Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (16 page)

Silver had grown up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, dreaming of being a writer. Her father kept everything she wrote, dating back to her first poems when she was five. She enrolled at Northwestern University in the Chicago suburbs to seek a degree in journalism, just to get away from her overprotective parents. An only
child, she wasn’t allowed to cross the street alone until she was twelve. So for college, her parents wouldn’t let her go to California like she’d wanted to. Northwestern, eighty-five miles south of her hometown, was as far as she was allowed to go. Her sophomore year, she transferred from journalism to theater arts. She performed in the school’s
Waa-Muu
variety show and wrote a sketch for it about an astronaut returning home (decades after Leachman appeared in the same annual revue). She was blown away by the fact that some of the audience members were from Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe, even though nothing ever came of them seeing it.

The next year, she made a deal with her parents: She could go to Los Angeles if she lived with her uncle, Sy Howard, who worked in show business creating the radio programs
My Boy Luigi
and
My Friend Irma.
Silver transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, and finally made it to the city of dreams and boundless freeway traffic jams. Once there, she spent her summers working as an extra in movies, meeting the likes of Steve McQueen. She knew she had to be in Los Angeles to break into show business. She knew that was where she belonged.

She met her future husband, stockbroker Arthur Silver, on her last day at UCLA. She was heading out to her graduation ceremony with her parents, and she ran into him on her apartment building’s stairs. Arthur was carrying a trunk up the stairs, and her mother said, “There’s a nice boy.”

“Oh, Mother,
please,
” Susan said with an eye roll. But she married him within three years.

After graduating, Susan got a job as an associate producer for comedian Mort Sahl’s talk show. She figured she got hired because he wanted to sleep with her, but that didn’t bother her much. She got along with him just the same. In the first six months she was there, Sahl fired five producers. She became a producer by default. But soon afterward, she found herself fired as well: She looked out the window, saw her car being towed, and ran outside to try to stop it, even though
Sahl had a rule against leaving the building without asking him. She proved to be no exception to his strict edicts; she, too, was gone by the end of the day.

Despite the shock of her first firing, she got another job casting for an advertising agency until she saw
Laugh-In
on TV and decided to apply there. Soon she became the assistant casting director; she took over as the head of casting when her boss died.

She knew she was funny, as funny as the writers on
Laugh-In
. She didn’t, however, know how to turn that into a real job. It all came together when Silver ran into an old boyfriend, who introduced her to his new girlfriend, another funny chick named Iris Rainer. The boyfriend suggested the girls work together on a script—he knew a guy named Garry Marshall who helped some other TV writer friends get their start, many of them funny women with limited writing experience. Silver and Rainer first conspired on a spec script for a new show called
Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp,
which featured live chimpanzees as
Get Smart
–style secret agents. The two wrote the spec hunkered over a typewriter together, on fresh onionskin paper. They would later thank God the episode was never made.

But the two also hammered out an episode of Marshall’s
Love, American Style
—a romantic comedy series featuring a different story every week—that
was
filmed. Marshall got them a shot at a
That Girl,
too, on an episode in which the main character, aspiring actress Ann Marie, was to get engaged to her boyfriend, Donald. But then the show’s producers decided not to let her get betrothed just yet—they’d end up saving that for the final season, in 1971. Iris and Susan’s episode was never shot, and Iris decided to take a break to have children. The partnership dissolved (though Rainer, who worked as an actress as well, would later go on to write for variety shows such as
The Osmonds
and
Sonny & Cher
). Silver was a newlywed, but she was on the market, professionally speaking. That’s when she landed the
Mary Tyler Moore
gig.

She and the other new
Mary Tyler Moore
writers—recruited via
friends of friends, lured from off-Broadway, snatched from the male-dominated writing staffs like those Treva Silverman had endured—would make Mary one of the most authentic, and emulated, female characters to ever hit television. Getting to that point, however, wouldn’t be any easier than it had been to get the show on the air to begin with.

(1970–71)

Allan Burns drove down Melrose Avenue on his way to work at
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s lot in Hollywood on a late September morning in 1970, as the television season officially got under way. He was having a hard time concentrating, still distracted by what he’d read in
Time
magazine the night before. Amid stories about heavier issues—President
Nixon’s approval rating plummeting below 50 percent, worries that a new school year would bring new waves of campus violence—came this slap in the face: “
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
on opening night at least, was a disaster for the old co-star of the
Dick Van Dyke Show,
” the reviewer had written. “She plays an inadvertent career girl, jilted by the rounder she put through medical school, and working as a ‘gofer’ at a Minneapolis TV station. Her bosses, a drunken clown of a news director and a narcissistic nincompoop of an anchorman, do an injustice to even the worst of local TV news.”

As Burns pulled up to a stoplight, something pulled him out of his
sour reverie: the Jaguar idling next to him, driven by Moore herself. He caught her eye, and her expressive face fell. He knew from her look that she’d read it, too. The
Time
critic had even gone so far as to compare Moore’s career—unfavorably—with that of Andy Griffith, who was also returning to his sitcom roots that season with a show set in a prep school, called
Headmaster
. Both huge TV stars were back on the small screen, “but only for Andy,” the magazine said, “does it seem like a halfway happy return.”

The “disaster” charge felt particularly hurtful in light of the calamitous first taping and the seeming victory of the second. The cast was now falling in love with each other, their jobs, their characters, and their leading lady, and they wanted very much for their show to last. Burns ached for everyone to think the show was as terrific as he did, for Moore’s sake and his own. But
Time
wasn’t the only publication to dismiss the show.
TV Guide
—the industry’s most vital resource and frequent Pepsi coaster—grumbled that Mary Richards was “
unmarried and getting a little desperate about it,” and called Rhoda a “man-crazy klutz.” The
New York Times,
meanwhile, had called the show “
preposterous.”

The best reviews only revved up to lukewarm; the
St. Petersburg Times,
for instance, hailed “
the return of a delightful and talented actress” in Moore but summarized the show as about “the life of a 30-year-old spinster.” The newspaper also named a show called
Arnie,
about a working-class couple with money troubles (months before
All in the Family
premiered with a similar premise), as the real show to watch for the new season, a common refrain among TV critics that year. The character of Lou Grant, another newspaper said, “
may take getting used to,” while Rhoda Morgenstern “is almost a cliché.” For Moore, an actress who remembered every bad review she’d ever had, these pans in major publications stung. She struggled to maintain her famous smile as her blood sugar levels surged and plummeted.

Those bad reviews stung Burns as well. He had pushed himself to his limits coming up with stories and writing scripts for this show. The
live audiences laughed at the tapings, but there was no way to be sure the material was good. The silly photo the cast had taken of all of them crossing their eyes—which they’d snapped with the intention of sending it out to critics who gave them bad reviews—suddenly seemed less funny. Brooks and Burns would soon tell their secretary, Pat Nardo, to throw out all the prints. But Nardo kept one copy in case it was worth something someday. At the time, such a show of faith seemed like a long shot.

Brooks and some of the other staffers took the bad reviews more lightly, at least outwardly. They bitched and joked about them, citing the studio audience’s laughter. Brooks’s braying guffaw stood out from the crowd on any given show night, audible even on air, but he wasn’t the only one laughing. That was all they
could
be sure about, he felt. The rest was beyond their control.

Still, Moore wasn’t yet convinced that the show would avoid joining her growing list of failures. She had faith in the series and the people behind it, but there was mounting evidence that it was not meant to be; it was stymied at every turn, from the network’s rejection of the divorce premise to CBS executives’ lack of enthusiasm for the project to these reviews. Hit status was getting harder and harder to imagine. CBS was at least promoting the show now, with spots featuring Moore’s face mugging for the camera—nothing about the show or its plots or characters—and the tagline “We’ve Got It All Together.” The network clearly hoped viewers would like the idea of watching Dick Van Dyke’s former TV wife on a new show, comforted by her cuteness and former-housewifeliness, and would tune in just for that. Despite Fred Silverman’s scheduling move, which saved the show in the short term, many at CBS still weren’t sure what to make of the series.

When
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
finally premiered, the ratings bore out this ambivalence. They hovered just out of the top twenty—hardly an achievement in the ’70s, when only three networks were vying for viewers. The new Saturday time slot was better than the show’s original spot would have been, but it was still date night.
Sandrich continued to hear from friends at other shows that CBS was preparing another series to take its place if it failed. Jim and Allan could have panicked and begun altering their vision for the show to attract more viewers. But instead they chose to maintain their faith in their own talent, and that of their cast, determined to make sure everyone—even the critics at
Time
and
TV Guide
—saw it.

That meant, however, more pressure on everyone involved to perform. Though they were becoming a workplace family like the one they portrayed on television every week, it wasn’t always easy to maintain that. Sandrich was constantly fighting Brooks on directorial choices and asking Asner to take his booming voice down several notches. Asner’s dramatic skill often got the better of him. When his character was mad, he seemed
really
mad. For the first several episodes, he and Sandrich had to learn to trust each other. They both sensed they might get there, but they weren’t there yet.

Sandrich and Brooks, meanwhile, often fought over Brooks’s penchant for yelling out his suggestions to actors during rehearsals. Brooks just wanted to make his show better the minute he thought of an idea, but this interfered with Sandrich’s process. Sandrich wanted the producers and writers to give their notes to the actors through him to protect his cast from being assailed with critiques from every corner. But Brooks couldn’t help shouting out, “Oh, oh, oh, try this!” in the middle of rehearsals. The producer wasn’t trying to circumvent the director’s power. It just kept happening. He would apologize, but then he would do it again.

And Brooks and Sandrich often differed over how scenes should be played. Brooks thought like a director, even though that wasn’t his job. The two sometimes found compromises, but not without occasional screaming matches. Sandrich frequently tensed up at the point in the week when the writers would come down from their offices to watch rehearsal. The actors hadn’t quite learned the script yet and were generally still carrying pages. Things weren’t working yet.

Sandrich felt outnumbered and outmatched by Brooks, Burns,
and several of their other talented, intelligent writers as they watched from the bleachers. Sandrich wanted to serve as the buffer between the actors and the producers, and this direct contact from the writers and producers threatened that. Sandrich didn’t like the writers getting mad at the actors and vice versa, but the days when the writers watched rehearsal, it was out of his hands.