Lee Grant IS “Fay”

As promised a couple of days ago, a thing on Fay, the very short lived 1975 sit-com starring Lee Grant (Lyova Haskell Rosenthal).

Grant is top-of-mind at the moment because my wife recently read her 2014 autobiography I Said Yes to Everything. I get lots of second-hand books in my house. By that I don’t mean used books, I mean it more like in the sense of second-hand smoke. I overhear my wife’s audiobooks, and then she talks to me about what she’s read, and ultimately it’s as though I read the book myself, at least the Reader’s Digest version.

Today happens to be Lee Grant’s birthday, and the wild thing is, nobody knows which one it is. I mean nobody knows how old she is. Whether by design or lost records, the year of Lee Grant’s birth is an enigma. But we do know that the day is Halloween, October 31, so I’m going to run with the theory that she’s 150 years old, because she clearly made some kind of a deal with the devil. By less fanciful measures she seems to have been born in the mid 1920s, and that’s old enough, she’s coasting toward the century mark. Lee Grant studied ballet with Balanchine the late 1930s! She also took acting with Sanford Meisner, and this proved to be where her heart truly lay.

Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story was Grant’s initial path to success, in both the original 1949 Broadway production and the 1951 William Wyler movie with Kirk Douglas, which won her many critical plaudits. That same year she married left-wing screenwriter Arnold Manoff. Shortly after their marriage the pair were denounced in Red Channels and blacklisted by the industry.

Grant emerged with a “third act” about a dozen years later, and it was rather a blazing one. My mom was a big fans of hers when I was a kid, probably from her years on Peyton Place. As a kid I thought of her as a soap actress and was kind of bored by her, but somewhere down the line a switch was flipped and I noticed how freaking gorgeous and glamorous she was, especially during what I think of as the Peak Lee Grant decade, roughly from Valley of the Dolls (1967) to Airport ’77. In between were things like Hal Ashby’s first film The Landlord (1970), a classic 1971 Columbo episode, Plaza Suite (1971), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), and Shampoo (1975). She kind of specialized in sexy, overbearing middle-aged women, proto-MILFs out of a Catskills comedian’s wet dreams. Her characters are always neglected and angry and tend to fight back with booze, sex, and emasculating remarks. Surely this is a Revolution that Lenin never envisioned!

And right in the midst of this period, she starred in Susan Harris’ first sit-com creation Fay, which aired in Fall 1975. I remember it from back in the day; it was very much hyped in TV Guide. Grant played a recently divorced San Francisco woman, dumped by her husband (Joe Silver) for a stewardess.

I apologize for the digression but I have to do this, because it’s Halloween. Joe Silver was in Rabid (1977) a couple of years later:

Fay’s best chum was played by a pre-Three’s CompanyAudra Linley. It was very much in the feminist spirit of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-offs, about a woman being strong enough to make it on her own. The first two episodes were directed by Alan Arkin!

Sound promising? It ought to have been. And yet it was cancelled after ten episodes, two and a half months, it didn’t even finish out the season. And yet the show was great! There are clips on youtube as this writing. Go watch them! They’re genuinely funny, not bull-shit funny like most shows, or not-at-all funny like some shows that lasted for years (Saved by the Bell? Full House? Give me a break! And also, come to think of it, Gimme a Break!) Furthermore, Grant carries it. You might assume that she’s strictly a dramatic actress. (In fact, just prior to this she had done a TV version of The Sea Gull). But no, she’s great. She’s arch and perky and dry and likeable and appealing and everything you want a sit-com star to be. The issue has to be that it was too edgy. It will be hard for contemporary younger people to perceive, but there are some mildly risque jokes about bedroom activities that were kind of TV terra incognita at the time. It was the sort of stuff that made dried-up, nasty old busybodies write letters to the networks back then. And according to Grant, they got it from the other end, too. The show was scheduled on the early side of prime time, the so-called “Family Hour”, when younger viewers tended to tune in. Kids and and young adults really aren’t too interested in the lives and problems of middle aged people — or sophisticated jokes.

Grant was nominated for an Emmy for her performance on Fay, but it was too late to save the show. Grant was so pissed about the cowardly cancellation that she went on The Tonight Showand badmouthed the producers and network people. A definite no-no. She was far from blacklisted this time though. She continued to act for decades and even became a repected director.

And is alive as I write this! Witches are real! Happy Halloween!