(1970)
James L. Brooks and Allan Burns were still toiling over their pilot script for The Mary Tyler Moore Show during the spring before the series was to air. On another day of not quite finishing, they got a call at their office. It was Moore’s manager, Arthur Price. He asked, not just out of curiosity, “Do you have any ideas on the theme?” Since Brooks and Burns were still recovering from their battle with the network and coming up with their living-in-sin compromise, they’d had time to write only a brief outline of the show’s pilot. They were still concentrating on Mary’s words—and the occasional foosball game—not her song.
But Price was always looking for opportunities for his music business clients. It just so happened that he’d passed the series outline on to one of them, a singer-songwriter named Sonny Curtis. The thirty-three-year-old southern “shitkicker kind of a guy,” as Burns describes him, had been born in a dugout—a hole in the ground with a roof over it, his family’s makeshift house—in Meadow, Texas. He had played with Buddy Holly back home, where the only way boys like them could get themselves out of their fleck of a town was to play some good country-and-western on the guitar. Curtis had found his way to fame when he met Holly in the ’50s at a local radio station’s “Sunday Party” open mic in Lubbock, Texas. Curtis, a good-looking bluegrass singer with a smooth voice, had driven thirty miles to pick for whoever would listen. He could also fiddle a hoedown like nobody’s business. Buddy took notice, and soon the two were swapping R&B records, drinking beer, chasing girls, and occasionally playing actual music together.
Because of this close friendship, Curtis later went on to play in Holly’s band, the Crickets, when the band members continued on after Holly’s death in 1959. Curtis also became a successful songwriter, whose hits included the much-covered rock anthem “I Fought the Law.” Now he lived in Los Angeles, and he was looking for work.
Curtis, who’d been spending most of his time writing jingles, had gotten a call from his agent that day, at around eleven in the morning, telling him about the new sitcom in the works for Mary Tyler Moore. Someone from the agency dropped off a four-page outline for the show at his house, which proved to be just enough detail. He didn’t want too much information to “muddy the waters,” as he says, of his creativity. First he thought of the gentle cascading notes of the guitar lick that would become the opening of the song. Then he contemplated what he knew about the show: It was to follow a young woman from the Midwest moving to the big city—which, to her, was Minneapolis—and renting an apartment almost beyond her means. The first lyrics began to flow: “How will you make it on your own? This world is awfully big, and girl, this time you’re all alone.”
By 2 p.m., he called his agent and said, “Who do I sing this to?”
Then Price called Burns, who remembers him saying, “There’s this guy who used to be with Buddy Holly. He’s a songwriter and he plays guitar. He’s written something I think is pretty good.”
“That’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, but okay,” Burns said.
At 4 p.m., Curtis sat in an iron chair in the middle of Brooks and Burns’s temporary office at CBS’s Studio Center, cradling his guitar, ready to make a buck or two on his new song. He laid a sheet of paper on top of his guitar case and sang the freshly written lyrics. Brooks and Burns looked at each other with mutual disbelief: Could it be this easy? How did a Texas farm boy understand their show about a modern midwestern woman so well when they still couldn’t seem to complete their script? This song would speak directly to the young women starting to enter the workforce in larger numbers.
Brooks got on the phone. The room filled with MTM staffers. He asked someone to bring him a cassette recorder; once it appeared, Curtis sang the song again.
Next Curtis found himself at Price’s office meeting with lawyers and the producers. They told him they wanted the song but would hire someone else to sing it. “You can’t have it then,” Curtis said. “If you’re gonna get someone that’s not-known to sing it, that not-known person has to be me.” They revealed that they were considering crooner Andy Williams for the job, who was, as Curtis says, “hotter than soap at the time,” and one of Price’s clients. Curtis’s only capitulation: “If you can get him,” he said, “you can have it. But otherwise it has to be me.”
Andy Williams declined the gig, so the songwriter got to sing his song, turning his gritty twang into a creamy city-boy baritone. Now Brooks and Burns had to write a character who lived up to every word of Curtis’s hopeful and hopelessly catchy tune, “Love Is All Around.”
Burns passed the song along to his friend, composer Patrick Williams (no relation to singer Andy)—who’d done music for several TV shows, including Columbo—and asked if he could work out some orchestrations to score the show. Curtis went to Williams’s house and played the song yet again on Williams’s tape recorder, then left. Williams began arranging how it would sound in the opening title sequence and for the end credits. Of course, he had no idea how important the song, or the show, would be at the time. It felt like just another job to him. In fact, he wasn’t hearing good buzz around town about the project. As he says, “It wasn’t like cymbals crashed and you heard a wild C-major chord from an orchestra when the Mary Tyler Moore Show pilot was made.”
Still, it needed cue music for however long it stayed on the air, and Williams was happy to do the job. Mary Tyler Moore, as Williams saw it, sounded like strings, flutes, clarinets, and flugelhorns, which he considered “a feminine kind of sound. I thought there was a certain vulnerability to the feeling of the show, and that’s what I tried to put into the music.”
At the time, he and most television composers wrote their scores by hand, and for each individual episode. For The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Williams used a twenty-five-piece orchestra, doing about three episodes in a three-hour recording session. He scored every cue as he watched a rough cut of a filmed show, treating it like a mini-movie and working with the natural audience laughter. (No laugh tracks allowed.) A fellow composer friend would later call Williams “the undisputed king of the three-second cue.”
Next, the producers recruited thirty-nine-year-old, Iranian-born director Reza Badiyi, who’d done some work on He & She, to shoot the opening for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He was himself an unusual Hollywood story: He’d moved from Iran to the United States in 1955 after directing documentaries in his native country, and graduated from Syracuse University with a film degree. He eventually befriended director Robert Altman, who hired him as his assistant on his low-budget 1957 debut, The Delinquents. Badiyi soon after secured work in the television industry, directing episodes of Mission: Impossible and Mannix—hardly a natural progression toward The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but he’d made a name for himself assembling the distinctive credits for the sensations Hawaii Five-O and Get Smart.
For The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Badiyi conceived a simple-but-sweet opening sequence, featuring Mary driving her 1969 Mustang from her hometown in the Minnesota suburbs down Route 100 toward Minneapolis, intercut with scenes of her leaving her friends behind to start a new life and frolicking about various parts of town looking glamorously independent. In one cut she wore a fox fur–trimmed jacket (which would disappear from the sequence by the second season, when Moore became an animal rights activist). In another she wore an enviable shearling and suede coat lent by Brooks and Burns’s new secretary, New York transplant Pat Nardo.
Now Badiyi, the producers, and Moore faced their first major decisions on the look of Mary Richards. Their main concern was distinguishing her from Laura Petrie. Moore wanted very much to prove that she could be more than Laura, since her previous efforts to do so in movies and on the stage had fallen flat. She thought long and hard about her former character’s distinctive look, and her own tastes. But in the end, she could think of only one major way to emphasize the new Mary: She would wear a wig to make sure her hair looked nothing like Laura’s signature bobbed flip. She hoped Brooks and Burns’s script would do the rest of the work to impress her new image upon viewers.
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.