(1972–73)
Treva Silverman liked to hang out in the Mary Tyler Moore offices on the lot, smoking grass with the boys after a day of sitting at her desk writing and revising. Amid the occasional clacks of typewriters working overtime and gales of laughter over shared joke ideas, she would puff on a pungent joint or eat one of her home-baked brownies. Lorenzo Music—a husky, dark, brilliant writer-producer—had great stuff, and it was the perfect way to unwind after another packed day on the set. She felt comfortable with Brooks and Burns, as well as Music. Once she’d been made story editor, she spent all of her time on the lot with them. They hung out wherever they could safely smoke joints, usually in their offices on the MTM lot. They all spent most of their after-hours stoned, except Burns. He loved to go home to his wife.
Silverman particularly enjoyed hanging out with Music and was knocked out by his warm-up performances. He was so subtle and silly and hilarious as the warm-up guy, entertaining the audience before the show and in between set changes, that she once whispered to him, “Don’t be so funny. You’re better than the show!” The workplace was becoming Treva’s family, just as Mary’s had become hers.
The MTM offices had turned out to be a dream come true, everything Silverman could have hoped for back when she was toiling away at piano bars. Silverman knew how lucky she was to have her job. The show was now part of what many have called the best lineup in network history, CBS’s 1973–74 Saturday night: All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett. Silverman loved to sit on the steps to the offices reading a new script by one of her fellow writers almost as much as she enjoyed writing one of her own. It wasn’t that everyone in the group had a lack of ego—in fact, she thought it just might be the opposite: Their egos were so strong, in the healthiest of ways, that it allowed them to not feel competitive. All they wanted was the best possible show. They rarely got jealous when another writer wrote something great. They just thought, Wow. I want to do that, too. It was a heady time to be a sitcom writer, particularly for Mary Tyler Moore, and not just because of Treva’s brownies.
Brooks and Burns had instigated an unusual policy concerning a writer’s credits, a policy that showed enormous respect for writers. No matter how many revisions were made on a script by others, the original writer’s credit was kept intact. Even if a script was completely rewritten before it was shot, the producers would never adjust the credits. This policy ensured a level of collaboration rare on television shows. It also guaranteed that the original writer, once committed to an episode, would get all the royalties.
Silverman loved the work she was doing and felt herself growing as a writer. She learned to do the rewrites on someone else’s scripts in that writer’s voice. She learned to write on the fly. Although she longed for a situation akin to Proust’s cork-lined room, she didn’t always have the luxury of being in a quiet room with a typewriter. She did, however, love the group meetings where everybody contributed lines. Nothing is more wonderful, she thought, than being around first-rate writers who care. It always makes you better.
Silverman had almost everything she had ever wanted—the respect of her fellow producers, the other writers, and the cast; and the chance Mary Tyler Moore gave her to shape the image of women for a large, mainstream audience. She still dreamed of finding the man to complete her fantasy scenario: accepting her Emmy while her husband rushes her off on their trip to Paris. But she was racking up Emmys, so she hardly had time to find him. While she was self-conscious about her still-unmarried status—Mary and Rhoda’s rise helped on this score, but didn’t erase the stigma in less progressive minds overnight—she dated up a storm. Her hair was long and blond, and she wore lots of miniskirts. She was popular. She simply didn’t find a keeper. Instead, she enjoyed what she thought was a wonderful time in America. She had what she calls “ ’70s kinds of experiences, Summer of Love experiences.”
With so much freedom, and almost all of her dreams coming true, the key question in Silverman’s life became: What do you do once you’ve gotten almost everything you wanted?
At the same time, there were much bigger battles to fight in television, and with television.
Norman Lear appeared before a U.S. Senate subcommittee on constitutional rights in 1972 to argue for greater artistic freedom for all involved in the arts, particularly TV. “As a writer and producer of All in the Family, I seem to be enjoying a rather singular experience insofar as network censorship is concerned,” Lear said in his statement. “While I confer many times a week with the Program Practices Department of CBS, I am happy to report that we are not censored on All in the Family.” Indeed, later that year, All in the Family would feature prime time’s first audible toilet flush, during a flashback to Mike and Gloria’s wedding, and would make a point of often featuring commode noise in subsequent episodes.
This “Golden Age of Comedy” had happened thanks to a strange confluence of events: the rise of several talented writer-producers, namely Brooks and Burns and Lear, and a willingness at the television networks to run with anything that attracted younger audiences and watercooler buzz. Those who worked on these particular shows were having an exhilarating time of it. Their success earned them freedom.
Despite this freedom, these shows could not portray many key facets of the tumultuous ’70s—and less successful shows could do even less. What happened in many young people’s real lives and what happened on television did not necessarily correspond. As Silverman, Brooks, Burns, and the others sat writing The Mary Tyler Moore Show, their contemporaries around the country held key parties in suburban homes, experimented with group sex, and had a great time all around. Silverman thought it was a wonderful time, the way life should be and would be from then on. We’ve finally found it, she thought. How nice.
But The Mary Tyler Moore Show could only push so far, so fast. Those with less liberal minds than Treva Silverman weren’t quite ready for all of that in prime time, and she knew it. It never even crossed the writers’ minds to incorporate those more realistic aspects of their lives into the show. There would be no Mary Smokes Grass with the Guys After Work episode. (Mary rarely even got drunk.) Mary went on countless dates, and she may have spent the night with a few of them, but the writers weren’t about to send her to a key party or an orgy. Mary, a good girl from the Midwest, might have a sexual affair or two, but, as Silverman says, “Mary Goes to the Playboy Mansion, I think, was an idea whose time had never come. ‘Mary swims topless, as Hugh Hefner looks fondly on,’ was not going to happen.”
What the show could get away with, as it rose in popularity throughout its second season, remained to be seen. Brooks and Burns had instilled the ideal of authenticity in their writers and cast. But how much of single women’s real sex lives would make it into the scripts, past network executives and censors? And how real could America take their fictional female characters, even those as now beloved as Mary and Rhoda, before they turned their dials? Was Mary Richards that kind of girl? And what kind, for that matter, was that kind?
Mary Richards may have summed up her own position on the matter best: “I’m hardly innocent. I’ve been around. Well, maybe not around, but I’ve been nearby.” She did, however, grow more liberated over time. As the show hit its peak influence in the third season, one episode had Mary staying out all night with a man, though only by insinuation: We see Mary leave for a date at night, and in the next shot we see her arrive home in the morning wearing the same dress. Men across the country wrote to the show in despair over the betrayal of their trust and admiration. Just a few weeks later, an even bigger landmark in Mary’s sex life came by quick, subtle suggestion: Mary’s dad comes over for some father-daughter time, and as her mom leaves him there for dinner with Mary, she calls out, “Don’t forget to take your pill!” Both father and daughter reply, “I won’t!”
“The Pill!” Brooks says. “That was a huge landmark.”
Birth control pills had first won approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960, and the Pill was credited for kicking off both the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, as symbolized by a Time magazine cover story in 1967. But the Pill wasn’t available to unmarried women in all states until the 1972 Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. Baird.
“Mary was a nice girl, in quotation marks,” Silverman explains of the Pill moment’s grand significance. “Had it had something to do with Rhoda it wouldn’t have had that effect, because Rhoda was something of a rebel. If Mary was taking the Pill, it gave the stamp of approval for sexuality.” In fact, several lines early in the show’s run referred to Rhoda’s active sex life, including a second-season episode when a fire in her apartment forces her to room with Mary briefly. As they get on each other’s nerves, Rhoda threatens to go to a hotel; Phyllis cracks that it wouldn’t be the first time. Rhoda—as a secondary character, a former New Yorker, and, perhaps, as a more “ethnic” woman—was accepted from the start as more worldly.
At last, in season three, Mary got to grow up, too. “Now she’s aggressively feminine instead of passively feminine and has healthily accepted the modern-day concept that it’s perfectly normal for a woman to be happy though she’s 32 years old and unmarried,” Weinberger told an interviewer at the time. “Instead of just reacting shyly to everyone else, the Mary character now yells at people and fights back.”
The producers learned to skillfully walk a line between innuendo and explicitness that often allowed them to push boundaries while acting innocent—a reflection, perhaps, of their main character herself. It was a trick they’d learned by accident when they’d convinced CBS executives to accept the idea of Mary having once lived in sin instead of having gotten divorced. Now they used this kind of sleight-of-script—leaving out explicit information to imply a range of possibilities—to handle other complicated issues. An early draft of the script for the episode in which Mary stays out all night included an exchange with Rhoda about what had happened on her long date: She and her beau had talked until dawn. “In the romantic glow of sunrise, did he propose?” Rhoda asked. Mary replied, “Yes, but not marriage.” The excision of the exchange in the final cut of the episode allowed viewers to imagine for themselves what happened: Likely, their thoughts were naughtier than anything the script could have contained.
Similarly, in the Pill episode, producers decided to nix a dialogue between Mary and her father about her sexual history, keeping the focus on their discussion about their own relationship. With that cut, they avoided any lines that implied judgment of Mary’s Pill-popping and let viewers imagine how her father felt about the disclosure—or whether he noticed it at all.
By this time, The Mary Tyler Moore Show had made lady sitcoms hot commodities. CBS itself tried to duplicate its success with Sandy Duncan, first with a show called Funny Face in 1971, which lasted only half a season before Mary Tyler Moore was moved up an hour on Saturday nights, to 8:30 p.m., to replace it. The official word was that Duncan was undergoing eye surgery, but the show’s format was scrapped when the star returned the next fall with a revamped version called The Sandy Duncan Show. Neither gelled with viewers or critics, who said Duncan’s character was too traditional and innocent for ’70s television. Its own executive producer admitted, “It was awfully old-fashioned in a year when All in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore were doing realistic comedy.” ABC attempted to get in the game with Shirley’s World, starring Shirley MacLaine, in 1971. Diana, starring Diana Rigg, hit the deteriorating NBC in 1973.
None lasted more than a season, but then came Maude. The show’s star, Bea Arthur, made for a startling screen presence, the anti–Mary Richards. She didn’t work, and she wasn’t single, but she wasn’t a standard housewife, either; she was a liberal activist on her fourth husband. Stately, imposing, and graying, Arthur had appeared onstage mostly in classical roles, such as Lysistrata, who famously led a protest against war in which women refused to have sex with their husbands, and Clytaemnestra, who betrayed and murdered her husband upon his triumphant return home from the Trojan War. As Maude says in one of the later episodes, she was a woman with “the innocent glow of Donna Reed . . . and the crisp features of George C. Scott.”
When Mary Richards stayed out all night, the national debate that ensued played out on Maude. Like all of Lear’s sitcoms, Maude took on the issues of the day, and it wasn’t about to ignore those issues just because they came up on another sitcom. “Look what happened on The Mary Tyler Moore Show recently,” Maude’s stuffy next-door neighbor, Arthur (Conrad Bain), huffs. “She went out on a date and she stayed out all night.”
“All night?” Maude responds, dripping with sarcasm. “Our little Mary?”
“You can sneer all you want, Maude,” Arthur says, “but as Mary Tyler Moore goes, so goes America.”
Maude had come into being as an adversary to Archie Bunker in a 1971 episode of All in the Family. Maude showed up to help her cousin, Edith Bunker, take care of the family when everyone in the house had the flu. But naturally, Maude had clashed with Archie quite spectacularly on political issues. After the episode was a hit, creator Norman Lear decided to give the character a spin-off.
From the beginning, Maude tore up traditional television social mores. Maude’s twenty-something daughter, Carol, dated a succession of men and spent the night with them. Both Maude and Carol identified as feminists. Maude and her husband, Walter, often played in contrast to the traditional neighbors portrayed by Bain and Rue McClanahan. Maude took tranquilizers, Miltown and Valium. Her husband drank too much.
But nothing made bigger waves than the episode that in November 1972, just two months into the show—and perhaps not coincidentally, during the traditional “ratings sweeps” period, when Nielsen was tabulating viewership—addressed abortion. Maude, at forty-seven, had prime time’s first legal abortion in an episode titled “Maude’s Dilemma.” Two CBS affiliates refused to show the episode, but the brouhaha just brought more attention to the show. “Maude is commercial TV’s first striking manifestation of the frustrated housewife archetype,” the Los Angeles Times said. “Her abrasiveness, while funny to viewers, is actually the expression of all her energy that has never left the home.” Arthur called her character “the Joan of Arc of the middle-age woman.” Fan letters poured in for her, gushing that she was “saying the things we’ve always wanted to say.”
The Mary Tyler Moore Show suddenly had a sister in TV feminism, and even shared some of its female writers with Maude. But Mary also strove to define itself in opposition to the new hit. “We’re not Maude,” Moore told an interviewer at the time. “I feel strongly that sex is a private thing not to be shared with an audience—or even with friends.”
Writer Sybil Adelman, who penned episodes of both Mary Tyler Moore and Maude, noticed a difference between writing for the two camps. The Mary Tyler Moore producers constantly picked her brain for womanly experience; the Maude producers just gave her assignments. “Norman more than the others treated us as writers,” she says, “and not women writers.”
Brooks didn’t worry much about Maude, and insisted his writers stay true to the original vision of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They would not become an issue show just to keep up with the competition, even if the issue was feminism and the competition was directly referencing them. Moore agreed: “The show is opening up, widening its perimeters, developing with the times,” she said at the time. “The characters are evolving. We’re getting into things like divorce and affairs, but we’ll never go where Maude and Archie Bunker have gone. That’s not our show.”
Some current social issues, however, couldn’t help but sneak into The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s realistic, 1970s landscape. Most notably, a discussion of gay rights tiptoed into a 1973 episode in which Phyllis’s brother, Ben, comes to town. Though Phyllis tries to set him up with Mary, he spends a great deal of time with Rhoda. By the end of the episode, a despondent Phyllis confronts Rhoda about her misgivings. “Ben and I aren’t getting married!” Rhoda responds. “He’s not my type!”
“What do you mean, not your type?” Phyllis says. “He’s attractive. He’s successful. He’s single.”
Rhoda concludes: “He’s gay.”
Phyllis hugs Rhoda. “I’m so relieved.”
Silverman thought it was a great idea for the show to address the gay movement, which was still very much on the fringes of mainstream culture. But the gay issue itself found its way into the script by pure coincidence, and the rest of the episode was constantly evolving throughout the week of shooting, changed in some way by almost every major player involved. No one was sure until it was finished whether it would be a disaster or a triumph.
As written by Jenna McMahon and Dick Clair, the original script called for Ben to take up with Rhoda instead of Mary for the week and thus cause Phyllis great consternation, with no references to sexual orientation. When actor Bob Moore showed up to play the part, however, Sandrich saw an opportunity: The actor himself was gay. After the first rehearsal, Sandrich went up to the writers’ office and argued for a rewrite. He wasn’t seeing romantic chemistry between the actor and Harper.
Brooks liked the idea, but called Bob Moore to make sure it was okay with him. The actor happily agreed. It would become one of TV’s first overt admissions that a character was gay, and that it was more than okay to be so—it was something to be appreciated, to laugh with, not at. The joke worked, but not at the gay character’s expense.
The creative momentum built from there. When Harper read the line in which Rhoda tells Mary that Ben loves red, she thought of a fire-engine–colored Courrèges dress that she herself owned. She wore it in the episode without further comment—the implication being that Rhoda wanted to please Ben even though she acted otherwise—and the audience went crazy when they saw it.
When it came time to shoot the confrontation scene, Harper made a more meaningful suggestion that stuck. Sandrich directed her to break the big news to Phyllis lightly, but Harper said, “No, I think it should be factual, like he’s a priest or he’s married or he’s going to Tibet for ten years.”
It worked. When she delivered the killer line—“He’s gay”—the show got one of its longest studio-audience laughs ever. Brooks said they’d have to cut the laugh in editing because it would be too much for the viewers at home—it went on for a good forty-five seconds or so. Harper and Leachman had to pause for that long while they stayed in character and kept the scene alive. Leachman’s face went on registering shock, confusion, and then understanding. Harper took a sip of her drink. They waited out the laughs just as they’d been trained to do in the theater. They knew they had to let the audience members get it out of their system or no one would hear the next lines.
The controversial plotline didn’t thrill the network, but by that time All in the Family was tackling such issues weekly, and burning up the ratings charts doing it. And Mary Tyler Moore had earned enough of a reputation that the executives simply warned the producers, “Be careful that the show does not go outside the bounds of its natural perimeters.”
The next year, however, the show pushed those perimeters, just a little, yet again. A 1974 episode came the closest the show ever would to addressing Watergate by featuring our little Mary thrown into a jail cell full of hookers when she refused to reveal a journalistic source under court order. “What are you in here for?” one cracks. “Imitating a Barbie Doll?” A few episodes later, the hooker (played to memorable comedic effect by Barbara Colby), whom Mary befriends, gets out of jail, too, and wants to pal around on the outside. Mary encourages her to find ways to make a legal living, perhaps following her passion for fashion design. Her first project: a dress for Mary that clung to her every curve and completely bared her midsection. The joke was obvious even to those who didn’t analyze it too deeply. Juxtaposing Mary’s good-girl image with prostitutes was inherently hilarious.
The episode became a hit, with shockingly little backlash.
The producers had learned to be careful when they handled hot topics, but not because they worried about offending viewers—rather, because they had tried it before to disastrous creative effect. In a late second-season episode called “Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda,” which directly addressed anti-Semitism, their attempt played as nothing more than an All in the Family imitation. And not a particularly good one.
Rhoda’s Jewishness, a huge part of her character, had never been the subject of a plot point before this episode. But viewers had certainly noticed the character’s ethnicity. Harper received a letter from someone in Arkansas saying, “I really love your work but I want to know are you Jewish or a regular American?” Finally, the producers decided: Why not acknowledge that being Jewish came with difficulties?
The episode guest-starred Mary Frann as a new friend of Mary’s who belongs to a country club that won’t admit Jews. But putting Mary through the motions of learning about bigotry, and then giving a grand speech against it by the end of the half hour, looked silly in the context of the character-driven Mary Tyler Moore Show. The episode became a study in the difference between MTM and Lear. On Mary Tyler Moore, the plots were to grow from the characters, not to be giant social issues descending upon the characters as if from above, to prompt heated dialogue and then evaporate.
The Mary Tyler Moore producers would never attempt an All in the Family imitation again.
In fact, “Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda” was the closest the show would ever get to explicitly making racial issues central to a plot. “That was just not our MO,” Burns says. “There were maybe two or three times in the history of the show when we did something a little preachy, and it didn’t really work.” Only black-centric shows rivaled female-driven shows in trendiness as the decade progressed, but rarely did the twain meet; Brooks and Burns felt like they had their hands full with fighting for women’s issues and Rhoda’s Jewishness without taking on civil rights as well.
Mary Tyler Moore lost its sole black recurring character when John Amos, who played Gordy—WJM’s smart, affable weatherman—left in 1973 to star in Norman Lear’s Good Times, which chronicled the travails of a family living in the Chicago projects. Brooks and Burns had purposely cast a black actor as part of the WJM staff, seeing both the social responsibility of diversity and the potential for light humor. “We made him a weatherman, which seemed to us to be funny because every black guy you saw on the air in those days was the sports guy,” Burns says. “Ted kept making the mistake, ‘Here’s Gordy with sports.’ ” Once Gordy had left, race rarely came up on The Mary Tyler Moore Show again.
Of course, the producers couldn’t have kept one issue out of Mary Tyler Moore if they’d tried: women’s lib. And though she’d ultimately be viewed in retrospect as a feminist heroine, Mary Richards had a fraught relationship with the women’s libbers of her time. Moore was often asked about her own stance on women’s issues, and she offered ambivalent answers at best: “I think women are okay. I mean, I like women, but I know a lot of people don’t like them. That’s partly women’s fault: They allow themselves to be put down, put back in the kitchen when the men are talking. In my mind I can see a lot of the new thinking about the female role, but emotionally I’m not there: I tend to defer to my husband, to accept his dominant role. And there are certain things that I’d rather talk over only with another woman. Unisex looks like it’s here, but I hope we never lose our sexuality. I wouldn’t like that at all.”
The feminist movement simply was not impressed with Ms. Richards, and Moore’s lack of enthusiastic cheerleading on the cause’s behalf likely didn’t help. Brooks learned all of this in November 1975 when he was invited to speak on a panel at the Conference on Women in Public Life, held at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. It would be a high-profile extravaganza at the height of the women’s rights movement, a U.S. version of the United Nations’ recent International Women’s Year meeting in Mexico City. He would be part of a panel addressing women’s progress in television and film. He could stay for the weekend at Lady Bird Johnson’s nearby ranch, the organizers offered. Yes, of course he could bring his now-serious girlfriend, Holly Holmberg. The couple would just have to say they were already husband and wife so Lady Bird would let them stay in a room together. The former First Lady was a women’s rights advocate, but she was very traditional. Surely he understood.
Brooks started to feel like he was in an episode of his own sitcom.
The morning before his appearance, women crammed the LBJ Library corridors to register for the event, making it the largest conference the facility had ever hosted and the largest in the United States for International Women’s Year. Ambassador Anne Armstrong urged the women to “go public. Women are now in centerstage. You owe it to the movement not to shun that spotlight, that mic, that printed page, but to use it as a benchmark. Maybe to run for office, maybe to manage a campaign, maybe to press for an appointive position, maybe to get on a TV show or an op-ed page. In whatever way, go public.”
At the Sunday night panel, before the packed thousand-seat auditorium—with another thousand participants overflowing into nearby hallways and rooms—Brooks filed onto the stage of the LBJ Library auditorium with the panel’s moderator, Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem; Virginia Carter, who worked as Norman Lear’s assistant; and Ann Hassett, the director of special projects at the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. The crowd included young and old women, some in housedresses, some in business suits. Steinem—in wire-rimmed glasses, a floral print blouse, and long blond waves—leaned into the microphone to wild applause from the crowd.
Her opening remarks addressed the importance of TV and film in forming and reforming public attitudes toward women. “I’d like to ask each of us to consider how much television and films have shaped our dreams,” she said. “Just consider what visitors from outer space might think if they were confronted with the last twelve years of television and films as the only evidence of what American women were like. First of all they would be convinced that there were twice as many American men as there were American women. It would be quite clear that we slept in false eyelashes and full makeup. Some of us would be taken to be a servant class of some sort. If we lived alone, we would almost have to be widows, at least until recently. That’s begun to change, and we’ll hear a little bit more about the change later.”
To the continuous clicks of cameras documenting the event, Steinem continued, considering the effect the women’s movement had on pop culture—progress had been made, she said, but not enough. “We have begun to see women who are autonomous, who disagree, who argue, who have some identity of their own, who seek jobs and are sometimes even paid for those jobs,” she said. “Mary Tyler Moore agitated for equal pay, and got half of what she asked for. It was a very pop cultural compromise.”
When Steinem introduced Carter, she mentioned Lear’s Maude. “Think of Maude!” she said. “Gives us hope.” Brooks, she said, was “a person who has tried to be very sensitive to the changes that women are demanding.”
During the question-and-answer period (which, unlike the introduction, was not recorded in Steinem’s archives), Brooks recalls Steinem pointedly criticizing The Mary Tyler Moore Show for allowing Mary to call her boss “Mr. Grant” when all of the other characters called him “Lou.” She got still more applause for this; the Mr. Grant Issue had become a major talking point for feminist activists. A terrified public speaker, Brooks was sure he even heard some boos from the audience when he was up to speak.
Mary Richards had officially become a polarizing figure, a fact that would have shocked the character herself.
On the one hand, she was continuing to bring issues specific to young, working women to the TV screen, and becoming even bolder about it. For instance, Mary’s adventures in the local TV news ranks often mirrored those of the women in Hollywood—she complained of pressure to “represent women everywhere” and of the station manager “trotting in groups of people and saying, ‘This is our woman executive!’ ” By 1974, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter were filled with announcements about groundbreaking promotions for women at movie studios and networks, including Ethel Winant, who was now officially vice president of casting at CBS. The moves were meant to publicly prove the Hollywood establishment was not sexist.
In the episode Steinem referenced, Mary fretted over the discovery that her salary was lower than that of the man who held her job before her; in the end, she did win a raise, though it was true it didn’t bring her totally on par with her predecessor. Others had praised the show for addressing the issue of equal pay realistically: “This is hardly earthshaking,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Don Shirley. “But the cumulative effect of such statements, with more or less subtlety, in almost every episode of the series, is hard to ignore.”
Mary’s famously quavery voice made the demand for equal pay both funny and poignant, but it wasn’t presented seriously enough for some critics. Mary also seemed to at least consider Mr. Grant’s argument that the guy deserved the extra fifty dollars a week because he had a family to support. Moore personally admired this mark of what she saw as Mary Richards’s reasonableness.
Many critics beyond Steinem complained that was exactly the problem with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Now that feminist ideals were becoming mainstream, it didn’t seem like enough simply to have a heroine who was over thirty and refusing to define herself by her search for a man. Mary Richards, some women’s lib activists said, was not nearly liberated enough. Her celebrated theme song identified her as a “girl.” She wasn’t a feminist heroine; in fact, she was a pushover. Critics said Mary Richards offered a “compromised and contradictory feminism,” with her empowerment tempered too much by “girl-next-door sweetness.” The New York Times pointed out that “she hardly ever gets to write the news or report it on camera—even though she appears to be several times brighter than the men who do.” Even the mainstream TV Guide complained in an editorial that characters like Mary Richards weren’t “challenging the family system, demanding a new kind of sexual relationship or a new division of labor in the home.”
The producers defended themselves, however: As for the Mr. Grant Issue, Mary was the kind of person who would address her boss properly. And while she was a bit of a people pleaser, she stood up for herself when necessary. They wanted to favor character over social statement, even as more women were entering the workplace, demanding equal pay just like Mary, and even reaching the upper echelons of the producers’ very own industry. The producers wouldn’t identify themselves or the heroine they’d created as feminist, per se, even if they were proud of the empowering figure she was becoming. Because she represented “good girls” and had a sense of vulnerability, they observed, no one could resent her as an icon.
That was, in fact, the secret to her unique power.
They even played her conflicted “Mr. Grant”-ing for laughs: In the 1973 episode when Lou confides in Mary about his divorce, he demands she call him by his first name if they’re going to have such a personal conversation. “Would that be just for the purpose of this conversation, or for, you know, all time?” she asks. Then she tries it out, stammering an awkward “Mr . . . . Lou.”
That changes his mind. “Call me Mr. Grant,” he concludes.