Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (42 page)

Nicholson, in turn, was impressed with Brooks’s TV-honed ability to figure out right away what was wrong with a scene. “Jim has got that brutal ‘Does it work?’ very firmly implanted in his mind,” Nicholson said at the time. “Even if your mother’s dying and this is your favorite line, you still ask, ‘Does it work?’ ” Brooks knew from his long days at
Mary Tyler Moore
in front of a studio audience what would work, what would get a laugh, and what would get a cheap laugh. He excised cheap laughs on the spot.

When the movie finally hit theaters, MacLaine, Nicholson, and
Winger made audiences weep as well as laugh (like ha-ha, especially Nicholson). In the early months of 1984, Los Angeles Film Critics plaques—for best picture, best direction, and best screenplay—piled up on the extra bed in Brooks’s office on the Paramount lot. Then the film garnered more Oscar nominations than any other that year, eleven. On the big night, it netted five Oscars, three of which went to Brooks himself: Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, beating out
The Right Stuff
and
The Big Chill
among others. In the director category, Brooks beat out Ingmar Bergman, a fact that particularly impressed his old pal Allan Burns.

Even as his life reached this glamorous peak, however, Brooks missed television and didn’t rule out returning to the medium where he’d begun his career. In fact, one fleeting moment with his cast from
Terms of Endearment,
during its onslaught of awards, made him miss his
Mary Tyler Moore
family even more.
After the New York Film Critics dinner, where the movie had racked up a few more statues, he headed to a crewmember’s nearby apartment with Nicholson and MacLaine. Winger hadn’t been able to make it, so she called to check in with her costars. When Brooks looked around the room during the phone call, he got choked up: He felt the same camaraderie he’d experienced working late nights on television, but it shimmered and then disappeared before he could take it all in.

He missed the protective bubble he’d lived in back in the
Mary Tyler Moore
days, where he didn’t have to obsess over budgets and ticket sales. He found himself constantly dividing the box office take of
Terms of Endearment
by the average $3.20 movie ticket to figure out how many people had seen his film. He didn’t like that kind of pressure to perform.

And yet four years later, he found himself writing and directing another Oscar-caliber movie,
Broadcast News,
starring William Hurt, Albert Brooks, and Holly Hunter. Some critics loved its commentary on news-as-entertainment culture, while others thought it was nothing more than a long, slightly updated version of a
Mary Tyler Moore Show
script. It did touch on similar themes, with a twist, namely the timely question of whether working women could “have it all”—a great career and love life and children. It was a theme that would recur in both Brooks’s and Burns’s post–
Mary Tyler Moore
work.

Brooks invited Burns to an early screening of the film on the studio lot, and Burns thought it was terrific. It felt like watching
Room 222
for the first time all over again. Allan and his wife, Joan, headed to their car afterward and were talking about how much they’d liked it when a woman Allan knew, a fellow writer, caught up with them. “That must kill you,” the writer said.

Burns was taken aback. “That’s kind of insulting,” he said. “Why would I be angry or upset at the fact that he’s written a great film? I’m feeling good about it, and you’re telling me I should feel bad?” It was an insinuation that would follow him through Hollywood for the rest of his life.

But Burns was still thrilled when
Broadcast News
was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Screenplay and Best Picture. In all, Brooks would direct nine different actors in Oscar-nominated performances as his career stretched on. He went on to produce several films as well, including
Big
and
Say Anything . . . ,
and TV’s
The Tracey Ullman Show,
which led to the massive pop cultural force of
The Simpsons
.

Brooks’s success didn’t surprise his former producing and writing partner one bit. Burns had seen Brooks’s talent close up. Occasionally, Burns wished he were still writing with Brooks, though he also knew they likely wouldn’t have written screenplays together. It had been the time for them to part professional ways when they did. He felt wistful sometimes, but he wouldn’t say he was envious of Brooks’s success. He was, in fact, happy for his old friend.

Around the same time, however, Brooks ran into personal troubles: He
split with his partner of twenty-seven years, Holly Holmberg Brooks—the flight attendant he’d met while filming
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. The two endured a nasty-at-times breakup made public by Holmberg Brooks’s $100 million lawsuit against the producer.
Holmberg, fifteen years his junior, accused him of not giving her half of their “cohabitation property” from that time, as he’d promised. “As an older man and professional writer,” the suit said, “James was powerfully persuasive and exploited plaintiff’s relative youth and lack of business and financial experience.” They never legally married, but they’d lived as spouses, with Holly even going so far as to take his last name. The two had a son and a daughter, along with Brooks’s daughter from his first marriage.

Holmberg Brooks went on to make a career for herself in Hollywood, founding a production company. She’d honed her skills writing for Brooks on
Taxi
. The couple eventually resolved their differences and were friendly again by 2010, when she attended the premiere of his romantic comedy
How Do You Know
.

As Allan Burns’s once jet-black hair turned to gray and then to white, he found his initial luck in Hollywood fading away. He did a few projects, in both movies and television, but nothing as successful as Brooks’s works of the same era. Many of Burns’s TV endeavors lasted for a year or so, nothing more.

His 1989 sitcom on NBC,
FM,
followed an unlucky-in-love radio programming director played by Robert Hays. Though it was produced by MTM, the company didn’t have the clout it used to. NBC decided not to pick the show up, and there was little MTM could do about it. Burns appealed to NBC president Brandon Tartikoff, who’d just taken over the job from onetime
Mary Tyler Moore
booster Fred Silverman. Burns recalls Tartikoff telling him, “I like it. I just don’t need it right now. I’ve got
Cheers
and I’ve got
Cosby
.”

After fifteen episodes on the air,
FM
found itself competing for a slot on the schedule with another struggling sitcom,
Seinfeld
. The ratings numbers were about equal, but NBC decided to gamble on a guy named Jerry Seinfeld instead of Bob Hays.

It was hard, afterward, for Burns to hold it against NBC, when
Seinfeld
eventually built to number one in the Nielsen ratings and became
one of the ’90s’ most influential shows, redefining the sitcom as much as
Mary Tyler Moore
had.

Things had not gone like Burns had thought they would after his Oscar nomination for
A Little Romance
back in 1979. Weren’t Oscar nominations supposed to get you somewhere? Instead, pursuing a film-writing career grew harder and harder. By the time he was in his sixties and seventies, he still had plenty of ideas, but movie and television studios are notorious for wanting only young talent, even behind the camera. In 2010, many of the
Mary Tyler Moore
writers and producers, now in their sixties and seventies, got a cut of a $70 million settlement the Writers Guild of America struck with major TV networks, movie studios, and talent agencies after filing an age discrimination lawsuit.

They all had their own stories about being iced out of jobs because of their advancing years, and Burns had his. Just a few years before the suit, he had gotten a meeting with some junior studio executives on a script he’d written. But when he walked into the room, he could see the faces of the two twenty-something women drop at the sight of his gray hair and wrinkles. Nonetheless, they told him they loved his movie—it was so castable!

“Your name sounds familiar,” one of them said. “What else have you done?”

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,”
he told them.

“Oh my God,” one of them said. “
That
Allan Burns.”

His answer had clearly garnered him great respect, but he felt he could also see them do the math before their eyes: That made him
how old
? Despite the graying and the wrinkles, he was well preserved, with thick hair and twinkling eyes. The script was never made. He has since taken comfort in the fact that he was once part of such a remarkable show—and the fact that he still lives in that beautiful house that he bought at the height of
Mary Tyler Moore,
with his wife of almost five decades, Joan. Nearly every flat surface of their home is crammed with photos of their two sons and five grandchildren.

No matter what came afterward for its creators and writers,
The
Mary Tyler Moore Show
remains one of the most acclaimed TV shows ever, with twenty-nine total Emmys. It also remains the best job any of its writers and producers have ever had, no matter their subsequent successes or failures. “Every year we’d be nominated, and we’d either win or we wouldn’t,” Brooks recalls. “But we’d have a party that was good whether we did or didn’t.”

(1977–present)

In the summer of 1986, Ted Knight was sick enough that word spread to his old friends from
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
: He had cancer, and his treatments were not going well.

When Gavin MacLeod heard how badly things were going for his old costar, he and his wife, Patti, went to Knight’s house to visit him. The show MacLeod had been starring in,
The Love Boat,
had just ended its nine-year run, and he had recently reconciled with his wife, whom Ted knew and loved from the
Mary Tyler Moore
years. Patti was about to go on the road with a play, and Gavin would be accompanying her for the summer. They worried it would be their last chance to see Knight, who lived just a few blocks away from them in the exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. The men had stayed in touch over the years, both serving as honorary “mayors” of the neighborhood. Knight had become well loved in the role, going to a local restaurant and setting up a sign that said, “The Mayor Is In”
while receiving concerned citizens, neighbors, and, of course, the fans who always bolstered his confidence.

Knight was now living in the sprawling house he’d always wanted, with the wife he’d long loved. When Gavin and Patti MacLeod arrived, Knight’s wife, Dottie, answered the door and admitted things weren’t looking good for her husband. Knight called from his bed on the second floor for them to come on up.

They found him in his bedroom, his cane propped next to him, self-help books surrounding him. They hugged him. “Look at you two,” Gavin remembers Knight saying. “You’re back together!” Seeing Knight in such a state, Gavin couldn’t help thinking about his own father, who died of cancer when he was thirty-eight, but he tried to keep his emotions in check and focus on his friend. “What’s going on?” Knight continued. “What caused you to get back together? You seem so happy.”

Gavin was nervous about revealing the truth of their reconciliation: They’d recently found religion together. “Don’t get scared,” Gavin joked, “but we became born-again Christians.”

The three discussed spirituality, and its particular pull as death approached. Knight told them he’d been reading all of the books surrounding him in hopes of finding some guidance, which emboldened Gavin to tell him, “You can have the peace of knowing where to go.”

Dottie came in, and the four of them held hands and prayed. Gavin let his tears come.

Afterward, Knight quipped, “I don’t feel any different!” But it was enough for Gavin. “You will,” he promised as he helped his old friend to the bathroom.

Later, Patti and Gavin supported Ted down the stairs so he could show them his prized possession: his pool. “I’ve always wanted to have a black-bottom pool,” Knight said, as proud as he’d ever been.

Weeks later, Ed Asner came by Knight’s house for a visit as well. The two hadn’t spoken in five years, since Asner’s spin-off,
Lou Grant,
had been canceled. The show had ended in part because Asner had
publicly supported medical aid for communist-leaning rebel troops in El Salvador, and Knight, when asked about it in interviews promoting his own new show,
Too Close for Comfort,
had failed to defend his friend. (Asner can’t remember what specifically Knight said or didn’t say that upset him, but he remembers that whatever it was, it was an “outrageous” breach of their friendship.) Asner refused to have anything more to do with Knight, until he heard Knight was dying.