Customer Reviews

Cagney & Lacey ... and Me: An Inside Hollywood Story OR How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blonde

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Barney Rosenzweig's memoirs of the 1980s are long on industry detail and short on self-examination, but that's Hollywood for you.

CAGNEY AND LACEY was credited as being the first big feminist TV show and it was hailed as such by Gloria Steinem and other pundits in the pages of MS. Magazine.

Rosenzweig was there from the beginning, after a checkered and mostly D-level career as a producer and sort of go-fer for more famous producers. He had worked his way up to a midlevel status when the job that made him notorious sort of fell in his lap. As he sees it, his then-wife created the show with another woman, and he managed to get it made and shown on the air, albeit with different stars. There was a version with Loretta Swit, another with Meg Foster, etc. Finally the lineup shifted to Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, and after a year of threatened cancellations, CAGNEY AND LACEY became a huge hit and won Emmys for everyone involved with it.

Rosenzweig's tale of what it was like producing the show is filled with ugliness. He savages some of his writers, including the man who went on to become the renowned thriller writer Robert Crais, but he saves most of his venom for his blow by blow depiction of the vanity and ego wars between his two leading ladies. Both equally insecure, Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly come off in Rosenzweig's rendition as supremely neurotic and paranoid, each one afraid the other was getting more money, perks, or directorial attention. Gless was a blonde beauty on the model, Barney admits, of Doris Day. But could she act? Tyne Daly could act, or should I say "act" in capital letters, but was she attractive enough for TV? Neither of them ever enjoyed a single happy moment, and made everyone miserable on the set and off for years and years. As a producer, it was Rosenzweig's job to keep them content, butter them up, flatter them outrageously, promise each one that the other wasn't getting anything she didn't have, and so on.

This element of the book just goes on and on and on and on. You feel like you were in the stars' trailers for every beef they had. Gless would complain that Daly was married to the show's director, Georg Stanford Brown (another diva according to Barney). Daly would say that Gless was getting all the close-ups. The picture got even grimmer once Barney himself started seeing past the tantrums that Gless threw on a daily basis, and started falling for her, leaving his wife and eventually making Gless his number one woman. After the way he writes about her throughout the first three quarters of the book, I'm surprised he could stomach her, much less love her. And they're still married apparently! Life is stranger than fiction and this book proves it for sure.

When I first found out that Barney Rosenzweig wrote this book I just had to have it. I loved the entire Cagney & Lacey series from start to finish including all the movies they did later. What stuff Barney Rosenzweig went through to get that show on the air. It was very interesting to read how much work is involved in getting a TV show on the air - especially a show that was cancelled and then brought back. I would higly recommend this book to any Cagney & Lacey fan. For that matter, to anyone who is curious about how TV shows get on the air.

Whether you are a fan of quality TV shows such as "Cagney and Lacey," "Trials of Rosie O'Neill." "Cristy," and others or if you have wondered exactly how programs make it to our TV screens, you will find this book informative, interesting and hilarious. Producer Barney Rosenzweig outlines not only how difficult it is to get a program on the air, but many network "executives" are totally out of touch with what the viewers want, cancelling programs before they have had time to "find" their audience. "Cagney and Lacey" was a ground breaking show, won awards every one of the seven years it was on TV. Week after week it dealt with topics that would timely even today, twenty-five years since it's premiere. Mr. Rozenzweig married "Christine Cagney" (actress Sharon Gless) in 1991. Ms Gless and Tyne Daly (Mary Beth Lacey) had such a wonderful rapport, it was almost like they were destined for these roles.
The actresses and Producer Rosenzweig brilliantly "saved" the show from cancellation, twice and I am sure it was no accident that this book coincides with the long awaited release "Cagney and Lacey's" first season on DVD!

For all Amazon customers who bought and love these DVDs but have been asking about the DVD release of the full 125 episodes of the original series - you can help achieve this! Head on over to the official Cagney & Lacey website at www[dot]cagneyandlacey[dot]com and complete the survey which - if sufficient customers respond - will be used to try to persuade MGM to release all 125 episodes on DVD! Thanks! Cagney & Lacey's WebSquad.

I now know everything there is to know about show business from Mr. Rosenzweig's detailed account of his daily life, right down to his bathroom conversations. Mr. Rosenzweig must have permanent hand prints on his back from patting himself on the back so much as he did in this book. Mr. Rosenzweig should take his own advice from page 274: "You are the best at what you do on the planet. Everyone knows it, but it is very unncessary to say it so yourselves, and not particularly attractive."

I wanted to read a book about Cagney and Lacey, with a possible sprinkling or two of anyone else connected to the show. I did not want to read a book about Mr. Rosenzweig's life with Cagney and Lacey sprinkled in every now and then. The title is very deceiving.

A very entertaining and informative look at the TV business in general and one remarkable show in particular by a guy with an attitude. Who also ran the show! Most entertaining and well written.

I thought it was a very interesting inside view of how the entertainment business, in particular TV, operates. It is very well written, easy to read, and with a lot of information about the main characters in Cagney and Lacey, I mean the actors, producers, executives. It gave me a different opinion on Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly. Different because I got to know them better, at least through the eyes of Barney Rosenzweig.

Good condition. Everything as promised.
It did have quite a strong perfumy fragrance, though, so I had to air it out for a few days.

To be fair, what I purchased ended up being an "uncorrected proof advanced reader copy" that had footnotes on nearly every single page, which was absolutely distracting and positively maddening. That aside, it took me nearly a month to get through this book (and I usually read from cover to cover in one night). I just didn't find it that interesting. I loved (and still do) the series, the actresses, the storylines, but the telling of this story left me cold. I probably would have preferred not to know that Tyne Daly is the ultimate diva, or that Sharon Gless is insecure. I would have liked to have known more about the lives of the supporting cast, but those actors are barely mentioned. Maybe I would have enjoyed the book more had Rosenzweig delved more into their lives and less into his own.

Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (2/07)

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading Rosenzweig's story. "Cagney & Lacey" aired from 1981 to 1988. These were my high school, through college and marriage, years. I remember enjoying the show when it aired on television. The show presented two strong women who were working in a male-dominated field and having to deal with their issues as women. I had no clue how much hard work went into getting this show on the air and keeping it there. Rosenzweig truly believed in this series and fought hard to get it on the air. He felt that it was time to have a show that stop focusing on the sexual exploitation of women. He was tired of seeing this reoccurring pattern of disrespect in both media forms of movies and television. "Cagney & Lacey" was to be his vehicle in which to start a new trend. I am grateful to him for doing this and had no idea how much of a struggle it took to get a great show on the air.

In addition to having to fight studio execs to get this project rolling, Rosenzweig also had to deal with the myriad of egos involved in producing the show - this ranged from writers, to actors, to investors and so on. The stress of having to compromise and placate everyone had to have been totally exhausting and quite a learning experience. To get the show to succeed, he also had to go to battle to get it into the best time slot. There were other issues going on such as getting screwed over financially by people that looked after their own best interests. He had to learn creative ways to get publicity for the show when he was dealing with people that weren't very supportive of its success. Rosenzweig also had personal issues going on while he was on the set. At the beginning of the series, he was married to a woman who helped get the show started. By the end of the series, he was seeing Sharon Gless, who he eventually married.

I learned a lot about what goes on in Tinseltown with trying to get shows to air. Normally, when I watch a television show, I might only wonder about how they did their special effects. Now when I watch a show, I am going to wonder a lot more than that. I am going to think about how many struggles it took just to get that show to air. I will never look at another television show the same again.

"Cagney & Lacey...and Me," is a must read for fans of the entertainment industry. In addition to learning about how show biz works, there is also a fascinating story going on about the personal issues that were being dealt with at the time. To quote Rosenzweig: "Approaching my 70th year on the planet, I confess to being less interested in what is to come than what has transpired. My past...the mistakes and the triumphs, the wins and all of the other stuff, is my legacy." This autobiography is also Rosenzweig's legacy.

Received book free of charge.