Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A History of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (5 page)

Three summers later, Jim Brooks—now officially James L. Brooks, television writer—called Allan Burns, eager to impress his old pal. He’d just helped develop a pilot—a test episode, which determines whether the network will buy the show and air it—for a new series called
Room 222
. The groundbreaking program would follow an African-American high school teacher played by the suave Lloyd Haynes, among the few black lead characters in TV history. ABC, the show’s network, was in third place of three networks, and its programming department was run by the audacious Barry Diller, so it was scrappier than its competition and willing to take chances. The show had gotten picked up and
was going into production. “I want you to come see it,” Brooks told Burns. “I’m really proud of it.”

“You want me to write for it, don’t you?” Burns said, already worried he’d get sucked in. “And I’m not going to because I want to devote time to writing screenplays.”

“No, no, no!” Brooks protested. “Not at all. I just want you to see it—I’m screening it for a bunch of people. Would you come over and look at it?”

Burns agreed to go to the Fox screening room, to show his support for Brooks’s enthusiasm. He watched the show—an hour-long drama that focused on an American history class at the fictional Walt Whitman High School in Los Angeles—with Brooks and executive producer Gene Reynolds, along with four other producers and writers.
This is about the best thing I’ve ever seen,
Burns thought as he watched. It addressed the race issues at its core, but subtly. The cast, from Haynes to Michael Constantine, who played the principal, to Karen Valentine, who played a teacher, to the kids in the class, was impeccable. Burns could tell Brooks had done his homework before writing the script. Brooks had spent time at Los Angeles High School, and had gotten this portrait of a modern school just right. ABC had wanted to put a laugh track behind the show, but Brooks and Reynolds had refused; Burns thought that was admirable. He couldn’t wait to tell his friend how terrific he thought the show was. When it ended, he didn’t hesitate. “Okay, Jim, where do I sign up?” he said. “Because I’m not going to get the chance to write on anything anywhere near this good for a while.”

Burns became one of the show’s first freelance writers, still keeping his options open to write screenplays. The series gave him an office, even though he insisted he wasn’t technically on staff. He wrote half a dozen scripts.

Then, when Reynolds left
Room 222
to work on some other pilots, Burns gave in and became a producer, always happy to help out. He and Brooks now produced and wrote, side by side, for the first time.
They grew closer; they liked each other and everyone they now worked with, a great feeling. All of the writers and producers partied with each other. They had their dream jobs. Everything seemed to be working according to plan.

Brooks, however, couldn’t quite settle for just a dream job. Looking to expand on his newfound success, he worked on some other pilot projects. Burns stepped up to run
Room 222
full-time while Brooks pursued those other ideas. By fall of 1969, Burns was once again saddled with a television show he hadn’t meant to run. He’d been trying to avoid exactly this—a committed, full-time involvement that took him away from his movie writing projects—but it was worth it to work on a great show and help his buddy Jim Brooks achieve the visions of TV greatness that had once seemed so far out of his reach.

The two made an unlikely pair. Brooks, a thirty-year-old hippie artsy type, had a beard and beads that belied his past life in a New York newsroom. Burns, a clean-cut thirty-five-year-old, sported side-parted hair and Buddy Holly glasses. But they had the kind of working chemistry that won Emmys and soon attracted the attention of Grant Tinker, now the vice president of Twentieth Century Fox Television, the studio that produced
Room 222
for ABC. He was also the husband of Mary Tyler Moore, that comedic vision both Brooks and Burns had admired from afar a decade earlier.

That fall, Burns found himself sitting across a restaurant table from Grant Tinker, a quietly handsome man who looked exactly like you imagine a great TV executive would look—graying hair, a few perfectly placed wrinkles, dimples, aquiline nose. The lunch, per Tinker, was to be a secret. Burns wasn’t sure why, but he went along with it, since Tinker was something like his boss’s boss’s boss.

Tinker asked Burns whether he’d ever thought about doing another sitcom. Burns responded by complaining about the tough six-day-a-week, sixteen-hour-a-day schedule. “Grant, I’ve done it,” he told
the executive, thinking of his wife and young children. “It’s hard work. I don’t want to do another one.”

“Well, think about it,” Tinker said. “If you’re running it, you can dictate your own schedule.” Burns foolishly bought that argument and went back to his own office, near his home in Brentwood, agreeing to give it some thought.

Then he got a phone call from Brooks. “Have you been talking to Grant at all?” he remembers Brooks asking. “About doing another pilot?” The secret lunches had made Burns nervous. And now he was worried his buddy had gotten wind that he was engaged in discussions about another job behind his back.

Burns took his chances that the curious tone in Brooks’s voice meant this was no accusation of treason. “As a matter of fact, I have,” Burns replied, still playing it cool.

“Well, me, too. He’s been talking to both of us. What do you think he’s getting at?” Brooks asked, then answered his own question: “I think Mary’s going to do a TV series and he’s feeling us out. He loves us. He loves
Room 222
. That would be his style.”

“You’re right,” Burns said, relieved they were on the same side. “Let’s call him.”

Brooks put Burns on hold while he patched Tinker in for a three-way conference call. Then they confronted the executive: “Mary’s doing another show, right?”

Tinker confessed: He’d tried to handle the proceedings in what he called a “dark of night kind of way. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this on my Twentieth Century Fox phone.” But he’d have to tell his prospective writer-producers eventually, so it might as well be sooner than later. “We’ve made a deal. But not at Fox. Let’s get together and talk about it.”

As it turned out, Moore had signed on for thirteen episodes with CBS; the network had jumped at the chance to work with her, without even the faintest hint of a premise. Tinker wanted creative minds
with a fresh vision of what Moore could do, and he hoped Brooks and Burns would team up for the job. He wanted the kind of writers he could trust while he got out of the way. If one terrific writer was a good thing, he thought, two would make things even better.

Tinker, whom Brooks describes as a “heroic figure” for using his business acumen for artistic good, had made one crucial decision when his wife had signed with CBS: Moore and Tinker would form their own production company, called MTM Enterprises, to maintain some control of the show to which she’d hitch her fortunes. Of course, this meant funding their own production, making the series an awfully large gamble for its star. Her money, her reputation, and her future now depended on its success. Failing to make good would provide one more dramatic wallop to the star’s fragile state. But succeeding would make Moore not only a star, but a pioneer. At the time, female producers were rare. Putting Moore’s name on the new venture could still go either way—yes, she had some star power, but many men in the business still resisted the idea of women with real, executive power.

Moore had given Tinker a few stipulations about what she wanted in her new show, Tinker now told his producers. She wanted to play someone close to herself, because she didn’t trust her acting skills to go much further. For the same reason, she also wanted to make it an ensemble show; even if it was named for her, as was typical for sitcoms of the time, she wanted to surround herself with great supporting actors. Allowing focus to routinely pull back from its marquee star would become the show’s first major innovation, and its hallmark.

Brooks and Burns agreed to the job. Burns would have to postpone his movie-writing dreams yet again. He hoped this show was worth giving that up—and that it lived up to the faith Tinker had placed in them.

This kind of project could catapult Brooks’s and Burns’s careers to the next level of greatness, even the
Dick Van Dyke
level of Emmy-winning prestige, or it could flop quite prominently. But the pressure didn’t end
there. As they brainstormed ideas, they also found themselves heading a production company, since Tinker didn’t want his name on it until the show was ready to go and he could leave his job at Fox.

Tinker secured offices for Brooks and Burns, then turned them loose to do the rest of the work. They put in long hours, getting to their new office in the early morning Southern California sun and heading home well after dark. They hired the new production company’s accountant, as well as other employees. Most writers, even executive producers, did not take on this level of responsibility at a production company. But Brooks and Burns hardly knew any better. The arrangement, luckily, worked well, with Burns’s experience and pragmatism balancing Brooks’s visions of greatness.

Among their first hires was their secretary, Pat Nardo, who’d recently relocated from New York. Back east, the twenty-nine-year-old had been working for Talent Associates, a production company known for its work on Broadway as well as its gritty TV drama,
East Side/West Side,
starring George C. Scott. When Nardo left high school ten years earlier, she’d been the only girl in her class who wasn’t engaged. Her friends had been in awe of her: “I don’t have your courage,” they said. “I want to know what I’m doing every Saturday night for the rest of my life.” When she started working at Talent Associates, she considered it the most exciting place to work in the world. There she got to be far more than a secretary, and she learned what went into high-quality producing. The company hired a fair number of women (which is to say, more than one), though Nardo suspected that was because women made less money and seemed less threatening to David Susskind, the prolific producer and talk show host who ran the place.

In any case, the job allowed her a surprising amount of responsibility and adventure. Susskind would send her on last-minute trips with F. Lee Bailey—a lawyer famous at the time for defending Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was convicted, then later acquitted in a retrial, of killing his pregnant wife (and whose story became the basis for
The Fugitive
). Bailey was now hosting a talk show,
Good Company,
meant to
emulate Edward R. Murrow’s successful ’50s interview show,
Person to Person
. Nardo got her first passport as a one-day rush job so she could jet to London for shoots with J. Paul Getty and Sean Connery. On another trip, she flew, with a scotch-sipping Bailey at the controls, in a private plane to Chicago for a tour of the Playboy Mansion.

But recently she’d met someone. Chuck Barris ran ABC’s daytime programming department, creating hot new game shows such as
The Newlywed Game
for the network, and she’d fallen for him. He asked her to move out to Los Angeles to be closer to him, and she found a job on a film that was about to start shooting. When that fell through, one of Barris’s colleagues suggested she interview with these two comedy writers he knew who were developing a show. He’d heard they needed a secretary.