Rita Lakin, Pioneering Screenwriter and Creator of ‘The Rookies’ and ‘Flamingo Road,’ Dies at 93
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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.
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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, James, Megan and Amara.
She was married to late Mod Squad director-producer Robert Michael Lewis from 1972-80.
“I got to do a lot of things that I actually liked doing,” she told Faillace when asked what her proudest career achievement was. “So how could I complain?”
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