Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (40 page)

As MacLeod loaded his dressing room odds and ends into the trunk of his car in the studio parking lot, MTM executive Arthur Price said, “I’m so sorry this is over. What are you going to do now?”

MacLeod, ever the optimist, said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to
stop now. My career has always been blessed.” He closed the trunk and added, “But nothing will ever be the same as this, either.”

Brooks was so wired that he couldn’t go home. He and his girlfriend, Holly, slept at the nearby Century Plaza hotel just to come down from the buzz before heading back into real life.

Moore spent the next three weeks with a lump in her throat, mourning the fall of her Camelot. White couldn’t think about the last episode without crying.

The
Mary Tyler Moore
team left a permanent reminder of their presence on Soundstage 2, a plaque with an inscription written by Tinker: “On this stage a company of loving and talented friends produced a television classic.”

The finale would become the benchmark for greatness in the particularly fraught feat of wrapping up multiple years of a popular television series. And the show itself was instantly recognized as something special, the likes of which were rare.
Time
magazine summed up the show’s legacy when its finale aired: “
In many places around the U.S.,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
changed the nature of Saturday nights; it even became fashionable to spend them at home. The show turned the situation comedy into something like an art form—a slight art form perhaps, but a highly polished one. MTM was the sitcom that was intellectually respectable. The writing, acting and directing on MTM have been the best ever displayed in TV comedy. Owing much to Moore, who always set a tone of perfectionism, the show has been technically superb and beautifully paced. Former CBS Executive James Aubrey used to say, ‘The American public is something I fly over.’ But unlike 90% of TV’s sitcoms, MTM has always transmitted intelligence, along with a rather unique respect for its characters and its audience.”

The show had come a long way from the “disaster”
Time
had predicted on the occasion of its premiere seven years earlier.

“I don’t want anybody to make any fuss. When I go, I just want to be stood outside in the garbage with my hat on.”

—Lou Grant

(1977–present)

In the summer of 1977, Joe Rainone quit his job at the family business. Intrigued by his adventures with
Mary Tyler Moore,
he wanted to see more of the country. With the show over, he felt his “anchor was gone,” he says. He told his family, “I’m just going to be gone one day, and then you’ll know I left. No good-byes.” (Howard Arnell would be proud.) In July, he got into his 1973 yellow Corvette and wandered west from Rhode Island, armed with a crate full of brochures he’d collected by writing away to tourist sites for information.

Throughout the Midwest, and on toward the coast, he sent postcards to a list of his favorite people. Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker got one from the Grand Canyon.

When he reached Los Angeles, he stopped by the MTM studio. He walked over from his seedy motel on Ventura Boulevard, the kind of place that usually rents by the hour. But the
Mary Tyler Moore
set was gone, its staff and cast dispersed. He went to the office to say
hi to Carol Straughn, who’d so generously brought him to the finale five months earlier. She was friendly, but busy helping her boss, Allan Burns, with a new project—Ed Asner’s spin-off,
Lou Grant
.

Rainone wandered over to the MTM administration building and found Tinker’s secretary. He introduced himself: “I’m an old friend of Grant’s from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.”

Tinker came right out and welcomed Rainone into his office. The two sat and chatted, Tinker propping his white-sneakered feet up on his executive desk. Tinker told Rainone tales from his own post-college drive around the country. After about twenty minutes of small talk, Tinker asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“I think I’ll head back,” Joe said. It was time to move on.

At the same time, James L. Brooks and Allan Burns faced perhaps the toughest decision of their careers: What does one do once one has created a television classic and guided it to a perfect end? What does one do after leaving the best job of one’s life?

Brooks had no doubt: He wanted to keep working with their team, to stay with at least part of the family they’d built over the previous seven years—Stan Daniels, Dave Davis, and Ed. Weinberger—to keep making great television. But the group felt that MTM Enterprises, their onetime Camelot, had gotten too big for its own good. As
Mary Tyler Moore
came to an end, the company still had a slew of shows on the air:
The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda, The Tony Randall Show,
and Ed Asner’s and Betty White’s own new series coming soon. Many more were in the works, and Brooks wanted his group to follow in the steps of their hero, Grant Tinker, instead of continuing to work for his growing company. He wanted them to run their own production company.

But when they asked Burns to join them, he decided to stick with MTM and
Lou Grant
. He and Brooks had talked their old boss at
Room 222,
Gene Reynolds, into executive-producing the new show. He’d been working on
M*A*S*H
since
Room 222,
and they knew
he’d be a great asset to their spin-off, which would be an hour-long, issue-driven drama. Brooks and Burns had gone to Reynolds’s office at
M*A*S*H,
which was now in its fifth season on the air, to ask for his help on
Lou Grant
. When they walked in, he was ending a tense phone call that seemed to be about his contract. They knew then that they had a shot.

Once they pitched the show concept to him, they could see his eyes sparkling with excitement. They asked him to join them. He demurred, saying he was mid-negotiation but would consider it. After a few tense weeks, he called them: He was in.

But in the meantime, Brooks decided he was out. Burns objected to the idea of leaving MTM behind, and to abandoning their character’s spin-off. He decided to run
Lou Grant
with Reynolds while working on his long-abandoned movie scripts on the side.

Brooks left MTM with Daniels, Davis, and Weinberger, a formidable team. Each was now regarded as a giant in sitcom writing in his own right, and the group’s first project was on the air the very next fall: the sitcom
Taxi,
based, in fact, on an article Grant Tinker had owned the rights to. When they read the
New York
magazine piece, “Night-Shifting for the Hip Fleet,” they knew that was what they wanted for their show. Brooks in particular wanted to do a “real male show” after years of concentrating so much on women. But Tinker had already optioned the 1975 story. Brooks called his old boss and asked, “Hey, can I have it?”

MTM may have grown, but it hadn’t gotten too large for Tinker to lose his familial spirit. He gave the article to them without a second thought, once again renewing Brooks’s faith in him as a person and a businessman. Tinker was, Brooks thought, what it meant to be a righteous man, a standard to live up to. With that one gesture, Brooks knew he would always be able to count on his
Mary Tyler Moore
family to back him up, even when he was on his own.

The show, about a ragtag group of cabdrivers in New York City, built on the tradition of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
with its intricate
characters and the workplace family at its center. The character of Elaine Nardo, an art gallery receptionist/driver played by Marilu Henner, was named for Brooks and Burns’s onetime secretary, Pat Nardo. Actor Tony Danza’s character, a losing boxer named Tony Banta, paid tribute to Nardo’s writing partner, Gloria Banta. The producers threw themselves into the project, scared of the inevitable comparisons with
Mary Tyler Moore
. They also found themselves on a completely different scene, with a predominantly young, predominantly male cast. “
The
Taxi
group was a very different, gritty, lively, raucous group,” Brooks said. “
Taxi
parties were always great parties.
Mary
parties you got home early.”

Burns, meanwhile, was ready to be himself instead of part of the group, after years of writing with the powerful force known as Jim Brooks. He got his shot at running a show without Brooks when
Lou Grant
debuted in 1977. Brooks and Burns worked together to create the show before Brooks’s departure, and decided the best way to make it stick was by moving their sitcom character into his own drama. The outlook was promising: The show, which followed Lou as he tackled issues at a new newspaper job, earned great reviews right away, unlike its predecessor. “
Ed Asner finally brings something fresh to the beat—an original, multidimensional character,”
Newsweek
said.

Even though TV was now officially the populist medium—it was in a staggering 71 million homes—Burns was still dreaming of writing for film. He loved doing
Lou Grant,
but, as ever, felt that it was stalling his longtime ambition. He handed over most of the daily show-running duties to Gene Reynolds while he carved out some extra writing time and got to work. Finally, the screenwriting career he’d been putting off for the past decade came to life when he wrote the script for the 1979 drama
A Little Romance,
based on the novel
E=Mc2 Mon Amour
. The story follows a teen, played by Diane Lane, who falls in love in France and runs away from her objecting mother with the help of a pickpocket, played by Laurence Olivier. The film made Lane a celebrated wunderkind, landing her on the
cover of
Time
magazine as one
of “Hollywood’s Whiz Kids,” and secured Burns an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (He ultimately lost to
Kramer vs. Kramer
.)

It was also the work Burns was most proud of in his life thus far. Clearly, he had at least a little talent of his own.

His other concurrent script, for
Butch and Sundance: The Early Years,
came out a few months later and bombed. Still, it seemed Burns had achieved his ideal career, shuttling between
Lou Grant
and movie writing. The occasional fizzle was to be expected in
any
movie career. With
Rhoda
over by 1978, his ties to Brooks were severed, but both were now well on their way to their own separate, if parallel, trajectories.

The same year Burns’s two films came out, Brooks’s first screenplay made it to the big screen as well. The romantic comedy
Starting Over,
featuring Candice Bergen, Burt Reynolds, and Jill Clayburgh in a love triangle, jump-started Brooks’s big-screen career, with
New York Times
critic Janet Maslin saying it was “
fast and funny while break[ing] new ground.”
All the Presidents’ Men
director Alan J. Pakula brought it to the screen and allowed Brooks to be more involved in the filmmaking process than most screenwriters normally were, but Brooks did not enjoy being far more sidelined from his own creation than he ever was in television. From then on, he determined, he’d be a writer-director. But he watched Pakula closely in anticipation of his own directing career, and learned one piece of invaluable directing wisdom from him: “
Take that nap. Every man’s a master of his own energy.”

Both Brooks and Burns were nominated for Writers Guild of America awards in 1980 for their scripts. They attended the awards together, but lost to Jerzy Kosinski, who wrote the adaptation of his own novel
Being There
for a comedy starring Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine.