Remembering Lyricist Alan Bergman / The 'Outrageous' Jessica Mitford

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm David Beancooley.

Today, we're going to remember lyricist Alan Bergman, half of the long-running songwriting duo with his wife Marilyn Bergman.

Here's a sampling of some of their songs.

light the corners of my mind.

Misty water color memories

of the way

we were.

That face,

that face,

that wonderful face,

it shines,

it glows

all over

the place

and what are you doing

the rest of

your life

north and south and east and west of your life

I have only

one request of your life

that you spend it all with me

Let's take it nice and easy

It's gonna be so easy

for

us to fall

in love

When lonely feelings chill

the meadows of your mind

Just think if winter comes

Can spring be far behind

Beneath the deepest snow

The secret

of a rose

is merely that it knows

you must believe in spring

Summer wishes,

winter dreams

drifting

down

forgotten streams.

Songs by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

Alan Bergman died last week at the age of 99.

His wife Marilyn died in 2022.

Their songs won Oscars, Grammys, and Golden Globes and were popularized by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Fred Astaire, and Barbara Streisand, just to name a few.

The Bergmans also wrote the words to the TV theme songs for the sitcoms Maude, Alice, and Good Times.

The couple collaborated on songs for more than 60 years.

We're going to listen back to some of Terry's 2007 interview with Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

At the time, Alan Bergman had released a CD of him singing many of their songs.

The couple met through composer Lou Spence.

The three of them collaborated on a song that was written for Frank Sinatra.

It became the title track of an album he released in 1960.

Let's take it nice and easy.

It's gonna be so easy

for us to fall

in love.

Hey, baby, what's your hurry?

Relax and don't you worry.

We're gonna fall

in love

to romance.

That's safe to say.

But let's make all

the stops along the way.

The problem

now, of course, is

to simply hold your horses.

To rush would be a crime.

Cause nice

How did you come up with the phrase nice and easy, which became the title of the song and Sinatra's album?

Yeah, well, when you write for somebody like Frank Sinatra, who has a definite

personality,

you try to write

it's easy to write a custom-made suit for him.

You know, he's very theatrical, He has a definite character.

And we felt, because they wanted something that was easy swinging,

that nice and easy, the phrase, that nice and easy does it every time, would be good for him.

It also had a kind of

subtext of to be a little sexy, which certainly also was part of Sinatra.

Is this one of those many songs about sex that isn't literally about sex, sex, but it's absolutely about sex?

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is.

Did he ever ask, did Sinatra ever ask you to write for him after having such success with this song?

Yes.

Yes, he did several times.

There was one time we received a call from him and said, I want you to write me a 10-minute number.

And we said,

About what?

He said, well, you know, boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy, lose girl, and so forth.

And we said to him, well, that's really been written.

He said, you'll figure it out.

He used to call us the kids.

And he said, you kids, you'll figure it out.

And

he said, get Michelle Legrand to be the composer.

And Michelle's father was very sick at the time, and Michelle couldn't do it.

So we called him and said, it's John Williams okay.

It was Johnny Williams.

He was not the

well-known conductor-composer then.

And we said, John, would you like to do this?

And he said, yeah, let's do it.

So

we wrote a 10-minute piece, which incidentally he wanted for his nightclub act.

So we wrote a piece that

talked about the fact that

the protagonist of the piece, in this case, the singer,

fell in love with the same woman over and over and over.

I don't mean literally the same woman, but you know, the same woman.

And each love affair ended badly.

And

I think I remember the phrase, the same hello, the same goodbye.

And when we finished it, we called him and told him that we had finished it.

And he asked us if we would come down to Palm Springs.

where he had a home and play it for him.

So the three of us drove down to Palm Springs and we got to his, I started to say house, but more like a compound actually.

And he opened the door himself when we finally made our way to the house.

And

Alan sang the song for him.

Alan, what was that experience?

Will you tell it?

Well, he was sitting on an ottoman in front of me and I sang for 10 minutes.

You know, that's a long time.

When I was finished, he was crying.

And

he said to Marilyn,

how do you know so much about me?

As if his life was such

a closed book.

Such a closed book, you know.

But it must have hit some nerve.

And he said, I have to learn this.

This is terrific.

I love it.

But he never learned it.

Every time we would see him, he would say, I'm going to do that.

Kids, I'm going to do that.

But he never did.

But it was a very nice experience, I must say.

Now, you've written a lot of songs for movies.

Some of your best-known songs are songs you wrote for movies.

You haven't written that much for theater.

How did you gravitate to writing songs for movies?

I think maybe movies made a

deeper impression growing up.

And we always knew knew that we wanted to write in a dramatic context.

We were more interested in

that than we were in just writing songs in limbo.

Writing for

in a narrative or dramatic context, when we were

honing a craft,

you can't write for a picture unless somebody hires you, you know.

So it's like an actor not being able to act unless he gets a job or she gets a job.

So we would do exercises.

We would find

either short stories or scenes from plays or articles in a newspaper and

pretend that they were assignments.

And

we wrote many, many, many songs that never saw the light of day, but were

exercises that we gave ourselves.

So I like to think that when the first job came, we were ready.

Well, let's listen to Alan Bergman sing.

This is What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?

which was written for the 1969 film The Happy Ending.

The composer was Michelle Legrand.

Why don't you tell us the story behind the song before we hear it?

Richard Brooks, who was a wonderful writer and director,

directed and wrote this film called The Happy Ending, which I think was well ahead of its time and

occasionally will appear on very very late night television but really didn't find an audience.

Anyway he came to us one day and said I want you to write me a song that is to appear twice in the film early in the film.

I want it to function as a perhaps a proposal of marriage between these

two young lovers.

But I want to hear the song again at the end of the film,

at which time

the wife, they since married, 16 years later the wife has become alcoholic and has left her husband and is in a bar and goes to a jukebox and selects a song and then sits down with a line-up of martinis in front of her.

And he shot this beautiful montage of Gene Simmons, who played the wife,

during which time she drifts into kind of a reverie while listening to the same song.

And he said, I don't want you to change a note or a word, but I want the song to mean something very different when you hear it the second time.

So that was a very interesting, challenging assignment.

And Michelle Legrand

wrote perhaps, I don't know, six or eight tunes as as his want

for this pot.

And they were all beautiful, but none really struck the three of us as being right.

And we said to him, because while he was writing music, we were sitting trying to solve the dramatic question of what the song should be,

we said to him, What happens if the first line of the song is, what do you do in the rest of your life?

And he said, oh, I like that.

And he put his hands on the keys, And as long as it takes to play that song,

that's what he played

from beginning to end.

And he said,

you mean something like that?

And we said, no,

we mean exactly like that.

And Alan said to him, Alan said to him, play it again.

And he said, oh,

I don't remember quite what I played.

Luckily, we had the tape machine going.

So we had the music.

So the first line of the song inspired the melody.

Exactly.

Yes.

Exactly.

But that happens sometimes.

With Michelle, we can't write lyrics first.

We prefer not to write lyrics first.

We prefer to have the melody.

We feel that

when we have the melody, that there are words on the tips of those notes and we have to find them.

Well, let's hear Alan Bergman singing What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?

that he and Marilyn Bergman co-wrote.

I have only one request of your life:

that you spend it all

with me.

All the seasons and the times of your days

All the nickels and the dimes of your days

Let the reasons and the rhymes of your days

all begin and end

with me

I want to

see your face

in every kind of light

in fields of dawn and forests of the night.

That's Alan Bergman singing a song he wrote with his wife, Marilyn Bergman.

We'll get back to Terry's 2007 interview with the Bergmans after a break.

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You were both writing lyrics for the composer Lou Spence, who wrote the melody for Nice and Easy, which was when you got your first hit.

And Marilyn, the way you described it, one of you was his morning lyricist and the other was his afternoon lyricist.

How did he end up having two different lyricists?

Because I like to sleep late.

It was early in our careers, and we were

trying to find out who we are, what we're saying, and he was writing.

I mean, he was talented.

We were both independently writing lyrics for Lou Spence.

You met

with, yes.

With Lou Spence.

Okay, okay.

You met through him, and then you decided that you should be writing lyrics with each other.

Yeah.

We wrote a song that day.

Yeah.

The first day we were introduced to each other, we wrote a song.

It was a terrible song,

but

we loved the process.

We enjoyed the process.

And

from that day on, we've been writing together.

Can you share a few bars of the awful song?

Oh, my God.

I only know the title.

Which was?

I never knew what hit me.

Ouch.

Something ouch.

Ouch is right.

So, Allenberg, when Johnny Mercer was your mentor, how were you lucky enough to get to know him?

Well, I met him when I was in graduate school at UCLA, and he

heard some things I had written, and he took a liking to me.

And

he spent, you know, over a period of two or three years.

Yeah, he would call me and say, I know all you're doing is working.

This is before I met Marilyn.

And

we would go down with his family to Newport, where he had a place,

where he had a house, and we would spend the weekend.

He would sit at the piano and listen to me play and

sing.

He liked the way I sang, and

he was just terrific.

I mean, I wouldn't be talking to you without him.

He was just marvelous to me.

So

what was some of the best advice that Johnny Mercer ever gave you about songwriting?

Ah.

Well, well, you know,

he

just outlined the craft about singing.

You're writing for an instrument and you have to respect that.

And

a lot about imagery.

More, it would be more, you can do better than that.

It wouldn't be specific, really,

which was great because

that helped

the more specific he would, I think teachers get, the less you feel free to express yourself.

And some of the early songs of mine,

you can hear Johnny Mercer in them,

trying to emulate him till I found and we found our own voice.

Alan Bergman, one of the songs you sing on your new album Lyrically, is a song that you say was an engagement gift to Marilyn Bergman.

Yes.

And the song is That Face, which was first recorded by Fred Astaire.

So before we hear you sing it, what's the story behind this song?

Well, Lou Spence, who wrote the music, he was going out with a girl, and Marilyn and I were going out together.

And I wanted to ask her to marry me and have

some kind of engagement.

I didn't have any money, so we wrote this song, and

we did get it.

We got an appointment with Fred Astaire.

Fred Astaire was Marilyn's favorite singer.

She loved the way he sang.

You still do.

Me too.

Yes.

Well, you know,

just to digress for a second, you know, the literature of the popular music in this country would be much poorer without a Fred Esther because all those great writers, Berlin, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, and so they all wrote for him.

Johnny Mercer.

So

we got Wangled an appointment with Fred Esther and sang him the song.

He He said, before I listened, he said,

he owned a record company.

He said, I only record what I sing in movies, but I'll listen.

It was very sweet.

And so we played and sang him the song, and he said, I'm going to record this next week.

And he did.

And I handed Marilyn

this record, I said.

And I married him.

And she married me.

Let's hear her sing it from the new Allen Bergman CD CD lyrically

that face,

that face,

that

wonderful face,

it shines,

it glows

all

over the place.

And how I love to watch it change expressions.

Each look becomes the prize of my possessions.

I love that face,

that face.

It

just isn't fair.

You must

forgive

the way

that I stare.

But never will these eyes behold a sight that could replace

that face,

that face,

that face.

That's Alan Bergman.

He and his wife, co-lyricist Marilyn, spoke with Terry Gross in 2007.

He died last week at the age of 99.

She died in 2022.

After a break, we listen back to a 1989 interview with Jessica Mitford, one of the aristocratic, unconventional Mitford sisters.

They're the subject of a new Brit Box drama series.

And I'll review the new Dexter spin-off, Dexter Resurrection.

I'm David Biancoule, and this is Fresh Air.

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Jessica Mitford was famous for several reasons.

One reason was her investigative books, including her best-known one, The American Way of Death, published in 1963.

It revealed how the funeral industry was financially taking advantage of grief-stricken Americans.

It was a bestseller and led to congressional hearings on the industry.

Another reason Mitford was famous was that she was committed to radical causes throughout her life.

In the 1950s, as a former member of the Communist Party, she refused to give any information to the House on American Activities Committee.

Mitford grew up in the English countryside, the daughter of a lord.

which gets to yet another source of her notoriety.

She was one of England's most unusual groups of sisters.

There were six Mitford girls, including Unity, who briefly was romantically involved with Hitler, Diana, who married Oswald Mosley, the head of Britain's Union of Fascists, and Nancy, who became a popular novelist.

The sisters are now the subject of a new Britbox drama series titled Outrageous.

In my recent review of the TV show, I called it and the Mitford Sisters fascinating.

Jessica Mitford died in 1996.

Terry Gross spoke with her seven years earlier in 1989.

Jessica Mitford, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks.

There's so much I want to talk with you about your life.

Let's start kind of way back.

How far?

In your childhood, when

you were a young girl from a prosperous family growing up in the English countryside, reading pacifist and leftist literature and getting very excited about it.

What was the initial appeal to you of it?

Well, you know, I've thought this over since.

I believe, actually, that one is very much the product of one's own time.

I mean, the 60s people were a product of their time, weren't they?

Now, I was a 30s person.

In other words, I was born in 1917, so by 1930, I was about 13 years old, reading everything I could lay hands on, like most children, and

sort of fascinated with the growing politics all around me.

It was the depression in England, tremendous poverty, huge areas called

unemployable areas, and then there was fascism rising abroad.

So these things made me think.

You're talking about how you think of yourself as being a product of your time, but it's fascinating how as a product of your time you became a leftist, yet two of your sisters became fascists.

And it's really so hard to imagine sisters in the same family growing up so different.

Do you have any explanation for it?

I never have been able to figure it out myself, frankly.

I've been asked that a lot of lots of times.

I'm sure you have.

Yeah, but I mean the thing is though that

some say it's sibling rivalry, which I don't believe really.

I really don't think so.

I don't think we were jealous of each other.

It was just that I happened to see things differently from the beginning.

Did you, because you were so opposed to fascism, did you find yourself

hating your sisters when they became fascists?

Not really.

That's the odd thing.

I was always deeply fond of my sister Unity.

She was one of my very favorite people in the world.

And what I did realize was that our divergent views politically were going to inevitably lead to a huge, well, end of friendship in fact, which in fact they did.

You kept a running away account when you were young, money so that you could run away from home, but what you ended up using your running away account for was to

try to go to Spain with the men who you later married.

That's it, yeah.

And that was just right around 50 pounds.

And this was during the Spanish Civil War, and you already knew which side

you were on.

You kind of went from this quiet, rural, country life, the daughter of a lord, to suddenly being a political radical involved in a revolution, a young married woman married to someone who was also from a wealthy background.

Your husband was the nephew of Winston Churchill.

Right, yes.

I wonder if you started to see your own families as the opposition.

Whether I ever saw them.

If you saw them as the opposition.

Oh, if I saw them as the opposition.

In the political battles you were aware of.

Absolutely, yeah.

See, both my parents went completely on the side of Hitler, which is very surprising.

You know, we were brought up in the shadow of the First World War, in a way.

And in those days, you see, the Huns, they were the filthy Huns who had killed Uncle Clem and numerous other relations in the First World War, people, of course, that I never knew because I was just born during that time.

And then all of a sudden,

Hitler became a tremendous star.

He did away with the labor unions, with the Communist Party.

He was doing away with the Jews.

And you can't discount the amount of anti-Semitism that goes on in the English upper class.

Jessica Mitford is my guest.

You lost your first husband in action in 1941

during the war.

He was 23 years old.

You just before that lost your baby who

died of measles.

The one that was born in Rotherhithe Street, right.

You were young, you were in your 20s.

Did you despair at that point that your life was over?

I think it must have been so hard to suffer those two losses at such a young age.

Well, also by then, I had another baby born in

1941, Dinky Constantia Romilly, who now lives in Atlanta.

She's a nurse there, in fact.

And

I mean, that was ages ago.

She's now 48.

Absolutely ancient.

I can't believe it.

But anyhow,

so she was my great standby and steadfast friend.

And anyhow, you know, when you're young, I suppose life goes on, and especially if you've got a baby to look after and support.

And so I got various jobs

with the government and other places, you know.

Let's move ahead a little bit.

You wrote about your membership in the Communist Party in your book, A Final Conflict.

What got you to join when you did?

Well, see, in the first place, I'd always been a terrific supporter of the Communist Party in England ever since I was about 15.

Because if you sort of studied the Times in those days, you know,

well, the Communists were in the forefront of the fight for the rights of unemployed, I mean, and

an end to things like the means test, which was a rotten sort of Tory ploy to prevent the unemployed from collecting unemployed insurance or welfare.

And then they were also in the forefront of the fight against fascism, both in

Germany and Italy, but in Spain above all.

It was the communists who recruited all the young people who went, who flocked from all over the world into the international brigade, of which Esmond Romilly was one, and that's how I met him.

And then we sort of ran off to Spain together, you know.

So that was sort of the progression of there.

And then, but we never actually joined the party, Esmond and I, in those days.

After Esmond was killed, I stayed in Washington with my baby Dinky, Constantio Romilly.

So then I remarried in 1943,

Bob Truheft, a lawyer, who I'd met in the OPA where I was working.

And that was in San Francisco.

We moved out to San Francisco.

And there, again, the Communist Party in those years seemed to me the absolute sort of lodestar or the

kind of backbone, really, if you like, of

all progressive left-wing movements, the ones the steadfast supporters of rights of black people, that kind of thing.

And this is what

made us determine to join.

So we did join in 1943 and remained members, in fact, until 1958, which was quite a longish time.

What got you to leave in 1958?

Well, by 1958, in the first place, the Khrushchev report about the crimes of Stalin had come out, and as a consequence of that, an awful lot of people flocked out of the CP.

Not, I didn't at the time.

That was in 1956, in fact.

And then came the invasion of Hungary, and then came Czechoslovakia, and so on.

And more and more people flocked out.

It was getting to be a waste of time.

I'd be better off working with people in the mainstream, in the movements on campuses, for instance, in the 60s and in the black community.

So many people were harassed during the McCarthy period and so many lives were ruined.

I'm thinking that it must have been hard to harass someone like you, someone who had been outspoken all of her life and who had already like a reputation for eccentricity because of her family.

I mean, did you feel like what can you do to hurt me?

Well I did a little bit.

Uh uh yeah.

I'll tell you what I really felt, which is that um the hell with them sort of thing.

I went uh we were subpoenaed, Bob Trueheft, my husband and I were both subpoenaed.

And I was subpoenaed um but by not only the main uh House Committee on Un-American Activities, but also the local version of the saying, the California Committee and so on.

And um well, I mean, what could you do?

Um actually I r when I went when I was subpoenaed by the main House Committee,

I was among a hundred people.

There were sort of huge

headlines in the Chronicle and other papers.

100 Bay Reds subpoenaed.

Well, of course, if I hadn't been one of those, I'd have been rather miffed.

Do you know the feeling?

Sort of rather annoyed.

But anyhow, I was one.

But they never finally called me.

But what I found out was that they were bound to pay per diem.

or was it no it wasn't per diem it was travel allowance so much a mile and since we lived in oakland I put in for $40 for travel allowance for the week that I was forced to be there, and then turned over the check to the Communist Party.

I hoped to annoy them somehow, you know.

In your memoir about

your coming of age called Daughters and Rebels, you wrote that you...

You confessed that you were guiltily looking forward to being a debutante.

Now, I don't know if you ever had

that experience or not, but certainly you became a very well-known leftist and left that society world.

Your father wrote you out of his will.

Yeah.

I think because you had named one of your children after Lenin, you called him Nicholas.

Do you ever have any regrets about

leaving wealth and privilege?

No.

In fact, you know, when that happened, which was in 1958, I happened to be in Mexico at the time, and to the horror of the landlady where I was staying, because she somehow thought she was going to have to pay for the calls, there were phone calls from everywhere, from the London Evening Standard, from Canada, from all over the United States.

What is your reaction to being cut out of your father's will?

And I said, I have no reaction.

I think people have every right to leave their money as they wish.

And I wasn't expecting any, you know.

So sort of the deflated journalists, you know how they hate that kind of bland answer.

Anyhow.

This could have been, I guess, a big thing if you were.

If you had to, you know, sort of screamed away or something, you know.

But you had just assumed that you.

Of course, I never expected it.

And that when you make the decision to live your life as you do,

you can't have it both ways.

That was.

Of course, exactly.

Who said it?

Jessica Mitford, let's talk a little bit about your writing.

You're best known for the book, The American Way of Death, Your Expose of the Funeral Industry.

What led you to want to expose

the

horrors of the funeral industry and how they would get people when they were weak and take them for whatever they could?

Well, it is rather weird, I admit, you know, it's an odd subject indeed.

I think the thing is that Bob Truhaff, my husband, who's a lawyer in Oakland,

was representing numerous trade unions.

And along about the middle 1950s, he began to notice, to his fury, that every time

a union member died, the breadwinner of a family, the hard-fought for union benefits meant to go to the widow and children would wind up being the price of the funeral.

So he started organizing the Bay Area Funeral Society, a non-profit thing, which I thought was rather boring, frankly.

I mean, I said, well, look, we're robbed every day in the supermarkets and by the landlords and things, so why pick on the wretched undertakers?

Until I began reading the trade magazines.

Oh, what did you see in there?

Oh, God.

Well, the titles would lead you on.

Mortuary Management.

Casket and Sunnyside.

One, Casket and Sunnyside.

And my favourite title of all, you know, which really makes you think, Concept, the Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries.

Well, I mean, you know, if you saw those, wouldn't you be reading them like mad?

I did.

And I found therein a whole wonder world of the mortuary that I'd never known existed.

You know, I hadn't known, for instance, that you could have a choice of

foam rubber or...

what you would call your inner spring mattress for your eternal sealer casket and that kind of thing.

And I started sending away for samples, and that was all so delightful.

So then I started writing that book.

Did you go undercover and pose as someone who had a deceased loved one so that you could shop for funeral arrangements?

Yeah, I did quite a bit of that.

That was one of the best parts of it.

Especially Forest Lawn in Los Angeles.

That was tremendous fun.

What was the experience there, like?

Well, I mean, I went there, and

actually, I went with a young man who is an American fellow who was teaching English history or something in one of the colleges there in Los Angeles.

And so we made up that he was my nephew and I was his English aunt and my sister was dying or something, you see.

And we wanted to make pre-need arrangements.

So I said we wanted to see everything.

But in those days, by the way, Forest Lawn was advertised was a price war on, and Forest Lawn was advertising on billboards, funerals from $145, you see, which sounded very reasonable.

So I said to the grief therapist, they're not salesmen, you know, they're grief therapists, I said to the grief therapist, well, we want to see everything in the nature of all the coffins, and I can choose the best, most appropriate.

So the first one we came to was $16,500.

Now you have to realize, we're talking in the late 19...

No, the early 1960s.

So you can double that or triple it or whatever for the inflation, what it is.

And I must say, it was rather magnificent, you know.

And I looked at it longingly.

And then I I said, well, could we see the $145 one?

And so, you know, he took ages finding it.

It was all hidden away somewhere.

And my dear, it was purple.

It had a purple that really hid his.

And I said, I looked at it and I said, my sister wouldn't be caught dead in that sort of thing, you know.

And so then we kind of went along and saw all the different plots and blah, blah, blah.

It was great fun.

After writing...

The American Way of Death, did you find yourself in the position of having to genuinely prepare somebody's funeral and having to shop for real in the funeral industry.

I have once or twice.

My favorite thing in that line, there was a man called Howard Gossage, extremely well known in San Francisco, but he died many years ago.

He was a wonderful, he was an adman, advertising writer.

And when he was

Oh, he did all those marvelous things in the New Yorker about the getaway car.

I mean, it's all years old.

I don't know if people remember it.

But he was much more than that.

He was a brilliant and funny fellow in all ways.

So he was dying of leukemia, and we knew he was dying and not expected to live.

So one morning, about 4, 5 a.m.,

his brother-in-law rang up,

who I hadn't met.

And he said, Howard died in the middle of the night.

And his last words to me was,

When I go, and I think it'll be very soon now, be sure to get hold of Jessica, because she knows how to nose out the cheapest coffin in this whole town.

So you know how when somebody dies and the survivors, you know, you always sort of say, or people say, well, what can I, can I do anything?

And the answer is no, obviously.

But in this case, yes, was the answer.

So I went and collected the widow, who was a beautiful young actress.

And together we went, my God, I got one for $150,

all in, you know.

And he was a rich man, and he would have been considered a super prize for the undertaking.

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Now, there was a casket named after you after your book came out, right?

A kind of bargain basement budget kind of casket.

Sort of industrialist in the Middle West had plans and specifications for the Jessica Mitford casket, which is going to be sort of made of plastic, I think, or something like that.

Did they really make it?

I'm not sure.

I never actually saw one.

My sister Nancy said, oh, well, we all know that you get 10% royalties on those Mitfords.

Jessica Mitford, it's been such a pleasure to have you here.

I thank you very, very much for joining me.

Well, thank you.

I've loved every minute.

Jessica Mitford, speaking to Terry Gross in 1989.

Jessica Mitford and her sisters are the subject of the new Britbox drama series titled Outrageous.

She died in 1996 at age 78.

Coming up, I review Dexter Resurrection, the newest entry in the Dexter TV series about a serial killer who hunts and kills other serial killers.

This is Fresh Air.

The new TV series Dexter Resurrection is the latest entry in the Dexter canon about a serial killer who targets other serial killers.

The new series is available on Paramount Plus and Showtime, and this weekend, Dexter Resurrection, presents its fourth episode, the one I consider the exciting turning point for this new series.

When Dexter premiered on Showtime in 2006, I loved it.

Michael C.

Hall, fresh off HBO's Six Feet Under, played the title character, Dexter Morgan.

Dexter was so traumatized as a child by witnessing the murder of his mother that he grew up with unquenchable homicidal tendencies.

Tendencies his dad Harry, a cop, channeled by teaching him to kill only bad people, specifically serial killers.

Dexter arrived on TV at a time when the anti-hero was king.

Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, Vic Mackey on The Shield, Walter White on Breaking Bad.

All of them had pushed the envelope of what audiences would accept from a morally complicated central character.

But Dexter doubled down and went all in.

The apex of the original Dexter series came at the end of season four, featuring John Lithgow in a season-long guest appearance as the Trinity Killer.

By that time in the series, Dexter had evolved to the point where he had a wife and a baby boy named Harrison, and, in most respects, a normal family life.

Except that, as Dexter hunted the Trinity Killer, the Trinity Killer was hunting him, and ended up killing Dexter's wife and leaving their son in a pool of his mother's blood, traumatized just as Dexter had been as a child.

Showrunner Clyde Phillips, who had overseen the series for four seasons, walked away after that season finale.

which I always considered the perfect ending for the series.

Except it didn't end.

Without Clyde Phillips, Dexter kept going for several more seasons, none of them any good.

Eventually, Clyde Phillips returned to the franchise with two more Dexter series, a prequel called Original Sin and a sequel, Dexter New Blood.

That show reintroduced Dexter's son Harrison, now as a homicidal teenager.

who, in the finale, shot Dexter dead with a hunting rifle.

But as we learned in the opening episode of the new Paramount Plus and Showtime series Dexter Resurrection, also developed by Clyde Phillips, Dexter was shot alright, but not shot dead.

Instead, we found him in a 10-week coma, subject to a series of drug-induced dreams.

He's visited in those dreams by several familiar faces from his past, including John Lithgow as the Trinity killer.

You think Harrison's my fault?

That I'm the bad guy?

If you hadn't thought that you could live the dream,

your wife would still be alive.

And your son wouldn't have been left to sit in a pool of his own mother's blood, just like you were the same age.

Maybe your precious son wouldn't have become a father killer, like

me.

He is nothing like you.

Let me give you a little advice.

Serial killer to serial killer.

Where you went long was thinking you could have it all.

A family and your dark passenger.

The first few episodes of Dexter Resurrection are good.

Better than any Dexter show has been in years.

But it's in episode 4 where Dexter Resurrection really comes back to life.

Masquerading as a serial killer named Red, Dexter infiltrates a creepy dinner party hosted by a wealthy twisted eccentric named Leon.

Leon, played by Peter Dinklage, has an assistant played by Uma Thurman, whom he dispatches to track down serial killers who are still at large and bribe them with a briefcase full of money to attend a very exclusive dinner party.

Leon explains it all when he opens the doors of his mansion to Red, aka Dexter.

I've been hosting this gathering for years.

I know how unnerving it can be for someone like you to be found, but your secrets are safe with me.

This is a safe space for people like you.

Like you?

Are you not

like me?

Me?

Goodness, no, I am just a huge fan.

And it's at the dinner party, when the usually anti-social killers meet and swap stories, where Dexter Resurrection regains its formerly strong footing.

These murderers are the beneficiary of some killer casting.

They include Eric Stone Street from Modern Family, Kristen Ritter from Breaking Bad, and Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother.

In this upcoming scene from episode 4, Dexter is using his phone to quickly research Lady Vengeance, the killer played by Kristen Ritter, when she sneaks up behind him and sees what he's up to.

And very quickly, another killer played by Neil Patrick Harris sneaks up too, asking Lady Vengeance to fill his wine glass.

Caught you.

Sorry, I was just.

Internet Internet stalking me?

It is.

It's cool.

I tried looking you up as well.

You did?

Didn't find anything.

So mysterious.

It's annoying, right?

Very.

Top me off.

Missed some Molly air.

Perfect.

Dexter Resurrection is full of old as well as new characters and has multiple murder investigations going on at once.

The narrative is as interwoven and complicated as a DNA strand and relies on the acceptance of quite a few major coincidences.

But it all works.

Dexter is back and Michael C.

Hall is better than ever.

Come for the party, stay for the murders, and the murderers.

On Monday's show, Mariska Hargate, best known as Olivia Benson on Law and Order SVU, talks about a different kind of role, being a daughter.

In her new HBO documentary, My Mom Jane, she explores the life of her late mother, Jane Mansfield, and uncovers long-buried family truths.

I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Schurrock.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Adam Staniszzewski.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B.

⁇ Cooley.

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