Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (13 page)

As rehearsals for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
got under way, CBS president Mike Dann was keeping a grueling schedule, spending two out of every four weeks living in rooms 176 and 177 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The nearly eighty-year-old resort, discreetly tucked away amid the mansions above Sunset Boulevard, had been the temporary home to a number of stars and industry executives over the years, including
Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich, who in the 1940s had forced the hotel’s Polo Lounge to change its rule against women wearing slacks.

Dann was staying in town more often now to keep an eye on the growing Los Angeles production wing of CBS. His marriage was straining from his time away from home; he took the 4 p.m. flight out of New York every other Sunday to be in Los Angeles in time for dinner at Chasen’s in West Hollywood. As the network’s head of programming spent the summer of 1970 shuttling back and forth across the country, he still wasn’t sold on the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
concept, despite the changes that producers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns had made to their proposal in hopes of courting favor with their network
bosses. In all honesty, Dann didn’t think about the show that much, period. He didn’t have time to search the crevices of every pilot script for hidden potential as he tended to the more complicated and pressing matter of putting together the fall schedule.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
did not make his top-priority list. He knew he wasn’t crazy about the thing, he knew it wasn’t shot yet, and he knew he’d committed to Moore that she’d get a slot on the schedule. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t need to bother with it beyond that.

Besides, most of his colleagues didn’t seem impressed with the script, either. Where were the jokes? Where was the comedy?

The day of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s first chance to perform in front of a studio audience began with news of a bomb threat on the lot.

CBS had asked the producers to stage a preliminary taping, and a lot was riding on it. The network wanted the producers to test some new cameras, and the run-through would also allow them to prove that their pilot was better than executives thought it would be. It was
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s first major opportunity, and there was no room for mistakes.

And yet the problems mounted from the start. The bomb scare left a residue of agitation across the lot. Southern California had witnessed its share of bomb scares in the previous several months, as had every major metropolitan area across the country. Radical counterculture groups had taken to explosives to make their point and had targeted New York in spectacular fashion, hitting Wall Street, Macy’s, Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA Building, and General Motors among others, prompting scores of copycat threats. Just months before the taping, in March, the underground group the Weathermen had accidentally leveled an apartment building where they were constructing bombs in Manhattan’s West Village. So a bomb on the set seemed all too plausible.

The threat was determined to be unfounded, and audience members
were herded in. But the folks in the stands couldn’t see the actors over the cameras, which were twice as bulky as the standard kind, so they were forced to try to catch the action on small monitors instead. The air-conditioning broke down, so the two-hundred-member audience and the actors were left to swelter in 90-degree July temperatures while watching a practice run of a series already being promoted to viewers as if it were a done deal. The microphones didn’t work properly.

A nervous Brooks and Burns faced a cranky audience when they emerged on stage to do the warm-up. Getting the audiences ready for a good show was a job often taken by executive producers with a comedy background—but Brooks and Burns were merely great writers with nice personalities and zero stage presence. Brooks felt lucky, in a way, because he froze. Burns, on the other hand, just kept blathering.

When they got offstage, story editor Lorenzo Music offered to take over the job in the future. He had a dry wit and a distinctive, deadpan voice that sounded like a bored door hinge in need of oiling; he had written and performed on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
to great effect. “I could do that,” he said of the emceeing duties, “and you guys wouldn’t have to worry about it.” They got the translation: They’d been shitty. Even the production manager, Lin Ephraim—a serious man who looked, Burns said, “like Mandrake the Magician”—told them he could do better. They realized they had been even worse than they had feared.

None of this struck the audience as funny. Neither, it seemed, did the script itself. Tinker recognized the pattern: Sometimes what works in rehearsal just doesn’t connect with an audience. It was an old Hollywood story, but one he’d hoped to spare his wife from. Nary a chuckle escaped from the bleachers, and the less the audience reacted, the less sure the actors felt. Sandrich knew his actors weren’t ready. He still needed time with them, and he hadn’t worked with the camera crew at all yet. He recognized that putting the actors in front of an audience too soon was going to take a toll on their psyches, and it worried him.

Moore had replaced her signature Laurie Petrie flip hairstyle with
a longer, straighter, more modern fall, but she couldn’t seem to make audiences stop comparing her new character with her former persona. She
could feel the audience’s patience dwindling from the very first scene, in which Phyllis and her young daughter, Bess, show Mary an apartment that Rhoda claims as her own. Moore could tell the audience didn’t like Rhoda. She could also tell they weren’t sure what to make of her own character, Mary Richards. Where was Dick Van Dyke when you needed him?

Post-show polling indicated that Rhoda—who made her entrance from Mary’s windowsill, threatening to take our heroine’s new apartment from her—was indeed universally hated. Phyllis, also, was “too abrasive,” according to audience feedback. Mr. Grant didn’t fare better; he came off as humorless and bullying when he grilled Mary about her religion and marital status at her job interview, then ended by telling her, “I
hate
spunk.”

The scene had given Asner trouble since his first audition. As a dramatic actor, he couldn’t seem to dial down the anger. Asner knew it wasn’t working as he was performing it. He felt miserable, and he could tell his costar did, too. He saw the looks on Brooks’s and Burns’s faces: They were not happy. Silence filled the studio. Brooks had never witnessed any of his work bombing before. No laughs. Some audience members left in the middle.

When the taping ended, Moore thanked the audience for sticking with her through it, then she fled the stage. Winant would remember it as the worst night she’d ever spent watching a sitcom taping.

Other cast members, however, didn’t notice how horribly the night had gone, particularly Valerie Harper, who had never done a television show and was used to the long learning curve of the theater. She had no idea the audience hated her character. She hadn’t expected laughs; after all, she hadn’t heard them all week during rehearsals, so why should she get them now? In the theater, every show takes a while to gel. It’s what previews were invented for—to figure out how to make a show better. Television, she started to realize, was rather punishing in
comparison: first preview, opening night, and closing night all in one, and all on film.

After the disappointed audience left, Brooks and Burns returned to their offices, dejected, sweating, and confused, to find Price, Tinker, the crew, and, worse, all of the stars’ managers and agents—about twenty people total—ready to point out everything that had gone wrong. Just as Brooks and Burns had choked onstage, they choked again here. Burns started babbling, while Brooks shut down. Burns talked to prevent everyone from leaving, as he had no idea what he and Brooks would do once the crowd dispersed and they faced their problematic script alone. Brooks was grateful Burns was at least saying something to the upset throng that filled their huge office. Everyone grew more depressed as they realized none of them knew what to do to fix whatever the problem was. They thought it was a good script.

Tinker hoped they were doing
something
. As he and Moore drove home from the disastrous taping, Moore had what Tinker calls “a fall-apart.” She cried in the car, then
pulled herself together to tuck her young son into bed and tell him the run-through had been fine. As she brushed her teeth, she fretted over her cracked stage makeup and her face, drooping with fatigue. She obsessed over plans for house renovations: What if they moved the bathroom sink to the opposite wall and put a closet in its place? Then the bedroom terrace could wrap around the wall with the bathtub.

She climbed into bed, leaving the bedroom lights on as she waited for Tinker to set the house alarm. The glare of the bulbs felt extreme. She mulled over the future of her precarious career. And her crying seemed far less cute in real life than it was when she did her famous sitcom cry on-screen. This project was supposed to redeem all of her dreams and hard work. Now it seemed hopeless.

Tinker heard her sob from the other room. For the first time since they’d signed the deal with CBS, Tinker wondered whether he’d made the right decisions for his wife’s new show. He called his producers. When they answered—no one would remember later which one of
them, and it hardly mattered—Tinker offered one suggestion: “Fix it.” They had their work cut out for them. They’d never heard their heretofore supportive boss so testy. They had one more shot at a real taping of the pilot, but that would be it. If they lost the audience this time, the show was doomed.

Soon after Grant Tinker’s ominous phone call, script supervisor Marge Mullen, who’d held the same job at
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
stopped by the producers’ office. She had an idea—maybe not the biggest one, but it was something. “People don’t seem to like Rhoda,” they remember her saying. “There’s this little girl who’s Phyllis’s daughter, and if the little girl likes Rhoda, it’ll give the audience the opportunity to love her, too.”

It was the only substantive idea for an improvement Brooks and Burns had heard all evening. They decided to take Mullen’s suggestion, cut a few other lines, and call it a night, putting their faith in what they’d written and the cast they’d hired. Many things had gone wrong with that first taping, but the words and the talent, they believed, were there.

The next morning, Sandrich faced his dejected cast for another rehearsal. He said, simply, calmly, “This didn’t work last night.” But he reassured them that the air-conditioning and technical snafus were at least partly to blame for the problem. They would still need to focus on playing the script better, but the script itself, he told them, would get only minor rewrites: “We all believe in the show,” he said, “and we’re not going to change it.”