“YOU’RE NOT SERIOUS about this idea? Women sitting on a couch talking to each other?”
At this point in our pitch, the Chicago media executive wasn’t buying the concept or the program. “Who do you think is going to watch this show?”
“Your wife,” I answered. “And all her friends.”
Still not convinced. “Why not famous women? And what’s your role?”
“I’m going to be sitting in the circle with them, and we’ll have famous women if the subject calls for it. But it’s not The Phil Donahue Show. It’s not interviews. Woman to Woman will be a conversation like women have with their friends all the time.”
“You’ve got to get a better name. No woman will watch a show called Woman to Woman,” and with that, he stood up to end the meeting.
I held out a copy of the pilot show on videotape. “Take the show home to your wife, and if she says she’ll watch it, will you consider taking the series for Chicago?”
He took the tape and agreed to show it to his wife. She loved it. We’d made one sale.
I’D FIRST MET Mary Muldoon, who became my producing partner for Woman to Woman, when we both worked for Hour Magazine. We had an idea that women watching daytime television wanted a show that talked with them, rather than about them. We wanted to produce something entirely different from anything else on TV at that time, from the way it looked to the subjects and guests.
For the pilot, I sat on a nubbly, beige-colored semicircular couch in a set of arched windows that looked somewhat like someone’s living room. A dozen other women sat beside me or on adjoining peach and mauve (very eighties) couches and easy chairs. Grammy-winning duo Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote our theme song, and Dionne Warwick recorded it and every day that distinctive voice opened the program with these lyrics:
“Woman to woman / face to face / coming together / from many places / asking the questions one at a time / bonding at the answers that were there all the time.”
The subject for the first show was a careful choice: “The Myth of the Happy Housewife.” I asked my guests, all of whom had been selected carefully for their opinions and personal stories, “What makes you happy?” to get the conversation going.
“A drink with my girlfriends,” one offered and the conversation was in motion. “Being a housewife is just a role I play.” “No one can do this alone.” Everybody was talking… just like women do with girlfriends. They were really listening to each other, too, and seemed to forget the cameras discreetly recording a real conversation. Given the bad name so-called reality television has given to anything real (consider The Real Housewives), I hesitate to use that description, but in the early eighties, real was a good thing.
From the very first taping, Mary and I knew we had something special—and revolutionary. Armed with a week of shows, we started the selling process, going literally station to station, meeting the same skepticism about the appeal of the title and format. But every single time a male executive showed the programs to his wife, the station bought the show.
OUR FIRST SHOW aired on September 14, 1983. The New York Times’s television critic wrote that the show was “being handled with intelligence. And it beats a steady diet of game shows,” which was a bit damning with faint praise. But the reviewer, a man, got the central point: “All of the women appear to be genuinely interested in one another.… One clue to this harmony and sympathy is that control of the program is just about completely in the hands of women.”
Yes, that was the point of the program and even the way we put it together, creating the first independent and only all-women production company, a decision we had to defend from time to time. The press seemed obsessed with the fact that we were an all-women production team, and there were tiresome questions about the differences in an all-female workplace. “We put on lipstick less often,” was one practiced answer, and on a more serious note, we would point out, we had no titles, no egos—just an all-women team getting a show on the air every day that would have meaning for the women watching and be a positive experience for the women participating. Not only did we want to prove that an all-women production team could be successful, but we believed it was the best model, editorially and culturally, for our show.
Mary and I had titles as co–executive producers, required for the business we incorporated for financial management, but otherwise no one had titles because we wanted to break down the usual hierarchy and invite everyone to the table equally. We remembered what it was like to have our ideas denigrated or for someone else to take credit for them because we were only assistants or associate producers, and we didn’t want anyone else dismissed or their abilities judged or limited by a title. Everyone was welcome to put forward ideas at our daily staff meetings.
We paid our staff top salaries and lobbied hard to get on-site daycare; I didn’t want other mothers to feel the stress or the guilt of choosing between being with their children or at work. If they wanted to have their young children with them in the office, we wanted to make that possible—and it kept us real about the challenges of balancing motherhood and work. We had a common area with changing tables and cribs and hired a professional to help out. We started out with three under the age of two and by the end of the first production cycle, there were four more between the age of six months and crawlers. Was there something in the water?
I was quite literally changing somebody’s baby on my desk while a male reporter asked me some question about ratings—which in large part determined whether a show or series continued production.
“Well, changing a baby’s dirty diaper certainly keeps your numbers from last week in perspective,” I told him.
If someone needed to work from home because their child was sick, that was fine. All those young mothers were bringing great ideas to the table, and we were rewarded with high staff loyalty; not a single employee left our eighty-person staff while we were producing the show, unusual in Hollywood. Women were watching, too, and after the first rating numbers came in, more stations signed on to broadcast the series.
I signed off at the end of every program, “Woman to woman, that’s how we learn, that’s how we change, that’s how we support each other.”
OUR TOPICS REALLY pushed boundaries for the day: Teen suicide. Sexually abusive soccer coaches. Ageism. Sterilization as birth control. Missing children. Life after menopause. Why pornography is so damaging for women. Surviving the death of a child. Compulsive eating. Teenage runaways. Surrogate mothers. The right to die. Wives and mistresses talking (that was a fun one!). The first national TV interview with a transsexual couple.
With such subjects being discussed not by experts but by real women sharing their own stories, it was important to have women production crews for the tapings, and we did.
Not surprisingly, the topics we took on were too controversial for some stations. Some canceled the program, but we didn’t change direction because the women we were programming for let us know that our shows inspired them, encouraged them to get support, helped them recognize they weren’t alone, and sometimes compelled them to take action.
Running a business—managing a team, meeting payroll, paying insurance and lawyers, and negotiating contracts with every single station—was new to me. Happily, Mary loved doing budgets and meeting payroll! (Always find someone who shares your values but complements your skills.) She was single, came from a big Irish family but never had children of her own, and chain-smoked like a chimney. In the good cop/bad cop scenario of most working partnerships, Mary was willing to be the “bad cop,” and she was a great partner.
After 180 original hours of conversations with “real women” about their lives, ideas, challenges, and accomplishments, Woman to Woman was nominated for an Emmy for best daytime talk series.
Mary and I went to the ceremony, which is decidedly less glamorous than the nighttime Emmys. We were just going to have a good time. After all, Phil Donahue had won almost every single year he’d been on the air, so we prepared our “it’s an honor just to be nominated” posture.
Phil and his wife, Marlo Thomas, someone I knew and admired a great deal, were seated at the table next to us. Mary and I had maybe one or two more glasses of wine than we should have because we were so sure Phil would win, and when they called out our names, we sat in stunned silence for a minute before leaping to the stage with no idea of an acceptance speech. I decided to use my daily closing line from the show, to which Mary added a quick quip, “She’s the one who talks. I’m the one who makes sure the shows get on the air.” Well, not exactly, we both did that. But it was a great partnership and the Emmy was a big accomplishment!
The only person who was more surprised than we were was Phil, but he graciously congratulated us and even posed for a photo.
NEGOTIATING DEALS FOR our second year was going to be a lot easier after the Emmy win, and while I was in Boston just a few weeks later to discuss the next year’s licensing contract, the general manager suggested a celebratory lunch.
“There’s a call for you, Ms. Mitchell,” the hostess at the Ritz-Carlton hotel said quietly. I excused myself to take the call.
It was the head of our syndication partners. “I have some bad news,” he said. “We just got the call that Golden West Television [our syndication partners] has been sold, to a private equity firm called KKR—Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Not sure, but there’s been a lot of talk about private-equity guys buying up media companies and leveraging their assets to buy bigger companies. We’re small potatoes, but that might be the plan.”
And so it was, a plan that began in the eighties to transform the media landscape. Our little production company, part of a small Hollywood syndication company that was started by the cowboy star, Gene Autry, by the way, was the first time a private-equity firm had bought a small media company for the sole purpose of strip-mining it to buy a larger media company. The outcome of these leveraged buyouts was that over the next thirty years, newspapers, radio, and television stations, as well as production companies and studios, were all vulnerable to being bought at a low valuation, followed by dramatic cutting of expenses and bulking up of assets to improve market valuations. Of course, I didn’t know KKR’s plans at that point, but I knew that they were in the profit-making and not program-making business.
We immediately launched a big advocacy program with the new owners, showing them ratings, ad revenues, reader responses, station buy-ins. All in vain. “Close down production as fast as you can,” we were told, “and because we’re nice guys, you can have the rights back to the show. And if you produce it somewhere else, we’ll take a cut to pay down the investment.”
Woman to Woman was a balance sheet loss to KKR, but it was so much more than just another show to us—not just because Mary and I owned the title or because it had won an Emmy—but because our lives had been changed and we had changed the lives of other women. We had made a difference. The show was, for all of us who worked on the team and all the women who shared their stories with us, a powerful validation of what women could create with each other and for each other. I wasn’t going to give it up.
IT WAS A mad scramble to find someone else to finance the production. The stations in our syndicated network had to know within a couple of weeks whether we would be producing more shows for them to broadcast.
My agent started making phone calls, as did I. WABC in New York said, “Come and produce the show here; you’re number one in New York and we love the show and don’t want to lose it on our lineup.” That would have meant moving to New York, hiring new staff, and turning ownership over to ABC. We said no. I flew to Chicago to try my luck there, but another story was developing there that became the biggest media story of all time. More on that later.
Then a producer at The Today Show, Jacoba Atlas (called Coby by everyone), called. “We’d like you to bring the concept to us and produce it in segments.” We could keep our independent production company with editorial control over the segments we produced. But there was no money to keep the team that was producing five hour-long shows a week. No option allowed the great team of women we’d hired to stay together. It was not the best choice, but for me and Mary, it was our only choice for continuing the concept for greatest reach and impact. We decided to take the NBC offer and keep the concept alive on the most popular morning show at the time.
I can still remember the profound sadness I felt the day I gathered everyone at Woman to Woman to announce our decision. We provided the most generous severance payments we could squeeze from the new owners. I don’t think I have ever felt such a loss as the day I cleaned out my office at Golden West Broadcasting studios and drove off the lot for the last time. I knew that whatever came next, it would never equal the experience of owning my own company, creating something that mattered to me and so many others, and shaping new ways of women working together as well.
Looking back, I believe my biggest mistake here was doubting myself and our ability to put together enough financing to keep the show in production. Had I been the risk-taker I am today, I would have borrowed the money from a bank for a year’s worth of shows, betting on our hitting the breakeven by end of year two. But, instead, I took the less risky course of returning to the network, giving them the financial responsibility (and any profits)—and Mary and I were right back in an old power paradigm.
Ultimately, I learned some big lessons about power. Mary and I might have felt powerful as hosts and producers, but the real power was a bunch of guys in suits who didn’t really care about our mission or our production team or even the audience we had built over one year. We learned a hard lesson about control and how you get it and keep it. Every part of a team has to be aligned and committed. In our case, our partners who paid the bills weren’t buying a mission; they were building an asset. We had broken new ground for women on television, but we hadn’t held our ground.
WOMAN TO WOMAN isn’t a story of failure, however. We’d taken a creative and financial risk and won an Emmy and gained a loyal following; we’d created a supportive working environment for other women and even reduced stress levels for some working mothers. We also made a deal with Lifetime cable network to rerun the first season’s shows, ensuring that the programs would continue to air… and in fact, they were seen by millions for two more years. The Today Show broadcast Woman to Woman segments for the next four years. Today, two decades after the last segment aired on The Today Show and many decades since Lifetime ran the shows, someone will recognize me as the host of Woman to Woman, a show that hasn’t been on television in any format since 1989.
What I’m especially proud of is that a selection of the original shows became the first television series ever collected by the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at Radcliffe College, and I’m grateful every day that there are copies for students and researchers to view as windows into the lives of real women in the mid-eighties. The original master tapes were lost in a fire, but everything about this experience had lit a fire within me—to take more risks, to trust my own instincts and experience, to fight for what I believe is important.
But I did have a real sinking spell after I gave up on my dream for Woman to Woman, a period of depression and anxiety, feeling that I was going backward for the first time in my professional life even though I was now a regular on NBC’s The Today Show. I had broken new ground for myself and, I believed, for other women, and it was tough to hold on to my grandmother’s adage that this fall had been a forward movement.
I would later understand that letting go of my dream for what this program could be also played a role in helping another woman to move forward. Oprah Winfrey, whom I had met and admired, was hosting her local Chicago show and was the lead-in program to the nationally syndicated Woman to Woman. She and her producer saw an opportunity when we had to pull out of syndication, to take Oprah’s local talk show into national syndication. They were able to move right into many of the time slots on stations around the country that our show had held.
What happened next is television history: Oprah quite literally transformed the media landscape, proving beyond anyone’s doubt that women want to see other powerful and inspiring women on television. By the sheer force of her presence, who she is, on-screen and off—a woman who speaks her truth, who opens her heart to hear others’ truths, and who communicates compassion and power—Oprah elevated a daily talk show into something no one else had ever achieved, and became media’s most powerful and most well-compensated personality. Oprah—through her programming, her philanthropy, her ownership—fully captures the power of fame, fortune, and media to be a positive transformative force. During the early years, when we saw each other at industry gatherings or women’s forums, Oprah would acknowledge the connection: “Pat paved the way with Woman to Woman, opening the door for what followed for me.” That’s, at least, partly true. But the bigger truth is that Oprah’s story is a testimonial to the power of one individual to change the world, and she is arguably among the world’s most dangerous women.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Abigail Disney
Abigail Disney (yes, of that Disney family) inspires me, too. She grew up with fame and fortune and chose to take a different path with her life and her work. She is a lifelong activist and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who produced the Oscar-nominated Pray the Devil Back to Hell, about Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee and all the women who fought to bring peace to their country, which was divided and stricken by war. Abby made her directorial debut with the Emmy-nominated The Armor of Light, which spotlighted controversial pro-life evangelical minister Rev. Rob Schenck and the gunning down of an unarmed African American teenager in an effort to explore the question of how people might be both pro-life and pro-gun.
Having dedicated most of her career to telling important stories through her films and her foundation, and supporting other work, Abby has now set her sights on a game-changing goal: a start-up called Level Forward that aims to back projects solely driven by women and persons of color. Named for the goal of a level playing field for women and others who have been traditionally disadvantaged in Hollywood, the venture is, as Abby says, “committed to the vision of unlocking and amplifying storytelling from all corners and perspectives, to claiming the power of ownership.”
In a wide-ranging conversation with my longtime friend and a woman I admire for her work and her outspokenness, Abby shared insights about her journey to becoming more dangerous.
Do you think of yourself as a dangerous woman, and if so, why?
Abby: I’m very proud to think of myself as a dangerous woman. Danger sounds like a terrible thing until you realize it’s just where you belong. I wasn’t brought up to be dangerous or even to speak my mind. But I felt danger all around me in the family. Now I have a postcard that says, “The older I get, the more everyone can kiss my ass.” That’s where I am right now. I don’t care what anybody thinks of me anymore. That’s an important part of being dangerous.
What have you learned about being dangerous from the films you’ve made?
Abby: Pray the Devil Back to Hell about the peace movement in Liberia taught me a lot about fear. Going to Liberia in my forties, not knowing what I would find or how I would tell the story, I had a lot of fear. And I learned that peace-building is the truly dangerous profession. Women peace builders in particular are dangerous and effective. When a woman says, “Stop killing my children,” it is quite difficult for everybody at the peace talks to say, “No, I’d really like to continue killing your children.” Women peace builders are fearless and feared. Leymah Gbowee, the Nobel Peace laureate whose story I told, knows real capital D danger, and is really good at anger as part of building peace. She channels it into a sort of righteousness that is really hard to deny. Anger is important for dangerous women.
How is becoming more dangerous playing out in your life now?
Abby: Recently this cabdriver just got right in my face and started screaming at me. I was watching him yell at me and I realized that he knew I was just as strong as he was; he had already shoved me. And he wasn’t hitting me, so that meant he wasn’t going to hit me and I thought, “Oh my god, that’s all you have? That’s it?” And I started to laugh. I gave a yelling man so much power for so many years, and all of a sudden it was just unmasked for me. And no man will ever yell at me again because I just saw it for everything that it is—a desperate measure, you know? I mean, years of being yelled at by my father just fell away, honestly. I spent all that money on therapy and all I had to do, all this time, was just get in a fight with a cabdriver. I tell women all the time, especially young ones, fear is your enemy; you cannot let it stop you from doing things. You’re gonna feel it no matter what, but think big. Don’t waste your time in half measures. Adrienne Becker, my partner, and I started Level Forward to give women-led projects a bigger voice. I could really, really fail spectacularly with it and I’m excited by that. After I mouthed off at Sundance about our plans, someone said, “Nobody will ever loan these women a hundred million dollars.” And Adrienne cut it out of the newspaper and put it on our desk and said, “A year from now we want to have a hundred million dollars.”