When I was looking for an episode of “The Great Gildersleeve” for Madison to join, I knew she couldn’t step in for Gildersleeve since he makes a lot of poor decisions for the comedy that I think Madison would’ve been smarter about. The show does have a lot of episodes with Leroy as the foil for “Uncle Mort,” so when I found this episode, of the two of them on a road trip, it felt right. Marjorie was excused out of the storyline by being away at “Red Cross Training.” Not sure what the reason was in real life, but the actress missed several episodes around that time. So Madison would step in for Leroy… oh… but what about Birdie?
From my first listening to the series, (this was a recommendation and a new one for me) I found Birdie instantly problematic. When I was in my college theater program (in the last Century), the faculty chose to do the play, “You Can’t Take it With You” which came out in the late 1930s. True to comedy of the era, the script had a Black maid, much like Birdie. Wise-cracking, but not very smart. My theater department had just had pushback from the university that there weren’t enough people of color in our program. We were in the middle of corn field Illinois, but the powers-that-be wanted to attract more inner-city Chicago students so they shifted recruitment, pouring extra teaching hours and casting into POC. Then when “You Can’t Take it With You” came up, these very white faculty members didn’t recognize that while, yes, you have a role written for a Black woman, it is a very insulting role. They actually had to write the character out of the script entirely or face backlash from students, parents and the university.
So while I understand the historical context of a character like Birdie, I didn’t feel comfortable with her in my script. And while I have addressed other racism in OTR, specifically Kato in “The Green Hornet,” I couldn’t find a way of keeping Birdie in the script and creating commentary about her through Madison. So I did what my college did and wrote her out. I’d already had Madison take over for Leroy, so it was a much safer choice to put Leroy as the “dumb kid” rather than Birdie as the “dumb Black maid.” If you listen to the original episode, Birdie is the one who doesn’t realize Gildersleeve has taken the car instead of the train, and she has some very over-the-top phone calls with the police. One of the “schtick” the series liked to do with Birdie is have her talk above her intelligence level. Saying “big words” but using them incorrectly. So she thinks she’s being smart but we all know she used that word wrong, proving she isn’t smart. Sadly, in my binging of so many episodes of the series, the actress, herself, often stumbled on those lines. Truthfully, they weren’t written very well from a dialogue perspective. So she was tasked with basically doing cartwheels to get the line out. And there were many times she flubbed those lines (but it was live, so it was kept in) I decided for me, I’d rather have a 12 year-old white boy step in for that comedy.
I know that in this series, like in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (who has the same actress who played the Bailey’s Black maid) that the family adores her and that allows for her wise-cracking sense of humor. But we’re also now in a world post “The Help” which portrayed Black maids as beloved by their white families, but, ultimately, was a reflection on the limitations of work available to poor Black women. Ooof! This was just too big of a subject for Madison this time around.
As a fan of old time radio, I also recognize that there weren’t a lot of recurring roles for people of color in that era. When we had our discussion with modern Asian American actors in Hollywood and they’re take on the “representation” of the past, one of our guests said that while Charlie Chan was woefully problematic, his parents loved the series because it was the only representation they had. If “Birdies” were all they had back then, I can at least not perpetuate that portrayal now.
-Chrisi (aka Madison)
