Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (24 page)

And now she’d finally gotten Jim Brooks to read one of her scripts.

He called to tell her. “God, this is awful.”

But he added, “You do have a great ear for dialogue, and that can’t be taught.” The next time she came to rehearsal, he gave her a stack of scripts to study. She pitched him and Burns ideas every week from then on, and in January 1971, they bought one. She skipped out of the office, saying, to no one in particular, “I’m a comedy writer for television!”

The story she’d pitched had Mary dating a gorgeous guy she met at a ski slope who turned out to be less-than-smart. The script ultimately wasn’t shot—though a later episode would have a similar story line—but Brown was now officially a
Mary Tyler Moore
writer. And she’d get her first episode on the air at the beginning of the following season with a story line about Mary’s couple friends splitting up.

Brown’s break illustrated the difference between Brooks and Burns and the many men who had run sitcoms before them: They were willing to foster the talent of any and all women who wanted to write for them, as long as they saw unique potential and a distinct point of view. At a time when the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild were only just considering forming women’s committees, Brooks and Burns were already hiring women left and right. In fact, they badly wanted these women’s contributions.

After all, while Brooks and Burns knew how to write a great, character-driven comedy, they didn’t know anything about being single, thirty-something women—the kind of women who were both their main characters and their most enthusiastic fans. “Allan and I, as straight guys, we don’t do that pantyhose and nail polish stuff,” Jim
was fond of saying. “I know there is a wealth of comedy in my wife’s purse, but I can’t access that.”

Gail Parent, a thirty-year-old writer, was another woman who helped them do that. She showed up from
The Carol Burnett Show
to seek work with her partner Kenny Solms. Until coming to
Mary Tyler Moore,
Parent felt quite like Silverman did on
The Entertainers, The Monkees,
and everywhere else she had worked. Namely, alone. Parent didn’t always mind, though; it was fun to be the only woman around. It made her feel special.

Parent had met Solms at NYU. He had memorized everything Mike Nichols had ever said, and she had memorized everything Elaine May had said, so they made a perfect pair. They started improvising together, and writing some of their bits down. They would sit in fancy New York apartment lobbies waiting for producers and comedians to come home so they could offer their writing services.

That didn’t pan out. But they eventually found a less creepy route to success: They wrote a comedy album that did well enough to get the attention of Carol Burnett and her husband and producer, Joe Hamilton. The next thing Parent and Solms knew, they had a seven-week deal to come out to Los Angeles and try writing for
The Carol
Burnett Show
. If they did well enough to stay on another thirteen weeks, their salary went down. Another thirteen, and it went down again. Still, they thought it sounded better than hounding people in their lobbies—they took the deal, and Parent made history as one of few women writing for Hollywood variety shows at the time. It turned out to be a smart move: Once the pair worked for Burnett, offers to write for other shows began to pour in, even as their base salary decreased. Just as Parent’s role model Elaine May was producing and directing her first movie,
A New Leaf
—a film that would usher in a new era for female directors—it looked as if Parent was on her way to similar success.

Parent was also slaving away on a novel she hoped to publish, but in the meantime she needed a source of steady income. Parent couldn’t wait to try her hand at
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. She had never seen anything that dealt with women so realistically and relatably, so she was thrilled when she and Solms got hired. Once she got the chance to hang around the set, being around other funny women was also freeing for a woman whose mother used to tell her, “Try not to be so funny—men would rather be romantic on a date than laughing all night.”

Pat Nardo, Brooks and Burns’s secretary, also had loads of funny thoughts that Brooks and Burns encouraged her to put into scripts. At first, her main job was taking notes on their brainstorming sessions. As she shot down ideas she didn’t think were good enough, they realized what a sharp comedic sensibility she had. “Come on,” they’d chide her, “write it down.” She refused unless she thought it was truly funny, and her high standards prompted them to try harder. Soon they knew a joke wasn’t funny unless Nardo wrote it down.

The turning point in her career came when she read the guys parts of letters between her and her friend Gloria Banta, whom she’d met when she lived in New York in the early ’60s. One day Brooks and Burns said, “You guys should try writing together.” It didn’t seem like such a crazy suggestion. Both women had worked in show business in New York. They always said they both had the “Gotta dance!” spirit Gene Kelly sang of in
Singin’ in the Rain
. Nardo’s overprotective mother wouldn’t let her follow her original dream of being a ballerina, but she could no longer stop her daughter from putting on a show.

Nardo had been working for Brooks and Burns for a year and began considering going back to New York after the San Fernando earthquake shook Los Angeles in 1971. She and her bosses had grown quite fond of each other—Burns called her at home just after the quake struck at 6 a.m. to make sure she was okay. But things weren’t
working out with her boyfriend Chuck Barris. As aftershocks from the quake continued for weeks, Nardo thought,
What am I doing here?

Around the same time, Burns walked her to her car after a late night at the office and said, “I think you can do it.” He wanted her to seriously consider writing for the show. Nardo liked the idea, but she didn’t want to do it alone. So she jetted back to New York to write with her best friend, happy to also return to her hometown.

Banta worked as an associate producer for media mogul David Susskind. She was in love with her city and her job, and she didn’t mind working on this little side project with Nardo. But she had no interest in TV writing as a long-term career. She didn’t want to move to Los Angeles, which just didn’t have as much character as New York as far as she was concerned. She hated warm weather and the nonstop Hollywood haze that choked Los Angeles. She preferred New York’s stage life to any other kind of show business, but writing with Nardo for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
one of her personal favorites, would be fun. Banta and Nardo called each other “Broadway Bess and TV Tilly.”

For three weeks, they met every day under a tree in Central Park and hammered out an episode of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

They based their script on a true story: New York mayor John Lindsay’s assistant had asked Nardo out, back when she worked at Talent Associates and she was living with Banta. Nardo rarely dated, and she’d had a crush on this guy from afar for six months after seeing him in the paper, so the two women went all out to get her ready for her big date. After hours of dressing her up like a paper doll, they finally got a call from the doorman saying her date had arrived, and Banta pushed Nardo out the door.

He picked her up there in a limo, but said he’d have to get out of the car a block down on Fifty-sixth Street to use a pay phone and check on things at work. When he got back in from his call, he told her he was very sorry, but he had to go tend to the Students for a Democratic
Society riots at Columbia University. They were getting much worse than expected. He dropped her off after an approximately five-minute date, and they never saw each other again. Nardo laughed hysterically the whole ride back up to the apartment in the elevator, knowing how funny Banta would think it was. That became an episode called “The Five-Minute Dress,” in which Mary dates a busy politician.

Nardo sent the script in to her bosses back in Los Angeles; they bought it and shot it. But Nardo decided to stay in New York. She got a job working for an executive in charge of daytime programming at ABC named Michael Eisner; she’d be heading up the network’s new
After School Specials
series. She scored immediately, coming up with a movie about a girl who wanted to play Little League. Banta wrote the script for
Rookie of the Year
with her, and child actress Jodie Foster starred. The
Hollywood Reporter
ran a front-page story about Nardo’s rise to the executive ranks, she recalls, under the headline, “It’s a Woman’s World at ABC.” She was vastly underpaid at $265 a week for helping manage the daytime programming department, but she was still the only woman in programming.

She wore out her welcome with the network’s other female employees, however, when she made a joke at the first women’s group meeting that “any meeting announced in the toilet belongs in the toilet.” She was trying to urge the ladies to stop posting meeting notices in the women’s restroom and instead use interoffice mail, but they didn’t appreciate her humor. She soon quit the women’s group.

Treva Silverman had found heaven working for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Brooks and Burns admired her work, which exceeded even their high standards, while many of the other young women writing for the show had to try and fail and try again in hopes of getting their scripts right. She displayed her uniqueness from her first episode, the second one to air in the series, in which Mary and Rhoda invite men they know over for an impromptu get-together, hoping to score dates. At Phyllis’s urging, Mary invites an old boyfriend she hasn’t spoken
to in years named Howard Arnell (played by Harper’s husband, Dick Schaal). He is so enamored of Mary from the second he walks in that he doesn’t acknowledge Rhoda, Rhoda’s “date,” and her date’s wife (oops). “Excuse me, I’d like to introduce myself,” Rhoda says to Howard. “I’m another person in the room.”

The line represented what Burns would call “pure Treva.” Neither he nor Brooks would ever have come up with it. Silverman also particularly molded the Rhoda character, because she so strongly identified with her, and took Rhoda in directions Brooks and Burns had never anticipated when they created her.

She also helped mold the show’s signature combination of comedy and drama, displaying a deft touch with the show’s more dramatic episodes. Her script for the 1973 episode “The Lou and Edie Story” won an Emmy and brought divorce to the forefront of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Better yet, it depicted a scenario typical of 1970s splits influenced by the growing women’s movement: Lou’s wife, Edie, played by character actress Priscilla Morrill, leaves him to find herself. “When I married you I was nineteen years old, and I thought you were the most wonderful man I ever met,” she tells him. “I still think so. But I want to learn more about the rest of me. Not just the part that’s your wife.”

The
Los Angeles Times
called the episode a “
breakthrough”: “If you watch
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Saturday on CBS, things will look the same, but you will probably feel differently,” columnist Mary Murphy wrote the week before the episode aired. “You’ll laugh, as you usually do between 9 and 9:30 p.m., but you may also notice a tight lumping in the throat or tears welling in the eyes as many in the audience did at a live taping.”