The show’s writer-producers clearly felt as I did. The day after the Emmy Awards, they took out a full-page ad in Variety that read: “Without Mary Tyler Moore, it would just be The Show.”
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FIVE
My life changed incrementally during the first season of the show. Slowly, people began to recognize me on the street. This delighted my mother whenever I visited her in San Francisco. She introduced me around her neighborhood of Polk Street as “the famous Rhoda from TV.” She didn’t care if she was talking to someone straight off the boat from China who had never seen the show. She would point to me and proudly say, “She’s Rhoda!” It made me happy to see her showing off her successful daughter. I wasn’t a ballerina, but this was close enough.
It was a great feeling not to worry about where my next paycheck was coming from. Although Dick and I now had money, we didn’t live extravagantly; we never spent lavishly. I was a successful television actress, but I didn’t feel like “star.” A star is Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Lana Turner—someone with glamour and beauty who must live glamorously and beautifully. I was me with a little more capital and freedom.
I clearly remember the first time I bought a piece of clothing without checking the price tag. I was shopping in a sharp little boutique on La Cienega called Bazaar CM and came across some great clothes cut in a 1940s style. I kept picking tops to go with trousers, then a jacket, then another jacket, and one more. When all was said and done, I carted home a bag stuffed with clothes. I had spent over five hundred dollars—the most money I had ever spent at any one time on clothing. Although it felt overly extravagant, it was satisfying to know that I could afford to spend money that I had earned myself.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was not my only source of income. I was still playing in Story Theatre at the Mark Taper Forum, and the producers, directors, and cast members of Mary Tyler Moore all came to performances and seemed to love the production. In fact, Dick and many actors in the company, such as Paul Sand, Hamilton Camp, Dick Libertini, Mary Frann, and Peter Bonerz, were all cast in Mary Tyler Moore productions.
When Story Theatre went to New York in 1970, the TV show was on hiatus, so I was able to open on Broadway and play there for a number of weeks before filming resumed. It was a dream come true. Story Theatre was a huge hit. I felt incredibly fortunate to be in both a hit TV show and a successful Broadway play at the same time. And I felt both productions were so extraordinarily good, I couldn’t believe my luck.
When I returned to Los Angeles, pal Linda Lavin stepped into my role in Story Theatre until the television season wrapped, and then I immediately went back into the show on Broadway. An actor’s life is often either feast or famine, and this was a time of feast. I will be eternally grateful that my employers were willing to work around my schedule so that I could perform in both productions.
As a cast member of Mary Tyler Moore, I still thought of myself as part of a small theater troupe. We had a little company of players, and each week we learned a different play, just like in summer stock. Even when I wasn’t in a scene, I would watch rehearsal. Whenever the scene involved a bit part—a waitress, delivery boy, stock clerk—I frequently stood in for the actor in rehearsals and run-throughs (performers with smaller roles weren’t usually called in until Thursday). I took on all sorts of roles, which was helpful to Jay, because he had a body to work with, and the actors had someone to play off of. It was great fun putting on accents and affecting funny voices. This came to be known on-set as “Valerie’s Repertory Theater.”
One time after I’d stepped in for a construction worker, I ran across our first assistant director, John Chulay, standing with his back pressed up against the side of the set like a spy from an old movie. He shook his head disparagingly and whispered, “Weak. Very weak.” I laughed so hard that I disrupted the rehearsal in progress. Critics—they’re everywhere.
The atmosphere on our set was a happy one. Mary’s name was a continual source of laughs. Often referred to as Mary Tailor Moore, she said she should go into alterations. While Mary worked in England, the Brits called her by one hyphenated name, Miss Tyler-Moore. But it was Gavin’s seven-year-old daughter, Julie, who dubbed Mary “Tiny Miley Moore.” We called her Tiny for a long time, which was quite fitting given that svelte figure. To keep it in shape, and for health reasons, Mary was diligent about exercising. She arranged for her ballet teacher to come to the stage to give her lessons during lunch break. Such discipline! On Mondays and Wednesdays, a couple of crew guys would set up a ballet barre and a large freestanding mirror. Knowing my dance background, Mary invited me to join her. No matter how hard I pressed the issue, she never let me contribute a penny toward the cost. “I’m doing it anyway, Val,” Mary said. “And I’d love the company.”
I think it was Ted who asked, “Hey, Mary, doesn’t Grant mind that you’re in dance clothes with the crew guys around?”
“Nah. They’re all eunuchs.” That was the Mary Tyler Moore humor. We laughed so hard, we couldn’t start class.
Mary always looked slender and darling in her leotard and pink tights. Obviously, I’d put on weight since my days as a dancer on Broadway. To distract from that, I always dressed head to toe in black. One afternoon when Mary and I were finishing class, Cloris exclaimed, “My God, Valerie, your ass is massive.” Not the height of tact but true. Cloris didn’t intend to be mean; as a devoted girlfriend, she simply wanted to inspire me to lose weight.
For a while, I had been putting off going on a serious diet because a large part of Rhoda’s humor was her struggle with weight. I felt I had to ask permission from Jim and Allan before I started to reduce. Naturally, the guys had no objection. “We won’t do fat jokes,” they said. “We’ll do diet jokes.”
It was Mary who gave me the push I needed to get my act together. “Go ahead, lose the weight,” she said. “You don’t want to be my sidekick all your life, do you?”
“Yes! Yes, I do,” I replied. “And so does everyone else in the world.” But her support was all I needed to begin watching what I ate. With the green light from everyone, I had no excuse to stay chubby.
Up until that point, there wasn’t a fad diet I hadn’t tried. Back in New York, perennial dieters Arlene and I went on the Stillman diet, with two other roommates, Michelle Evans and Nancy Cheevers. Michelle went on to become a very successful cookbook author (Fearless Cooking for Men, etc.) and Nancy an extraordinary cook, introduced me to that Bible of the 1960s, The Joy of Cooking—which was way before Michelle started writing her books! Our apartment was very food focused. The Stillman method was a sort of demented precursor to the low-carb craze. I remember seeing Dr. Stillman, a cranky old guy with wire-rimmed glasses, being interviewed by Dick Cavett and extolling the virtues of eating lamb and beef slathered in butter. He preached that you could consume as much red meat and fat as you liked so long as carbs never touched your lips.
Cavett asked, “What about heart disease?”
“Go to a cardiologist,” Dr. Stillman replied. “With me, the weight comes off.”
As tasty as his meal plan was, it didn’t help me drop a pound. Could have been the mashed potatoes I ate with the steak.
After the Stillman diet, I tried the grapefruit diet—eating half a grapefruit before every meal with the vain hope that the acid in the citrus would burn whatever fat I consumed. There was the watermelon juice fast, the cabbage soup three-times-a-day cleanse, and the hard-boiled egg and prune diet. Any one of these programs might have worked had I possessed the fortitude to stick with them long enough. But I always seem to fall off the wagon. I was never a night-eater, but I do overeat—sneak-eat, car-eat, “perpetu-eat.”
Luckily for me, when I decided to get serious about dieting, Gavin MacLeod was beginning the Weight Watchers program. We decided to partner up and keep each other honest. And we knew we would laugh. It was during this time that I discovered that when I was ballet dancing at Radio City Music Hall, he was working there as an usher. Not only that, he
married a Rockette!
Weight Watchers was all about selection and portion control—fuel the fire but in moderation. I had a little scale and weighed out my “legal lunches” at home before coming in to work. If I was eating out, I brought my scale to the restaurant. I weighed whatever I ordered, cut off the permitted amount, and fought the urge to eat the rest.
Gavin and I motivated each other. We ate salad with fat-free dressing, celery, carrots, and the permissible portion of chicken. Weighing my food was almost a fetishistic ritual, and it forced me to be conscious about amounts of food eaten and to be wary of overeating. As Rhoda’s great line, inspired by my buddy Mary-Frann, expressed so perfectly, “Why am I bothering to eat this piece of chocolate? I should just apply it directly to my hips.” On Weight Watchers, eating became a healthy, constructive endeavor instead of a destructive compulsion.
Gav and I were doing very well on the program and were already losing weight. One day at lunch, while I was setting out my little tray of preweighed food, he walked over with a diet soda. When he popped it open, the can began to spout like Old Faithful. Gavin and I stared at the can as it bubbled and fizzed.
I took a closer look, and my jaw dropped. “Gavin,” I said, “that’s not diet. That’s regular soda.”
“It’s a miracle,” Gavin shouted. “A miracle!”
“It is. It’s a sign from God: ‘You two have been so good. Don’t drink this.’ We’re saved!” We laughed until tears ran down our cheeks. Gavin and I had both attended Catholic school and were well versed in miracles and signs from heaven. Listen, whatever it takes to keep you on the program!
No matter how hard I fought it, the food demon often rose up and grabbed me. During the second season of Mary Tyler Moore, Dick and I attended an Oscar party at a friend’s house. There was an enormous spread—a tempting buffet of lasagna, pesto pasta salad, garlic bread, and all those deliciously fattening things that Weight Watchers prohibited.
My diet was working for me. I had lost a considerable amount of weight, and I was determined to stick to the program. When everyone hit the buffet, I whipped out my little container of poached chicken and dressing-free salad and ate virtuously.
I was proud to have conquered my demon. After dinner, on my way to the bathroom, I passed through the kitchen and caught sight of a tray of gorgeous brownies all stacked in a tempting pyramid. The food demon began to roar. I ignored it.
When I emerged from the bathroom, I passed those brownies again, but this time I couldn’t resist. I shoved a brownie in my mouth. It wasn’t as tasty as I’d hoped. This didn’t deter me from grabbing another. Before I knew it, I’d eaten three brownies, telling myself, They were small. I quickly rearranged the display so it wouldn’t appear that any were missing.
A little while later, our hostess brought out the brownies. Before passing them around, she said, “I just want to warn you, there’s a little something special in these brownies. If you don’t like marijuana, you might want to skip them.” I don’t even drink, but I had unknowingly eaten three pot brownies! For two days I felt like I was in a sleepwalking daze. That’s what I get for sneaking sweets!
Three brownies notwithstanding, I lost a lot of weight on Weight Watchers. However, like many former chubettes, I never felt like a slender person and carried my old self-image in my head. Our writers, especially the gifted Treva Silverman, used this disconnect in people when writing Rhoda. When she loses weight and wins a beauty contest, Rhoda has trouble dealing with it.
Besides being two of the best comedy writers to come down the pike, Jim and Allan, along with the writing team they assembled, created scripts that told the truth about what it means to be human. They always prioritized humor above anything else. Season after season, they brilliantly deepened the relationships between characters on The Mary Tyler Moore Show; they never allowed any character to become static but allowed for growth and change.
From time to time the writers introduced new characters, such as Gordy the weatherman, played by the wonderfully deft John Amos. Dear, unique Georgia Engel came in as Georgette, Ted Baxter’s girlfriend. Then the phenomenal Betty White joined us. She was warm, charming, and a complete professional. From the day she joined the cast, it was as if she’d been there all along. Betty was utterly marvelous in her portrayal of Sue Ann Nivens, “the Happy Homemaker,” whose fussy pinafores camouflaged a man-crazed predator. Betty does have a naughty streak and to this day plays the racy, elderly lady part brilliantly. I can assure you, it’s all an act. Betty is as sweet as can be. She just knows what’s funny.
The writers did not shy away from hot-button issues of the day—divorce and homosexuality, to name two. But aside from one episode, they never made an issue the central focus of the story line. The exception to that rule was an episode on discrimination in which Mary was invited to play tennis at a country club where Jewish Rhoda wasn’t welcome. Mary Frann, my costar in Story Theatre, played Mary’s beautiful but bigoted friend. After the filming wrapped, Allan said, “This isn’t us. This is good for Maude; this is good for All in the Family. We’ll touch on issues only as they occur in the lives of our characters, not as the focus of the plot.” The core idea of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was to portray people bumping up against people emotionally and intellectually—people coping with others, confronting others, making space for others in a realistic manner. The writers didn’t want to make statements. They wanted to reflect life.
Jim and Allan and their entire team maintained the highest level of smart comedy—characters and plot—without resorting to slapstick, vulgarity, or cliché. Rhoda was a perfect example of this fine balance. She was Jewish but the writers refused to have her speak Yiddish or satirize her ethnicity for cheap laughs.
Though Jim and Allan were firmly in charge, they also welcomed our input on how we would deliver certain lines. We were able to offer our emphasis and intention, and if it was funny, the guys welcomed it. After all, we were the ones who had gotten to know each of our characters intimately. This was particularly interesting in the episode when Phyllis tries to set up her brother, Ben, with Mary, only to discover that he’s more interested in hanging out with Rhoda. Naturally, this horrifies Phyllis. At the end of the episode, Phyllis tells Rhoda in her own spectacularly condescending way that she’s okay with her brother marrying Rhoda, to which Rhoda replies, “Phyllis, I’m not going to marry Ben.”
“Why not?” Phyllis says defensively. “My brother is successful. He’s handsome. He’s intelligent.”
“He’s gay,” Rhoda says.
Before filming, Jim, Allan, and I had a discussion with Jay about how Rhoda should deliver the line. Should she break the news to Phyllis gently? Should she whisper it, to be discreet? I felt Rhoda would be matter-of-fact and not tiptoe around the issue. We all agreed that Rhoda didn’t think Ben’s being gay was a bad thing. It just made marriage impossible: As in, he’s a priest. He’s married. He’s moving to Tibet.
The audience didn’t see it coming. They roared. The laughter went on so long that Cloris and I had to keep on acting silently until she could deliver her rejoinder: “Oh, Rhoda, I’m so relieved.” Anything was better to Phyllis than her brother marrying “dumb awful” Rhoda.
While the producers avoided material that was overtly political, there was one instance when politics intruded upon the show. During the third season, a small group of us went to Minneapolis to film some exterior shots. In particular, the producers wanted to show Mary and Rhoda emerging from their iconic Victorian house.
The woman who lived in the house wasn’t a fan of the show. In fact, she disliked it intensely, because for the past year people had been constantly ringing her bell and asking if Mary was home. She knew that the producers wanted to film another sequence at her house, and she was ready.
When we showed up, there were enormous sheets hanging over the entire front of her house that read “Impeach Nixon.” It must have taken her hours to paint the banners and then hang them. I admired her spirit and effort, not
to mention her message. Nevertheless, there was no way we could film the house. We quickly regrouped and shot elsewhere in downtown Minneapolis.
After the first season, The Mary Tyler Moore Show really caught on. From time to time we hit the number one spot in the broadcast ratings, and if we weren’t number one, we were solidly in the top ten. Emmy nominations for all the actors, writers, and directors kept rolling in. While I was aware of the show’s success and Rhoda’s popularity, it was still a surprise to win two more Best Supporting Actress awards.
The second time I won an Emmy, Cloris was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a comedy. When the presenter announced that there was a tie in our category, I prayed it was between Cloris and me. In the brief second before they announced the winners’ names, I imagined the two of us running up to the stage together. Then they called my name and that of . . . Sally Struthers! The camera caught me mouthing her name in surprise. Nothing against Sally, but I was hoping to share the moment with Cloris, my Mary Tyler Moore partner in crime. My gifted friend went on to win nine Emmys, more than any other performer, and has earned twenty-three nominations.
My success on Mary Tyler Moore led to a lot of other opportunities. Because of my schedule on the show, it was possible to do outside work only on hiatus. Television movies were being produced hand over fist, and I appeared in many of them. I was also cast as Alan Arkin’s wife in my first big theatrical film, Freebie and the Bean. We shot in that jewel of a city, San Francisco, and I played Alan’s Mexican-American wife. The movie posters read: “Guess who’s playing Consuelo?!”
Working during hiatus, especially in movies, gave Dick and me more financial freedom than we’d ever expected. Dick was continually doing guest spots and film roles, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which filmed on location in Czechoslovakia. He took Wendy with him because I was busy working. What an experience for a young American kid to have the opportunity to travel behind the Iron Curtain. Since we were both working consistently, we bought a very pretty house in Westwood on Lindbrook Drive. This house will always have a special place in my heart for being the first house I ever owned.
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