Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (34 page)

When the pilot didn’t make it on the air, Brooks and Burns—who were fond of the women’s work together—asked them to write for the
Rhoda
spin-off. They happily signed on. Nardo also started hanging out with Jim Brooks and Dave Davis more than ever. She often went to lunch with them, begging them like a pesky little sister to tell her what they were discussing when they referred to producer business she didn’t know about. They became her best friends, her big brothers, and her closest advisers whenever she had trouble with men, which was fairly often. The three of them went out to Dave and Jim’s beach house, taking care of Jim’s baby daughter when he had her for the weekend. For Pat, at least, it was the best time of her life.

In fact, Nardo and Banta were both having a blast. They thought the people they worked with on the show were wonderful, and they loved having an office to go to every day. It felt, even in the moment, like a golden time in their lives. The women took refuge in the comforting world of MTM Entertainment, away from the still-sexist world that most of Hollywood was. They’d tried to write for some other shows, including one where they stood outside a meeting room while the male producers discussed their script. They could hear one of the
guys saying, “Well, it’s a piece of shit, but I’d sure like to fuck that Banta.” They knew there were men like that in the business, but none of them was at MTM.

New writer Deborah Leschin also found her place among
Rhoda
’s young female staffers. The bubbly twenty-six-year-old started out at Garry Marshall’s new project,
Laverne & Shirley,
but she dreamed of working with Valerie Harper or Dick Van Dyke. She was living back at her parents’ place in Passaic, New Jersey, after a stint with Marshall, when she decided to write a few spec scripts for
Mary Tyler Moore
. She soon got a call from
Rhoda
producers asking her to come aboard, and she was breathless with excitement. She felt like Rhoda made the single woman in the ’70s look like a “bright, shiny penny.” She’d wanted to work for MTM Entertainment so badly that on a previous trip to Los Angeles, she’d driven by the studio on Radford Avenue and took a photo of the gate, determined to drive through it someday.

When she returned to Los Angeles for a job interview with Charlotte Brown, she didn’t feel it went well, but she got the job anyway. The two didn’t seem to mesh, but Brown needed another woman on her staff and chose Leschin.

Leschin couldn’t believe her luck, regardless of her friction with Brown. She would drive home from work in her new little Mercedes and scream with joy. She had said she was going to be a writer for
Rhoda,
and, dammit, she had done it. Her parents had scoffed at her dreams. Her friends had said, “Do you know how many single Jewish girls in New Jersey want to write for this show?” But she did it. Dream after dream came true. Some of those old friends back in New Jersey were now getting married and having babies, but to that she said:
Feh
.

Brooks and Burns, meanwhile, along with Davis and Music, worked overtime now to crank out quality scripts for both
Mary Tyler Moore
and
Rhoda,
in addition to attending to
The Bob Newhart Show
. Music had audience warm-up duties at all the shows, with the tapings spread throughout the week. Brooks shocked his coworkers by getting only more brilliant the more he produced. The writers and producers
would all sit in a room thinking,
What are we going to do? The second act is a mess
. Brooks would say, “What if . . . ?” And then he’d tear into an idea, complete with plot twists and killer lines. His colleagues would wonder,
What are we doing here?
They could see they were in a room with a genius, and they weren’t sure their own contribution was even necessary. They knew their script would end up with five lines of their own and the rest Brooks’s, but they didn’t mind one bit.

The Radford Avenue studio became known as “Camelot” because of Tinker’s insistence on giving his writer-producers autonomy and fighting network interference on their behalf. Brooks and Burns, encouraged by the Camelot philosophy, had just created yet another show for the MTM empire as well,
Friends and Lovers
. They
raked in three hundred thousand dollars per year each at this time, though the work was endless. To keep themselves sane—or was it the opposite?—they developed a system to test jokes. Since Nardo was no longer their secretary, they didn’t have her disapproval as a bellwether for bad lines. Now they had a buzzer at the office that they could hit to signify their lack of approval for a gag, while a unanimous winner was signaled with a music box that played “The Impossible Dream.”

With
Rhoda,
however, the producers had one major concern beyond writing good jokes: forestalling her marriage as much as possible. Silverman pushed for a fall sweeps wedding. “I think it’s going to be a number-one Nielsen show,” he told them.

“Aww, come on!” they remember protesting. “We’ve got so much we want to do in the first year. Maybe at the
end
of the first year we get them married. Not this close to the beginning!”

But by the eighth episode, on October 28, 1974, Fred Silverman had his way. Rhoda and Joe walked down the aisle in a two-part special that brought Mary, Georgette, Phyllis, Murray, and Lou to New York for the nuptials. Silverman’s prediction came true; the episode went through the roof. In fact, it broke several records. It became the highest-rated television episode of the decade thus far, and the second-most-watched
of all time, beat only by the birth of Little Ricky on
I Love Lucy
in the ’50s.
More than 50 million Americans tuned in, which represented more than half of the total audience watching television that night.
Monday Night Football
host Howard Cosell, as he called a game on a different channel opposite the broadcast, cracked that he hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Fans held wedding parties to watch together throughout the country and sent “wedding gifts” to CBS. Harper—who, in the episode, famously ran through the streets of Manhattan in her wedding dress after Phyllis forgot to pick her up for the big day—won her fourth Emmy for the performance. Brooks and Burns enjoyed notching a new accomplishment: They had produced their first country-stopper of an episode.

In fact,
Rhoda
even beat
Mary Tyler Moore
in the ratings during its first season on the air, 1974–75, which solidified Rhoda Morgenstern as an icon. Mary and Rhoda made the October 1974 cover of
Time
as “Funny Girls” when the magazine declared that year “the Golden Age of comedy.” Harper, the Jersey girl who’d dreamed of being a ballerina, had turned her New York upbringing—and her impression of her stepmother, Angela—into one of TV’s most memorable characters. “A failed ballerina you have before you,” she would say, “but a successful actress.”

When Grant Tinker asked Jim Brooks and Allan Burns about writing a spin-off script for Cloris Leachman, even his confident baritone couldn’t convince them. Both producers said a polite, “No, thanks.” They respectfully offered a litany of potential pitfalls they saw with the project. They were both pretty busy by this point, overseeing
Mary Tyler Moore,
helping with
Rhoda,
and launching
Friends and Lovers
. So they had a perfectly good excuse not to get involved in
Phyllis,
but their objections went beyond that.

For starters, there was the Cloris problem. Just because Phyllis stood in a certain place or said a certain line at a certain time in a script did not mean Cloris would perform it that way. In fact, it almost guaranteed
she wouldn’t. She wanted to live every last scene as Phyllis; she wanted to embody the essence of Phyllis, which was to be the most important person in the room. Onlookers had a hard time telling where Cloris ended and Phyllis began; even Cloris herself did. And that was despite the fact that she’d continued appearing in several of the era’s most progressive films. In Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of Henry James’s
Daisy Miller,
she played Cybill Shepherd’s mother. She stole the show as the terrifying Frau Blucher in Mel Brooks’s
Young Frankenstein
. Yet, when she returned to the job of playing Phyllis, she
became
Phyllis, through and through, with all the difficulties that entailed.

This approach worked on the sets of Oscar-caliber films and it even worked on the set of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
for a recurring secondary character once everyone got the hang of her. It remained to be seen, however, how her approach would transfer to her own spin-off. And yet the prospect of a show of her own grew likely as Leachman became a star in her own right. MTM would likely lose her to another production company if it didn’t give her a bigger showcase.

In addition to the Cloris problem, however, there was the Phyllis problem. Phyllis was an even trickier character to turn into a leading lady than Rhoda had been, given that her main function on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was to be abrasive and self-absorbed. But Leachman, then forty-nine and reaching a new apex, wanted to follow in Harper’s footsteps, and Weinberger and Daniels were up for the challenge of creating a show for her. Tinker put his faith in Leachman’s performance and hoped for the best.

In an effort to soften Phyllis for her role as a main character, the writers lost many of the kooky elements that made her such a hit in a supporting role, though Leachman still tore into the part with her trademark scene-chewing force. The show explored new sitcom territory in featuring a middle-aged widow, with Phyllis’s often-mentioned, never-seen husband, Lars, dying in the pilot episode. Phyllis is shown grieving and finding out that Lars left her no life insurance. (Perhaps befitting the invisible Lars, no one ever explains how he died.) The
conceit was a clever way to start Phyllis on a brand-new life in San Francisco when she moves in with her in-laws, and it helped garner instant sympathy for the notoriously prickly character.

But the show suffered from comparison to
Mary Tyler Moore
and
Rhoda
. Even worse, it weathered a devastating loss to its cast early on. Barbara Colby, once a crowd favorite on
Mary Tyler Moore
as Mary’s prostitute cell mate in the episode in which Mary is jailed, joined the spin-off cast as Phyllis’s new boss at a photography studio. After she appeared in just three episodes, however, Colby and a colleague, James Kiernan, were both killed while walking to her car after an acting class in the Venice section of Los Angeles. They were
shot by two men in the parking lot the night of July 24, 1975. Kiernan lived long enough afterward to describe the murder to police, but it was never solved; authorities classified it as a random “thrill killing” since the victims weren’t robbed and the perpetrators didn’t seem to have another motive. Liz Torres took over Colby’s role on
Phyllis,
but the show never found its footing afterward.

Leachman proved the ideal star to lend her cast emotional support after the tragedy—she was nothing if not a mother. She would tell “
Barbara stories” to cheer everyone up, recounting funny incidents in which Colby had ad-libbed off camera. Leachman herself had more trouble coping, but she kept it to herself. “It was the worst death I’ve ever experienced,” she said at the time. “With my mother and father, at least it was fair.”

Then, two more cast members died during the show’s run: eighty-six-year-old Judith Lowry, who played Mother Dexter, died in 1976, and just two months later, her ninety-two-year-old on-screen boyfriend (whom she’d just married on the show), Burt Mustin, died as well.

There were, however, other problems with the show. Leachman’s perfectionism ate at everyone’s patience, and it was harder to handle when she was the dominant force on the set. She
could spend hours debating the optimal heights of stools she and her boss would sit on
for a scene or demonstrating how a supporting character should deliver a line. She came on strong with her fellow actors, who could get defensive if they didn’t know her well. Besides which, if they did do what she’d asked, often the result was for her character to be in the spotlight, all others fading out.