I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny (15 page)

That’s how it works in the TV business. If you produce a hit show, the network will buy your next idea. Even if it’s two guys standing across a room from each other, throwing a ball back and forth, the network will order thirteen episodes without blinking.

So Artie pulled two writers, David Davis and Lorenzo Music, off
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
to create a show for me.

The first idea Davis and Music had was for me to play a psychiatrist. They knew my telephone comedy routines well. In fact, Music had cowritten an air-traffic-controller skit that I performed on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
. As Davis put it, I listened funny. So in searching for a profession to take advantage of me being a reactor to various situations, they floated the idea of psychiatry.

I resisted. I didn’t like the idea of being a psychiatrist because they deal with seriously ill people. I didn’t want to be doing a show about a doctor treating a patient with multiple personalities or bipolar disorder. “As much as that appeals to me, that shouldn’t be where we get our humor,” I explained.

I suggested making the character a psychologist be cause they deal with less seriously disturbed people. A psychologist would be seeing a guy who won’t get on the plane, while a psychiatrist would be treating a guy who wants to blow it up because he doesn’t like the Salisbury steak. So my newest job was as a psychologist, “a serious albeit unspectacular profession,” according to Dr. Robert Hartley himself.

We honestly weren’t sure how the audience would react to a psychologist as an occupation. Most people think psychologists are nuttier than the people they treat. In college, all the psych majors were off by themselves in the corner of the library, reading obscure books, fidgeting with their hornrimmed glasses, and carrying on conversations with themselves.

Originally we also made my office suitemate, played by Peter Bonerz, a psychologist. For contrast, Peter was going to be a radical psychologist who was into wild treatments like primal screaming. But this proved to be too much, so the character was changed to a children’s orthodontist.

In the fourth season, we did an episode that addressed the skepticism toward psychologists. It’s one of the episodes most often mentioned to me by people who remember the show. A seemingly friendly talk-show hostess named Ruth Corley invites Dr. Hartley on her morning show. He arrives expecting a softball interview, but he ends up being excoriated.

His rude awakening begins with Corley’s introduction: “It’s been said that today’s psychologist is nothing more than a con man, a snake-oil salesman flimflamming innocent people, peddling cures for everything from nail biting to a lousy love life—and I agree. We’ll ask Dr. Hartley to defend himself after these messages.”

Later in the interview, she calls Bob on the carpet about whether or not he cures his patients.

“You mean you ask forty dollars an hour and you guarantee nothing?” she says.

“Well, I validate.”

“Is that your answer? Do you ever cure anybody?”

“Well … I wouldn’t say ‘cure.’ ”

“So your answer is no.”

“No, my answer is not no. … I get results.”

As Bob leaves, he passes two nuns on their way to being interviewed and quips: “I’ll go fifty-fifty on a hit man.”

But even the most casual viewer of the show knows that Dr. Hartley’s regular patients were no better off on their last visit to Room 715 on the seventh floor of the Timpau Medical Arts Building than they were on their first.

Mr. Peterson remains meek and scared of everything from his wife, to upholstery, to geese. Mrs. Bakerman, who describes herself as a “weirdette,” has no obvious hangups, and therefore none are cured. Michele Nardo continues to have trouble getting a date and is afraid to be seen in a swimsuit. And Mr. Carlin, his premiere patient, continues to harbor hostility and insensitivity to others’ feelings.

A typical session is one during which Mr. Carlin informs Dr. Hartley of his progress. “I think I’m overcoming my agoraphobia,” Mr. Carlin says.

“I didn’t even know you had a fear of open places,” Bob says.

“Open places?”

“Agoraphobia is a fear of open places.”

“I thought it was a fear of agricultural products.”

“Sorry …”

“Well, anyway, wheat doesn’t scare me anymore. I’m still a little skittish around barley.”

Another day, Mr. Carlin appears and announces, “I only had one problem this week. Yesterday, I was possessed by the devil.” To which Dr. Hartley says, “Okay, go with that, Mr. Carlin.”

Here’s a classic phone conversation with a “cured” patient: “Mrs. Harlick, we’ve been over this before,” Dr. Hartley says. “As you said yourself, you overeat because having a beautiful body threatens you, and for some reason, having a fat body doesn’t threaten you. … I’m happy to hear you’ve been able to control it. Mrs. Harlick, I can’t understand you with your mouth full.”

Some, like the ventriloquist’s dummy who wants to break up the act and go out on his own, were probably incurable from the start.

But for all the uncured patients, Dr. Hartley did do some good. A woman once wrote me a letter saying that she and her husband were having problems with their son and so they told the boy they wanted him to try therapy. They asked if he would mind getting some professional help to straighten out his problems. The boy asked his parents if the doctor would be like that man on television. When the parents assured them he was, the boy agreed to go.

The question of Bob Hartley’s TV wife and kids came up early in the discussions with Davis and Music. Finding a wife proved to be almost as difficult as it was in real life. We read several very good actresses, but no one really clicked with me.

Then one morning, Artie called. “I think I’ve found your wife,” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t know she was missing,” I replied.

Budumbump
. He explained that he was watching
The Tonight Show
the previous evening and Suzanne Pleshette was Johnny’s guest. “She’d be great,” he said. “She’s her own woman. It will be an ideal marriage.”

I agreed. I knew Suzie socially, but I questioned whether or not she would do television. She had acted in several feature films, including
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; The Birds;
and
Nevada Smith.
She had also appeared on Broadway in
The Miracle Worker
. Though she had starred in some TV movies, hers wasn’t a name that would have been on the casting list for a sitcom.

Artie called her agent, and it turned out she was interested. Because Suzie had spent most of her career working on location, she, too, wanted to get off the road and have more of a normal kind of life.

Suzie hadn’t done situation comedy, but she dove into the process. While taping one of the first episodes, she pulled me aside and asked why she was saying a line about a lawyer. I explained to her that the line was a playback on an earlier lawyer line. From then on, every time we had a similar situation she’d say, “This is a lawyer joke again, right?”

On camera, we clicked. The chemistry was perfect. Bob and Emily were a modernized couple for the seventies, and there was the perfect amount of tension, love, and respect to make the marriage feel real. They also got on each other’s nerves the way spouses do.

In one episode, Bob is in bed eating a bowl of cereal annoyingly.

Emily: “Do you know that you always chew your food thirty-two times?”

Bob: “Yeah, my mother taught me that. She used to say thirty-two times keeps your tummy from danger, then you can stay up and listen to
The Lone Ranger
.”

Emily: “Stop it. It’s been driving me up the wall for six years.”

Somewhat radical for the time, they were shown sleeping in the same bed. We were one of the first shows to suggest that Bob and Emily had a sex life—quite something for a TV sitcom in 1972.

At the end of the first episode, in which Emily is scared to fly to New York with Bob and a group of patients, Bob receives a phone message from his wife saying that he was sensational. Jerry, Bob’s suitemate, overhears this and queries Bob.

Jerry: “I didn’t think Emily went to New York with you.”

Bob: “No, she didn’t. She was referring to something that happened this morning.”

Years later, when I did the sitcom
Newhart
and Mary Frann was cast as my wife, I told Mary that she had one of the hardest jobs in TV because everyone was going to compare her to Suzanne. It didn’t help that I once called her “Emily” in the middle of a taping. All in all, I think Mary did a great job carrying the burden and creating her own, unique on-camera relationship with me.

As to the issue of Bob and Emily Hartley having kids, the only other real creative demand I had was that I didn’t want them to have children. I didn’t want to be the dolt of a father who gets himself in trouble and then the precocious kids huddle in the kitchen and plot a way to get Dad out of this pickle.

My own kids didn’t seem to mind that they had no namesakes on TV. They were just happy with all the new toys.

The producers, however, had agreed that if Suzie became pregnant in real life during filming we would make Emily pregnant. Though that never happened, in the fifth year of the show, the producers hatched an idea for Emily to get pregnant. They commissioned a script and sent it over to me.

The next day, one of the producers called me and asked what I thought.

“It’s a very funny script,” I said.

“Oh, I’m glad you like it,” the producer said. “We were really nervous about your reaction.”

“I only have one question,” I said. “Who are you going to get to play the part of Bob?”

If I had to place a number on it, I would say that Bob Hartley was 85 percent me, 15 percent TV character.

Bob Hartley was not in the mold of Ozzie Nelson of
Ozzie and Harriet
or Robert Young’s Jim Anderson from
Father Knows Best
. He had flaws, though not as many as
All in the Family
’s Archie Bunker. While he was amiable, well-intentioned, and generally easygoing, he could also be petulant, peevish, and egotistical.

As I said, 85 percent real Bob, 15 percent TV Bob.

He also had an everyman quality. Every wife who watched would come away saying, “that’s exactly what my husband would do,” and every guy would say, “I almost did the same thing.” You are dealing with human nature, which truly doesn’t change that much, so it’s easy to find the truth.

When Bob finds out that Emily’s IQ is higher than his, all of his flaws surface. In the episode, Emily, who is a part-time teacher, is assigned to administer IQ tests. She first tries to give a practice test to their loopy neighbor Howard, who quips, “I hope the test isn’t as hard as the directions.” And then she convinces Bob to take the test.

The following day, Emily grades the test. Bob can’t wait to find out his score.

“Emily, if I can give up three hours of my life to take the IQ test, you can give up three seconds of your life to answer it for me,” Bob tells her. “What was the score?”

“I don’t think people should know their IQs,” she says.

“Well, you know your IQ.”

“That’s different. I have to know mine.”

“I have to know mine. What was it?”

“One hundred and twenty-nine.”

“One hundred and twenty-nine … that’s good, isn’t it?”

“That’s very good, Bob,” she says with sincere flattery. “That’s almost gifted.”

“Almost gifted. … What’s yours?”

“It’s not important.”

“I know it’s not important, but what is it?”

Emily laughs girlishly. “I’m embarrassed.”

“Well, honey, don’t be embarrassed. I had four more years of college than you. I have a Ph.D.”

“Bob, it’s one hundred and fifty-one.”

“That’s good, too.”

Of course Bob can’t let go of this. A little later in the episode, he tells Emily that her higher IQ is affecting their marriage, but she tries to downplay the situation.

“What’s it got to do with us?” she says. “We’ve got a perfect marriage.”

“Emily, a perfect marriage is where a husband and a wife have the same IQ.”

“Bob, it’s not important. …”

“Next to perfect is where the husband’s is higher than the wife’s. …”

“Bob, forget it.”

“Third is where the husband’s is one point higher than the wife’s …”

“Bob, please forget it.”

“Fourth, which is us, which is the worst, is where the wife is one hundred and fifty-one and the husband is one hundred and twenty-nine, which is difference of … of …”

“Twenty-two.”

Petulant, peevish, and a little egotistical. By the way, if you are a guy I wouldn’t bother to find out your IQ. Based on my experience, your wife probably does have a higher IQ than you.

It was my idea to set
The Bob Newhart Show
in Chicago. Besides the fact that I was associated with Chicago, the other big cities were taken.
The Jeffersons
was set in New York. Even Minneapolis was taken by
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.