Rose Leiman Goldemberg, a playwright and screenwriter who wrote the script for “The Burning Bed,” a 1984 TV movie that starred Farrah Fawcett as an abused wife exonerated for killing her husband, bringing a taboo subject to network television and into the national conversation, died on June 21 at her home in Cape May, N.J. She was 97.
Her death was announced by her publicist, Alan Eichler.
Ms. Goldemberg was working as a playwright in the mid-1970s when she sent a few story outlines to an unusually receptive television producer. One of them, a drama about immigrants set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910, caught his interest.
It became a television movie, “The Land of Hope” (a title Ms. Goldemberg hated), which aired on CBS in 1976. It centered on a Jewish family and their Irish and Italian neighbors. There were labor organizers, gangsters and musicians, and a rich uncle who wanted to adopt a child to say Kaddish for him when the time came. Such an ethnic stew was a stretch for the network, and critics loved it.
“A thoroughly charming surprise,” John O’Connor wrote in his review for The New York Times.
As a pilot for a series, “The Land of Hope” went nowhere, but it made Ms. Goldemberg’s reputation, and she began receiving stories to be turned into scripts.
“Where did you spring from?” one network executive asked her, she recalled in a 2011 interview for the nonprofit organization New York Women in Film & Television. “As though I were a mushroom.”
It was Arnold Shapiro, the veteran producer, writer and director behind “Scared Straight!,” a well-received TV documentary about teenage delinquents being brought into contact with prison inmates, who sent Ms. Goldemberg “The Burning Bed,” a 1980 book by The New Yorker writer Faith McNulty about the case of Francine Hughes.
Ms. Hughes’s story was horrific. For 13 years, she had been terrorized by her alcoholic husband. One day in March 1977, after a brutal beating, she called the police in their Michigan town. Two officers responded and then left, saying there was nothing they could do because they hadn’t witnessed the attacks.
That night, the beating resumed, and Ms. Hughes’s husband raped her. When he fell asleep, she doused the bed with gasoline, lit a match and set the bed on fire. Then she put her children in the car and drove to the county jail to report what she had done.
Mr. Hughes died that night, and Ms. Hughes was charged with first-degree murder. Nine months later, a jury pronounced her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The verdict made national headlines.
Ms. Fawcett, the pinup star of “Charlie’s Angels,” the frothy crime series, was already attached to the project; she had shown her dramatic chops in “Extremities,” an Off Broadway production about a woman who exacts revenge on her rapist, and wanted to continue working in that vein. Yet the project was initially turned down by all three networks. When it was resurrected, by NBC, in one of those complicated scenarios particular to Hollywood, Mr. Shapiro was somehow left out of the production.
The movie aired in October 1984, to mostly critical acclaim. (Paul Le Mat played the husband.) It was seen by tens of millions of viewers, and NBC’s ratings soared, pulling the network out of third place and putting it on top for the first time in a decade. Ms. Fawcett, Ms. Goldemberg, the producers and even the makeup artist were nominated for Emmy Awards, and the movie set off a national conversation about domestic abuse. Women’s shelters, a rarity in those days, began opening all over the country; the film was shown in men’s prisons; and Ms. Goldemberg was often asked to speak to women’s groups.
Inevitably, as she recalled in 2011, “someone would say, ‘I couldn’t talk about my own abuse until I saw the film.’”
She added: “It wasn’t because of me. It was a wonderful performance by Farrah, and the timing was right. It was just a remarkable confluence of the right things happening at the right time.”
Still, Ms. Goldemberg began fielding entreaties from other actresses who wanted her to write star vehicles for them, projects akin to “The Burning Bed.”
She did so for one of Ms. Fawcett’s fellow angels, Jaclyn Smith, co-writing the TV movie “Florence Nightingale” for her. Broadcast in April 1985, it did not have the same impact as “The Burning Bed”; most critics found it soapy and forgettable.
A Lucille Ball vehicle fared much better. Ms. Ball wanted a script about homelessness, and when she and Ms. Goldemberg met at her Beverly Hills house, Ms. Ball laid out her terms: She wanted to play a character with some of the personality traits of her grandmother, and named for her.
Ms. Goldemberg came up with “Stone Pillow,” a television film about a homeless woman named Florabelle. In his Times review, under the headline “Lucille Ball Plays a Bag Lady on CBS,” Mr. O’Connor called the movie “a carefully contrived concoction” but praised Ms. Ball “as wily and irresistible as ever.”
Ms. Goldemberg did not take every project she was offered. She said she was lucky to have a bread-winning husband who paid the rent. Among the ones she rejected were a sympathetic portrait of Hitler as a child that blamed his mother for his evil ways and a story about a woman who falls in love with her rapist.
Had she been a single mother, Ms. Goldemberg said, she might have made different choices.
Rose Marion Leiman was born on May 17, 1928, on Staten Island. Her mother, Esther (Friedman) Leiman, oversaw the home until World War II, when she became an executive secretary at Bank of America; her father, Louis Leiman, owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores in New Jersey.
Rose earned a bachelor’s degree in 1949 from Brooklyn College, where she had enrolled at 16, and a master’s degree in English from the Ohio State University.
She married Raymond Schiller, a composer who followed her from Brooklyn College to Ohio State, in 1949; he later became a computer systems designer. They divorced in 1968. Her marriage, in 1969, to Robert Goldemberg, a cosmetic chemist, ended in divorce in 1989.
Her first television-related job was at TV Guide in the 1950s, writing reviews of shows airing on what was then a new medium. She eventually began writing plays.
“Rites of Passage” (1975) was about a woman who loses the power of speech and cognition. “Gandhiji” (1977) imagined a reincarnated Mahatma Gandhi forced to re-enact his personal life with his immediate family. With “Letters Home,” Ms. Goldemberg adapted the book of the same name by Aurelia Plath, the poet Sylvia Plath’s mother, who had collected her daughter’s correspondence; the play opened off Broadway in 1979 to mixed reviews.
Ms. Goldemberg is survived by a son, Leiman Schiller, and three stepchildren, David Goldemberg, Kathy Holmes and Sharanne Goldemberg.
In her 2011 interview with New York Women in Film & Television, Ms. Goldemberg was asked what advice she would give a young female screenwriter. “Don’t be discouraged by rejection,” she said. “You can come back.”
The key, she added, was a killer second draft: “If you can write the best second draft that can be written, that’s more impressive than anything you can write the first time.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Rose Leiman Goldemberg, 97, Dies; Her ‘Burning Bed’ Was a TV Benchmark appeared first on New York Times.
