Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (38 page)

Luckily, at the time, Moore still had her sitcom to return to. And even in its final seasons,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
wasn’t finished making television history. In some ways, it seemed invigorated by approaching the finish line, especially compared with
All in the Family
.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s longtime partner in history-making TV limped along, a shadow of its former self, no end in sight. Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers were preparing to leave the show, and Archie’s purchase of Kelsey’s Bar would do little to revive the flagging series.
All in the Family
was reinforcing Tinker’s and the producers’ decision to name an end date.

The sixth-season episode of
Mary Tyler Moore
that would become many viewers’ favorite of all time started out as just another half hour of television. The show scheduled to air October 25, 1975, had a funny plot, sure, but so did many
Mary Tyler Moore
episodes. This particular script featured the funeral of Chuckles the Clown, a recurring character who hosted the children’s show on WJM.

Producer David Lloyd had written the script at home, just as he wrote all of his scripts,
stopping occasionally to laugh at something he’d written. He knew in this case that what he was writing was at least a little daring, and pretty funny. As Moore recalled, “
It was the first time anybody had attempted a comedy episode about a tragic situation: the nervous giggles some people get in the midst of a funeral, out of an awareness that this is the one time you should never, ever laugh.”

The idea came from a variety of sources. One was Brooks’s memory of what his mother and aunt once did: “They got the giggles at a funeral when I was a kid, like nine years old,” Brooks says. “I was humiliated.” Another was something one of the writers had recently read about a guy who had died when, for unknown reasons, he’d put
a large, empty stewed tomato can over his head. His fellow workers couldn’t get over what a funny way that was to die. Lloyd turned in a script Brooks and Burns loved, full of his “mordant take on what is funny and what isn’t,” as Burns says. A line from Lou, as written by Lloyd, elegantly summed up the deeper meaning of the episode—finding humor in the inevitable end. “It’s a release,” he explains to Murray. “A kind of defense mechanism. It’s like whistling in a graveyard. You try to make light of something because it scares you. We laugh at death because we know death will have the last laugh on us.”

The first sign that the episode would be something truly memorable came when Moore fretted over the subject matter, worrying it was “too sad.” But Tinker, Brooks, and Burns outvoted her and proceeded with the script. She conceded to their expertise.

But then Sandrich declined to direct it. Joan Darling, who’d left behind an acting career on television and in the theater to join the growing number of women pursuing directing, took the reins for “Chuckles Bites the Dust” from Sandrich. She had gotten her start directing the pilot of Lear’s
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
and had gone on to direct other shows for Lear as well as MTM’s
Doc
. Despite a legend to the contrary, Sandrich insists he didn’t object to the material. “That’s been so distorted,” he says. Every season, he’d direct only sixteen of the twenty-two
Mary Tyler Moore
episodes so that he could have the freedom to do other shows occasionally. He was scheduled to work at about the same time on the American version of
Upstairs Downstairs,
called
Beacon Hill
. Weinberger asked Sandrich, “The week you’re gone, would you like us to do ‘Chuckles Bites the Dust’? Or do you want us to do the Eileen Heckart episode?” Heckart occasionally appeared on the show as Mary’s brash aunt, and Sandrich particularly loved working with her. He chose her episode.

This immediately gave much of the cast and crew the impression that he was worried the topic was too sensitive. The network, too, had balked, though, as usual, Brooks and Burns forged ahead with Tinker’s blessing.

Darling, however, was thrilled to get the assignment—not because she knew it would be a classic, but because the work would get her a much-needed paycheck. She was also happy for every chance she got to prove that women could direct. The first time she drove to the studio, she had to pull off to the side of the road to calm her nerves.

The episode itself posed its share of challenges. Moore pulled Brooks and Burns aside during rehearsal and told them, “I can’t do this.” They worried she was backtracking to her original concerns about the episode, but now she had a different problem: She could barely keep herself from cracking up every time she had to refer to one of Chuckles’s characters, “Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo.” And if she laughed too early in the episode, it would ruin the effect of her losing control at the funeral; she had to contain herself even while everyone in the scenes with her was laughing. Every time she’d make eye contact with Asner or MacLeod, she’d lose it.

Then the pretaping run-through had several problems that echoed the infamous pilot disaster five years earlier. Moore was still laughing, while the crew was . . . not. “We had a fairly elderly crew, and as we rehearsed it, they were not laughing their asses off,” Asner recalls. The reaction of the crew was usually a reliable indicator of how a show would play, so now the producers and actors were getting worried. Perhaps laughing at mortality
was
pushing beyond the limit, but it was now Friday, too late to scrap the episode. “Just do the best you can,” Brooks told the cast. “We’ll try to write new stuff later and see if we can salvage it, but for now we’re at a complete loss.”

Not only that, but the run-through had timed out at about five minutes under the required airtime. Burns instructed the actors to “go out there and play the hell out of it” so the audience’s laughter would fill the time. If there was still a deficit, they shouldn’t worry too much—the writers would likely be adding new material in later weeks, anyway.

But somehow, the episode magically coalesced at showtime. The audience actually did laugh when Murray, Lou, and Mary found out
about Chuckles’s death, caused by an overzealous parade elephant that mistook the clown, costumed as Peter Peanut, for a real snack. They laughed even more when Murray started rattling off one-liners about the ridiculous incident. “Each time he’d do one, I’d force myself to create the biggest belly laugh I could, which evidently infected the audience pretty well because by the time we finished the scene, we’d extended it by a minute,” Asner recalls. “By the end of the show, the audience had laughed so much, we had extended it five minutes.”

Luckily, Moore didn’t join the audience in those extra guffaws until her well-timed breakdown in the middle of Chuckles’s funeral. Her costars did their best not to talk to her between scenes, or even look at her, for fear of setting her off on another of her giggling fits.

The episode won praise as soon as it aired—in fact, as soon as it was shot.
M*A*S*H
writer
Ken Levine was in the studio audience that night, and he knew while he was sitting in the bleachers that he was watching what might be the single greatest half-hour comedy in television history. He and his writing partner, David Isaacs—who’d recently gotten a rejection letter from Lloyd—walked out of the studio in awe. “Do you think we could ever write anything that good?” Levine asked. Isaacs responded, “No one can.”

Future
TV Guide
critic Bruce Fretts, nine years old at the time, watched the episode at home with his family—the CBS Saturday night lineup, with
Bob Newhart
and
Carol Burnett,
had become a weekly ritual for them, as for so many other families across the country. They called the stars “the Holy Trinity of Comedy.” Not every episode of
Mary Tyler Moore
was allowed on when Bruce was in the room; his parents would decide each week based on the synopsis in
TV Guide
. (You know, the one you’d check to see if it was an (R)—for rerun—or not.) When Mary met a hooker in jail, for instance, that was a no-go.

But when Bruce saw the “Chuckles” episode, even at his young age, he knew something special had happened. He didn’t know yet how to articulate why it was so funny, so memorable, but he would figure out why—and grow up to write for that Holy Bible of television.
(He would even think of that episode when attending his mother’s funeral thirty-seven years later. “I chuckled a bit, albeit quietly, at the memory of my mom crying with laughter at her beloved Mary bursting out in guffaws,” Fretts recalls. “It was an oddly comforting reminiscence that brought a smile to my face on an otherwise sad day.”)

In his
Los Angeles Times
column, Cecil Smith raved about the “rare experience” the episode provided: “
It was not only a very funny show, but . . . it actually disturbed you, which TV comedy almost never does . . . . It had a bizarre reality that grabbed you where you live—it bothered you. To bring a story like this off in the confines of TV’s comic strips is really quite exceptional. It points up again the high degree of skillful ensemble acting that sets
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
apart.”
Time
magazine said: “
In another moving and improbably funny show, Chuckles the Clown, while dressed up as a peanut, was stomped to death by an elephant. Divorce, death and departure were part of the show’s workings; MTM possessed at least that much realism.”
Washington Post
critic Tom Shales later remembered the episode as a “
bittersweet riot about laughing in the face of death . . . . Watching this and other perfectly crafted [
Mary Tyler Moore
episodes], one is reminded not only of the show’s high standards and high quality, but of how caught up we were in the lives of the characters, and how caught up they seemed to be in ours.” Just a year after the show had aired,
Newsday
writer Bruce Cook had already deemed it “
a classic.”

Darling earned her first Emmy nomination for the show, and Lloyd won for the script. Darling’s reputation as a director got such a boost that she started receiving film scripts from major studios to consider. The episode would show up on virtually every future list of “greatest episodes of all time,” usually at the top.

It also got the producers an invitation to the Cannes Television Festival’s competition, another one of those bizarre real-life incidents that played out like an episode of their own show. Weinberger, Davis, and Brooks headed to France for the occasion. “We go in, and they’re showing the show,” Brooks recalls. “There are around sixty people in
the room. They have things where you can put what language you want, because it was a dubbed French version. So we’re listening to it in English and they’re listening to it in whatever language they want to listen to it in, and we didn’t get one laugh. Except at a certain point, because we were getting no laughs, we were falling on the floor laughing. It was as inappropriate as the show itself!”

When the cast returned to the set in late summer of 1976, they knew the clock was ticking. “This is the first day of the first week of the last year!” Mary announced.

MacLeod was standing next to her. “Mary, I just want to thank you for all this,” he said.

“Gavs, don’t start now,” she joked. “We have a whole season to get through.”

Moore still wasn’t sure what she’d do after the finale. Those blank pages in her calendar after the show’s end loomed. She felt whatever came next would be a true test of her talent: If she didn’t make good, it would seem she’d just been lucky up until now. Asner was anxious, too—he’d rather stick around for a year at least, he thought. He had the best of both worlds, a steady comedy job and summers off to shoot dramatic movies and guest roles. He’d had his best hiatus the year before, in 1975: He played a Chicano bush pilot in the TV movie
Hey, I’m Alive
(with
All in the Family
’s Sally Struthers); the owner of a pro football team that hires a mule as a kicker in Disney’s
Gus;
and a Nazi army escapee in the miniseries
Rich Man, Poor Man
. He didn’t want to have to find a new day job—Tinker had shifted
Mary Tyler Moore
’s production schedule just to accommodate some of Asner’s
Rich Man
shooting, a rare gesture he might not get from future employers.

But for now, they had a show to do, and
Mary Tyler Moore
wasn’t about to take things easy, even in its last stretch: Two of the show’s highest-profile guest stars were booked to appear in its final days.

The cast didn’t think it could get more exciting than landing Walter Cronkite in the show’s fourth season—until First Lady Betty
Ford signed on for an appearance in the show’s final year. Ford was famously drunk when she turned up on the series as herself in its seventh season, taping her appearance not long before she checked into Long Beach Naval Hospital for rehab and then subsequently founded her own clinic. The scene called for a brief phone call between her and Mary, with
Moore’s half filmed on the set and Ford’s shot at a hotel in Washington, D.C. Moore and a crew flew to the capital for the occasion, and were welcomed at the White House by a smiling, but slurring, First Lady. The fifteen-minute shoot was an hour and a half behind schedule, and rehearsals fizzled since Ford couldn’t remember her lines.