Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (44 page)

The next year, she was back on television, ready for a fresh start with the medium that had built her career. Again, the show was called
Mary
. She was still under her long-term contract with CBS, signed after the end of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and hoped to redeem her name in television after her failures of the last eight years. She decided to return to her beloved sitcom format, even though she still didn’t think she was a comedian. “
I’m not an innately funny person,” she told the
New York Times
then. “I find it an almost overbearing responsibility when I think about having to be funny . . . . I like simply standing next to the funny person. Just being part of what caused the laughter is great fun for me.” The concept for
Mary
felt strangely familiar: Following the adventures of a fortyish divorcée who worked at a struggling tabloid newspaper, it sounded a lot like Brooks and Burns’s first proposal for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But the MTM luster was fading now, sixteen years after the company began and without Tinker to lend his vision.
Mary
lasted just half a season. Moore tried yet again two seasons later with
Annie McGuire,
which followed a couple married later in life. Her first show not bearing some form of her name, however, didn’t do any better, and lasted just ten episodes. A few years later, MTM Enterprises went on the stock market and flopped. MTM never returned to its heights of television production, and the company was at last absorbed into Twentieth Century Fox by the ’90s.

She had some minor success during the same period by revisiting her
Mary Tyler Moore
roots: She reunited with Burns on a movie script he’d written for her,
Just Between Friends
. In it, Moore plays an uptight housewife-turned-aerobics-instructor who finds out, after her husband’s death, that he’d been cheating with her best friend. The film,
directed by Burns and costarring Christine Lahti and Ted Danson, explored a theme that had become mainstream since
Mary Tyler Moore
: the divide between working, single women and stay-at-home moms.

Moore was now playing the stay-at-home mom. But the movie didn’t make enough impact to help anyone forget she was Mary Richards first.

Back in the early ’70s, with
Phyllis
and
Rhoda
on the wane and plagued with troubles of their own, what once seemed like a sure thing for Betty White—a spin-off show for her belovedly bitchy Sue Ann—now looked like a huge gamble. So much so, in fact, that MTM Enterprises issued an edict: Yes, there would be a show starring Betty White. No, it would not be about Sue Ann Nivens. To soften her up enough to be a leading lady would destroy her character, à la
Phyllis
; to marry her off was a chance they weren’t about to take after
Rhoda
. They would, instead, build a whole new show around White.

In
The Betty White Show,
she would play a character named Joyce Whitman, a TV actress who has to work with her ex-husband as the director of her new show. Georgia Engel would play Joyce’s best friend.
White had watched
Star Trek
from its beginning in 1966, often to her husband’s chagrin, so she pitched the idea of Joyce’s series being a space show. It would not only provide two contrasting worlds for Joyce, but it would also be hilarious, she thought. David Lloyd wrote the pilot script, with Ed. Weinberger and Stan Daniels producing; but the guys decided to put Joyce in a second-rate crime show called
Undercover Woman
instead, to play off the recent success of Angie Dickinson’s
Police Woman
.

Despite all of those efforts, the show would last only half a season. Just two months later, in April 1978,
Maude
ended its six-year run, and
All in the Family
said good-bye to the cast that had made it famous (attempts at reboots and spin-offs of the show would never reach the same heights as the original). By that December,
Rhoda
was over as well.

The Golden Age of Comedy that
Time
had declared in 1974 had officially ended.

Gavin MacLeod cracked the code of the changing TV landscape in the late ’70s better than anyone else who came out of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
He turned down a pilot in which he would have played a character who, he says, was “like Murray in a cowboy suit,” to instead take his dream job, costarring in a production of
Annie Get Your Gun
with Debbie Reynolds in San Francisco. Then his agent told him about a script for a pilot called
The Love Boat
. “I think it stinks,” his agent said. “But do you want to read it?”

MacLeod agreed to take a look despite that unenthusiastic endorsement. As he read it at his house in Palm Springs, and saw the simple but compelling premise—a show following different romantic stories each week, set on the same cruise ship with the same amiable staff—he thought,
No one has ever done anything like this before.
He handed it over to his wife, and within the first ten pages, she told him, “I think if you get the right people, it could be interesting.”

MacLeod agreed to a meeting with producer Aaron Spelling about the role of Captain Merrill Stubing since he was driving to Los Angeles to meet with NBC about another pilot anyway. When he got to Spelling’s mansion, he found a producer who’d done his homework. “I know you like to do other things,” MacLeod recalls Spelling saying. “So I can structure this so you’re not doing the lead.”

MacLeod’s agent had warned him about saying yes right away to Spelling. “Aaron,” he said, “gives great interview.” His agent had been right: “Just say yes,” Spelling now implored MacLeod.

“I promised my agent I wouldn’t say yes,” MacLeod said. But he
wanted
to say yes, and he told his agent so as soon as he could get to a phone after meeting with Spelling. “I like Aaron,” MacLeod told him. “And I read the other pilot script you gave me, and they’re in like a Salvation Army place, and they’re knocking Jimmy Carter, they’re knocking this and that. I don’t want to do that.”

He went back to
Annie Get Your Gun
after filming the
Love Boat
pilot and loved the stage work even more than he’d expected to. He thought,
Wow, this is great. I get to do a musical! I’m used to seven pieces in the orchestra, and they have twenty-eight pieces!
Then he got the call that he was, in all honesty, dreading: Spelling telling him
The Love Boat
had gotten picked up for the fall. Spelling had promised to work around the actor’s schedule, but daily performances nearly four hundred miles from Los Angeles seemed a bit much.

“Isn’t it great?” Spelling said to MacLeod of
Love Boat
’s prospects. “The focus groups saw you in the pilot, and they pressed those buttons [to indicate their love for a character], and it went through the roof!”

“Aaron,” MacLeod remembers saying, “I’m going to open in San Francisco in a week and a half.”

“Didn’t I say I’d work around you?”

Indeed, every afternoon for the duration of the play, one of Spelling’s drivers would take MacLeod from the
Love Boat
set to Los Angeles International Airport, and MacLeod would fly to San Francisco, where he’d be taken from the airport to the theater. He would eat dinner, do the show, and fly home. Spelling may have been accused of watering down television with his soapy, guilty pleasures, but he was a man of his word.

And MacLeod was thrilled when
The Love Boat
became a huge hit, an icon of ’80s television and a mainstay of family viewing on Saturday nights. He didn’t mind that people called it “mindless television.” It was what viewers wanted to see. He had been part of a show that got more Emmys in seven years than any other show, and now he got to be part of a show that made people happy and provided them some escape from their everyday lives. Was that so bad?

Many of his former
Mary Tyler Moore
costars took a voyage or two on the vessel of romance as well: Georgia Engel, Harold Gould, Valerie Harper, Ted Knight, Cloris Leachman, Nancy Walker, and Betty White all showed up in guest spots. Harper appeared on a show in which the ship was traveling the Nile, and she brought her new
husband, personal trainer Tony Cacciotti, with her for the shoot. MacLeod tried to give the couple his expansive suite so they wouldn’t have to sleep on bunk beds in a cramped cabin, but Harper would have none of that. “No, no, you worked hard for this,” she told him. “It’s yours.”

White appeared twice, both times having the damnedest time keeping her hands off MacLeod’s bald head—she missed Sue Ann’s signature caress, but she knew that time was over. You just don’t do that to Captain Stubing. Somehow it felt as if nothing, and yet everything, had changed.

Ed Asner had changed as well. He had become a feminist.

Yes, the man behind the gruff Lou Grant had been converted to a full-fledged women’s rights advocate after witnessing Mary Richards’s ascent for seven seasons. He was a vocal ERA supporter. And, on a more personal level, his agent added a clause to his
Lou Grant
contract that required progressive hiring practices on the show. Asner may have acted macho—some midwestern football player habits don’t die easily—but he did his best to support and speak out for women’s equality. In 1986, he would even deliver the National Organization for Women’s 20th Anniversary radio broadcast, a tribute to male feminists like Alan Alda.

Asner was growing ever more outspoken about his political beliefs by 1982. While he’d become a fervent women’s libber during his time on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
it was his more extreme-left views that got the most attention, culminating in controversial fund-raising efforts to send medical aid to rebels in El Salvador fighting against the U.S.-supported regime. Asner even went so far as to send out a letter asking for donations that began, “
My name is Ed Asner. I play Lou Grant on television.” That raised the hackles of conservative Screen Actors Guild members such as Charlton Heston, who objected to Asner’s use of a character to push a political agenda.

Right-wing sentiment turned even more against Asner when he
answered a question in a press conference: Would he support free elections in El Salvador even if the result was a communist government there? At first, he demurred. Then, given a few more seconds to think, he changed his mind, just as he had years earlier when he gave a poor reading for his Lou Grant audition. He said to himself,
You came all this way to give that kind of bullshit answer?
So he stepped back to the microphone and told the reporters what he really thought: If that’s what the people chose, he answered, he would have to support it. He felt like the dog in the
Tom and Jerry
cartoons:
Boom!
Incinerated by his own words. He realized he could be ending his own career, and he made peace with that in the moment.

He was labeled “communist swine” and “
the Jane Fonda of Latin America.” (“I didn’t know I was that cute,” he quipped in response.) Burns and the other
Lou Grant
producers tried to talk Asner into toning down his rhetoric. Asner remembers producer Seth Freeman telling him, “We think there are two ways to present ideas: One is the way you’re doing it and one is the way we do it. We think our way is better.”