Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

by Ronald Brownstein

Mary Kay Place was bursting with ambition and talent. The day after graduating from college, she pointed her Volkswagen Beetle toward the West Coast with the name of one contact at CBS in her pocket.9 Place was creative and vivacious: she could sing and write songs; act and write dialogue. So, of course, she was offered only clerical jobs, and went through a series of them at CBS over the next few years. When Maude, the All in the Family spin-off, went on the air in 1972, Place became the secretary for the writing staff. Her first opportunity to show she could do more than type came one day during Maude’s first season, when she was walking back from lunch with one of her colleagues.10 The two were singing a funny song Place had written called “If Communism Comes Knocking at Your Door (Don’t Answer It).” Some of the All in the Family writers overheard the two singing and told Lear about the song. After Place auditioned it for him, he put her and her friend on All in the Family to sing it in an episode that aired in January 1973. In a preview of her career to come, it became Place’s first published song and her first television acting credit. Her work in the hectic atmosphere of a weekly situation comedy provided her a crash course in scriptwriting. “Working with the writers was a seven-days-a-week, twenty-four-hours-a-day job,” she remembered. “I was constantly typing every draft, every rewrite. I was in every note session with the writer. I was in the note sessions with th...