Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (12 page)

Ethel Winant and the
Mary Tyler Moore
boys were still having trouble finding the right actress to play Mary Richards’s sidekick, the sarcastic, 150-pound schlub named Rhoda Morgenstern—the kind of big-city girl who wouldn’t be ashamed to be on the birth control pill but also wanted to find a husband, and would have to still be likable while doing all of that. It was starting to feel like an impossible task. They thought they’d considered every thirty-something actress in Hollywood, but none was quite right. Then Winant, on one of her standard theater runs—she’d often see up to two plays per night on Los Angeles’s “off Melrose” circuit, scouring the casts for talent—spotted a thirtyish woman with brown hair, perfect bone structure, green eyes, a quick wit, and an intriguing combination of warmth and edge. As soon as Winant saw Valerie Harper, she thought,
Wow, this is her. That’s our Rhoda.

It made sense that Harper had the air of Rhoda, an insecure New Yorker. Her family had moved constantly throughout her childhood,
with her dad’s industrial lighting company always transferring him. But they finally settled in Jersey City, where she spent her teen years, just over the Hudson River from Manhattan. The final move changed Harper’s life—after studying ballet since she was nine, she was dancing at Radio City Music Hall by the time she was fifteen, for seventy dollars a week, doing four shows a day, “forming shapes of presidents’ heads or twirling umbrellas,” she says.

The experience inspired her to move into the city as soon as she graduated, to pursue dancing and show business. At seventeen she landed a part in the chorus of the musical
Li’l Abner,
which played in Las Vegas and then was shot as a movie in Los Angeles in 1959. She didn’t get any other jobs while she was in Hollywood at that time—all she got was hepatitis, a condition for which her doctor prescribed eating bread and sugar to keep her strength up. Her weight ballooned from 130 to 150, putting her well beyond ballerina weight and giving her a lifelong image of herself as fat.

Things weren’t all bad for Harper, though. When she moved back to New York, her roommate introduced her to actor Dick Schaal. The two got married in 1964, just as she also joined Schaal’s touring company, an offshoot of the legendary Second City comedy troupe called Story Theater, in what she calls the role of “the girl.” The troupe always had one token woman—Elaine May, Melinda Dillon, Mina Kolb. In this group, it was Harper.

Her parents, in the meantime, divorced. Her father remarried to an Italian woman named Angela from 116th Street in the Bronx, the street known for its connection to the Genovese crime family. The character of Rhoda was Jewish, but she was also from the Bronx, and Harper’s stepmother provided the perfect model for her accent and mannerisms. Some of her lines—most notably, “Who do you think you are?”—came out far more Italian than Jewish. So to get the Jewish part down, Harper would add a bit of her dancer friend from New York, Penny Ann Green, a Brooklynite who’d changed her name from Joanna Greenberg.

Somehow, there at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in 1969, as Winant watched Harper perform, the casting director felt all of this potential in the young actress. Winant called her in for an audition the next day, though Harper didn’t harbor much hope for winning the role. “Because of my name,” she says. “That is, I didn’t have one.” She also figured she looked too similar to the leading lady—both were brunettes, both had small noses. Basically, she shared Rhoda’s lack of self-confidence.

Harper had only minor experience in television—she and Schaal had settled down in Los Angeles just two years earlier. The two had cowritten one episode of the romantic anthology series
Love, American Style,
but aside from that she’d had only bit parts in the TV industry. The couple were renting a small house in West Hollywood and helping each other get their West Coast careers off the ground. So far Schaal had gotten luckier than Harper, snagging speaking roles on
I Dream of Jeannie
and
That Girl
. Harper had even met Mary Tyler Moore in passing once when Schaal did a brief guest spot on
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
though that was before they’d moved to Los Angeles.

Harper was thrilled for the chance to audition for
Mary Tyler Moore,
if only to read for the part opposite Moore, one of her role models. So she prepared as best she could, running her audition lines with Schaal over and over at home and bringing her own prop cloth with which to wash the imaginary window in Mary’s apartment in her opening scene.

When Harper read the scene for the producers, complete with prop cloth, Brooks didn’t feel it; he loved Harper but didn’t think she was Rhoda, and he wanted the absolutely perfect actress for this special role. “She was something we never expected the part to be,” Burns says, “which was someone as attractive as she was. But you’ve got to go with the talent.”

And the actress’s natural knack for nailing dialects, including the Bronx Jewish intonation she wasn’t sure she could master, intrigued the producers and Sandrich enough that they brought Moore in to
read with her despite Brooks’s misgivings. Sandrich argued in favor of Harper from the beginning, and even called Winant to offer a tip to pass on to the actress for her next reading: “Tell Valerie to dress down and not wear any makeup,” he said. She had the necessary body type: chunky by Hollywood standards, at a time when Goldie Hawn and Mary Tyler Moore were the ideal. She just needed to look a little more unkempt, something that might take some effort for such a beautiful woman.

Moore came to Harper’s reading straight from ballet class, her hair still damp and in a bun, wearing a pink dance shirt and white trousers. The two women sat and read the scene together, and after more than fifty actresses had sat before Moore reading those same lines with her, she knew what Winant had known:
That’s Rhoda
.

By the time Harper had driven the ten minutes from the studio to her house on Westmount Drive, her husband greeted her on the front lawn to tell her she’d gotten the part. The inexperienced actress would make a mere seven hundred dollars a week, but that was fine with her. Winant had finally cast the last major part in the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
pilot.

Throughout these auditions, Moore was going over the script and pondering her own character, eager to nail her first starring role on television. To flesh out Mary Richards, she
channeled her own aunt, a successful executive at the Los Angeles news station she’d helped the producers to research for their script. Her name was Alberta “Bertie” Hackett, but she was known as Bertie
Hatchet
. Of course, not too much
hatchet
spirit came through in Mary Richards, but her aunt’s liberated attitude did. When Moore was failing in school, her aunt would assure her, “You’re going to be a dancer, or you’re going to be an actress. Whatever it is, you’re going to be very good at it.”

Now Moore was hoping to prove her aunt right with the role of her life.

(1970)

It wasn’t until Jim Brooks and Allan Burns had hunky actor Angus Duncan pinned against a wall that they knew for sure their new sitcom was veering off the tracks.

As rehearsals had gotten under way on the set earlier that week, things seemed to be going okay, if not great. The initial read-throughs—the first step in the rehearsal process, where the actors sit at a table reading their parts aloud—went only barely well enough. The producers knew, as they said, that they had “a little bit of work to do.” And Moore was struggling with a still-new diabetes diagnosis: She had decided to keep the fact of her disease from everyone but her closest friends and family, always sneaking off to inject herself with insulin, an act that nauseated her every time,
careful not to leave stray syringes in a wastebasket where someone else might find them.

But then, the tension erupted. Duncan, the Ken-doll–handsome, clean-cut actor the producers had cast in the guest role of Bill, Mary’s
noncommittal med student ex, made a dramatic show of expressing his displeasure with the pilot script’s rewrites, throwing the pages on the floor when he saw them. Duncan—best known for replacing Robert Redford in the ’60s Broadway production of
Barefoot in the Park,
and thus, in a way, one step away from the dreamiest man in the country—had crossed a line. He hit the laid-back producers in the one place it counted: their writing. Burns felt defensive of his own fledgling career, contained, as he saw it, in those precious pages. Brooks was already developing a lifelong, unfailing policy: Always respect the script. No one knew what Duncan was thinking. Perhaps he was showing off for the more famous actors surrounding him on the set. Perhaps he genuinely disliked the new pages.

Either way, in his gesture of disrespect, Brooks and Burns’s hopes of greatness seemed to dwindle before them. Suddenly the pair of writer-producers had the tall, chiseled actor cornered against a wall. The uncharacteristic “out-of-body” experience, as Brooks would remember it, forced them to become “atypically he-men.” They could see the fear in the actor’s blue eyes, and the admiration from the rest of the cast. Brooks told Duncan, “You respect the script. We can replace you.”

They’d succeeded in flaunting their masculinity to their new cast, but the chances of Brooks and Burns redeeming their reputations with this show at CBS were diminishing. They’d lost veteran director John Rich, who’d handled most episodes of
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
to CBS’s in-the-works comedy
All in the Family
. Rich met with Brooks and Burns to deliver his regrets. “
Having worked with Mary on
Dick Van Dyke,
I thought this would be a very good show,” he said. “But it has some overtones of reminiscence. It just feels okay, like another comedy that might be good, but this other thing,
All in the Family,
is outrageous.” Lear’s incendiary dialogue had blown him away, to the point where he’d said to Lear, “You aren’t going to make this, are you?” When Lear said yes, Rich asked, “Is anybody going to put it on?” Rich
told Moore that he was sorry, but he had to be a part of Lear’s show, “even if it’s just an exercise.”

Brooks and Burns settled instead for the upstart Jay Sandrich, who’d directed a few episodes of
He & She
. Sandrich had no contacts in the industry beyond Burns’s acclaimed, ratings-deprived program, so he had a hard time finding work after the show folded. He’d later call the
Mary Tyler Moore
job “the luckiest thing of my career.” He adds, “They took a big shot asking me if I was interested in doing the show. I hadn’t done anything as a director that had been in that class.” As a result, Sandrich felt insecure, but he was determined to hide it.

He developed his own methods to prove to the producers that they hadn’t made a mistake by hiring him: The show would employ the “multiple-camera” technique used by most sitcoms that were filmed before a live audience, capturing different angles at the same time to be edited together later. But it wouldn’t be filmed like a stage production, as many other sitcoms were, with the actors playing to the audience. It would more closely resemble a short movie, shot on film instead of videotape. Sandrich studied other shows on the air at the time and thought,
Why are they yelling at each other? They’re sitting next to each other.
So as he took over directing the
Mary Tyler Moore
cast, he instructed the actors to speak in natural tones and interact with each other. “You’ve got mics right over you,” he’d say. “You don’t need to project.”

As the rehearsals progressed, some tension grew among the stars and producers as they tried to get the hang of this new approach. And in the case of Cloris Leachman and Gavin MacLeod, old friction returned. The two had worked together three years earlier in a TV show called
The Road West
. The opportunity had thrilled MacLeod, as he’d admired Leachman’s work with Katharine Hepburn onstage in
As You Like It
and in the comedic play
Remains to Be Seen
.

In
The Road West,
MacLeod had played a saloon owner dumped
by Leachman’s character for another man. In their first scene together, MacLeod chased Leachman down on a white horse to confront her. He had to stage-slap her, but had no experience in hitting anyone, onstage or in real life. Something went wrong in the scene, and Leachman screamed out in pain. From then on, she avoided MacLeod; they didn’t see each other until the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
pilot. The first days there, they shared no scenes, so there were no problems. But at dinner at the end of the first week on the set, MacLeod recalls Leachman declaring, “I won’t sit next to Gavin MacLeod because I hate his guts.”

Knight laughed as MacLeod simply muttered, “Oh, she’s driving me crazy,” without confronting her any further.

The cast arranged their dinner seating such that the two would not be near each other, but the incident did nothing to calm the actors’ nerves.