Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (10 page)

The script had impressed her the minute she began reading it. Winant could not resist the idea of this wonderful actress as such a strong, independent, single lead character. The sitcom
That Girl,
which premiered in 1966, had attempted the same territory, but Marlo Thomas’s character had remained ditzy and dependent on her boyfriend and father, even if she was technically single. Winant could already envision how terrific this new Mary Tyler Moore show would be, if everything
went well, with a thirty-something female character navigating her life and her career on her own terms. But Winant’s love for the script went beyond the main character’s independence. Some magic was brewing among the supporting characters, each of whom felt like a fully realized person who could be the center of his or her own show.

It baffled Winant, to some extent, that her fellow executives—the male suits who surrounded her—weren’t so excited about this series. They didn’t hate it, at least not as much as they acted like they did while they negotiated with the producers, but they didn’t have the confidence in it that Winant had.

Brooks and Burns appreciated her support—hers was the only positive voice they were hearing from the network at the moment. Once, during a heated discussion with an executive, during which said executive implied that no one at CBS cared for the program, Burns blurted out, “There’s one person who likes us. Ethel Winant.”

Next thing Winant knew, her secretary was searching the halls for her—Winant was elsewhere in the building at the moment—and, when the secretary found her, she said, “They’ve been buzzing for you on the executive intercom for the last twenty minutes. You better get up there.”

When Winant arrived in her bosses’ office, she later recalled, they asked her, “Did you tell Jim Brooks and Allan Burns that you liked their script? Why would you do that?”

“One, because I like the script,” she answered. “And two, because I’m casting their show.” She had volunteered to handpick the actors for the show, even though her executive position at the network no longer included such direct involvement in shows. She had read five or six of Brooks and Burns’s scripts by that time, and loved them all, but dreaded her colleagues’ reaction to them. She knew they wouldn’t like the character-driven humor. Most of them, she said, didn’t even bother to read the scripts—they took the rumors of imminent disaster at face value. “They just accepted that they had this great star at a disastrous production group,” she later remembered. “So they didn’t pay too
much attention to me because they were convinced that nothing I did was going to matter.”

She had gotten used to being on her own. As the first female television network executive ever, Winant harbored a particular interest in making this show a success, and she wasn’t blind to why she might take the show personally. Winant was married and a mother of three, but, boy, was she happy to see a character to whom she could relate after all this time. Despite Winant’s own successes, women were still treated as a second class in Hollywood. CBS had yet to provide a separate ladies’ room, or even a simple restroom lock, in the executive dining room. Winant had to place her high-heeled shoes outside the door of the restroom to let the others—all men—know she was inside.

A show like Mary’s, however, made all of Winant’s sacrifice—of time with her young sons and her actor husband, H. M. Wynant (he’d changed his name from Haim Winant)—worth it. Her husband supported her career drive—he even benefited from her position of power on more than one occasion—but things were often tense at home, and she knew she wasn’t the best mother. Family had not turned out to be her strong suit, but she knew good television. And though Winant, as the executive in charge of talent at the network, didn’t often cast individual shows at this point, she agreed to take on Moore’s sitcom.

When it came to the role Knight wanted, the role of news anchor Ted Baxter,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s producers had thought more along the lines of Lyle Waggoner, the beefcake from
The Carol Burnett Show
.
Jack Cassidy, who’d played a similarly buffoonish part on Allan Burns’s show
He & She,
was also in contention for the role—it was written with him in mind—but he turned it down. The producers had even considered casting the stately, thirty-six-year-old John Aniston, imagining the character might evolve into a love interest for the leading lady. But after three callbacks, Brooks and Burns still weren’t convinced Aniston was their man.

They hadn’t been thinking of a silver-haired gentleman, but Winant believed Knight, at forty-six, might lend a whole different dimension
to the bumbling newsman. And he sure seemed to want it, at least as far as she could tell. She called Brooks and gushed, “You
have
to see this.” He agreed, eager to see anyone who might be the right person to make his show something special. She hoped she was right—she might look a little crazy if his audition for the producers went disastrously.

As it turned out,
Mary Tyler Moore Show
producer Dave Davis had just seen Knight in a local production of the Broadway comedy
You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running
. “This guy is hysterical,” he told Brooks and Burns of Knight. “I think you ought to see him.” A guy this funny had no business lingering on the sidelines of Hollywood any longer. In fact, anyone who had seen his work would have wondered what was taking his career so long.

Ethel Winant convened with James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, along with director Jay Sandrich, Mary Tyler Moore, and Grant Tinker, to see actors for auditions at the production office’s new home, the old-Hollywood holdover General Service Studios. George Burns and Gracie Allen had filmed there.
The Beverly Hillbillies
shot there now.

To sort through potential cast members, the
Mary Tyler Moore
team would meet in a building on the dusty old Desilu lot at General Service, where
I Love Lucy
had been filmed. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball’s production company had changed television, comedy, and CBS with the couple’s classic sitcom. They had virtually invented the modern TV comedy. Arnaz and Ball had since divorced, and Ball sold the company to Gulf + Western, a deal that led to the creation of Paramount Television. She now ran her own Lucille Ball Productions and starred in CBS’s
Here’s Lucy
.

But the couple’s old studio home remained. The building where the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
auditions were being held had once been used as an office by Arnaz. It had been maintained over the years in a house-like building complete with a yard-like plot of grass in front of it. Secretary Pat Nardo, used to cramped New York City, gushed over
it, begging Brooks and Burns to get a puppy. It was now Brooks and Burns’s working space, with their desks at opposite ends of the room, facing the sofa in the middle. Nardo sat just outside. The producers’ cavernous shared office provided the perfect place to pick through their options for the cast.

Knight appeared in front of them as Baxter—no doubt about it—and not just because he shared a first name with the character. He wore a bright blue blazer from a thrift store, looking every bit the local TV news anchor from a low-budget station. Winant, a woman susceptible to vintage and handmade costume jewelry, appreciated the unique effort, as did the producers. This guy wanted the role enough to furnish his own wardrobe. They were touched. They knew that as a struggling actor, he didn’t have much money to spend on extras. Knight’s performance took the character deeper than they’d envisioned: Ted Knight’s Ted Baxter would be arrogant, sure, but anyone who bothered to look closely enough could see through the arrogance to the fragile person inside. In fact, Ted Knight’s insecurity pulsed through his performances like an exposed nerve; if he thought he was covering it up, he was wrong. And in this case, that worked in his favor. It would have broken Burns’s heart to reject this guy.

Because the
Mary Tyler Moore
producers had originally imagined the part going to someone younger, they asked Knight back three times for additional readings before they gave in. But in the end, he was the one.

Gavin MacLeod showed up in Brooks and Burns’s office ready to read for the part of hard-boiled newsroom boss Lou Grant, but he didn’t want it.

Though he wasn’t a household name, MacLeod had played a long string of thugs in prominent TV guest spots and small-but-memorable movie roles since he came to Los Angeles from New York in 1957. He’d grown up in Pleasantville, New York, home of
Reader’s Digest,
for
which his mother worked before he was born. He got an acting scholarship to Ithaca College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in drama. He moved to New York City soon afterward and married a Rockette, Joan Rootvik, with whom he lived in a small apartment at Ninth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, across from a bus depot. When he’d first graduated from college, he had a simple career goal: to appear in one Broadway play and one movie, then retreat to teaching drama for the rest of his life. But his dreams had since grown, pushing him to move to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-seven, a decade before he appeared in front of Brooks, Burns, and Winant.

His first time in his new Los Angeles agent’s office, he met a fellow actor who was also new in town, named Tadeus Wladyslaw Konopka. This guy was also just starting out in Hollywood, but he was seven years older than MacLeod. When they met in 1957, he gave some advice to MacLeod: He himself was getting a business manager, and MacLeod should, too. MacLeod remembers protesting: “I don’t have any money!” But they both hired the same man anyway to manage their meager funds, and they remained friends after that, providing mutual respect and support for each other’s work. Soon Tadeus Wladyslaw Konopka would start using the same name for his acting career that he’d used on the air as a children’s show host in Providence, Rhode Island: Ted Knight.

The move to Los Angeles pushed MacLeod far beyond his inauspicious Broadway debut in a Shelley Winters play (his one line: “Back up, Johnny, back up like a mule”). He’d since become the go-to guy for thug parts thanks to his premature baldness and 260-pound weight at the time. When a critic described one of MacLeod’s characters as “something that crawled out from under a wet rock,” he summed up MacLeod’s entire movie and TV career prior to 1970. MacLeod continued that tradition in prominent TV guest spots, like the part of drug dealer Big Chicken on
Hawaii Five-O.
He had built his résumé on advice he once got from actress Jessica Tandy: “Take what you think
is your liability and make it your asset as an actor.” MacLeod’s baldness plus his girth equaled tough-guy roles that he figured he’d be stuck with for the rest of his career. But his warm smile and kind blue eyes suggested an untapped side to the actor.

Even as MacLeod was auditioning for the part of Lou Grant, growling a convincing, “You’ve got spunk,” his mind was on a different role: Murray Slaughter, Mary’s disgruntled coworker—based, though MacLeod didn’t know it at the time, on a gay colleague of Brooks at CBS News, who kept a pair of ice skates in his desk drawer to hit Rockefeller Center on his lunch breaks. All MacLeod knew then was that the character was intended to grow into Mary’s workplace nemesis. (He would soon be established as straight and happily married.) MacLeod didn’t believe himself as Moore’s boss. He felt he should be her peer. Even though Murray was a supporting part, MacLeod’s offscreen nature lent him a certain kinship with the snarky—but, MacLeod was sure, nice-underneath-it-all—newswriter. In short, he liked Murray. He thought the character had potential.

After getting laughs from the producers and casting director as Lou, MacLeod turned to leave. He had his hand on the doorknob, then reversed course. He took his chances and asked to read for Murray; the producers obliged. MacLeod delighted in what he saw as the poetry of Murray. He loved one of Murray’s few lines in the pilot script: “Ah, the Mastroianni of Minneapolis!” he says in a taunting singsong when he sees Ted.

After reading as Murray, MacLeod left, satisfied that he’d at least tried for what he wanted. Burns, in particular, reacted so warmly that MacLeod was sure he’d get at least one of the parts; he just hoped it was the right one. As he headed out the door to his rehearsal for a staging of
Carousel,
he saw actor Ed Asner—a familiar face, as the two often found themselves vying for the same parts—pacing in the waiting room.