Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (25 page)

The result was a vulnerable character arc for the tough Lou Grant. “That was pretty damn good, you know?” Burns says. The producers hadn’t planned to divorce the couple, but when they thought of it, they went with it, and Treva was the perfect person to pull it off. “That was our way of doing divorce,” Burns says, “which they had not wanted us
to do.” As
Time
magazine later said, “
On MTM, characters developed, changed, sometimes in ways disconcerting to all those schooled in the inevitability of happy endings. Lou Grant (Edward Asner) and his wife Edie (Priscilla Morrill) separated; she felt stultified and wanted to try a different life. Ah well, the faithful said, they will get back together. They did not; they got divorced.”

Though Silverman was great at what she did, she also appreciated her new bosses’ patience with her process: She was slower than any of her colleagues, even if her work was worth the wait. Once her drafts arrived, they’d be near perfection. She spent all of her time at the studio office. MTM was
the
place to be for women in the TV business at the time, and Silverman wasn’t going to relinquish her prime spot any time soon.

Susan Silver took pleasure in the chance to turn her life into sitcom scripts. The episode “Room 223,” about Mary dating her journalism class teacher but getting a C on a paper anyway, counted among the many swiped from Silver’s everyday existence. She relied so much on her life for plots that she barely realized she was allowed to make things up. If she was stumped for story ideas, she’d stare out her study window, watching the leaves in the gentle Southern California breeze. She’d even resort to pulling the dictionary off the shelf. If nothing had happened to her, she’d pick words at random hoping for inspiration:
Hmm, A: Maybe we could do something about airplanes . . .

In fact, all of the women writing regularly for the show relied on their lives for inspiration. In the episode “Love Blooms at Hemple’s,” in which Rhoda falls for a guy so fast she starts planning their wedding, writer Sybil Adelman used the wording she’d always dreamed of having on her own wedding announcement: “Mr. and Mrs. Morgenstern are relieved to announce the wedding of their daughter . . . .”

Adelman couldn’t believe her luck: As an aspiring TV writer, she’d once accepted a show assignment just because the office had air-conditioning and Los Angeles was caught in a hot spell. So to work
on shows she loved, like
Mary Tyler Moore,
felt like a luxury even better than central air. Her former boss, Carl Reiner—she’d been his secretary—recommended her and writing partner Barbara Gallagher to Brooks and Burns. The producers hired the Mary-and-Rhoda–like pair. (Gallagher was the Mary, Adelman the Rhoda.) For Reiner, they’d written an episode of
The New Dick Van Dyke Show
in which Dick’s daughter walks in on him and his wife having sex. CBS declined to air it, and Reiner quit the show in protest. But Adelman and Gallagher, with a real (if unaired) script to their credit, got a dream career.

In one of their
Mary Tyler Moore
episodes, the pair based the story on Adelman’s relationship with Reiner: Lou worries Mary will get a better job and leave him. That had happened to Adelman, who just a few years before would thrill at the prospect of taking Friday afternoon off to walk over to the
Mary Tyler Moore
set from Reiner’s office to watch the run-through. At the time, she’d thought it was better than the high school prom. Now those actors were saying her words, and she was no one’s secretary anymore.

Karyl Geld, a thirty-year-old dress designer, had just moved to Los Angeles from New York with her husband and toddler son when she decided to be a TV writer. She was watching the Emmys at home, and when she saw Lily Tomlin come on the screen in a prom-like dress, she knew she should be critiquing the comedian’s wardrobe, but instead she thought:
Maybe I should be a comedy writer
. She knew she was funny. So she started writing spec scripts.

Almost a dozen spec scripts later, none of them had sold. Then she wrote one for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and her life changed. After becoming famous around the industry for
not
getting hired, she got a letter from Brooks and Burns saying they thought her script was terrific. Her first assignment: an episode in which Rhoda and Mary go to New York for Rhoda’s sister’s wedding. She thought that sounded perfect for her, since she was Jewish herself—she had a Jewish mother, too. And she had the perfect ending for the script: When Rhoda has a blowup with her mother, they make peace when her mother shows her
a letter she wrote to Rhoda on the day of her birth. Geld copied the letter verbatim that her mother had written to her, to be opened on the occasion of her wedding—though she’d left it unsealed, and Geld had it at home in her garage.

So in a way, Geld’s mother is responsible for one of the best jokes in the episode, a line from her letter to her newborn daughter: “God has been good to me. The nurses haven’t been so nice, but God has been good to me.” Geld had learned her first lesson of sitcom writing: Steal from real life.

Silverman’s tenth episode, in October 1972 at the beginning of the second season, got even more personal: It tackled Rhoda’s self-esteem and weight issues—and by extension, Silverman’s own. In the episode, Rhoda has joined a Weight Watchers–like group, but she’s also talked into competing in the beauty contest at the department store where she works. After the contest, she refuses to tell Mary and Phyllis how she placed; in fact, she won. Rhoda’s self-deprecation reflected Silverman’s own insecurities. The episode marked a turnaround in Rhoda’s character, from the sweatshirt-clad schlub of the pilot to the fashion icon she became. Silverman loved writing about the “blossoming of someone’s self-esteem. I was writing about Rhoda, but I was also writing about myself, about all women.”

Brooks and Burns knew beauty pageants weren’t exactly progressive, but they liked that the episode helped the character to evolve. They also liked that Rhoda finally admitted on-screen that she was beautiful, weight fluctuations or not.

Harper, who doesn’t hesitate to call Silverman a “genius,” won an Emmy for her work in the episode. The TV camera panned in for a close-up on the actress’s striking face as she gave her acceptance speech: “I want to thank Treva Silverman for writing a perfect episode,” she said. Silverman watched from, of all places, a health resort where she was trying to lose weight. The writer burst into tears at the public acknowledgment of her work, and the graciousness of Harper. She’d never forget it, she knew.

Female TV writers became all the rage as
Mary Tyler Moore
’s popularity soared in its third season. The image of comedy writers was changing from swearing guys in alpaca sweaters and pinky rings to women in miniskirts with typewriters. When
Laugh-In
started in 1968, its writers worked in a hotel room across from the studio and thus claimed they “couldn’t have a woman in that environment.” The sketch comedy series was still on the air, but its male-centric writing staff suddenly looked like a relic. Executives across Hollywood were saying, as Treva Silverman put it, “
We’re going to do a story about women and we’re going to have women writers and women producers and women actresses. It’s women, women, women. Get Barbara, she’s a woman! Get Linda, get Mary!”

Susan Silver soaked up the attention as one of the first women to write for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. As a newcomer to TV writing as well as a bombshell with a weakness for tight sweaters who made for a hell of a photo, she became a hot commodity.
Playgirl
sang her praises and described her “beautiful, tousled blond” hair and her “wry laugh.”
TV Guide
nestled a career-defining piece about her among its orderly prime-time programming grids with a provocative headline: “The Writer Wore Hot Pants.” She did, in fact, wear hot pants in the shoot for the story, which showed her posed at a typewriter while wearing short shorts, though she was embarrassed when she saw it in print. Every time she wore those damn things, she seemed to regret it.

In the interview, Silver painted an idyllic picture of being a groundbreaking woman in the industry: Being female and “presentable” helped her get work, she admitted. She wouldn’t call herself a “militant feminist,” she said, but she did attend a women’s workshop at the Writers Guild. (In fact, she had to quit volunteering for the National Organization for Women because she was too busy writing scripts.) People often wondered why she worked when she had a husband, she said. She worried more about her own insecurity than about sexism. Getting a job just hadn’t seemed that hard to her so far.

Silverman had gotten press a few years earlier when she broke barriers by writing for
The Monkees,
but she got plenty of attention within the industry now, especially when she became the show’s executive story consultant—making her the first female comedy executive in television. Brooks and Burns had granted her the promotion by telling her, “We need another head. We don’t care what your title is, whatever you want.”

When she won an Emmy for her writing on the show, she became the first female writer to take home the comedy award solo, without a partner. She even won the TV academy’s first (and only) “super-Emmy,” a gimmick that pitted every winner of every category that year up against each other for a sort of ultimate award. She felt like she had the whole weight of womankind on her shoulders; if she failed, it seemed, all women would fail along with her. One might think that feeling would prove pretty daunting, but Treva Silverman found it exhilarating.

University of Michigan senior Marilyn Suzanne Miller spent the spring of 1972 watching every episode of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s second season. The Rhoda clone—she was Jewish, with dark hair and a rebellious streak—was finishing her playwriting degree from home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. (She’d fallen one credit short and had to take a correspondence course in geography to graduate.) The accomplished eldest of four girls in her family, she was waiting around her “very middle-class” home to hear if she had been admitted to graduate school in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program. She was worried about paying for it even if she did get in, and she got a job writing department store ads. Then she had an idea while she watched her favorite show: Maybe she could write a script for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
now at the height of its popularity, and sell it to pay for grad school. She sat down and wrote page after page of dialogue, oblivious to how TV plots were structured.

When she felt satisfied with her draft, she pored over the show’s
ending credits and spotted the name James L. Brooks. She called information in Los Angeles and got the number for his office. A secretary answered there, and Miller let loose with her practiced spiel: “Hi, I’m twenty-two, and I’m in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, and I’d like to send you a script.” The secretary transferred her to Brooks, and Miller told him the same thing. He gave her the mailing address at the office, and she sent him her script.