Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (20 page)

Brooks and Burns now felt more secure in their leadership role and projected that newfound confidence. In fact, they instilled awe in their cast, prompting the actors to work to meet their producers’ expectations. Brooks and Burns were also, it must be said, getting wealthier than they’d ever been, though they barely had time to notice or enjoy it. They didn’t even pay attention to the number on their paychecks; they just knew that it built up to a pretty terrific amount over time. Brooks didn’t realize how much money he had until Burns and his wife bought their house on Mandeville Canyon Road in the tony Brentwood neighborhood for $260,000. The first time he walked into the plush, Spanish-style home, Brooks declared, “Oh, my God! I’m rich!”

Brooks and Burns now got to settle into their role as executive producers and hire additional producers. Music and Davis were preparing to leave the show to launch MTM Entertainment’s second sitcom, which would star comedian Bob Newhart. Brooks and Burns were away from the clacking and dinging of their typewriters more now than they’d ever been, as they dealt with bigger production issues, so they needed help with day-to-day writing. Sandrich suggested a guy named Ed. Weinberger, a
Dean Martin Show
writer whose movie script draft he’d read. Brooks and Burns didn’t know Weinberger, but they trusted Sandrich’s recommendation and liked Weinberger’s work samples. They took their chances on him even though he hadn’t written a half-hour sitcom script before.

Being on the set amazed Weinberger, a Philadelphia native and Columbia grad who wrote for comedian Dick Gregory in the 1960s, almost as much as it had enthralled fan Joe Rainone. At first, when Weinberger critiqued the run-throughs with Brooks and Burns, he’d simply whisper his suggestions to Brooks, too scared to say them
aloud. When he wrote his first script for the show, he gargled with his aftershave and patted his cheeks with Listerine the day he had to turn it in.

For another of his early episodes, he walked the streets of Los Angeles all night coming up with an ending because he didn’t want to ask his new bosses for help. The script had Lou buying his favorite bar and trying to run the business. Lou’s not sure what to do as it starts to falter. As Weinberger walked up and down Sunset Boulevard, he ran into some people he knew who were having a great time hitting the bars. Then he figured it out: Lou would
force
his bar patrons to have a great time. The episode scored; it became one of Burns’s favorites of all time. “I’ve never heard laughs go on as long as that,” Burns recalls. “It was wonderful.”

The cast was now spending most of their waking hours on the set. Weeks took on a comfortable sameness. Leachman would come to the run-through before each Friday taping, even for episodes she wasn’t in. She cackled like crazy as she watched her costars and said to the producers, “I love this! Put me in it!”

“This is a dress rehearsal, Cloris,” they replied. “We are not putting you in it now.”

Then three hundred audience members filled the powder-blue bleachers while three cameras recorded the actors’ performances. On nights when Brooks’s wife
hadn’t
provided material by giving birth, Music developed some go-to routines for his audience warm-up. One of his typical shticks was asking the audience members to raise their hands if they hadn’t seen the show before. “Uh-huh. About five or six. You, sir, will you please stand up? Now we don’t want to embarrass anyone, but will you please take off your clothes and tell the reason you haven’t seen the program?”

The filming would almost always go smoothly, with few retakes. After the taping, the actors thanked God for their ideal jobs and then went to dinner together, often at Tail o’ the Cock—where Asner was
a regular treated to doting service—or the Red Lantern Inn, a Laurel Canyon Boulevard mainstay owned by Frank Capra’s son.

The scene that unfolded there followed a cozy, family-like routine as well. Asner chatted with, entertained, and befriended everyone in his orbit, “the king of the lot,” as MacLeod called him. Harper made the rounds to ensure that all of her cast mates knew what a wonderful job they’d done, and the writers and producers, too. Harper and Moore played an opposites-attract pair—loud and quiet, loose and proper, free and buttoned-up—as did their producers, Brooks and Burns. Harper was a theater rat, a lapsed Catholic, a registered Democrat, and a proud women’s libber who’d been inspired by reading Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
. Moore was a chorus-girl-turned-TV-star, a good Catholic, a registered Republican, and unwilling to declare herself a feminist. But they loved each other just the same, and fiercely.

Ethel Winant sometimes joined them, often with her young sons, who loved to come to tapings and sit next to their mom in director’s chairs. Once, on a post-show excursion with the cast to the Aware Inn—one of the country’s first natural-foods restaurants—a Mercedes painted in multicolored tie-dye patterns pulled up. Out came an Indian man with long, white hair, and a skinny guy with a dark mop and a brush of a mustache. When Ravi Shankar and George Harrison were seated at the table next to the MTM crew, Winant’s teenage son, Bruce, was dumbstruck. Ethel rose and glided over to have a few quiet words with the former Beatle, then beckoned Bruce over to meet him. Bruce never knew if his mother had met the inconceivably famous musician before, but she certainly acted as if she had every right to be talking to him.

Knight and Leachman soaked up any attention they could, each in his or her own way. Knight demanded laughs with his over-the-top antics, preening for onlookers. Leachman could get even more outrageous. She told stories about working alongside a young Brando. She flirted playfully with Brooks, often teasing him about “thinking about the three of us girls when you lie in bed at night.” Brooks rubbed
Leachman’s back, fumbling and neurotic, overheated and nervous. “Jim,” she told him once, “hands should never ask questions.” He thought,
Holy shit. That’s the coolest thing anybody’s ever said
. She’d cross boundaries just to get a reaction, but if someone called her on it she’d retreat in childlike hurt.

Other times, she applied her maternal know-how with magical precision. Leachman returned Brooks’s backrub once as they waited for the crew to change the set. Later, he told her, “I don’t know what you did, but I went back to my office and burst into tears. I couldn’t stop crying.”

Leachman and MacLeod forgot their earlier differences. They now carpooled to work. In her autobiography, Leachman calls him “the person I had the most doubt about” when the show began, but, she adds, he “emerged new and splendid, [playing] his character with real sweetness.”

During the week, Moore would sit on the stage in her canvas director’s chair, dancer’s posture in evidence, chewing gum as she concentrated while others rehearsed scenes that didn’t feature her. Aside from the pack of Silva Thins in her hand and her hair pulled into a bun, she was almost indistinguishable from her character sometimes—were those
her
black boots and chic plaid knickers, or were those Mary Richards’s? Surely, Moore had the meticulously cared-for skin and bright white teeth of someone who was beyond “regular,” but she counteracted those factors with the way she acted. She rarely retired to her dressing room, as she preferred to know what was going on and to use her breaks to chat with her costars.

She didn’t boss people around, but she did have exacting standards that perhaps contributed to the show’s success more than we’ll ever know. She simply didn’t tolerate “
when people don’t do their work right,” she once said. “That’ll get me. But when I’m mad I don’t take it out on anybody; I just like to sit down with whoever it is and talk things over, precisely and practically.” Luckily, she didn’t have to do
that much on the set of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
: “We have good, demanding people,” she said. “I’m just part of the ensemble.”

Moore did act like the boss on the set, in the sense that she exuded no-nonsense leadership, though she studiously avoided acting like “the star.” She always insisted on being nothing but a fellow player. She almost never pulled executive rank on the writers, either, objecting to only one script idea: a plot in which Mary was to have a tattoo she was embarrassed about and wanted to get removed at the hospital. That pushed beyond the proper star’s limits. “I can’t play that,” she said, calling herself a “good Catholic girl.” The writers changed her cause of hospitalization to tonsillitis.

Harper had to demand her friend get star treatment because Moore wouldn’t. Harper told Leachman over lunch, “You and I are going to have to make an effort to see to it that Mary is treated like a star because she isn’t going to do it herself. She makes no demands on anybody and does what she’s told. So every once in a while, you and I are going to have to say, ‘No, Mary, what do
you
want?’ ”

Moore was also obsessed with being punctual. When her car broke down on her way to rehearsal, she almost broke down herself. She took a cab and scurried onto the stage, where everyone on set proceeded to ignore her as a joke, knowing she hated messing anything up. She knew their prank meant they understood and accepted her, flaws and all, like a family.

They all, in fact, accepted each other that way. As Brooks later said: “
A television job that’s working is the best job in the world. You get to do something you like. You get to do it with people you like. You have community of a sort that you’re denied in movies, because shows can go on five, seven years, even decades. People meet, they get married, they have children. It’s like a town. It’s enormously secure—until it isn’t. But as long as it is, it is, and it’s great.”

They would have to work extra hard now to keep their little work family grounded. By 1974, almost a quarter of total TV viewers in the country, or 43 million people, were watching their show every week.
Though
All in the Family
held on to the No. 1 spot with a full third of viewers, most of the major critics were now unanimous in their support of
Mary Tyler Moore
as a classic in the making: The
Wall Street Journal
’s Benjamin Stein called it “
the best show on television, week in and week out, since its beginning four years ago . . . . [Viewers] are watching people much like themselves—doomed to live imperfect lives, often comically mixed-up lives, still stretching for a measure of dignity.” Stein gushed, “It is these changes of mood, these swings from happy to sad, which parallel human life and make the show so rich. Mary is always being wrenched, as so many of us feel we are, and she always comes back for more, as all of us do. And she makes us laugh about it, as our best friends can and do. To do that on a continuing basis requires writing talent of a very high caliber fitted perfectly to the characters on the show.”

Individual episodes didn’t always spark immediate conversations across the country the way
All in the Family
did with its interracial sniping between Archie Bunker and neighbor George Jefferson or the Bunkers’ handling of a swastika spray-painted on their door. But
Mary Tyler Moore
’s characters stuck in viewers’ minds as if they were real—fans could find themselves genuinely depressed after watching Lou and his wife separate, elated when Rhoda won a beauty contest, or uncomfortable when Mary had another one of her lousy parties.

When the subject of TV came up, most erudite Americans would shrug and claim they didn’t watch much. But
someone
was watching, because television viewership was growing every year, with the average home taking in six hours a day. And one of the few shows that even educated, upscale viewers often did admit to watching, along with perhaps the World Series or public television documentaries, was
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Even author Martin Mayer, who wrote the 1972 book
About Television
despairing about the state of TV—“Daddy only watches television when he’s paid for it,” he writes of telling his children—admitted to watching the occasional episode of
Mary Tyler Moore
of his own free will.