Gertrude Berg was truly an amazing woman. She wrote and performed, as Molly Goldberg, in 12,000 episodes of one of radio’s first serials, which went on the air in 1929, a week after the market crash. She made the transition to television in the well-known New York minute, earning the first Best Actress Emmy ever awarded. When loyalty to a fellow cast member and a right-wing advertiser boycott ended that program ("I Love Lucy" moved into the time slot), she went on stage and won a Tony as Best Actress, starring opposite Cedric Hardwicke in "A Majority of One."
Aviva Kempner’s rock-solid documentary, "Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg," which opens today, honors Berg and Goldberg, and also their precursor Tillie Edelstein, who was born in 1898, reared in the Bronx and in the Catskill hotel business until she married an English engineer, Lewis Berg, and took his name, adding it to the Gertrude she had adopted earlier.
From a childhood ambition to be an actress, she wrote humorous sketches to amuse hotel guests in bad weather, expanded them to honor small-town, back-fence stories and moved them to the big city, where discussions took place through open windows over fire escapes or air shafts. The show was not afraid to tackle political issues of the day, from the anti-Semitic rants of Father Coughlin to Hitler’s actions in Europe. Most, however, were light-hearted and family oriented, to be copied in "Fibber McGee," "Henry Aldrich," "The Great Gildersleeve" and dozens of other programs.
Berg, who lived on Park Avenue, wore furs and pearls and had no Yiddish accent whatsoever, was a hard-driving taskmaster, but her loyalty to Philip Loeb, who portrayed her husband on TV, was her undoing. An active union man, a founder of AFRA (later, and still, AFTRA) and Actors Equity, Loeb was accused in 1950 of Communist sympathies, and her sponsor, General Foods, wanted him fired. Berg refused. She won, but only a temporary victory, because the show was canceled a few months later. Berg even appealed to Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, asking that he use his influence, but when the Cardinal said his price would be her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she withdrew her request. Loeb’s tragic story was told later in "The Front," with Woody Allen, Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi, the originator and the first successor, respectively, of the role of Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof."
Berg, obviously a driven woman, kept right on acting, and even though she won a Tony for "A Majority of One," Hollywood cast Rosalind Russell as the Jewish housewife from the Bronx, and Alec Guinness to replace Cedric Hardwicke as the Japanese businessman with whom she develops a relationship.
The only footage of Berg, besides a few clips from "The Goldbergs," are some scenes from an interview she did with Edward R. Murrow. Lots of tributes, anecdotes and stories, however, from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, NPR’s Susan Stamberg, Ed Asner, Norman Lear and many other friends and family members. Interestingly, Asner blames Berg’s show for making it more difficult for Jews to assimilate, just as "Amos ‘n’ Andy" may have made it tougher on Afican-Americans who wanted to fit into American society. However, most of the interviewees credit Berg and her work with improving the image of Jews in American society.
Kempner, who also did a brilliant documentary on baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, has done it again.
Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe