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A comedy revolution swept TV in the seventies, with Marilyn Suzanne Miller fortunately in the middle of that golden age of sitcoms, first as a writer of acclaimed shows like The Odd Couple, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Maude, and Barney Miller, and then as one of just three women on the original writing staff of Saturday Night Live. Having studied playwriting in college, Miller developed a reputation as a master of rich, character-based pieces that made viewers laugh despite the sometime melancholic undertones, pushing real-life-based, enigmatic, sexual, assertive women as engines of sketches. The pieces were hip, weird, and not cute, with previously untelevised female concerns central to the themes. Miller—a television pioneer who broke barriers for TV women writers and their on-air creations—may not have broken into the business at all if not for her own chutzpah and the kindness of one particular stranger, Mary Tyler Moore Show executive producer James L. Brooks. For some inexplicable reason, Brooks took a cold call from Miller, just out of college with no professional writing credits, and became her biggest booster, helping her land her first writing job in Hollywood. “I hit the ground running,” Miller recalls. “There was a golden age of superb sitcoms dominating TV at the time I graduated from college, and it was just a combination of fortuitous circumstances (including not enough grad school tuition financing) that allowed me to jump start writing for TV when I was twenty-two.”
Miller was born in Neptune, New Jersey, on January 3, 1950, the oldest of four daughters, raised principally in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. Her mom, who was chief proofreader for Webster’s New World Dictionary for thirty years, went on to write and edit books for ten more years on subjects as diverse as women’s health and psychological testing. Now 84, she recently line edited, copy edited, and proofread Miller’s first book, How To Be a Middle-Aged Babe. Her father, a psychologist, was in the second wave to storm Normandy’s beaches in World War II. But he was also a jazz prodigy who played in Europe during the war, used to sneaking out at night as a teenager in Asbury Park, hopping a train to New York, and (a tall teen) standing in as sideman at jazz clubs on sax and clarinet while his parents thought he was home asleep. Miller recalls as a child listening with her parents to Al “Jazzbo” Collins, Leonard Bernstein’s What is Jazz, Nichols and May, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, and Bob and Ray, reflecting their love of jazz and offbeat humor. Outgoing and precocious, she performed “Lullaby of Birdland,” à la Sarah Vaughan in a local elementary school talent contest at age five or six—and was annoyed at winning only the second-place prize. Entrepreneurial, at four, she cajoled her best friend into the lucrative “Sing a Stoop,” going door to door, offering to sing requests on neighbors’ stoops (or to leave) if they paid them.
In college, Miller decided to pursue a degree in playwriting, although she also sang and danced leads in campus musicals and wrote some occasionally at the University of Michigan. She graduated in 1972. “In post-grad life, I thought I’d write these sparkling musicals like Jean Kerr, hand in the script, then show up in something fabulous by Dior to gather up my dazzling reviews. But the English were taking over Broadway with shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, and the Broadway musical I loved went into the dumper.” Miller was accepted into the revered writing program at the University of Iowa—a three-to-four-year master’s of fine arts program that would have meant huge student loans. “The whole idea of being a poor playwright living in that dreaded garret, while repaying loans wasn’t the MBA money-machine other grad schools perpetrated. I needed cash.”
“I had loved The Mary Tyler Moore Show during college, and, a December grad, I went home and wrote a ‘semi-episode’ to sell—I related to this first show about a real, single working woman, and her Jewish sidekick friend. With no previous intention of writing for TV, these characters spoke to me—other great shows started showing up—M*A*S*H, All in the Family—perhaps selling episodes might pay for grad school.”
Watching the The Mary Tyler Moore Show credits, Miller noticed the name James L. Brooks, one of the executive producers, called information, got the number of CBS, asked to be connected to him—and Brooks took the call (“for reasons neither of us knows to this day—I was a stranger”). Miller said she’d written “most of a Mary Tyler Moore script” (with no idea of the collaborative nature of sitcoms), asked him to read it, and (as she relays in the 2001 book, The First Time I Got Paid for It) two weeks later, Garry Marshall flew her to Hollywood as a junior writer for The Odd Couple (Iowa gave her a deferment). Brooks brought her to MTM to write for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda; she subsequently scripted episodes of many shows: Maude, Barney Miller, and Welcome Back, Kotter (never making it to Iowa).
In 1975, Miller earned her first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy-Variety or Music special, for her work on the Lily Tomlin special, Lily, with an innovative approach to sketch comedy. A producer there, a one-time comedic performer from Canada, Lorne Michaels, was later approached by NBC about creating a new late-night show with a hip sensibility to air live Saturdays from New York, and invited Miller along for the ride. Much as she wanted to (but thinking she ought to marry her then-boyfriend), she declined at first and then relented, and at twenty-five, became one of only three women on the original writing staff of Saturday Night Live (then called NBC’s Saturday Night), with Anne Beatts and Rosie Schuster, all of whom became influential comedy writers, particularly in their treatment of women’s concerns in sketches. “Lorne encouraged me to write in my own voice. And when I wrote something good, people wanted to do it. It was a little niche I had created for myself,” Miller told Tom Shales for his book Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests.
Miller’s style—to focus on character, not jokes, using a “playlet” dramatic structure, infusing humor with poignancy—were called “Marilyn Pieces,” and included “Slumber Party” (with guest Madeline Kahn) in which young girls speculate on how you have intercourse, “The Judi Miller Show” (for Gilda Radner) and “Rhonda Weis”, recurring sketches about, first a girl who does shows in her bedroom, and a Jewish princess (also played by Radner). In one Rhonda sketch about overusing her credit card, Miller recalls, “Rhonda and the credit card lady (Jane Curtin) compete on how bad their menstrual cramps are, how often, how heavy, how many Tampaxes they use each month—the unsung song of the female period—till I was arguing about disgusting amounts of cramps and blood with Standards and Practices till Saturday, asking for more than I wanted and ending up with just the right amount as I played the feminist card and grossed them out, and into defeat.”
Miller collaborated with Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd on the “wild ’n crazy” Czech Brothers. Miller recalls Ackroyd was fascinated with a line from Martin’s stand up calling himself, in a weird accent, “a wild ’n crazy guy.” This evoked for Ackroyd a whole world of guys he came to Miller with. He said, you know those Eastern European guys who were scientists or engineers in their own country but had to take low-paying jobs in America, and are constantly hitting on you and think they’re incredibly cool? Miller knew them well. She, Martin, and Ackroyd earlier worked out the sketch beats, then Ackroyd joined her at two a.m. to write the sketch and fell asleep in her office. Miller wrote the first draft, inventing their pseudo-hip expressions, waking Ackroyd to bounce lines off him; in rehearsal, when they played Ping-Pong, slamming their paddles flat on the table and danced with each other to the juke box, each holding one leg, it all seemed perfectly natural.
Drawing on her love of musicals, Miller created the famous “Dancing in the Dark” piece with Radner and Martin (inspired by The Band Wagon, where two inevitable lovers, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, find themselves gracefully and sensuously in an improvised dance in Central Park). Martin and Radner—in a singles bar—lock eyes and dance, but do their personal version of the same thing. Miller wrote most of the original music and lyrics for the early years of SNL (including “Goodbye Saccharine,” sung by Radner as Rhonda Weis, with back-up vocals including Linda Ronstadt), and returning in the eighties, “Making Love Alone,” a Cole Porter–ish merengue that Bernadette Peters sang on the show that gets requests for performance to this day.
In 1977, when SNL won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy, Variety or Music series, Miller was asked to accept the award as a result of a noteworthy dramatic piece she wrote for John Belushi and Sissy Spacek. In all, she won two Emmys and three other nominations during her tenure at the show, as well as several Writers Guild Awards. In The First Time I Got Paid for It, Miller described a family dynamic like being in a “Rockefeller Center located suburban house, where some of us had our own rooms and some had to report to the sofa.” The “living together” aspect of office life was both a powerful emollient to creativity and a roiling agony to the survival of self,” she added. Having actually had a job before, Miller could type fast, made top of the show ($750/week), and turned down a hugely lucrative job as story editor at Maude, to watch her coworkers ogle at someone who knew where the typewriter keys actually were. The women grew close—Miller developed a special rapport with Radner, both Jewish, University of Michigan attendees, who shared sensibilities.
In 1979, Miller focused on theater, including the one-woman Broadway play and movie Gilda: Live. Joseph Papp produced three of her pieces at the New York Shakespeare festival, one play produced by National Public Radio, and another translated into polish, performed at the Atheneum Theater in Warsaw. Sydney Pollack directed a workshop production at the Shakespeare Festival of her play One of the Guys, starring SNL cohort Bill Murray. In 1989 she wrote a comedy for the PBS short film series Trying Times titled “The Boss” with Jean Stapleton and Corey Feldman, directed by Alan Arkin. She returned to weekly television as a producer on Fox’s Tracey Ullman Show, winning another Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Variety or Music Program in 1990, and the next year signed on as coexecutive producer of The Carol Burnett Show, working in the usual spate of produced, never-aired pilots and films under numerous overall deals.
In March 1992, while creating a pilot for actress Rosanna Arquette with Rosie Shuster, Miller learned she had advanced breast cancer. She and Shuster wrote the pilot during inpatient chemo sessions with a typewriter smuggled into the hospital. That same year, due to chemo, she appeared on Comedy Central in a wig, fake eyelashes and eyebrows. At the end of a year of treatment, she returned to Saturday Night Live at the behest of Lorne Michaels. At Hillary Rodham Clinton’s invitation, Miller wrote and directed the president and first lady in a much-admired parody of the “Harry and Louise” insurance ads for the Washington correspondents’ dinners, inviting SNL alumnus Al Franken to collaborate.
In 1998, Miller scripted a powerful episode about breast cancer for Murphy Brown, winning both a Humanitas Prize and the Gilda Prize (awarded by Gilda’s Club New York) for it. With a total of three Emmys, she is tied with another comedy writer, Merrill Markoe, for the most Emmys ever won by a female writer, and is in undisputed possession of first place with eight nominations total. In 2001 she won her third Writers Guild Award, for Saturday Night Live: The Twenty Fifth Anniversary Show, collaborating with Bill Murray, Paul Shaffer, and in studio 8H, has always most loved to speak to a whole world in her own, female voice.
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