Mary Tyler Moore died January 25,
2017 in Connecticut. The star
of two of television’s most beloved,
iconic, and influential sit-coms, a shrewd
businesswoman and powerful producer,
Oscar nominee for a type cast shattering dramatic role, philanthropist, activist, and feminist was
80 years old. She had been suffering complications of Type 1 diabetes in recent years which
had left her nearly blind. Few actresses
have been as loved by fans and show business insiders alike,
Moore
was born on December 29, 1936 to a comfortably
middle class Catholic family in Brooklyn,
New York. When she was eight years old the family
moved to Los Angeles where she
decided to become a dancer at age 17
while attending Immaculate Heart High
School in Los Feliz, California.
She
got her first break as Happy Hotpoint, a tiny dancing elf on
appliance commercials during aired during broadcasts of the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. She auditioned
for the role of Danny Thomas’s
oldest daughter in Make Room for Daddy, but was turned
down because “no daughter of mine could have a nose that small.” She became the sultry voiced receptionist on Richard Diamond, Private Detective
who was only shown from the waist down, and featuring Moore’s shapely dancer legs.
| Mary as the dancing elf Happy Hotpoint in Ozzie and Harriet commercials. |
By
the late ‘50s Moore was appearing regularly as a guest star in numerous TV series including, Bourbon Street Beat, 77
Sunset Strip, Surfside Six, and Hawaiian
Eye—all detective shows from
the Warner Bros. assembly line—as
well Wanted
Dead or Alive, Steve Canyon, Thriller, and Lock-Up. Finally it was Danny Thomas, Sheldon Leonard’s partner in the production
company who remembered the “girl with three names” and recommended her to him
Sheldon Leonard for the new show he
was developing with writer/comedian Carl Reiner.
The
Dick Van Dyke Show, which premiered
on CBS on October 3, 1960 was something different—it split its time and attention between Rob
Petrie’s—Van Dyke—job as head writer of a comedy/variety show and his home
in suburban New Rochelle, New York
with his beautiful and somewhat neurotic young wife, Laura.
In this it echoed the show
biz/domestic split of the classic I Love Lucy and Thomas’s Make Room for Daddy. The couple did have a child, a grade school age
boy named Ritchie, but plots seldom revolved around him and he
did not even appear in many episodes. At home the story was all about Rob and
Laura, played by raven-haired Mary Tyler Moore.
Although
Van Dyke had a certain youthful
Midwestern charm, Moore was noticeably
younger than her husband which was explained
in backstory episodes showing
Rob meeting her while serving as a sergeant
in an Army entertainment troupe and
she was a 17 year old dancer. That
background also allowed Moore to dance in the series, both in the living room
of their home and with other cast members in productions for the mythical Allen Brady Show. It also showed of her long legs, but
not as on Richard Diamond in short skirts. Instead they were tightly encased in capri pants, a choice Moore herself insisted upon because unlike previous
domestic icons on TV like Harriet Nelson
or Donna Reed, “real housewives
don’t vacuum in full skirted dresses and heels.” Sponsors and the network were mortified and fearful but Moore took the considerable
risk of sticking by her guns. It was a modest
but real assertion of independence and even feminism.
Women, it turned out, loved
the pants and they became a fashion
rage. As for the men, they thought they looked just
great on her despite—or because of a “certain cupping under” which emphasized the shape of her butt.
The
show ran for 5 seasons and could
have gone on but Van Dyke wanted to concentrate
on his increasingly successful movie
career which already included Bye, Bye Birdie and Mary
Poppins.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was nominated for 25 Primetime Emmy Awards and won
15 including a nod to the
program as Best Comedy and Best Achievement in Comedy, for Reiner
as a writer and producer, for Jerry
Paris as a director, and to all
of the principal cast members.
In
2002, it was ranked at 13 on TV
Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Shows of
All Time. And has been in continual syndication or on basic cable since its first run.
During
the run of the show Moore married CBS producer Grant Tinkler. It was her
second marriage. The first to the “the boy next door” Richard Carleton Meeker in 1955 produced a son, Richard Jr. That marriage ended in divorce in 1961. She married Tinkler a little more than a year
later.
Moore
moved on to movies under contract
with Universal Pictures where she
made 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967 with Julie Andrews, and the 1968 films What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?
with George Peppard, and Don’t
Just Stand There! with Robert
Wagner. Memorably she played a nun opposite Elvis Presley in Change of Habit in 1969. That flick was a box office disappointment on first release but has become a cult favorite.
Meanwhile
Moore and Tinkler formed a new production
company, MTM Enterprises in 1969 and successfully
pitched new sitcom to CBS for the 1970 season. The Mary Tyler Moore Show turned out
to be even more successful than The Dick
Van Dyke Show and was culturally
significant in profound ways.
In
the show Moore portrayed Mary Richards, a
thirty-something single woman who arrives in Minneapolis to start a new life and career.
Just what she was doing since presumably
graduating from college is never quite clear but the lyrics to the show’s catchy
theme song, Love is All Around by prolific 70’s tunesmith Paul Williams indicate she may have had a bumpy ride.
How will
you make it on your own?
This world is awfully big, girl this time you’re all alone
But it’s time you started living
It’s time you let someone else do some giving.
Love is
all around, no need to waste it
You can have a town, why don’t you take it.
You’re gonna make it after all
You’re gonna make it after all.
Mary
landed a job as sort of a Girl Friday in the newsroom of a third rate local TV station and
launched a career in which she would
steadily advance first to a news writer then to a producer.
Earlier Marlo Thomas had
been the first to portray and “independent single woman”—if you forget about
early television’s Our Miss Brooks
and Private Secretary—in That
Girl! But Thomas’s character was
an actress/model who sometimes took odd jobs rather than a career woman and
much of the show focused on her Doris
Day-like virginal relationship with her boyfriend. Although The Mary Tyler Moore Show did not spend
a lot of time on Mary’s love life, it was tacitly
understood that she was no naïve
maiden saving herself for the right
man. One episode made headlines when Mary casually decided to go on the Pill.
Mary
became the focal point of her work place, relied upon by her crusty managing editor Lou Grant (Ed Asner); the pompous, vain, and ignorant anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight); world weary writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin McLeod); and was vexed
by a seemingly sweet but back stabbing cooking show host Sue Ann
Nevins (Betty White.)
On
the job Mary fought for equal pay with the men in the newsroom
and gently confronted prejudice
about what a woman could do.
She
found a not terribly grand or glamorous apartment in a converted Victorian mansion where she
made friends with another single woman, sharp
tongued Rhoda Morgenstern, a Brooklyn
Jewish transplant with a woeful love
life, and somewhat more reluctantly with landlady Phyllis Linstrom, a middle
aged woman with an always unseen husband Lars.
In
seven seasons the show was almost always in the Nielson top 20 and was early appointment
TV for many. The episode featuring
the funeral of Chuckles the Clown, the station’s children’s show host who was trampled
by an elephant while walking in
a parade dressed as a giant peanut, is usually considered one
of the top five funniest TV comedy
episodes of all time. The show garnered
a then record breaking 29 Emmy’s including 5 for Moore personally
as an actress.
The
city of Minneapolis commemorated the
program with a life sized statue of
Moore tossing her knit cap in the
air on the site where the famous opening sequence was filmed.
MTM
productions spun off successful
programs featuring Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant. The company also made The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, and Remington
Steele making it one
of the most powerful companies in
TV. Moore was compared to Lucille Ball and her Desilu Productions, but she
was the first to admit that she was never the hand-on producer Ball became
and that her husband Grant Tinkler managed the company. Still, the company made her enormously wealthy and catapulted Tinkler to the position of Chairman and CEO of NBC from 1981 to
1986 after his divorce from
Moore. Moore left the management of the
company in the hands of Arthur Price
under whose management it went into a slow decline and was sold in 1986 to Jim Victory Television. The company and its valuable catalog changed hand several more times and is now owned
by the Walt Disney Company.
The end of her marriage to Tinkler was
part of a dark time for the woman that the public associated with perkiness and spunk. She had been
diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at 33
in 1969 just as she was getting set to launch her eponymous show. Although she
was able to control the illness, the
effects worsened over the years and
were the cause of serious health issues
in the final decades of her life. She
became an activist for diabetes research
and was the long time chair and public face of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, now known as the JDRF.
After all of her success, Moore
struggled establish a lasting new television program. Later
forays into series programming,
including two variety shows and two
short lived sitcoms were notable
failures. Her movie career
fizzled after the box office failure of Change
of Habit. To cope with the disappointments and frustrations she turned increasingly to
drink and like her former TV husband
Dick Van Dyke, she struggled with alcoholism. She chronicled that battle in her 1995 memoir
After
All.
In 1980 Moore was cast against type as the cold
mother who rejects her surviving son after his brother and her favorite died in a sailing
accident in Ordinary People. Robert
Redford’s directorial debut was one of the most admired films of the year and earned six Academy Award nominations and won four including Best Picture and Best Director. Moore was
nominated for Best Supporting Actress
and won a Golden Globe to add to her
crowed trophy case.
She could hardly enjoy the success. On October 14, 1980, less than a month after
the premier of Ordinary Moore’s only child, 24 year old Richard died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound. Moore always maintained that the death
was accidental but it was ruled a suicide. The loss was devastating to her.
In 1983 Moore found some peace and comfort when she married Dr.
Robert Levine who she met while he
was treating her mother. They made their
home in New York City and in Connecticut where he remained devoted
to her through her increasingly fragile health until she died.
Moore appeared as a guest on various TV
programs and starred in several made for
TV movies including Stolen Babies
for which she won another Emmy in 1993.
Notably she reunited with surviving members of Dick Van Dyke Show in a
2004 TV movie. Her last work was on an
episode of Hot in Cleveland in 2012 that reunited her with series regular
Betty White as well as Mary Tyler Moore regulars
Cloris Leachman, Valerie Harper, and Georgia
Engel. The reunion was partly the
result of Harper’s announcement that she had inoperable brain cancer and Moore’s own fragile health.
Increasingly, Moore spent her energy in philanthropic pursuits. In addition to her work with the JDRF she
raised money for Civil War landmark
preservation in honor of her father’s lifelong passion. She was especially interested in animal welfare. She worked with Farm Sanctuary to raise awareness about the process involved in factory farming and to promote compassionate treatment of farm animals. A long-time vegetarian, she promoted a meatless
diet. With close friend Bernadette Peters she founded Broadway Barks an annual pet adopt-a-thon in New York City. The
two also campaigned together to get
the city animal control agencies and
shelters adopt a no-kill policy.
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