NEW YORK — Welcome to the ‘60s.
For the highly fashionable “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” the calendar shift into the new decade doesn’t just represent new dresses and hats, but also a renewed sense of self as the feminist moment kicks off.
For the “Maisel” women, though, they were already on their way.
“(Rose) is willing to shed a lot of what she needed to be, and I would say it’s no accident that the decade is shifting, too,” Marin Hinkle, who plays Midge’s mother, Rose Weissman, told the Daily News.
“They started to change my color scheme into the bolder set, they started to add new shapes, pants…The second I put that on, I kind of didn’t know who I was as Rose.”
The Prime Video series, which returned Friday for the first two episodes of its fourth season, opens in 1960, as the decade flips over. John F. Kennedy is about to be elected — Rachel Brosnahan, who stars as the eponymous Mrs. Maisel, teased that the show will “intersect with the political world in at least one moment” this season — the civil rights movement is ramping up and so is the Vietnam War.
The ‘60s didn’t represent a total about-face. But, perhaps more than any other decade, the culture changed forever.
Hinkle, 55, remembers her mother, a judge in the Superior Court of Massachusetts who went to law school while Hinkle was young, wearing pantsuits to work for the first time. Caroline Aaron, who plays Midge’s ex-mother-in-law, Shirley Maisel, tells of her mother’s friend realizing her own value.
“She was almost in tears, and she said to me, ‘don’t ever do volunteer work. No matter what you do when you grow up, don’t ever volunteer. Make sure someone pays you for whatever work you do,’” 69-year-old Aaron told The News.
Rose, when the season kicks off, is getting her matchmaking business off the ground, a revolutionary idea for a woman whose business card for her entire life had read “daughter, sister, wife, mother.” Shirley, on the other hand, is less excited to branch out. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” doesn’t make a judgment call on which woman is right.
“For Shirley, it’s going to be a real tug-of-war. I think she’s going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new world,” Aaron told The News.
“I saw that when I was growing up among my mother’s friends, the ones that thought all of this women’s lib stuff was hooey and they should be dressed for dinner and they should wait on their husbands, they should put themselves second. And they thought there was nothing wrong with that. Shirley’s going to be one of the last ones to sign up because she likes her life.”
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s” entrance into the ‘60s also represents another true-to-life change for the cast: the beginning of the end for Lenny Bruce. As fictional Midge’s career has seen peaks and valleys, the show has represented Lenny’s as a continued slide into misery and despair. In real life, Lenny was convicted of obscenity in 1964, blacklisted from almost every major comedy club in the country by the middle of the decade and on Aug. 3, 1966, found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home, naked, of morphine poisoning due to an overdose.
“It’s the magic Lenny Bruce come down to earth a little bit more,” Luke Kirby, who plays the comedian, told The News. “Seeing how he contends with gravity is important to the story.”
But the ‘60s also saw one of his most legendary shows, a Carnegie Hall performance in the middle of a blizzard in February 1961. “Maisel” spent three days shooting at the iconic Manhattan venue over the summer, but Kirby was mum on whether the tea leaves read true, saying only that recreating that show would be “a dream come true.”
“Lenny Bruce, when he performed at Carnegie Hall, he talked about Jack Kennedy becoming president and he expressed an excitement and an alacrity for being alive because there was going to be a baby born in the White House. Kennedy represented a kind of youthfulness that had never been seen in those halls of power. Politics aside, that was the most exciting thing for (Lenny),” Kirby, 43, told The News.
“I feel like that decade in America did bring on a cultural awakening. It is a new morning that Midge is waking up to.”
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