Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (8 page)

They also took the opportunity to rethink the idea of putting her at the mercy of a bitchy boss in a Los Angeles newspaper office. They had never loved that concept to begin with, so they felt lucky to replace it. Now Mary would live in the city—Minneapolis, they decided, to get away from overplayed Los Angeles and New York. Minneapolis’s bad weather could provide plot points and visual interest. Mainly, snow. And lots of coats. It would also allow for a bit of character illumination. What seemed like a big city to Mary would be a small town to her New York transplant best friend, Rhoda.

Mary would work in a local TV newsroom based on Brooks’s experiences at CBS News in New York. A newsroom would lend a sense of everyday reality to the series, as well as provide conflict—it would be a loser station constantly struggling with ratings. For research, Brooks and Burns spent time at the local Los Angeles news affiliate, KNXT, where CBS president Robert D. Wood had once worked, and where Moore’s aunt, Alberta Hackett, also used to work. The station’s anchor, Jerry Dunphy, known for his authoritative voice, became the model for the vacuous character of Ted Baxter. Brooks and Burns saw producers with bottles of liquor in their desks and thought,
Our producer character must do that.

To make sure Moore was surrounded by a strong ensemble cast, they created two separate worlds for Mary, her workplace and her home life—a similar model to
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
but this time, with a single woman at its center. To populate these worlds, the writers dreamed up the kind of strong characters they were known for: an overbearing, semi-alcoholic newsroom boss; a kindly newswriter; that Dunphy-like newscaster; a perfectionist neighbor; and that tough best friend.

The friend was to be a particularly important part of the cast. Brooks and Burns based Rhoda Morgenstern on a friend of Brooks’s sister named Rose Goldman. Rhoda got her last name from the title character of the Herman Wouk novel and subsequent film
Marjorie Morningstar,
about a Jewish girl who changes her name to become an artist. But Goldman provided Rhoda’s generous heart and soul. Brooks had met Goldman when he was newly married and looking for an affordable apartment in New York. Goldman did the impossible by finding him one. Her secret: bribing the doormen of a rent-controlled apartment with the promise of brides.
That
was Rhoda.

Mary would need help from a friend like that. She’d be starting over after a major breakup with a longtime boyfriend who refused to propose, even after she’d supported him through medical school. The script would imply that she had possibly lived with him, though it would never make it clear. Given that she was thirty and had been “supporting” him, audiences could surmise the obvious. CBS, in turning down divorce, had settled for living in sin.

Brooks liked the idea of a character who was “an independent single woman, who had spent her life wanting to be a dependent married woman up until that point.” That premise struck him as rife with fresh comedic possibilities and dramatic conflicts alike. Brooks and Burns’s original twenty-one-page proposal for the show summed up her character: “Mary is open and nice. That’s why she’s in trouble. It’s also why she’s still single. If she had been less open she could’ve maneuvered that doctor into marrying her. In the world of the seventies, openness
is for national parks; niceness is for Betty White, who can turn a buck with it; and trust is something the President asks for and doesn’t get. Lest you be left with the picture of Mary with warm apple pies cooling on her windowsill, singing duets with her pet squirrel, that’s not our girl. It’s just that she seems especially wholesome when contrasted with those around her. (We’ll let you in on a secret that’s for our eyes only. Mary is not a virgin. This becomes a very wholesome quality when you realize that Rhoda is not a virgin many times over.) . . .

“This series will, as we hope you have noted, be comedically populated. But it is clearly about one person living in and coping with the world of the 1970s . . . tough enough in itself . . . even tougher when you’re 30, single, and female . . . when, despite the fact that you’re the antithesis of the career woman, you find yourself the only female in an all-male newsroom.”

This described the fate of more than a few real women at the time, but it was a scenario that had never been depicted on television. When Moore read it, she told the producers she loved it enough to take the risks involved. “This is what I wanted to do,” they recall her saying. “I would have loved to have been divorced. But this is great.”

(1970)

James L. Brooks and Allan Burns were still toiling over their pilot script for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
during the spring before the series was to air. On another day of not quite finishing, they got a call at their office. It was Moore’s manager, Arthur Price. He asked, not just out of curiosity, “Do you have any ideas on the theme?” Since Brooks and Burns were still recovering from their battle with the network and coming up with their living-in-sin compromise, they’d had time to write only a brief outline of the show’s pilot. They were still concentrating on Mary’s words—and the occasional foosball game—not her song.

But Price was always looking for opportunities for his music business clients. It just so happened that he’d passed the series outline on to one of them, a singer-songwriter named Sonny Curtis. The thirty-three-year-old southern “shitkicker kind of a guy,” as Burns describes him, had been born in a dugout—a hole in the ground with a roof
over it, his family’s makeshift house—in Meadow, Texas. He had played with Buddy Holly back home, where the only way boys like them could get themselves out of their fleck of a town was to play some good country-and-western on the guitar. Curtis had found his way to fame when he
met Holly in the ’50s at a local radio station’s “Sunday Party” open mic in Lubbock, Texas. Curtis, a good-looking bluegrass singer with a smooth voice, had driven thirty miles to pick for whoever would listen. He could also fiddle a hoedown like nobody’s business. Buddy took notice, and soon the two were swapping R&B records, drinking beer, chasing girls, and occasionally playing actual music together.

Because of this close friendship, Curtis later went on to play in Holly’s band, the Crickets, when the band members continued on after Holly’s death in 1959. Curtis also became a successful songwriter, whose hits included the much-covered rock anthem “I Fought the Law.” Now he lived in Los Angeles, and he was looking for work.

Curtis, who’d been spending most of his time writing jingles, had gotten a call from his agent that day, at around eleven in the morning, telling him about the new sitcom in the works for Mary Tyler Moore. Someone from the agency dropped off a four-page outline for the show at his house, which proved to be just enough detail. He didn’t want too much information to “muddy the waters,” as he says, of his creativity. First he thought of the gentle cascading notes of the guitar lick that would become the opening of the song. Then he contemplated what he knew about the show: It was to follow a young woman from the Midwest moving to the big city—which, to her, was Minneapolis—and renting an apartment almost beyond her means. The first lyrics began to flow: “How will you make it on your own? This world is awfully big, and girl, this time you’re all alone.”

By 2 p.m., he called his agent and said, “Who do I sing this to?”

Then Price called Burns, who remembers him saying, “There’s this guy who used to be with Buddy Holly. He’s a songwriter and he plays guitar. He’s written something I think is pretty good.”

“That’s kind of putting the cart before the horse, but okay,” Burns said.

At 4 p.m., Curtis sat in an iron chair in the middle of Brooks and Burns’s temporary office at CBS’s Studio Center, cradling his guitar, ready to make a buck or two on his new song. He laid a sheet of paper on top of his guitar case and sang the freshly written lyrics. Brooks and Burns looked at each other with mutual disbelief: Could it be this easy? How did a Texas farm boy understand their show about a modern midwestern woman so well when they still couldn’t seem to complete their script? This song would speak directly to the young women starting to enter the workforce in larger numbers.

Brooks got on the phone. The room filled with MTM staffers. He asked someone to bring him a cassette recorder; once it appeared, Curtis sang the song again.

Next Curtis found himself at Price’s office meeting with lawyers and the producers. They told him they wanted the song but would hire someone else to sing it. “You can’t have it then,” Curtis said. “If you’re gonna get someone that’s not-known to sing it, that not-known person has to be me.” They revealed that they were considering crooner Andy Williams for the job, who was, as Curtis says, “hotter than soap at the time,” and one of Price’s clients. Curtis’s only capitulation: “If you can get him,” he said, “you can have it. But otherwise it has to be me.”

Andy Williams declined the gig, so the songwriter got to sing his song, turning his gritty twang into a creamy city-boy baritone. Now Brooks and Burns had to write a character who lived up to every word of Curtis’s hopeful and hopelessly catchy tune, “Love Is All Around.”

Burns passed the song along to his friend, composer Patrick Williams (no relation to singer Andy)—who’d done music for several TV shows, including
Columbo
—and asked if he could work out some orchestrations to score the show. Curtis went to Williams’s house and played the song yet again on Williams’s tape recorder, then left. Williams began arranging how it would sound in the opening title sequence and for the end credits. Of course, he had no idea how important
the song, or the show, would be at the time. It felt like just another job to him. In fact, he wasn’t hearing good buzz around town about the project. As he says, “It wasn’t like cymbals crashed and you heard a wild C-major chord from an orchestra when the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
pilot was made.”

Still, it needed cue music for however long it stayed on the air, and Williams was happy to do the job.
Mary Tyler Moore,
as Williams saw it, sounded like strings, flutes, clarinets, and flugelhorns, which he considered “a feminine kind of sound. I thought there was a certain vulnerability to the feeling of the show, and that’s what I tried to put into the music.”

At the time, he and most television composers wrote their scores by hand, and for each individual episode. For
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Williams used a twenty-five-piece orchestra, doing about three episodes in a three-hour recording session. He scored every cue as he watched a rough cut of a filmed show, treating it like a mini-movie and working
with
the natural audience laughter. (No laugh tracks allowed.) A fellow composer friend would later call Williams “the undisputed king of the three-second cue.”

Next, the producers recruited thirty-nine-year-old, Iranian-born director Reza Badiyi, who’d done some work on
He & She,
to shoot the opening for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. He was himself an unusual Hollywood story: He’d moved
from Iran to the United States in 1955 after directing documentaries in his native country, and graduated from Syracuse University with a film degree. He eventually befriended director Robert Altman, who hired him as his assistant on his low-budget 1957 debut,
The Delinquents
. Badiyi soon after secured work in the television industry, directing episodes of
Mission: Impossible
and
Mannix
—hardly a natural progression toward
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
but he’d made a name for himself assembling the distinctive credits for the sensations
Hawaii Five-O
and
Get Smart
.

For
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Badiyi conceived a simple-but-sweet
opening sequence, featuring Mary driving her 1969 Mustang from her hometown in the Minnesota suburbs down Route 100 toward Minneapolis, intercut with scenes of her leaving her friends behind to start a new life and frolicking about various parts of town looking glamorously independent. In one cut she wore a fox fur–trimmed jacket (which would disappear from the sequence by the second season, when Moore became an animal rights activist). In another she wore an enviable shearling and suede coat lent by Brooks and Burns’s new secretary, New York transplant Pat Nardo.

Now Badiyi, the producers, and Moore faced their first major decisions on the look of Mary Richards. Their main concern was distinguishing her from Laura Petrie. Moore wanted very much to prove that she could be more than Laura, since her previous efforts to do so in movies and on the stage had fallen flat. She thought long and hard about her former character’s distinctive look, and her own tastes. But in the end, she could think of only one major way to emphasize the new Mary: She would
wear a wig to make sure her hair looked nothing like Laura’s signature bobbed flip. She hoped Brooks and Burns’s script would do the rest of the work to impress her new image upon viewers.