Mary Tyler Moore died six years ago
today 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 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 featuring Moore’s shapely dancer legs.
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 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 more 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 off 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 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 run in 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 its first release but has become a cult favorite.
Meanwhile
Moore and Tinkler formed a new production
company, MTM Enterprises in 1969 and successfully
pitched a 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 ‘70s 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 an “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 workplace, 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 backstabbing
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 hands-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 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 to
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.
But she struggled with ill health. In 2011 she survived surgery to remove a meningioma,
a benign brain tumor. By 2014 friends reported that diabetes
symptoms were contributing to renal
failure and vision loss. She
died from cardiopulmonary arrest because of after
suffering from pneumonia a week
after being placed on life support at Greenwich
Hospital
in Connecticut.
Millions mourning the woman who really did
turn the world on with her smile.
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