Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (32 page)

If it saved her sanity, if it inspired her, she thought, maybe she could.

She remembered an illuminating moment from a brief vacation she’d taken to Athens the year before. A taxi driver had offered to show her the sights. She told him she couldn’t afford that, but he said, “I’ll do it as a friend.” She trusted the older, kindly gentleman. As she waited for him to pick her up the next day among the Greek parliament
buildings, an elderly, English-speaking couple asked her if she was lost, and she explained that she was waiting for this cabdriver.

“I’m a little concerned,” the man said. “You don’t know this person.”

“Honey, let her be,” the woman countered. “You’re only young and pretty once!” It struck Silverman then: She
would be
young and pretty only once. She had to spend that time doing more than hanging out in the MTM offices, eating pot brownies and writing scripts. She went home to America and made a list of things she wanted to do before she died, and living in Europe was number one.

She had accomplished one part of her Emmy-speech fantasy scene: the part where she wins an Emmy. She’d done that twice, and yet the other part—going to Europe with the dream guy—had yet to materialize. Figuring she’d be hard-pressed to will a dream guy to appear, she decided to make the other part true. She would catch the next plane to a new life in Europe.

In June 1974, she left the show. It now rested in good hands with Brooks and Burns getting help from Weinberger and his writing partner, Stan Daniels. It had amassed a deep well of regular writers, too, like the prolific David Lloyd. With a clear conscience and a sense of freedom, Silverman booked passage on the SS
France
and headed for Paris, the city where many expat writers had gone before. The day she left, a dozen friends came to see her off at the dock, smiling and waving. As the gangplank was pulled up, the last voice she heard was her father’s, calling out to her, “Don’t talk to any strangers.”

By the time President Richard Nixon resigned in a live television broadcast in August, she was renting “the world’s most incredible apartment” in Paris’s artistic Sixth Arrondissement. Solms, knowing how involved she was in politics, sent her some taped clips of Nixon flashing a “victory” sign at the cameras as he boarded the helicopter that would take him home to California after his resignation. She and some American friends in Paris watched them and howled. She took French classes and forgot all about deadlines and agents and Emmys.

She only briefly dipped back into her American life a year later when
Ladies’ Home Journal
honored her and fellow MTM writer Charlotte Brown in a televised “Woman of the Year” celebration along with the likes of Lady Bird Johnson and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. The magazine sent her first-class airfare and put her up in a New York hotel to attend the ceremony. While she was there, producer Lorne Michaels told her he was launching a show called
Saturday Night Live
and he wanted to hire her for his writing staff. But she didn’t want to get sucked back in. She told him: No, thanks. Then she flew back to her new European life. She was living the dream. She was more than five thousand miles away from Los Angeles when the Screen Actors Guild elected its first female president, Kathleen Nolan.

Brooks and Burns, meanwhile, prepared to lose Harper and Leachman as well, to their own spin-offs. Like Treva, the actresses had grown restless to try new ventures.

“I really miss Phyllis. Of course, I never knew her very well. Maybe that helps.”

—Georgette Franklin

(1974)

Back in the first season of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Fred Silverman—the owlish executive heading CBS’s programming—visited a Friday night taping and asked to see Valerie Harper afterward. She thought she was getting fired. “That was a great show tonight,” he told the actress. “What would you think if we spun you off?”

For a second, she still believed she was getting fired. “Spinning off” sounded like a bad thing. At the time, in 1970, spin-offs weren’t all that common in television. She considered it a few more seconds before responding. “Oh,
spun me off
! Like my own show?” she said in the familiar, exuberant cadence of Rhoda Morgenstern. Silverman nodded. But Harper still had her doubts. “I think it’s a little soon,” she concluded.

The prospect scared her. Being on
this
show still scared her. First, she talked to her husband about it, and he encouraged her to consider the idea. It would give her a chance to play Rhoda’s life on her own
terms instead of just relating to Mary, he said. She wouldn’t have to worry about blocking Mary’s shot; the shot would be hers.

Harper also confided in Mary Tyler Moore about the idea. Moore’s heart sank at the prospect of losing her friend as her costar, but she put aside her own feelings and told Harper it seemed like a natural progression. “Do you want to be my sidekick all your life?” Moore asked her.

“What if it bombs?” Harper replied. She and her character shared the same self-confidence, or lack thereof.

“Then you move back to Minneapolis!” Moore said, painting on a smile.

That helped. When Harper’s fan mail continued to increase, talks about a Rhoda show grew more serious. Three years into
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
Harper felt better about it, even though she was still nervous. She went to her on-screen mother, Nancy Walker, a showbiz veteran, for advice. “Stop obsessing, Val,” Walker said. “It’s a job. Take it.”

Harper agreed to do it, and the producers went to work figuring out what the concept behind Rhoda’s show would be.

The “spin-off”
had existed since at least 1941, when the character Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, from the radio comedy show
Fibber McGee and Molly,
got his own show,
The Great Gildersleeve
. Television, however, was only just beginning back then and there was no need to recycle characters. Now, in the early ’70s (and a few years after Silverman first mentioned the idea to Harper), the spin-off was booming thanks to the character-driven comedies of MTM and Lear, which produced intriguing roles faster than they could get their own shows.
All in the Family
alone would eventually beget
Maude, The Jeffersons,
and
Good Times
.

The
Mary Tyler Moore
producers resisted the idea of spinning Rhoda off this early, even now as the show’s fourth season approached. They were interested more in quality than a spike in ad revenue. Fred Silverman assured them, “I think she’s so strong a character that she should have her own show.” Brooks and Burns didn’t want to fight the
network president who’d been their savior, nor did they want to risk losing the in-demand Harper to another production company or network. That would be worse than spinning her off prematurely.

The problem: Rhoda was hardly your typical main character on television. Though Harper was a striking beauty, she had a good ten-to fifteen-pound advantage over most of her contemporaries. She had the kind of hips you didn’t always see on actresses, and she had a self-deprecating way of putting on another ten pounds just by joking about her own weight. The fact was, Harper loved to be perceived as “dumpy and frumpy.” She enjoyed having the distinctive job of lobbing all the zinger lines without having to worry about how she looked.

She also delighted in her character’s attitude, her outsider status as a witty Jewish girl from the East Coast. Harper realized early on that the only way Rhoda could hold her own with the too-perfect-to-be-true Mary was with her New York confidence:
I’m gonna straighten this shiksa out
. She asked Brooks and Burns, “Can I call her ‘kid’?” They loved the idea and used it from then on.

Rhoda always had a joke to hide her insecurity. Rhoda to Phyllis on what single people do to have fun: “Same as you—sit around and wonder what it would be like to have a happy marriage.” Rhoda on accidentally using Mary’s makeup mirror: “Mary, why didn’t you warn me? I thought it was a relief map of the moon. When they sell those magnifying mirrors they should include a printed suicide note.” Rhoda on candy: “I don’t know why I’m putting this in my mouth. I should just apply it directly to my hips.” (That oft-quoted line was an off-the-cuff addition from writer Treva Silverman, directly from Harper’s own mouth, during a run-through.) On Mary’s assertion that chocolate doesn’t solve anything: “No, Mare, cottage cheese solves nothing; chocolate can do it all!”

Rhoda’s accent had its own odyssey. Harper was born in Suffern, New York, and after moving around the country as a child had spent her share of time in New York City, performing in theaters. But she was neither from the Bronx nor Jewish, like Rhoda was supposed to
be—Harper’s parents were Catholics of French and English ancestry. She picked up the accent itself quickly, thanks to her Bronx-raised stepmother and some Jewish friends back in New York, but she constantly pushed her Jewishness further than the producers wanted. Brooks’s own Jewish heritage gave him the final authority on such matters, and he didn’t want to overwhelm viewers with her ethnicity. Harper was always asking: Could she say “schlep”? “Shiksa”? “Schmuck”? No, no, and no, Brooks answered. The revelation of Rhoda’s Jewishness to the network executives—in the first-season script featuring her mother, Ida—had come just months after the “audiences don’t like mustaches, divorce, and Jews” speech from the CBS brass. Brooks didn’t want to back down from the network, but he didn’t want to go too far just to incite them, either.

By the fourth season of
Mary Tyler Moore,
in 1973–74, Rhoda had settled into everything unique about her character—her Jewish background, her New York street smarts, her body, her wardrobe. Harper even
used the hiatus between
Mary Tyler Moore
and
Rhoda,
the summer of 1974, to play another Jewish woman, returning to New York to play a character named Sally Kramer in a Broadway domestic drama,
Thieves.
She enjoyed the change of pace that returning to the stage allowed her—and the easy entrée to Broadway that her stardom now afforded her—but as
Rhoda
prepped to premiere in the fall, Harper had anxiety dreams. In one, her three favorite actresses—Anna Magnani, Anne Bancroft, and Maureen Stapleton—invited her to appear with them in a play, but she stood onstage confused, mute, and scriptless while they performed perfectly.

Harper worried about the more practical changes that having her own show brought to her life as well; after years of handling her household tasks herself, she was forced to hire help with the shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Mimi Kirk, Rhoda’s fashion muse, came with Harper to the new show as her assistant, jewelry-maker, headscarf-tier, and lunch-maker. She called Kirk “
a friend, an alter ego whose taste I rely on in decisions I don’t have time to make.” Harper could afford
the help—she was now
making twenty-five thousand dollars a week, plus a cut of the show—but it felt unnatural to her. She still drove a 1968 Pontiac Firebird with two dented fenders, and
hated talking or thinking about money. She did spend on travel and clothes, but the rest went to housekeeping—she believed strongly in paying well and giving raises.

More than anything, she loved sharing her newfound wealth. She bought her mother her first pair of real gold earrings, pledged five thousand dollars to the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and donated to the United Farm Workers. Schaal had supported her in the beginning of her acting career when she was making almost nothing, and she was thrilled to finally be able to reciprocate. “Now that I’m making more money than he is, even if we split up, half of everything should be his,” she told
Ms
. “Friends advised me to get a sugar bowl, stash away money, keep everything for myself. It’s interesting what money brings out in people: If a woman has
no
money, she’s supposed to get a husband; if she has a lot, she’s supposed to keep it from her husband.”

Her darling
Mary Tyler Moore
costars
sent her a gift to cheer her up, and cheer her on: a photo of them all with exaggerated sad faces, except for a laughing Ted, with the caption, “We Miss You.”

As work began on
Rhoda,
Brooks and Burns refined its concept: Per Fred Silverman’s wishes, Rhoda would meet the man of her dreams, at last, and get married, making the show about the travails of a modern marriage. The producers decided Rhoda would move back to New York City (which, of course, would be re-created on a soundstage a few doors down from
Mary Tyler Moore
in Los Angeles) after meeting said man on a two-week visit to the East Coast. They also settled on featuring Rhoda’s parents as regular cast members—already played by Nancy Walker and Harold Gould on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—and giving her a sad-sack younger sister, Brenda. For that role, the producers found a nasal-voiced treasure in theater actress Julie Kavner (later
to voice Marge on the Brooks-produced
The Simpsons
). Bob Moore, who’d played Phyllis’s gay brother on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
would serve as
Rhoda
’s regular director. He set a tone for working on the show: It would be fun and laid-back, just like its leading lady.