Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (28 page)

At last, in season three, Mary got to grow up, too. “
Now she’s aggressively feminine instead of passively feminine and has healthily accepted the modern-day concept that it’s perfectly normal for a woman to be happy though she’s 32 years old and unmarried,” Weinberger told an interviewer at the time. “Instead of just reacting shyly to everyone else, the Mary character now yells at people and fights back.”

The producers learned to skillfully walk a line between innuendo and explicitness that often allowed them to push boundaries while acting innocent—a reflection, perhaps, of their main character herself. It was a trick they’d learned by accident when they’d convinced CBS executives to accept the idea of Mary having once lived in sin instead of having gotten divorced. Now they used this kind of sleight-of-script—leaving out explicit information to imply a range of possibilities—to handle other complicated issues. An early draft of the script for the episode in which Mary stays out all night included an exchange with Rhoda about what had happened on her long date: She and her beau had talked until dawn. “
In the romantic glow of sunrise, did he propose?” Rhoda asked. Mary replied, “Yes, but not marriage.” The excision of the exchange in the final cut of the episode allowed viewers to imagine for themselves what happened: Likely, their thoughts were naughtier than anything the script could have contained.

Similarly, in the Pill episode,
producers decided to nix a dialogue between Mary and her father about her sexual history, keeping the focus on their discussion about their own relationship. With that cut, they avoided any lines that implied judgment of Mary’s Pill-popping and let viewers imagine how her father felt about the disclosure—or whether he noticed it at all.

By this time,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had made lady sitcoms hot commodities. CBS itself tried to duplicate its success with Sandy Duncan, first with a show called
Funny Face
in 1971, which lasted only half
a season before
Mary Tyler Moore
was moved up an hour on Saturday nights, to 8:30 p.m., to replace it. The official word was that Duncan was undergoing eye surgery, but the show’s format was scrapped when the star returned the next fall with a revamped version called
The Sandy Duncan Show
. Neither gelled with viewers or critics, who said Duncan’s character was too traditional and innocent for ’70s television. Its own executive producer admitted, “
It was awfully old-fashioned in a year when
All in the Family
and
Mary Tyler Moore
were doing realistic comedy.” ABC attempted to get in the game with
Shirley’s World,
starring Shirley MacLaine, in 1971.
Diana,
starring Diana Rigg, hit the deteriorating NBC in 1973.

None lasted more than a season, but then came
Maude
. The show’s star, Bea Arthur, made for a startling screen presence, the anti–Mary Richards. She didn’t work, and she wasn’t single, but she wasn’t a standard housewife, either; she was a liberal activist on her fourth husband. Stately, imposing, and graying, Arthur had appeared onstage mostly in classical roles, such as Lysistrata, who famously led a protest against war in which women refused to have sex with their husbands, and Clytaemnestra, who betrayed and murdered her husband upon his triumphant return home from the Trojan War. As Maude says in one of the later episodes, she was a woman with “the innocent glow of Donna Reed . . . and the crisp features of George C. Scott.”

When Mary Richards stayed out all night, the national debate that ensued played out on
Maude
. Like all of Lear’s sitcoms,
Maude
took on the issues of the day, and it wasn’t about to ignore those issues just because they came up on another sitcom. “Look what happened on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
recently,” Maude’s stuffy next-door neighbor, Arthur (Conrad Bain), huffs. “She went out on a date and she stayed out all night.”

“All night?” Maude responds, dripping with sarcasm. “Our little Mary?”

“You can sneer all you want, Maude,” Arthur says, “but as Mary Tyler Moore goes, so goes America.”

Maude had come into being as an adversary to Archie Bunker in a 1971 episode of
All in the Family
. Maude showed up to help her cousin, Edith Bunker, take care of the family when everyone in the house had the flu. But naturally, Maude had clashed with Archie quite spectacularly on political issues. After the episode was a hit, creator Norman Lear decided to give the character a spin-off.

From the beginning,
Maude
tore up traditional television social mores. Maude’s twenty-something daughter, Carol, dated a succession of men and spent the night with them. Both Maude and Carol identified as feminists. Maude and her husband, Walter, often played in contrast to the traditional neighbors portrayed by Bain and Rue McClanahan. Maude took tranquilizers, Miltown and Valium. Her husband drank too much.

But nothing made bigger waves than the episode that in November 1972, just two months into the show—and perhaps not coincidentally, during the traditional “ratings sweeps” period, when Nielsen was tabulating viewership—addressed abortion. Maude, at forty-seven, had prime time’s first legal abortion in an episode titled “Maude’s Dilemma.”
Two CBS affiliates refused to show the episode, but the brouhaha just brought more attention to the show. “
Maude is commercial TV’s first striking manifestation of the frustrated housewife archetype,” the
Los Angeles Times
said. “Her abrasiveness, while funny to viewers, is actually the expression of all her energy that has never left the home.” Arthur called her character “the Joan of Arc of the middle-age woman.” Fan letters poured in for her, gushing that she was “saying the things we’ve always wanted to say.”

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
suddenly had a sister in TV feminism, and even shared some of its female writers with
Maude
. But
Mary
also strove to define itself in opposition to the new hit. “
We’re not
Maude,
” Moore told an interviewer at the time. “I feel strongly that sex is a private thing not to be shared with an audience—or even with friends.”

Writer Sybil Adelman, who penned episodes of both
Mary Tyler
Moore
and
Maude,
noticed a difference between writing for the two camps. The
Mary Tyler Moore
producers constantly picked her brain for womanly experience; the
Maude
producers just gave her assignments. “Norman more than the others treated us as writers,” she says, “and not
women
writers.”

Brooks didn’t worry much about
Maude,
and insisted his writers stay true to the original vision of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. They would not become an issue show just to keep up with the competition, even if the issue was feminism and the competition was directly referencing them. Moore agreed: “
The show is opening up, widening its perimeters, developing with the times,” she said at the time. “The characters are evolving. We’re getting into things like divorce and affairs, but we’ll never go where Maude and Archie Bunker have gone. That’s not our show.”

Some current social issues, however, couldn’t help but sneak into
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s realistic, 1970s landscape. Most notably, a discussion of gay rights tiptoed into a 1973 episode in which Phyllis’s brother, Ben, comes to town. Though Phyllis tries to set him up with Mary, he spends a great deal of time with Rhoda. By the end of the episode, a despondent Phyllis confronts Rhoda about her misgivings. “Ben and I aren’t getting married!” Rhoda responds. “He’s not my type!”

“What do you mean, not your type?” Phyllis says. “He’s attractive. He’s successful. He’s single.”

Rhoda concludes: “He’s gay.”

Phyllis hugs Rhoda. “I’m so relieved.”

Silverman thought it was a great idea for the show to address the gay movement, which was still very much on the fringes of mainstream culture. But the gay issue itself found its way into the script by pure coincidence, and the rest of the episode was constantly evolving throughout the week of shooting, changed in some way by almost
every major player involved. No one was sure until it was finished whether it would be a disaster or a triumph.

As written by Jenna McMahon and Dick Clair, the original script called for Ben to take up with Rhoda instead of Mary for the week and thus cause Phyllis great consternation, with no references to sexual orientation. When actor Bob Moore showed up to play the part, however, Sandrich saw an opportunity: The actor himself was gay. After the first rehearsal, Sandrich went up to the writers’ office and argued for a rewrite. He wasn’t seeing romantic chemistry between the actor and Harper.

Brooks liked the idea, but called Bob Moore to make sure it was okay with him. The actor happily agreed. It would become one of TV’s first overt admissions that a character was gay, and that it was more than okay to be so—it was something to be appreciated, to laugh with, not at. The joke worked, but not at the gay character’s expense.

The creative momentum built from there. When Harper read the line in which Rhoda tells Mary that Ben loves red, she thought of a fire-engine–colored Courrèges dress that she herself owned. She wore it in the episode without further comment—the implication being that
Rhoda
wanted to please Ben even though she acted otherwise—and the audience went crazy when they saw it.

When it came time to shoot the confrontation scene, Harper made a more meaningful suggestion that stuck. Sandrich directed her to break the big news to Phyllis lightly, but Harper said, “No, I think it should be factual, like he’s a priest or he’s married or he’s going to Tibet for ten years.”

It worked. When she delivered the killer line—“He’s gay”—the show got one of its longest studio-audience laughs ever. Brooks said they’d have to cut the laugh in editing because it would be too much for the viewers at home—it went on for a good forty-five seconds or so. Harper and Leachman had to pause for that long while they stayed in character and kept the scene alive. Leachman’s face went on registering
shock, confusion, and then understanding. Harper took a sip of her drink. They waited out the laughs just as they’d been trained to do in the theater. They knew they had to let the audience members get it out of their system or no one would hear the next lines.

The controversial plotline didn’t thrill the network, but by that time
All in the Family
was tackling such issues weekly, and burning up the ratings charts doing it. And
Mary Tyler Moore
had earned enough of a reputation that the executives simply warned the producers, “
Be careful that the show does not go outside the bounds of its natural perimeters.”

The next year, however, the show pushed those perimeters, just a little, yet again. A 1974 episode came the closest the show ever would to addressing Watergate by featuring our little Mary thrown into a jail cell full of hookers when she refused to reveal a journalistic source under court order. “What are you in here for?” one cracks. “Imitating a Barbie Doll?” A few episodes later, the hooker (played to memorable comedic effect by Barbara Colby), whom Mary befriends, gets out of jail, too, and wants to pal around on the outside. Mary encourages her to find ways to make a legal living, perhaps following her passion for fashion design. Her first project: a dress for Mary that clung to her every curve and completely bared her midsection. The joke was obvious even to those who didn’t analyze it too deeply. Juxtaposing Mary’s good-girl image with prostitutes was inherently hilarious.

The episode became a hit, with shockingly little backlash.