![]() ![]() 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. “Coming out of that environment, I was tougher than I needed to be,” Beatts said. It meant constantly keeping up her guard and proving her machismo. She had learned self-defense strategies as the only woman on the staff of National Lampoon, yet being one of the guys was exhausting. I fought to get him hired! But he truly thought chicks aren’t funny.” The awful thing is that she had known him before SNL. “John Belushi used to go to Lorne all the time and tell him to fire the women writers,” Beatts said. 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. Her writing partnership with Shuster blossomed into something wonderful, but it began out of pragmatism. In 2015, Beatts met me for an interview at a café 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. It was only years later that I discovered that Beatts had been one of the few female contributors to National Lampoon that she had coedited 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, Laraine Newman, and Bill Murray. It boosted Parker’s career, but Beatts never got another sitcom of her own on the air. Square Pegs only lasted for 20 episodes before CBS canned it. ![]() 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. 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. 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. If there is a comedy pantheon, Anne Beatts should have her own special altar in the chamber dedicated to forgotten pioneers. ![]()
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