If you happen to have been born around 1950, the odds are fairly great—almost 90 percent—that your parents never got divorced. By 1960, however, divorce rates started to climb, doubling within two decades, and children born in the 1970s stood a whopping 50 percent chance of living through the end of their parents’ marriage.
As divorce skyrocketed, the once-taboo subject started to transform television comedy. Out went Ward and June Cleaver, a blandly perfect married couple, and in came Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, miserable divorced men forced to share an apartment. Sitcoms started to take on a darker edge in keeping current with American culture.
In 1973, right in the middle of that seismic shift, The Mary Tyler Moore Show aired a milestone episode called “The Lou and Edie Story,” in which Lou Grant—a gruff-but-wise newsman played by the late Ed Asner—gets separated from his wife. Grant’s poignant anguish was so powerfully scripted that it earned that episode’s writer an Emmy Award: the first such award, in fact, ever given to a woman for solo comedy writing.
In conversation, Silverman comes across a bit like a Jewish version of the laughing Buddha.
Fifty years and one sparkling career later, Treva Silverman—now 88 years old—is widely adored and admired by fellow comedy writers and actors alike. David Pollock—who worked alongside Silverman on the staff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later earned Emmy recognition himself for his work on Frasier and The Carol Burnett Show—calls her “unfailingly friendly, a genuine person, and an intensive listener.” Actor and comedian Ruth Buzzi, who performed in comedy revues scripted by Silverman, declares her “a sweet, beautiful lady.” And Ken Levine, a two-time Emmy winner for Cheers and Frasier, heaps praise on the brilliance and compassion of her work: “Her comedy is grounded firmly in humanity,” he says. “All her laughs come out of character.” Buzzi acknowledges a debt to her sparkling comedy, too: “With Treva Silverman, how could I not come off as a funny lady?”
In conversation, Silverman comes across a bit like a Jewish version of the laughing Buddha. Both Levine and Pollock described her as “ethereal,” and in his short film Oedipus Wrecks (one third of the 1989 anthology film New York Stories), Woody Allen plays a neurotic lawyer who falls in love with a kind psychic named Treva—not an accidental choice, according to Silverman. She is still writing and working on projects, and in these increasingly troubled times, her airy-but-decisive voice may be one we need.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
Silverman grew up in Cedarhurst on Long Island and was artistically precocious. One morning, her mother heard someone practicing the piano and sounding quite beautiful. Her three older sisters all took lessons, but Silverman’s mother was shocked to find her youngest daughter’s untrained five-year-old fingers working the keys. An expert from Juilliard discovered that Silverman had perfect pitch and pronounced her a prodigy.
Years later, having enrolled in both music and dance lessons, Silverman would read The New Yorker on the train into Manhattan from Long Island, discovering the erudite humor of Dorothy Parker and S.J. Perelman. It was Robert Benchley’s masterful voice, however, that really captivated her. His literary style, humane and self-deprecating, stuck with Silverman. It taught her how comedy could speak to the human struggles and foibles that unite us all.
After graduating from Bennington College, Silverman wrote musicals for a children’s theater, discovering the intersection of musical composition and comedy. In crafting clever lyrics for her scores, she found the puzzle of matching meaning to meter exhilarating. Throughout her career as a writer, she remained a musician at heart.
“Being a musical prodigy, having written lyrics, she already had in her head that [writing] is all about rhythm and how to fit [words] syllabically,” says Rachel Axler, another Emmy-winning writer (The Daily Show and Veep) who names Silverman as an inspiration.
As a young writer, Silverman formed a small troupe with her boyfriend Johnny Meyer and another Jewish Long Islander who had recently graduated from Barnard with a degree in theater: Joan Molinsky, who would later take the stage name Joan Rivers. Together, they produced musical comedy revues for Borscht Belt resorts, but their clever work was poorly received by elderly Jews looking for Henny Youngman-style “Take my wife, please” one-liners.
Returning to the city, Silverman and Rivers took up residence in the same building—directly across the street from the Ed Sullivan Theater—and started collaborating on scripts and jokes for Rivers’ stand-up act. They remained neighbors until Rivers married her husband Edgar. Silverman happily served as her maid of honor.
Life in New York led to new creative possibilities that would eventually bear fruit. One evening, Silverman and Meyer were at one of their favorite piano bars in Manhattan, a place where audience members were routinely invited to perform whenever the pianist took his break. At the first opportunity, Silverman jumped behind the keyboard, and when the pianist’s break was over, she was approached by a young man who wanted to compliment her playing. The two struck up a lively conversation about music and literature that lasted into the early morning hours. At the time, that young man was working as a page at CBS News; in a few years, however, James L. Brooks (Taxi, Cheers, The Simpsons) embarked on a legendary career in television comedy. Decades after they met, they still remain friends.
Breaking Into the Business
For a while, Silverman continued to write revues. Her work was picked up by Upstairs at the Downstairs, a well-known New York nightclub that featured an all-star ensemble, including Buzzi, Dom DeLuise and Avery Schreiber. Performances were half music, half sketches, and Silverman primarily wrote the songs, joining forces briefly with a partner, Jonathan Tunick, who would go on to become the primary orchestrator for Stephen Sondeim.
Silverman was a masterful composer, but comedy started to come easily, too. In the early 1960s, she wrote “East Side/West Side,” a sketch in which the bohemian east side of Manhattan and the bourgeois west side stood in for communist East Germany and capitalist West Germany. Her piece garnered huge interest, and the new notoriety shifted her artistic focus toward comedy.
In 1964, when Carol Burnett was looking to start a television show called The Entertainers, she came to Upstairs at the Downstairs to see Silverman’s material. Silverman, who got wind of Burnett’s visit, spent a week’s salary buying tickets for everyone she knew in order to pack the joint with a friendly audience that would roar at every line. Unbeknownst to everyone there, however, Burnett ended up seeing a later show. Regardless, she loved Silverman’s work, and soon Silverman found herself in the writers’ rooms of shows such as That Girl, The Monkees, and Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp.
It wasn’t long before Silverman got a call from an old friend, James L. Brooks. He was co-producing a new show called Room 222 about an interracial inner-city high school, and he wanted Silverman on the staff. The show was a perfect fit for Silverman, whose characters always inspired hope in difficult times. After its first season in 1970, Room 222 won an Emmy for best new program, beating out Sesame Street.
The show’s success led television executive Grant Tinker to approach Brooks and his partner Allan Burns about putting together a program for Tinker’s wife, Mary Tyler Moore, whose star was on the rise after her work on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Brooks, who drew on his time in the CBS newsroom to create The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a series about a young single woman who moves to Minneapolis and stumbles into a role as an associate television news producer.
Brooks knew he needed Silverman’s deft touch to round out a powerhouse writers’ room that included Ed Weinberger, David Lloyd and Bob Ellison. Her work was strongly influenced by the feminist writers of the period, and it provided a necessary balance to her male colleagues’ creative perspectives.
“I loved writing for that show,” Silverman recalls. “We all inspired each other. There was no ego. Anybody could come up with a line when we were doing rewrites.”
Breaking the Sitcom Glass Ceiling
Debuting during the heart of the women’s movement, The Mary Tyler Moore Show became one of the first situation comedies that featured a range of female perspectives, beginning with the series’ main character; Mary Richards was a soft, midwestern Presbyterian who both wanted and feared the independence that women were experiencing.
“Mary represented all the people who were not yet ready,” Silverman reflects.
At the time, there were many women who recognized and disliked the unfairness of the patriarchy but who only knew life under that system. Change seemed scary, and Mary stood in for viewers who had one foot on and one foot off the feminist train.
Characters (from left) Rhoda, Phyllis and Mary in a still from the last episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
The show’s cast of characters also included Phyllis Lindstrom, who lived downstairs from Mary and seemed to have it all—a master’s degree, a job, a marriage to a doctor, and a daughter—but who was nonetheless always miserable. Rhoda Morgenstern, who lived next door to Mary, was a single, street-smart Brooklyn transplant.
To that group, Silverman added one more character: Georgette Franklin. An episode focusing on Rhoda’s work life required a new sidekick. Rhoda was herself Mary’s loud-mouthed sidekick, so Georgette needed to have a different energy. Silverman realized that a ditzy woman might work as a comic foil, but instead of creating another in a long line of sexist “Dumb Dora” characters that have appeared throughout television history, she wrote Georgette as a woman with gentle insight.
“She was so pure and unfettered,” Silverman says.
Super Emmy
In 1973, Brooks and his partner asked Silverman what she wanted to write about for a new episode. “I want to see Lou Grant in pain,” she answered immediately.
Silverman believed that newsman Lou Grant had become a bit one-dimensional. She wanted to give the character depth, so she wrote an episode in which he and his wife Edie go to therapy, making the hyper-masculine Grant deeply uncomfortable. The therapy doesn’t go well, and Edie decides to leave her husband. Toward the end of the episode, Grant rages at his wife: “Listen, Edie, if you plan to come marching back to me, I’m warning you. I’ll…”. Then, after a pregnant pause, he’s a changed man: “I’ll take you right back.”
Grant’s vulnerability might have made the episode too heavy. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was, after all, a sitcom, not a drama. Silverman’s instincts about the ending, however, proved to be right. “I cried when I wrote it,” she says, “because it’s exactly what he would do, and it was seeing him unmasked.”
In 1974, the episode earned Silverman her Emmy Award. Actually, two Emmys. That year, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences tried a new gimmick, awarding a “Super Emmy” for each category. The winners of the comedy and drama Emmys competed against each other for Writer of the Year, and Silverman won. The experiment was discontinued the next season, making Silverman the lone Super Emmy winner for writing in television history.
Broadway Bound?
Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, Silverman started writing for the stage as well. Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Michael Bennett, fresh off a smash hit with A Chorus Line, really wanted to work with her.
They developed an idea for a musical about a young American woman who travels to Europe and experiences a sexual awakening. (Fans of Seinfeld will recognize in this premise shades of Rochelle, Rochelle, the fictionalized musical about “a young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk” that featured prominently in a season four episode.) If anything would fill a theater, Bennett thought, it would be titillation. In Silverman’s hands, however, Scandal was destined to become profound.
She wrote her first draft of the script as a series of episodes, but the project’s original composers struggled with her material. Her comedy was just too tight. Her scenes flowed so perfectly, one after another, that songs would have been superfluous. Finally, composer Jimmy Webb—best remembered for the song “MacArthur Park”—joined the project, and he decided to add musical interludes rather than songs between Silverman’s episodes, which gave life to her main character’s affairs and emotions.
Book written, music composed and arranged, choreography complete, and the whole show cast—with Tony-Award-winner Swoosie Kurtz in the lead—Scandal was slated to open on Broadway on April 11, 1985. Preview performances had already begun when Bennett, to everyone’s surprise, canceled the production.
Publicly, he refused to say why he made such an immense decision. Privately, he knew he was dying and couldn’t see it through, especially given the concerns of the show’s backers, who were wary of supporting such an explicitly sexual show during the AIDS crisis. New York Times critic Barbara Gelb, who had been following Scandal’s development, wrote that “like the handful of others who saw it, I knew it would have been the best thing he’d ever done.” Silverman’s Scandal is widely considered to be the funniest play never produced.
Fixing the Stone
Later that year, Silverman found an opportunity to work as a comedic trauma surgeon.
Robert Zemeckis had wrapped production on Romancing the Stone, and test audiences hated it. The romance between the lead characters, played by Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, felt inauthentic. Turner’s character in particular just wasn’t appealing.
Zemeckis didn’t have the budget to rewrite and reshoot any more than the opening scene, so Silverman did what she does best: use comedy to humanize the story. She gave Turner’s character—Joan Wilder, a romance novelist—a cat named Romeo. In the new scene, after putting the finishing touches on her latest novel, Wilder weeps at getting the ending just the way she wanted, then celebrates by giving Romeo an entire can of tuna, garnished proudly with a sprig of parsley. “Just so you know,” Wilder says to her cat, “That’s Bumble Bee, kiddo. I spare no expense when I celebrate.”
That one line, a Silverman classic, was sufficient to win over audiences. Romancing the Stone won a Golden Globe for Best Picture in the comedy or musical category, beating out both Beverly Hills Cop and Splash.
Contemporary Comedy
Decades after that success, Silverman continues to write. She’s currently at work on several projects and remains an avid supporter of her fellow writers. Levine, in particular, counts on her wisdom and advice as a kind of joke whisperer.
“Whenever I have a first draft,” he says, “Treva is the first person I send it to. She is so honest in her comments. We’ll go over the script line by line, and she has some really good suggestions. It’s all in the details. She’s a master.”
Along the way, Silverman has also inspired generations of smart, funny women who followed the comedic trail she blazed, balancing their lives and careers.
“She achieved so much in this very male space,” says Axler, “and still retained both her sense of self and also a gentleness, a kindness.”
Silverman has also achieved a sense of perspective about comedy: its relevance and influence on the broader culture. Back in 1973, when she earned her Emmy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was part of a monumental CBS primetime lineup that included All in the Family and M*A*S*H, two sitcoms that also turned vital social issues into comedy. Silverman’s writing was part of the discourse that informed how social change unfolded in America. “The Lou and Edie Story,” for example, aired the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, right when the women’s movement was in full swing. By telling stories that centered multiple women with varied perspectives on modern life, The Mary Tyler Moore Show created a sense of possibilities for contemporary audiences.
“So many women were influenced by the show,” Silverman says, “Thinking it’s OK to be like Mary. But some would also think, ‘Huh, how interesting to be like Rhoda, too.’”
Silverman also warns that in the wrong hands, or with the wrong intentions, comedy can close minds faster than opening them. “There is a lot of comedy that is mean, that just makes fun of people for the sake of making fun of people,” she says, “and the people who do that are changing our lives and our world and our everyday fears.” Silverman prefers comedy that helps connect people at a deep level.
“Sometimes when you’re with a group of people who don’t know each other, maybe in a theater,” Silverman says, “if something has really moved you or made you joyously happy, you know that everybody in the theater feels like that, and that sense of oneness means for the moment that you are all sharing each other.”
Silverman wants to teach us, in other words, how to repair the world with humor. Perhaps we ought to listen.
Opening Image credit: Nataliia Lytvyn from Noun Project.