It was 1983, and Tom Sawyer, that's his real name, had just stepped out of a screening room in the producer's building at Universal Studios.
He walked into Peter Fischer's office, past the cocktail table to the desk, and sat down to discuss what he'd just watched: the first 20 minutes of the pilot of "Murder, She Wrote," a new mystery series starring Angela Lansbury, a 59-year-old film and stage star making her TV series debut. She hadn't been the first choice for the show, but CBS approached her after Jean Stapleton of "All In the Family" fame turned the part down. TV hadn't been Lansbury's first choice either. As she put it in a 1984 TV interview promoting the first season of the show, "I love the musical theater and to leave that was very hard for me, very hard. But I did have to face the fact that it wasn't happening there for me."
