Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (31 page)

As she got to know the cast, Engel learned one thing quickly: “With the exception of Betty, every single person on the show was like their character,” she says. “The writers take a kernel of what the person’s like and then shape it for however the drama needs to happen. Betty, her humor is that kind of sophisticated, almost lewd stuff she can do so well, but she’s so unlike that.” Engel had to admit she was a lot like Georgette—she seemed dippy but knew exactly what was going on, and could pull off a zinger when you least expected.

Knight, right in line with her observation, proved a bit of a challenge for her at times. She had difficulty connecting with him in a performance because, she says, his character was so self-absorbed. The two didn’t connect much offstage, either, because of their large age gap. Knight, who was Engel’s father’s age, had a son her age. But she saw the good in Knight, too. Though she didn’t feel close to him, she admired him, particularly his dedication to his family; she often thought of Knight’s wife, Dottie, as “the real Georgette.”

True enough, Leachman tells tales of Knight resisting beautiful,
young female fans. “There was a girl, he’d have liked to have gone to bed with her,” Leachman recalls. “He used to say, in that Ted voice, ‘I can’t . . . I could, you know. But I can’t.’ ” Knight also turned on the kiddie-show-host charm he’d perfected early in his career whenever kids frequented the set, including Leachman’s. Despite his better qualities, however, Engel says, “He was not my most fun one to work with. He worked in a vacuum, as opposed to Mary and Ed and Valerie and Gavin, who always connected with you with their eyes.”

Engel also had to get used to life in Los Angeles, both on the set and off. Brooks and Sandrich’s screaming matches alarmed her at first. Moore comforted her: “It’s okay,” she whispered during one. “They do like each other.” Engel also had to adjust to the driving culture of Los Angeles—or, rather, the driving culture had to adjust to her. She stayed in a hotel down the street from the studio during her first year on the job, and she would walk to work. As a young woman with plenty of energy, and a New Yorker used to walking everywhere, she enjoyed it, but Los Angeles streets have never been pedestrian-friendly; sidewalks will disappear and reappear with no hint of logic or concern for safety. One of the crewmembers saw her walking and thought she was too shy to ask for a ride; many on the set then got the same impression. But she simply liked to be vehicle-free.

Eventually, when her contract was extended beyond her first seven shows, she gave in and got a furnished apartment in the Hollywood Hills near her dance studio, and her sister gave her a giant, old Buick for one dollar; she called it “the Booper.”

She was thrilled to become a permanent addition to such a generous cast. She’d never get over how wonderfully they treated her. In one episode, for example, titled “Murray Can’t Lose,” Engel had to learn an entire dance sequence, which she worked on for weeks back home in New York. When it came time to shoot the show, the script ran eight minutes over time. Brooks and Burns contemplated cutting the dance scene, the easiest solution, but Asner and Moore asked the
producers to cut their own scenes instead. The producers obliged. Engel knew Knight wouldn’t have wanted any of his lines cut, so she was grateful for Asner and Moore’s acknowledgment of how hard she’d worked.

She felt like part of the
Mary Tyler Moore
family for sure now. So much so, in fact, that when Asner and MacLeod vacationed with their wives in Hawaii together, Engel’s parents, who lived on the Kona Coast, hosted them. Engel thought it was awfully cute that these big television stars went out of their way to find her parents in the middle of nowhere for a visit.

When the cast returned for the following season, Georgette and Ted married on-screen in a memorable, impromptu ceremony performed by a minister played by John Ritter, clad in tennis whites, at Mary’s apartment. Their marriage, though tested by Georgette’s unfounded suspicions of infidelity, would become one of the series’s few enduring romantic pairings.

And Engel got to be part of the growing “women over thirty can actually be on TV, too!” media storm, even though she was six years too young. A magazine reporter called the MTM publicity department, wanting to meet with Engel, Harper, and Moore for a piece about actresses over thirty, and Engel happily went along, even though she was thinking,
I’m not even over twenty-five!
No one ever knew the difference, and no one ever asked her age.

The real-life marriages on the set weren’t always as easy as Georgette and Ted’s, particularly for the couple at the center of it all.

In a sense,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had begun back on the set of
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
during the shooting of the pilot in 1961. Grant Tinker, then an advertising executive with the New York–based firm of Benton & Bowles, flew out to Los Angeles to watch the filming of the first episode of the show that his client, Procter & Gamble, was sponsoring. The dashing businessman, known for his stylishly narrow
ties and Protestant ethics, looked forward to watching Van Dyke work, though he didn’t know anything about the lady who was cast to play the wife.

Then he met her: Mary Tyler Moore. Tinker admired her ability to not come across as “actressy”—she seemed to him as real off camera as on, and he fell in love with her genuineness. He didn’t believe in love at first sight, but he fell deeply in love with her over time, and knew from that first meeting that something special could grow between them.

He asked her out the day they met, which happened to be the same day her separation from her first husband was announced in the Hollywood papers. “
I don’t think I should,” she told him. “I think some time should elapse before I start to see people.”

Tinker nodded in agreement and turned to leave, then doubled back. “Look, a friend of mine just gave me his house in Palm Springs,” he said. “Would you like to join me there for the weekend?”

“No!” she replied with a laugh. “You don’t get it, do you?”

A month later, though, Tinker—recently divorced himself—arranged for Moore to come to New York on a publicity tour. They spent time together and found they shared a serious attraction and admiration of each other’s professional drive. The match was made in overachiever heaven; they supported each other in their complementary careers. One time early in their relationship, for instance, Tinker returned to Los Angeles after a meeting in New York with advertisers about
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. He brought Moore a huge bouquet of red roses, but his message was at least as much business as romance: “Take these and put them at Sheldon Leonard’s feet,” he told her of the show’s legendary executive producer, “because he just gave the most wonderful pitch to Kent cigarettes and Procter & Gamble.”

Just a year after meeting, the two married and settled into a fairly regular life, not terrifically Hollywood. They had a nice house in the Hills and a
cook to handle dinner, but they spent most of their
downtime listening to music—opera, rock, pop—and reading—
Time, Newsweek,
Book-of-the-Month. Of course, they didn’t have much downtime. The longer their relationship went on, the more work they had to attend to and
the emptier it became.

Now, five years after launching
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
and MTM Enterprises together, and twelve years after getting married, their relationship had hit a kind of autopilot: It hummed along at high gear, feeding off their shared energy, mutual appreciation, and business interests. But it seemed their business interests were all they had in common these days. They kept their marriage so private, however—even from the
Mary Tyler Moore
cast and producers—that it came as a shock to everyone who knew them when they announced their separation.

Moore and Tinker never spoke in specifics to anyone about the temporary breakup, even on the close-knit set. They didn’t have a huge fight, they explained; that wasn’t their way. They just felt that their marriage had fallen below their high standards. Moore had suddenly become aware of her great dependence on Tinker, as her best friend and business partner. She felt she leaned on him too much. She was trying to figure out how to balance her independence with her ingrained habit of deferring to her husband’s dominant role. She admired the way her friend Valerie Harper maintained such effortlessly equal status with her own husband, Dick Schaal, though Moore wasn’t sure she could ever achieve that herself. Maybe it just wasn’t in her nature. “I allowed myself to be treated like his student,” she later wrote, “taking every one of his lessons on people, places, and driving very, very seriously.”

As that realization weighed upon her, she finally snapped at him one night after a silent dinner in front of the evening news: “Can’t you remember to put your knife and fork together on the dish when you finish?”

Tinker calmly suggested they separate, saying they had “poisoned the marriage.” He proposed waiting until the May hiatus in shooting
so as not to upset everyone at the studio. She countered that she didn’t want to pretend, and asked him to have his things out of the house in two days.

Moore and Tinker spent their months apart in dignified management of an uncomfortable situation. They still worked on the same lot, and Tinker ran the company whose signature production was her show. His presence at her show’s run-throughs and filmings felt awkward, but they handled it with characteristic dignity. Most afternoons, as Moore left the lot,
she’d wave to Tinker as he sat in his fourth-floor office. The two remained civilized, above all.

Their separation shocked no one more than their double-date partners, Betty White and Allen Ludden. The four went to dinner so that Moore and Tinker could explain their split to their closest friends. Moore confided in White about how much it hurt, and Ludden and White had their own kind of grieving period.

Five months later, something magical happened. Tinker called the Luddens and asked to take them to dinner, adding, “Would you mind if I brought a date?” They reluctantly agreed. They’d have to move on sooner or later.

The couple met Tinker at Chasen’s, where he said his date would be coming a little late from work. Then she showed up: It was Moore, and they had reconciled. Ludden and White delighted in watching Moore and Tinker drive home that night together up Benedict Canyon Road.

The following day at the lot, Harper lamented to Moore and White that it was her last on the set. She’d gotten her own spin-off show,
Rhoda
. As the three women sat together on the bleachers, Harper mused, “It’s so hard for me to leave this show. It’s a sad day.”

Moore took Harper’s hand and smiled. “You can’t ask me to feel very sad today,” she said. It was a good thing she had something to be so happy about; she would miss Harper dearly. Harper was
one of the few people Moore had felt comfortable opening up to.

Soon after reconciling, Moore and Tinker
moved into a new Bel
Air home. They felt that briefly separating had been beneficial, and recommended it to anyone they knew who had marital problems. They thought they were stronger for it.

Treva Silverman loved bringing Mary and Rhoda to life every week, and she loved breaking down barriers for women on the screen and behind the scenes. But the stability of her television industry jobs, starting with
The Entertainers
—the first time in her adult life that she’d had a regular paycheck and security and an office—gave her time to reevaluate. She realized that since being deemed a musical prodigy at five, she had done nothing but give of her creative capital. She played, she wrote music, she wrote scripts, she played some more, she wrote some more scripts. The thought struck her: She had to take in some of the world, or her creativity would just dry up.

But all the women writers—on the show, and even in the industry—looked up to Silverman. She had come before most of them. She had gotten promoted from freelance writer to story consultant, the first female with an executive title on a network sitcom. She also maintained an air of unassailable coolness. All of the other female writers wanted to hang around her, even though she was closer to the guys than anyone. She provided a laugh a minute. Gail Parent’s writing partner, Kenny Solms, would throw parties stocked full of comedy writers, where Kenny and Treva would make up musicals on the spot. Gail wasn’t such a great improviser; Kenny would call her the next day to tell her how terrible she had been at it. But Silverman was always at the center of the party. Could she walk away from that?