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    Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg
    Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg
    Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg
    Ebook312 pages4 hours

    Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg

    By Gertrude Berg and Cherney Berg

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    About this ebook

    In these warm, happy memoirs of one of America’s most beloved radio, television, and stage stars, a woman who has delighted millions of people tells her own wonderful story, from the arrival of her grandfather in this country to her triumph in the Broadway hit A Majority of One.

    Her story really begins with Grandpa Mordecai Edelstein, who came to America, as she proudly explained to the grandchildren, before the Statue of Liberty.

    Young “Tillie,” as Gertrude Berg was called, grew up in a most engagingly alive family of brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Manhattan’s upper East Side. “Home,” she says, “was an apartment on the fourth floor of a house you called an apartment house if you wanted to be fancy, and a tenement if you wanted to be depressing.”

    One day, her highly unpredictable father bought a hotel in the Catskills, a million-dollar mansion, for $500 and his word of honor, which was worth the difference. What with cocky bellboys, temperamental headwaiters, lovesick cooks, hungry musicians—and the guests, and the rain—every member of the family was busy. It became Gertrude’s job to entertain the fretful guests whenever storm clouds gathered, and as a result, she began to read palms. But she soon started writing playlets with parts for as many guests as possible. She remembers “with particular pride such masterpieces as ‘Snow White and the Twenty-eight Dwarfs’ and ‘Thirty-three Blind Mice.’”

    After such an education, radio was a natural step for her. Her own family (protesting loudly) became models for the famous radio family, The Goldbergs, which has captivated audiences for thirty years. Her experiences in the early days of radio, the transformation of The Goldbergs from radio to television, and her wonderful friendship with Sir Cedric Hardwicke, co-starring on Broadways with her, are all recalled with gusto, excitement, and pride.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPapamoa Press
    Release dateDec 2, 2018
    ISBN9781789127645
    Molly and Me: The Memoirs of Gertrude Berg
    Author

    Gertrude Berg

    Gertrude Berg (1899-1966) was an American actress, screenwriter and producer. A pioneer of classic radio, she was one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit when she premiered her serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs. Her career achievements included winning a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, both for Best Lead Actress. She was born Tillie Edelstein on October 3, 1899 in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, to Jacob and Diana Edelstein, natives of Russia and England, respectively. Tillie married Lewis Berg in 1918; they had two children, Cherney (1922-2003) and Harriet (1926-2003). She learned theater while producing skits at her father’s Catskills Mountains resort in Fleischmanns, New York. She developed a semi-autobiographical skit, portraying a Jewish family in a Bronx tenement, into a radio show. Berg wrote her script by hand, taking the pages this way to NBC; when the executive she was meeting with protested that he could not read what Berg had written, she read the script aloud to him. Her performance not only sold the idea for the radio program but also got Berg the job as the lead actress on the program she had written. Berg continued to write the show’s scripts by hand in pencil for as long as the program was on the air. A 15-minute episode of The Rise of the Goldbergs was first broadcast on the NBC radio network on November 20, 1929. Berg became inextricably identified as Molly Goldberg, the bighearted matriarch of her fictitious Bronx family who moved to Connecticut as a symbol of Jewish-American upward mobility. She wrote almost all the show’s radio episodes (more than 5000) plus a Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly (1948). CBS brought The Goldbergs to television in 1949. Berg died of heart failure on September 14, 1966, aged 66, at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan.

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      Molly and Me - Gertrude Berg

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