Radio & TV: Life with Molly

Twenty years ago a squib on the radio page of the old New York Evening World noted that “the story of a cloak-and-suit operator’s climb from a dingy tenement to Park Avenue will be dramatized in the Rise of the Goldbergs . . .” With that feeble trumpet toot, the Goldberg family was off on a career that has included a run of 17 consecutive years on radio (only Amos ‘n’ Andy has run longer), a Broadway play and road company, a comic strip, vaudeville sketches and a television show (Mon. 9:30 p.m., CBS-TV). In all the years, the Goldbergs have never managed to climb out of their Bronx tenement at 1038 East Tremont Avenue (in real life, 1038 is a street intersection). The Goldbergs have never made Park Avenue. But their creator, plump, 50-year-old Gertrude Berg, did. She has also bought a country estate on the more than $1,000,000 she has earned from the multiple Goldberg enterprises.

The enormously successful Goldberg scripts have an apple-dumpling flavor—sugary, smooth as butter, pastry-thin in plot and heavily spiced with Bronxisms. What keeps this confection from cloying is Author Berg’s tart recognition of human frailties and her blunt but understanding sense of humor. Besides writing, co-directing and bossing her show with an iron will, Gertrude Berg plays Molly, the Goldberg matriarch, with a full complement of shrugs, flutters, malapropisms and a passionate capacity for making something dramatic of the commonplace.

Last week, spurred by their television success (they averaged third in the Hooperatings), the Goldbergs were back on radio (Fri. 8 p.m., CBS) after a three-year lapse, doing a weekly repeat of the TV show. It adds seven more hours of rehearsal time to the 26 already required, but only minor editing of the TV script is required for radio. “I’m writing just the way I’ve always written,” says Gertrude Berg. “The only difference is that you can sustain a scene longer on TV. In radio, you break up short scenes with musical bridges.”

She no longer has time for exhaustive research into the folkways of urban Jewish life (“Fortunately, Molly never has to be too accurate”). Over the years, the Goldbergs’ fan letters (several thousand a month) have maintained a steady 50-50 average between Jews and non-Jews. Mrs. Berg likes to recall the time the Mother Superior of a Philadelphia convent wrote to ask for a synopsis of six weeks’ programs. “She said the nuns were regular listeners but they’d given up the Goldbergs for Lent and now they were wondering what had happened.”

There is a “very good chance” that Molly and her family will soon be in a movie. But the Goldbergs’ invasion of Hollywood, says Mrs. Berg, “will have to wait until my next vacation.”