Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (6 page)

At first, she wasn’t impressed with the idea of working for Brooks and Burns. Before working for Susskind, she’d been secretary to the charismatic producer Bob Rafelson, who created
The Monkees
TV show in 1966. Nardo hadn’t watched
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
so she had only the vaguest idea of who this Mary Tyler Moore was, and she had no idea who Brooks and Burns were.

When she met with them, she couldn’t even believe these two guys could work together—they were the definition of “odd couple.” Brooks’s desk was a mess of papers and stray pieces of clothing; Burns’s was impeccable. Brooks slumped over and spaced out during the interview; Burns directed the questioning. When Burns asked what brought her to California, she didn’t want to say she’d come for a man, so she ranted in her Bronx accent about how sick of New York she’d gotten. Brooks, finally roused, looked right at her and said, “She’s Rhoda.”

She had no idea what he meant—that she was the embodiment of the outspoken, Jewish girl from New York they’d been envisioning as the character of Mary’s best friend. But her Rhoda-ness sold Brooks on Nardo. Burns, on the other hand, liked her Gucci shoes. She got the job, whether she wanted it or not. She didn’t—she was sure she would
be miserable at it. She was above this. But she took it to make money and stay close to Barris.

It helped, however, when Brooks and Burns offered to get the
New York Times
delivered to the office every day for her. She’d read the paper every day of her life since her teenage years, but she couldn’t afford it now. She’d considered it her college. If Pat Nardo was going to be a secretary, she needed at least a little bit of intellectual stimulation. The
New York Times
was a good start. She had no idea at the time that she’d be among the show’s several influential women behind-the-scenes—and one of its many secretaries-turned-TV-writers who would help make Mary Richards into a feminist icon.

Just when Nardo was starting to warm to her new job, she managed to offend her new bosses. Brooks and Burns were going to a meeting across town, and they felt bad that their secretary would be alone in the office all day, so they invited her to join them. She climbed into the backseat. As they drove, they were discussing how awful most of television was. “Talk about a bad show,” Nardo cracked, “how about that
My Mother the Car
?” Brooks and Burns froze, suddenly silent. She knew what she’d done just by the way they acted. “And you wrote it,” she concluded.

In case there had been any lingering doubt, this served as a reminder to Brooks and Burns: If their secretary didn’t know who they were, if her only knowledge of their body of work was their laughable mother-as-motor-vehicle scripts, they still had a long way to go to conquer Hollywood.

(1969–70)

The character who could change all of their fates, Mary Richards—who could give Treva Silverman something to write about, could make Jim Brooks and Allan Burns the innovative producers they wanted to be, could give Mary Tyler Moore the comeback she needed—began her fictional life in a room full of men. And that life began with one dreaded word:
divorce
.

Brooks and Burns sat in a conference room at CBS’s New York headquarters, known as Black Rock. The network had just built the structure—the
only skyscraper ever designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, famous for his stark aesthetic. The black granite building at Fifty-second Street and Sixth Avenue rose thirty-eight stories from midtown Manhattan’s Television Row, where CBS, ABC, and NBC all plotted their gambits to dominate the country’s
83 million TV sets. The building seemed fittingly ominous for this nightmare of a business meeting. A fall chill settled over the shedding trees in nearby Central Park.

The producers were now trapped in one of the upper floors, surrounded by black-paneled walls and network executives, as the lights in the ceiling burned into the tops of their heads. CBS was the Establishment, where executives wore pin-striped suits and had gray hair. Both Brooks and Burns had been to other pitch meetings before in their careers, but this felt different, more menacing. As Burns later remembered, “It was like something straight out of Kafka.”

Brooks and Burns had flown across the country from Los Angeles with Arthur Price, Moore’s business manager and now the de facto vice president of her production company, to share their vision for the new series with programming executive Mike Dann and his colleagues. The destiny of the show rested with Brooks and Burns, in this room, as the faces of MTM Entertainment. They wished Tinker, with his magical way of smoothing over any business interaction, were there with them. But Tinker remained in Los Angeles, staying in the background for now.

“You want to
divorce
Mary?” Michael Dann asked, incredulous.

Dann was known for his obsession with ratings numbers, and
particularly his competition with NBC’s vice president for audience measurement, Paul Klein. As technology made the numbers increasingly parsable, network executives had begun to worship the god known as Nielsen, the company that tracked viewership numbers for the networks.
Ratings were born in the days of radio, back in 1930, when a group of advertisers met with an opinion researcher to form the Cooperative Analysis of Broadcasting. The group decided to use telephone polling to determine which shows were most popular; researchers would call a sampling of potential viewers and ask what they’d listened to the day before. Nielsen began offering ratings services in 1942, replacing phone polling with a device that was installed in selected homes to photograph and time-stamp which channel the device was tuned to at a given time. The national numbers were extrapolated from the sampling of about 1,200 homes. Eventually, Nielsen moved into the burgeoning world of television.

Now, in the late ’60s, Nielsen raked in an estimated $10 million a
year from the networks, local affiliates, and advertising agencies. And for good reason: The numbers were growing ever more sophisticated, allowing networks to determine their audiences’ location (goal: big cities), age (goal: younger than forty-nine), income (goal: higher than the
$8,389 annual average), and level of education (goal: college or better). This information was gold to advertisers hoping to target their messages. And it led networks to promote themselves with laughably specific boasts:
NBC’s 1970 “Product Usage Highlights” packet, for example, proudly announced, “Audiences of 12 returning NBC shows reveal high usage of dry dog food.”

Dann and NBC’s Klein, as the two most ratings-obsessed men in a ratings-obsessed business, had become infamous in their enmity. The two often traded barbs in the industry press, as well as via personal correspondence. They’d never met in person, but regularly exchanged notes bearing messages such as, “
You are scum!” The battle had heated up in the last two seasons of television: After thirteen straight years of CBS dominance, NBC started winning in the demographic most important to advertisers—young, wealthy, educated consumers.
To pull off a last-minute victory for the 1968–69 season, Dann threw out his network’s weakest regular shows and subbed in specials: a documentary about Eskimos, another about a veterans’ hospital; a broadcast of British drama
Born Free
and its sequel,
The Lions Are Free
.

Things got so desperate that the entire season’s success ended up riding on a CBS
Cinderella
special. Dann wired CBS’s two hundred affiliates: “
My [contract] option is coming due shortly . . . . And how you promote
Cinderella
will tell me something about your personal feelings toward me.” CBS came out ahead of NBC,
20.3 percent to 20 percent.

Now, however, as calendars flipped to the last page of 1969, Dann’s position at CBS was far from solid. The ratings wars had continued the previous fall, with NBC doing so well that it called a press conference where it handed out bright yellow buttons that said
HAPPINESS IS BEING NO. 1
. “
I’ve never known what it is to lose,” Dann kept muttering to colleagues, flabbergasted. “I’ve never lost a season.”

Dann wasn’t taking any chances with his programming, and he and the New York suits hadn’t laughed at a thing Brooks and Burns had said in their comedy pitch so far. The word
divorce
hung in the air. The network executives saw nothing funny about divorce. The divorce rate in the country was skyrocketing. It was a serious problem, not a sitcom premise. They would sooner fill the time period allotted for this show with that American-flag footage that signaled the network had signed off for the night than they would sanction a comedy about a divorced woman played by Mary Tyler Moore. “Yes,” the producers said. “We want to divorce Mary.”

A silence.

Then, the onslaught of objections. “The audience will think she divorced Dick Van Dyke!” one executive said.

The producers ran through their prepared response: They would show her husband. He would be nothing like Dick Van Dyke. They promised. The script would make it clear that Mary was not at fault, that she was so likable even her ex’s parents couldn’t stay away from her after the divorce.

“Why not make her more like Doris Day or Lucille Ball?” another executive asked.

Doris Day, they explained, was somehow playing an ingénue even though she was forty-eight. That might have flown once, in the ’60s, but it was hardly the way to make a statement at the beginning of a new decade. Movements for women’s independence, free love—these weren’t even
new
anymore, and yet TV was still trying to sell shows about happy couples and “innocent” grown women and life down home on the farm. And Lucy, a national treasure, could do what she pleased and still draw an audience. Brooks and Burns wanted reality with this show. Funny reality, but reality. And a lot of viewers would likely relate to a thirty-year-old divorced woman, the producers argued.

“Why
do
you have to say her age?” another executive wondered. “You don’t have to
say
it. Lucy never says her age.”

But, the producers replied, they wanted to say Mary’s age. If she
was thirty, and single, and divorced, wouldn’t she be inherently more interesting than the ageless wives who had populated television since its inception?

“We have a man here from our research department,” Dann said, “and I’d like him to say a few things.”

Research Department Man chimed in. “Our research says American audiences won’t tolerate divorce in a lead of a series any more than they will tolerate Jews, people with mustaches, and people who live in New York.”

Brooks and Burns could form no logical response to this, except, perhaps, to note that Mary would be none of the other three. The writers refused to back down. The executives implied that if they went ahead with their current plans, the show wouldn’t last past its thirteen-episode commitment. This, and Brooks and Burns hadn’t even gotten past the “divorce” part of their pitch to discuss Mary’s proposed job as a gossip columnist’s assistant. The matter of her career and the rest of her life would have to wait until her complicated marital status was settled.

Dann, meanwhile, rolled his eyes at another pair of creative types gone haywire in a pitch meeting: This was a pretty typical day at the office for him, especially when dealing with the unique breed of individuals known as comedy writers. He imagined them all immediately heading to their analysts’ offices between meetings to deal with their intense
feelings
. He always felt like they were about to strangle him with their enthusiasm for their own ideas. “If you guys are determined to go with this,” he told the producers, “it’s Grant’s call.”

As Brooks, Burns, and Price turned to leave, Dann asked Price to stay behind. “Arthur,” he said, “there are a few business things I’d like to discuss if the guys want to wait outside for you.” Once the door closed, he had one item of business: These guys, whoever they were, could very well end up killing Moore’s show, he warned.

Price told him he’d discuss the matter with Tinker, but he didn’t think a change of producers was likely. He didn’t, however, sugarcoat
things when he met Brooks and Burns at the elevator. “Guys,” he said, “that did not go well.”

A few weeks before the New York meeting with the network, newly minted producers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns had arrived at Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker’s home in the tony Hollywood Hills—a neighborhood full of winding roads and panoramic views made famous by resident George Harrison’s song “Blue Jay Way.” The producers came armed with a bold idea, and some trepidation. They knew how important this show was to Moore, and thus to Tinker. And they knew their idea wasn’t quite what most people expected from Moore’s return to television. But they also thought it was a terrific idea, the next step beyond
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.

When Moore appeared atop the grand staircase to make her movie-star entrance, the producers had to choke down their nerves. When she got to the bottom of the stairs, however, she wobbled a little, pretending she was drunk, drugged, or otherwise unstable, here in the middle of the day. Then she laughed.