Back in March, I received an e-mail from a stranger. He identified himself as Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s producer. He explained that they were planning for her to do a one- woman stage show. Although the second act would consist entirely of Dr. Laura’s answering written questions from the audience, they wanted a funny script for the opening act. Would I be interested in having a meeting? Sure, I’m game for just about anything that doesn’t involve heavy lifting or getting on an airplane.
So it was that a couple of weeks later, I drove up the coast to Schlessinger’s home in Hope Ranch, a very chi-chi part of Santa Barbara. The dinner was first-rate and apparently I passed muster because I was invited aboard the project.
We agreed on a basic format, which consisted, for the most part, of my writing monologues in addition to letters and phone calls to Dr. Laura from famous people and fictional characters, all seeking her help with their problems.
I went home and began writing. As I’d complete a page or two, I’d e-mail it to Ms. Schlessinger. As a rule, she seemed pleased. When she wasn’t, she’d let me know and I’d take another whack at it. As I had told her and her producer, a nice guy named Geoff Rich, I have a normal amount of writer’s ego, but I was more than willing to submerge it in this case. When I was writing for TV, after all, I was writing dialogue for actors to perform. If they didn’t like what I’d written, I was more than ready to argue about it. But this was different. Dr. Laura wasn’t going out there as Hawkeye Pierce or Rhoda Morgenstern or Dr. Sloan, she was going on stage as herself, and she had to be totally comfortable saying the words I was putting in her mouth.
The first glitch occurred when I was mailed the deal memo. That was when I discovered that Dr. Laura was demanding the primary writing credit, even though she wasn’t going to do any of the writing. I told the producer that I was willing to wager that the lady I listened to on the radio would give short shrift to anyone whose ego was so needy that she’d insist on grabbing credit for work she hadn’t performed. He laughed. “Good point,” he said. Laughter over, he added that she insisted on the credit. I told him I’d go along with it because I was preparing to fight over the royalty schedule. He gave in on the money.
In any case, I continued writing amusing, even witty, material for the next several weeks, all the time wondering when they were going to hire a director to start working with my star. Then I got the news—Dr. Laura had flown back to New York to meet a few contenders, and had selected a woman with a background in soap operas. Fine. I really wasn’t expecting Mike Nichols.
Dr. Laura e-mailed me to report that the director was coming west, and we’d soon be getting together to figure out what more needed to be written. I waited. Then I waited some more. I finally decided I had gotten the dates wrong. I hadn’t. It seems that the director had not only arrived in Santa Barbara, but had begun working with Ms. Schlessinger. After three days, the director phoned the producer in New York and reported that it was hopeless. Dr. Laura couldn’t memorize lines, no matter how brilliant they were, and was in a panic.
Now I had known all along that she felt uncertain about her ability to remember lines, but the producer and I both assumed that was merely a natural case of the jitters. She wasn’t going to debut “Dr. Laura: In My Never Humble Opinion” (her title) in Santa Barbara until mid-August. Inasmuch as I’d been feeding her pages since early April, she had months to work on it. Besides, the stage set we had discussed would provide plenty of places in which to cleverly conceal cue cards if she needed them as a crutch.
In any case, when Mr. Rich began his phone call with the old news that “The good news is we have a director,” it wasn’t too hard to figure out that the bad news is that they no longer had a writer. The new plan called for Dr. Laura and the director to come up with ten topics that Laura felt she could discuss off the top of her head. I was assured I’d be paid in full – always the right thing to say to a writer who has his lawyer on speed-dial. Before hanging up, I couldn’t resist asking Mr. Rich if Dr. Laura always delegated others to extend her regrets.
In retrospect, I liked dinner, I liked Dr. Laura’s house, her cars and her producer. But I could only marvel at the chutzpah, the gall, of someone who spends three hours a day dispensing advice to people, telling them how they should behave, who signs off each and every hour with her signature, “Now go and do the right thing,” and who then behaves so boorishly in her own private life.
Dr. Laura, you insisted on stealing credit for work you weren’t going to do. And when, after three long months, because of your own inability to do something child actors do every day of the week, you dumped the person who did the work, you weren’t even decent enough to call or even e-mail an apology.
I’m afraid you wouldn’t know the right thing from a hole in the ground.
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©2004 Burt Prelutsky
