Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (9 page)

Moore and the crew experienced Minneapolis at its most brutally cold on the February day when they shot the credits. Luckily Moore didn’t have to speak for the footage, as most of the time her lips couldn’t move enough to form coherent words. But Badiyi had a vision, and most of it involved outdoor shooting. He hoped the final scene of the sequence would become the pièce de résistance: Mary would stop in the middle of an intersection, Nicollet Mall and Seventh Street, and toss the hat she had with her (a knitted black and turquoise beret Moore’s aunt had given her) in the air. The beret would serve as the perfect headwear for this, given its associations with rebels (see: beatniks, Black Panthers) as well as girlish dreams of European sophistication. The act, Badiyi reasoned,
would symbolize Mary’s graduation into her new, single, adult life in the city.

As they wrapped up filming on Nicollet Mall, Badiyi told the
shivering star, “
Run out into the middle of that intersection and throw your hat up in the air as if this is the happiest moment of your life.” As always, Moore did as she was told, even though she wasn’t sure what Badiyi was envisioning. The hat flew up in the air, and then plopped down onto the pavement. That was the shot. They wrapped.

Once they returned to Los Angeles and Badiyi showed Brooks and Burns the raw footage on the editing machine, the producers were puzzled. But they had other worries, so they had to trust Badiyi to do something worthwhile. If they hadn’t been desperately trying to write a good script, they may have meddled more.

They were happy they didn’t. They couldn’t believe just how good it looked once it was edited together, freeze-framed at the end with the hat in the air and a scowling older woman who happened to be walking by disapproving of Mary’s independence for eternity. “You son of a bitch,” Burns said to Badiyi. “You made this work.”

But Brooks and Burns, along with their growing crew, still had far more work to do before they had a ready-to-shoot show.

After the scouting trip to Minneapolis, the producers knew what Mary’s home would look like: a three-story Queen Anne Victorian house, with the exterior of the real home at 2104 Kenwood Parkway, divided up into apartments. Mary would have the $130-a-month studio unit with the grand Palladian windows that the script outline called for: “A room. Actually, an entire apartment, a single large room. There are some—mostly of the working-girl variety—who would consider this a ‘great find’: 10-foot ceilings, pegged wood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and, most important, a fantastic ceiling-height corner window. Right now the room is totally empty, but it won’t be for long. It will be the main setting for THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW. So God Bless It.”

Set designer Lewis Hurst and set decorator Raymond Boltz went to work putting this description together with some Mary-appropriate décor. Their crews began constructing sets on the stage at General
Service Studios, where the first season of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
would go into production. She’d have a hideaway bed, not having much of a choice in such a small apartment. A French armoire would show off her impeccable taste. A wooden
M
on her wall would signify that the place was hers, and only hers. She’d have a kitchenette with a stained-glass window that opened and closed to show or hide it, a walk-through closet that led to the unseen bathroom, and she would, in fact, get her wood-burning Franklin stove in the corner and her vaulted ceilings with beams. Thrift-store finds like her oak dining set and upholstered chairs would nod to her budgetary limits. The pumpkin-shaped cookie jar in her kitchen could hold real cookies for between-scenes snacking.

She would go to work in a building that, in real life, was the twenty-story Midwest Federal Savings and Loan high-rise in downtown Minneapolis. The set designers would create a typical newsroom for WJM-TV: plain, industrial, drab décor with utilitarian desks. Mary’s desk would always display her neatly arranged office supplies, as well as a vase that contained a single fresh flower.

At the end of each show, a title card would mark it as the work of MTM Enterprises. The production company’s trademark seal would emerge as a hastily conceived parody of the MGM lion, with a fluffy orange cat (named Mimsie, procured from a shelter for the occasion) meowing instead of MGM’s definitive roar—ironic, in a sense, given that the once-mighty MGM itself was now gasping for breath as its musical heyday came to an end. Burns had come up with the idea to play off the similarity between the names.

It took Brooks and Burns’s team a whole day to get usable footage of the cat—six reels of film in all. In frustration, producer Dave Davis put some milk on the cat’s paw so she would lick it. He took that piece of the tape and ran it backward through the Moviola, to look like she was looking up and then meowing. They got the actual “meow” from a sound library and dubbed it in. After at least six hours’ more work than they’d planned for the task, the MTM logo came to life.

Brooks and Burns, meanwhile, continued to toil away at the actual script. They couldn’t force the words until they were willing to come, they reasoned, even if dozens of people were scouting locations, building sets, editing ending titles, and filming a cat in anticipation of those words.

At last, however, it happened. Sometime between foosball matches, words tumbled onto the page, and they . . . weren’t bad. In fact, when Brooks and Burns finished the pilot script and passed it around to Mary and Grant, friends, network executives, potential crewmembers, and potential actors, one reaction came back over and over: It was unlike anything anyone in the television industry had ever read in 1970. It was hardly Beckett, yet it broke with traditional television comedy form just enough to surprise audiences, but not enough to scare them. That was where its power lay, as far as its writers and producers were concerned. Not only did it divide Mary’s time equally between home and work—an innovation for a female character—but it also combined sophisticated humor with genuine pathos. It didn’t just emulate
The Dick Van Dyke Show;
it went beyond it.

To most of the network executives, this was not good news—the humor was too sophisticated to jump off the page at them, and the pathos seemed maudlin. To the rest of the script’s earliest readers, this could change everything. But it would require the right cast to do it justice, and enough network support, against all odds, to survive past CBS’s original thirteen-episode commitment. In fact, tucked into newspapers’ pages alongside news of the Vietnam War’s Cambodian campaign and the Kent State shootings were TV business articles in which insiders were already predicting the show’s demise. Herb Jacobs, an industry consultant who was becoming known for his preseason predictions of ratings success and failure,
pronounced
Mary Tyler Moore
’s fate to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in the spring of 1970: It was likely to be canceled as soon as it could be.

Brooks and Burns took the slight personally, and fired back in a
letter to the
Los Angeles Times
’ TV critic, Cecil Smith: “We are distressed at the reports of Herb Jacobs’s predictions, . . . particularly in light of the fact that we have made no pilot he could have seen nor could he have access to our scripts. This business being as nervous and as timid as it is, we feel that statements like Jacobs’s can be harmful. As people trying to do a good television show, we’re disappointed to find there are those who smugly wish us failure without any knowledge of what we’re doing.”

That C-major chord of victory was still a long way off.

(1970)

CBS casting executive Ethel Winant peered through her oversize black-framed glasses at the actor before her, who was pleading for his life. They were always pleading for their lives, or at least for their livelihoods, when they appeared in her office at CBS Studio Center. There, piles of scripts were strewn over every surface, watched over by the framed photos of Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, Jack Palance, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all the other huge names Winant discovered when she worked on one of TV’s earliest drama series,
Playhouse 90
. The struggling actors who came into her office and stood in front of the tiny woman in her Day-Glo, drapey dresses and chunky plastic jewelry wanted to be her next discoveries. They hoped to someday be worthy of framed, autographed photos themselves.

Winant’s intuitive kick, the one she got when she saw the right actor standing there, could take them to that next level. She’d developed this sense in the decades since she’d graduated from the University
of California, Berkeley, as she’d worked her way through a string of backstage positions at the Pasadena Playhouse. She had to delay her theater dreams when she worked as a riveter during World War II at Lockheed, but even then, she’d started a theater club that produced plays for Los Angeles venues in the afternoon.

After the war, instead of heading to housewifery like many women of the time, she’d moved to New York to work for theatrical agents and for playwright Tennessee Williams. When she visited the set of the television show
Studio One,
she got hooked on the new medium, where she’d eventually make a name for herself casting
Playhouse 90
. She had since risen through the ranks at CBS at a time when most women were lucky to be secretaries and assistants. Other women in the business looked to her as an example—if she could do it, maybe they could, too. Only one other woman at CBS was close:
Anne Nelson, the director of business affairs.

Now the handsome fellow before her, the one with silvery hair, ice-blue eyes, newscaster cheekbones, and booming baritone, needed to flip the right switch in her so he could lift himself out of the one-line-part purgatory he had inhabited for his entire acting career. At forty-six, Ted Knight was getting anxious about making this Hollywood thing stick. He’d
dropped out of high school once upon a time to fight in World War II and had studied acting when he returned. But he’d spent the early years of his career mastering puppetry and ventriloquism as the
host of a kids’ show in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1950s.

Eventually, he moved west to seek his fortune in Hollywood, hoping to finally make a name as a legitimate actor. But since arriving more than a decade before his audition with Winant, his résumé had become an endless list of appearances on the likes of
Bonanza, Combat!, McHale’s Navy,
and
Get Smart
. Knight’s best-known moment on-screen had come when he played the cop guarding Norman Bates (silently) at the end of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic
Psycho
. Since then, the nation had gone to war in Vietnam, the Beatles had evolved
from teenyboppers to musical revolutionaries, and the world had mourned John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Ted Knight, however, had gotten almost nowhere. Now, in the spring of 1970, he was ready for his big break.

He did, in fact, make an impression on Winant, who had one of the sharpest minds, and the best instincts, in the business: It was his cheekbones and his voice. They didn’t work for the role he was officially there for (which no one would even remember later); but they were perfect for the role he was now telling her he
really
wanted.

What he really wanted, he said, was to play the hunky lunk of an anchorman in that Mary Tyler Moore series Winant was also in the process of casting. She couldn’t blame Knight for hoping for a shot at Moore’s show. Mary was a dream, for one thing, just an adorable girl. Winant could tell Moore was willing to work hard to make this a great show. Winant knew showbiz enough to know when someone
wanted
it; this girl did.

Winant would stay up late into the night going over scripts in her bedroom, her stack of player directories at her side, her TV always on, her eyes always scanning for a new discovery, and she’d become obsessed with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. She always made herself available, until the latest hours, sitting next to her dedicated business phone line at her home, to argue the show’s case. Her young children, lying awake well past bedtime, could overhear her saying, “If you don’t do this, I’ll put my job and reputation on the line.” She believed in
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and she was going to do her best to defend it from meddling fellow executives.