(1970)
It wasn’t until Jim Brooks and Allan Burns had hunky actor Angus Duncan pinned against a wall that they knew for sure their new sitcom was veering off the tracks.
As rehearsals had gotten under way on the set earlier that week, things seemed to be going okay, if not great. The initial read-throughs—the first step in the rehearsal process, where the actors sit at a table reading their parts aloud—went only barely well enough. The producers knew, as they said, that they had “a little bit of work to do.” And Moore was struggling with a still-new diabetes diagnosis: She had decided to keep the fact of her disease from everyone but her closest friends and family, always sneaking off to inject herself with insulin, an act that nauseated her every time, careful not to leave stray syringes in a wastebasket where someone else might find them.
But then, the tension erupted. Duncan, the Ken-doll–handsome, clean-cut actor the producers had cast in the guest role of Bill, Mary’s noncommittal med student ex, made a dramatic show of expressing his displeasure with the pilot script’s rewrites, throwing the pages on the floor when he saw them. Duncan—best known for replacing Robert Redford in the ’60s Broadway production of Barefoot in the Park, and thus, in a way, one step away from the dreamiest man in the country—had crossed a line. He hit the laid-back producers in the one place it counted: their writing. Burns felt defensive of his own fledgling career, contained, as he saw it, in those precious pages. Brooks was already developing a lifelong, unfailing policy: Always respect the script. No one knew what Duncan was thinking. Perhaps he was showing off for the more famous actors surrounding him on the set. Perhaps he genuinely disliked the new pages.
Either way, in his gesture of disrespect, Brooks and Burns’s hopes of greatness seemed to dwindle before them. Suddenly the pair of writer-producers had the tall, chiseled actor cornered against a wall. The uncharacteristic “out-of-body” experience, as Brooks would remember it, forced them to become “atypically he-men.” They could see the fear in the actor’s blue eyes, and the admiration from the rest of the cast. Brooks told Duncan, “You respect the script. We can replace you.”
They’d succeeded in flaunting their masculinity to their new cast, but the chances of Brooks and Burns redeeming their reputations with this show at CBS were diminishing. They’d lost veteran director John Rich, who’d handled most episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, to CBS’s in-the-works comedy All in the Family. Rich met with Brooks and Burns to deliver his regrets. “Having worked with Mary on Dick Van Dyke, I thought this would be a very good show,” he said. “But it has some overtones of reminiscence. It just feels okay, like another comedy that might be good, but this other thing, All in the Family, is outrageous.” Lear’s incendiary dialogue had blown him away, to the point where he’d said to Lear, “You aren’t going to make this, are you?” When Lear said yes, Rich asked, “Is anybody going to put it on?” Rich told Moore that he was sorry, but he had to be a part of Lear’s show, “even if it’s just an exercise.”
Brooks and Burns settled instead for the upstart Jay Sandrich, who’d directed a few episodes of He & She. Sandrich had no contacts in the industry beyond Burns’s acclaimed, ratings-deprived program, so he had a hard time finding work after the show folded. He’d later call the Mary Tyler Moore job “the luckiest thing of my career.” He adds, “They took a big shot asking me if I was interested in doing the show. I hadn’t done anything as a director that had been in that class.” As a result, Sandrich felt insecure, but he was determined to hide it.
He developed his own methods to prove to the producers that they hadn’t made a mistake by hiring him: The show would employ the “multiple-camera” technique used by most sitcoms that were filmed before a live audience, capturing different angles at the same time to be edited together later. But it wouldn’t be filmed like a stage production, as many other sitcoms were, with the actors playing to the audience. It would more closely resemble a short movie, shot on film instead of videotape. Sandrich studied other shows on the air at the time and thought, Why are they yelling at each other? They’re sitting next to each other. So as he took over directing the Mary Tyler Moore cast, he instructed the actors to speak in natural tones and interact with each other. “You’ve got mics right over you,” he’d say. “You don’t need to project.”
As the rehearsals progressed, some tension grew among the stars and producers as they tried to get the hang of this new approach. And in the case of Cloris Leachman and Gavin MacLeod, old friction returned. The two had worked together three years earlier in a TV show called The Road West. The opportunity had thrilled MacLeod, as he’d admired Leachman’s work with Katharine Hepburn onstage in As You Like It and in the comedic play Remains to Be Seen.
In The Road West, MacLeod had played a saloon owner dumped by Leachman’s character for another man. In their first scene together, MacLeod chased Leachman down on a white horse to confront her. He had to stage-slap her, but had no experience in hitting anyone, onstage or in real life. Something went wrong in the scene, and Leachman screamed out in pain. From then on, she avoided MacLeod; they didn’t see each other until the Mary Tyler Moore Show pilot. The first days there, they shared no scenes, so there were no problems. But at dinner at the end of the first week on the set, MacLeod recalls Leachman declaring, “I won’t sit next to Gavin MacLeod because I hate his guts.”
Knight laughed as MacLeod simply muttered, “Oh, she’s driving me crazy,” without confronting her any further.
The cast arranged their dinner seating such that the two would not be near each other, but the incident did nothing to calm the actors’ nerves.
As rehearsals for The Mary Tyler Moore Show got under way, CBS president Mike Dann was keeping a grueling schedule, spending two out of every four weeks living in rooms 176 and 177 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The nearly eighty-year-old resort, discreetly tucked away amid the mansions above Sunset Boulevard, had been the temporary home to a number of stars and industry executives over the years, including Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, who in the 1940s had forced the hotel’s Polo Lounge to change its rule against women wearing slacks.
Dann was staying in town more often now to keep an eye on the growing Los Angeles production wing of CBS. His marriage was straining from his time away from home; he took the 4 p.m. flight out of New York every other Sunday to be in Los Angeles in time for dinner at Chasen’s in West Hollywood. As the network’s head of programming spent the summer of 1970 shuttling back and forth across the country, he still wasn’t sold on the Mary Tyler Moore Show concept, despite the changes that producers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns had made to their proposal in hopes of courting favor with their network bosses. In all honesty, Dann didn’t think about the show that much, period. He didn’t have time to search the crevices of every pilot script for hidden potential as he tended to the more complicated and pressing matter of putting together the fall schedule. The Mary Tyler Moore Show did not make his top-priority list. He knew he wasn’t crazy about the thing, he knew it wasn’t shot yet, and he knew he’d committed to Moore that she’d get a slot on the schedule. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to bother with it beyond that.
Besides, most of his colleagues didn’t seem impressed with the script, either. Where were the jokes? Where was the comedy?
The day of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first chance to perform in front of a studio audience began with news of a bomb threat on the lot.
CBS had asked the producers to stage a preliminary taping, and a lot was riding on it. The network wanted the producers to test some new cameras, and the run-through would also allow them to prove that their pilot was better than executives thought it would be. It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s first major opportunity, and there was no room for mistakes.
And yet the problems mounted from the start. The bomb scare left a residue of agitation across the lot. Southern California had witnessed its share of bomb scares in the previous several months, as had every major metropolitan area across the country. Radical counterculture groups had taken to explosives to make their point and had targeted New York in spectacular fashion, hitting Wall Street, Macy’s, Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA Building, and General Motors among others, prompting scores of copycat threats. Just months before the taping, in March, the underground group the Weathermen had accidentally leveled an apartment building where they were constructing bombs in Manhattan’s West Village. So a bomb on the set seemed all too plausible.
The threat was determined to be unfounded, and audience members were herded in. But the folks in the stands couldn’t see the actors over the cameras, which were twice as bulky as the standard kind, so they were forced to try to catch the action on small monitors instead. The air-conditioning broke down, so the two-hundred-member audience and the actors were left to swelter in 90-degree July temperatures while watching a practice run of a series already being promoted to viewers as if it were a done deal. The microphones didn’t work properly.
A nervous Brooks and Burns faced a cranky audience when they emerged on stage to do the warm-up. Getting the audiences ready for a good show was a job often taken by executive producers with a comedy background—but Brooks and Burns were merely great writers with nice personalities and zero stage presence. Brooks felt lucky, in a way, because he froze. Burns, on the other hand, just kept blathering.
When they got offstage, story editor Lorenzo Music offered to take over the job in the future. He had a dry wit and a distinctive, deadpan voice that sounded like a bored door hinge in need of oiling; he had written and performed on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour to great effect. “I could do that,” he said of the emceeing duties, “and you guys wouldn’t have to worry about it.” They got the translation: They’d been shitty. Even the production manager, Lin Ephraim—a serious man who looked, Burns said, “like Mandrake the Magician”—told them he could do better. They realized they had been even worse than they had feared.
None of this struck the audience as funny. Neither, it seemed, did the script itself. Tinker recognized the pattern: Sometimes what works in rehearsal just doesn’t connect with an audience. It was an old Hollywood story, but one he’d hoped to spare his wife from. Nary a chuckle escaped from the bleachers, and the less the audience reacted, the less sure the actors felt. Sandrich knew his actors weren’t ready. He still needed time with them, and he hadn’t worked with the camera crew at all yet. He recognized that putting the actors in front of an audience too soon was going to take a toll on their psyches, and it worried him.
Moore had replaced her signature Laurie Petrie flip hairstyle with a longer, straighter, more modern fall, but she couldn’t seem to make audiences stop comparing her new character with her former persona. She could feel the audience’s patience dwindling from the very first scene, in which Phyllis and her young daughter, Bess, show Mary an apartment that Rhoda claims as her own. Moore could tell the audience didn’t like Rhoda. She could also tell they weren’t sure what to make of her own character, Mary Richards. Where was Dick Van Dyke when you needed him?
Post-show polling indicated that Rhoda—who made her entrance from Mary’s windowsill, threatening to take our heroine’s new apartment from her—was indeed universally hated. Phyllis, also, was “too abrasive,” according to audience feedback. Mr. Grant didn’t fare better; he came off as humorless and bullying when he grilled Mary about her religion and marital status at her job interview, then ended by telling her, “I hate spunk.”
The scene had given Asner trouble since his first audition. As a dramatic actor, he couldn’t seem to dial down the anger. Asner knew it wasn’t working as he was performing it. He felt miserable, and he could tell his costar did, too. He saw the looks on Brooks’s and Burns’s faces: They were not happy. Silence filled the studio. Brooks had never witnessed any of his work bombing before. No laughs. Some audience members left in the middle.
When the taping ended, Moore thanked the audience for sticking with her through it, then she fled the stage. Winant would remember it as the worst night she’d ever spent watching a sitcom taping.
Other cast members, however, didn’t notice how horribly the night had gone, particularly Valerie Harper, who had never done a television show and was used to the long learning curve of the theater. She had no idea the audience hated her character. She hadn’t expected laughs; after all, she hadn’t heard them all week during rehearsals, so why should she get them now? In the theater, every show takes a while to gel. It’s what previews were invented for—to figure out how to make a show better. Television, she started to realize, was rather punishing in comparison: first preview, opening night, and closing night all in one, and all on film.
After the disappointed audience left, Brooks and Burns returned to their offices, dejected, sweating, and confused, to find Price, Tinker, the crew, and, worse, all of the stars’ managers and agents—about twenty people total—ready to point out everything that had gone wrong. Just as Brooks and Burns had choked onstage, they choked again here. Burns started babbling, while Brooks shut down. Burns talked to prevent everyone from leaving, as he had no idea what he and Brooks would do once the crowd dispersed and they faced their problematic script alone. Brooks was grateful Burns was at least saying something to the upset throng that filled their huge office. Everyone grew more depressed as they realized none of them knew what to do to fix whatever the problem was. They thought it was a good script.
Tinker hoped they were doing something. As he and Moore drove home from the disastrous taping, Moore had what Tinker calls “a fall-apart.” She cried in the car, then pulled herself together to tuck her young son into bed and tell him the run-through had been fine. As she brushed her teeth, she fretted over her cracked stage makeup and her face, drooping with fatigue. She obsessed over plans for house renovations: What if they moved the bathroom sink to the opposite wall and put a closet in its place? Then the bedroom terrace could wrap around the wall with the bathtub.
She climbed into bed, leaving the bedroom lights on as she waited for Tinker to set the house alarm. The glare of the bulbs felt extreme. She mulled over the future of her precarious career. And her crying seemed far less cute in real life than it was when she did her famous sitcom cry on-screen. This project was supposed to redeem all of her dreams and hard work. Now it seemed hopeless.
Tinker heard her sob from the other room. For the first time since they’d signed the deal with CBS, Tinker wondered whether he’d made the right decisions for his wife’s new show. He called his producers. When they answered—no one would remember later which one of them, and it hardly mattered—Tinker offered one suggestion: “Fix it.” They had their work cut out for them. They’d never heard their heretofore supportive boss so testy. They had one more shot at a real taping of the pilot, but that would be it. If they lost the audience this time, the show was doomed.
Soon after Grant Tinker’s ominous phone call, script supervisor Marge Mullen, who’d held the same job at The Dick Van Dyke Show, stopped by the producers’ office. She had an idea—maybe not the biggest one, but it was something. “People don’t seem to like Rhoda,” they remember her saying. “There’s this little girl who’s Phyllis’s daughter, and if the little girl likes Rhoda, it’ll give the audience the opportunity to love her, too.”
It was the only substantive idea for an improvement Brooks and Burns had heard all evening. They decided to take Mullen’s suggestion, cut a few other lines, and call it a night, putting their faith in what they’d written and the cast they’d hired. Many things had gone wrong with that first taping, but the words and the talent, they believed, were there.
The next morning, Sandrich faced his dejected cast for another rehearsal. He said, simply, calmly, “This didn’t work last night.” But he reassured them that the air-conditioning and technical snafus were at least partly to blame for the problem. They would still need to focus on playing the script better, but the script itself, he told them, would get only minor rewrites: “We all believe in the show,” he said, “and we’re not going to change it.”
As the official Friday pilot taping approached, the producers took all the practical steps they could to avoid another meltdown. They made sure the sound was working, the cameras weren’t hindering the audience’s view, and the air-conditioning was running. Brooks and Burns relinquished the audience warm-up: Lorenzo Music took over as promised, and charmed the audience. Sandrich reminded Asner to concentrate on delivering the “I hate spunk” line with “controlled anger,” not all-out rage. The women sat in the makeup room’s three chairs, chatting, practicing lines, getting primped with hair spray and amber eye shadow. The two hundred fresh audience members filed into the studio bleachers, ready for a show.
The only major change to the script was pigtailed twelve-year-old Lisa Gerritsen as Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, saying, “Aunt Rhoda’s really a lot of fun,” as Mary opened the curtains in her new apartment to see a harried Rhoda on her balcony in the opening scene. Gerritsen was the granddaughter of child actor and later screenwriter True Eames Boardman, as well as the great-granddaughter of silent film actors, but she had now made her own showbiz history.
This time, the audience roared. Gerritsen’s new line seemed to indeed be the magic bullet. The entire scene soared. Brooks and Burns avoided looking at each other, afraid to jinx the laughter they now heard. But they made delighted eye contact as the next scene began. The atmosphere lightened like it was filling with helium, taking the studio up higher and higher.
The audience’s response this time gave Moore confidence that buoyed her right through the rest of the taping and spread to her fellow actors. In the next scene, Mary sat down for an interview with Mr. Grant. He asked her about her religion and marital status; the audience laughed this time. He offered her a drink. Asner’s instincts told him to make an aggressive turn toward Moore as a windup to the scene’s conclusion. His anger and mania finally came off the way it was supposed to: over-the-top funny. Dying was hard; comedy was harder. But it was awfully fun when you nailed it.
“You know what?” Asner finally said as Mr. Grant. “You’ve got spunk.” Mary nodded in agreement, then he delivered the punch line: “I hate spunk!”
Asner saw the audience take off like a guided missile. He felt empowered, like King Kong. He could squeeze the entire crowd in his massive hands.
The audience laughed when Mr. Grant told Mary he’d fire her if he didn’t like her or if she didn’t like him. They laughed when Phyllis had the locks on Mary’s apartment changed to keep “dumb, awful Rhoda” out. Moore pulled off a star-quality performance. She looked adorable while juggling high comedy and the weight of the more poignant moments when her ex pays her one final visit.
With the tiniest tweak to the script, the taping went down in television history as a smash.
As for that ex, and the originally disgruntled actor who played him, the producers had to admit he did a good job. But not quite good enough to make up for his earlier misbehavior. After the successful taping, Duncan asked them, “Could I be a recurring character on the show?”
“We don’t think so,” they replied, “but thanks for your offer.”
Despite the triumphant pilot performance, The Mary Tyler Moore Show still faced a major hurdle: Test screenings, even of that second filming, were going poorly with sample viewers when they watched a taped version. The questionnaires that viewers completed showed they thought Mary was a loser. Why was she thirty and still single? Was Ed Asner’s character Jewish? Why was Rhoda so mean? The network made Tinker and Moore an offer: They could negotiate a price to walk away from the contract, call the whole thing off.
Tinker still had faith in the show and stuck to it; he asked Dann to go ahead with it, taking his chances that it would become a hit with audiences and force CBS to continue with it. But Dann still got to choose the show’s spot on the fall prime-time schedule, a decision that could make or break the series’s future, and so far he had it set for a terrible slot. Dann knew the importance of a good time slot: “There’s no such thing as a good show with a bad rating,” he would say. “You always must win your time period.” So the clearest statement of his true feelings for The Mary Tyler Moore Show came when his scheduling decisions were announced. Faced with intense competition from rival NBC in the previous TV season, Dann put the show on Tuesdays, between the very incompatible Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw, and opposite NBC’s much-hyped Don Knotts Show, a variety hour starring the beloved Andy Griffith sidekick. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was scheduled, essentially, to be finished after its thirteen episodes.
And the negative audience testing hadn’t changed CBS executives’ minds about that scheduling. With CBS still short of confidence in the show, the executives listened to all of the test audiences’ objections. They asked Tinker in for lots of meetings. He understood their trepidation: They had a thirteen-episode commitment, and that investment made them nervous. He tried to listen to their worries while letting his executive producers go about their business. But word was out in the industry: When Sandrich went to another studio to direct an episode of a different series, someone there told him CBS had a show called Shane, a Western series based on the movie, that it was preparing to put in Mary Tyler Moore’s slot when the latter inevitably failed. Even the producers, despite their general naïveté about the television business, knew they were dead in the time slot they’d been given.
Then things changed in the top ranks of CBS. Dann resigned to help launch the Children’s Television Workshop in New York, where production was beginning on a new kids’ show called Sesame Street. He’d been working in commercial broadcasting a long time, he told his colleagues, and he was rich enough to focus on doing something worthwhile with his career.
Of course, the move hadn’t come without urging from his network bosses. After fourteen consecutive years of ratings wins, CBS had fallen behind NBC’s new programs—most notably Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In—that packed, as industry parlance put it, “contemporary relevance” and were as glossy, sleek, and modern as Cher’s hair. Big-money advertisers now wanted those audiences, who’d been suddenly flocking to NBC. Even if CBS caught up to NBC in overall ratings, it had a devastating disadvantage in the key demographic.
And when a network needs a change of direction, a change in programming leadership signals that intention to the industry.
Robert Wood had just taken over as the network’s president after running its West Coast operations for a year; the often-frazzled executive defied the long tradition of network heads such as Jim Aubrey, Louis Cowan, and Merle Jones, who acted as if they came from nobility. Wood’s energy spilled out all around him. One of his first major acts as president was to promote Fred Silverman, at just thirty-three, from vice president of program planning to Dann’s old spot at the head of the programming department, and he started making changes. His mandate: Transform the network to attract cosmopolitan audiences in major cities. Television could no longer survive by appealing to rural viewers. Knockoffs of The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, and Gomer Pyle were over. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. That was the nature of the business. Silverman joked, “I firmly believe that people do respond to different things. I just wish I knew what they were.”
It turned out that, at least in this case, he did. Wood and Silverman would get credit for what became known as “the rural purge,” the cancellation and marginalization of several still-successful, but demographically less desirable, comedies, starting with Lassie, Hee Haw, and Mayberry RFD. Green Acres star Pat Buttram, who found his show moved out of its desirable slot and then axed, would lament that CBS had “cancelled everything with a tree.” The edgier creatives in the business hailed Wood for killing what they saw as stale, irrelevant programming.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show suddenly had some great advantages: its pronounced lack of trees and its air of sophistication. Perry Lafferty may not have supported Brooks and Burns as much as they would have liked at their big network pitch meeting, but the urbane CBS executive came to their aid now, urging Silverman to consider Mary Tyler Moore as just the sort of thing the network should nurture, and do more of. It felt current, positioned to capture the new, young demographics TV needed to expand its audience. Social awareness and challenges to traditional values were what the network needed now. It was time for TV to stop ignoring the world around it.
Just months earlier, in March 1970, a group of about one hundred feminists had made news by staging a sit-in at the office of Ladies’ Home Journal editor John Mack Carter to protest the way the magazine depicted women’s interests, and thus call attention to the importance of expanding women’s perceived roles beyond the homemaker. The number of single women in their late twenties and thirties was on the rise as more women delayed marriage or got divorced. Women’s lib was making headlines; it was cool and current. A show that demonstrated even a hint of women’s liberation and genuine artistry screamed young, affluent, and urban at a time when most sitcoms were still using feminism as nothing but a punch line.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show went from dead-before-it-aired to potential network savior.
Fred Silverman flew to Los Angeles from his office in New York in the late summer of 1970, just a month before the new fall lineup would premiere, to screen some of the shows he’d inherited from Mike Dann’s reign. He hadn’t yet seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show. By that time, the entire East Coast office of CBS had written the show off, but he was intrigued by Lafferty’s lobbying on its behalf. He wanted to see it for himself.
Silverman watched the pilot and a rough cut of the second and third episodes, with Ethel Winant and a few other executives by his side. He thought all three episodes were terrific. In fact, he thought you’d have to be a complete moron not to see that it was a great show. Now he had a problem, however: This show he loved sat in his schedule’s worst time period, on its way to oblivion.
He called his boss, Bob Wood, back in New York, even though it was now Friday evening on the East Coast. Winant, in the room with Silverman at the time, held her breath, not knowing what her new boss was going to say about the show to his boss. “Bob, I just screened The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he told Wood. “You know where we’ve got it on the schedule? It’s going to get killed there, and this is the kind of show we’ve got to support. We ought to think about moving this thing. We have a bunch of junk on Saturday night. We ought to move one of those hillbilly shows and put this there.”
With that, Green Acres was packed off to Tuesday nights, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set to air at 9:30 p.m. on Saturdays, as part of a lineup that included two top-twenty shows, My Three Sons and Mannix, as well as Mission: Impossible. Instead of facing Andy Griffith favorite Don Knotts and Mod Squad, Mary would compete with the new (and destined to be short-lived) ABC drama The Most Deadly Game and NBC’s movie night. These were much better odds. Fred Silverman had rescued The Mary Tyler Moore Show from a quiet Tuesday night death. When Wood announced his sweeping changes, which included the Mary Tyler Moore move, on July 21, 1970, the Boston Globe called it a “wholesale upheaval” of the network schedule, “unprecedented for so late in the season.” But, writer Percy Shain noted, “the strategy involved in these transfers is obscure.” No one in the industry was entirely sure yet what CBS was up to.
In any case, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was now in prime position to become a hit. The problems threatening Brooks and Burns’s show had so distracted them, however, that they hadn’t even had time to think about hiring writers. Finding any writers who could handle the unique tone of the show would provide a challenge. But now they needed them, and fast. And they wanted at least a few of them to be women, ideally young and single like the show’s main character, to lend the sense of realism both Brooks and Burns cherished. But in 1970, few shows had hired anyone but white men to write them, no matter who the shows’ main characters were. As a result, there were hardly any female comedy writers with experience. Another challenge loomed before them.