Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (11 page)

A few hours later MacLeod’s agent showed up at his rehearsal and
beckoned him offstage. “They want you to do the pilot,” MacLeod remembers him saying, though the agent was confused: “Is there a guy called Murray in that?”

“Yes,” MacLeod said. “There is.”

Winant and the producers had been trying to cast the part of Lou Grant for three months. Brooks and Burns had wanted to hire Shelley Berman, a comedic actor who’d made several guest appearances across television. He’d started in Chicago’s Compass Players, later to become Second City, along with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and eventually recorded several hit comedy records. Price, however, begged them to reconsider, noting the actor’s reputation for being difficult. Not wanting to take their chances with their precious production, they instead pursued Jack Klugman, who was known for his roles in dramatic films such as
12 Angry Men
and
Goodbye, Columbus
. But he had already committed to a Garry Marshall series, the TV adaptation of
The Odd Couple
. (Berman later played a divorced dentist obsessed to hilarious effect with Mary’s impressive teeth in one of
Mary Tyler Moore
’s early episodes.)

In any case, Winant wanted someone else as Lou Grant: Edward Asner, a balding, bushy-eyebrowed, paunchy slab of masculinity. The fifty-year-old midwesterner, known for roles on
The Outlaws, Mission: Impossible,
and
The Invaders,
would contrast nicely with Mary’s willowy femininity. Winant’s fellow CBS executives expressed skepticism, saying, “Ed Asner’s a good actor, but he can’t do comedy.”

They had good reason to doubt Asner’s comedic abilities, or at least no evidence to believe in them. For the past decade, Asner, the fifth and youngest child of a Kansas City junk dealer, had been appearing in television movies and in supporting roles as warrant officers, district attorneys, sheriffs, and sergeants. He’d grown up striving to “sing the loudest and act the loudest,” he says. A high school football player, he didn’t take to the stage until he was at the University of Chicago, where he fell in love with acting by participating in a school radio program.
But, he says, “I was too bourgeois to think people made a living as radio actors, so I studied political science.”

Acting sucked him in further when his roommates, who were both, as Asner says, “more cosmopolitan” than he was, bought him a Valenti Angelo–illustrated version of
The Song of Songs Which Is Solomon’s,
a gold-edged edition of the famously romantic Old Testament book. They gave it to him for his birthday, he says, “as a counterthrust to my jockiness.”

Asner was considering trying out for a radio production of Shakespeare’s
King Richard II,
and he practiced reading a passage from
Solomon
for his roommate. “Where did you learn to read like that?” his shocked friend asked. Asner played the Duke of York in the production and got hooked on acting for life.

For a few years, he lived on odd jobs: selling shoes, selling ads. He got occasional stage roles in Chicago. He lived in a one-room apartment that looked out on an airshaft. He took a job driving a cab but found he didn’t make much money because he spent all of his time parked and reading scripts. Finally, the army drafted him, and he served in the Signal Corps in postwar France. “The best thing I did for my country was organize the basketball team that played the French and won a lot of French hearts,” he says.

When he returned to the States, he spent a few years in New York doing theater before moving to Hollywood in 1961 to seek acting work. He planned to stay for just a week to scout out the options, but at the end of the week he called his wife back east and told her he wanted to stay for another week. “Oh, shit,” she said. That week, he got an agent and called his wife again to say he wanted to move to Los Angeles. “Oh, shit,” she said again. But they did.

Winant was sure that Asner, as Lou Grant, could keep the
Mary Tyler Moore
cast of characters in line. Tinker backed her up, and urged Brooks and Burns to see Asner’s performance as a newspaperman on the political drama
Slattery’s People,
which had run on CBS four years earlier. “I think he’d be wonderful,” Tinker told the producers. He sent
over a few screeners of the show for them to watch, and they agreed that Asner was terrific.

All of the forces had aligned to guide Asner into the part, and Asner wanted it. The
Mary Tyler Moore Show
pilot was the best script he’d read since he moved to Los Angeles. He longed for the challenge of comedy, which made him nervous. He liked to tell a story he heard about English actor Edmund Gwenn, best known for his Oscar-winning role as Kris Kringle in
Miracle on 34th Street.
Director George Marshall, one version of the oft-told Hollywood tale goes, came to visit Gwenn on his deathbed. Gwenn said, “Dying’s hard, but comedy’s harder.” (The same line was also attributed to Peter O’Toole and Edmund Kean over the years. In any case, it seemed to resonate with a number of actors.)

When Asner came in for a reading, he charmed Moore, Brooks, and Burns as soon as he entered the room and made some small talk, so they all figured he’d be just as breezy in the audition. He and Moore read their scene together from the pilot episode: Lou interviews Mary, badgering her about her religion and marital status, and then, when she protests, delivers what would become perhaps the series’s most famous line: “You’ve got spunk . . . I hate spunk.”

But Asner roared the line so loudly at the star, gave it so much of his dramatic conviction, that he scared everyone in the room.

Asner knew his performance was off. He could tell he’d blown his audition from the barely concealed scowls and winces on the faces of Moore, the producers, and Winant. “That was a very
intelligent
reading,” he remembers one of the producers saying to him. He knew what that meant—it wasn’t funny.

Brooks and Burns struggled to cover their horrified reactions with more small talk. However, as Asner walked out to his car, he realized they were just too nice to indicate how rotten he’d been.

Then he had a thought: If he already knew where he’d gone wrong, why couldn’t he make it right? Especially since those producers seemed so nice. Asner marched back in and asked Nardo if he could see Brooks
and Burns again. When she buzzed the producers and announced that Ed Asner was back, Burns thought,
Awww, shit.
Was this guy going to force them to reject him to his face? But they agreed to see him anyway.

Asner burst back into the office and said, “You just sat there on your asses and let me bomb like that? I was terrible. And you know it was terrible and you were too polite to tell me. Don’t be so fucking polite. Tell me what you want in this character.” Winant welcomed him, eager to prove her faith in him correct. And the guys, once again too nice to say no, talked him through the character for a half hour. “We want you to read it like a crazy meshugana,” they told him. Now they were speaking this Jewish boy’s language.

He and Moore did their second take, with Asner dialing the volume—and the palpable
hatred
of spunk—down several notches. The whole room laughed this time, though Moore still didn’t see it. “Well, I guess we keep looking, huh?” the producers remember her saying when Asner left the room again.

“Mary, I’ve got to tell you,” Winant said, “the hairs went up on the back of my neck when you were reading together. It was so great.”

“Oh, really?” Moore said.

Winant’s instincts remained unchallenged once again, and this time, the producers’ pathological niceness had saved the day. If Jim Brooks and Allan Burns didn’t have such good manners, they never would have seen Ed Asner’s second try. And they never would have offered the part to him.

Winant knew whom she wanted for the role of Mary’s fluttery, perfectionist neighbor, Marna Lindstrom. She wanted Cloris Leachman, who’d appeared in guest roles on shows such as
The Andy Griffith Show
and was a longtime personal friend of Winant. When Winant told Leachman about
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
it piqued the actress’s interest, even though she encountered plenty of naysayers as she spoke to colleagues about it: “Oh, who wants to watch a show about a single
woman?” she remembers someone saying to her. But she forged ahead, hoping to prove that sentiment wrong. More importantly to her, she was hoping to prove she could do comedy.

Although she’d acted for years, she’d always had a hard time convincing casting directors that she could be funny. A casting report from back in her teen years read: “Intelligent reading, good expression, but can only play straight.” She’d performed in the musical/comedy review at Northwestern University,
The Waa-Muu Show,
during her time there, but she dropped out of college, put off by all the term papers involved, and became the 1946 Miss Chicago instead. This also did little to add to the perception that she had comedy talent, nor did her time studying at the legendary Actors Studio, run by Elia Kazan. Her stint there did, however, inspire one of her go-to jokes when she was courted by a classmate but declined his advances. “Brando just wasn’t my type,” she delighted in saying many times afterward.

Instead she’d married movie producer George Englund in 1953, giving up her career for seventeen years of housewifery. She had been taught that
ambition
was a dirty word for a woman. But she loved and missed acting. And now, as the ’70s approached, it was occurring to her that ambition was the way to get the work she wanted. But it wouldn’t be easy: At forty-three, Leachman had five children, ages three to sixteen. Not only that, but her résumé from the last decade didn’t exactly entice sitcom producers. Brooks, Burns, and Sandrich all had the same reaction to Winant’s suggestion that they cast Leachman: “Are you kidding? This is a woman who’s been on
Lassie
for the last several years.”

Winant, however, did not worry. “Trust me on this,” they recall her telling them.

Leachman’s audition didn’t get off to a great start. She arrived a half hour late—the kids were always making trouble when she wanted to leave the house. But when she showed up, she showed the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
producers how funny she could be—and gave them a glimpse of what working with her would be like—before she’d uttered
a word of the script. When she entered the room where Moore, Tinker, and the producers waited for her, she asked, “Who makes the decisions here?” Everyone pointed to Brooks and Burns, so she went and sat in Brooks’s lap, then flitted, “like a wood nymph,” as Moore later said, to Burns’s lap. She even twirled Tinker’s hair, and this was a man whose meticulously parted hair did not invite twirling, and thus was not often twirled. Moore thought,
How am I ever going to hold my own in a scene with her?

Once the producers and Tinker assured Moore that she could, in fact, share the screen with Leachman, she saw the potential. The lady from
Lassie
won the role. Leachman, however, refused to sign a long-term contract, agreeing only to an episode-by-episode deal. She’d just shot a movie with director Peter Bogdanovich called
The Last Picture Show,
and she wanted the freedom to do more films. Soon the producers would change her character’s name from Marna to the more assonant Phyllis Lindstrom. She was getting funnier already.