Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (7 page)

Burns and Brooks laughed in response, more at ease. She was genuinely funny.

They didn’t know if she would find their proposal for her show quite so amusing. Writers renowned for their Emmy wins, critical lauds, and realistic approach to issues on
Room 222,
Jim Brooks and Allan Burns did not court the masses with middlebrow humor. They tackled modern problems. Brooks’s old boss on
Room 222,
Gene Reynolds, had instilled in him the value of research—lots and lots of research. Brooks would tell him, having visited a school for a day, “I’m done.” Reynolds would say, “Go back.” At first, Brooks grew annoyed, but once he learned to stop resisting the extra work, he started to enjoy it. He’d since adopted that approach to all of his work.

Critics seemed to like that approach, though
Room 222
was hardly a smash hit with viewers. The duo knew Tinker liked them, but they had no idea yet what to expect of their star. They also weren’t sure how
much she wanted to risk on her comeback show. For their part, however, they wanted this series to be a step forward from
Room 222,
to be even better and bolder than their first risky enterprise together was. They could only hope Moore and Tinker gave them that chance.

Moore’s character, they now told their new bosses, should be divorced and starting a new life. Her name would be Mary Richards, a smart, nice girl from Roseburg, Minnesota—and she would be unapologetic about her age, about being single, and about her independence. Popular culture was changing: Woodstock had rocked the music world earlier that year. The Beatles had given their last concert together. Brooks and Burns wanted to make a show that could finally pull television into modern times, they explained to the couple.

The idea went over better than they dared hope.

Moore herself had gotten divorced, eight years earlier, from the man she’d married straight out of high school, Richard Meeker. She could relate to the character they were now proposing, a woman who had chosen the wrong man when she was too young to know better and was now starting over. Their idea also seemed like a fresh concept for television, she told them, with lots of story possibilities. That the character was a single woman, and thirty, felt new for the lead of a sitcom.

Brooks and Burns’s pitch also called for Moore’s character to be an assistant to a prickly gossip columnist modeled after the
Los Angeles Times
’ Joyce Haber. Moore and Tinker went for the whole thing. “I hired you because you did stuff that seemed to be in the real world,” Tinker told the producers. “And that’s what I want this to be.”

What Grant Tinker wanted and what CBS executives wanted, however, was not necessarily the same.

Next Brooks and Burns had to present their Moore-approved premise to CBS’s Los Angeles–based vice president, Perry Lafferty. If he liked it, they’d head to New York for what would be that ultimately disastrous final approval meeting. Over a tense lunch at the network’s Television City headquarters, Lafferty was already anticipating the cold
reception their idea would receive at CBS’s East Coast headquarters. This was, after all, the network of
I Love Lucy
. “Divorced?” he asked. His boyish face went slack and pale with disbelief as commissary knives and forks clanged against commissary plates. “No, you can’t do this. You cannot have Mary Tyler Moore divorced. People hate divorce and there’s no way that anybody is going to accept her that way.”

Lafferty was known for being slick and modern himself—his meticulously side-parted hair, dark-framed glasses, and tailored suits made him look like a handsome, serious version of a
Get Smart
agent. But he’d risen through the ranks at CBS on a straightforward philosophy: Series concepts should be as simple as a paper clip, “
a bit of wire adroitly twisted into useful form,” but capable of infinite variations, like a great piece of classical music. More practically speaking, scrapped series pilots cost the network up to $750,000 each year. Lafferty didn’t like missteps.

On the other hand, critics were grumbling about CBS’s successful, but wildly out-of-touch, lineup of silly, backwoods-set shows:
Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction
. “
A stirring up of the schedule, particularly with some contemporary material among all that rural corn pone, would be good for television,”
Los Angeles Times
columnist Cecil Smith had written of the network’s current offerings. Lafferty wanted to take a few creative chances with some new shows—but big gambles were better off made in summer programming, not in series featuring major stars, with major commitments, and major fall launches. He was currently considering seventeen possible new shows for the fall, but he had only four open spots on his schedule. One of those
had
to go to Moore, so Lafferty preferred her series concept be ironclad.

But it was hard to tell anymore what was ironclad in the TV business. The medium had tentatively pushed boundaries in the past year, though not in a very artful way. The sketch comedy series
Turn-On
turned into a notorious flop, airing just once in February 1969 on ABC with gratuitous bits that expected audiences to guffaw over uses
of the word
titular
and a pregnant woman singing “I Got Rhythm” as a reference to (lack of) birth control. NBC’s . . .
Then Came Bronson
tried to be
Easy Rider
for TV but came off as a toothless wannabe starring one of many Steve McQueen lookalikes who populated the airwaves that season.

Overall, though, networks continued to offer either the same old predictable standards or fluff for prime-time, scripted programming in 1969:
The Brady Bunch,
that happy, blended television family resplendent in trivial problems and loads of double-knit polyester, premiered;
My Three Sons
and
Bewitched
remained staples. The formula for success espoused by former CBS president Jim Aubrey—“
broads, bosoms, and fun,” a nonstop beach party—had yet to leave the airwaves completely even though times had changed since the early ’60s, when he’d given the green light to
Hillbillies,
Gilligan’s Island,
and the like. Aubrey had great success with that programming throughout the decade, even though he had great contempt for his audience: “
The American public,” he once said, “is something I fly over.”

Television’s untapped power grew more evident through its role in real events: The
moon landing was viewed by 720 million people around the world; Senator Edward Kennedy addressed the fatal car crash on Chappaquiddick before a national audience; film director Roman Polanski discussed the brutal murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by followers of Charles Manson. All these real events kept viewers riveted, and had them talking for days about what they’d seen on television.

It seemed like TV had the power to effect genuine change, to push culture forward instead of holding it back. Producers like Brooks and Burns were trying to move the medium in that direction—the trick was to do so without scaring network executives and alienating advertisers. Joining them in their crusade was film director Norman Lear, who wrote and produced the Dick Van Dyke movies
Divorce American Style
and
Cold Turkey
. He had been struggling to get his progressive sitcom about a blue-collar family with political differences onto the
air. Based on the British series
’Till Death Do Us Part,
which featured a working-class Tory battling with his socialist son-in-law, the U.S. version had gone through
two failed pilot episodes at ABC, but Lear, who felt that no one was depicting American life candidly on television, was determined to make it work. Comedy writer Garry Marshall had a pet project, too: bringing a TV version of Neil Simon’s acclaimed Broadway play and film
The Odd Couple
to life. They all hinted at TV’s potential to turn toward the smarter.

Now, however, Brooks and Burns tried to reason with Lafferty on a more basic level. They just wanted him to consider the divorce idea for the moment; changing television history could come later. “Look, everybody, including all the executives at CBS, has been divorced,” they told him. “It’s not this terrible stigma. It’s not like divorced people are lepers. Why are you so afraid of it?”

Lafferty started to warm to the idea, even though it still made him nervous. “Listen,” he said, “what you’re saying makes sense. But we have to go and pitch it to Mike Dann in New York.”

That, of course, didn’t turn out so well.

After the New York meeting, Arthur Price called Grant Tinker to tell him what the CBS executives had said about Brooks and Burns. Tinker wasn’t interested. Firing Brooks and Burns was out of the question as far as he was concerned. He knew he still had leverage—he had Moore, with whom the network wanted to be in business. Moore and Tinker were willing to reconsider the divorce angle if their producers were, but the producers themselves would stay.

Dann just wanted to protect Moore’s persona. He’d done battle for years with Reiner over
The Dick Van Dyke Show
upholding Standards & Practices edicts: Yes, the Petries would need to sleep in separate beds, with nightstands between them. If Lucy and Desi had to do it, so did Rob and Laura. Dann’s standards hadn’t changed much since then. He worried that Moore’s loyal fans would react badly to her being a divorcée, a status he thought implied a woman of lesser morals.
“I think you could classify me as a prude at that point,” he explains. “I was worried about keeping a perfect image of her.” He wanted to maintain leverage for the network as well: “You’re negotiating with [producers] for a major commitment of a couple million dollars,” Dann says. “You never are
too
enthusiastic [about their show] when you’re dealing with them. As a consequence, the creative people think they know everything, but they don’t. While my career depends upon them, at the time they make the deal, they’re the opposition.”

And in this case, the opposition—Moore and Tinker—wouldn’t back down. “They knew exactly what they wanted to do and they were going to do it,” says Fred Silverman (no relation to Treva), who at the time worked under Dann as the network’s vice president of development. “After that the network threw its hands up.” The couple proved a formidable team, Dann recalls: “Grant played a strong role in getting Mary what she wanted. Mary was lady-like and could cook dinner for you, but she was firm about protecting her career.”

Jim Brooks and Allan Burns got on a plane back to Los Angeles together after their New York meeting, exhausted and dejected. The five-hour flight felt twice as long, Burns recalls, as they relived the horrible feeling of a room full of network executives who seemed to hate them. Soaring over the patchwork quilt of midwestern states, they discussed quitting the Moore project, knowing they could always go running back to
Room 222
. That show was struggling in the ratings, but it was still getting solid critical notice and had a shot at some Emmy nominations. “And I’ve got my movie career,” Burns reasoned, trying to see the bright side. Why not make everyone’s lives easier, they thought, and back out now? They figured that if they did stick around, Dann would just make their lives miserable.

But after they got home, they reconvened in their shared temporary office at CBS Studio Center and thought better of their decision. The news of their quitting would come out in
Variety,
they figured, and it would seem like they didn’t get along with Moore and Tinker. It
would look bad for everyone involved. So they decided that since they still had Moore’s and Tinker’s backing, they would brainstorm a new concept for the show to address some of the network’s concerns while still making a series that felt contemporary for 1970
and
worthy of Moore’s big comeback.

They thought about Moore’s strongest qualities, about what she was best at. There was no reason she had to be in a typical domestic sitcom as a wife to use the traits that made Laura Petrie a sensation—just the right balance of sexy and innocent, sweet and tough, independent and vulnerable. After a week, they came up with a compromise of sorts: Mary would still be single. And, yes, still thirty. But she wouldn’t be going through a divorce; she would simply be recovering from a big breakup.