Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (33 page)

But finding the love of Rhoda’s life turned out to be as difficult for the producers as it had been for Rhoda. They had hoped to sign Judd Hirsch, a thirty-nine-year-old actor who’d appeared in a few TV movies and could provide an authentic Bronx-born, Jewish match for Rhoda. But he backed out of contention for the role because of scheduling conflicts, so the producers kept looking for Rhoda’s man.

After seeing nearly 150 actors for the role, they settled on a tall, curly-haired hunk named David Groh, who’d played only a few small TV parts before but looked like he could sweep Rhoda off her feet. He had little comedy experience, but he had a great camera presence, and the pilot was set to shoot soon. So the producers tested their luck—they’d had so much luck with their
Mary Tyler Moore
cast—and hoped some of Harper’s perfect timing and delivery would rub off on Groh. “He was a good actor,” Burns says. “A very good actor. Great looking. Not much comedy. But he worked hard and he tried so hard, David.” Groh also came off a little shy, but he was well liked by his costars. “You know what I liked about him? He was so appreciative,” says Candice Azzara, who played Joe’s secretary. “He was a humble loner.”

Lorenzo Music, the writer-producer who’d been with
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
since the beginning, rounded out the regular cast. He’d come over to
Rhoda
to help write and produce it on a daily basis, but now he’d stumbled upon his first TV acting job. As the producers auditioned voice actors to play the often heard, never seen part of Carlton, Rhoda and Brenda’s drunken doorman, no one quite nailed it the way Music read it. His distinctive drowsy, cracking voice would eventually become famous in the part as the guy always announcing himself on Rhoda’s door buzzer as “Carlton your doorman.”

With rehearsals for her show now under way, Harper often
sneaked back over to her original television home, the
Mary Tyler Moore
set,
three doors down from what was now her own set, just to rub the sofa where she’d sat dozens of times or to smell the Oreos and Lorna Doones kept in Mary’s cookie jar. For some reason, despite Moore’s diabetes and Harper’s weight struggles, the stagehands thought it was a fine idea to use real cookies as props. Moore and Harper, good-natured about almost everything, sniffed but did not snack.

As
Rhoda
progressed, Harper continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with various diets. Her
size fluctuated enough that the wardrobe supervisor would hold up items, asking, “Are you going to attempt to get into these today?” Harper called them “attempt pants” and “attempt suits,” some of which were never worn at all.

Grant Tinker was now worried about spreading his company too thin—it was launching
Rhoda
along with a sitcom starring
Hogan’s Heroes
’ Bob Crane called
Second Start
as well as its first two dramatic series.
Tinker was so uncharacteristically anxious that he had migraines. And he was losing sleep fretting over what the loss of Rhoda, a major ingredient in
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s success, might do to his flagship series. Would the company, and his wife’s show, survive these major moves that he’d approved?

Tinker hadn’t planned to run his own production company. He’d worked as an executive at Fox and Universal, so he figured he’d go back to a network or major studio job after he helped launch
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. But
The Bob Newhart Show
followed in 1972 as MTM’s second production, and, as a witty take on a straightforward concept—a Chicago psychologist tends to his colorful patients and relationship with his smart wife—upheld
Mary Tyler Moore
’s high script standards. “
It would have been very easy to do craziness,” Newhart’s TV wife, Suzanne Pleshette, said in an interview at the time. “But the show is not bizarre. There’s no freaky hook. No one’s mother is a car.” She likely didn’t realize that her production company’s star writers, Jim Brooks and Allan Burns, had written for
My Mother the Car,
and she meant it as a compliment.

Newhart himself, however, knew the company’s pedigree when he signed on for the show after turning down dozens of other pilots that he didn’t think had much potential. “When I got the offer for this show, I knew the quality of the guys working on it,” he said. “And it wasn’t [about] a wife and a dog and three kids.” His show would soon do for psychologists—and their patients—what
Mary Tyler Moore
had done for single women. Newhart was soon receiving letters thanking him for demystifying therapy. And MTM would develop a curious reputation in the TV business: It seemed the place only hired nice people, stars who didn’t act much like stars, casts who all got along, and the best writers around.

In any case, soon Tinker found himself heading a company that bore his wife’s name. Since this seemed to be where fate had placed him, he did his best to make it into the kind of company he’d always dreamed of working for. He didn’t want a factory. They’d only make shows they wanted to make; they wouldn’t chase ratings for the sake of ratings or lower standards just to make network executives happy. Why would he bother having an independent company otherwise? Why not just go back to work for Fox or Universal?

The Rhoda spin-off seemed like a natural. Few secondary characters break out as huge and as fast as she did. Young women who weren’t too busy imitating Mary Richards’s style tried to figure out how to twist and tie headscarves to look like Rhoda. Her zingers, often delivered during the characters’ late-night, post-date girl talk in Mary’s apartment, stuck with fans. A 1974
Time
magazine story declared Moore and Harper “
a neatly balanced show business cartel” for MTM Entertainment. “One is tranquil, the other seems to have been born with sand under her skin,” the article said. “Doublehanded, they are bringing a new sophistication back to television entertainment.” Even better, “Audiences in search of funny girls have learned to forsake the theater for Valerie and Mary on the smaller screen.”

Rhoda
was poised to take advantage of the barriers
Mary Tyler Moore
broke down. Feminism,
Ms.
magazine, and sexy singles life were
referenced. From the first season, topical, edgy, and undeniably ’70s references stuffed the show: “I’m not talking about a one-night stand,” one swinging bachelor told Rhoda as he asked her out. “We’re in town till Thursday.” When Rhoda moved in with Joe, he jokingly asked her how she wanted to be listed on their mailbox: “What would you like, Ms. or Miss or what?”

Harper, a self-proclaimed feminist, made sure the show was as true to her beliefs as possible, just as she’d done on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. When Rhoda suspected she was pregnant, the original script had her say to the doctor, “
I’m thirty-three—I’ve just got under the wire, huh?” Harper, however, would have none of that. She complained to producers, “Hey, people get married at thirty-three. What do we say to them?” They cut the line. In the episode in which Joe and Rhoda decide to get married, the script originally had Rhoda begging Joe to marry her, but Harper wouldn’t play it, so the producers rewrote it to make the marriage mutual.

From its beginning, eight women wrote for
Rhoda,
many of whom had honed their skills on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Several of them came back to MTM specifically to write for their favorite character—it was no coincidence that so many of them were Jewish girls from the East Coast.

Gail Parent had written an episode of
Mary Tyler Moore
with her longtime partner Kenny Solms, but when she tried her hand at a few
Rhoda
s, it was the first time she had worked solo. She got to write some of the show’s most memorable early episodes, including Rhoda’s bridal shower. Writing alone terrified Parent. It required a different process. She had written a novel,
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York,
in the time since working on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. The hilarious book-length suicide letter chronicled a single thirty-something woman caught between wanting traditional marriage and living it up on New York’s singles scene. It became a bestseller in 1972. Though Parent was married and living in Los Angeles at the time, she based the book on
the experiences of her then-single best friend, who was living in New York. She didn’t expect her book to become such a huge sensation, but the reviewers raved, and the phenomenon grew from there. Between Mary Richards and Sheila Levine, no doubt remained that single, thirty-something women were the rage.

Now that she was working on
Rhoda
alone, however, Parent had a problem. She had written her book in longhand, then hired a typist. Kenny had always been the typist in their partnership. For
Rhoda,
she had to peck through her scripts alone.

Charlotte Brown, who’d struggled to sell a few scripts for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and then had written several
Bob Newhart
episodes for MTM, joined
Rhoda
’s stable of regular writers. Her first episode of
Rhoda
featured Joe and Rhoda meeting each other’s parents. She loved to write anything that featured Ida Morgenstern because the character was so similar to Brown’s own mother. She often gave Ida lines her mother had said, verbatim. Brown once told a
TV Guide
writer that her mother was the “prototype” for Ida. Her mother read the article, and while she didn’t know what “prototype” meant, she was insulted.

Brown sat in the audience with her parents the night of one episode’s taping, her eyes trained on her own mother’s face as Rhoda noted that her mom had taken the plastic covers off the sofa. “What?” Brown’s mother whispered, wondering why her daughter was staring at her. “I never had plastic on the furniture!” When Brown got home late that night, she called her brother to demand he confirm her memory. (He did.)

Brown soon became an executive script consultant, her first step up the chain of staff producers for
Rhoda
. The job demanded all of her time, but she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day. Sometimes she drove home just as normal people were driving to work. But her efforts didn’t go unnoticed. Later, she’d become the first female show runner on a sitcom when she took over
Rhoda
’s top post from Davis and Music. Harper took out an ad in
Variety
thanking Brown for all of her hard work and told Gloria
Steinem in an interview that Brown was “literally doing the work of four men who used to be there.”

Gloria Banta and Pat Nardo finally gave in and moved back to Los Angeles from New York. Since writing their first script for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
they’d written a few more scripts, After School Specials that Nardo produced for her network, ABC. After they’d amassed a body of successful work, the recently formed ICM talent agency wanted to sign them for a pilot project starring Maureen Stapleton called
Ladies from Flatbush
. Nardo’s boss at ABC, Michael Eisner, had gotten promoted from managing daytime programming to primetime, and he helped secure her the new gig. Banta and Nardo decided, reluctantly, to move back to Los Angeles. They knew that was where they needed to be if they wanted to keep working in the industry.