performer. So she had to make
Speaker 4: the decision in those days, give up the show and
Speaker 4: go with the guy she loved to Chicago. She got
Speaker 4: pregnant and that was the decision, and off they went
Speaker 4: to Chicago for a couple of years. And then Abe
Speaker 4: last Wogel was coming through on the whatever that was
Speaker 4: that Pacific Railroad. He represented Sinatra and Danny Kay and
Speaker 4: Judy Garland, so he was very well known. He was
Speaker 4: told that there was a great comic he should stop
Speaker 4: and see on his way to New York, and he
Speaker 4: saw my father and he signed him up and brought
Speaker 4: him to Hollywood right away, and he said to my father,
Speaker 4: you know, you're a star, you should come to come.
Speaker 1: To La So that's a pattern in your family, the
Speaker 1: women in your family marrying men that they meet on
Speaker 1: radio shows and TV shows.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So you're out there in the fifties, you moved to California.
Speaker 1: Where did you go to school out there? Beverly Hills
Speaker 1: High School?
Speaker 3: No, Marymount went to mary She went.
Speaker 1: To a Catholic school. Yeah, your father's an old school Lebanese.
Speaker 4: I went to Marymount. My husband went to Notre Dame.
Speaker 4: So we were raised the same way. Actually, and he's
Speaker 4: from Cleveland and I'm from Beverly Hills. But we have
Speaker 4: the same upbringing.
Speaker 1: Really strict Catholic upbringing.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And when the time comes for you to launch your
Speaker 1: own career, you start that girl in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: sixty six, and you're a young woman. You're very young, right.
Speaker 3: Well, I had done a pilot.
Speaker 4: You know, everything in this business is wonderfully progressive. I
Speaker 4: had bumped around doing seventy seven Sunset Strip and Dobie
Speaker 4: Gillis and all these terrible shows. Laura Badi did Adobe Gillis.
Speaker 4: I didn't know, mister d Not that bad, but pretty bad.
Speaker 4: I did all those shows. I played a Chinese girl
Speaker 4: on Bonanza. Nobody knew what to do with me. I
Speaker 4: was a Chinese girl. I played a Hawaiian girl. I
Speaker 4: played an Arabian girl. They never saw me as the
Speaker 4: girl next door.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't get cast as the Chinese girl now, right, But.
Speaker 4: With my coloring, I'm out of complexion, dark hair, dark eyes,
Speaker 4: so they could only They never saw me as the
Speaker 4: girl next door. But I was cast in a pilot
Speaker 4: at Universal called Two's Company, which was an adorable show
Speaker 4: by a young couple, and it didn't sell. But the
Speaker 4: head of the network called me, Edgar Sharrick, and he said,
Speaker 4: Claire al almost bought the show because they think you
Speaker 4: can be a TV star, so we'd like to talk
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 3: So I went in.
Speaker 4: I was disappointed the show didn't sell because I loved
Speaker 4: and they said we want to do a show starring you.
Speaker 4: And they gave me a whole bunch of scripts to read.
Speaker 4: And I called them up and I said, all the
Speaker 4: shows you've given me to read, the girl is the
Speaker 4: wife of somebody, the secretary of somebody, the daughter of somebody.
Speaker 4: Have you ever thought about doing a show where the
Speaker 4: girl is the somebody? And he said, would anybody watch
Speaker 4: a show like that? I said, I think so. When
Speaker 4: I gave him a book Feminine Mystique, I said, read this.
Speaker 4: He called me up and he said, this is what's
Speaker 4: going to happen to my wife. And it did, actually,
Speaker 4: So we built a show based on that. A girl
Speaker 4: like me graduated from college, didn't want to get married,
Speaker 4: wanted to be an actress, wanted to move to the
Speaker 4: big city, and everybody said it wouldn't succeed.
Speaker 3: And that first night, Wow, it got a forty share
Speaker 3: on ABC.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and all of a sudden, I was the ultimate
Speaker 4: girl next door, which was so funny because I could
Speaker 4: never get cast like that. And then I became the
Speaker 4: girl next door so much in people's minds that it's
Speaker 4: very hard for me to play meaner people.
Speaker 1: The murderous. Yeah, I have a script for you where
Speaker 1: you play a woman that murders people.
Speaker 3: That's what I want.
Speaker 1: I'm having trouble raising money for the film that would
Speaker 1: attached as a.
Speaker 3: Murderers and I'll do it for nothing.
Speaker 1: A lot of the financiers, a lot of the investors
Speaker 1: I'm talking to aren't buying you as a murderist. But
Speaker 1: I'll work on it.
Speaker 3: I can do it.
Speaker 1: But let me ask you this. Obviously, in the sixties,
Speaker 1: the looming cultural reality is the Vietnam War, and a
Speaker 1: lot of programming and a lot of music and things
Speaker 1: are things that help us to forget and feminism, in
Speaker 1: my mind, doesn't really get rolling till the seventies. And
Speaker 1: your show's over by seventy one. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: later on about Free to Be You and Me. But
Speaker 1: at the moment that you do the show, you were
Speaker 1: doing Barefoot in the Park in London.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right.
Speaker 1: And I often tell people that when a company is
Speaker 1: kind of mounting up their slate, it's a relatively new company.
Speaker 1: So when HBO decides it wants to do original program
Speaker 1: and they get Sarah Jessica to do Sex in the City,
Speaker 1: they get Jimmy Guandolfini and David Chase to do the Sopranos,
Speaker 1: and they pay these people a lot of money to
Speaker 1: stay with the show and do the hit show for
Speaker 1: a long long time. And really, ABC was a fledgling
Speaker 1: network in the sixties. I mean there was CBS that
Speaker 1: was NBC and ABC was like the red headed step
Speaker 1: child behind the two of them, and Leonard Goldberg and
Speaker 1: all those people were building the company during that time.
Speaker 1: Did you feel that was a part of their faith
Speaker 1: in you and their needed you were part of building
Speaker 1: that network.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Money doesn't talk, it it speaks obscenities, right, Clara was
Speaker 4: willing to put up all the money for my show.
Speaker 4: They wanted a woman, a young woman, to sell shampoo,
Speaker 4: and I was their girl. I mean, there wasn't another
Speaker 4: girl they could see yet, and I'm sure there were many,
Speaker 4: but there wasn't one. They saw me as I could
Speaker 4: sell the shampoo and a conditioner and the makeup and everything,
Speaker 4: and so they fixated on me, and that gave me
Speaker 4: tremendous power to get my show done. And so as
Speaker 4: we embarked on how to get this show written and created,
Speaker 4: I used to play charades with Bill Persky and Sam Denoff,
Speaker 4: who had won a couple of Emmy for the Dick
Speaker 4: Van Dyke Show. And so I said to them ABC
Speaker 4: wants to do a show with me, and we're looking
Speaker 4: for writers. Would you ever consider writing a show about
Speaker 4: a girl? Because they'd only written guy shows, And they
Speaker 4: said that'd be great. We'd love to.
Speaker 3: Talk about it.
Speaker 4: Mike nicholsond cast me in Barefoot in London. They came
Speaker 4: to London to see my Opening Night and then they
Speaker 4: decided to do it, and so they wrote the pilot
Speaker 4: and when it sold, they weren't willing to sign up
Speaker 4: for five years. Nobody really wants to sign a five
Speaker 4: year contract, as you know, everybody, you know, we cringe
Speaker 4: when we see a five year contract. And Danny Arnold
Speaker 4: was going to be the producer. He only wanted to
Speaker 4: sign up for two years. Billy and Sam. So the
Speaker 4: only person who said I'll be here for five years
Speaker 4: was me, So I became the producer. Otherwise, had they
Speaker 4: said it, they probably would have been the producer. So
Speaker 4: not only did I become the producer, I own the negative.
Speaker 4: I own the whole thing. And that only happened because
Speaker 4: I was the only one who said I'll do it,
Speaker 4: and I had learned so much working from my father
Speaker 4: at the studio. Nothing was a mystery. And you know,
Speaker 4: in every profession, whether it's show business or law or
Speaker 4: interior design or whatever it is, it's mysterious. But when
Speaker 4: you know the language, it isn't. I mean, I knew
Speaker 4: what a scrim was. I knew what dailies where. I
Speaker 4: knew what the editing machine with the three heads looked like.
Speaker 4: I knew what musical scoring was. I knew what a
Speaker 4: red tape was.
Speaker 3: I knew it all.
Speaker 4: So because I had just been a bug on the
Speaker 4: wall and been the one who carried the film from
Speaker 4: one end of the studio to the other, and been
Speaker 4: interested in sat in and watched people, I was very knowledgeable.
Speaker 4: And I certainly was knowledgeable about comedy. I mean I
Speaker 4: knew comedy. I'd done Barefoot in the Park, I'd done
Speaker 4: under the ummem Tree, I had done Blotsmanagerie. I had
Speaker 4: done a million plays by then. I was only twenty
Speaker 4: five years old. But as you know, when you start out,
Speaker 4: you're just doing stopuck, you know, or three city plays.
Speaker 4: I did two for the Seesaw and three cities. So
Speaker 4: I was very good on the stage. I mean I
Speaker 4: had my sea legs, so I was ready.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Whenever I speak at colleges and stuff, and people ask me,
Speaker 4: you know, how do I get started? I said, start
Speaker 4: in a little theater. Get into little theater and do
Speaker 4: as many plays as you can do. Because I believe
Speaker 4: everybody gets a shot, but not everybody gets a second shot.
Speaker 4: But if you're ready for your first shot. I was
Speaker 4: when I was cast by Mike and Barefoot. I auditioned
Speaker 4: for him with about, I don't know, one hundred people.
Speaker 4: They gave me Marty Milner as my partner. We said
Speaker 4: how do you do and got up on stuff twelve
Speaker 4: see yeah, And I got the part. And Mike said
Speaker 4: to me later, who are you? What have you done?
Speaker 4: And I told him, for a kid, I was pretty seasoned,
Speaker 4: and so I was ready. So when I came back
Speaker 4: from Barefoot, I was really strong. I've been a year
Speaker 4: there and I was very strong and so and by
Speaker 4: strong I mean not scared, knowing how to do it
Speaker 4: and trusting my instincts. I love working with actors. I
Speaker 4: love being a part of a company, and we had
Speaker 4: a great company.
Speaker 3: Ted Bessel was aces.
Speaker 1: Apropos of what you said about, you know, being in
Speaker 1: the theater. I always tell people when they're younger, I
Speaker 1: say do anything. I said, don't have a lot of
Speaker 1: pride about what you do. Don't say no to anything.
Speaker 1: You got to put that energy out there and give
Speaker 1: it up. You know what I mean? Now I know
Speaker 1: that the world was much smaller than it is now.
Speaker 1: Now there's so many shows. There's too many shows. There's
Speaker 1: no way we can have everything be good. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's just too much content out there. And everybody's chasing
Speaker 1: the same actors. Everybody's chasing the same writers, right and
Speaker 1: for you back then, Perski and these famous writers, I'm
Speaker 1: imagining that the television landscape was very finite back then.
Speaker 1: So finding good writers, there weren't a.
Speaker 4: Lot of them, were there, right, right, No, they weren't. No,
Speaker 4: they were pretty stellar. The show was that good because
Speaker 4: they were so good, you know, as you Danny Arnold
Speaker 4: later created Barney Miller, which is fantastic show. Sure, and
Speaker 4: Billy went on to do Kate n Ally and a
Speaker 4: whole lot of very good women's shows. He got to
Speaker 4: become a real guru for women's shows. They were very
Speaker 4: gifted people. And the thing is is they would rewrite everything.
Speaker 4: You know, We'd get a script and it would be
Speaker 4: kind of so so, but it had a good premise,
Speaker 4: and they'd rewrite the hell out of it and bring
Speaker 4: it back to the table and it was fantastic.
Speaker 3: And then the person.
Speaker 4: Whose name was on it would win an Emmy for it,
Speaker 4: and then somebody like you would call and say, is
Speaker 4: this the same Joe blow that you had because his
Speaker 4: script is not very good, but our guys had completely
Speaker 4: redone it.
Speaker 1: Actress and activist Marlo Thomas Her push for equal rights
Speaker 1: was part of the larger conversation about gender equality in
Speaker 1: the seventies. Feminism was also a heated topic in my
Speaker 1: twenty twelve conversation with author Erica Jong and her daughter
Speaker 1: Molli jang Fast.
Speaker 5: I think that women who are fourteen fifteen are in
Speaker 5: the most difficult position they have ever been in modern society.
Speaker 1: What do you think about that?
Speaker 4: I mean, I agree, I think there's a lot of sexuality.
Speaker 1: I think it's not explained to young girls in.
Speaker 5: A way very confusing, Molly.
Speaker 4: But I think that's a legacy of the feminist movement.
Speaker 5: I mean, we said we want not a legacy of
Speaker 5: the feminist movement. It is a legacy, and here I
Speaker 5: really feel fierce. It is the legacy of a distortion
Speaker 5: of women's desire for equal rights.
Speaker 3: Equal rights are not platforms shoes.
Speaker 5: You can't and naked clothes equal rights.
Speaker 4: But you can't blow up an ad Am bomb and
Speaker 4: then choose how it's going to go.
Speaker 1: Here more of my conversation with Erica Jong and Mali
Speaker 1: Jang Fast and Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break,
Speaker 1: marlow Thomas explains why she went to New York to
Speaker 1: study acting with Lee Strasberg after her success on TV.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: As executive producer and star of That Girl, Marlowe Thomas
Speaker 1: worked closely with the writers to make her character Anne
Speaker 1: Marie more believable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a regular company. You know.
Speaker 4: You sit around and say, let's do an arc where
Speaker 4: she's looking for a job and she gets these four jobs.
Speaker 4: Or let's do an arc where her father wants her
Speaker 4: to move back home, you know, and so you talk
Speaker 4: about the arc, and then we'd read to have a
Speaker 4: table read, and everybody would give their comments. There were
Speaker 4: very few times where, you know, there were any huge debates.
Speaker 4: You know, I've always felt about story that what's right
Speaker 4: always wins.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: The first year was a little difficult because I was
Speaker 4: the only girl on the staff. You know, they staffed
Speaker 4: the show. I didn't staff the show. I didn't know
Speaker 4: any writers.
Speaker 3: I was a kid. How would I know writers.
Speaker 4: So they staffed the show with a lot of terrific
Speaker 4: guy writers, in which I would say, I don't think
Speaker 4: a girl would say that to her father, or I
Speaker 4: don't know that's the way a girl would end an
Speaker 4: argument with her boyfriend. So we'd have these debates. So
Speaker 4: finally Danny Arnold, who was one of the smartest guys
Speaker 4: in the world, said, you know what we need. We
Speaker 4: need a female story editor. You can't be the only
Speaker 4: girl in the room. And so the female story editor
Speaker 4: came on and that was heaven because she was able
Speaker 4: from her expertise and her ability to write, to say,
Speaker 4: you know, let's go this way. The only real debate
Speaker 4: we ever had was they wanted to be a wedding.
Speaker 3: For the last show.
Speaker 4: Clara al wanted a wedding. ABC wanted a wedding. The
Speaker 4: producers wanted a wedding, and I said, we can't do
Speaker 4: a wedding. We can't end the show with a wedding.
Speaker 4: If we end the show with a wedding, this audience,
Speaker 4: which has followed this character for five years, she's independent,
Speaker 4: she doesn't want to get married, she's not sure she
Speaker 4: wants to get married. She wants a career. We've had
Speaker 4: so many of those conversations. To have a wedding is
Speaker 4: to betray them. I think we're saying that's the only
Speaker 4: happy ending, and lots of shows end with weddings. I
Speaker 4: don't want this show to end with a wedding. And
Speaker 4: that was a problem. That was the only one. And
Speaker 4: the interesting thing is, I mean, obviously they let me
Speaker 4: have it that way, and then a couple years later
Speaker 4: Billy and Sambo said to me that was such a
Speaker 4: right idea because it had gone into syndication.
Speaker 3: That way, the show is over.
Speaker 4: Once you see the show run through and you see
Speaker 4: the wedding, then you know how the story ends. But
Speaker 4: I would have felt it would have been a wrong
Speaker 4: message to say this is the only happy ending. And Alec,
Speaker 4: I'll tell you the mail that poured in about that.
Speaker 4: Thank you, thank you Marlon for not coming out, thank you,
Speaker 4: thank you for ending with a wedding. I mean, they
Speaker 4: really they wanted to see it. They've been hanging on
Speaker 4: to the fact that this is the one single girl
Speaker 4: on television. Had never been a single girl before. There's
Speaker 4: this one single girl and she doesn't get married at
Speaker 4: the end. And I always had a thing growing up,
Speaker 4: which is why I did Free to Be You and Me.
Speaker 4: That every princess married the prince. That was the only
Speaker 4: happy ending of a fairy tale. And I hope your children,
Speaker 4: in fact, I'm going to send you Free to Be
Speaker 4: this week. Your children should listen to Free to Be
Speaker 4: You and Me, because there is no one happy ending.
Speaker 4: Your boys and your girls will have the happy ending
Speaker 4: that they create for themselves, not one that goes along
Speaker 4: with what every other boy and every other girl has done.
Speaker 1: So when the show is over, when did you go
Speaker 1: to the actors studio after that? Because you were in
Speaker 1: Hollywood doing the show. So when the show's of a
Speaker 1: you moved to New York.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, they wanted us to do two more years,
Speaker 4: and they wanted me and Chatty to get married. I
Speaker 4: didn't want to get married, but they said, well then
Speaker 4: just two two more years because they really needed that girl.
Speaker 4: I mean, there weren't a lot of hits on ABC,
Speaker 4: as you remember, And I said, I just can't. I
Speaker 4: was a girl when we started. I'm a woman now.
Speaker 4: I can't be the same little girl running around trying
Speaker 4: to get a job. I mean it's I'm too old now,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm thirty one, decided to move on and
Speaker 4: I got a script. It was called Crackers. It was
Speaker 4: about a woman who was a drunk, and it was
Speaker 4: a very touching story. And I read it and I thought,
Speaker 4: I don't know how to do this. Everything I had
Speaker 4: done had been in this comedic vein Barefoot in the Park,
Speaker 4: and all the stuff i'd done, I mean, even Glass
Speaker 4: Menagerie didn't have that kind of character that you had to,
Speaker 4: you know, to play a good drunk and to have
Speaker 4: come out of that, and all the would come from
Speaker 4: the withdrawal to.
Speaker 1: Ring yourself out. You got to ring yourself out there.
Speaker 3: I didn't know how to do it.
Speaker 4: So I called Ellen Berson, who I had met a
Speaker 4: few times. So she said, you got to go to
Speaker 4: Lee Strasford. So I called him. He said he'd meet
Speaker 4: me at FU to New York. And he said to me,
Speaker 4: you're a big star. You got a lot of awards.
Speaker 4: What do you want to come to class for. I said,
Speaker 4: because I only know how to do what I know
Speaker 4: how to do, and I've gotten by on a lot
Speaker 4: of charm and comedy instinct. He said, don't look at
Speaker 4: gift horse in the mouth, my dear, I said, I'm
Speaker 4: not complaining. I'm just saying that's what I got. That's
Speaker 4: my whole bag. So he said okay, And after that
Speaker 4: I started doing work. I mean, I want an Emmy
Speaker 4: as Best Dramatic Actress playing a schizophrenic. After that that
Speaker 4: Lee Grant cast me in it was called Nobody's Child,
Speaker 4: and I don't I'm not saying this to toot my
Speaker 4: own horn, but I'm saying this to prove what acting
Speaker 4: classes do for you. I was up against Vanessa Redgrave,
Speaker 4: Catherine Hepburn, Jenna Rollins, and Mayor Winningham and I won
Speaker 4: that Emmy. And I would not have won that had
Speaker 4: I not stop my career and worked on my work
Speaker 4: for three years. And I say often to people, sometimes
Speaker 4: your career gets in the way.
Speaker 3: Of your work. You've got to stop and do your
Speaker 3: work and figure out what it is you want.
Speaker 1: I've been there.
Speaker 4: When I quit that girl, my father said to me,
Speaker 4: you have to be crazy. You are the heir apparent
Speaker 4: to Lucille Ball. I said, Daddy, I know that's a
Speaker 4: great compliment, but I don't want to be Lucille Ball.
Speaker 4: I respect Lucille Ball. She's a genius. That's just not
Speaker 4: where I'm headed. I want to be a lot of
Speaker 4: other people.
Speaker 1: Now now free to be you and me. How did
Speaker 1: that start?
Speaker 3: It really happened because of my niece.
Speaker 4: As you know, and as you can hear from what
Speaker 4: I'm saying, I was born a feminist.
Speaker 3: I mean I really was.
Speaker 4: My father used to call me misindependence. As a child,
Speaker 4: I always had an idea of what I wanted to do,
Speaker 4: and I wanted to do a single girl on television.
Speaker 4: I gave feminine mystique to the head of the network.
Speaker 4: I was obviously always going in that to and when
Speaker 4: I was doing that girl, I got a lot of
Speaker 4: male from young women that was shocking. I get a
Speaker 4: letter from a sixteen year old girl who said, I'm pregnant.
Speaker 4: I can't tell my father. Where can I go? I'm
Speaker 4: twenty two years old and I have two children and
Speaker 4: my husband beats me up. Where could I go? So
Speaker 4: I said to my secretaries we called them at the time,
Speaker 4: I had two of them. I said, I don't know
Speaker 4: where the hell is somebody going in Duluth if they're pregnant.
Speaker 4: Where does somebody go in Salt Lake City if they're
Speaker 4: being beaten up? As I'd looked around and we looked around.
Speaker 4: There wasn't any place. There were no legal advisors. There's
Speaker 4: no place for a woman or a girl to go
Speaker 4: for safety or counsel or anything which politicized me. That's
Speaker 4: how I met Gloria Steinem and all these women and
Speaker 4: created the misfoundation for women. All that happened because of
Speaker 4: the male I got, because there was no place for
Speaker 4: women to go. But then my sister had a baby,
Speaker 4: the first grandchild in our family, and she was about
Speaker 4: four and a half or so, and I was reading
Speaker 4: the books in her bedroom and they were all the
Speaker 4: thing about the boys do this, and the girls do that,
Speaker 4: and the Princess Mary is the prince at the end
Speaker 4: of the thing. And I said to my sister, this
Speaker 4: is such rubbish. It took us thirty years to get
Speaker 4: over this. You got to get her something else. So
Speaker 4: I went to the bookstore to find something else, and
Speaker 4: there wasn't anything. So I decided to do one of
Speaker 4: my own. So I created Free to Be You and
Speaker 4: Me for her. I really had no intention of becoming
Speaker 4: a big franchise. I just wanted to do something that
Speaker 4: would have stories for boys and girls that said they
Speaker 4: could be anything. They wanted to be that it'd be
Speaker 4: non racist and non sexist, and so I got together
Speaker 4: with friends like Schelle Silverstein and Herb Gardner and Kleeband
Speaker 4: who had done the music and lyrics for a chorus line,
Speaker 4: and Patty Chayevsky who was a friend of Herbie's, and
Speaker 4: a bunch of people. We sat around and said, I said, okay,
Speaker 4: let's rewrite our childhood. What would you have like to
Speaker 4: have heard when you were a kid. And Herb Gardner said,
Speaker 4: I would have liked to have heard that it was
Speaker 4: okay for a boy to cry and that it wasn't sissy.
Speaker 4: And Carol Hall wrote that wonderful song It's all Right
Speaker 4: to Cry, which has become a classic, and we got
Speaker 4: Rosie Grier to sing it, which was great. And then
Speaker 4: I and then I said, I want there to be
Speaker 4: a story where the princess does not marry the prince
Speaker 4: at the end and goes on to her own life,
Speaker 4: and she's not a blonde, she's a brunette like me
Speaker 4: with olive skin. We did that one. We did Atalanta
Speaker 4: where she runs in the race and chooses her own life.
Speaker 4: So we rewrote all the things and the company was
Speaker 4: called Bill Records at the.
Speaker 3: Time, you know, I was a big shot.
Speaker 4: And so they made the record and Alan al directed
Speaker 4: the written pieces, got Mel Brooks to play one of
Speaker 4: the babies with me. That the two Babies who don't
Speaker 4: Know Who's a boy and Who's a Girl? And Mel
Speaker 4: and Carl Reiner wrote it.
Speaker 3: It was hilariously funny.
Speaker 4: We did the whole thing and he said, you know,
Speaker 4: you're not going to sell more than fifteen thousand.
Speaker 3: I said, that's okay.
Speaker 4: We're not doing this for the money. We want to
Speaker 4: change the world, one five year old at a time. Well,
Speaker 4: it went gold and it went platinum, and then we
Speaker 4: did the book and it was number one on the
Speaker 4: best seller list. So we did the special one on
Speaker 4: Emmy and a Peabody. I mean, it's just because there's
Speaker 4: been nothing like it. And just last week it was
Speaker 4: inducted into the Library of Congress with albums, along with
Speaker 4: Janet Jackson, Kermit the Frog, and Thomas Edison, of all people.
Speaker 4: So when an idea is right, and it wasn't, you know,
Speaker 4: I didn't write the pieces. I conceived the idea and
Speaker 4: assigned the pieces. But I'm not that kind of writer.
Speaker 4: I couldn't write a song. But you know, Alec, I'm
Speaker 4: sure you feel this in your work. If something comes
Speaker 4: organically from you, as that girl did, as Free to
Speaker 4: Be did, it's something you really believe in, you want
Speaker 4: to do. It does touch other people, you know. It
Speaker 4: isn't like, oh, I think it would be really commercial.
Speaker 4: If I did a show about this, that's probably not
Speaker 4: going to be successful. But if it comes out of
Speaker 4: your own desire to right or wrong, or change the world,
Speaker 4: or express this thing that's so on fire inside of you,
Speaker 4: that has a very good chance, I believe of being successful.
Speaker 1: Actress and activist Marlo Thomas. This is It's all Right
Speaker 1: to Cry, sung by Rosie Greer from Free to Be,
Speaker 1: You and Me. That's right, Rosie Greer, the NFL defensive tackle.
Speaker 6: It's alright to cry. Ry the sad out of of you.
Speaker 6: It's all right cry.
Speaker 1: It might make you feel better when we come back. Marlowe.
Speaker 1: Thomas talks about her forty year marriage to talk show
Speaker 1: host Phil Donahue. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
Speaker 1: friend and be sure to follow. Here's the thing on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you were listening to Here's the Thing.
Speaker 1: For much of the seventies, Marlowe Thomas was a proud
Speaker 1: single woman with no interest in getting married, and then
Speaker 1: a guest appearance on a daytime talk show in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven changed everything.
Speaker 4: I just never wanted to be married, you know, it
Speaker 4: just wasn't for me. I had an idea of what
Speaker 4: I wanted to do. I wanted to go to London
Speaker 4: and do a play. I wanted to be free to
Speaker 4: take any opportunity that and I don't mean in a
Speaker 4: romantic way. I had a lot of fabulous boyfriends, but
Speaker 4: I just wanted to experience so much. And my husband
Speaker 4: got married at twenty one, and he said to me, one,
Speaker 4: how the hell did you have the guts not to
Speaker 4: get married early? I said, because I'm a girl. I
Speaker 4: knew damn well, if I got married, I'd be responsible
Speaker 4: for the babies, for the house, for the husband, for
Speaker 4: the everything. I grew up with that I know.
Speaker 3: I'm of a.
Speaker 4: Lebanese family and an Italian family, and they're a lot
Speaker 4: like the Irish, as you and Phil are. You know,
Speaker 4: the mother runs the roost. She takes care of the children,
Speaker 4: and she has a thousand of them. My father's one
Speaker 4: of ten, my mother's one of five. My mother gave
Speaker 4: up her career and followed my father around the country
Speaker 4: and really supported him in his career, and that was
Speaker 4: her choice. I looked at that choice and said, that's
Speaker 4: not for me. I wanted to be my father. I
Speaker 4: wanted to be on stage. I used to see my
Speaker 4: father in the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and his
Speaker 4: eyes would be shining and he was having a ball,
Speaker 4: and I'm so happy.
Speaker 3: And that was it.
Speaker 4: I think I discovered what you say you're discovering now.
Speaker 4: I discovered work made me happy, made me happy and
Speaker 4: my husband. In the last about six years, I did
Speaker 4: a play off Broadway, in a play on Broadway. One
Speaker 4: was Elaine May on Broadway and one was Jojo Petro
Speaker 4: off Broadway. And Phil said to me, you're so happy
Speaker 4: when you do a play. As far as I've ben thurned,
Speaker 4: you can do a play every year. I'm the happiest
Speaker 4: when I'm on stage. And so I made that decision.
Speaker 4: I hadn't expected to meet Phil. It was beyond my control.
Speaker 4: It's like a gag. I mean, he walked in the
Speaker 4: green room and it was like a shampoo commercial.
Speaker 3: I mean, his big blue eyes and.
Speaker 4: That shock of white hair, and I thought, oh my god.
Speaker 4: And I was dating like three men at the time.
Speaker 4: Phil said the same thing. He said, I walked down
Speaker 4: the hall after her, and I thought, my god, she's
Speaker 4: a bad thought. And then we flirted for an hour
Speaker 4: on his show. He asked me out the next night
Speaker 4: and that was it.
Speaker 1: But what changed, meaning you said in interviews that you
Speaker 1: had a couple different types of boyfriends. You had the
Speaker 1: hunky boyfriend, you know, you had the leading man boyfriend.
Speaker 1: Then you had the smart, funny boyfriend to keep you interested.
Speaker 3: Well, you're very right.
Speaker 4: My comment was that I, you know, the the you know,
Speaker 4: the gorgeous guy, the hunk and everything. That guy was,
Speaker 4: you know, a sexy turn on. And the other guy,
Speaker 4: he was so smart that he taught me things. I
Speaker 4: was very attracted to men like that who kind of
Speaker 4: you know, just taught me about business or taught me
Speaker 4: about life, who were just very smart, which the hunky
Speaker 4: guy didn't really have that right, And this was the
Speaker 4: first time I met a man who had it all.
Speaker 4: Phil was hunky and sexy and real smart, and it
Speaker 4: just was. It was a great package. And so at
Speaker 4: first the first thing that brings you together is the hunky,
Speaker 4: sexy part. And then the more I got to know him,
Speaker 4: just so wise and he always does the right thing.
Speaker 4: He always ends up with the right spot. And Phil
Speaker 4: moved his show, his show, his whole show, all the
Speaker 4: producers and everything, to New York. I was living in LA.
Speaker 4: He was living in Chicago. I had a big production company.
Speaker 4: I had made twelve movies for television in a row.
Speaker 4: He had his own show, and he was raising four
Speaker 4: boys on his own. He was getting his boys through school.
Speaker 4: His show every day at nine am. Our lives were insane,
Speaker 4: and I said to him, he said, he wanted me
Speaker 4: to move to Chicago. And I said, look at this
Speaker 4: point in my career, I really can't live in Chicago.
Speaker 4: I could live in New York or LA. He said,
Speaker 4: I can't live in LA. I'm not interested. He said,
Speaker 4: no offense, but I'm not interested in interviewing actors. So
Speaker 4: we picked New York and we moved everything to New York,
Speaker 4: including his show. He said, let me just get my
Speaker 4: boys through high school, which was like another two three years.
Speaker 4: He got his boys whore. We bought an apartment, We
Speaker 4: got married, the boys, got through high school. He moved
Speaker 4: his show and everything, and we made a life in
Speaker 4: New York, where neither of us lived. We bought an apartment,
Speaker 4: we bought a house in Connecticut. We invented a life.
Speaker 1: Now. Obviously, another enormous part of your family's legacy, your
Speaker 1: Dad's legacy and your legacy, is Saint Jude's. Talk to
Speaker 1: me about the genesis of that and why Memphis.
Speaker 4: My father grew up very poor, an immigrant family. My
Speaker 4: grandparents were from Lebanon. They had no money. They came
Speaker 4: here with all their belongings in cloth bags and arranged marriage.
Speaker 4: Had ten babies, nine boys, and a girl without a doctor,
Speaker 4: hot water and her sister. So everybody in the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: They were everybody. They were Polish, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Lebanese, whatever,
Speaker 4: And they never went to a doctor, and they all
Speaker 4: had jobs on consignment. I mean, it was real, real
Speaker 4: dirt poor people. And my father had little friends who
Speaker 4: died of things like influenza and appendicia, this which are
Speaker 4: manageable situations, but they died because they never could see
Speaker 4: a doctor. So he had a very first hand look
Speaker 4: at the inequity of health care in this country, and
Speaker 4: that always was in his mind. And so when he
Speaker 4: made a promise to Saint Jude, show me a sign
Speaker 4: that I can make it in my career, because he
Speaker 4: was my father was terrified at being poor and not
Speaker 4: being able to raise his children the way his father was.
Speaker 4: So he was willing to give up show business if
Speaker 4: he knew what got assign you to something else. Anyway,
Speaker 4: he got a sign, and he continued on his way,
Speaker 4: and when he got very successful and quite wealthy, he
Speaker 4: decided it was time to pay back, and he wanted
Speaker 4: to build a hospital for very ill children where nobody
Speaker 4: would be turned away, not for race or religion, and
Speaker 4: no one would pay for anything, not treatment, travel, housing,
Speaker 4: or food. And he picked the South because and this
Speaker 4: was a wonderful story. My father carried this little piece
Speaker 4: of paper in his pocket for men years. He read
Speaker 4: in the paper that a black boy eight years old
Speaker 4: in Mississippi was hit by a car. A white guy
Speaker 4: hit him on his bike. The white guy picked him
Speaker 4: up and tried to get him to a hospital, but
Speaker 4: no emergency room would take him because he was black.
Speaker 3: And he died.
Speaker 4: So my father decided, I'm putting it in the South.
Speaker 4: I want the kids from the South to be able
Speaker 4: to get here too, And so he did.
Speaker 3: Interesting and it was the first solely integrated hospital in
Speaker 3: the South.
Speaker 4: And we have the largest program for sickle cell We
Speaker 4: have eight hundred sickle cell patients and we have a black, white, Hispanic.
Speaker 3: They come from all over the world. We even have.
Speaker 4: Amish people, which so stunned me because here are these
Speaker 4: people won't even have a zipper. But when it comes
Speaker 4: to saving your kid, if your child to sick, god forbid,
Speaker 4: you'd sell your arm to get your kid. Well, these
Speaker 4: parents come terrified. They're gonna have to sell their house,
Speaker 4: that everything else. They don't have to sell anything. They
Speaker 4: just have to there. And we put them up in
Speaker 4: beautiful housing, which by the way, I do most of
Speaker 4: the decorating. We can put up four hundred families for years,
Speaker 4: two years at a time.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible place.
Speaker 1: Well, let me just say this to you. I want
Speaker 1: you to tell your husband that we'd love to have
Speaker 1: him on the show. I didn't want you together because
Speaker 1: I feel like a show with Phil Donague. That's four
Speaker 1: segments we need to do four hours before down here
Speaker 1: because I respect him and I admire him, and he's
Speaker 1: got a lot to say. We'd love to have him
Speaker 1: on because I'm a huge fan of your husband's show.
Speaker 1: Really tell him and what I love about your husband
Speaker 1: was is that his political views, though they tilted in
Speaker 1: a certain way, they weren't partisan. Do you think that
Speaker 1: you agree with that?
Speaker 4: Through most of his career, Yes, he got hit in
Speaker 4: the head, got fired from MSNBC because he opposed the
Speaker 4: war in Iraq, and it was an interesting time for him.
Speaker 4: Here's a guy who'd been on the air for twenty
Speaker 4: nine years in syndication and when I first met him,
Speaker 4: he said, I've got the best job in television. And
Speaker 4: I said why. He said, because I can say anything
Speaker 4: I want to say. And if you don't want to
Speaker 4: run it in Detroit, you don't have But I'm in
Speaker 4: two hundred and fifty cities, so don't run it. So
Speaker 4: he wasn't used to any kind of censorship overview. He
Speaker 4: just did what he wanted. He went on MSNBC and
Speaker 4: the war was ramping up against Iraq, so he put
Speaker 4: on fathers who had lost their sons, both from Israel
Speaker 4: and Palestine to talk about what war really does. And
Speaker 4: these are men who were opposite each other in their beliefs,
Speaker 4: but they had both lost sons in these wars. And
Speaker 4: he had on all the people that were against the war,
Speaker 4: the Colin Powells and all the people, and they were
Speaker 4: all the generals who were against the war. And NBC
Speaker 4: told his producer, you've got to get filled to get
Speaker 4: off the war thing. You know, NBC is run by
Speaker 4: General Electric. General Electric makes things that go boom. So
Speaker 4: he didn't stop. He felt it was not only he
Speaker 4: wasn't being defiant, he was being a journalist, was saying,
Speaker 4: he was showing the other side of this, and all
Speaker 4: the other shows everywhere actually were for the war.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just want to say this to you, and
Speaker 1: that is you probably should go back on TV because
Speaker 1: you'd still be the funniest, most sophisticated, gorgeous woman on TV.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: That line from Lucy to you and Mary Tyler Moore
Speaker 1: hovering around the same time onto Murphy Brown, those great,
Speaker 1: great leading ladies of network television. God, I would love
Speaker 1: to work with you one day. What enjoy that.
Speaker 3: Thank you. We'll give me a call, Ale anytime.
Speaker 1: We will call you. We book. This was fun, love you,
Speaker 1: thank you, my very best to you, and thank you.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: My thanks to Marlow Thomas. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. We're produced
Speaker 1: by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue and Zach McNeice. Our engineer
Speaker 1: is Frank Imperial. Thanks for listening.