Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (41 page)

While Brooks and Burns forged promising careers beyond television, most of the
Mary Tyler Moore
writers whom Brooks and Burns had so caringly mentored were discovering the hard truth—that the time
they’d spent on such a successful show was a fluke, a freak occurrence in an industry that usually manufactured failure.

When Treva Silverman got back from Europe, she was dazzled by how the TV business had changed in the two and a half years that she had been away. Many more women were now TV executives, with the power to be decision makers. She was getting a lot of offers. She wrote and produced several sitcoms, wrote innumerable pilots, and got involved as a script doctor for movies, which she found she liked. To her surprise, diving into someone else’s drafts appealed to her.

Michael Douglas phoned her. He had an unreleasable film. The name was
Romancing the Stone
. The script was good, the acting was good; the problem was that nobody liked the female lead, the character of Joan Wilder, played by his costar, Kathleen Turner. Focus groups found her icy and cold and couldn’t relate to her, much less root for her. As producer, Douglas had only a limited amount of money he could spend on retakes—they had to make her likable in her first scene or else the picture was going to fail. The problem was Kathleen Turner was alone in her apartment in that first scene; there was nobody to talk to.

Aha. Silverman rewrote the first scene so that Turner had a sweet little cat. Turner talked baby talk to the cat. She gave the cat specially prepared cat food. She adored that cat, and the audiences adored
Romancing the Stone
. It was shades of the unlikable Rhoda, saved by Phyllis’s daughter’s affection, all over again.

Treva then wrote her own romantic comedy script; lyricist Ed Kleban read it and showed it to the creator-choreographer-director of
A Chorus Line,
Michael Bennett. Bennett read it and flew her to New York to meet him. They clicked, and Bennett told her he wanted her to write his next musical. Thrilled, she moved back to New York to work with him. After searching around for a topic, Bennett was intrigued by the idea of her taking off and living in Europe, and decided he wanted her to write a musical based on her European adventures.

Working with Bennett was one of the happiest and most creative
times of her life. There was an eight-month workshop period where she wrote and rewrote and rewrote her play, and that was “as close,” she says, “as she could come to heaven.” Michael taught her to explore a character from an actor’s point of view, to mine the truth of one’s experience, and to be fearless. They worked together for four years, and at one point Michael asked her to come to Boston to work on
Dream Girls
with him. She realized she felt totally at home in theater. Her show was headed to Broadway and it was all coming true.

As she was getting dressed one morning to go to a meeting with Michael, she got a call—Michael had disappeared, nobody knew where he was, he had abandoned the show. Nobody knew why. As the weeks passed and Michael was unfindable, it turned out that he had become ill with AIDS. He never came back to theater work and spent the rest of his short life seeking a cure. Treva was devastated by his illness and by the sudden out-of-the-blue crashing of the world around her. She says that she divides her life into two sections: before Michael and after Michael.

Every now and then, she wonders what her life would have been if she hadn’t taken those years off, if she had stayed on with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Did it harm her career? Did she leave at the wrong time? The best answer she can come up with is that, yes, it most likely hurt her career. But then again, how do you weigh one turn in the road against another? If she hadn’t left, she never would have worked with Michael, never would have had those four glorious years of learning from a master, never would have written what she considers the best thing she’s ever done.

Recently she revisited her play and fell in love with it all over again. She decided that she was going back to the theater world, has rewritten and updated her play, and is having a first reading in New York. And she is looking forward to another turn in the road.

Susan Silver worked on the teen TV comedy
Square Pegs
in the ’80s, growing increasingly annoyed with the disorganization in the industry,
not to mention the drugs, before getting fed up with Hollywood for good. She moved back to New York to work in political campaigns and nonprofits instead. Gail Parent was one of the few
Mary Tyler Moore
alumnae to strike gold again: She wrote for
The Golden Girls,
where she was once again the only woman in the writers’ room—even on a groundbreaking show that focused on four older women.

The women’s personal lives were more fraught than those of their peers as well. Silver never married again; ironically, her ex-husband went on to produce
Married with Children
. Parent married four times, but she appreciated the precious years in between when she was single: “I would lie in a king-size bed and think,
How could somebody else fit in here?
” she says. “I had complete control over my life.”

None of the women were sure whether they were running from marriage because of their feminist instincts, or if marriage wasn’t built for driven women like them. For Marilyn Suzanne Miller, it seemed like the latter: She lived with one boyfriend who told her the home office was off-limits to her. “If you want to write,” he told her, “you’ve got to leave.” Another boyfriend, a press secretary, whispered lovingly to her, “There’ll only be one career in my house.” She had plenty of boyfriends and lived with several of them, but she always felt like she was “stuffing herself away.” She often made more than they did. “I was dating guys in their thirties and surpassing them, and that made things rough.”

When Pat Nardo got married a few years after
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
ended, she and writer Sybil Adelman (now Sybil Sage) took a photo of their left hands with their wedding rings on, just to document what they knew was a rare moment: The two of them were married at the same time.

Nardo, naturally, saw the professional opportunity in her new life circumstances. She hadn’t forgotten what she’d learned on
Mary Tyler Moore
: Real life is always rife with sitcom possibilities. She spun her marriage into TV comedy—and
almost
made it big. When she and Banta left
Rhoda
in 1977, that marked the end of their partnership,
and Banta’s writing career. (She instead went into producing, which eventually led her into the executive ranks at the Comedy Central network in its early years.) But Nardo started her own production company and in 1983 sold her dream project to ABC.
It’s Not Easy
was loosely based on Nardo’s experiences marrying a Warren Beatty–gorgeous, wealthy man she met in London named Richard Black. She fell for him so hard that she didn’t pay much heed to the massive complications his ex-wife and children would bring to her life.

The show was to star Gerald McRaney and Larry Breeding as the former and new husbands of a character played by Carlene Watkins (Ed. Weinberger’s real-life wife). The pilot went beautifully, and the network immediately committed to thirteen episodes of the series. But then
Simon & Simon,
McRaney’s series on CBS, got a last-minute reprieve from cancellation, which meant he had to pull out of Nardo’s project. Soon afterward, Breeding was killed in a car accident. Nardo was in production with a thirteen-episode commitment and no cast.

Bert Convy and Ken Howard stepped into the leading roles, but the show was never quite the same. Even though the
New York Times
called it “
one of the more promising” series of the season, the all-important cast chemistry Nardo had learned so much about on
Mary Tyler Moore
had vanished from the project.
It’s Not Easy
lived out its on-air commitment, then ended, one more cautionary tale about the unpredictability of the TV business.

Nardo and Black eventually divorced.

Of course, the MTM cachet did lead plenty of its alumni into long and respectable television careers. Writer-producer Ed. Weinberger created
The Cosby Show
and
Amen
. Director Jay Sandrich went on to oversee most episodes of
The Cosby Show
as well as episodes of
Two and a Half Men
and
The Golden Girls
. Writer David Lloyd worked on
Frasier
and
Cheers
. Writer Monica Johnson wrote the Albert Brooks film
Lost in America
. Writer Karyl Geld (now Karyl Miller) went on to pen episodes of
My Sister Sam, Kate & Allie,
and
The Cosby Show
. And writer Sybil Sage went on to
Northern Exposure
and
Growing Pains
.

In all, being a former MTMer wasn’t a bad life. “We got a lot because of the MTM name,” Nardo says. “We were stars.”

After their concurrent string of awards nominations for their post–
Mary Tyler Moore
screenplays, Brooks and Burns drifted apart. They stayed in touch but didn’t see each other as often.

Brooks was consumed in a new project. After he collected his accolades for
Starting Over,
Paramount sent him Larry McMurtry’s book
Terms of Endearment,
which follows thirty years of a contentious relationship between an overprotective mother and her stubborn daughter. The studio saw it as a potential vehicle for a specific actress—Brooks would never reveal who—but he didn’t want to write it with any “preconditions.” He did, however, want to write the script—he had wanted to do a mother-daughter story for some time, ever since writing scenes for Rhoda and her mother—and he convinced Paramount to option it without their actress attached. The studio’s president, Michael Eisner, had faith in Brooks’s abilities: “I think you’ll do a good enough job so that if we don’t want to make it I can sell it someplace else,” the executive told the writer.

Once again, Brooks was back to writing distinctive leading lady roles, with men as their supporting players—though he did invent one standout male role, Garrett Breedlove, a swaggering astronaut and randy suitor to the mother character. When Brooks turned his finished script in, he found himself in slightly familiar territory: The executives didn’t get that it was funny. “No, no, that’s a funny line,” he told them on more than one occasion.

“Yes, you mean witty,” they would say.

“No,” he would answer, “I mean ha-ha.” It was the early days of
Mary Tyler Moore
all over again.

Finally, however, Eisner gave Brooks the go-ahead on his pet project via a note: “
Terms of Endearment.
Go picture at 7
¹
/
₂
million. Delivery Xmas of ’82.” Brooks framed the scrawl and hung it on his office wall.

But the $7.5 million wasn’t enough, and Brooks wouldn’t do it as a low-budget shoot that wasn’t on location. So the film got stuck in turnaround. He tried to sell it elsewhere, but no one bit. Eisner told him, “I still like it. I still like it for seven and a half.”

Then Brooks’s agent had an idea: Ask MTM Enterprises for the extra money he needed. Arthur Price agreed on the company’s behalf, even though his colleagues told him it was a crazy investment. He didn’t expect it to make the company money, but he thought it had a chance of breaking even. MTM put up $1 million, and in the end Paramount agreed to spend $9 million.

When it was finally made, the family drama became a showpiece for Shirley MacLaine, whom Brooks wanted for the role of the widowed mother, Aurora Greenway, because she shared his view that the film was a comedy (aside from the tragic ending). Debra Winger played her daughter. And Jack Nicholson took the part of Breedlove, deemed “
uncastable” by Brooks himself. To Brooks’s relief, Nicholson was happy to take a supporting role, because that willingness had served him well in
Easy Rider
and
Reds
. Even though Brooks had worked with some of the biggest names in TV comedy, bossing around movie stars of such caliber intimidated him. He told Nicholson as much when they started working together. “You can say anything you want to me,” Nicholson drawled, setting Brooks at ease. MacLaine proved a gifted on-the-spot comedian, and Nicholson ad-libbed a few of his character’s funniest lines.