JOAN: In my generation, in the business I was in, if you didn’t have males helping you, you didn’t get anywhere. They were the mentors and the ones who took an interest in advancing careers. It wasn’t about hitting on women. It was just interest in seeing the job done. And if they found a woman who could do it, they were great. You could not have succeeded without them, in my day. Now often you have a woman boss. That was not true in my day. Women weren’t in the television world in positions of responsibility at all.

MARLO: With me, I was mentored by men, but they weren’t my friends. They were people that I … like Mike Nichols was a big mentor of mine. He pulled me out of the cattle call of 500 girls and sent me to London in Barefoot in the Park. But I didn’t know him. And Ed Sherick was my mentor at ABC. I did a screen test for some other show which didn’t sell, and he called me in and said, “You can be a television star and we’re going to find something for you.” So the two most important men in my career were not people that I knew. I really can’t look back and say that a friend boosted my career. What I can say is that I made friends with people that I worked with, and many of them women; and men that I worked with on my television show who became my friends and we worked after that. But I never had a friend say, “Here’s a job,” or “Here’s a script.”

JANE: Liz, our dear Liz Smith, helped me. And when she started she was the first one in our crowd to become successful. And when she had her column, I think within a month or so, I was doing design. I was designing clothes at that time and trying to make it and not being successful at it. But she would help me in her column and she helped many people. And she still does. She still helps people. She did that with many people. And Jane Trahey, Jackie Babbin and Barbara Schultz at CBS gave me my first writing job. I don’t think I would be anything without friends helping.

JOAN: There was a friend who was the vice president at Carnegie Corporation, the foundation. And he just believed in me and asked me to do this study for Carnegie on preschool education and just kept pushing, even though the other funders didn’t want a woman as head of the project. One of them being the No. 2 at Ford Foundation in the area of interest to me was a woman who said, “It will never be taken seriously if a woman is head of it.” And he just kept pressing on and without … and he was a mentor and immense help, I mean, in every conceivable way. And he and his wife have become friends of mine. That was how I knew him.

JANE: No one took me in hand or no one directly. I think that that’s very important for people to have. And I would like to think I’ve been that to other people now, because I realize how important it is. But, no, I just got helped by people kind of opening doors or making a call. Like Jane Trahey called. I thought I was going to be a designer. That was the only thing I was kind of connecting with at that time. And she called Kimberly Clark at Fieldcrest and I became a design consultant, really. I mean, I showed them my work and I did the work for it. But the call was very important. And she was just a friend. And that happened over and over and over again.