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| Montage from The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, 1984 |
Sylvia and Aurelia Plath lived in that patriarchs' paradise, and their husbands abused them. We find this horrifying. But domestic abuse was common, and a victim's speaking out was called "He said she said" and was therefore nothing. Until.
Playwright and screenwriter Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote the TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). It was the first really raw and bloody TV portrayal of a battered wife tried for murdering her husband. More than 50 million people watched its premiere. [1] The result: criminalization, in the U.S., of domestic violence and marital rape. The latter, considered a separate issue, became illegal in all 50 states in 1993. The federal Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, has since updated its language and scope.
Before The Burning Bed, if police saw no violence they didn't make arrests. Clergy counseled married women despite broken jaws and shiners to remember their vow to honor their men. Shelters for women and children were few. There were some domestic-violence phone helplines. A 1-800 number appeared at the movie's end. Tens of thousands phoned that evening.
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| Rose Leiman Goldemberg |
Goldemberg died July 21 at age 97. Her link with Sylvia Plath is her adaptation of Letters Home, a selection from Sylvia's letters edited by her mother Aurelia Plath. The two-character play debuted in New York in 1979, went to London and Paris and onward, and there is a very good closed-captioned French-language film of it (1986). Goldemberg earned Aurelia Plath's trust with a staged reading in Warren Plath's living room. Aurelia received 50 percent of each production's profits and letters document the women's friendship. But Goldemberg had to move on to her next book, play, or movie. She wrote a lot of each. [2]
As with The Burning Bed, Goldemberg often dramatized biographies and hustled to sell her scripts and see them produced. In the 1980s all three commercial television networks aired prime-time made-for-TV movies. All rejected the Burning Bed. They said no big female star wanted to appear disheveled and bruised to play a battered wife and mother. Except Farrah Fawcett. Fetishized for her pin-up photo and iconic hairdo, Fawcett had left what was called "jiggle TV" for gritty roles in off-Broadway plays such as Extremities. She gave a performance so memorable people still watch it.
Hollywood actors then asked Goldemberg to write them similar star vehicles with serious themes. She wrote Stone Pillow (1985), about a homeless woman, for Lucille Ball. All three networks then exploded with TV movies exposing the harm done by incest, stalking, parental kidnapping, and psychiatric treatment, which Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar had made a women's issue. These TV movies are now on YouTube and exist because women writers had and used their nerve.
Success felt strange. In a note to herself written two weeks before Letters Home premiered, Goldemberg, temporarily away from home, 1) longed to talk with Aurelia but didn't want to burden her and 2) felt insecure, yet exhilarated. "I am fifty, and old enough to know something," she mused. "Do we keep discovering?" [3]
Some of Goldemberg's earlier plays now seem dated. The Plath play was her only international hit. She wrote novels and screenplays few people ever heard of. It is easy for writers to think that a life spent writing what they were moved to write was mostly wasted.
Note to self: It never is.
[1] "Francine Hughes Wilson," New York Times obituary 31 March 2017, says 75 million.
[21 See roseleimangoldemberg.com, her New York Times obituary (30 July 2025), and a full-length interview with Goldemberg (2011) opening with a discussion of The Burning Bed, on YouTube.com.
[3] "Thoughts at Barbara's typewriter," 12 September 1979, Rose Leiman Goldemberg Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.
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| Actor Doris Belack, Letters Home's original "Aurelia," and Aurelia Plath at the American Place Theater, New York, September 1979. (That's not Sylvia's necklace.) |