Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (45 page)

Asner appreciated the sentiment but felt trapped by his situation. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “They’re attacking me. Do you want me to shut up?”

They had no answer, but soon they didn’t need one.
Lou Grant
—despite its continuing place in the top ten—was canceled by the fall of 1982. CBS executives maintained that the decision had nothing to do with politics, though Asner pointed out that actor Howard Hesseman, who’d also participated in the rally for the rebels, found his equally popular
WKRP in Cincinnati
axed as well. The network never acknowledged a tie between the political uproar and the cancellations, but Asner will always believe there was one.

Asner felt he was “blacklisted” by some after the event, and his agent advised him to stop responding to accusations because it “kept the game alive.” But Asner wasn’t as concerned about his own career prospects as he was sorry to put the cast, crew, producers, and writers
out of work. He thought the ensemble on
Lou Grant
was as good as that on
Mary Tyler Moore,
and he felt badly that they didn’t get to continue. But he would never admit he regretted saying what he did. He simply regretted the consequences.

He would also never admit he regretted his fallout with Knight when Knight failed to defend him in interviews about the controversy. But it was a shame nonetheless.

At the Church of the Recessional, in Forest Lawn Cemetery, just outside Los Angeles, on a perfect August day, Knight’s body lay in a flag-draped casket. The
Mary Tyler Moore
writers had taken out a full-page ad in that morning’s
Variety,
showing a photo of Knight as Baxter and saying, “Bye, Guy.” Mourners filled the pews to capacity. Asner was among them, along with Moore, Leachman, Harper, and MacLeod. Producer David Lloyd, who’d written the “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode, spoke. Nancy Dussault, Knight’s
Too Close for Comfort
costar, read a telegram from President Reagan: “All America joins us in mourning the loss of this fine man, who gave us the best of his talents and captured our affection and admiration.”

MacLeod then stood before the congregation and told them about his thirty-year journey with the man who was Ted Baxter. He told them about working with Knight, and about their final prayer together. Then he cited none other than Chuckles the Clown’s oft-quoted motto: “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants,” he said. “That’s how I’ll remember you, Ted. Oh, the fun we had together.”

On May 19, 2008, all of the surviving cast members from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—Mary Tyler Moore, Ed Asner, Gavin MacLeod, Valerie Harper, Betty White, Cloris Leachman, and Georgia Engel—gathered on the Chicago set of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. Winfrey had watched every episode throughout her teens “like my life depended on it,” she said. Now that Winfrey had become the most powerful person in media—an unthinkable feat for a woman when
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had begun—she used her clout to make one of her own dreams come true. She was reuniting the cast of the show that had inspired her to become the woman she was. In 1997, a surprise appearance by Moore on
Oprah
had rendered Winfrey sobbing and speechless. Now she wanted the whole cast there for a real interview. “The show was a light in my life, and Mary was a trailblazer for my generation,” she said. “She’s the reason I wanted my own production company.”

Her staff re-created the newsroom set of WJM and Mary’s first studio apartment. The
seventy-five-member crew assigned to the task pored over DVDs of the show to get every detail correct. They found out how tall Moore was, then scaled their sketches as close as possible to the originals. They scoured thrift stores, antique shops, and eBay for the right furnishings. The wood-burning stove in the corner of Mary’s apartment came from a museum. Lou Grant’s office coffeepot came from the art director’s grandma. With every new score, the staff did a jig to celebrate—’70s phones, a hand-painted spice rack, the exact mirror and pumpkin cookie jar from the original set. The
M
on the wall was the easy part.

After thousands of man-hours, they had versions of both sets that were up to Winfrey standards. “I wanted to walk through those doors and sit at Mary’s desk,” she said. “And today, I get to do it.”

With the clone of Mary’s apartment as their backdrop, the cast reminisced with Winfrey about their part in making a TV classic. “From this small and neighborhood-like studio [came] these little gems of shows that were well-written and people who respected each other and who did their very best not to get the bucks, but to make a good show,” Moore said of MTM. Winfrey told Moore she’d spent years wondering what might have happened to Mary Richards once she’d left WJM in the finale. Moore had a simple answer: “She continued working, and then she met and fell in love with a wonderful man and they got married and had wonderful children.”

Winfrey broke into tears when Moore presented her with a gold
O,
just like Mary’s
M,
signed by the cast. After a tribute to Ted Knight’s memory, the cast and Winfrey shared a group hug like the one that had ended the series.

After the show wrapped, Winfrey walked with MacLeod back to where the cast had their guest dressing rooms, recalling an appearance Winfrey had made on
The Love Boat
before she was famous. She wanted to write her phone number down for MacLeod. While Winfrey stepped away into her own office for paper and pen, MacLeod slipped
into the wrong dressing room, thinking it was his, but finding Leachman there naked. She screamed at him, but after the initial shock, they made up, yet again. It helped to soothe her nerves when MacLeod later cracked, “I’ve known you for fifty years. Why did I wait so long?”

Through the years, Moore tried—but failed—to play down talk of her being a “symbol” to women. She tried to shed her Mary Richards image, her efforts to do so culminating with an autobiography,
After All,
in 1996. In it, she revealed every imperfection in her life: her struggle with alcoholism, the death of her son, her regrets about spending so much time at work in his formative years, her divorces, her diabetes. She proved that no matter what the world thought, Mary Tyler Moore was not the sweet, perfect, inspiring Mary Richards. She was simply a flawed actress doing the best she could.

She knew, however, that Mary Richards would always follow her. She would have to learn to live with it, and she would have to acknowledge her own influence: Female comedians and producers cited her as the reason they’d known they could succeed in the business; single, working women everywhere hummed her theme song to themselves whenever they were feeling overwhelmed by life’s challenges. (If you think this is an overstatement, you are not a woman who grew up in the ’70s idolizing Mary Richards.) Because of her show, women had infiltrated the television industry until, by the end of the 1970s, professional women’s groups proliferated throughout Hollywood and were filled with high-powered producers, directors, writers, and executives.

Moore put all of this out of her mind the same way she let herself forget that when she was on camera, millions of people were watching her, planning their entire evenings around her show. She liked to joke that the only time she thought about being a symbol was
when she tried to get a good table at a restaurant. Then she found herself suddenly hoping the maitre d’ had seen
Dick Van Dyke
or
Mary Tyler Moore
or
Ordinary People
.

She just wanted to be remembered as someone who always looked for the truth. Even, as she once said,
if it wasn’t funny.

The television of the 1980s had made it feel as if the previous decade’s progressive television revolution had been nothing more than Mary’s Impossible Dream. A return to vapid female roles and token people of color marked the superficial programming of an empty-calorie decade.
Three’s Company, Dallas, The Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie’s Angels,
and
Dynasty
outweighed the gains in that same decade of
Kate & Allie
or
The Cosby Show
.

Women’s comedies had a brief moment again in the late ’80s and early ’90s: Murphy Brown upset a vice president with her plans for single motherhood, Ally McBeal single-handedly killed feminism (according to a
Time
magazine cover story with echoes of the ’70s feminist backlash against
Mary Tyler Moore
), and no one missed the parallels to Mary Richards. In 1998, another major milestone in Mary Richards’s afterlife came in the form of a bawdy HBO sitcom about, not one, but four single women over thirty:
Sex and the City.
Though that show’s graphic sex and naughty girl talk went far beyond what we saw of Mary’s dating life, the influence of
Mary Tyler Moore
was clear. Where once Mary had broken ground by casually mentioning her Pill use and staying out all night with a man, these women went through a man a week. A sly reference to birth control would’ve been the tamest part of any episode.

That’s why it made all too much sense when Moore brought the idea of a Mary-and-Rhoda revival to CBS. And yet the network that had supported her for so long declined. But she wouldn’t give up. She was
visibly excited when she talked about this project, despite her previous efforts to disentangle herself from her character. Now she was ready to make the best of her legacy. She wanted to bring the characters back to television, twenty years after
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had gone off the air, to follow their adventures as once-again-single women.

ABC, as it turned out, did share her enthusiasm—at least at first—and
plans came together in 1997 for a new series set to start the next year featuring Moore and Harper as middle-aged versions of their memorable characters. They would reunite after living separate lives, and both would have college-age daughters. Moore talked it up to the press: It could be an innovative series, she proclaimed. It would take long-known and -loved characters and catch up with them twenty-five years later. It would be
The Golden Girls
meets
Mary Tyler Moore
. What could be better?

But the problems soon mounted. The actresses and the network couldn’t agree on a version of a pilot script they all liked, and the development dragged on for two more years. Eventually ABC president Jamie Tarses had to admit in 1999, “
This was one of those cases where the stars didn’t line up correctly.”

To make up for the time and resources spent on the idea, the network decided to expand the pilot script into a TV movie, then gauge audience reaction to determine whether to pursue a series. Harper and Moore had a blast filming it, with a sixty-two-year-old Moore even
doing her own stunt when she had to sprint down a New York sidewalk, jump over a rolled-up carpet being carried by two workmen, and skid to a stop—all in high heels, chasing a stray dog. She broke her right wrist in the process, perhaps a sign of the project’s fate.