Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (43 page)

His visit to his ailing friend that day “had nothing to do with making up,” Asner says. “I went to pay my respects.” By this time, Knight had slipped much closer to death; he couldn’t communicate, and showed no signs of recognizing Asner.

“You’re still my brother,” Asner told him. Asner did not apologize. He didn’t feel he needed forgiveness. He didn’t visit Knight to make himself feel better; he went in hopes of making Knight feel a little better. He had no idea if it worked. “The sin was his,” Asner says. “I hope he left this veil of tears a little more lighthearted.”

It would, as the MacLeods had feared and Asner had known, be the last time any of them saw their friend. Two months later, Gavin got an urgent phone call while on the road with Patti in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The play’s producer came to him, crying, and said, “The Associated Press wants to talk to you right away.” Gavin knew immediately that the news service was writing his friend’s obituary.

Ted Knight died on August 26, 1986, at just sixty-two years old, after being stricken with an aggressive form of cancer. The Connecticut native and son of a
Polish immigrant barman had served in the U.S. Army in World War II, worked as a disc jockey, become a ventriloquist, and, finally, found his calling as an actor. In all, he’d played three hundred parts in various television shows, including
Gunsmoke, The FBI,
and
Get Smart,
but he would never quite separate himself from the role of buffoonish anchorman Ted Baxter on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

He’d remained married to his wife, Dorothy, throughout his career,
and left behind two sons, Ted and Eric, as well as a daughter, Elyse. His real-life family reached out to his professional family when it came time to plan the funeral. They asked his
Mary Tyler Moore
costar, Gavin MacLeod, to be among the speakers at the service.

MacLeod was anxious. He knew his strong religious beliefs could make some people feel uncomfortable. But he couldn’t turn down the chance to memorialize the friend he’d known since they met in that agent’s office back in 1957, when neither of them had a career or a proper business manager.

On August 28, 1986, the cast of
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
reunited for the first time since they’d gone off the air nine years earlier, to attend the funeral of one of their own. The private service in Glendale, California, prompted more laughter than tears as the mourners remembered Knight’s comic gifts. It also allowed the cast members to reflect on their own lives since the show. Some of them had continued success, some of them didn’t—but either way, everything had seemed a little harder, a little more painful, than it had when they’d spent seven years cocooned together in the protective shell of Soundstage 2.

The summer after
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
had ended, Mary Tyler Moore
didn’t know what to do with herself. The show had been her whole life. She had no real hobbies besides dancing, and all of her closest friends had been on the set. Ballet classes filled some of the void, as did therapy, but she mostly wandered through her days until Tinker returned home from work at night.

Tinker was off running the company that bore her name, MTM Enterprises. MTM was now hitting its zenith, producing hits such as
Newhart,
starring the company’s old favorite, Bob Newhart, this time as an author-turned-inn operator in New England. MTM’s medical drama,
St. Elsewhere,
earned lukewarm ratings but great critical acclaim, and its police drama
Hill Street Blues
was an across-the-board success that redefined the cop genre. The hit crime-solving dramedy
Remington Steele,
starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan as sexy detectives, added to the company’s long list of accomplishments.

Moore was now the official queen of a quality-TV kingdom, but she preferred to let her talented husband and producers do what they did best without her interference. “
Mary’s not a Lucille Ball,” one MTM executive said at the time. “She doesn’t get involved with the lights and the props and every aspect of production.” Soon, Tinker left the company’s everyday operations as well, figuring it could hum along just fine under the supervision of others. After eleven years of running MTM, he took a new job heading NBC. He’d had his first job at the network, and he’d returned for that brief period in the ’60s in New York. He thought it would be great to go back in the ’80s and end up on top. He liked ending up on top. As he would say, “It’s better than the other way, right?”

But he hadn’t forgotten the show that had made his company. In 1982, when ABC canceled
Taxi,
he lent a major assist to Jim Brooks when his old producer called him to commiserate. By the end of the conversation, Tinker had saved Brooks’s post–
Mary Tyler Moore
baby. He offered to put it on his new network, where it ran for another year. Tinker’s “extraordinary manners,” as Brooks says, had come to the rescue once again.

At the same time, however, Moore was dealing with a quick succession of tragedies. Her sister Elizabeth, nineteen years her junior, died of a drug overdose in 1978. Her son, Richie, died two years later when he accidentally shot himself with a faulty gun.

She and Tinker split up for good shortly thereafter.

Moore also experienced wild fluctuations in her post–
Mary Tyler Moore
career. More than anyone else on the show, she’d become entwined with her America’s-sweetheart character. She
was
her character in viewers’ minds, and there was little she could do to stop that. Having her name in the title of her now-classic show didn’t help matters.

Nonetheless, she tried to live down that legacy with another show
bearing her name. Once again, she returned to her original dream: to sing and dance. A variety series seemed like a good idea at the time, despite the critical drubbing of her variety special a few years back,
Mary’s Incredible Dream
. She maintained that
Incredible Dream
had been brilliant, if too avant-garde for TV audiences, and was willing to try again with a more traditional variety format. It would allow her to perform musical numbers and comedy skits, and it would, Moore thought, allow a natural transition from Mary Richards into other roles. This way, audiences wouldn’t be forced to accept Moore immediately as some
other
person, just as herself.

Alas, her show,
Mary,
lasted only three episodes, despite having ratings powerhouse
60 Minutes
as its lead-in, and despite a cast that included Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz, and David Letterman. Letterman, a struggling young comedian, was thrilled to work with Moore, whom he’d admired since
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. Hell, he was thrilled just to get a name badge that got him into CBS Television City and its commissary full of stars, where he could see the likes of Bob Newhart or Ted Knight eating tuna, corned beef sandwiches, and salad bar fixings. But the show didn’t make the best use of its future all-stars, particularly Letterman, whose sardonic humor was reduced to smirking through perky song-and-dance numbers. “
That was tough,” Letterman later said. “I knew my limitations, but this really brought them home. You know, it was, ‘You’re not a singer. You’re not a dancer. You’re not an actor. Get out of here. What are you doing? Get away from Mary. That’s her fruit. Don’t try and eat her fruit.’ ”

The show faltered from the start, trying to combine sincere musical numbers with the “edgy” humor that made
Saturday Night Live
popular. To wit, one memorable number had Keaton and Letterman dressed up like characters from a scene in
Deliverance,
singing the Village People song “Macho Man.” “It’s enough to make you cry,” critic Bob Moore wrote in
The Palm Beach Post.
“After five fabulous years with Dick Van Dyke and seven equally enjoyable ones with her own
show, Mary Tyler Moore is in trouble. Deep trouble . . . As for Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz and David Letterman, they should be thankful they have jobs at all, because it seems inconceivable people with the comedy acumen of MTM could so miscast their No. 1 star with such inferior talent.”

Variety shows were also falling out of favor, though the youthful
Donny & Marie
was still going strong. Even Carol Burnett ended her show that year.

Moore regrouped with another idea: She would turn her variety show into what she called a “
sit-var.” Later that season, she returned to TV in
The Mary Tyler Moore Hour,
a sitcom
about
a singing, dancing variety show star. “Surprisingly enough, that failed, too,” she later joked. Despite attempts to shore up ratings with crowd-pleasing cameos by the likes of Bea Arthur, Lucille Ball, and Dick Van Dyke, TV viewers wouldn’t accept her as a new Mary. The show premiered on March 4—hardly an auspicious start, as it came near the end of the “midseason replacement” season, when networks were already preparing their schedules for the following fall—and was canceled by June after eleven episodes.

Just one year later, however, Moore achieved one of her greatest career heights: She starred in Robert Redford’s screen adaptation of
Ordinary People,
playing against type. She got her first Oscar nomination with her portrayal of distant mother Beth Jarrett, who grows even colder after the death of one of her two sons. Redford said he got the idea to cast her when he saw her walking on the beach in Malibu and wondered about “
the dark side of Mary Tyler Moore.” Moore said at the time, “
I guess he was right to wonder about that, because there is, in fact, a dark side.” She related to the role, she later said, of a woman who was so brittle inside that she could alienate her own son, because of her “
self-expectation for perfectionistic, unachievable dreams” and her “inability to be a whole person and give it freely.”

Moore and Redford met to discuss the role early in the casting
process, before Redford went on to audition other actresses for three months. Finally, he came back to his original choice and offered her the part. After the film was released to great acclaim and award nominations, Moore ran into Jim Brooks on the street.
“Mary,”
was all he had to say for her to know what he meant. She accepted the compliment gratefully.

Though Moore had planned to attempt yet another sitcom in 1980, she decided instead to take a unique part in the Broadway play
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
The experimental piece features a quadriplegic main character who spends the play arguing for euthanasia, never moving during the performance. Tom Conti had originally played the role and won a Tony for it, but Moore agreed to take over for him instead of pressing her luck at another sitcom. She, too, won a Tony for her effort, a special award from the academy acknowledging the risk she’d taken with the role. The victory
took on extra significance for Moore because of her awful earlier experience with the stage adaptation of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. She’d finally conquered the unforgiving Broadway stage—for herself, and for television actors who weren’t taken seriously by the New York theater snobs. Joe Rainone visited her backstage at one performance to congratulate her, and she never failed to make him feel she was glad to see him.

Now single for the first significant period of time since she was nineteen, Moore
remained in New York City to live alone and find herself. She spent a few years finally playing Mary Richards in real life, feeling what it was like to make it on her own, renting a house on East Sixty-fourth Street. That didn’t last too long, however: Three years later, in 1983, as Brooks’s
Terms of Endearment
opened in theaters, she married her third husband, Dr. Robert Levine, whom she met
when he treated her mother for heart trouble.

Over time, Moore developed a habit of unwinding with
a drink or two before dinner and a brandy after, a pattern that started to catch up with her because of her diabetes. Her blood sugar would fluctuate with
each drink, exhausting her. In 1984, she
read about Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minnelli seeking help for their addictions at the center run by Betty Ford. Inspired, she decided to check in to break what Levine called a “
social drinking” habit.