Barbara Gordon obit

Barbara Gordon Dies: TV Producer Who Wrote Of Valium Addiction In Memoir-Turned-Movie ‘I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can’ Was 90

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Barbara Gordon, an Emmy Award-winning TV producer and documentary filmmaker whose battle with Valium addiction was chronicled in her 1979 memoir I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can and 1982 film adaptation, died Tuesday, April 7, at her home in New York City after several years of ill health. She was 90.

Her death was announced by family last week, though it was not widely reported at the time.

“Although an urbanite through and through, she was a force of nature,” her brother, Edward Loeb, said in the published obituary.

Gordon’s revelatory account of her mental health battles and benzodiazepine dependence in an era when the drug was much overprescribed and generally assumed to be safe, became a bestseller, was on the shortlist for an American Book Award and was adapted by playwright David Rabe for a film starring Jill Clayburgh. Jack Hofsiss directed, with Scott Rudin and Edgar J. Scherick producing.

Critics were not impressed by the movie, nor was Gordon herself. In her published obituary, she is quoted as saying: “It was an awful disappointment, so different from the book, so unfeeling, so yucky. But I’m not the first writer who had her book horribly altered by Hollywood and I’m afraid I won’t be the last.”

Still, the movie helped spread the word about the dangers of prescription medication addiction, the title of the memoir and the film becoming so recognizable in the 1980s and ’90s that playwright Tony Kushner could use it in 1991 as a punchline in Angels in America as a surefire laugh-getter. Gordon herself once explained the title by noting that it was based on an old Catskills joke in which a man and a woman meet at a singles resort. While dancing together, the man says “I’m only here for the weekend,” to which the woman replies, “I’m dancing as fast as I can.”

The phrase captured not only Gordon’s humor but her frenetic lifestyle and career in the 1970s.

Born Barbara Sue Loeb on December 19, 1935, in Miami Beach, Florida, Gordon attended Vassar and received a degree from Barnard College before landing a job as a secretary at NBC in New York. She soon began writing for the network’s Today Show, and from there became a writer and producer for public television and at CBS’ New York flagship WCBS.

For WNET, a primary PBS member now known simply as 13, Gordon produced segments for the acclaimed 1971-’72 series The Great American Dream Machine. During her TV career she won three New York-area Emmy Awards.

In addition to her brother, she is survived by his wife Melinda, three nephews and other extended family.