Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (27 page)

Instead of returning the pleasantry, she snapped, “Really? What’s my name?” Of course he didn’t know. Part of her liked it better that way.

Just as Miller was moving up in the TV industry while clinging to her independent spirit, so was MTM Enterprises. Though it had started out as a “production company” in name only, it was becoming more than the independent force behind
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Now, after a shaky start, the studio’s
Bob Newhart Show
was a modest hit and there was talk of the company producing more programs in the upcoming seasons. Brooks and Burns were at the upper ranks of the expanding enterprise, whether or not they meant to be.

The writers they had plucked from inexperience and obscurity now had the chance to become major forces in the TV business, too. Brooks and Burns offered Susan Silver the chance to executive-produce
Bob Newhart,
a promotion from her role as a freelance writer on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. She turned it down, then immediately started wondering if she’d made the wrong choice. It could lead to her own show to create and produce, not to mention bigger paychecks. But she wanted to give more time to her husband. They were discussing having children. She didn’t want to keep the brutal hours required to run a show while starting a family.

She wrote two episodes of
Bob Newhart
but chose to take her chances on writing some pilot scripts for the next season in hopes of creating her own new show. In essence, she declined to stop freelancing and join the MTM family full-time, with all of its attendant responsibilities, security, benefits, and clout.

Instead,
Bob Newhart
’s co-creators,
Mary Tyler Moore
writer-producers Lorenzo Music and Dave Davis, got the show off the ground without her. It soared into television’s top-twenty ranks with a strong assist from its prime spot on the schedule, right after
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Silver would never stop wondering if she made the wrong choice.

(1972–73)

Treva Silverman liked to hang out in the
Mary Tyler Moore
offices on the lot, smoking grass with the boys after a day of sitting at her desk writing and revising. Amid the occasional clacks of typewriters working overtime and gales of laughter over shared joke ideas, she would puff on a pungent joint or eat one of her home-baked brownies. Lorenzo Music—a husky, dark, brilliant writer-producer—had great stuff, and it was the perfect way to unwind after another packed day on the set. She felt comfortable with Brooks and Burns, as well as Music. Once she’d been made story editor, she spent all of her time on the lot with them. They hung out wherever they could safely smoke joints, usually in their offices on the MTM lot. They all spent most of their after-hours stoned, except Burns. He loved to go home to his wife.

Silverman particularly enjoyed hanging out with Music and was knocked out by his warm-up performances. He was so subtle and silly
and hilarious as the warm-up guy, entertaining the audience before the show and in between set changes, that she once whispered to him, “Don’t be so funny. You’re better than the show!” The workplace was becoming Treva’s family, just as Mary’s had become hers.

The MTM offices had turned out to be a dream come true, everything Silverman could have hoped for back when she was toiling away at piano bars. Silverman knew how lucky she was to have her job. The show was now part of what many have called the best lineup in network history, CBS’s 1973–74 Saturday night:
All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart,
and
Carol Burnett
. Silverman loved to sit on the steps to the offices reading a new script by one of her fellow writers almost as much as she enjoyed writing one of her own. It wasn’t that everyone in the group had a lack of ego—in fact, she thought it just might be the opposite: Their egos were so strong, in the healthiest of ways, that it allowed them to not feel competitive. All they wanted was the best possible show. They rarely got jealous when another writer wrote something great. They just thought,
Wow. I want to do that, too
. It was a heady time to be a sitcom writer, particularly for
Mary Tyler Moore,
and not just because of Treva’s brownies.

Brooks and Burns had instigated an unusual policy concerning a writer’s credits, a policy that showed enormous respect for writers. No matter how many revisions were made on a script by others, the original writer’s credit was kept intact. Even if a script was completely rewritten before it was shot, the producers would never adjust the credits. This policy ensured a level of collaboration rare on television shows. It also guaranteed that the original writer, once committed to an episode, would get all the royalties.

Silverman loved the work she was doing and felt herself growing as a writer. She learned to do the rewrites on someone else’s scripts in that writer’s voice. She learned to write on the fly. Although she longed for a situation akin to Proust’s cork-lined room, she didn’t always have the luxury of being in a quiet room with a typewriter. She did, however, love the group meetings where everybody contributed lines. Nothing is
more wonderful, she thought, than being around first-rate writers who care. It always makes you better.

Silverman had almost everything she had ever wanted—the respect of her fellow producers, the other writers, and the cast; and the chance
Mary Tyler Moore
gave her to shape the image of women for a large, mainstream audience. She still dreamed of finding the man to complete her fantasy scenario: accepting her Emmy while her husband rushes her off on their trip to Paris. But she was racking up Emmys, so she hardly had time to find him. While she was self-conscious about her still-unmarried status—Mary and Rhoda’s rise helped on this score, but didn’t erase the stigma in less progressive minds overnight—she dated up a storm. Her hair was long and blond, and she wore lots of miniskirts. She was popular. She simply didn’t find a keeper. Instead, she enjoyed what she thought was a wonderful time in America. She had what she calls “ ’70s kinds of experiences, Summer of Love experiences.”

With so much freedom, and almost all of her dreams coming true, the key question in Silverman’s life became: What do you do once you’ve gotten almost everything you wanted?

At the same time, there were much bigger battles to fight in television, and with television.

Norman Lear appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on constitutional rights in 1972 to argue for greater artistic freedom for all involved in the arts, particularly TV. “
As a writer and producer of
All in the Family,
I seem to be enjoying a rather singular experience insofar as network censorship is concerned,” Lear said in his statement. “While I confer many times a week with the Program Practices Department of CBS, I am happy to report that we are not censored on
All in the Family
.” Indeed, later that year,
All in the Family
would feature prime time’s first audible toilet flush, during a flashback to Mike and Gloria’s wedding, and would make a point of often featuring commode noise in subsequent episodes.

This “Golden Age of Comedy” had happened thanks to a strange confluence of events: the rise of several talented writer-producers, namely Brooks and Burns and Lear, and a willingness at the television networks to run with anything that attracted younger audiences and watercooler buzz. Those who worked on these particular shows were having an exhilarating time of it. Their success earned them freedom.

Despite this freedom, these shows could not portray many key facets of the tumultuous ’70s—and less successful shows could do even less. What happened in many young people’s real lives and what happened on television did not necessarily correspond. As Silverman, Brooks, Burns, and the others sat writing
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
their contemporaries around the country held key parties in suburban homes, experimented with group sex, and had a great time all around. Silverman thought it was a wonderful time, the way life should be and would be from then on.
We’ve finally found it,
she thought.
How nice.

But
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
could only push so far, so fast. Those with less liberal minds than Treva Silverman weren’t quite ready for all of that in prime time, and she knew it. It never even crossed the writers’ minds to incorporate those more
realistic
aspects of their lives into the show. There would be no Mary Smokes Grass with the Guys After Work episode. (Mary rarely even got drunk.) Mary went on countless dates, and she may have spent the night with a few of them, but the writers weren’t about to send her to a key party or an orgy. Mary, a good girl from the Midwest, might have a sexual affair or two, but, as Silverman says, “Mary Goes to the Playboy Mansion, I think, was an idea whose time had never come. ‘Mary swims topless, as Hugh Hefner looks fondly on,’ was not going to happen.”

What the show could get away with, as it rose in popularity throughout its second season, remained to be seen. Brooks and Burns had instilled the ideal of authenticity in their writers and cast. But how much of single women’s real sex lives would make it into the scripts, past network executives and censors? And how real could America take
their fictional female characters, even those as now beloved as Mary and Rhoda, before they turned their dials? Was Mary Richards that kind of girl? And what kind, for that matter, was that kind?

Mary Richards may have summed up her own position on the matter best: “I’m hardly innocent. I’ve been around. Well, maybe not
around,
but I’ve been nearby.” She did, however, grow more liberated over time. As the show hit its peak influence in the third season, one episode had Mary staying out all night with a man, though only by insinuation: We see Mary leave for a date at night, and in the next shot we see her arrive home in the morning wearing the same dress. Men across the country wrote to the show in despair over the betrayal of their trust and admiration. Just a few weeks later, an even bigger landmark in Mary’s sex life came by quick, subtle suggestion: Mary’s dad comes over for some father-daughter time, and as her mom leaves him there for dinner with Mary, she calls out, “Don’t forget to take your pill!” Both father and daughter reply, “I won’t!”

“The Pill!” Brooks says. “That was a
huge
landmark.”

Birth control pills had
first won approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, and the Pill was credited for kicking off both the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, as symbolized by a
Time
magazine cover story in 1967. But the Pill wasn’t available to unmarried women in all states until the 1972 Supreme Court decision
Eisenstadt v. Baird
.

“Mary was a nice girl, in quotation marks,” Silverman explains of the Pill moment’s grand significance. “Had it had something to do with Rhoda it wouldn’t have had that effect, because Rhoda was something of a rebel. If Mary was taking the Pill, it gave the stamp of approval for sexuality.” In fact, several lines early in the show’s run referred to Rhoda’s active sex life, including a second-season episode when a fire in her apartment forces her to room with Mary briefly. As they get on each other’s nerves, Rhoda threatens to go to a hotel; Phyllis cracks that it wouldn’t be the first time. Rhoda—as a secondary
character, a former New Yorker, and, perhaps, as a more “ethnic” woman—was accepted from the start as more worldly.