Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (4 page)

But Albee began disparaging the current script in public: “
All those awful jokes will be thrown out,” he told the
Boston Globe,
“and I hope to substitute some genuine wit.” An angry Burrows left as the production’s director, replaced by
110 in the Shade
director Joseph Anthony.
Actors often received new script pages mere hours before curtain time during the preview shows, which caused major problems even though much of the material, Moore thought, was “
masterful,” ahead of its time. Still, it was excessive. Sometimes the show
ran four hours.

Moore, despite her best efforts, was at least part of the problem. In Boston, she had “
a vocal range of about six notes,” as she later recalled, and a temperature of 103 as she battled the flu.
Audiences in Philadelphia booed her, shocking the cast and crew. Who on earth boos the sweetest sitcom wife on television? Answer: people who want to see the darling star they fell in love with playing someone darling, not playing this dark lady of the night. If Moore had been given the role Audrey Hepburn had playing Holly Golightly, she may have been able to nail it. But she’d been given the part of a complicated, opportunistic hooker with more emphasis on how she made her living (collecting “fifty dollars for the powder room” from her dates)—and sometimes broke out into song. And other times swore. It was a dramatic challenge for which Moore was not prepared. Cast members started calling the show
Who’s Afraid of Holly Golightly?

The implied answer was Mary Tyler Moore. “
She was a dream to work with, inexhaustible,” Merrill said. “She was a good egg, but you always had a sense you knew you weren’t getting all out of her.” Every time Moore left the stage, she felt so terrible that she’d
throw her arms around the stage manager, Burrows’s son Jim, for comfort. Once, she collapsed to the floor, sobbing, “
What have I done wrong?” She
thought she was always about to be fired from the project. Merrick showed no ill will toward the actress, however. Despite rumors that Tammy Grimes or Diahann Carroll might take her place, Merrick never recast the role.

Instead, Merrick put Moore and the rest of the cast out of their misery. On December 15, 1966, he canceled the show before it officially opened in New York, despite having to refund
$1 million in advance ticket sales. He referred to the incident in the press as “
my Bay of Pigs.” Moore later admitted to
Time
magazine, “
I told everybody that
doing
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
had strengthened and enriched me and that I had developed valuable scar tissue to make me tougher. Except that none of that was true.”

Holly Golightly, the character who had redefined single womanhood in America and made an icon of Audrey Hepburn, would not be doing the same for Mary Tyler Moore. Since
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
Moore had acted only in a handful of disposable movies for Universal that she’d been contractually obliged to make. The least offensive of the roles was as the naïve Dorothy, a supporting character in the film version of
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
starring Julie Andrews as the aggressive flapper. The most infamous was as a nun in
Change of Habit,
in which Moore, as Sister Michelle, falls in love with a doctor played by Elvis Presley.

Moore knew how far she’d fallen when she attended a movie premiere and was shoved out of the way by a pack of photographers. “
Step aside, lady,” one of them said to her, “here comes Marlo Thomas.” Thomas was becoming a trendsetter as the star of a new sitcom,
That Girl,
about a single girl trying to make it in the big city. Moore was becoming a no-name, a has-been.

Soon after that, Moore suffered a miscarriage. She had a ten-year-old son from her first marriage, Richie, who shuttled between living with her and with his father, Dick Meeker, whom Moore had married straight out of high school. She had continued
smoking and drinking after she found out she was pregnant with her and Tinker’s first child—still a common practice at the time—and later wondered if her bad habits contributed to her miscarriage. At the hospital after losing the fetus, her body dealt her another blow: Her
doctors discovered she was diabetic. Frustrated, she “
caved in to an assault of self-pity,” as she would later call it, after her diagnosis: She bought a dozen doughnuts, then drove around Beverly Hills eating all of them.

When the
Van Dyke
producers contacted Moore soon after that, with the offer to reunite her with her former TV husband in a variety
special called
Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman,
she grabbed the chance. At best, it would help fans—and, perhaps more importantly, show business—to
forget about the
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
debacle. At worst, it would end up a night of fun with old friends.

It got Moore far more than fun, though. The special didn’t just feature Moore, it presented her as at least an equal to Van Dyke. In fact, it often played like a celebration of her, a reminder through song, dance, and comedy of all the assets that had been buried under the rubble of the last few years of her career. The opening number, “On the Other Hand,” had Van Dyke singing about Moore’s wonderfulness while dancing with dozens of different cardboard cutouts of her looking sexy in a bikini, seductive in a glittery gown, cute in a summer frock. Their first performance together, “Life Is Like a Sitcom,” poked a bit of good-natured fun at their previous life as a TV couple. It was a special that challenged every TV reviewer
not
to use the word
charming
. Moore looked fresh, funny, talented, and totally in her element.

As soon as CBS executives saw the ratings for
Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman,
and heard fans’ enthusiastic response to seeing Moore on television again, they offered her the exact chance at career redemption she needed. How would she like to have her own sitcom, to be the headliner instead of the “other woman”?

Moore saw her way out of the career slump and personal disappointment she’d been stuck in for the last few years; she didn’t hesitate to sign the deal. She’d missed TV comedy since leaving
Dick Van Dyke
. But she also knew she needed this new sitcom of hers to be special.

Under the circumstances, with her career comeback so fresh and still delicate, CBS likely assumed she’d hire Carl Reiner to make her another show in which she played an adorable housewife. That way, everyone—the network and viewers—would get what they expected. If there was a lesson to be learned from the
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
debacle, it was that audiences did not enjoy the element of surprise when it came to Mary Tyler Moore.

But that was not what Moore would do. Instead, she allowed Tinker,
with his eye for both the business and content of television, to take care of the details. Her strategy was to surround herself with talented people she trusted and let them do their thing—exactly what she’d wished she could have done on
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She chose well: Her husband was not only running a major television studio at the time, but he was the kind of guy so perfect you wanted to hate him, except that you couldn’t because he was so darn nice. He was known for hitting the home run at company softball games, for winning every tennis match, and for charming his associates with generosity, kindness, and class. He was good at everything he tried. If anyone had a chance at knocking her new sitcom out of the park, it was Tinker.

The couple had just returned to the welcoming warmth of Los Angeles to escape from the tribulations of the previous few years and for Tinker to start a new job as the head of Twentieth Century Fox Television. It was the perfect time for both Moore and Tinker to start life anew. What better way than working on her comeback project together?

Jim Brooks was hanging out at a laid-back New Year’s Eve party in Los Angeles given by a guy named Bud Wiser—yes, the man, a fellow documentary writer, shared his name with a brand of beer. A Clark Kent type in a tuxedo showed up among the jeans-and-T-shirt crowd as champagne-popping time drew near. Allan Burns had arrived at the party with his wife, Joan, armed with a joke about their stuffy wardrobe, and the stuffier party he’d attended beforehand. “Now can I start having fun?” Burns said, chafing in his tux jacket. He and Joan had been at her friends’ formal shindig ahead of this one. Brooks couldn’t get over someone walking into that Bud Wiser party in black-tie gear.

Brooks and Burns, who’d known of each other through mutual friends, soon started chatting, and Brooks admitted to Burns that he didn’t much like the documentary work he had been doing since moving to Los Angeles. What he wanted to do was comedy, great comedy. Brooks had quit his job in New York as a copywriter in the CBS newsroom
a few months earlier, thinking he’d find a larger sense of purpose writing documentaries in Los Angeles for producer David Wolper. Brooks surprised himself by making the move; he hadn’t thought of himself as someone with enough ambition to do such a thing.

His instinct to move toward the source of media power was a good one. The television business was truly taking over the country now. In the depths of North Dakota, three steel beams connected by a metal grid and painted in alternating red and white bands stretched above the surrounding farmland for
2,063 feet in what was now the tallest man-made structure in the world, the KTHI-TV mast, built for one reason: to broadcast network programming to the widest possible swath of households. To be in on the business that provided that programming, these days, one had to be in Los Angeles.

But since coming to Hollywood, Brooks, a quietly funny guy who enjoyed the work of comedians Mike Nichols and Elaine May, found himself more and more interested in the world of television comedy, rather than documentary. He didn’t dare think he could get a job writing that sort of thing, but it intrigued him. “I want to get into TV,” Brooks told Burns. “Sitcoms.”

Burns’s tux looked to Brooks like a sign of his success in the television business. He knew Burns’s résumé, which spanned the impressive breadth from cartoon
George of the Jungle
to sophisticated sitcom
He & She,
which focused,
Dick Van Dyke
–like, on a cartoonist and his wife (played by real-life couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss). The show had gone off the air after just one season but had gotten loads of industry attention and won Burns an Emmy. By Brooks’s count, Burns had about a million shows on the air at the time. Brooks wanted to be the next Carl Reiner, and this guy was in the right line of work to get him there.

Burns didn’t impress himself quite so much. Though he worked steadily, the work didn’t make him very proud. He was known for, among other things, co-creating the sitcom
My Mother the Car,
which was as ridiculous as its title: It starred Dick Van Dyke’s brother, Jerry,
as a guy whose deceased mother speaks to him through the radio of his antique car. At the same time that hippies were taking LSD and advocating for socialism and protesting war and making free love and
wondering what it all meant,
network television was trying to sell America a show about a guy whose car radio talks to him. The series became an instant, and lasting, punch line about everything dumb and crass and uncool and out-of-touch about TV. In any case, Burns’s television work wasn’t his focus. He was working on a screenplay on the side. He
really
wanted to be a respected film writer. Five years of television had worn him out, and it was time to follow his dream.

That night, as Brooks and Burns rang in 1966, Burns agreed to help secure his new friend a gig writing for
My Mother the Car
. It would be a good and obviously low-pressure place for him to start. The job marked Brooks’s first break into Hollywood writing, and he was grateful for the opportunity, even if
My Mother the Car
was no
Dick Van Dyke
. “Pillar of the Community,” Brooks told him. “That’s my new nickname for you.”

Thanks to the break Burns gave him, Brooks went on to write episodes of
That Girl,
The Andy Griffith Show,
and
My Three Sons
before he was hired as a staffer on the short-lived comedy
My Friend Tony
. Jim Brooks was finally on his way to the career he wanted. Or at least he hoped so.