(1971–72)
Ed Asner realized he finally felt good about his new job late in the summer of 1971. He was waiting, along with Ted Knight and Gavin MacLeod, backstage for the first studio audience taping of the second season, listening to the familiar theme song play as they awaited their introductions. Peeking out at the cheering crowd, confident in the show’s upward trajectory, Asner sighed. “Man, I can die happy now.”
“Hold on, sweetheart,” MacLeod cracked. “We haven’t won our Emmys yet.” Knight, silent, wanted that Emmy, too, and he was determined to get it.
The good news: It was starting to look like they’d have their shot. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was growing into a full-fledged phenomenon. As the women’s lib movement went mainstream—Ms. magazine, Gloria Steinem, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Title IX—and All in the Family shocked audiences far more than a single lady could, people stopped worrying so much about Mary slipping into old-maidhood. Even TV Guide, which had once described her as “unmarried and getting a little desperate about it,” encapsulated the change in attitude she’d helped perpetuate when it later declared that she was “thirty-three, unmarried, and unworried—Mary is the liberated woman’s ideal.” The magazine put Moore on its cover three times in the show’s first two years on the air.
The stars—and even the writers—became the subjects of incessant publicity in the likes of the Hollywood Reporter, TV Guide, and Mademoiselle, rivaled in coverage only by the stars of All in the Family. They were recognized everywhere they went. They were besieged by fans desperate to talk to their favorite stars but lacking in anything to say besides telling Harper she looked much prettier in person (a good sport, she took it as a compliment) or asking Asner stuff like, “Why are you so mean to Mary?” He had a stock answer, grumbling, “Yeah, yeah, every boss in the world should be so mean to his Mary.” It was a pain in the ass and tiresome, but, they felt, a fair price for being on a hit show.
Shockingly famous people were now not only consenting to appear on the show, but requesting to. Walter Cronkite, watched by more than 20 million viewers every night, played himself and told the stars he was a fan of the show. When he spent his weekends sailing, he’d bring his boat into port every Saturday night, he said, in time to watch. He also took a particular interest in Leachman; MacLeod was certain that America’s most trusted newsman had a crush on the flighty actress. Singer Carole King also appeared on the show, playing a family member of Mary’s boyfriend, whose son Mary doesn’t like. The woman whose plaintive songs—“So Far Away” and “It’s Too Late”—had crackled through the cast’s and writers’ stereo speakers had volunteered herself for a low-key appearance on their show, just to be with them for a week. She was credited as Carole Larkey, using her married name, and the network didn’t promote it as a huge pop star’s guest appearance; they played it like just another episode.
The writers, meanwhile, collected praise and attention like few TV writers had ever enjoyed. Everyone from critics to Emmy voters to the actors themselves heaped praise on the artful writing, a concept still rare in television. After all, just nine years earlier, Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow famously chastised broadcasters for their perpetuation of a “vast wasteland.” Now viewers planned their Saturday nights around The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family, and felt no guilt in the pleasure.
The network executives were now leaving the Mary Tyler Moore Show scripts alone as ratings climbed and Emmys piled up. At last, Brooks and Burns got to run their own show without interference. The production moved into a permanent home, Soundstage 2 at CBS Studio Center, the same stage that had housed the hit show Gilligan’s Island. This meant Brooks and Burns had to relinquish the office once used by Desi Arnaz, including the steam room, but it was worth giving up the chance to sauna with the ghosts of the greatest sitcom of all time for their show to have a real home. And they didn’t have much time for steam rooms anyway. They were soaking in the experience of running their own successful sitcom. Brooks considered the entire experience his version of college. He learned everything he’d ever wanted to know. Leachman taught him about theater, Harper about improv, Asner about drama, Knight about his own vaudevillian approach. They would all discuss craft between rehearsals, while Brooks took in every word.
Even Mike Dann, the prickly executive who’d originally buried the show in a terrible time slot on the network schedule, had to admit: “They were the classiest situation comedy to be developed, and everybody after that modeled themselves after it.”
If there was any doubt remaining that The Mary Tyler Moore Show had made it, two unmistakable signs of success proved the point: By the second year, Mary Richards’s popularity was secure enough that Moore could ditch her wig. No one was about to mistake Mary for Laura Petrie any longer. At the same time, Burns called Sonny Curtis and asked him to record new lyrics to the theme song: “She’s obviously made it,” he told the musician, “so we’ve got to update it.” Now, instead of worrying about how Mary would make it on her own, the new lyrics asked, “Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”
Soon berets became a universal symbol of independence. Lou, Rhoda, Mary, Ted, Murray, and Phyllis all became recognizable personality types. Single women everywhere longed for a cozy, $130-a-month studio apartment like Mary’s, complete with their initials on the wall. Her home became so well known that the location, 2104 Kenwood Parkway in Minneapolis, turned into a popular tourist destination even though only her fictional address—119 North Weatherly—was ever mentioned on the air. The tourist traffic at the house got so bad that the owners put an “Impeach Nixon” sign in the window in hopes of preventing producers from filming the new 1973 opening-title sequence there. Given that Mary Richards admirers would still be visiting the house decades after the show aired, the effort’s ultimate goal—stifling gawkers—was futile.
As the show reached new heights, a 747 carrying Joe and Eddy Rainone from Rhode Island to California—their first flight ever—touched down in Los Angeles. The airsick boys stumbled into their Riverside Drive motel, weary and uncertain of what would happen to them in the coming week. Would the Mary Tyler Moore people even remember that they’d given the go-ahead for a set visit? Would they know who the Rainones were? At the check-in desk, their questions were answered: The clerk handed them a package from the Mary Tyler Moore staff. Inside was a script for the episode being shot that week, titled “Thoroughly Unmilitant Mary,” about a strike at WJM. With it was a stack of comic books, which Rainone had mentioned liking. A note signed from Lorenzo Music said the producer would pick them up at their hotel at nine the following morning.
As promised, their phone rang just before nine. Music’s laconic voice was on the other end. “I’ll be there soon,” he told them, “driving a brown station wagon.”
Rainone couldn’t believe he was about to meet someone from MTM Enterprises! Who was driving an unassuming station wagon! His greatest dream was coming true. On the ten-minute drive to the lot, Music told the brothers that the producers had come to look forward to Joe’s letters because of their detailed critiques. Once, when Brooks was out of town, he even had Music photocopy that week’s letter and send it to him on the road.
Soon Joe found himself, wonder of wonders, plopped down in Allan Burns’s office, awed by the shelves full of bound Room 222 and He & She scripts. He felt a jolt when a lanky, gorgeous brunette passed by: Mary Tyler Moore, right there! When she peeked into the office, though, he could see that it wasn’t the star: Instead, it was his first pen pal on the set, Mimi Kirk, who also worked as Moore’s double during lighting setups. Eddy and Joe met her, then went across the hall to meet production manager Lin Ephraim. When they were whisked back to Allan’s office, it had been transformed: A semicircle of chairs had materialized, filled with the cast members. Mary Tyler Moore, for real this time, along with Valerie Harper, Ed Asner, John Amos (who played WJM weatherman Gordy), Ted Knight, and Gavin MacLeod. Joe lost his footing when he caught sight of them, then recovered in time for Music to introduce him and his brother to everyone.
He took a seat and stared at his heroes. Harper barely looked like Rhoda, she was so luminous—like so many fans told her, he wouldn’t have recognized her out on the street. Moore glowed from the couch, tanned deeply, her endless legs crossed, her smile overwhelming. Then, something even more overwhelming: She spoke to him. She knew who he was. “When I heard you were coming,” she said, “I took your letters home with me over the weekend and I read them.” He had written nearly forty letters at that point.
After the read-through came lunch. The producers explained that they’d deemed this “Joe Day” and had made a reservation for the cast and producers to eat with Joe and his brother at Tail o’ the Cock, a restaurant popular with Hollywood types and paneled with wood so dark it made the sunniest Los Angeles afternoon seem like last call inside. There Joe sat, sandwiched between Harper and Moore, chatting about whatever. He kept an eye on his brother on the opposite end of the table, who was talking with Amos and MacLeod. Joe was mortified to hear his brother detailing his own stomach problems, then relieved when the conversation turned to hockey instead.
Brooks and Burns, down on Joe’s side of the table, awed their fan with behind-the-scenes tales, including one about the final episode of the first season. Rainone hadn’t exactly loved it, and he told them so in his letter that week. It turned out the episode had been so problematic that the producers had kept rewriting and reshooting it in pieces throughout the first season’s production. First, they’d conceived it as a showcase for comedian Richard Libertini’s impression of a bird—they would dress him in a chicken suit, and he’d play a character at the station, maybe from a children’s show, called Big Chicken. But nothing they did with him worked right. Eventually, his scenes were edited down to just one, a gathering in Lou’s office, and a new story emerged: Lou nearly getting fired because at forty-five, he was now “too old” to connect with the youthful audience the station needed. Slim Pickens played the station owner in a performance that made Burns cringe—it wasn’t the actor’s fault, Burns just knew it wasn’t funny. But the season was coming to an end and something had to go on the air, so the producers stopped fussing with the episode and shipped it to the network. Every show has a worst episode, and this would be theirs.
Hilariously, Los Angeles Times critic Cecil Smith raved about it when it aired. He called it “of singular value to connoisseurs of comedy, if only for the portrait wrought by Slim Pickens of a TV tycoon who was once a cowboy star and who conducted business in the living room of his home astride the stuffed carcass of the horse he rode in movies.” Brooks and Burns got a far more accurate reading of the episode’s effectiveness when Joe’s letter arrived the next week. By this time, Joe had developed an intricate “rating” system that he used to evaluate every episode. In short, he counted what he called “jollies” (times he laughed out loud), grins (times he smiled at a joke), and sobs (any tears would do). It was a weighted system, with jollies receiving two points to every one instance. This episode barely rated at all. “You picked up on something Cecil Smith didn’t,” the producers said of Joe’s evaluation. “Here’s this guy who’s supposed to know TV, and you picked up that it was bad.”
Brooks proceeded to probe Joe on his writing habits and aspirations. Had he ever thought of being a television writer? Joe demurred, saying he didn’t think he had it in him to make up funny stuff like they did. He loved the idea of being able to work for his favorite show, of going to the set every day, but he didn’t think writing was his way in.
Halfway through lunch, Tinker strode in and kissed Moore hello. “What are you doing here?” his wife asked.
“I’m here to meet this young man,” he told the now-breathless Joe. “Before you guys leave this week,” he said to Rainone, “I want to sit down and have a talk with you.”
Tinker headed back to the office, Burns picked up the lunch check, and Rainone couldn’t believe a thing that was happening to him. The rest of the day floated by, impossible to grasp, Joe’s personal Land of Oz. He saw the set, Mary’s apartment and the WJM newsroom laid out before him, Lou’s office folded into the side. Right before him, his favorite cast rehearsed a scene in which a union representative bursts into the newsroom with word of a strike. And then Sandrich invited him, Joe Rainone, to step in and play the union representative. When he got tired of doing the scene over and over, and his delivery grew monotonous, Sandrich would have none of it. “What do you mean, coming onto my set and delivering that line like that?”
Joe Rainone put everything he had into that line for the rest of the afternoon.
The remainder of the week swooshed by: an interview with syndicated TV columnist Charles Whitbeck, the beach in Santa Monica, the Wednesday run-through, Disneyland. Friday, the night of the taping, Rainone arrived to find the staff hyped up. Brooks—looking like a cross between Jim Morrison and John Lennon in wire-rimmed glasses and a skin-tight, chest-baring, lace-up shirt—was wearing a pin reading “It’s a Girl!” His wife had just given birth to their first child. Rainone loved being there for such a significant event, chatting with Music near the cameras and posing for photos with Brooks, Moore, and Burns. Even better, Moore told him the producers wanted to let him be an extra in the episode’s crowd scene. Joe had his long-awaited chat with Grant Tinker, in which the executive quizzed him on his interests and background. Rainone briefly wondered if this was a job interview of some kind; it sure felt like it. But soon it was time for filming to get under way.
Further investigation revealed that union regulations would prohibit Joe’s appearance in the episode, but he was still happy to be there. After being ushered into the bleachers next to his brother with the rest of the studio audience, Rainone watched as the episode came together in its finished form. Music warmed up the audience, telling them about Brooks’s new daughter. Music glanced at the note in his hand: “Amy Lorraine Brooks weighs . . . sixty-eight pounds?” The audience laughed. “Oh, wait a minute, that’s six pounds, eight ounces.”
Then Music introduced Joe and Eddy Rainone, fans who’d come all the way from Rhode Island for the taping. Joe stood up and waved. Two older women sitting in front of him turned and looked at him, he says, “like I was their favorite son.” After the taping, Eddy and Joe stuck around as long as they could, watching the relatively boring process called “wild lines,” lines from previous scripts that needed to be re-recorded for clarity. But eventually, it was time to go home.
Before Eddy and Joe headed back to their motel that night, Music told Joe, “There’s been some talk of finding you something to do around here.”
“Yeah, Mary told me about the crowd scene,” Joe replied.
“No,” Music said. “Something more permanent.”
Brooks and Burns now felt more secure in their leadership role and projected that newfound confidence. In fact, they instilled awe in their cast, prompting the actors to work to meet their producers’ expectations. Brooks and Burns were also, it must be said, getting wealthier than they’d ever been, though they barely had time to notice or enjoy it. They didn’t even pay attention to the number on their paychecks; they just knew that it built up to a pretty terrific amount over time. Brooks didn’t realize how much money he had until Burns and his wife bought their house on Mandeville Canyon Road in the tony Brentwood neighborhood for $260,000. The first time he walked into the plush, Spanish-style home, Brooks declared, “Oh, my God! I’m rich!”
Brooks and Burns now got to settle into their role as executive producers and hire additional producers. Music and Davis were preparing to leave the show to launch MTM Entertainment’s second sitcom, which would star comedian Bob Newhart. Brooks and Burns were away from the clacking and dinging of their typewriters more now than they’d ever been, as they dealt with bigger production issues, so they needed help with day-to-day writing. Sandrich suggested a guy named Ed. Weinberger, a Dean Martin Show writer whose movie script draft he’d read. Brooks and Burns didn’t know Weinberger, but they trusted Sandrich’s recommendation and liked Weinberger’s work samples. They took their chances on him even though he hadn’t written a half-hour sitcom script before.
Being on the set amazed Weinberger, a Philadelphia native and Columbia grad who wrote for comedian Dick Gregory in the 1960s, almost as much as it had enthralled fan Joe Rainone. At first, when Weinberger critiqued the run-throughs with Brooks and Burns, he’d simply whisper his suggestions to Brooks, too scared to say them aloud. When he wrote his first script for the show, he gargled with his aftershave and patted his cheeks with Listerine the day he had to turn it in.
For another of his early episodes, he walked the streets of Los Angeles all night coming up with an ending because he didn’t want to ask his new bosses for help. The script had Lou buying his favorite bar and trying to run the business. Lou’s not sure what to do as it starts to falter. As Weinberger walked up and down Sunset Boulevard, he ran into some people he knew who were having a great time hitting the bars. Then he figured it out: Lou would force his bar patrons to have a great time. The episode scored; it became one of Burns’s favorites of all time. “I’ve never heard laughs go on as long as that,” Burns recalls. “It was wonderful.”
The cast was now spending most of their waking hours on the set. Weeks took on a comfortable sameness. Leachman would come to the run-through before each Friday taping, even for episodes she wasn’t in. She cackled like crazy as she watched her costars and said to the producers, “I love this! Put me in it!”
“This is a dress rehearsal, Cloris,” they replied. “We are not putting you in it now.”
Then three hundred audience members filled the powder-blue bleachers while three cameras recorded the actors’ performances. On nights when Brooks’s wife hadn’t provided material by giving birth, Music developed some go-to routines for his audience warm-up. One of his typical shticks was asking the audience members to raise their hands if they hadn’t seen the show before. “Uh-huh. About five or six. You, sir, will you please stand up? Now we don’t want to embarrass anyone, but will you please take off your clothes and tell the reason you haven’t seen the program?”
The filming would almost always go smoothly, with few retakes. After the taping, the actors thanked God for their ideal jobs and then went to dinner together, often at Tail o’ the Cock—where Asner was a regular treated to doting service—or the Red Lantern Inn, a Laurel Canyon Boulevard mainstay owned by Frank Capra’s son.
The scene that unfolded there followed a cozy, family-like routine as well. Asner chatted with, entertained, and befriended everyone in his orbit, “the king of the lot,” as MacLeod called him. Harper made the rounds to ensure that all of her cast mates knew what a wonderful job they’d done, and the writers and producers, too. Harper and Moore played an opposites-attract pair—loud and quiet, loose and proper, free and buttoned-up—as did their producers, Brooks and Burns. Harper was a theater rat, a lapsed Catholic, a registered Democrat, and a proud women’s libber who’d been inspired by reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Moore was a chorus-girl-turned-TV-star, a good Catholic, a registered Republican, and unwilling to declare herself a feminist. But they loved each other just the same, and fiercely.
Ethel Winant sometimes joined them, often with her young sons, who loved to come to tapings and sit next to their mom in director’s chairs. Once, on a post-show excursion with the cast to the Aware Inn—one of the country’s first natural-foods restaurants—a Mercedes painted in multicolored tie-dye patterns pulled up. Out came an Indian man with long, white hair, and a skinny guy with a dark mop and a brush of a mustache. When Ravi Shankar and George Harrison were seated at the table next to the MTM crew, Winant’s teenage son, Bruce, was dumbstruck. Ethel rose and glided over to have a few quiet words with the former Beatle, then beckoned Bruce over to meet him. Bruce never knew if his mother had met the inconceivably famous musician before, but she certainly acted as if she had every right to be talking to him.
Knight and Leachman soaked up any attention they could, each in his or her own way. Knight demanded laughs with his over-the-top antics, preening for onlookers. Leachman could get even more outrageous. She told stories about working alongside a young Brando. She flirted playfully with Brooks, often teasing him about “thinking about the three of us girls when you lie in bed at night.” Brooks rubbed Leachman’s back, fumbling and neurotic, overheated and nervous. “Jim,” she told him once, “hands should never ask questions.” He thought, Holy shit. That’s the coolest thing anybody’s ever said. She’d cross boundaries just to get a reaction, but if someone called her on it she’d retreat in childlike hurt.
Other times, she applied her maternal know-how with magical precision. Leachman returned Brooks’s backrub once as they waited for the crew to change the set. Later, he told her, “I don’t know what you did, but I went back to my office and burst into tears. I couldn’t stop crying.”
Leachman and MacLeod forgot their earlier differences. They now carpooled to work. In her autobiography, Leachman calls him “the person I had the most doubt about” when the show began, but, she adds, he “emerged new and splendid, [playing] his character with real sweetness.”
During the week, Moore would sit on the stage in her canvas director’s chair, dancer’s posture in evidence, chewing gum as she concentrated while others rehearsed scenes that didn’t feature her. Aside from the pack of Silva Thins in her hand and her hair pulled into a bun, she was almost indistinguishable from her character sometimes—were those her black boots and chic plaid knickers, or were those Mary Richards’s? Surely, Moore had the meticulously cared-for skin and bright white teeth of someone who was beyond “regular,” but she counteracted those factors with the way she acted. She rarely retired to her dressing room, as she preferred to know what was going on and to use her breaks to chat with her costars.
She didn’t boss people around, but she did have exacting standards that perhaps contributed to the show’s success more than we’ll ever know. She simply didn’t tolerate “when people don’t do their work right,” she once said. “That’ll get me. But when I’m mad I don’t take it out on anybody; I just like to sit down with whoever it is and talk things over, precisely and practically.” Luckily, she didn’t have to do that much on the set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “We have good, demanding people,” she said. “I’m just part of the ensemble.”
Moore did act like the boss on the set, in the sense that she exuded no-nonsense leadership, though she studiously avoided acting like “the star.” She always insisted on being nothing but a fellow player. She almost never pulled executive rank on the writers, either, objecting to only one script idea: a plot in which Mary was to have a tattoo she was embarrassed about and wanted to get removed at the hospital. That pushed beyond the proper star’s limits. “I can’t play that,” she said, calling herself a “good Catholic girl.” The writers changed her cause of hospitalization to tonsillitis.
Harper had to demand her friend get star treatment because Moore wouldn’t. Harper told Leachman over lunch, “You and I are going to have to make an effort to see to it that Mary is treated like a star because she isn’t going to do it herself. She makes no demands on anybody and does what she’s told. So every once in a while, you and I are going to have to say, ‘No, Mary, what do you want?’ ”
Moore was also obsessed with being punctual. When her car broke down on her way to rehearsal, she almost broke down herself. She took a cab and scurried onto the stage, where everyone on set proceeded to ignore her as a joke, knowing she hated messing anything up. She knew their prank meant they understood and accepted her, flaws and all, like a family.
They all, in fact, accepted each other that way. As Brooks later said: “A television job that’s working is the best job in the world. You get to do something you like. You get to do it with people you like. You have community of a sort that you’re denied in movies, because shows can go on five, seven years, even decades. People meet, they get married, they have children. It’s like a town. It’s enormously secure—until it isn’t. But as long as it is, it is, and it’s great.”
They would have to work extra hard now to keep their little work family grounded. By 1974, almost a quarter of total TV viewers in the country, or 43 million people, were watching their show every week. Though All in the Family held on to the No. 1 spot with a full third of viewers, most of the major critics were now unanimous in their support of Mary Tyler Moore as a classic in the making: The Wall Street Journal’s Benjamin Stein called it “the best show on television, week in and week out, since its beginning four years ago . . . . [Viewers] are watching people much like themselves—doomed to live imperfect lives, often comically mixed-up lives, still stretching for a measure of dignity.” Stein gushed, “It is these changes of mood, these swings from happy to sad, which parallel human life and make the show so rich. Mary is always being wrenched, as so many of us feel we are, and she always comes back for more, as all of us do. And she makes us laugh about it, as our best friends can and do. To do that on a continuing basis requires writing talent of a very high caliber fitted perfectly to the characters on the show.”
Individual episodes didn’t always spark immediate conversations across the country the way All in the Family did with its interracial sniping between Archie Bunker and neighbor George Jefferson or the Bunkers’ handling of a swastika spray-painted on their door. But Mary Tyler Moore’s characters stuck in viewers’ minds as if they were real—fans could find themselves genuinely depressed after watching Lou and his wife separate, elated when Rhoda won a beauty contest, or uncomfortable when Mary had another one of her lousy parties.
When the subject of TV came up, most erudite Americans would shrug and claim they didn’t watch much. But someone was watching, because television viewership was growing every year, with the average home taking in six hours a day. And one of the few shows that even educated, upscale viewers often did admit to watching, along with perhaps the World Series or public television documentaries, was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Even author Martin Mayer, who wrote the 1972 book About Television despairing about the state of TV—“Daddy only watches television when he’s paid for it,” he writes of telling his children—admitted to watching the occasional episode of Mary Tyler Moore of his own free will.
Television was gaining so much power that some, including Mayer, accused it of killing live entertainment and mainstream magazines, poisoning sports and news, and aiming to take down newspapers and political elections. Cable television seemed to simply be bringing broadcast television to far-flung rural areas that didn’t have local stations, but Mayer saw something else. Those newfangled domestic communication satellites, beaming programs willy-nilly all over the United States, portended potential bedlam. Cable television, with its coaxials snaking their way underneath us all, weaving an invisible web whose force was yet unknown, would be the nation’s next “impending disaster,” he predicted.