Top Quotes: “Dying of Politeness: A Memoir” — Geena Davis

Childhood

“I may be one of the few people who can honestly say they very nearly died of politeness. Two others are my parents, as you’ll see. This dangerous politeness was bequeathed to me early on. I was conditioned to think that I mustn’t ask for things, must never put anyone out; so trained to be insanely polite that I learned to have no needs at all.”

“My polite near-death came when I was about eight years old. My ninety-nine-year-old great-uncle Jack was driving his wife, great-aunt Marion, my parents, and me back to their house after a dinner out. The lovely old fella was occasionally veering in and out of the oncoming, if blessedly empty, traffic lane. Rather than saying anything out loud, like … I don’t know, “FOR GOD’S SAKE PULL OVER, JACK, WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE” — my parents simply moved me to the spot between them on the back seat, thinking, I presume, that when the inevitable head-on collision occurred, I’d be killed a little less in the middle. (Never mind the fact that I was now perfectly positioned for a straight shot through the windshield.)

Finally, great-uncle Jack full-on wobbled into the other lane and stayed there, straddling the yellow line — but this time a car was approaching.

Still, not a peep from my parents.

At the very last instant, with mere seconds before impact, Marion gently said, “A little to the right, Jack.” I still remember the distorted faces of the occupants of the other car streaking past us, inches away, as he swerved just in time. The lesson being: Even if there is death in the offing (or of the offspring), don’t say something that could possibly be perceived as impolite.”

“I had my kids late in life — at forty-six and forty-eight! — and I thought it was wonderful that this happened after I’d become more of who I was supposed to be.”

“We — Mom, Dad, Dan, and I — basically lived like my grandparents had back in the day, heating the house with a wood stove, kerosene lanterns always at the ready, and taking baths on Saturday nights. (We didn’t have a shower.) Dan and I had to take turns with who would get the bathwater first; there was only one bath drawn to save water, and being second always gave us the heebiejeebies.

Dad had a collection of about five hundred antique axes that were spread all over the house, including beneath the dining room table and under my bed. Mom grew all our food — all of it, from asparagus to zucchini — in a one-acre garden. She would often start the water boiling and then say, “Go pick the corn.” It really was Little House on the Prairie, without the pinafores and gingham dresses. Or prairie.

My folks were raised to be deeply resourceful. They came from a time when people could do anything and everything themselves — build their own house, make their own clothes. Our collection of used foil was something to marvel at. In fact, I’m not sure they ever bought a second roll.

They were also the most deeply, profoundly polite people who ever lived. My parents would probably have been Amish, had they heard of being Amish. Their lives would have changed not a bit.”

“As I said, I chose my career very early: The Christmas when I was three, I asked Santa for sunglasses, because somehow, I already knew that movie stars wore them. (My mom said she had a hell of a time finding children’s sunglasses in December in Massachusetts.) I would wear the sunglasses whenever I watched TV.”

“My mother had only two dresses throughout high school, wearing one and washing the other every day. She worked as a nanny for a dollar a day, and she ended up putting her older sister through nursing school and her younger brother through college. Once they had jobs, though, they didn’t pay for her to go to nursing school, as promised, and for the rest of her life she felt somewhat martyred, and quite rightly.”

“My dad had me do things with him from a very young age. If he was shingling the roof or grabbing the kerosene lanterns from the bulkhead during a hurricane, so was I. As a result, I grew up believing I could do anything, and apparently, he thought I could, too. One day, Dad managed to get himself a huge splinter under his thumbnail. Mom was going to pass out just from looking at it — she was a fainter at the sight of blood — but Dad already realized I was made of sterner stuff. He got tweezers and asked me if I’d help him out. “Yes!” toddler me said, as I dug right in.”

“The one that bothered Mom the most was that I’d never eat a sandwich she made without opening it first to examine the contents.

“What do you think, I’m going to poison you?!”

Well, yes, evidently, I did.”

“It was a mystery to me — and everyone else — how I could have become so phobic about being poisoned. Then one day I was hanging around in the church kitchen with my mom and some other ladies while they prepared dinner for a Mr. and Mrs. Club get-together. At some point, their conversation turned to breastfeeding, and I guess my mom thought I was out of earshot when she said, “Oh, Geena did not want to stop nursing. I finally had to put some hot sauce on my nipples, so she’d stop.”

BINGO! THERE we go!”

“When I was finally old enough to stay home alone while my folks went somewhere, my mother would try to convince me to come along by saying, “Well, I hope you won’t regret not coming if we get killed in an accident.” AND I WENT. Which means that what convinced me to go was the opportunity to die along with them, rather than suffer from survivor’s guilt.”

“Bless you if you imagine I was inundated with suitors as a young woman. In fact, I had just one date in high school, with Eddie O’Melia, and he didn’t ask me out for a second one. Over the years I’ve had multiple people come up to me and say, “My cousin/uncle/friend dated you in high school,” and my reply is always “Is his name Eddie O’Melia? Because otherwise, not so much.””

“I wanted to host sleepovers but was embarrassed at the state of my house… so I decided I was going to do something about it. I wanted to start with the living room because that’s where my friends and I would all sleep on the floor. By twelve years old I had saved up enough money from my paper route to order prepasted wallpaper and curtains from the Ward catalog, which I then picked up on my bike when they arrived at the package store. I stashed it all in my room, and one day, when my mom went off to her job as a teacher’s aide, I wallpapered the whole living room, installed curtain rods, and hung the curtains by myself — all before she got home.

Mom was stunned beyond belief.

“What… how … what did you do?”

When my parents got over the shock, they really loved it. In hindsight, it was very strange that they didn’t say, “Why didn’t you consult with us!” I had changed their house! I was twelve! But I think they were just accepting of the way I was — perfectly capable of taking on big projects. And also knowing they would never have gotten around to it themselves.”

Adolescence

“I started Swedish classes in the evenings as soon as I got there, and my host family spoke Swedish pretty much exclusively with me; this full immersion policy really worked. In a little over a month, I could communicate and understand what I needed to get by, and by Christmas I was rather fluent. (And much less homesick, now that I could communicate and understand what the teachers said in school!)”

“And then I was leaving Sweden — now fluent in a couple of new lingual things —to get back to Wareham, Massachussetts, in time for graduation. I brought home white clogs to wear with my white cap and gown, ye gods. When my parents picked me up at the airport, I had a hard time jumping right back into English. That might sound show-offy or made up, but I had really spoken only Swedish for ten months. I was now thinking exclusively in Swedish; even my dreams were in Swedish. Mom got a little teary on the car ride home from the airport because I sounded so funny.

One of the things I most eagerly looked forward to was seeing my Swedish “brother,” Lars, he of the beer coasters and car posters. He was still there in my hometown, and his host family invited me to a barbecue at their house right after I got back. I couldn’t wait to see him and have a conversation in his language and show him what I’d learned. (Swedes have often been amused to hear that I speak Swedish with the regional accent of the area where his folks lived, a Sandviks dialekt.)

I found Lars at the barbecue and launched happily into our now shared language, only to hear him say, “Oh, man, wait, I can’t even … Dude! My brain isn’t working that way now,” in totally American-accented English, and, just like me, he now had a regional accent. He was speaking English with the same Cape Cod accent I always had. Rats, still out of sync — we’d traded languages! We’ve stayed in touch all these years.”

“My masquerade was a hit. After that first time, the manager hired me to be a fake mannequin in the window every Saturday. The large crowds were translating into increased foot traffic in the actual store, and I was having a great time, while refining my technique.”

“In the commercial, eating the brittle/shoe candy bar was to turn me into a Swede. I started the ad speaking with my American accent, but each bite gave me more of a Swedish lilt, until I was finally in ecstasy over the candy bar, speaking fully in Swedish. The late ‘70s/early ‘80s were the height of “Sweden is sexy” time around the world, hence the inner logic of the ad.”

“She told me delightedly that people seemed to enjoy the way my name was spelled.

I said, “Yeah, I tell them you didn’t know how to spell Gina the right way.”

“Oh no, that’s not true,” she said. “I lived in a neighborhood full of Italians for a time. I knew very well how to spell ‘Gina.’”

“Then why didn’t you spell it G-I-N-A?”

“I didn’t want anyone to think it was pronounced gina.’ As in va-gina.”

Here I’d thought my name was misspelled for a sweet, funny reason, but it turned out my entire identity was based on the fear of vaginas.”

“I was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. I had to let those words sink in; I was thirty-two years old, and this was my first nomination for anything.”

“Five years later, during the Northridge earthquake, the Oscar fell off my mantelpiece, and now it leans forward, like a skier going down the ski jump. When I asked if it could be fixed, I was told no, but that they could give me a different one. I demurred. I wanted to keep the real one. And it’s fun to have an unusual-looking Oscar, a little off-kilter, like me.”

“My mom’s coworkers held their own Oscar ceremony for her. The faculty all dressed up for the occasion, with the principal presenting a little award to her for “Best Mother of an Oscar Winner.” Brilliantly playing along, my hammy mom delivered her acceptance speech, perfectly imitating the way I had delivered mine, replete with palming her own cheek.”

“On the back of the Oscar win I became a superstar… in Wareham.

I was asked to be the parade marshal for the town’s semiquincentennial — 250th year anniversary — in 1989.

My parents and I rode in a convertible in the parade, wearing costumes from that period. My dad had grown out muttonchop sideburns for a year in anticipation of the anniversary.

For parts of the parade, there were no observers at all except the people living in the house we were passing, so there’d be maybe a couple sitting in lawn chairs out front. When we came into view, they’d say, in a perfectly normal, conversational tone, “Hi, Geena, nice to see you.” The car would creep awkwardly along until finally they’d say, “Bye, Geena, take care now.””

“I was in the makeup trailer parked on a street in Manhattan on the morning of the first day of shooting when the second assistant director came into the trailer to let me know they were ready for me on set. I told him that the wardrobe department had just asked me to wait for a second while they got a belt, and he said, “Okay, then, just come after they bring it.”

Mere seconds went by before affable, everybody-loves-him Bill Murray came raging into the trailer, violently banging the door open.

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?” he bellowed.

“Are you fucking kidding me?! Get the fuck OUT THERE!” And with that, he got behind me and roared in my ears, out of the trailer, onto the street, “Move! Move! Move!” By now we were getting close to where everything was set up: It was a big outdoor scene at an intersection, and between the cast, crew, extras, and spectators, there were easily more than three hundred people there — and Murray was still screaming at me, for all to see and hear.

“STAND THERE,” Murray shouted, pointing at a piece of tape on the asphalt. Then, still shouting: “ROLL IT!”

What in the very fuck??

Fortunately, it was a scene where I didn’t have any lines, because I couldn’t have gotten them out anyway. I was shaking all over, dying from shame. We did two or three or four takes, I can’t remember, and at some point, he nudged me with his elbow and said, all innocent and butter-wouldn’t-melty, “What’s with you, you good?” The point of this story is not to reveal that Bill Murray has a very dark side; that’s hardly news. And it’s not to admit that when I had lunch with my manager and my agent that same day, I didn’t tell them what had happened because I was so ashamed (I never told anyone). And it’s not to admit that I would later find out that the screaming performance was all an act to make sure I knew my place.

And it’s not even to point out that he had been raging at me in full clown getup: the makeup, the shoes, the whole nine yards. No — I tell this story because sometime later we appeared together on The Arsenio Hall Show to publicize the movie. You can look it up on YouTube. Watch how Bill flirts with me and paws at me and even pulls down the strap of my dress; take note of Hall’s grotesque enjoyment of all this while you’re at it. For that matter, notice how I giggle and go along with it, as if we’re great pals; as if the raging hadn’t happened, as if the way they’re both objectifying me is really fun. Like so many women in a situation like that, I didn’t know how to avoid being treated that way; I shut up and played along.

But then, one year later, I met my “Louise,” in the form of Susan Sarandon. And everything changed.”

“As we sat down to discuss the script that first day, I swear it was, like, on page one that Susan said, “So, my first line here, I think we should cut it. We don’t need it … or, I suppose we could put it on page two…” My jaw hit the floor. Susan went through each scene with confidence and ease. Ridley was completely unfazed, of course. Why I had assumed ahead of time that I’d need to whip out the girly tropes, I have no idea, but there it was. Ridley engaged with Susan on every point, and when she pitched a whole new scene she thought was necessary, Ridley agreed.

I knew in that meeting that I was now on another planet, a new, exciting, powerful planet, and Susan Sarandon was the Queen Alien. How had I never been exposed to a woman like this, a woman who very simply and clearly said what she thought? How could she possibly have sat there expressing opinions that didn’t start with, “This is probably a stupid idea,” or “I don’t know what you’ll think, but …” I was so long conditioned to think it shameful to be seen and heard, to think it was impolite to sort of, well, exist.

Susan was a revelation. Somehow, I’d reached my mid-thirties without being able to speak up for myself … even when I was one of the leads in a movie — about strong women! Clearly something was up, and this was going to be a whole new experience for me.”

“Fast-forward to a few years later, and I was boarding a flight from Geneva to LAX. As I walked down the gangway, a group of flight attendants seemed to be waiting for me at the airplane door. When I got close, one of them said, “Guess who you’re sitting next to?! George Clooney!”

For once in my life accomplishing the feat of saying the perfect thing at the perfect time, I replied, “Guess who he’s sitting next to?”

Sure enough, there was George Clooney, nibbling on his nuts, and he was just as warm and friendly as you’d hope him to be. We chatted for quite a while, until suddenly he said, “You know what, I hate that Brad Pitt.” I laughed and said, “No, you don’t. Isn’t he, like, your best friend?”

“No, no, I hate him,” George said. “He got the part in Thelma & Louise.”

“Oh, I see! Did you want that part?”

“Well, yes — couldn’t you tell when I auditioned with You?”

Ah,, no, I could not tell. I didn’t recognize any of the guys at the auditions, though all had been working on various shows and movies. I didn’t think, “Hey, look, it’s George Clooney!” when George walked into the room. ER was still a couple of years away. Back on the plane, I could have laughed and said, “Oh my God, were you one of the guys with brown hair? I don’t remember you at all!” but I didn’t, even though I’m sure he would have cracked up at that.

Nope, too polite still.

Instead, I said, “Oh yes, I could tell. You were so great.” Wimp.

For the record, the four candidates for J.D. were, in no particular order, George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, Grant Show, and Brad Pitt. Quite an amazing lineup.”

“As it happened, two weeks after it opened, Susan and I ended up on the cover of TIME magazine — and that issue included two editorials about the movie, both negative.

So many people loved it, but there were a number of passionate editorials denouncing it — “Oh my God, the world is ruined — now the women have guns” type of stuff. Some people from both left and right of the political spectrum adopted a kind of “tut-tut” attitude. Some on the left felt that the violence perpetrated by the protagon-ists shouldn’t be thought of as liberation for women; the other side just hated that some of the male characters were shown in a bad light.

Regarding the supposed high level of violence, Entertainment Weekly humorously suggested that people deeming the movie violent get a grip, by publishing a chart comparing Thelma & Louise to Lethal Weapon:

THELMA & LOUISE

Gunshots: 11

Gunshots Fired at People: 1

LETHAL WEAPON

Gunshots: 425*

Gunshots Fired at People: 300.”

“Susan and I were both nominated for Best Actress; Jodie Foster won for The Silence of the Lambs.

Before the awards were handed out, Susan and I were sitting next to each other, and she leaned over and said, “If I win, I’m bringing you up with me.”

I thought, Why didn’t I think of that? If I’d gone up, I would’ve praised her to the skies, of course, but for Susan to think of that (I don’t believe that has ever happened at the Oscars) was just another sign of why I love her so.

Thelma & Louise became a cultural landmark; it was hailed as a bright new beginning for films starring women. Whether the press loved the movie or not, they were unequivocal in predicting that it would “change everything.” Now there would be so many more movies starring women — female buddy pictures, female road movies — films for and with women would now explode. I thought, I can’t believe it — I got to be part of something that’s going to change things for women!

Turned out its impact on Hollywood culture was very easy to measure. Nothing changed.

But I did.”

“When it came to learning and growing from the roles I’ve played, you can imagine what an extraordinary doubleheader it was making Thelma & Louise and A League of Their Own back-to-back. It was life-changing enough to be in one movie that struck a nerve, but to have my very next movie also become a cultural phenomenon caused a tremendous shift in my life.

Back then (thirty years ago, ye gods!), I never thought about how long movies I was in would live on, but just about the same number of girls and young women come up to tell me that they play sports because of A League of Their Own as when it first came out. (Those are my favorite interactions, by the way.) In fact, none other than Abby Wambach (you know, the two-time Olympic gold medalist, World Cup winner, and member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame — that Abby Wambach) told me she took up soccer because of League.”

“About halfway through the shoot, my parents came to Indiana to visit, which caused a little bit of confusion on the set. The people playing fans in the stands had been admonished not to wear their own “modern” eyeglasses when the cameras rolled, lest they ruin the 1940s. authenticity. Mom and Dad were standing down by the dugout with me, when an extras wrangler came and urgently told them to get back in the stands —they were not allowed down there, and my mom should remove her “modern glasses” immediately. The confusion came from the fact that the extras in the stands were wearing period costumes — and my parents still dressed like it was the 1940s.

On another day, I asked my dad to play catch with me — something we’d never done when I was a kid, but so touching and wonderful to do with him now. We overheard someone in the stands say, “Oh look, Geena Davis is so nice, she’s playing catch with that old man.” Again, he must have been just some old guy from the extras, since he was apparently in costume.”

“Things moved quickly. We were married within six months. The wedding was big, naturally: a three-day extravaganza on a farm up in Wine Country. Friday night we threw a country-western-themed barbecue in the barn, with line dancing. (I’d been obsessed ever since Susan and I learned on the set of Thelma & Louise.) The day of the actual wedding we filled with crazy fun activities on the big grounds of the farm. Needless to say, it was the only one of my many weddings with an elephant ride, and a hot-air balloon tied to a rope so you could go up and down in it. The property had an island in the middle of a lake which we turned into a “Dessert Island,” with little rowboats you could take back and forth until everyone was sugared to the max.

The actual ceremony took place in the early evening, in a romantic, broken-down stone building with no roof; we decorated the shabby-chic walls with silk banners.

Unfortunately, the press found out about the wedding (probably because Sylvester Stallone was there!) and helicopters hovered overhead during the ceremony and part of the dinner, almost drowning out “The Geena and Renny Waltz,” which had been written for us by a Finnish composer (and which Finnish couples still play at their weddings). It was all so much-much… but taking things to the max was Renny’s way, and I was all in.”

“That character, Charly Baltimore, was tough, all right. I had the honor of being the first woman to say “Suck my dick” in a movie, so … proud of that. I say first because there was a second time just a year later: Demi Moore said it, too, in G.I. Jane — directed by Ridley Scott!”

“In the song “Busy Man” by Billy Ray Cyrus, there’s a lyric that says, “Have you ever seen a headstone with these words, ‘If only I had spent more time at work’?”

Well, if you haven’t, then mine will be the first. Because I do, with all my heart, wish I’d been able to work more in my forties and fifties. I mean, you can imagine how incredibly spoiled I was, considering that in my opinion) I’d landed some of the best roles out there — juicy lead parts with big arcs and so much to do. But I was deeply aggrieved to find that the work for which I’d been previously known, and which I’d loved with great passion, became harder to come by past forty.”

“In the first Stuart Little, there’s a scene with a remote-controlled boat race on the lake in Central Park, and I happened to be watching as an assistant director set up the child extras. I noticed he was giving all the remotes to boys, and then choosing girls to stand behind the boys, to cheer them on. I went over to the AD and quietly said, “Hey, what would you think about giving half of the remotes to girls?” He looked at me as though thunderstruck — “Yes, yes, of course!” he said, and winced. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of it himself… but the point was, he couldn’t: All he was doing was what the culture dictated — “Only boys like mechanical things” —and he fixed it immediately when he realized how unconsciously he had followed gender stereotyping. (He still talks about it, all these years later.)

That little thing — which probably no one watching the movie even noticed — would grow into one of my deepest passions over the intervening years: the representation of girls and women in films for young people.”

“Unlike a lion, I was training about four hours a day, six days a week, shooting more than 4,500 arrows a month, with Don refining my skills. I’d finished twenty-ninth out of three hundred at the national championships in July 1999 — being in the top thirty-two of that competition automatically gets you into the Olympic trials semifinals.”

“I’d casually ask: Have you ever noticed how few female characters there are in movies made for kids?

And to a person they’d say, “No, no, that’s nọt true anymore, that’s been fixed.” And often they’d name a movie with only one, maybe two female characters in it as proof that gender inequality was a thing of the past.

But here’s the thing: No one took the question lightly. They truly felt a responsibility to do right by girls in their movies and TV shows, and thought they were. How could that be? How could the people creating these movies and TV shows not notice the huge gender imbalance?

Now I realized that I needed the numbers. If the actual creators of kids’ media couldn’t see the dearth of female presence, maybe the data would help them to become aware.”

“I became a middle-aged data geek by sponsoring the largest research project ever undertaken on the representation of female characters in kids’ entertainment-which took two years to complete because it was so extensive. This initial research showed that in kids’ movies and TV shows, for every one female speaking character, there were three male characters; that female characters tended to contribute very little to the plot, and often served as “eye candy.” (Oh, and one of the most common occupations for female characters in G-rated movies was royalty, which, hey, is a great gig — if you can get it.)

Our research also revealed that when female characters do exist in children’s media, they are often either narrowly stereotyped and/or hypersexualized. The effect of that hypersexualization was seen in a study conducted by Christine Reuter Starr at Knox College in Illinois. First published in the journal Sex Roles, Starr and her faculty advisor, Professor Gail Ferguson, found for the first time that little girls were self-sexualizing by the age of six. (When shown two dolls, one of which was wearing “modest but still trendy” clothes, and the other dressed in revealing, “sexy” clothes, 68 percent of the girls said they “wanted to look like” the sexy doll, and 72 percent believed that doll would be “more popular.”)

As far as the occupations of female characters go, in family films 81 percent of the jobs were held by male characters. The most troubling finding was that the percentage of fictional women in the workforce was even lower than the one that exists in the real world. Despite women holding 21 percent of global political positions worldwide, out of 127 characters holding political office, only 12 were female. In the legal sphere on screen, male judges and lawyers outnumbered females 13 to 1, and in computer science and engineering, the ratio of men to women was 15 to 1.”

“My first move after I had the research in hand was to ask Disney if I could present it to them. They were very obliging and gathered about forty people in a conference room for me, culled from live action and animation and everything else Disney does. I made the presentation, having no idea how they would react — were they going to doubt the research? Feel defensive in some way?

As it turned out, their reaction was better than anything I could have hoped: They were staggered, every one of them. One of the men present, an animator, spoke first.

“Just this morning, I was drawing a scene in a restaurant. And I made every single character, from the diners to the wait staff, male. I have no idea why I did that,” he said. “I’m the problem!”

Bless him, it broke the ice and drew a laugh, and others chimed in. The head of casting for the studio was crestfallen. She said, “Every movie we do here, my staff and I go through it to see who could become Asian-American, who could become Black or Hispanic. And we never once have said, “Could this character be played by a woman? I have no idea why we never thought of that.” Creators’ reactions to hearing the research was exactly the same at every studio, network, and production company. They were stunned. They thought they were doing right by girls, and they were floored to learn that they were not.”

“The great thing is, my plan is working. The data really was the magic key to making change. In the fall of 2019, something historic happened: For the first time, female leads and co-leads in family films reached gender parity. In early 2020, our research found that the same has happened in television made for kids. And in 2021, gender parity for minor and secondary female characters in popular television programming was achieved for the first time in history.”

“Here’s my theory of change: there’s one category of gross inequality in our culture where the underrepresentation of women can be fixed overnight:

On screen.

In the time it takes to create a new television show or movie, we can change what the future looks like, so that media itself can be the cure for the problem it created.

In other words, we can create the future through what people see.

Yes, there are woefully few women CEOs in the world, but there can be lots of them in films. How long will it take to fix the problem of corporate boards being so unequal? Well, they can be half women tomorrow, on screen. How are we possibly going to get a lot more girls to go into science, technology, engineering, and math careers? There can be droves of women in STEM jobs right now, in fiction-and girls and women will see them and say, “That could be me, too.”

So, get this: When we were looking at careers of characters on TV, there was one occupation that really stood out as being very well populated by women: forensic scientist. I don’t have to do any work to get more female forensic scientists on TV. The phenomenon has a name, too: the CSI Effect. And the percentage of women studying forensic science in college has skyrocketed, from seeing it.

Media images are incredibly powerful.

“Seeing it and then being it” doesn’t just apply to occupations.

A few years ago, my archery coach Don called and said he’d been looking at some charts regarding competitive archery; girls always had the lowest numbers for participation. But suddenly, in 2012, girls’ participation shot up by 105 percent — to the top.

So what happened in 2012? Both The Hunger Games and Brave hit theaters, both movies featuring a badass female archer as the protagonist. Girls left the theater and bought a bow.”

“We were the number one new show of the season. Commander had been nominated for a Golden Globe, and I won the Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series in January.”

“People loved Commander in Chief; the ratings were good, and we were getting plaudits and prizes. However, something huge happened partway into the season:

The creator, Rod Lurie, was taken off the show. I was absolutely stunned: Rod had been brilliant, irreplaceable. How could we do it without him? Even though I was an executive producer on the show, I wasn’t told why this happened … or even that it was going to happen. (I would find out later that it was basically to do with a turf war between Touchstone, the studio, and ABC.) But a new showrunner was immediately brought in: Steven Bochco, stalwart of Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue, among a host of other hit shows.

When Steven came on, I had the idea to take him out to lunch, figuring he’d want to get to know me — why did I think that yet again?

I said, “So tell me, what interested you in taking over Commander in Chief?”

“Well, it’s not like that,” he said. “I just made a deal with Touchstone, and they asked me to, so I thought I’d do them a favor.” Uh-oh.

Almost immediately, it was felt that my character (the president of the United States, mind you) was making too many decisions on her own … and that she needed more men in the room telling her what to do. With that in mind, a new character was added to the show, a campaign strategist.”

“Eventually, Steven Bochco got fired from the show too, and neither the network nor the studio wanted to hire a new showrunner. That meant our excellent head writer, Dee Johnson, took over. It had seemed scary to lose two showrunners, but Dee was awesome, and we would do whatever it took to keep our beloved show going.

Suddenly, shockingly – ABC took us off their schedule.

They didn’t want us opposite American Idol, as it was chewing up all competition back then, so we went on a three-month hiatus. During that time, we shot the remaining six episodes, with a view to coming back once Simon Cowell had stopped tormenting people.

All right. Time to step up.

“We’re a great team,” I said. “We can do this-we’re going to save our show!!” We were determined we would survive this rough patch, and be on for many more seasons; of course we would. We were on a mission.

With American Idol complete, it was our time to return … but for some inexplicable reason we’d been moved to Wednesday night, instead of our original Tuesday, and at a different time; there had been zero advertising to tell viewers where to find us. Back then, before binge watching and streaming, TV viewing habits were just exactly that: habits. Folks knew that Tuesday was “that great new show about the female president,” but if you moved it to a different night and didn’t tell anyone, you were pretty much guaranteeing that ratings would suffer.

And so it was.

I wish I could tell you that it didn’t matter, that viewers found us and stayed loyal, but in 2006, your time slot was everything.

Right about this time, an organization called the White House Project – a nonprofit that worked to promote women’s voting, political participation, and leadership – decided to present awards to both Rod Lurie and me for Commander in Chief. Marie Wilson, who founded the WHP, loved the show; it was emblematic of everything they stood for. At the awards ceremony, Rod and I were standing backstage, about to be introduced, when I got a call. Commander in Chief had been canceled. I took the deepest breath imaginable, went out on stage, gave my speech, and walked off.

Rod said, “Wow – you really held it together. You could have said, ‘By the way, we just got canceled.”

But what was the point?

I was too devastated to even think about telling anyone publicly that night. I loved that show, I loved that character, the audience had loved it … and most important, we’d brought the representation of women in the culture to a new high. And it had all been taken away in an instant. (Talk about the power of media images: A survey conducted by the Kaplan Thaler Group showed that after our one season, 58 percent of respondents [519 women and 503 men, divided equally between Democrats and Republicans] were more likely to vote for a woman candidate for president than before it aired.)”