Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (29 page)

The producers had learned to be careful when they handled hot topics, but not because they worried about offending viewers—rather, because they had tried it before to disastrous creative effect. In a late second-season episode called “Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda,” which directly addressed anti-Semitism, their attempt played as nothing more than an
All in the Family
imitation. And not a particularly good one.

Rhoda’s Jewishness, a huge part of her character, had never been the subject of a plot point before this episode. But viewers had certainly
noticed the character’s ethnicity. Harper received a letter from someone in Arkansas saying, “I really love your work but I want to know are you Jewish or a regular American?” Finally, the producers decided: Why not acknowledge that being Jewish came with difficulties?

The episode guest-starred Mary Frann as a new friend of Mary’s who belongs to a country club that won’t admit Jews. But putting Mary through the motions of learning about bigotry, and then giving a grand speech against it by the end of the half hour, looked silly in the context of the character-driven
Mary Tyler Moore Show
. The episode became a study in the difference between MTM and Lear. On
Mary Tyler Moore,
the plots were to grow from the characters, not to be giant social issues descending upon the characters as if from above, to prompt heated dialogue and then evaporate.

The
Mary Tyler Moore
producers would never attempt an
All in the Family
imitation again.

In fact, “Some of My Best Friends Are Rhoda” was the closest the show would ever get to explicitly making racial issues central to a plot. “That was just not our MO,” Burns says. “There were maybe two or three times in the history of the show when we did something a little preachy, and it didn’t really work.” Only black-centric shows rivaled female-driven shows in trendiness as the decade progressed, but rarely did the twain meet; Brooks and Burns felt like they had their hands full with fighting for women’s issues and Rhoda’s Jewishness without taking on civil rights as well.

Mary Tyler Moore
lost its sole black recurring character when John Amos, who played Gordy—WJM’s smart, affable weatherman—left in 1973 to star in Norman Lear’s
Good Times,
which chronicled the travails of a family living in the Chicago projects. Brooks and Burns had purposely cast a black actor as part of the WJM staff, seeing both the social responsibility of diversity and the potential for light humor. “We made him a weatherman, which seemed to us to be funny because every black guy you saw on the air in those days was the sports guy,” Burns says. “Ted kept making the mistake, ‘Here’s Gordy with
sports.’ ” Once Gordy had left, race rarely came up on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
again.

Of course, the producers couldn’t have kept one issue out of
Mary Tyler Moore
if they’d tried: women’s lib. And though she’d ultimately be viewed in retrospect as a feminist heroine, Mary Richards had a fraught relationship with the women’s libbers of her time. Moore was often asked about her own stance on women’s issues, and she offered ambivalent answers at best: “
I think women are okay. I mean, I like women, but I know a lot of people don’t like them. That’s partly women’s fault: They allow themselves to be put down, put back in the kitchen when the men are talking. In my mind I can see a lot of the new thinking about the female role, but emotionally I’m not there: I tend to defer to my husband, to accept his dominant role. And there are certain things that I’d rather talk over only with another woman. Unisex looks like it’s here, but I hope we never lose our sexuality. I wouldn’t like that at all.”

The feminist movement simply was not impressed with Ms. Richards, and Moore’s lack of enthusiastic cheerleading on the cause’s behalf likely didn’t help. Brooks learned all of this in November 1975 when he was invited to speak on a panel at the
Conference on Women in Public Life, held at the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. It would be a high-profile extravaganza at the height of the women’s rights movement, a U.S. version of the United Nations’ recent International Women’s Year meeting in Mexico City. He would be part of a panel addressing women’s progress in television and film. He could stay for the weekend at Lady Bird Johnson’s nearby ranch, the organizers offered. Yes, of course he could bring his now-serious girlfriend, Holly Holmberg. The couple would just have to say they were already husband and wife so Lady Bird would let them stay in a room together. The former First Lady was a women’s rights advocate, but she was very traditional. Surely he understood.

Brooks started to feel like he was in an episode of his own sitcom.

The morning before his appearance, women crammed the LBJ Library corridors to register for the event, making it the largest conference the facility had ever hosted and the largest in the United States for International Women’s Year. Ambassador Anne Armstrong urged the women to “go public. Women are now in centerstage. You owe it to the movement not to shun that spotlight, that mic, that printed page, but to use it as a benchmark. Maybe to run for office, maybe to manage a campaign, maybe to press for an appointive position, maybe to get on a TV show or an op-ed page. In whatever way, go public.”

At the Sunday night panel, before the packed thousand-seat auditorium—with another thousand participants overflowing into nearby hallways and rooms—Brooks filed onto the stage of the LBJ Library auditorium with the panel’s moderator,
Ms.
magazine founder Gloria Steinem; Virginia Carter, who worked as Norman Lear’s assistant; and Ann Hassett, the director of special projects at the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. The crowd included young and old women, some in housedresses, some in business suits. Steinem—in wire-rimmed glasses, a floral print blouse, and long blond waves—leaned into the microphone to wild applause from the crowd.

Her opening remarks addressed the importance of TV and film in forming and reforming public attitudes toward women. “
I’d like to ask each of us to consider how much television and films have shaped our dreams,” she said. “Just consider what visitors from outer space might think if they were confronted with the last twelve years of television and films as the only evidence of what American women were like. First of all they would be convinced that there were twice as many American men as there were American women. It would be quite clear that we slept in false eyelashes and full makeup. Some of us would be taken to be a servant class of some sort. If we lived alone, we would almost have to be widows, at least until recently. That’s begun to change, and we’ll hear a little bit more about the change later.”

To the continuous clicks of cameras documenting the event,
Steinem continued, considering the effect the women’s movement had on pop culture—progress had been made, she said, but not enough. “We have begun to see women who are autonomous, who disagree, who argue, who have some identity of their own, who seek jobs and are sometimes even paid for those jobs,” she said. “Mary Tyler Moore agitated for equal pay, and got half of what she asked for. It was a very pop cultural compromise.”

When Steinem introduced Carter, she mentioned Lear’s
Maude
. “Think of Maude!” she said. “Gives us hope.” Brooks, she said, was “a person who has tried to be very sensitive to the changes that women are demanding.”

During the question-and-answer period (which, unlike the introduction, was not recorded in Steinem’s archives), Brooks recalls Steinem pointedly criticizing
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
for allowing Mary to call her boss “Mr. Grant” when all of the other characters called him “Lou.” She got still more applause for this; the Mr. Grant Issue had become a major talking point for feminist activists. A terrified public speaker, Brooks was sure he even heard some boos from the audience when he was up to speak.

Mary Richards had officially become a polarizing figure, a fact that would have shocked the character herself.

On the one hand, she was continuing to bring issues specific to young, working women to the TV screen, and becoming even bolder about it. For instance, Mary’s adventures in the local TV news ranks often mirrored those of the women in Hollywood—she complained of pressure to “represent women everywhere” and of the station manager “trotting in groups of people and saying, ‘This is our woman executive!’ ” By 1974,
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
were filled with announcements about groundbreaking promotions for women at movie studios and networks, including Ethel Winant, who was now officially vice president of casting at CBS. The moves were meant to publicly prove the Hollywood establishment was not sexist.

In the episode Steinem referenced, Mary fretted over the discovery
that her salary was lower than that of the man who held her job before her; in the end, she did win a raise, though it was true it didn’t bring her totally on par with her predecessor. Others had praised the show for addressing the issue of equal pay realistically: “This is hardly earthshaking,” wrote the
Los Angeles Times
’ Don Shirley. “But the cumulative effect of such statements, with more or less subtlety, in almost every episode of the series, is hard to ignore.”

Mary’s famously quavery voice made the demand for equal pay both funny and poignant, but it wasn’t presented seriously enough for some critics. Mary also seemed to at least consider Mr. Grant’s argument that the guy deserved the extra fifty dollars a week because he had a family to support. Moore personally admired this mark of what she saw as Mary Richards’s reasonableness.

Many critics beyond Steinem complained that was exactly the problem with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Now that feminist ideals were becoming mainstream, it didn’t seem like enough simply to have a heroine who was over thirty and refusing to define herself by her search for a man. Mary Richards, some women’s lib activists said, was not nearly liberated enough. Her celebrated theme song identified her as a “girl.” She wasn’t a feminist heroine; in fact, she was a pushover. Critics said Mary Richards offered a “
compromised and contradictory feminism,” with her empowerment tempered too much by “
girl-next-door sweetness.” The
New York Times
pointed out that “
she hardly ever gets to write the news or report it on camera—even though she appears to be several times brighter than the men who do.” Even the mainstream
TV Guide
complained in an editorial that characters like Mary Richards weren’t “
challenging the family system, demanding a new kind of sexual relationship or a new division of labor in the home.”

The producers defended themselves, however: As for the Mr. Grant Issue, Mary was the kind of person who would address her boss properly. And while she was a bit of a people pleaser, she stood up for herself when necessary. They wanted to favor character over social
statement, even as more women were entering the workplace, demanding equal pay just like Mary, and even reaching the upper echelons of the producers’ very own industry. The producers wouldn’t identify themselves or the heroine they’d created as feminist, per se, even if they were proud of the empowering figure she was becoming. Because she represented “good girls” and had a sense of vulnerability, they observed, no one could resent her as an icon.

That was, in fact, the secret to her unique power.

They even played her conflicted “Mr. Grant”-ing for laughs: In the 1973 episode when Lou confides in Mary about his divorce, he demands she call him by his first name if they’re going to have such a personal conversation. “Would that be just for the purpose of this conversation, or for, you know, all time?” she asks. Then she tries it out, stammering an awkward “Mr . . . . Lou.”

That changes his mind. “Call me Mr. Grant,” he concludes.

(1972–74)

Among
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s biggest fans were actress Betty White and her game-show-host husband, Allen Ludden. Almost every Friday, the couple could be found in the bleachers of the sitcom’s live tapings.

Moore had been friends with White for a decade now, since their husbands had introduced them. Both women were TV stars at the time, though White had been around since the medium’s earliest days, hosting talk shows, producing and starring in the low-budget, traditional-couple sitcom
Life with Elizabeth
in the ’50s, and becoming a fixture as a game-show guest in the ’60s. She met her husband on his show
Password
. Their love was legendary: They attended each other’s tapings every time they could, and drove matching Cadillacs. Ludden was also close to Tinker, and Mary and Grant were among the first friends Ludden had introduced to his new bride in 1963, the same year that they, too, had gotten married.

The Luddens had been cheering for the show from its beginning: Allen sent Mary a floral arrangement shaped like the number 1 for that first precarious taping, and continued the tradition at the beginning of each subsequent season, sending a 2 for the second year, and so on. Allen and Betty knew about every labored-over script revision and ratings point change from dinners with Mary and Grant. They loved watching the show from its initial struggles to its grand popularity.