(1974)
Back in the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Fred Silverman—the owlish executive heading CBS’s programming—visited a Friday night taping and asked to see Valerie Harper afterward. She thought she was getting fired. “That was a great show tonight,” he told the actress. “What would you think if we spun you off?”
For a second, she still believed she was getting fired. “Spinning off” sounded like a bad thing. At the time, in 1970, spin-offs weren’t all that common in television. She considered it a few more seconds before responding. “Oh, spun me off! Like my own show?” she said in the familiar, exuberant cadence of Rhoda Morgenstern. Silverman nodded. But Harper still had her doubts. “I think it’s a little soon,” she concluded.
The prospect scared her. Being on this show still scared her. First, she talked to her husband about it, and he encouraged her to consider the idea. It would give her a chance to play Rhoda’s life on her own terms instead of just relating to Mary, he said. She wouldn’t have to worry about blocking Mary’s shot; the shot would be hers.
Harper also confided in Mary Tyler Moore about the idea. Moore’s heart sank at the prospect of losing her friend as her costar, but she put aside her own feelings and told Harper it seemed like a natural progression. “Do you want to be my sidekick all your life?” Moore asked her.
“What if it bombs?” Harper replied. She and her character shared the same self-confidence, or lack thereof.
“Then you move back to Minneapolis!” Moore said, painting on a smile.
That helped. When Harper’s fan mail continued to increase, talks about a Rhoda show grew more serious. Three years into The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Harper felt better about it, even though she was still nervous. She went to her on-screen mother, Nancy Walker, a showbiz veteran, for advice. “Stop obsessing, Val,” Walker said. “It’s a job. Take it.”
Harper agreed to do it, and the producers went to work figuring out what the concept behind Rhoda’s show would be.
The “spin-off” had existed since at least 1941, when the character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, from the radio comedy show Fibber McGee and Molly, got his own show, The Great Gildersleeve. Television, however, was only just beginning back then and there was no need to recycle characters. Now, in the early ’70s (and a few years after Silverman first mentioned the idea to Harper), the spin-off was booming thanks to the character-driven comedies of MTM and Lear, which produced intriguing roles faster than they could get their own shows. All in the Family alone would eventually beget Maude, The Jeffersons, and Good Times.
The Mary Tyler Moore producers resisted the idea of spinning Rhoda off this early, even now as the show’s fourth season approached. They were interested more in quality than a spike in ad revenue. Fred Silverman assured them, “I think she’s so strong a character that she should have her own show.” Brooks and Burns didn’t want to fight the network president who’d been their savior, nor did they want to risk losing the in-demand Harper to another production company or network. That would be worse than spinning her off prematurely.
The problem: Rhoda was hardly your typical main character on television. Though Harper was a striking beauty, she had a good ten-to fifteen-pound advantage over most of her contemporaries. She had the kind of hips you didn’t always see on actresses, and she had a self-deprecating way of putting on another ten pounds just by joking about her own weight. The fact was, Harper loved to be perceived as “dumpy and frumpy.” She enjoyed having the distinctive job of lobbing all the zinger lines without having to worry about how she looked.
She also delighted in her character’s attitude, her outsider status as a witty Jewish girl from the East Coast. Harper realized early on that the only way Rhoda could hold her own with the too-perfect-to-be-true Mary was with her New York confidence: I’m gonna straighten this shiksa out. She asked Brooks and Burns, “Can I call her ‘kid’?” They loved the idea and used it from then on.
Rhoda always had a joke to hide her insecurity. Rhoda to Phyllis on what single people do to have fun: “Same as you—sit around and wonder what it would be like to have a happy marriage.” Rhoda on accidentally using Mary’s makeup mirror: “Mary, why didn’t you warn me? I thought it was a relief map of the moon. When they sell those magnifying mirrors they should include a printed suicide note.” Rhoda on candy: “I don’t know why I’m putting this in my mouth. I should just apply it directly to my hips.” (That oft-quoted line was an off-the-cuff addition from writer Treva Silverman, directly from Harper’s own mouth, during a run-through.) On Mary’s assertion that chocolate doesn’t solve anything: “No, Mare, cottage cheese solves nothing; chocolate can do it all!”
Rhoda’s accent had its own odyssey. Harper was born in Suffern, New York, and after moving around the country as a child had spent her share of time in New York City, performing in theaters. But she was neither from the Bronx nor Jewish, like Rhoda was supposed to be—Harper’s parents were Catholics of French and English ancestry. She picked up the accent itself quickly, thanks to her Bronx-raised stepmother and some Jewish friends back in New York, but she constantly pushed her Jewishness further than the producers wanted. Brooks’s own Jewish heritage gave him the final authority on such matters, and he didn’t want to overwhelm viewers with her ethnicity. Harper was always asking: Could she say “schlep”? “Shiksa”? “Schmuck”? No, no, and no, Brooks answered. The revelation of Rhoda’s Jewishness to the network executives—in the first-season script featuring her mother, Ida—had come just months after the “audiences don’t like mustaches, divorce, and Jews” speech from the CBS brass. Brooks didn’t want to back down from the network, but he didn’t want to go too far just to incite them, either.
By the fourth season of Mary Tyler Moore, in 1973–74, Rhoda had settled into everything unique about her character—her Jewish background, her New York street smarts, her body, her wardrobe. Harper even used the hiatus between Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, the summer of 1974, to play another Jewish woman, returning to New York to play a character named Sally Kramer in a Broadway domestic drama, Thieves. She enjoyed the change of pace that returning to the stage allowed her—and the easy entrée to Broadway that her stardom now afforded her—but as Rhoda prepped to premiere in the fall, Harper had anxiety dreams. In one, her three favorite actresses—Anna Magnani, Anne Bancroft, and Maureen Stapleton—invited her to appear with them in a play, but she stood onstage confused, mute, and scriptless while they performed perfectly.
Harper worried about the more practical changes that having her own show brought to her life as well; after years of handling her household tasks herself, she was forced to hire help with the shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Mimi Kirk, Rhoda’s fashion muse, came with Harper to the new show as her assistant, jewelry-maker, headscarf-tier, and lunch-maker. She called Kirk “a friend, an alter ego whose taste I rely on in decisions I don’t have time to make.” Harper could afford the help—she was now making twenty-five thousand dollars a week, plus a cut of the show—but it felt unnatural to her. She still drove a 1968 Pontiac Firebird with two dented fenders, and hated talking or thinking about money. She did spend on travel and clothes, but the rest went to housekeeping—she believed strongly in paying well and giving raises.
More than anything, she loved sharing her newfound wealth. She bought her mother her first pair of real gold earrings, pledged five thousand dollars to the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and donated to the United Farm Workers. Schaal had supported her in the beginning of her acting career when she was making almost nothing, and she was thrilled to finally be able to reciprocate. “Now that I’m making more money than he is, even if we split up, half of everything should be his,” she told Ms. “Friends advised me to get a sugar bowl, stash away money, keep everything for myself. It’s interesting what money brings out in people: If a woman has no money, she’s supposed to get a husband; if she has a lot, she’s supposed to keep it from her husband.”
Her darling Mary Tyler Moore costars sent her a gift to cheer her up, and cheer her on: a photo of them all with exaggerated sad faces, except for a laughing Ted, with the caption, “We Miss You.”
As work began on Rhoda, Brooks and Burns refined its concept: Per Fred Silverman’s wishes, Rhoda would meet the man of her dreams, at last, and get married, making the show about the travails of a modern marriage. The producers decided Rhoda would move back to New York City (which, of course, would be re-created on a soundstage a few doors down from Mary Tyler Moore in Los Angeles) after meeting said man on a two-week visit to the East Coast. They also settled on featuring Rhoda’s parents as regular cast members—already played by Nancy Walker and Harold Gould on The Mary Tyler Moore Show—and giving her a sad-sack younger sister, Brenda. For that role, the producers found a nasal-voiced treasure in theater actress Julie Kavner (later to voice Marge on the Brooks-produced The Simpsons). Bob Moore, who’d played Phyllis’s gay brother on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, would serve as Rhoda’s regular director. He set a tone for working on the show: It would be fun and laid-back, just like its leading lady.
But finding the love of Rhoda’s life turned out to be as difficult for the producers as it had been for Rhoda. They had hoped to sign Judd Hirsch, a thirty-nine-year-old actor who’d appeared in a few TV movies and could provide an authentic Bronx-born, Jewish match for Rhoda. But he backed out of contention for the role because of scheduling conflicts, so the producers kept looking for Rhoda’s man.
After seeing nearly 150 actors for the role, they settled on a tall, curly-haired hunk named David Groh, who’d played only a few small TV parts before but looked like he could sweep Rhoda off her feet. He had little comedy experience, but he had a great camera presence, and the pilot was set to shoot soon. So the producers tested their luck—they’d had so much luck with their Mary Tyler Moore cast—and hoped some of Harper’s perfect timing and delivery would rub off on Groh. “He was a good actor,” Burns says. “A very good actor. Great looking. Not much comedy. But he worked hard and he tried so hard, David.” Groh also came off a little shy, but he was well liked by his costars. “You know what I liked about him? He was so appreciative,” says Candice Azzara, who played Joe’s secretary. “He was a humble loner.”
Lorenzo Music, the writer-producer who’d been with The Mary Tyler Moore Show since the beginning, rounded out the regular cast. He’d come over to Rhoda to help write and produce it on a daily basis, but now he’d stumbled upon his first TV acting job. As the producers auditioned voice actors to play the often heard, never seen part of Carlton, Rhoda and Brenda’s drunken doorman, no one quite nailed it the way Music read it. His distinctive drowsy, cracking voice would eventually become famous in the part as the guy always announcing himself on Rhoda’s door buzzer as “Carlton your doorman.”
With rehearsals for her show now under way, Harper often sneaked back over to her original television home, the Mary Tyler Moore set, three doors down from what was now her own set, just to rub the sofa where she’d sat dozens of times or to smell the Oreos and Lorna Doones kept in Mary’s cookie jar. For some reason, despite Moore’s diabetes and Harper’s weight struggles, the stagehands thought it was a fine idea to use real cookies as props. Moore and Harper, good-natured about almost everything, sniffed but did not snack.
As Rhoda progressed, Harper continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with various diets. Her size fluctuated enough that the wardrobe supervisor would hold up items, asking, “Are you going to attempt to get into these today?” Harper called them “attempt pants” and “attempt suits,” some of which were never worn at all.
Grant Tinker was now worried about spreading his company too thin—it was launching Rhoda along with a sitcom starring Hogan’s Heroes’ Bob Crane called Second Start as well as its first two dramatic series. Tinker was so uncharacteristically anxious that he had migraines. And he was losing sleep fretting over what the loss of Rhoda, a major ingredient in The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s success, might do to his flagship series. Would the company, and his wife’s show, survive these major moves that he’d approved?
Tinker hadn’t planned to run his own production company. He’d worked as an executive at Fox and Universal, so he figured he’d go back to a network or major studio job after he helped launch The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But The Bob Newhart Show followed in 1972 as MTM’s second production, and, as a witty take on a straightforward concept—a Chicago psychologist tends to his colorful patients and relationship with his smart wife—upheld Mary Tyler Moore’s high script standards. “It would have been very easy to do craziness,” Newhart’s TV wife, Suzanne Pleshette, said in an interview at the time. “But the show is not bizarre. There’s no freaky hook. No one’s mother is a car.” She likely didn’t realize that her production company’s star writers, Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, had written for My Mother the Car, and she meant it as a compliment.
Newhart himself, however, knew the company’s pedigree when he signed on for the show after turning down dozens of other pilots that he didn’t think had much potential. “When I got the offer for this show, I knew the quality of the guys working on it,” he said. “And it wasn’t [about] a wife and a dog and three kids.” His show would soon do for psychologists—and their patients—what Mary Tyler Moore had done for single women. Newhart was soon receiving letters thanking him for demystifying therapy. And MTM would develop a curious reputation in the TV business: It seemed the place only hired nice people, stars who didn’t act much like stars, casts who all got along, and the best writers around.
In any case, soon Tinker found himself heading a company that bore his wife’s name. Since this seemed to be where fate had placed him, he did his best to make it into the kind of company he’d always dreamed of working for. He didn’t want a factory. They’d only make shows they wanted to make; they wouldn’t chase ratings for the sake of ratings or lower standards just to make network executives happy. Why would he bother having an independent company otherwise? Why not just go back to work for Fox or Universal?
The Rhoda spin-off seemed like a natural. Few secondary characters break out as huge and as fast as she did. Young women who weren’t too busy imitating Mary Richards’s style tried to figure out how to twist and tie headscarves to look like Rhoda. Her zingers, often delivered during the characters’ late-night, post-date girl talk in Mary’s apartment, stuck with fans. A 1974 Time magazine story declared Moore and Harper “a neatly balanced show business cartel” for MTM Entertainment. “One is tranquil, the other seems to have been born with sand under her skin,” the article said. “Doublehanded, they are bringing a new sophistication back to television entertainment.” Even better, “Audiences in search of funny girls have learned to forsake the theater for Valerie and Mary on the smaller screen.”
Rhoda was poised to take advantage of the barriers Mary Tyler Moore broke down. Feminism, Ms. magazine, and sexy singles life were referenced. From the first season, topical, edgy, and undeniably ’70s references stuffed the show: “I’m not talking about a one-night stand,” one swinging bachelor told Rhoda as he asked her out. “We’re in town till Thursday.” When Rhoda moved in with Joe, he jokingly asked her how she wanted to be listed on their mailbox: “What would you like, Ms. or Miss or what?”
Harper, a self-proclaimed feminist, made sure the show was as true to her beliefs as possible, just as she’d done on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When Rhoda suspected she was pregnant, the original script had her say to the doctor, “I’m thirty-three—I’ve just got under the wire, huh?” Harper, however, would have none of that. She complained to producers, “Hey, people get married at thirty-three. What do we say to them?” They cut the line. In the episode in which Joe and Rhoda decide to get married, the script originally had Rhoda begging Joe to marry her, but Harper wouldn’t play it, so the producers rewrote it to make the marriage mutual.
From its beginning, eight women wrote for Rhoda, many of whom had honed their skills on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Several of them came back to MTM specifically to write for their favorite character—it was no coincidence that so many of them were Jewish girls from the East Coast.
Gail Parent had written an episode of Mary Tyler Moore with her longtime partner Kenny Solms, but when she tried her hand at a few Rhodas, it was the first time she had worked solo. She got to write some of the show’s most memorable early episodes, including Rhoda’s bridal shower. Writing alone terrified Parent. It required a different process. She had written a novel, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, in the time since working on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The hilarious book-length suicide letter chronicled a single thirty-something woman caught between wanting traditional marriage and living it up on New York’s singles scene. It became a bestseller in 1972. Though Parent was married and living in Los Angeles at the time, she based the book on the experiences of her then-single best friend, who was living in New York. She didn’t expect her book to become such a huge sensation, but the reviewers raved, and the phenomenon grew from there. Between Mary Richards and Sheila Levine, no doubt remained that single, thirty-something women were the rage.
Now that she was working on Rhoda alone, however, Parent had a problem. She had written her book in longhand, then hired a typist. Kenny had always been the typist in their partnership. For Rhoda, she had to peck through her scripts alone.
Charlotte Brown, who’d struggled to sell a few scripts for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then had written several Bob Newhart episodes for MTM, joined Rhoda’s stable of regular writers. Her first episode of Rhoda featured Joe and Rhoda meeting each other’s parents. She loved to write anything that featured Ida Morgenstern because the character was so similar to Brown’s own mother. She often gave Ida lines her mother had said, verbatim. Brown once told a TV Guide writer that her mother was the “prototype” for Ida. Her mother read the article, and while she didn’t know what “prototype” meant, she was insulted.
Brown sat in the audience with her parents the night of one episode’s taping, her eyes trained on her own mother’s face as Rhoda noted that her mom had taken the plastic covers off the sofa. “What?” Brown’s mother whispered, wondering why her daughter was staring at her. “I never had plastic on the furniture!” When Brown got home late that night, she called her brother to demand he confirm her memory. (He did.)
Brown soon became an executive script consultant, her first step up the chain of staff producers for Rhoda. The job demanded all of her time, but she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day. Sometimes she drove home just as normal people were driving to work. But her efforts didn’t go unnoticed. Later, she’d become the first female show runner on a sitcom when she took over Rhoda’s top post from Davis and Music. Harper took out an ad in Variety thanking Brown for all of her hard work and told Gloria Steinem in an interview that Brown was “literally doing the work of four men who used to be there.”
Gloria Banta and Pat Nardo finally gave in and moved back to Los Angeles from New York. Since writing their first script for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, they’d written a few more scripts, After School Specials that Nardo produced for her network, ABC. After they’d amassed a body of successful work, the recently formed ICM talent agency wanted to sign them for a pilot project starring Maureen Stapleton called Ladies from Flatbush. Nardo’s boss at ABC, Michael Eisner, had gotten promoted from managing daytime programming to primetime, and he helped secure her the new gig. Banta and Nardo decided, reluctantly, to move back to Los Angeles. They knew that was where they needed to be if they wanted to keep working in the industry.
When the pilot didn’t make it on the air, Brooks and Burns—who were fond of the women’s work together—asked them to write for the Rhoda spin-off. They happily signed on. Nardo also started hanging out with Jim Brooks and Dave Davis more than ever. She often went to lunch with them, begging them like a pesky little sister to tell her what they were discussing when they referred to producer business she didn’t know about. They became her best friends, her big brothers, and her closest advisers whenever she had trouble with men, which was fairly often. The three of them went out to Dave and Jim’s beach house, taking care of Jim’s baby daughter when he had her for the weekend. For Pat, at least, it was the best time of her life.
In fact, Nardo and Banta were both having a blast. They thought the people they worked with on the show were wonderful, and they loved having an office to go to every day. It felt, even in the moment, like a golden time in their lives. The women took refuge in the comforting world of MTM Entertainment, away from the still-sexist world that most of Hollywood was. They’d tried to write for some other shows, including one where they stood outside a meeting room while the male producers discussed their script. They could hear one of the guys saying, “Well, it’s a piece of shit, but I’d sure like to fuck that Banta.” They knew there were men like that in the business, but none of them was at MTM.
New writer Deborah Leschin also found her place among Rhoda’s young female staffers. The bubbly twenty-six-year-old started out at Garry Marshall’s new project, Laverne & Shirley, but she dreamed of working with Valerie Harper or Dick Van Dyke. She was living back at her parents’ place in Passaic, New Jersey, after a stint with Marshall, when she decided to write a few spec scripts for Mary Tyler Moore. She soon got a call from Rhoda producers asking her to come aboard, and she was breathless with excitement. She felt like Rhoda made the single woman in the ’70s look like a “bright, shiny penny.” She’d wanted to work for MTM Entertainment so badly that on a previous trip to Los Angeles, she’d driven by the studio on Radford Avenue and took a photo of the gate, determined to drive through it someday.
When she returned to Los Angeles for a job interview with Charlotte Brown, she didn’t feel it went well, but she got the job anyway. The two didn’t seem to mesh, but Brown needed another woman on her staff and chose Leschin.
Leschin couldn’t believe her luck, regardless of her friction with Brown. She would drive home from work in her new little Mercedes and scream with joy. She had said she was going to be a writer for Rhoda, and, dammit, she had done it. Her parents had scoffed at her dreams. Her friends had said, “Do you know how many single Jewish girls in New Jersey want to write for this show?” But she did it. Dream after dream came true. Some of those old friends back in New Jersey were now getting married and having babies, but to that she said: Feh.
Brooks and Burns, meanwhile, along with Davis and Music, worked overtime now to crank out quality scripts for both Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, in addition to attending to The Bob Newhart Show. Music had audience warm-up duties at all the shows, with the tapings spread throughout the week. Brooks shocked his coworkers by getting only more brilliant the more he produced. The writers and producers would all sit in a room thinking, What are we going to do? The second act is a mess. Brooks would say, “What if . . . ?” And then he’d tear into an idea, complete with plot twists and killer lines. His colleagues would wonder, What are we doing here? They could see they were in a room with a genius, and they weren’t sure their own contribution was even necessary. They knew their script would end up with five lines of their own and the rest Brooks’s, but they didn’t mind one bit.
The Radford Avenue studio became known as “Camelot” because of Tinker’s insistence on giving his writer-producers autonomy and fighting network interference on their behalf. Brooks and Burns, encouraged by the Camelot philosophy, had just created yet another show for the MTM empire as well, Friends and Lovers. They raked in three hundred thousand dollars per year each at this time, though the work was endless. To keep themselves sane—or was it the opposite?—they developed a system to test jokes. Since Nardo was no longer their secretary, they didn’t have her disapproval as a bellwether for bad lines. Now they had a buzzer at the office that they could hit to signify their lack of approval for a gag, while a unanimous winner was signaled with a music box that played “The Impossible Dream.”
With Rhoda, however, the producers had one major concern beyond writing good jokes: forestalling her marriage as much as possible. Silverman pushed for a fall sweeps wedding. “I think it’s going to be a number-one Nielsen show,” he told them.
“Aww, come on!” they remember protesting. “We’ve got so much we want to do in the first year. Maybe at the end of the first year we get them married. Not this close to the beginning!”
But by the eighth episode, on October 28, 1974, Fred Silverman had his way. Rhoda and Joe walked down the aisle in a two-part special that brought Mary, Georgette, Phyllis, Murray, and Lou to New York for the nuptials. Silverman’s prediction came true; the episode went through the roof. In fact, it broke several records. It became the highest-rated television episode of the decade thus far, and the second-most-watched of all time, beat only by the birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy in the ’50s. More than 50 million Americans tuned in, which represented more than half of the total audience watching television that night. Monday Night Football host Howard Cosell, as he called a game on a different channel opposite the broadcast, cracked that he hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Fans held wedding parties to watch together throughout the country and sent “wedding gifts” to CBS. Harper—who, in the episode, famously ran through the streets of Manhattan in her wedding dress after Phyllis forgot to pick her up for the big day—won her fourth Emmy for the performance. Brooks and Burns enjoyed notching a new accomplishment: They had produced their first country-stopper of an episode.
In fact, Rhoda even beat Mary Tyler Moore in the ratings during its first season on the air, 1974–75, which solidified Rhoda Morgenstern as an icon. Mary and Rhoda made the October 1974 cover of Time as “Funny Girls” when the magazine declared that year “the Golden Age of comedy.” Harper, the Jersey girl who’d dreamed of being a ballerina, had turned her New York upbringing—and her impression of her stepmother, Angela—into one of TV’s most memorable characters. “A failed ballerina you have before you,” she would say, “but a successful actress.”
When Grant Tinker asked Jim Brooks and Allan Burns about writing a spin-off script for Cloris Leachman, even his confident baritone couldn’t convince them. Both producers said a polite, “No, thanks.” They respectfully offered a litany of potential pitfalls they saw with the project. They were both pretty busy by this point, overseeing Mary Tyler Moore, helping with Rhoda, and launching Friends and Lovers. So they had a perfectly good excuse not to get involved in Phyllis, but their objections went beyond that.
For starters, there was the Cloris problem. Just because Phyllis stood in a certain place or said a certain line at a certain time in a script did not mean Cloris would perform it that way. In fact, it almost guaranteed she wouldn’t. She wanted to live every last scene as Phyllis; she wanted to embody the essence of Phyllis, which was to be the most important person in the room. Onlookers had a hard time telling where Cloris ended and Phyllis began; even Cloris herself did. And that was despite the fact that she’d continued appearing in several of the era’s most progressive films. In Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of Henry James’s Daisy Miller, she played Cybill Shepherd’s mother. She stole the show as the terrifying Frau Blucher in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Yet, when she returned to the job of playing Phyllis, she became Phyllis, through and through, with all the difficulties that entailed.
This approach worked on the sets of Oscar-caliber films and it even worked on the set of The Mary Tyler Moore Show for a recurring secondary character once everyone got the hang of her. It remained to be seen, however, how her approach would transfer to her own spin-off. And yet the prospect of a show of her own grew likely as Leachman became a star in her own right. MTM would likely lose her to another production company if it didn’t give her a bigger showcase.
In addition to the Cloris problem, however, there was the Phyllis problem. Phyllis was an even trickier character to turn into a leading lady than Rhoda had been, given that her main function on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was to be abrasive and self-absorbed. But Leachman, then forty-nine and reaching a new apex, wanted to follow in Harper’s footsteps, and Weinberger and Daniels were up for the challenge of creating a show for her. Tinker put his faith in Leachman’s performance and hoped for the best.
In an effort to soften Phyllis for her role as a main character, the writers lost many of the kooky elements that made her such a hit in a supporting role, though Leachman still tore into the part with her trademark scene-chewing force. The show explored new sitcom territory in featuring a middle-aged widow, with Phyllis’s often-mentioned, never-seen husband, Lars, dying in the pilot episode. Phyllis is shown grieving and finding out that Lars left her no life insurance. (Perhaps befitting the invisible Lars, no one ever explains how he died.) The conceit was a clever way to start Phyllis on a brand-new life in San Francisco when she moves in with her in-laws, and it helped garner instant sympathy for the notoriously prickly character.
But the show suffered from comparison to Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda. Even worse, it weathered a devastating loss to its cast early on. Barbara Colby, once a crowd favorite on Mary Tyler Moore as Mary’s prostitute cell mate in the episode in which Mary is jailed, joined the spin-off cast as Phyllis’s new boss at a photography studio. After she appeared in just three episodes, however, Colby and a colleague, James Kiernan, were both killed while walking to her car after an acting class in the Venice section of Los Angeles. They were shot by two men in the parking lot the night of July 24, 1975. Kiernan lived long enough afterward to describe the murder to police, but it was never solved; authorities classified it as a random “thrill killing” since the victims weren’t robbed and the perpetrators didn’t seem to have another motive. Liz Torres took over Colby’s role on Phyllis, but the show never found its footing afterward.
Leachman proved the ideal star to lend her cast emotional support after the tragedy—she was nothing if not a mother. She would tell “Barbara stories” to cheer everyone up, recounting funny incidents in which Colby had ad-libbed off camera. Leachman herself had more trouble coping, but she kept it to herself. “It was the worst death I’ve ever experienced,” she said at the time. “With my mother and father, at least it was fair.”
Then, two more cast members died during the show’s run: eighty-six-year-old Judith Lowry, who played Mother Dexter, died in 1976, and just two months later, her ninety-two-year-old on-screen boyfriend (whom she’d just married on the show), Burt Mustin, died as well.
There were, however, other problems with the show. Leachman’s perfectionism ate at everyone’s patience, and it was harder to handle when she was the dominant force on the set. She could spend hours debating the optimal heights of stools she and her boss would sit on for a scene or demonstrating how a supporting character should deliver a line. She came on strong with her fellow actors, who could get defensive if they didn’t know her well. Besides which, if they did do what she’d asked, often the result was for her character to be in the spotlight, all others fading out.
The series also suffered from a sudden increase in scrutiny of sex on network television, even on the groundbreaking shows that had been enjoying great artistic freedoms. In one episode, Phyllis’s daughter, Bess, now a teenager, goes on an overnight ski trip with friends and Phyllis believes she’s spent the night with a boy. Phyllis frets to her boss, Julie, about her fears that Bess might “become a woman” on the trip, and Julie suggests Phyllis initiate a mother-daughter sex talk. First Phyllis insists she’ll know if her daughter has “matured” just by looking at her. But when Bess arrives home, Phyllis isn’t sure. She eventually takes Julie’s advice and confronts Bess about her concerns, only to learn from Bess that she didn’t do it. The script called for Phyllis to do a double take afterward and say, “unless she lied,” which would leave the matter open to interpretation—a tactic that would have fit right into the glory days of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But Phyllis was no Mary Tyler Moore.
CBS originally refused to air the episode and backed down only after Brooks and Burns, who now had serious clout at the network, stepped in. They compromised with the network in the end, agreeing to cut the last line; there would be no ambiguity about whether the teenager had sex. The conflict, as it turned out, was a harbinger of a more conservative era in television to come, the “family hour” initiative that would soon burn some of the biggest hits of the ’70s. Times were changing. Antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly now had a regular commentary spot on the CBS Morning News. The Equal Rights Amendment no longer seemed like a sure thing. Single women facing relevant, realistic issues were on their way out. And surely no proper lady talked openly about sex.
The episode would hardly be the most difficult trial that Phyllis faced, but it would be among the last. Though Phyllis ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1977, it never gained traction with audiences, who were already moving on to lighter TV fare such as Happy Days and Charlie’s Angels. No one blamed Leachman. Tinker knew the scripts never quite got up to par.
Then, shocking news came for Rhoda: The woman whose long-awaited wedding had brought the country to a standstill was heading for divorce.
Rhoda hadn’t quite made it on her own, despite her show’s record-breaking early achievements. After the big wedding, the show was noticeably less funny—and less interesting. Soon it became clear: The audacious Rhoda had married kind of a dud. “When Rhoda got married, it was a disaster,” Banta says. “It just changed everything. It changed her personality. Suddenly the show was hard to write.”
Furthermore, it turned out that many fans hadn’t wanted Rhoda to get married in the first place—her appeal as a character came from her outsider status, her valiant battles in singlehood. “ ‘Sadie Sadie married lady’ was what went wrong with Rhoda,” Harper says. “Success is equated with marriage. The base of her character was this victorious loser, and she was perceived to have won—she had this hunky husband.” Rhoda had excelled on The Mary Tyler Moore Show at sniping from the sidelines, and now here she was representing mainstream married women. Adds Rhoda writer Deborah Leschin, “I wanted it so much to be a women’s show about women, and her being married took that spin off of it for me.” Now Rhoda had become thinner and more fashionable than ever, married, and settled. Parent says, “I learned early on that it was a bad idea to pitch the ‘bop-on-the-head’ show, where something happened to a character and they changed. It never worked because characters have to stay the same.”
CBS’s Standards & Practices department, fearing conservative backlash, added to the trouble, allowing so little sex that it was difficult to portray a fun, modern marriage: Groh, as Rhoda’s on-screen husband, always had to have a pajama top on if the two were in bed together. And any talk of sex had to walk a fine line.
After two seasons of fighting Rhoda’s fate, the producers made the historic decision to break up their central married couple. Harper’s favorite quip became, “This is the first divorce where the charge is lack of comedy.” And the producers faced the unfortunate task of telling Groh, whom everyone on set liked, that he was out of a job. The chemistry between Harper and Groh had never developed the way they’d hoped, the producers explained to Groh. He took the news well, and appeared periodically throughout the third season so the show could portray the split. “I don’t think we ever cast the guy great,” Brooks says. “The right person has to walk through the door, and it just didn’t happen in this case.” The good news: Six years after they pitched a show about a divorced woman on her own to CBS, the MTM producers had one. And one about a Jew in New York, no less.
The divorce idea still made the network nervous, but Silverman and his executives also saw that it had to be done. Viewers, on the other hand, were less easy to please. Even though many had hated that Rhoda was no longer single, at least as many now wrote in to complain about Rhoda getting divorced. CBS’s early edicts against divorce proved at least partially true; women in particular felt panicked by the idea that Rhoda could get divorced. If Rhoda could get divorced, anyone could get divorced.
With Rhoda on the dating market again, however, there was room for creative renewal. The show could add new characters, most notably a swinging-single neighbor played hilariously by Ron Silver. Still, Brooks never felt like the show reached its potential the way Mary Tyler Moore did. “I feel like the divorce was a mistake,” Brooks says, even though he also felt the marriage was a mistake. Leschin, too, couldn’t warm to the divorce even though she’d hated the marriage. “That made it even worse,” she says. “It left us no place to go. We had no stories.”
Despite the setbacks on Rhoda and Phyllis, MTM Enterprises had become a major force in the industry. By 1974, MTM was grossing more than $20 million and had eight comedies in the works or on air: Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Rhoda, and Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers on CBS; The Texas Wheelers on ABC; and Doc, Three for the Road, and Phyllis being prepped for the following season. Although movies steered the national conversation like never before—the sequel Godfather Part II was released in 1974 and grossed $193 million—television still permeated life across the nation. Americans talked about the Corleones at a cocktail party or two, but they invited Mary and Rhoda into their living rooms every week. Since The Mary Tyler Moore Show had premiered, CBS had remained atop the ratings, with NBC and ABC fighting it out for second place every year, thanks in large part to MTM. And women were proliferating on TV as strong main characters, even beyond the sitcom—Police Woman and Wonder Woman were now hits, and that was at least partly thanks to MTM as well.
Only Norman Lear and Garry Marshall rivaled MTM’s output and clout. “It was a phenomenon,” says composer Pat Williams, who went from scoring The Mary Tyler Moore Show to orchestrating most of MTM’s series. “That whole period of time where Mary’s show went into The Bob Newhart Show and so forth, the way Grant Tinker ran that place was with such class.”
Now Moore’s dream of a hit show had come true, and Tinker’s of an independent studio had as well. “On Mary’s shows, nothing is sacred and few things are profane,” Time gushed. “Sex, inflation, urban miseries and small-time office politics are alive and laughing on prime time.” Tinker put it more simply: “On Friday nights,” he said, “I used to make my rounds to all the different shows, and witnessed a hell of a lot of good television being made.” No laugh tracks allowed, or necessary.