Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (17 page)

The negative buzz continuing to build in Hollywood about
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
didn’t transfer to the audience, though. Even if the viewership wasn’t as large as the network had hoped, many of those who did watch saw something in the pilot—the spark of something special.

Joe Rainone was one of those viewers. An intense nineteen-year-old student with a mop of brown hair parted in a left swoop across his black-framed glasses, he tuned in for that first September 1970 episode with only casual interest. He decided to watch with his parents at their Rhode Island home, where he lived while studying accounting at nearby Bryant College, mainly because he thought Mary Tyler Moore was pretty. He sort of remembered that she’d been on something called
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
but he had never seen it. The show had aired at 9:30 p.m., which was too late for him at that time—he was just ten then. More recently, he’d caught a TV movie she starred in called
Run a Crooked Mile
. She’d played the wife of a guy who got amnesia. Rainone thought she was very good in it; in other words, he thought she was sexy. When he saw promos for her new TV show, she also looked, you know,
good
. He made a mental note to see it.

Rainone liked the pilot enough to tune in for the second episode. That’s when he got hooked. He was entranced when Richard Schaal—Harper’s real-life husband—as Mary’s overenthusiastic suitor, Howard Arnell, gave a hilariously overwrought speech about how he couldn’t tie himself down to one woman. The words, and their performance, played like a master class in comedy. “Mary, if you say another word to me, I won’t go,” Schaal announces. She makes a show of zipping her lip. As he
heads out the door, he hits her with another histrionic pronouncement: “Mary, no goodbyes.” Then he turns and says, “Goodbye.”

Rainone knew then that the show, as he says, had “revolutionary aspects.” It was self-aware, multilayered, and very funny. He wanted to meet the people who made it. He especially wanted to meet Moore, for obvious reasons. But he was in Rhode Island, and she was in Los Angeles. His accountant’s mind went to work.

Letters. That was the key. One of his favorite writers, fantasy master H. P. Lovecraft, wrote voluminous letters, as Rainone knew from the bound volumes of Lovecraft correspondence that he owned. Rainone would write to Moore about her show, the one thing they had in common, and would throw in references to his own life where appropriate. Then she would get to know him, get to like him. And then who knew what might happen?

The second episode now over, Rainone climbed the stairs to the office where his family ran a printing business. He sat at the typewriter and pecked out five double-spaced pages of his thoughts regarding the episode. Satisfied with his five pages, he sealed them in an envelope. The next day, he visited the local library, hauled a Los Angeles phone book off the shelf, and looked up “CBS Television City,” a phrase he’d remembered from watching
The Carol Burnett Show
. He took his chances that
Mary Tyler Moore
was filmed there, too.

This would become his standard weekly ritual: five pages minimum, double spaced, full of scene-by-scene critical analysis of what he’d just watched on television. Addressed to Television City and dropped into the mail the next day. Through his letters, he would eventually develop elaborate theories about the show: His Theory of Parallel Characters posited that Mary’s home and office worlds mirrored each other—Phyllis was to Ted as Rhoda was to Murray. His Theory of Anti-Mary held that the power of the humor in an episode was directly proportional to how far from Mary’s central axis of goodness a featured supporting character pivoted.

Every week, he would send off his analysis, and await a reply. His
letters did, miraculously, make their way from CBS Television City, up through the Hollywood Hills, and down again into Studio City, where the show was actually filmed, more than six miles away. But secretary Pat Nardo received all of the correspondence for the show, and she didn’t think such obsession should be encouraged. So his letters piled up for months, unread and unanswered. He just kept sending them anyway.

The order came through the phone lines, spiraling around the curlicued cord and hitting Allan Burns’s ear with brute force: “I’m giving you orders,” Frank Barton, the network programming liaison and Burns’s nemesis, told him. “You cannot shoot this episode.”

“Why not?” Burns asked.

“The way Rhoda treats her mother? That’s supposed to be funny? And this scene at the beginning, the sadism scene?”

The network still wasn’t making life easy for Brooks and Burns. Even as some of the suits began to see the show’s potential, many of them still couldn’t stifle the urge to meddle. Somehow, the
Mary Tyler Moore
episode about Rhoda’s mother coming to visit, titled “Support Your Local Mother,” seemed radical to CBS executives, so much so that Barton called Burns to forbid shooting it. In the episode in question, the second that Brooks and Burns had written (it would be the sixth to air), Rhoda’s mother, Ida, would come to visit, and her passive-aggressive tendencies would drive Rhoda to refuse to speak to her. The first scene of the script featured Mary distressing a table to make it look “antique” by hitting it with a chain, per Phyllis’s suggestion, and laughing every time she did it. Burns had recently learned about the furniture refinishing technique from his wife, since they couldn’t afford real antique furniture. It had little to do with S&M, unless, apparently, you had the imagination of a network executive.

Brooks walked into their shared office while Burns was on the phone with Barton. As Brooks listened in, he could tell it was a CBS
suit on the other side of the line and he could tell the executive was telling Burns how unfunny the show was.

Frustrated by CBS’s demands, they called Tinker, who was known for running interference with the network. “I just read that episode—it’s funny!” he told them. “Shoot it.” The network had committed to thirteen episodes with Moore, so contractually they couldn’t stop Brooks and Burns from shooting whatever they wanted. The network could, of course, choose to air the episode at a time when no one would see it, but Tinker was determined to back his producers.

Besides, the producers had booked Nancy Walker to play Ida, and Walker was a sure thing, performance-wise. The tiny redhead, a Broadway mainstay, would make a funny episode even funnier. Sandrich was directing another show that week, so Brooks and Burns went ahead and hired a director—Alan Rafkin, who’d worked on
Andy Griffith
and
Dick Van Dyke
—and got to work. Rafkin was immediately impressed with Moore’s leadership on the set, having worked with her years earlier on
Van Dyke
. He later wrote in his autobiography, “
she seemed to act from behind a shield of thick plastic. Like her former co-star Dick Van Dyke, she would be great with an audience, while at the same time she didn’t give anything of herself backstage. First and foremost Mary was a businesswoman and she ran her series beautifully. She was the boss, and although you weren’t always wedded to doing things exactly her way, you never forgot for a second that she was in charge.”

The episode would ultimately get Rafkin his first Emmy nomination and would win Emmys for Brooks and Burns’s script—but for now all the producers had won for themselves was a bad reputation with CBS executives. The word around the network offices was that they were “asking for trouble.”

They refused to do big, traditional “block-comedy” sequences, which were considered the essential ingredient in sitcoms at the time, thanks to
I Love Lucy
. Think of Lucy’s most famous scenes, the kind of ha-ha funny clip that plays well in a promo without context: getting
drunk on Vitameatavegamin, stuffing her mouth with chocolates from the conveyor belt at her candy factory job, battling overwhelming soap suds filling her kitchen. Why couldn’t Mary Richards just get into those sorts of scrapes instead of worrying about why her new best friend wouldn’t talk to her mother? The network fired off a warning memo that explained the basics of situation comedy to Brooks and Burns: “
Mary should be presented with a problem. Toward the end she should solve that problem in a surprising and comical manner.” Maybe, it also suggested, she could date someone fun, like a visiting prince, just to spice things up.

Brooks and Burns chose to ignore this. They instead pursued a loftier idea of what a sitcom could be. They resisted Mary engaging in zany antics just for a laugh. She would not stomp grapes or get mixed up in the chorus line at the Copacabana. They would start with a relatable premise and assume reasonable intelligence on the part of Mary as well as most of her supporting characters. They wanted to present plausible people who reacted in believable ways. Sometimes, they hoped, they would also make viewers laugh.

Relations with CBS executives lightened up a few months later as the show settled into solid, if not spectacular, ratings. Wood decided to take a chance on nurturing
Mary Tyler Moore
as the network’s foray into programming for that demographically desirable creature known as the sophisticated urbanite. He signed off on a full season; the show had outlived the thirteen-episode commitment that so many in the industry predicted would be its entire life span. He called Moore, who was in the middle of a read-through, to deliver the news. The cast sat, silent, waiting for her to get off the phone. “Gang, we can hang out the laundry,” she announced when she returned. “They picked us up.”

Joe Rainone was growing depressed. He’d spent the entire first half of
Mary Tyler Moore
’s first season writing letters to its cast and crew every week, but he’d heard nothing. He started to wonder if he had the right address, but wasn’t sure where to find a different one. He kept typing,
five pages every week, just in case they were going somewhere. But his mood was growing darker with the winter months in cold, snowy Rhode Island.

On Saturday, January 2, 1971, he watched, as usual. He trudged upstairs to type his letter, as usual. It was a good episode, as usual, with one of his favorite characters—Howard Arnell, Mary’s sad-sack admirer. The character had inspired Rainone’s first letter to the show. That fact, coupled with Rainone’s upcoming twentieth birthday later that week, put him in a reflective mood as he typed. “Here I am, I’ve probably lived a third of my life,” his letter began. He went on to bemoan the lack of response to his letters and to mention his upcoming birthday. He put it in the mailbox, expecting no result, then went to bed.

The next week, the mailbox produced an unthinkable treasure: an oversize envelope with a Los Angeles return address, bearing his name. He ripped it open to find a birthday card signed by every member of the
Mary Tyler Moore
cast and the production staff. A letter inside, on stationery featuring a cartoon drawing of Moore, was signed by a woman named Mimi Kirk, who, she explained, was Moore’s assistant. “The producers want you to know that as soon as they finish producing this season they’re going to write to you themselves,” she assured him. Soon, in fact, he did get notes back from Burns and Music, as well as another letter from Kirk. They sent him newspaper clippings about the show and production schedules, souvenirs they thought he might enjoy.

That spring, as more envelopes arrived from the
Mary Tyler Moore
offices, Rainone’s parents started to ask questions. He explained the correspondence to them and his older brother, Eddy, a twenty-one-year-old who also helped run the family business. “Are you ever going to meet these people?” Eddy asked.

The thought hadn’t occurred to Joe beyond his abstract hopes—spending his summers at the business and the rest of the year in school didn’t give him much extra money. Eddy was already working full-time
and drawing a paycheck from the business, though, so he offered to pay if Joe wanted to go to Los Angeles and take his brother with him. Joe dashed off a letter to Burns: If he came out west for a week, could he possibly visit the set?

Burns responded: Well, yes. But a week was a bit much. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller only got to watch one scene and shake hands with the cast when he visited recently.