A portrait of a sitcom pioneer

Aviva Kempner'sYoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is a lively, loving portrait of Gertrude Berg (1898-1966), creator and star of The Goldbergs, a hit on radio and television.

"The most famous woman in America you've never heard of," Berg was a show-business pioneer (and an Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress) who helped pave the way for Lucille Ball, Norman Lear, and Oprah Winfrey.

Many interviewed in the film, who include Lear and National Public Radio's Susan Stamberg, speak of Berg as the fairy godmother of the sitcom. Others affectionately describe The Goldbergs as the archetype of the American working-class clan.

So beloved was the show about the immigrant family in the Bronx and its optimistic, big-hearted matriarch, Molly (played by Berg), that FDR is believed to have said that it was Molly, not him, who got America through the Depression. Molly, whose neighbors in a Bronx tenement called yoo-hoo across the airshaft seeking advice, dispensed wisdom, recipes, and hope.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of many who remember the show and its creator/star, consistently voted the most admired American woman of the '30s and '40s. When Ginsburg joined the Supremes, she recalls, fellow jurist Thurgood Marshall called her "Mrs. Goldberg." Ginsburg took it as a compliment because Molly Goldberg "was such a mensch."

In audiotapes of the radio program and kinescopes from the television sitcom, Kempner shows how The Goldbergs established the template for shows from I Love Lucy to Family Ties to The Cosby Show to Seinfeld.

All of them show characters rooted in their living rooms, opening the door (or in Molly's case, the window) to neighbors who discuss the issues of the day.

Still, the most powerful woman on the airwaves was powerless in the face of anti-communist agitation. The nation's shift from FDR liberalism to Eisenhower centrism proved to be The Goldbergs' undoing. Philip Loeb, the fine actor who played Berg's husband on TV, was a unionist targeted by anti-Communists.

Berg fought for Loeb - threatening her sponsor, General Foods, with a boycott if it pressured him to quit. But the nervous sponsor and network prevailed. Loeb quit voluntarily to save the show, a move that ruined The Goldbergs and led to Loeb's eventual suicide.

Over a 25-year career in radio and television, Berg - married to a chemical engineer on the team that invented instant coffee - wrote about 12,000 scripts, establishing a personal brand comparable to that of Winfrey.

The film shows the elegantly coifed and dressed Berg at her Park Avenue apartment interviewed by newsman Edward R. Murrow. Proud of her achievements (and her English antiques), the smiling, well-spoken figure laughs ruefully that she spent more of her life being Molly Goldberg than herself.

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.EndText