Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (26 page)

Brooks read it when he received it, and was impressed enough to pass it around to colleagues, including producer Garry Marshall. Brooks also sent Miller a letter to tell her that she wrote better than most writers who worked in Hollywood—and that meant something, given that he rejected a fair number of sample scripts he received from aspiring writers. Brooks told her his writing staff was full, but he’d passed her sample on to some friends in the industry because she’d written some very funny dialogue. Eventually, Marshall’s writing partner, Jerry Belson, called her at work and asked if she could be on a plane to Los Angeles in two weeks to write for
The Odd Couple,
one of television’s more respected comedies.

Standing on a mezzanine in the office where she worked, she looked down on all the people in cubicles and knew her life was about to change. She had to overcome some minor resistance from her mother over the move, but Marshall called to reassure her. And Miller flew west. She felt like she was living a Hollywood story even as it happened. Jim Brooks had made her believe in happy endings.

When Miller got to Los Angeles, she worked as Marshall’s apprentice, the only woman in the office at the time on
The Odd Couple
. Star Tony Randall would give her Neil Simon and Shakespeare plays to study for script structure. She was excited to shop in Beverly Hills at the Rodeo Drive designer boutique Theodore and carry her Louis Vuitton purse. She felt like a real Los Angeles girl.

Marshall and Belson paired her up with Belson’s sister, Monica Johnson, and advised them to write scripts together. In the winter of 1973, Miller came back from lunch one day to the
Odd Couple
office
to find a telephone message on her desk from Ed. Weinberger. She and Johnson had gotten their first assignment for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Their episode, about Mary’s very bad day as she prepares for the annual Teddy Awards banquet, was to air that February. Her first day on the set, Miller couldn’t believe she was seeing the actors she’d adored, now here in the flesh before her, saying her words. She went to a store in Beverly Hills and bought the same jeans Mary Tyler Moore had. She copied Moore’s haircut.

Miller felt that the show had changed her not just professionally, but personally. The show taught her to be who she was. Mary had left her ex and found herself a life and career on her own. As Miller started her own adult life, she longed to be independent like Mary. She had felt the character’s impact in a way the older women writing for the show hadn’t. She went right from resisting the Ann Arbor police at the University of Michigan to working for Jim Brooks, and Mary Richards was the reason.

Seeing the producers at work impressed Miller even more. As a young writer, she thought it was pure magic to watch the creative flow of Burns, Brooks, Weinberger, and Silverman. She loved to listen to them probe into the characters’ psyches. As she witnessed them work, she says, she realized why
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was different from
All in the Family,
or even
M*A*S*H
. The
Mary Tyler Moore
producers were doing something no one else was: “drilling into human beings,” as she called it. That was why she and other fans felt so connected to the show.

Miller loved that Brooks and Burns asked her, Johnson, and Silverman, throughout their hours and hours of story meetings with the producers over chicken salad sandwiches, “Would she feel that way? Would she do that? Is that a girl joke?” Brooks
wanted
girl jokes, unlike many other producers. He and Burns
wanted
women around, and Miller could feel it.

Despite being nearly a decade younger than Mary and Rhoda, Miller and Johnson soon got a chance to work their own lives into a
script in which Mary’s twenty-something boyfriend invites her over for a party at his place with his friends. The girls got to write in all kinds of stuff about how people their own age acted, to represent hippies and other people they knew. Brooks and Burns wanted to use them as a source to get at the younger counterculture movement.

Miller and Johnson even got a friend of theirs hired for a bit part when they wrote that “a girl with red hair, white skin, and a big nose is sitting on the bed” at the party. The producers had to give the role to their friend because the stage direction was so specific. Their script also created a boutique for Mary and Rhoda to visit in search of “younger” clothes, the kind of place they regularly shopped. Miller and Johnson just knew that the girl behind the counter at a store like that would be reading
Siddhartha
. They put it in the script. “They wanted us to deliver what we knew of our world,” Miller says. “They wanted the truth out of us girls. ‘Let’s get some girls together and see what they think and do and say’—that’s the premise of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
”

Of course, sexism hadn’t magically dissolved overnight from television’s airwaves to reveal a new egalitarian order. A 1973 TV viewer
could still find talk show host Jack Paar needling guest Goldie Hawn about her flat chest, commercials declaring that “a woman should be soft all over,” airline ads inviting customers to “come and fly” the stewardesses, and the
Dean Martin Show
featuring an all-girl singing group called the Ding-a-Lings. Only two women starred on network dramas at the time: Peggy Lipton on
Mod Squad
and Susan St. James on
McMillan and Wife
. And even though women were advancing at MTM, relatively few women worked in Hollywood overall—and fewer held a position as high as Silverman did.
Of the Writers Guild’s nearly three thousand members, just 411 were women.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had 25 female writers of 75 total freelancers and staffers, an astonishing percentage in 1973;
The Partridge Family
was considered progressive for having just 7 women among its 76 writers.

And even on the
Mary Tyler Moore
set, not every man felt as open-minded
as Brooks and Burns did. Asner, for one, bristled in the show’s early days every time he saw a female name as the author of a script. He still proudly identified as a chauvinist in the first and second seasons of the show. Once he argued for hours on the set with Harper about what he saw as the silliness of using “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.” Harper insisted on being called an “actor”—“
you never hear people say ‘doctresses’ or ‘writeresses,’ ” she explained. She would not back down on this point. Her progressive attitudes would later land her on the
cover of
Ms.
magazine, which praised Rhoda as “one of the few realistic women on television” in an interview with Gloria Steinem. But Harper did not sway Asner’s feelings toward women.

Something else did. When the Emmys for the second season were given out in September 1972, Asner won for his performance in an episode about Rhoda redecorating his place—written by Susan Silver. He thanked Silver and Silverman by name in his speech, and again via a personal note later. “Without them,” he quipped to the Emmy audience, “I’d just be another pretty face.” To top it off, Silver got to attend the Emmy ceremony that year with her husband as her date.

Miller, the show’s youngest hire, was now using her new job to gain access to a rollicking social life in Hollywood. She hung out at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. The club
had just opened in 1972 in the space recently vacated by the nightclub Ciro’s, where Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, and Frank Sinatra had once frolicked. It had become the primary scene for aspiring comics; Jay
Leno would soon meet David Letterman there. Miller lived in nearby West Hollywood, as did several aspiring standups, and was one of the few among her new friends who had a job. She paid a comedian named Al Franken to teach her tennis, just so she could give him some money without hurting his pride. She treated everyone to drinks and dinners.

At night she hung out with Garry Marshall’s sister, Penny, and comedian Jay Leno at the coffee shop across the street from the Comedy Store, until 3 or 4 a.m., just hours before she’d have to get up for work.

As Marilyn and Penny sat across the street waiting for their friends to come off the stage, Marilyn ate chocolate chip cookies while Penny knitted. They gawked at
Led Zeppelin, the Who, and the Rolling Stones as the groups smoked in the parking lot between the club and the Hyatt hotel next door (known in those days as “the Riot House”). Mel Brooks’s cohorts Rudy De Luca—the club’s co-owner with Sammy Shore—as well as Barry Levinson and Buck Henry, passed through.

To all of them, Miller seemed a fascinating enigma: a funny, attractive woman who had a job in comedy. She knew she was the queen of the hop. Her friends’ whole lives depended on waiting to go onstage at the Comedy Store to try out their latest material, and they cared what
she
thought because she was a real, employed comedy writer. They all watched each other’s acts, then went out and critiqued them. After hours of this, Miller retired to her sparse apartment to sleep on a mattress on the floor for a few hours before heading to work. She didn’t have the time or inclination to buy a real bed.

Her days with her partner, Monica Johnson, turned out to be a different kind of crazy. Johnson had a wicked sense of humor, but no writing experience, so Miller was in charge of their collaborative efforts. At twenty-six, Johnson had already been married three times. Her most recent husband had been a clockmaker, so she had purged her home of all timepieces. Miller had to remember to bring a watch when they wrote at Johnson’s place. Johnson would show up in meetings with her hair rolled around orange-juice cans—a low-budget version of curlers—still dressed in her nightgown because she’d locked herself out of her house. Because such things were commonplace in her life, Johnson simplified her writing approach: “I’ll just think of funny things,” she told Miller, “and you can put them in if you want.”

Miller considered herself a serious writer, so if she was to be partnered with Johnson, this seemed the best method to her as well, since it gave her ultimate control. Miller made the rules of their partnership even though she was twenty-two and Johnson was twenty-six. And her rules were strict.

Miller refused to follow one common practice of comedy writing: typing “JTC”—meaning Joke to Come—when one can’t think of a good gag and so resolves to do that later. “Marilyn Miller doesn’t do Joke to Come,” Miller would say. When the duo wrote their episode about Mary dating the younger guy, for instance, and Mary and Rhoda visit the youthful clothing shop, Rhoda asks the shopgirl, “What’s the name of this store?” The writers wanted to think of a hilarious name for the kind of place that sold potpourri and books about how to find your inner soul. But they wouldn’t settle for JTC on it. Miller turned to Johnson—this sort of thing was Johnson’s department, for sure—and said, “Well, what is it?”

They sat for three hours in silence thinking of the name of the store. Finally, Johnson turned to Miller and said, calmly, as if it were completely obvious: “Shot Down in Ecuador, Junior.” Miller bolted out of her chair, screaming and laughing and jumping up and down. Only Monica could think of that phrase. Miller would never understand what went on in her partner’s head. (Years later,
Tonight Show
writer Herb Sargent would say, upon meeting Miller, “Shot Down in Ecuador, Junior, huh?” Miller treasured the compliment, even though it was for her partner’s contribution.)

Despite her success, Miller resisted becoming a true Hollywood insider. She preferred staying a little outside the mainstream, like her comedian friends. She got an invitation to Chasen’s, the famous Beverly Hills restaurant, for an industry Emmy-watching party thrown by the major studios. She and her friends thought it was dumb, and hatched a plan to go dressed in gorilla costumes. They didn’t understand that the people at the gathering could make or break their careers.

Luckily, they abandoned their costume idea and Miller wore an evening gown, but still brought her petulant attitude. The West Coast head of the International Famous Agency, Frank Konigsberg, greeted her at the entrance saying, “Good evening, it’s so good to see you.”