Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (23 page)

Still, the boys worried less about their weight than the girls did. The three male stars ate lunch regularly at Art’s Deli, sometimes joined by Sandrich, while the girls went for health food across the street—salads, mostly, as Leachman was a vegetarian. “Look at our guys,” Leachman would say, “trundling off to have pastrami.” Avoiding the deli seemed to work for Harper. She shed the exact twenty pounds that had won her the role of Rhoda to begin with, thanks to Weight Watchers, dance class, and those salads with Leachman. Finally, Harper lost so much that she went to Moore, concerned for the sake of the show: Should she put the weight back on so as not to ruin her character’s jokes? Moore assured her it would be fine.

The writers did, too, after some discussion. “Look, we’re doing all these fat jokes and you aren’t fat anymore,” they teased her, “so what are we going to do?”

Harper offered, “You’re absolutely right. How selfish it was of me to have lost all that weight. I’ll eat Italian dinners for a few weeks and put it back on.”

She actually did it, though the writers had thought she was joking, so they’d thought up “thin stories” for Rhoda instead. Harper took off thirty pounds this time, and stuck, at least for the moment, with her new weight. But she would never stop thinking of herself as fat.

Jay Sandrich, a focused director with a penchant for stuffy golf sweaters, had a problem in the uncontrollable free spirit known as Cloris Leachman.

Leachman was a brilliant improviser. From take to take, she never did the same thing twice. She was always messing with the script, then apologizing. Harper tried to soothe her: “You’re the only one doing it right!” Leachman took the role seriously, and personally, often to her detriment. Sometimes when interviewers came to her house to write about her, she would find herself behaving as Phyllis instead of herself. She’d internalized the role, agonized over it, and analyzed her alter ego. On the surface, she felt, Phyllis might seem neurotic, but the fact was, she wanted badly to be perfect. Phyllis manifested the modern woman’s dilemma: She aspired to the feminine ideal in the kitchen and the home as well as the bedroom, and she had no idea how to do it all. Even Leachman’s mother had a theory about Phyllis; she summed up the character’s personality as “the sure, firm touch on the wrong note.”

All that analysis could lead to brilliance, but it made for tense moments on a sitcom set, which was meant to run on precision and routine, budget and schedule. While shooting scenes, Leachman often wandered off to a different part of the room than the script called for, so moved was she by Phyllis’s impulses as they coursed through her. The problem with such method instinct on a sitcom: The cameras could film only certain parts of the set, as determined ahead of time by rehearsal blocking. If Leachman wandered off camera, it didn’t matter how great she’d been; the audience at home wouldn’t see it. Few
rehearsals went by without Sandrich screaming, “Cloris!” at least once. At that, she would turn into “a pillar of salt,” as Moore later recalled, but that didn’t stop Leachman from doing the same thing again a week later.

In his calmer moments, Sandrich explained to Leachman that no matter how great her acting was, it meant nothing if she wasn’t on her mark. Leachman put it another way: “I would always try to find some different way to do a thing and I suppose that Jay would then have to try to figure out how to get it on camera. I don’t want to get into a pattern because patterns deaden. I see some actors go dutifully to their spots, cameras on them, being a good girl or boy, and that’s not the stuff of greatness.” Sandrich, however, dealt with the fallout, and often got notes from the producers that asked why he let Cloris do what she did. All he could say in reply: “I didn’t. Cloris will do what Cloris wants to do.”

Leachman often arrived late for rehearsal because she was so busy squeezing fresh juice for her five children in the morning, packing lunches, and dealing with other strife at home, which could set the entire week’s production schedule back. She was juggling her large family and on-again, off-again marriage. She felt guilty and realized the others in the cast all knew their lines better than she knew hers. Ethel Winant, herself a mother, defended the actress to producers and CBS executives. “She has five children,” Winant would say. “She needs to be at home. She’ll get there when she can.”

Harper, however, was Leachman’s staunchest ally. Leachman loved that Harper was always saying, “That’s my girlfriend!” when she saw Leachman. It meant more to Leachman at the time than Harper knew, the feeling that she had a fellow woman on her side. Finally, Leachman, inspired by the friendship and support she felt from Harper, stood her ground against Sandrich. During the second season, when she was on the phone with one of her kids and she heard Sandrich scream her name, she said to him, “Would you ask me nicely? Then I would be happy to come.”

Now Leachman felt more secure asking for what she wanted from the crew, too; once, after she and Harper and Moore had blocked an entire scene, she protested. “Oh, my God,” she said to Moore. “We have to switch sides. You girls have such cute noses, and this is my bad side.”

“Oh, Cloris,” Sandrich sighed, but the women obliged Leachman and did it all again.

“I don’t know my bad side,” Harper cracked. “I think they’re equally not great.”

Harper could relate to Leachman, as she had her own difficulties with TV production. She had to learn how to stand behind Moore in a shot without stepping on her heels or blocking her, a skill she hadn’t learned in the theater. She was constantly refining her Bronx accent, often running up to the producers’ office to ask their secretary, New Yorker Pat Nardo, to say a word or phrase for her. She also had to learn how to take feedback from the producers. Harper’s actor husband, Dick Schaal, would counsel her when she came home to their new house in Westwood, distressed that the producers had criticized her: “Valerie, don’t think of that. It’s not us and them. They are Saint Bernards with brandy, and you are a stuck hiker. Help is on the way. They’re coming to make the show better.”

To assuage her anxiety, Harper grew obsessed with “keying” off furniture and props, always having something physical to do in a scene to make sure she was in the right place at the right time. She second-guessed her instincts and judged her own performances as they happened. In her theater days, she had been able to absorb the material slowly. Here on the set of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
she was often still struggling on Wednesdays, just two days before taping.

Once Harper calmed down, she was able to take the producers’ advice and improve with every show. One particular bit of wisdom about her tendency to overact stuck with her: “If you’re too presentational with a joke,” Brooks advised her, “you’re working without a net.” If you let the audience know you think you’re funny, and they don’t laugh, he
explained, you’ll end up embarrassed; if you deliver the funny line like a throwaway, and they laugh, it’s even funnier. Her casual laugh lines soon became one of her hallmarks as an actress.

Sandrich grew used to Harper’s quirks over time, and his confidence in her grew despite her lack of confidence in herself. “She’ll get there,” he’d reassure the writers and crew. And she always did.

“I tell you, this is a great country. You know what makes it great? Because you don’t have to be witty or clever as long as you can hire someone who is.”

—Ted Baxter

(1972–74)

When Ted Baxter—the show’s resident chauvinist, with his penchant for calling women “chicks” and “broads”—made a joke about filing his dates as simply “blond, brunette, or redhead,” Treva Silverman could not stand for the scene as it was written. Mary, she insisted, could not be part of it if she didn’t pointedly object to Ted’s behavior. “Either Mary can’t be in the shot,” she told Brooks and Burns, “or she’s got to have a rejoinder.”

The men were used to taking such corrections from the women they hired. In fact, they welcomed it. Silverman held the line on larger feminist issues, for the most part, while Susan Silver often set them straight on the minutiae of women’s grooming habits. During a discussion about one particular scene, for instance, one of the guys said, “Then Mary will go get cleaned up.” Silver objected: “No, women don’t ‘get cleaned up.’ That’s a guy thing.”

By the end of the first season, Brooks and Burns went from having
one woman on board—Treva Silverman—to having several on board, and several more on the way. Never before had so many women assembled to write one comedy series. Brooks and Burns went from being open to hiring women to being determined to disprove the long-standing belief that women weren’t funny.

Word spread, and by the third season, female TV writers started to materialize in front of Brooks and Burns at every turn. They came at the producers through mutual dentists. They showed up in the bleachers at rehearsals and tapings. They called from across the country, lobbying for jobs harder than McGovern and Nixon were begging for votes. They sent in half-finished scripts. They came through Brooks’s and Burns’s producer friend Garry Marshall, a generous mentor who respected women’s comedic talents. Marshall had a younger sister, Penny, who was very funny herself. (Brooks and Burns thanked Marshall by giving his sister a recurring part as Mary’s new neighbor in the fourth season. But Penny would soon leave it behind to shoot a new show for her brother,
Laverne & Shirley
.) The question became how much time Brooks and Burns could spend shaping aspiring female writers’ raw talent—few of them were as experienced as their male peers, because it hadn’t been easy for them to get hired before
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

Advertising copywriter Charlotte Brown found her way to
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
via the dentist, who happened to mention during her checkup that Jim Brooks was his neighbor and patient. She ran home to put together a package with her commercial reels and her spec script, which the dentist passed on to Brooks. Eventually Brooks called her and told her he hadn’t had time to look at any of it, but she was welcome to come to rehearsals and sit in the bleachers. She snuck out of her agency job by pleading a string of fake doctors’ appointments—the dentist, emergency surgery, anything she could think of.

Every time, the same thing: Brooks gave her a friendly greeting, but nothing more. Frustrated, she wrote another spec script and gave it to him.

Just a few years out of UCLA, where she’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an English degree, she’d already made one career change, and the script, if successful, would mean a second. Brown had grown up in the sprawl of Los Angeles after moving there from Ohio as an infant, but she’d remained insulated in a middle-class world, knowing few people in Hollywood. She was at least three degrees of separation from anyone with a recognizable name. (The closest she got to a celebrity was going to college with the daughter of one of Bob Hope’s writers.) Still, she’d longed for a career in television since junior high, the worst three years of her life. She’d spent her summers in a pink bathing suit, watching TV by herself. She’d enjoyed popularity in elementary school, but as high school approached, being smart lost its cool. She begged teachers to give her B’s just so she could fit in with the others, but it didn’t work. TV became her refuge.

By high school, she was already thinking
comedy writer
when anyone asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, but she didn’t dare say it aloud. Instead, she went with one of the few acceptable answers for girls at the time:
teacher.
She earned her English degree at UCLA, and taught high school while her boyfriend finished up law school. For two years, she loved the kids, but hated everything else about the job. Seeking more intellectual stimulation, she volunteered for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968, just months before his assassination. There, she met a woman who was an advertising copywriter. Even though the advertising business in Los Angeles was nascent at best, Brown couldn’t shake her fascination with this woman’s profession. She put together a portfolio of pretend ads, and in a few months she had a job. She wrote copy for Thrifty drugstore ads: “Colgate Toothpaste, 89 cents,” that sort of thing.

What came next was pure Hollywood. A few weeks into her new job, she wandered the halls of the ad agency office, bored, seeking the stimulation she’d believed she’d find there. The creative director invited her to help a group brainstorm ideas for a radio campaign for Bubble Up, a precursor to 7-Up. She suggested a character called “Bubbles
Upton,” a takeoff on Goldie Hawn’s popular dumb-blonde persona from
Laugh-In
. The client loved it, and Brown was catapulted out of the Thrifty account. The campaign proceeded until Hawn’s lawyers served Bubble Up cease-and-desist letters for imitating their client, but Brown’s course was set. She was a comedy writer.