From the very beginning, when the contact I’d been given at CBS’s press department didn’t have an answer to a question, he’d refer me to someone else, who in turn often did the same. My secretarial sisters (often fans of the show themselves) and the phrase “So-and-so has referred me to So-and-so about such-and-such” eventually took me up one side and down the other of CBS’s corporate ladder. It would also extend the reach of my curiosity out to Beauty and the Beast’s creatives themselves –and then even beyond them– to ad agency and merchandiser, publishers and pundits.
These were people whom I would only ever know as words on the page of a letter or as voices over the phone, but without them there wouldn’t have been a show called Beauty and the Beast much less any news to print about it in something called Pipeline.
The first thing I would learn from these long-distance phone-dezvous was how few on this team ever talked directly to one another! The second lesson was that television shows are as much a competition of ideas as team efforts, so never assume you’re getting the whole story from any one source.
Steff, David Greenlee, & Sheila Kaminsky all first meet at a Creation Con in Albany, NY.
Actor David Greenlee was the best person to start with since I had already met him at a convention and we were both just learning the proverbial ropes about doing Q&A’s. The next interview with someone involved with the show, however, was a totally different kind of learning experience. It soon became apparent that the person was slightly drunk. Unknown to the contact at CBS who had arranged the phone call, the man had actually left the show under a cloud that very day! He seemed friendly enough but soon was barely concealing his disappointment and disdain. Some of what he was saying about B&B I already knew wasn’t true. I didn’t let on, not wanting to acknowledge that I knew he was trying to pull my leg. Then came info that I didn’t find believable at the time but that would turn out later to be true, confidences that should not have been shared with anyone outside the production let alone with a fan/journalist. I wished him well and hung up the phone, sure that more than just his own career would suffer if I made public anything of his rant. B&B certainly wouldn’t be the better for it.
It seemed best just to forget the whole conversation –hoping he would do the same by the next morning. I’ve never regretted it since. Every time this talented fella’s work has been credited on other favorite shows of mine through the years, I’ve felt rewarded and glad of the choice.
A much happier example of TV network stovepiping was to come. I heard matter-of-factly at CBS that B&B had been renewed for its second season. The next call on the then monthly list was the production office. I naturally congratulated then secretary Eve Needleman. There was a moment’s silence. “WHAT!?” she exclaimed.
“You’ve been renewed?” I questioned back at her.
“Who told you that?” Eve sounded excited, but wary.
I answered, then heard her repeat the whole exchange to someone nearby. There was the sound of her headset settling on the desk, footsteps …and then… wave upon wave of yells and cheering. It was one of the happiest sounds I’ve ever heard, like the joyous greeting that rises up from Times Square at New Year’s.
There’s a moment when you finally grasp that the tv characters you grew up loving as a child had really been played by actors all along. Another when something, a beautiful riff of music, a deft play of light or novel camera angle, suddenly makes you appreciate what had always been there but rarely noticed for what it was. Eventually, you came to know, if not fully understand, that before there were set designs on a drawing board or actors to rehearse a single line, all of what you saw and heard existed in a writer’s imagination alone. Nevertheless, whether the bridge of the Enterprise or the ranch at the Ponderosa –from Mayberry’s Main Street to Storybrooke, Maine– these are all still real places to children and adults alike who love them. But as I listened to the joyful renewal news dance from desk to desk and office to office, the sound growing louder even as it got farther away, I fell in love with a real place and the real people in it. Even though it was a place I would never see, filled with people most of whom I would never meet face to face.
From that moment, I didn’t just go on the hunt for news for Pipeline readers but tried to provide a means of communication betwixt all those who worked for, or on, Beauty and the Beast. People who otherwise might not have known, or perhaps, even cared what the other ‘team members’ were doing. These were people who were fans of the show, and people who were not; people who respected fans, and people who definitely didn’t. In any case, all were equally important people to talk to on Pipeline’s monthly rounds.
A candle from Winterfest, author and actor of “Bluebird” fame meet (photo by Brooke Rodriguez) and a close-up of one of the castings of Robert John Guttke’s “Vincent with a Rose.”
Within the coming couple of years, I came to be treated more as a go-fer’s apprentice for Witt-Thomas’ ad agency and Republic Pictures’ merchandising department. Missions accepted with relish.
Ron Koslow at the 1989 VQT convention.
I was proud to have been delegated as liaison for Viewers for Quality Television on the show’s behalf and vice versa, as well as be a go-between for the first fan-run conventions, like TunnelCon1 and South of Oz.
The continuation of a beautiful friendship with Robert Guttke at Tunnelcon1 in 1990, it would be almost 20 years or so before he wanted to throttle me again!
Later in the second season I was sure enough of myself to have even pitched my own idea to the buyers for CBS’s morning talk show. They agreed to do a live on-air segment touring Beauty and the Beast’s stages. I came that close to getting everyone a visit to the set! Arrrggghhh! It all fell through when NY/LA time collided with cast/set availability. …Frustrating as this was, it had been in the works and I (drumroll please) had put it there.
As always, when you get a little too full of yourself, there’s always something around the corner to get you back down to terra firma.
Keeping off a sore foot at the autograph table at South of Oz in 1991.
…Like the constant 24/7 phone calls, especially during the fight to get a third season ordered and again the next year trying to deal with cancellation. It drove my family nuts and kept me busy straight through the death of my much-loved pet parrot “Nanno” and then even my own cancer scare. That turned out to be only a scare, but one that has kept me on thyroid meds ever since.
Nanno supervises a friend at our first computer (from Texas Instruments) circa 1980.
…Then there was the constant fear that one of those fan/secretaries at CBS programming (especially in Kim LeMasters’ and then Howard Stringer’s own office) would get themselves fired for conspiring to bury their bosses in beseeching telegrams.
…Or the insane scramble to find not one (thank you, Donna Huffaker) but two other fans willing to go on camera when “Entertainment Tonight” suddenly wanted to do a reaction piece about the show’s demise.
Luckily, longtime Star Trek and B&B fan, Barb Storey, one of the opposition in the third season pro/con debate, volunteered. Have you ever unwittingly stepped on a toe, or rubbed somebody the wrong way, and then never quite figured out the how or why? People used to love to call me up just to tell me how angry I had made her …yet again. Just saying, without Barb, that ET deal would’ve fallen through, too.
I had that ‘how-did-I-get-here’ feeling again as the local cameraman and handsome young TV reporter packed up their lights and I helped them out with the portage. I had felt more than a little over-the-top trying to put a jovial face on being in front of the camera, was far more comfortable handling the tripod. Whenever I would feel myself getting overwhelmed I’d silently repeat to myself the mantra, “Someone has to do it if it’s going to get done. If that someone this time around is you, count yourself lucky.” 
I lost count of how many interviews I gave that Spring. 2 or 3 a day it seemed during the first week after cancellation, all as much about B&B’s amazing fandom as about anything I’d done or even about the show itself. Those people were and ARE still pretty amazing.
Perlman’s Posse, five of those amazing people, NYC branch, showing off their gang’s B&B fan pride.
By the end of Pipeline’s existence I had communicated with at least one person in every state of the Union and quite a few other countries besides. Far from what one TV critic, who deserves to remain nameless, tried to dismiss entirely as just a bunch of overweight, under-loved malcontented females, I knew otherwise first-hand:
…From a magazine editor at Writer’s Digest (who would go on to author the first official BATB fiction published), to a waitress just scrapeing by in the rust belt making it “Friday night to Friday night;”
…From lawyers (who put time in gratis working through all the legalities of maybe, just maybe, independently crowdsourcing new episodes), to housewives (who took up charity work in the show’s name);
…From a rocket scientist with NASA (I’m not kidding!), to an Elizabethan scholar (both of whom had been reading the Bible in the original Aramaic);
…Men and woman alike, most if not all with only the love of this TV show in common.
Interviews of me never did them justice really, not the Helpers or the helped. I’d always wished I’d found a better way to describe them, remembered what I’d forgotten to mention, never knowing what the reporter was going to actually use of what I babbled on about anyways.
Exhausted and all talked out, I collapsed in the chair and eyed the Pipeline masthead waiting on the computer screen. The final gift from a beloved grandmother, itself the beginning of so much, I gave the Mac a pat before turning the phone back on. There I found a message on my answering machine that must’ve come in while I was on camera. Listening to it was like sipping hot cocoa with just the right number of miniature marshmallows on top; like kicking off heavy, sodden boots and peeling out of a snow-encrusted playsuit in front of a rollicking warm fire …and just… laughing. Laughing at dear, sweet Roy DotRice’s jest…
Pipeline 