Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (36 page)

She would be whoever she was, maybe even whoever she wasn’t. She would test her fears, test her limits. Be and do things she never would be and do in Real Life. Because this would be Experimental Life.

She had always been careful about decision making, planning in advance. When she went on a trip, she would pore over schedules, hotel ratings, guidebooks, checking out each detail. Her first week in Paris, however, she packed an overnight bag, went to the nearest train station, and got on the first train that was leaving. She stayed on until it had reached its final destination, which was Lyon, walked into the first hotel that had a vacancy, explored the town, and spent the night. The next day, the same thing. The first train leaving Lyon. She got on, and then got off at the last stop. Grenoble, then Milan. The trip lasted six days.

While she was living in Copenhagen she joined an improvisation group for English-speaking actors. She had always been terrified of acting, and thought a little private improv group might help. (Her singing and piano playing didn’t count—there was always a piano between her and the audience.) The director of the group liked her acting and asked her if she would star in a production he was mounting at an English-speaking theater, the Mermaid.
Not for nothing was I voted Best Actress at Lawrence High School,
she thought to herself at the first preview, as she stood behind the curtain trembling and praying she wouldn’t pass out.

At a hotel in Mykonos there was a handwritten list of places to go, among them, a nude beach. A nude beach? Exactly what she would never ever do. So she decided to do it. The first bus left at 8:30 a.m. She delayed and delayed until 4 p.m., then, determined, hopped on the bus. When the bus dropped her off, she walked resolutely onto the beach, not looking left or right, put down her towel, and then, with a flushed face and clenched teeth, took off all her clothes—standing,
even!—and sat down, nude, on the towel. She thought she would die. Then she noticed that a lot of the people were looking at her. What? Was her body that good? Or—
uh-oh
—that bad? When she got up enough nerve to look around her, she saw that everyone was dressed. Fully clothed. It was so late that they had gotten dressed to take the last bus back.

She lived in Amsterdam in a hotel that had no closets. She lived in Copenhagen with a Danish family who had a parrot who kept talking back to the television during the pauses. (During the film of
Hamle
t
: Laurence Olivier: “To be—” Parrot: “TEW BEEE.” Olivier: “Or not to be.” Parrot: “AW NOT TEW BEE.”) In Yugoslavian restaurants, she arbitrarily pointed to items on the menu, not having a clue what kind of food would appear on her plate. She rode a motorcycle on a winding coastal road, clutching the back of a waiter she met in a fishing village in Portugal.

Friends wrote to her from home—when was she coming back? She felt she would know when it was time to go back home: when she got tired of living in Europe.

She was walking along a street in Copenhagen, and was mesmerized by a photo in the window of a travel agency. Wherever that photo was taken, she wanted to go there next. She went into the store. “That photo—where is that?” “Oh, that’s Lucca. In Italy.” Treva gasped. She had been to Lucca. Two weeks before. She realized then that she would never get tired of living in Europe. It was time to go home. She had ended up staying two and a half years.

When she returned, she would find a television business radically different from the one in which she’d started her career nearly a decade earlier.

There was no doubt that female protagonists had come a long way thanks in large part to Mary Richards. They’d come so far, in fact, that they were no longer seen as unique, as was apparent with
Fay
’s cancellation. Reflecting this change, many of the writers who had helped
build
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
into a phenomenon had dispersed around the world—like Treva Silverman—and across the country to test their cachet on other shows and in other genres.

Marilyn Suzanne Miller moved to New York when producer Lorne Michaels asked her to be on the writing staff of his new late-night sketch show for NBC,
Saturday Night Live
(the job Treva had turned down to return to Europe after the
Ladies’ Home Journal
luncheon). Miller was one of only three women on the original team. It felt far different from working for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
the land of orderly desks and regular schedules. Hard drugs were everywhere, far beyond the occasional after-hours pot haze at
Mary Tyler Moore
. Her old friends from the Comedy Store had moved up the showbiz ranks, gotten jobs at
The Tonight Show
and sitcoms, and had enough money to buy cocaine.

When Michaels called to offer her the job, she was planning to marry the boyfriend she lived with and write sitcoms forever. “There were so many great sitcoms to be written,” she says. “It just never ended.
Barney Miller, Welcome Back, Kotter
. You would just do it and do it and do it. The need for material was endless then.” She also got an offer to be a story consultant on
Maude
while she weighed the
Saturday Night Live
opportunity.
Maude
was a guaranteed six-figure deal versus
Saturday Night Live
’s $750 per week, and no assurance that the show wouldn’t be canceled. She took
Saturday Night Live
anyway. She won an Emmy for her efforts.

Writer Susan Silver, who’d gotten her start in the first season of
Mary Tyler Moore
but turned down MTM’s offer to produce
The Bob Newhart Show,
had escaped the suffocating Hollywood scene altogether. And even though she’d once abandoned her career with MTM to focus on starting a family with her husband, they’d since split up. She was now thirty-two and living the Mary Richards life in a two-room sublet on New York City’s East Fifty-eighth Street. She traded on her looks, personality, and pedigree with TV’s most respected comedy to make connections and score media attention. She charmed her way
into a lunch at the old-school media haven ‘21’ with a writer from
Esquire,
who penned an entire column that, she says, “made” her. Robert Alan Aurthur anointed her “the most beautiful, talented, beautiful, talented writer in television.”

She even got to be featured in her own “Dewar’s Profile,” an ad campaign for the whisky that told the world of her love for
The Diary of Anaïs Nin
and tennis and declared her “honest, determined, and intelligent.” She got a case of Dewar’s for her trouble. She handed the bottles out to friends as Christmas gifts, as she had developed an ulcer that prohibited her drinking. Seven years into her career, she still got so nervous at pitch meetings that her stomach was disintegrating. She had to swig Maalox before each pitch, though she didn’t mind letting the producers and executives see the bottle of antacid. She figured it engendered sympathy.

There was a much bigger reason for Silver’s anxiety: As the
Fay
cancellation indicated, the TV industry had become a confusing beast to serve. Did it want edgy or safe? Did it want to please those young viewers who loved controversial shows, or did it want to please the protesters who were vocal about hating them? The industry itself, as a whole, clearly had no idea. In one 1975 TV column, for instance,
Washington Post
critic Benjamin Stein complained about the aimlessness of the current lineup. NBC’s
The Family Holvak
made that wholesome Walton family “
look like the Gestapo.” A
Hogan’s Heroes
copycat, ABC’s
On the Rocks
glorified prison life but wasn’t funny. And even MTM’s own
Doc,
about an older doctor in a poor New York neighborhood, was deemed “syrupy and cloying.”

A game of executive musical chairs ensued as the networks panicked over their conflicted priorities. And
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
’s network savior, Fred Silverman, was among the first to grab a new spot: He abandoned CBS just as it faltered, taking a job at struggling ABC instead. He would program against the schedule he’d assembled, the schedule with which CBS had dominated the early ’70s. He felt
his work at CBS was done and was looking for a new challenge. One of the ironies of success in television is that it leaves executives little to do once they’ve achieved it. It also means that anything that doesn’t go perfectly will be deemed a failure. ABC was younger and scrappier and could use his help—it offered him a chance to be a savior all over again.

Silverman knew he needed to take ABC in the opposite direction he’d once taken CBS. His new network simply couldn’t compete with what CBS did best: those urbane, topical comedies. He tried something else instead: sex and escapism. He figured he’d just try a few shows and see how it went. Television programming is an inexact science—trying out a bunch of stuff, seeing what sticks, and throwing out the rest. The law of averages, as Silverman said, meant something had to work eventually—when it did, the network, and the entire industry, would follow.

His new schedule delivered sooner than he would have dared hope. He promptly boosted ABC to number one with shows such as
The Six Million Dollar Man, The Captain and Tennille,
and
Three’s Company,
quite a feat after CBS’s years of domination. The other networks scrambled to catch up, to please viewers, advertisers, politicians, and activists—and ended up pleasing few with their unmemorable fare. “
I think of commercial television like Times Square,” former CBS News president Fred Friendly said in a
Newsweek
article titled “Why Is TV So Bad?” “In trying to make more money, the lowest common denominator was catered to. And now TV entertainment, like Times Square, is nothing more than a slum.” CBS president Robert Wood, the onetime champion of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
offered this as an explanation: “You sure don’t start out to make a bad show. But safer and on the air is preferable to different and off the air.” The loss of one ratings point in a network’s seasonal average could cost $20 million in advertising.

Pressure came from outside the business, too. Conservative groups amplified their criticism of TV’s edgy content, and discovered the power of the Federal Communications Commission complaint. The
bureaucratic organ
received two thousand complaints in 1972; it received twenty-five thousand in 1974. So the FCC—charged with licensing stations, and therefore with policing their commitments to the public interest—stopped short of outright censorship, but pressured the networks into agreeing to a “family viewing” period for the first hour of prime time: Between 8 and 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, programming was to be free of sex and violence, a broad order. The networks, wary of censorship accusations as well, presented the idea as their own:
In a December 1974 letter, CBS executive Arthur Taylor told the National Association of Broadcasters’ Television Code Review Board that he was concerned about a recent surgeon general’s report that found a link between TV violence and children’s violent urges. “What I’m hoping for is that we can discover new creative devices that can sustain action, adventure, jeopardy, and threat without using cruelty and brutality,” he told the
New York Times
amid the controversy.

The change, however it came about, sparked an outcry among producers and writers, who felt their creative freedom (and, some claimed, their First Amendment rights) slip away. No one seemed to doubt that violence was not the only element of drama that would be curtailed during the forbidden hour. Public reports about a meeting a month before Taylor’s letter, between the FCC and the networks, indicated that FCC chairman Richard E. Wiley had suggested the TV executives reduce violence
and
sex in their programming, particularly during the early evening when families might be watching. All the new guidelines said was that the Family Viewing Hour shouldn’t include programs “deemed inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience,” leaving “appropriate” open to wide interpretation. Programming codes at CBS and NBC at the time, for instance, allowed
hell
and
dammit,
while ABC did not; CBS let
Good Times
character J.J. use the phrase “big mother” all the time, while ABC nixed that one as well.