If there is a comedy pantheon, Anne Beatts should have her own special altar in the chamber dedicated to forgotten pioneers. Beatts—who died on Wednesday at the age of 74—got her start as a comedy writer when being “one of the guys” was a necessity, because there were so few other women allowed into the gang. I will always love her for creating the short-lived series Square Pegs, a 1980s comedy about high school eccentrics that was crammed with New Wave tunes (Devo made a cameo appearance playing a bat mitzvah), chaotic visuals, and a stream of sharp one-liners. The show revolved around two deeply nerdy girls, played by Sarah Jessica Parker (in her first major TV role) and Amy Linker, at a time when teen shows hardly ever focused on the female perspective. Square Pegs only lasted for 20 episodes before CBS canned it. It boosted Parker’s career, but Beatts never got another sitcom of her own on the air.
It was only years later that I discovered that Beatts had been one of the few female contributors to National Lampoon; that she had co-edited the first book of women’s humor, the 1976 collection Titters; and that she had been one of the first women on the early Saturday Night Live staff, writing some of the show’s classic sketches and shaping characters for Gilda Radner, Larraine Newman, and Bill Murray.
In 2015, Beatts met me for an interview at a cafe on Sunset Boulevard, where she told me about her experiences in Hollywood for a book I was working on about pioneering women in television, Stealing the Show.
“When people would say, how did you get into comedy? I would say: On my back, the same way Catherine the Great got into politics,” Beatts wisecracked. When she began dating National Lampoon magazine writer Michael O’Donoghue, she says, “It wasn’t like I thought, if I sleep with this guy I can write for National Lampoon. I was attracted to people that were funny and doing interesting stuff, so those ended up being my boyfriends.”
When Lorne Michaels offered O’Donoghue a writer gig on the first season of SNL in 1975, he invited Beatts as well. “He made an effort to hire women,” she told me. “I also think Lorne liked the idea of hiring couples because I think he felt being on Saturday Night Live was like boarding the ark …you really couldn’t have a life because the hours were so crazy.” Beatts initially turned the job down, telling Michaels she was too busy working on Titters, which became the first anthology of humor by women. “I didn’t really want to work in television,” she said with a smirk. “Television to me was like a lava lamp with sound. But Lorne just basically said, ‘You won’t have to work that hard, you could do the book as well.’ In other words, he just lied to me!”
Beatts was one of several women hired to write for the show, along with Michaels’ then-wife Rosie Shuster and Mary Tyler Moore Show writer Marilyn Suzanne Miller. “Lorne used to come around at four in the morning and say, What do you have for the girls?” expecting them to cough up sketches for female cast members Newman, Radner, and Jane Curtin. “So we did feel a responsibility to work with the actresses to make sure they had more to do than just say, ‘Mr. Jones will see you now.’”
Her writing partnership with Shuster blossomed into something wonderful, but it began out of pragmatism. In the mid-1970s, consciousness-raising had become standard practice for burgeoning feminists all over the world, but misogyny was rife within the SNL inner circle. “John Belushi used to go to Lorne all the time and tell him to fire the women writers,” Beatts said. The awful thing is that she had known him before SNL. “He was my friend. I fought to get him hired! But he truly thought chicks aren’t funny.”
She had learned self-defense strategies as the only woman on the staff of National Lampoon, yet being one of the guys was exhausting. It meant constantly keeping up her guard and proving her machismo. “Coming out of that environment, I was tougher than I needed to be,” Beatts said. She recalled O’Donoghue teasing her: “If someone said to me, ‘Women are afraid of mice,’ I would say, ‘Well, okay, I will eat the mice!’ I was going to work harder and stay up longer. Essentially you find out that if you try to be one of the guys, you just end up being a slightly defective guy.”
A slightly defective guy who gets paid less, as Beatts found out a couple of months into her tenure at SNL. “The network called me and said: ‘We made a mistake: we are paying you too much.’ I was making the same amount as Michael [O’Donoghue],” she said, ruffling her shock of white hair with her hand. “I went to Lorne and said: ‘I’m not giving it back, they can’t do this.” She says the SNL producer backed down, but the under-valuation of her talents was clear.
Once SNL became a cultural phenomenon, though, Beatts saw the chance to forge a path of her own. Enveloped in her edgy New York aura, she started flying out to Hollywood to discuss movie projects, and her agent decided to take her around to pitch television networks. Having co-created SNL’s popular Nerds characters for Radner/Murray, Beatts decided that high school weirdos could be a great subject for a show. CBS execs were interested, but, she said, “they said they wanted to know if it could it be about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I was like, No, these girls are nerds— they dream of being kissed, they have never been touched!” The show got picked up anyway.
Amy Linker and Sarah Jessica Parker in Square Pegs
© Embassy Pictures/Everett Collection.“Square Pegs was the first job I ever got without sleeping with anyone,” Beatts said wryly. In fact, at that time there were almost no women running series on their own. Nearly all of the pioneering women of prime time of that era and before (Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore, etc) made TV in partnership with husbands. “The network likes to have someone they feel comfortable with. It allows them to have a dick in the room. I always had a fantasy of walking into the writers room at Saturday Night Live with a giant dildo slapped on.”
What Beatts had in mind for Square Pegs didn’t match the desires of the execs. She wanted it to be the first television show with an all-female writers room: “I only wanted to hire women because I thought, well, it’s about the experience of young girls in high school. We wanted to hire people who actually experienced that. But they said you can’t only have women.” The network forced her to hire a token male writer, Andy Borowitz. “He wasn’t happy there,” Beatts said. “We called him Tootsie Borowitz.” Many of the episodes were also directed by a woman, Kim Friedman, another relative rarity in that era.
Beatts’ working methods weren’t orthodox either. “I wanted to be in charge of all aspects of the production, which is how we had been accustomed to work at SNL in terms of our sketches. That’s how I learned to produce. You would be in charge of the wardrobe and everything,” she recalled. “They thought I would be more passive….So I became a troublemaker.” A year after the show’s 1983 cancellation, an expose on Square Pegs ran in TV Guide with the title “Anatomy Of A Failure: How Drugs, Ego, And Chaos Helped Kill A Promising Series.”
Although not fully-realized, Square Pegs now looks like a visionary precursor to legendary teen-misfit shows like Freaks and Geeks. “All we have to do is click with the right clique, and we can finally have a social life that’s worthy of us,” says Lauren, Amy Linker’s character. The girls desperately crave acceptance, but are too clever and oddball to conform to cookie-cutter popularity.
Like Square Pegs, Freaks and Geeks didn’t survive more than a season either—but that didn’t prevent Paul Feig and Judd Apatow from achieving Hollywood superstardom. In contrast, Beatts never managed to get another one of her series pilots picked up. She went on to work on Cosby Show spinoff A Different World in the late 80s, and later took on other less high-profile projects as well as teaching, most recently at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.
Back in 2015 when we spoke, Beatts was philosophical as she sifted through memories from her career. “It’s taken me a long time to learn to smile more and be less aggressive,” she said. “I wasn’t girly enough. One of the issues in Hollywood is there are girls and ladies but there weren’t a lot of women. Just to be a regular woman was not a role that was recognized. A man has to invade a small country to be called aggressive but with a woman, if she hangs up the phone on someone, that’s it.”
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