Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (21 page)

Television was gaining so much power that some, including Mayer, accused it of killing live entertainment and mainstream magazines, poisoning sports and news, and aiming to take down newspapers and political elections. Cable television
seemed
to simply be bringing broadcast television to far-flung rural areas that didn’t have local stations, but Mayer saw something else. Those newfangled domestic communication satellites, beaming programs willy-nilly all over the United States, portended potential bedlam. Cable television, with its coaxials snaking their way underneath us all, weaving an invisible web whose force was yet unknown, would be the nation’s next “impending disaster,” he predicted.

(1970–73)

Anyone who wondered where Mary Richards got her chic sense of style—and many young women across the country wanted very much to know—stopped wondering when they saw
Leslie Hall. The former beauty queen kept the trunk of her Plymouth stocked with clothing, sewing kits, and other emergency fashion supplies, and she kept herself dressed in the kind of fitted pantsuits, trench coats, flared slacks, and tailored blouses Mary’s character was becoming famous for.

Hall, who was married to an actor, grew up in Chicago and moved west as a young model to seek work as a showgirl. After her divorce in 1953, she went to work in live TV at CBS Television City. Though she’d hoped to be a set designer, she settled for costume design when she found the set world impenetrably sexist. Soon she was working on television shows such as
77 Sunset Strip
and in feature films such as
Bye Bye Birdie
and
The Music Man
. Her big break came when she dressed
Elizabeth Montgomery on
Bewitched,
which led to work on the fashionably influential
Get Smart
.

Hired as the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s costume designer for the female cast members after the pilot episode, Hall constantly refined Mary’s image, dressing Moore like her own life-sized Barbie doll. She would whisper her disapproval of the smallest details about Moore’s outfits whenever she hadn’t dressed the star. As she sat watching the Emmys on television with her young son, Gary, she’d scoff at how horrible Moore’s taste was in her view. No one else did—Moore was a fashion idol dating back to
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
after all—but Hall had an impeccable eye. She couldn’t tolerate anything outside the bounds of her own refined taste.

Hall felt at home on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. She was spirited and funny like the main character, and a trailblazer in her own industry. The costumers’ guild awarded “cards” to members, rating them according to experience: 1–3 ratings had been reserved for men and 4–6 had been reserved for women until Hall made the first female 1.

Hall also brought an innovative idea to dressing Mary Richards: She decided to make a deal with one designer to provide all of the character’s clothes for the season’s twenty-plus episodes. This approach would expose the clothing to a wide audience and provide the character with a realistic, consistent, and stylish wardrobe. Evan-Picone, known for its ready-to-wear, career-oriented separates, would match Mary’s character perfectly. Before that, costumers had simply gone to department stores and bought clothes that they would tailor to their actors. Hall’s
Mary Tyler Moore
deal marked TV’s first fashion product placement of sorts. It also marked one of the first instances of a character so realistic that she rewore the same pieces, mixing and matching from episode to episode. Mary’s miniskirts and tasteful sweaters, tailored slacks and shirtdresses, would reappear throughout a season.

During the audience warm-up before every Friday night taping, so many questions came up about the clothes that Hall would routinely come out and answer fashion inquiries for twenty or thirty minutes.
And Hall’s ideas made such an impression in the costuming world that the giant William Morris Agency offered to “package” her as they had the similarly talented Rita Riggs, a close friend of Hall who handled all of Norman Lear’s shows. Riggs went on to handle several shows at a time with a team of assistants, but Hall declined. She didn’t want to become a corporation.

Moore’s stand-in, Mimi Kirk, contributed a key fashion element to the show, though she’d never get an official credit from the costuming department. The tall brunette with ice-blue eyes had assisted the star as her lighting double and secretary from the show’s early days and always dressed in elaborate gypsy-style fashion. A widowed mother of four young children, Kirk began meditating after her husband died in a private-plane crash. And she took on many of the accoutrements of the health-food and self-help culture she’d adopted, including the flowy, hippie wardrobe. She loved clothes made out of scarves and tablecloths and even bedspreads. On a typical day at the set, she wore jeans and Frye boots, floaty tops and huge earrings, and the occasional headscarf.

While Harper spent the first episodes trying to look extra-chunky in baggy, store-bought clothes, she admired Moore’s business girl wardrobe and wished her character could develop her own distinctive look. One day as she watched Kirk on the set, Harper asked Burns, “What would you think if I went that way?” Rhoda, she reasoned, thought of herself as an artist even though she was a window dresser, and dressing like Kirk would provide a nice contrast with Mary’s tailored look.

Burns encouraged her to experiment with the idea, so she wore a cardigan and had Kirk tie it at the waist for her. She tweezed her eyebrows thinner and at Kirk’s urging tried a headscarf, specially twisted and tied around her head by Kirk. Soon Kirk became Harper’s assistant and Moore hired a new one. Kirk made clothes for Harper—scarf-like tops, a purse made out of an abalone shell. She coordinated with Hall, but brought in more and more clothing for Harper, eventually giving all of her scarves to the actress.

Kirk embroidered constantly, sitting with Moore and Harper
as they needlepointed on the set, and even embroidered a shirt for Brooks. Harper upgraded her own everyday wardrobe a bit to match her character’s, having lacked any specific sense of style before that. Now, as more young women imitated Rhoda’s headscarves, she, too, became a fashion icon. The headscarf—an idea Kirk had lifted from a photo spread she saw in
National Geographic
—had become a national trend. So much so that Harper suggested to Kirk, “Why don’t you make these scarves and sell them?” But Kirk preferred helping her friend look great as Rhoda, nothing more.

As
Mary Tyler Moore
’s audience grew, advertisers, and thus TV networks, were scrambling to cater to the new consumer group known as “Life Stylers”:
women who embraced liberation in their everyday lives without necessarily identifying as feminists. These women
were
Mary Richards. And they needed fabulous clothes, beauty products, and furniture to feel like the independent women they wanted to be. The rise of the young, empowered woman on television had at least as much to do with marketing as with feminist ideals. Products such as Charlie perfume, Breck shampoo, and Aqua Net hair spray now had the perfect place to advertise their wares.

And
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s female stars were benefiting—their audience may not have been as big as
All in the Family
’s, but their target viewers were far more chic. Those viewers wanted to emulate their favorite characters, Mary and Rhoda.

Interviews became a regular burden, both on the set and off, during most of the women’s downtime, particularly for Moore. Women’s magazines hung on her every word. (
Ladies’ Home Journal,
for instance,
promised its readers: “Mary Tyler Moore, Ali MacGraw, and Others: Beauty secrets of the world’s most glamorous women.”) “
I do interviews for the sake of the show, and that’s about it,” she told one reporter at the time. “Interviews are like set-pieces. I find that most of my life is doing set-pieces. At home, outside, and of course down here at work. Just one set-piece after another. Very rarely are there times
when I can just be myself, be with my husband or a friend, and relax.” Almost every interviewer who came her way mentioned in his or her story how proper Moore was—nice, but guarded. Her eye contact fluttered. Her most revelatory answers were about her own guardedness. “I’m cautious in my dealings,” she said. “I’m a hang-back person when things get uncomfortable. I’m reserved, I guess. I’m precise; I’m never late to anything, always ahead of time and waiting. I tend to be moderate; some people think I’m very conservative, and sometimes I am.”

But as the show became a phenomenon, Ed, Gavin, and Ted were keeping track of how much rehearsal time went into their camp—the newsroom—and the girls’ camp—Mary’s home. And they didn’t like what they found.

The men could handle the fact that the women got more attention for their wardrobes and from the press—they loved their costars and didn’t begrudge them the media spotlight. But the guys grew jealous of a slight they took personally: how much time the producers and directors spent on the girls’ scenes. The guys hid their feelings; all three were experienced dramatic actors, after all. Sandrich never knew how they felt. He just knew they were efficient with their working style; they nailed their scenes and moved on. They also often had simpler staging to master in the office set than the women had in Mary’s apartment. Sandrich didn’t worry about the guys. But the guys worried about what they saw as a lack of support from their director, and they grew a little envious of their female costars.

Perhaps they also simply weren’t used to playing second string to a bunch of women. Such was life on the set of TV’s first truly female-dominated sitcom.

Asner, MacLeod, and Knight also grew close because of their separation from the women. They often sat together on the sidelines and watched Moore, Harper, and Leachman rehearse. They’d watch again from the wings during the women’s scenes at tapings. Their beef wasn’t with the women themselves, after all. The ladies appreciated the shows
of support; they loved to come offstage and see the three guys lined up against the scrim in their director’s chairs.

Other times, the guys took long lunches together, developing both deep friendships and tensions. Tellingly, Asner and Knight jockeyed for who would be the first man through the door whenever they entered a restaurant; MacLeod was always the third.

Asner and Knight had a bond MacLeod couldn’t penetrate. Asner and Knight both knew what it was like to want to be the best, the biggest, the most. They bonded quickly and rushed into a brotherly level of closeness, often checking on each other throughout the day on the set whether or not they had scenes together. They shared an ambition the laid-back MacLeod lacked. He figured that what was meant to be would happen. Asner and Knight made things happen.

This instinct made for stellar performances, but it did no favors for their friendship.

Knight, it seemed, harbored more acute jealousies than his male costars did. He felt he was the lowest in the pecking order of all the regular cast members, period. It began in the first season, when he was the only one with an outdoor trailer for a dressing room, which he called his “pizza oven.” More than a decade older than Moore, Knight felt he deserved his own show.