Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (2 page)

Once she was playing at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue, a place high-priced and elegant enough that, finally, she could invite her parents to see her perform. Seated at a flower-laden table listening to her play and sing, her parents watched while a man came up to the piano, spoke a few words to her, and put a ten-dollar bill in her glass piggy bank. Her father rushed to his daughter. “What did that man want?” he demanded.

“ ‘My Funny Valentine,’ Dad,” she sighed.

The good news was that the women’s lib movement was starting to percolate. The Pill had been introduced in 1960, freeing women from pregnancy fears. And Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 bestseller,
Sex and
the Single Girl,
had recently scandalized the nation, making women like Silverman feel
a little
less alone in their singlehood while emboldening them to wear shorter skirts and sleep with any man they pleased. Not every woman had to be Jackie Kennedy, for Chrissake. Brown rallied the single-girl troops to pursue their sexual desires, even giving them advice on the art of pleasuring men. “
Theoretically a ‘nice’ single woman has no sex life,” she wrote. “What nonsense!”

Brown saw the single woman as a “
glamour girl,” contrary to many other contemporary writers, who seemed to pity and fear any unmarried women who displayed both sex drive and career drive. Unmarried women were characterized as spinsters, unmarried men characterized as bachelors-around-town. Brown would soon revamp the magazine
Cosmopolitan
as a haven for sexually liberated women. Her proposal for the makeover said that her
Cosmopolitan
would tell an aspiring actress “
not to stay back home in Lima, Ohio, like most articles on the subject do, [but would offer] practical advice. Where to live. How much money to save up first.” Treva was beyond the
Cosmo
girl already—she had loads of practical advice she could give such a creature—but it was comforting to know there were girls who dreamed of the exact kind of life she already had.

One night in 1964, Silverman was playing at a piano bar in Manhattan’s theater district—it was another one of those dark, smoky places, but this one had a well-tuned baby grand. She took her requisite set break, listening to the glasses clink and the patrons murmur in the absence of her playing. Still energized from her performance, she struck up a conversation with an intense, bearded, hippie-ish guy and his girlfriend sitting near her at the bar. Soon they were chatting about their mutual love of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger. Beards were only just on the brink of acceptable mainstream grooming at the time, a signal of a certain kind of rebelliousness that endeared this guy to Silverman. Guys with beards tended to smoke weed, be creative, listen to cool music. They were Silverman’s people. Even more so when they
could talk Fitzgerald and Salinger. It figured that he was there with a woman, though. Those guys were always taken.

The guy, Jim Brooks, worked at CBS as an assistant in the newsroom. Treva and Jim talked about their mutual ambition to write for television. Brooks was intrigued with the sketch comedy work she was doing; his admiration for her was instant. He knew Upstairs at the Downstairs and its reputation for sharp, topical work. She was attracted to the way his mind worked, his quick, easy, funny conversation, his split-second responses. Something clicked between them: that feeling that says,
We’re going to matter in each other’s lives.

She stayed in touch with Jim as she got more and more of her comedy sketches and songs performed in New York cabarets. Then came the day she received word that not one, not two, but five sketches of hers were going to be featured at Upstairs at the Downstairs. Five! She had been elevated to being the only sketch writer in the show. She was glowing with success when she ran into the mother of her best friend from high school. What luck, Treva thought—someone with whom to share her excitement. “Mrs. Bernstein, I just found out!” she said. “I have five sketches in the new Upstairs at the Downstairs!”

Treva waited for that spark of respect to alight in the older woman’s eyes. Instead, she got: “How nice that you’re keeping busy . . . . Are you seeing anyone?” Treva wondered if she would ever go a day again without hearing that question, dripping with passive-aggressive judgment.

But comedian Carol Burnett walked into Upstairs at the Downstairs a few months later with a different attitude toward talented, funny women like herself. Not long after Treva had talked to Jim about wanting to break into TV, Burnett came down to Midtown from her Upper East Side apartment to check out new talent at the revue; it was similar to the one in which Burnett had gotten her own start, the Blue Angel, nearly a decade earlier. Burnett liked Silverman’s sketches so much that she invited her to write for a variety show she was about to star in, CBS’s
The Entertainers,
along with Bob Newhart and Dom DeLuise. Writing comedy on a network TV show! Treva had arrived.

Silverman’s work there led to a job in Hollywood writing for the television show
The Monkees
. She moved west in 1966 to craft scripts for the made-for-TV band that was aiming to replace the Beatles in teen girls’ hearts, even as posters for the edgier Who and the Kinks, David Bowie and Jefferson Airplane, vied for the poster space on those same teenagers’ walls. When Silverman got to her new gig, she found she was once again, as she had been on
The Entertainers,
the only woman writer on staff. The only other women she encountered were secretaries who typed up what the funny guys wrote and mimeographed copies for the producers and cast.

At that point, Treva was one of only two or three women writers in TV comedy who worked without a male partner; she was such an anomaly that
Mademoiselle
magazine did an article on her. She was part of a sociological phenomenon, a generation of new feminists being profiled in newsmagazines, who prioritized their careers over marriage and were often the only women wherever they went, their miniskirts, high boots, and tent dresses distinguishing them from the cinch-waisted, full-skirted secretaries who came before them. Later, interviewers would always ask Silverman, “How did you survive in such an atmosphere? How did you make it in a profession that had only been men?” The truth, however, was that she just
did
because she
had
to if she did the job she wanted. If the cherubic, soft-spoken Treva Silverman had to sit in rooms full of bearded men to be a comedy writer, then that was what she would do.

Then the original bearded guy in Silverman’s life, Jim Brooks, reappeared in the summer of 1969. Treva had written for several sitcoms during the two years since
The Monkees
went off the air, including a few episodes of Brooks’s groundbreaking high school history class comedy,
Room 222
. They’d stayed in touch since meeting in New York, and he had even introduced her to his fellow producer on
Room 222,
the short-haired, clean-cut Allan Burns. Now Brooks was calling her with a rather existential question: “What are you doing right now?”

“Washing my hair.”

“No,” he said, “I mean
with your life
. Our pilot is going to series—the one I’m doing with Allan Burns—and we want you to come on board. It’s with Mary Tyler Moore.” With the woman from
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
the one who was pretty
and
funny? Like Jean Arthur and Carole Lombard? There was nothing Silverman wanted more. That was quite a relief to Brooks and Burns, who needed writers who could understand their kind of show. They could also use some estrogen-fueled help with their female lead character. No one knew whether the show would last beyond CBS’s initial thirteen-episode commitment to it, but Brooks offered her all he could: “We want you to write for this series,” he told her, “and we want you to write as many episodes as you want.”

As Brooks, Burns, and Silverman carefully wrote and rewrote the early scripts for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
in 1970, they didn’t dream their show would have any long-lasting effect on the world. They just sat at their typewriters and pounded away, trying to write the best they could and hoping the show didn’t get canceled. At times the series
would
veer awfully close to ending prematurely. But instead, the writers’ and producers’ ideas and actions—some smart, some not—piled on top of each other, mixed together, and made history. They pulled star Mary Tyler Moore out of a perilous career slump. They weathered attacks from network executives who said the program was too different to succeed, or just plain rotten. They survived cast members’ insecurities and jealousies, divorces and diets, and screaming matches between producers and directors. Along the way, they made several unlikely stars, changed the fates of a dozen female TV writers who spun their everyday lives into comedy gold, helped usher in a more woman-friendly era in the television industry, elevated the sitcom to an art form, and killed a clown.

This book tells their story: how they made a classic, and how it changed their lives, and the lives of those watching, forever.

“I’m an experienced woman. I’ve been around . . . . Well, all right, I might not have been around, but I’ve been . . . nearby.”

—Mary Richards

(1961–70)

There is a certain trajectory your life takes when you create a classic book or movie, song or television show. It’s a path followed by all those who accomplish this rare feat, and yet they never know they’re on it at the time. And thus they never know if the vision they’re fighting for is valid, much less great. They don’t know of the accolades, or the difficulties, that are to come. They don’t know how hard it will be to move on from such a rarefied experience, nor how hard it will be to duplicate it, but they will try, because, let’s face it, they won’t have much choice. Most of them will find out that comebacks are hard to come by. Then they will, if they are lucky, come to accept that even one classic in one’s life is quite enough, and they will sit back and enjoy all the glory that gives them before their time is through.

It is not, all in all, a bad life. But it’s not as easy as it looks, either.

Jim Brooks was on his way to such a fate, though he never would have guessed it, when he was spending his days writing copy for CBS
News in New York—reports on the Bay of Pigs, Andy Warhol, Beatlemania, anything and everything that came through on the clanging wire service machines.

It was 1961, and some form of network news had been a standard part of American life for nearly forty years, since the days of radio. Now television had taken over the country, but it was only just hitting its stride. News was at the forefront of every development in television: The
first national live television broadcast in the United States was President Harry Truman’s 1951 speech in San Francisco at the conference for the Treaty of Peace with Japan. A then–cutting-edge microwave relay system allowed viewers in local markets across the country to hear the president’s words at the same time, united, as a nation. Two months later,
commercial television had its first live national broadcast with CBS’s
See It Now,
a newsmagazine series that opened with a split screen of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge—look! Both coasts! See it now! As the 1960s began and Brooks got hired at CBS, more developments in technology allowed the news to be almost up-to-the-minute when it aired. He had timed his stumble into the business well.

The job required a lot from a guy without a news background, without even a college diploma—Brooks had dropped out of New York University. Now twenty-one, he had lucked into the gig with help from a friend of his sister. The job was exhausting, but he found refuge in watching television when he got home. Not the news—no more news, please—but comedy,
The Dick Van Dyke Show
in particular. While
I Love Lucy
had perfected the sitcom,
Dick Van Dyke
made it more realistic, wringing its comedy not from far-fetched shenanigans but from everyday situations. Brooks liked that
Dick Van Dyke
was about a TV writer, Rob Petrie; even though Rob wrote for a variety show, Brooks could relate at least a little.