Anne Roberts Nelson, influential TV executive
LOS ANGELES - Anne Roberts Nelson, a pioneering television executive with CBS who negotiated contracts for such long-running hits as “I Love Lucy’’ and “Gunsmoke,’’ has died. She was 86.
Mrs. Nelson, who was hired in 1945 and was the longest-serving CBS employee with 64 years, died Saturday of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles.
She was promoted to vice president of business affairs for CBS Entertainment in 1999 and remained on the job until January, after she was laid off in a round of network cuts, her family said.
“For the entire time that I had the good fortune to work with her, she was a role model,’’ said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment. “Every meeting we had together, every deal we negotiated together, she was the image of professionalism and always someone who infused everything she did with humanity and her own personality. She had grace and charm, but she was a tough negotiator.’’
Fresh out of the University of California at Berkeley, Mrs. Nelson got a two-week temporary job as an assistant to Ernest H. Martin, the future Broadway producer who was then general manager of CBS Radio in Los Angeles. Soon she was an assistant director in sales services and on her way to becoming one of the first female executives who was not hired out of the secretarial pool.
Mrs. Nelson made her way up the network ladder, getting promoted to director of business affairs for the radio division in 1955, then the television division in 1959, and eventually to the vice president’s office 40 years later.
She had a variety of duties along the way, including booking talent for “The Ed Wynn Show’’ and “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show’’ and negotiating contracts for CBS mainstays “I Love Lucy,’’ “Gunsmoke,’’ “All in the Family,’’ “The Red Skelton Show,’’ “The Wild, Wild West,’’ “Perry Mason,’’ and “The Young and the Restless,’’ among others.
“She really was alone in the field for a lot of years,’’ Mollie Gregory, who interviewed Mrs. Nelson for her 2002 oral history “Women Who Run the Show,’’ told the Los Angeles Times Wednesday. “She had a remarkable spirit. She never quit.’’
Despite toiling in a male-dominated industry, Mrs. Nelson told Gregory that she never felt downtrodden.
“I don’t like generalizations,’’ Mrs. Nelson said in the book. “I don’t like to be categorized as a woman. I like to be categorized as a competent person.’’
While she was building her career, she was also raising three children with her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson Jr. They had married in 1946, eight years after he and actress Bette Davis divorced. He died in 1975.
Born Anne Roberts in San Francisco, she grew up in South Pasadena. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1944 before landing at CBS.
