Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (22 page)

He envied the attention the women got, but he was most jealous of his best friend on the set, Asner. Asner felt that Knight was attacking him for winning some of the show’s earliest Emmys. Knight would, Asner says, accuse him of “buying” his awards. Then Knight’s mood would shift back from black, and the two would be the best of friends again.

One time, a particularly accusatory rant got under Asner’s skin enough that he refused to talk to Knight all week. When the Friday night taping came, Asner was still fuming, and his mood wrecked his performance. He hated himself for not leaving his feelings at the stage door. Knight, however, didn’t have such a problem. He floated onstage
and nailed every laugh, irritating Asner but also making him smile. The two actors reconciled after the taping, even though Asner was still annoyed at himself for not keeping his personal feelings separate from his professionalism. They always made up in the end. MacLeod, as the peacemaker between them, had a theory as to why Asner and Knight loved each other so much and fought so much: “Ed and Ted both wanted to be No. 1 with Mary.”

Asner didn’t provide the only source of Knight’s insecurity. Knight got sensitive about slights to his Polish heritage and chafed whenever anyone told a Polish joke at a table read—a common shtick in the ’70s, just a few decades after the wave of immigrants from Poland to America following World War II, Knight’s own parents among them.
All in the Family
’s Archie Bunker, for instance, was prone to disparaging his son-in-law, Mike, as a “dumb Polack” to huge laughs.

Knight’s sensitivity to Polish jokes reflected something deeper: his concern that fans thought he was as dim as his character. He was growing tired of being the butt of the joke, tired of people thinking he was dull-witted. The character revision that had gotten him hired to begin with—turning Ted Baxter from a love interest for Mary Richards into a shallow, aging, needy newscaster—now haunted him, even though he got some of the biggest laughs of anyone in the cast, most notably from the big boss, Tinker. Tinker loved to sit in the bleachers and watch rehearsals just to see what Ted Baxter was up to that week. No matter how much acclaim Ted’s character got, however, MacLeod noticed Knight becoming increasingly possessed by his internal struggle with Baxter. “Why did they have to name him Ted?” Knight would complain to his friend as they dissected each episode over the phone on Saturday night. “Why did it have to be
my
name?”

Finally, Knight voiced his concerns about his character to Burns as he plopped down in the producer’s office one day. He begged for changes to Ted Baxter’s story lines, anything to humanize him, make him a decent person, make him smarter. Floundering, Burns called Weinberger to help him talk the actor down: “Ed., I need you. Get in here.”

As Burns waited for Weinberger to arrive, he continued to try to soothe Knight. “Oh, come on, Ted. You’re beloved! People love you. People know that Carroll O’Connor isn’t that racist bastard, you know? On
All in the Family,
that bigoted guy? People know that he’s not that. People know that you, Ted Knight, are not Ted Baxter.”

Knight still wasn’t buying it, but his mood started to turn around a little when Weinberger came in and talked about the history of the great clowns. Knight drank it in, though his insecurity continued to get the better of him. “I just . . . everybody thinks I’m stupid!” he cried.

“No, no, no, no,” Weinberger countered. “You’re an actor!”

“I know, but they think I’m stupid.”

“No they don’t!” Weinberger insisted. He amped up his talk of the great buffoons of theatrical history, going back to the masked comic character, Brighella, who was part of the sixteenth-century Italian tradition of Commedia dell’Arte. Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch from Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
may have come up. These all, Weinberger contended, led directly to Ted Baxter, arguably TV’s first such clown with dramatic purpose. Finally, Knight seemed to pull it together.

Then Brooks walked in. “Ted Knight!” he said, ignorant of the conversation’s topic. “How does it feel to be one of the great schmucks of all time?” Knight collapsed all over again.

The producers did eventually manage to buck him up again, but they never knew when Knight might have another meltdown. And even on the days when he didn’t fret dramatically about his character’s mental shortcomings, Knight was always either basking in the glory of his fame or obsessing over his own inadequacies. He and his close friend Adam West (who played Batman on television) would meet for lunch at a deli in Pacific Palisades called Mort’s, for instance, where Knight insisted on sitting outside so he could see fans notice him. “That’s right,” he’d tell them. “It’s me!” Yet after every taping he begged his cast mates and producers to reassure him that he’d been funny
enough: “Did I get them tonight?” he would ask. “I think I got ’em. Did I get ’em?”

Moore often reassured him by cracking up at his gags. “Never play a scene with animals, children, or Ted,” she’d say.

The women in the cast, meanwhile, struggled to maintain their real-life relationships with men, given their growing fame and all-consuming jobs. Moore adored Tinker. Harper admired her talented husband, Dick Schaal, whom she regarded as her best friend and most trusted adviser. Leachman spoke of nothing but her husband, producer George Englund. “They were women who achieved a lot, but what they all had in common is that they weren’t independent women,” Brooks says. “They were women who lived, in large part, for the men they were with.”

Still, Moore began to strain under the intertwined nature of her professional and personal lives; she and Tinker were together all the time, in a way, because of work, and yet they barely got the chance to spend time alone. Leachman broke up and reconciled with Englund a number of times during the show’s run. Once she stood at Pat Nardo’s desk in the producers’ office, talking about her recent separation from Englund. She looked off in the distance, as if playing the most dramatic scene of her career, and said, ostensibly to Nardo, “George was the love of my life.” Nardo was startled, since she barely knew the actress. But she understood: Leachman wanted to talk about her husband, and she didn’t care to whom.

It was the men, including Brooks, who experienced the first official splinterings of relationships under the pressure of success. Brooks split up with his wife, despite the recent birth of their first child. MacLeod’s marriage ended, too: He’d married his wife at twenty-five, when she was a Rockette and he was an usher. They’d had four children together, two boys and two girls, and had tried therapy for years, but couldn’t hold things together anymore. He felt like a failure for letting it go, but he finally did.

Both men also recovered with new relationships quickly afterward. MacLeod joined a group dedicated to the preservation of the American musical, through which he met his soon-to-be-second wife, Patti Kendig, a stage actress with three children of her own. Brooks soon took up with a twenty-one-year-old flight attendant he had met on a plane trip from Minneapolis to Los Angeles for location scouting. He
asked Holly Holmberg out on their first date over Memorial Day weekend in 1973, and she moved in with him in Malibu a year later.

More women on the set of a show meant, alas, that a particular obsession with weight permeated the atmosphere. Of course, the men weren’t immune to the lure of the crash diet, either.

Perhaps it was Moore’s own fixation on maintaining her svelte figure—she was
five foot seven and 118 pounds—that prompted her costars to worry about their own. Several times a week, Moore ate a quick paper-bagged lunch and then changed into a leotard for an on-set dance class with her longtime instructor, Sallie Whalen. Moore had trained for decades in ballet—it most certainly contributed to her remarkable grace and posture—and she missed the toning effect it had on her lean body.

The actress had three portable ballet barres and a huge mirror on wheels brought to the soundstage on the days when Whalen visited. Harper and Moore would wear their workout clothes on Monday and Wednesday, Harper in her black leotard and Moore in pink, so they could squeeze in a class at lunchtime. Harper tried to pitch in for the cost of the teacher, but Mary insisted, “No, no, I need the company.”

Sometimes guest actresses or crewmembers would participate as well. Beverly Sanders, a friend of Moore from Whalen’s class at the American School of Dance in Los Angeles, played a waitress at the WJM crew’s favorite restaurant, and she joined in the dance class whenever she appeared on the show. For all of the women, the class was more than a means for weight loss. It became a nostalgic reminder of their dancing days—they welcomed every groan-inducing stretch
and new blister. They held ballet class as a sacred rite and bonding experience as much as a waistline-trimmer. “
It’s a discipline in itself and a lot more fun than just exercising,” Moore said at the time. “And it makes dieting easier, too. Dancing for me is like a cheap form of therapy: When your muscles are in agony you can’t think about your problems. Any psychiatrist will tell you that the greatest thing you can do when you’re depressed about something is physical exercise.” Afterward, they’d all get back to work, Moore wearing the muumuu and leggings that kept her body warm and supple after class.

Despite her willowy figure, dance class wasn’t enough for Moore. She took up dieting and
encasing her thighs in Saran Wrap in hopes of reducing them. Even though she knew she had good genes when it came to staying thin, she could be drawn into
comparing herself to the models in
Vogue
and
Bazaar
. A typical lunch for her was a
crab salad with diet cola.

Tinker would often chide her to lay off the calorie-counting and would cite the comedian Totie Fields, who based much of her humor on weight struggles. “
It’s all well and good,” he would tell his wife, “but remember that somewhere along the line Totie Fields looked like you on the way up.” His wife’s general perfectionism troubled him as well. “
I love her,” he once told a
People
reporter, “but I sometimes find myself almost wishing she would do something wrong.” Still, Moore worried about her body and her aging face—refusing, for instance, to watch old
Dick Van Dyke
episodes from just a decade earlier because, as she said, “
it’s like Dorian Gray in reverse.” She wouldn’t watch herself in movies, either. “
On the big screen you don’t
like
yourself,” she told one reporter. “On the small screen you’re not so bad.”

Moore was hardly alone in her weight fixation. The more popular the show got, the more the cast became consumed with their fluctuating scale numbers. Harper’s assistant and fashion muse, Mimi Kirk, requested the on-set breakfast be switched from sweet rolls to fruit, a move everyone in the cast appreciated. Asner took up jogging, horrified by what his two-hour lunches (often complete with vodka) did
to his already-beefy build—especially given the on-screen comparison with Moore. He thought he looked like a pumpkin when he saw set photos of himself. He dropped from 250 pounds to 210, though he never totally gave up the lamb stew and double martinis he favored.

Leachman, meanwhile, gave Asner some extra incentive. She promised if he lost thirty pounds, she’d sleep with him. She liked to tease that he’d lost twenty-nine pounds then went right back up, for fear of having to make good on their deal. “I don’t know who was more frightened,” she would say.

MacLeod and Harper tried Weight Watchers together, inspiring Harper to give up her doughnut habit. “Isn’t it wild?” Harper said to her diet mate. “All the potbellied guys are home drinking beer, looking at
Playboy,
while the wives are at Weight Watchers, sweating to be beautiful, so they can hold on to the fat guy!” MacLeod was not about to be one of those guys. He lost so much weight that the infamous episode in which Slim Pickens plays WJM’s wacky cowboy owner looked even more ridiculous by the time it made it to the air: They reshot so many scenes throughout the season that MacLeod’s weight appeared to fluctuate by up to twenty pounds from one scene to the next.