Rookies’ and ‘Flamingo Road,’ Dies at 93
One of television's first showrunners, she also wrote for
'Dr. Kildare,' 'Peyton Place,' 'Mod Squad' and 'Medical Center' and had a long
association with producer Aaron Spelling.
The Hollywood Rpeorter
By Mike Barnes
April 21, 2023
Rita Lakin, the boundary-pushing TV writer and showrunner
who worked on Peyton Place, The Doctors and Mod Squad and created series
including The Rookies and Flamingo Road, has died. She was 93.
Lakin died March 23 of natural causes at an assisted
living facility in Novato, California, her son, writer-producer Howard Lakin,
told The Hollywood Reporter. “Before her, they hadn’t thought about writing
television from a woman’s point of view,” he noted.
Lakin also penned a groundbreaking 1975 episode of CBS’ Medical
Center centered on a transgender character; served as a showrunner/executive
producer on the 1976-77 CBS drama Executive Suite; and wrote such popular
telefilms as 1971’s Death Takes a Holiday and 1973’s Message to My Daughter and
A Summer Without Boys.
After she met some people from Texas whom she didn’t
like, she rejected an offer in 1978 to create the pilot for a show about an oil
family in the Lone Star State. That series, of course, was CBS’ Dallas. “They
were fortunate I turned it down,” she told Adrienne Faillace during a 2017 chat
for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews.
Lakin began a long association with producer Aaron
Spelling in 1969 when she was a story editor and writer for two seasons on his
hit ABC drama Mod Squad, about three young undercover cops played by Clarence
Williams III, Peggy Lipton and Michael Cole.
Three years later, she arrived at his office to pitch him
on a movie and learned he was desperately struggling to come up with a new show
for ABC — and that his deadline was 15 minutes away.
“Unbelievably, I opened my mouth and said, ‘Why don’t you
give them Mod Squad all over again?'” she recalled. “I’m making this up as I go
along. I said why don’t you do something called The Rookies? Instead of having
boy cops in the field, you have boys becoming cops. That might work.
“He dashes over to the phone, calls up ABC and says, ‘I
think I have the show. It’s called The Rookies.’ … He’s pitching this and I’m
saying to him, ‘Yeah, it’s the life of these guys and their girlfriends and
their wives and what happens to them’ … I’m throwing this out to him and he’s repeating
every word. He hangs up the phone and says, ‘It’s sold’ [and] ‘I’m now going to
make you rich.'”
Lakin received creator credit for The Rookies, which
starred Georg Stanford Brown, Michael Ontkean, Sam Melville, Kate Jackson and
Gerald S. O’Loughlin, but did not have anything to do with the series once it
was greenlighted. It ran four seasons, from 1972-76.
She developed the 1980-82 NBC primetime soap Flamingo
Road, starring Morgan Fairchild, Howard Duff and Stella Stevens, from a 1942
novel and became its showrunner before that was even a term.
“They hired me because they wanted me to run the show and
make it succeed,” she said. “Before that, the attitude toward writers was keep
them as far away from the set as you possible could because they’re going to
want to change everything.”
The older of two sisters, Rita Weisinger was born in the
Bronx on Jan. 24, 1930. Her father, David, was a plumber and her mother,
Gladdy, a housewife. As a youngster, she loved reading and “lived at the
library,” she said.
She attended Hunter College with the goal of becoming a
teacher but started writing short stories and sold her first one to Manhunt
magazine as R.W. Lakin, using that byline because she was told no one would buy
an action-adventure yarn from a woman.
When her husband, Hank, a nuclear physicist, landed a job
in Simi Valley, they came west, but he died suddenly from leukemia in 1961, and
she was left with three young children and no money at age 30. (Her son said
the family learned about the cause of his illness — from radiation poisoning on
the job — just a few years ago.)
“I didn’t want to work at Woolworths, I didn’t know what
to do, and I was also grieving,” she said. “I went to all the movie studios,
and I did get a job at Universal as a secretary.” Even though she could type
only six words a minute and did not know shorthand, she played “the widow’s
card” to get hired, she revealed in 2016.
Her bosses would become future Paramount and Universal
studio chief Ned Tanen and Dale Sheets, later a top personal manager in
Hollywood.
Lakin bought a book, Teleplay, to learn how to write a
script after hearing she could make hundreds of dollars on one and sold a story
about a woman with kids who becomes widowed to NBC’s Dr. Kildare. It would
become a 1964 episode that was directed by Sydney Pollack and featured Ronnie
Howard of The Andy Griffith Show.
After writing for Daniel Boone, The Virginian and Bob
Hope’s Chrysler Theater, she got her first staff writing position, on Peyton
Place. She spent two seasons (1965-66) on the ABC primetime soap, which aired
three half-hour episodes a week during her stay there.
On that show — the best job she ever had, she said — the
staffers wrote scenes, not entire scripts, and “came up with a style that
worked for everybody.” (She returned 20 years later for the telefilm Peyton
Place: The Next Generation.)
She said that when she was starting out, only about 40 of
the 1,000 or so screenwriters in television were women, and more than half of
them worked with their husbands.
Seizing an opportunity to come home, Lakin joined the New
York-based NBC soap The Doctors, where she knocked out scripts for five shows a
week from 1967-69, departing with the serial No. 1 in the daytime ratings.
In the ’70s, she began to pitch her own ideas — “I was
able to write about things that were important and nobody stopped me; in fact,
they said, ‘Go ahead, do it,'” she indicated. One notable effort became a
season-opening, two-part episode for the issues-oriented Medical Center about a
surgeon (Robert Reed) who wants gender-reassignment surgery.
Her résumé also included installments of Run for Your
Life, The Invaders and her only sitcom, Family Affair. Those comedies “were
stupid, and they wanted stupid people to say stupid things at all times. I didn’t
want to do that,” she said.
In addition to Mod Squad and The Rookies, Lakin worked
with Spelling on the highly rated 1972 telefilm Women in Chains, starring Ida
Lupino; as a staff writer for a season of ABC’s Dynasty in 1987; and as a
co-creator of the 1989 NBC medical drama Nightingales. It would be her last TV
gig.
After the 1988 WGA strike, she said the studios “got rid
of every writer who made too much money, and I was on that list. I couldn’t get
a job after that.” She was told that she was too old.
Spelling, she said, “had one idea that he carried through
all the time: gorgeous women and gorgeous men looking gorgeous and doing
exciting things. Show after show after show, that’s what he did.”
Her autobiography, The Only Woman in the Room, was published
in 2015. She also wrote nine “Getting Old Is … ” mystery novels that centered
on a 75-year private detective in Fort Lauderdale named Gladdy Gold and a 2021
romantic comedy, Prince Charming, Go Home.
Her son noted that she mentored “a ton of people” during
her career and was “a real pistol. She was very social and loved to be out
there in the world.”
In addition to Howard — a writer and/or producer on shows
including Dallas, Falcon Crest and Flamingo Road and one of the creators of
Nightingales with his mom — survivors include her other children, Gavin and
Susanne, and her grandchildren, Alison and James.
LAKIN, Rita (Rita Weisinger)
Born: 1/24/1930, Bronx, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 3/23/2023, Novato, California, U.S.A.
Rita Lakin’s westerns – writer:
Daniel Boone (TV) – 1965
The Virginian (TV) - 1965
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