A woman who dared to be funny
Mary Tyler Moore had spunk. “I hate spunk,” Lou Grant said passionately when he hired Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But here we women are, spunky because there is no other way to be, still.
Though Moore, always willowy, then thin, then bone-thin, had been extremely ill — nearly blind and ravaged by lifelong diabetes — I dreaded her death. Apparently the sunniest of women in American comedy, she symbolized happiness, before everything went wrong.
This is nonsense of course. The Dick Van Dyke Show was born in 1961 at the head of a decade of violent breakage. The Mary Tyler Moore Show — largely written by women — appeared in 1970 while Richard Nixon was president, in wartime, while economic and climate harbingers appeared like the ghosts of Christmas Future. And it was a terrible era for women, but then every era has always been terrible for women. The needle hasn’t shifted much on the dial.
What I mean is that I watched Mary Tyler Moore when I was a child and optimism seemed plausible to me: I would move to a city, live in a glam apartment and wear striped knits to work and cool shoes, end of story. Children’s dreams are tiny, a rearrangement of toy chairs in a dollhouse. Moore was always smiling, her huge toothy grin the emblem of sheen.
Mad smiling isn’t the way of comedians now. But Richards was funny. “I’ve been around,” her character says defensively. “Well, all right, I might not have been around, but. . . I’ve been nearby.”
As a child in Los Angeles, Moore attended a dance class where the pianist, a terrifying grim woman, used to scream at her, “Smile!” She smiled out of terror and that became the automatic — and famous — smile she pasted on her face all her life.
Her Catholic childhood was pure pain, with an alcoholic mother and a cold, punitive father. When she was 6, she was sexually prodded and probed in bed by a friend of her parents, a man she knew as “Mr. Archer.” She was terrified and deeply shamed.
But when she haltingly told her mother about Mr. Archer, her moth- er said “No! That’s not true. IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.” It was 1942. Men had their way, and women didn’t dare protect their own tiny girls. Moore blamed her mother more than the pedophile. You don’t survive parents like that.
“Strange how events that change a life inside and out take no more than a moment,” Moore wrote in her autobiography, After All. “Let’s get married.” “It didn’t happen.”
Actors are sensitive people damaged early. Moore called herself “a chameleon in that I take on the colours of success or failure, happy or sad, depending on what’s going on. I wait to see what colour I am meant to be.”
When she won acting awards, the pleasure would last five minutes. Neither thin-skinned nor armourplated, she took what was handed to her: a loveless childhood, inherited alcoholism, illness, a troubled son who died by gunshot, a sister who died at 21 by her own hand, two failed marriages and finally a long happy one. Still she smiled.
She was a wonderful actor. I recall a scene in Ordinary People, the 1980 drama directed by Robert Redford, with her and Donald Sutherland as parents of one drowned son and one suicidal one. She is rigid and self-disciplined, trying to maintain a sheen of perfection. On a golf course with the in-laws, a mundane day that still feels like torture, Sutherland makes a mild suggestion.
Moore’s head moves through the scene like a ball. It drops and swivels and lifts. Disastrous precise words emerge, the words that signal the end of the marriage though they don’t yet know it. There’s nothing physically frantic, simply the actorly decision to deliver the lines with the smooth dancer’s flow of her neck.
Moore was a performer of her time, sublimating herself, covering the pain with a kind of wiry cheer. The way to be now is bold and knifelike: Tina Fey (who used Mary Richards as a model), Amy Schumer, Melissa McCarthy, Jessica Williams from the Daily Show and the great Samantha Bee. They’re known not for their smiles, but for their eyes, hard as buttons, and their damning words.
This is one way young girls try out selves, learn how to be, to survive.
It’s the done thing to write an early autobiography. I find it odd that no one mentions the pedophilia episode in Moore’s childhood, nor Schumer’s ill father repeatedly defecating in public. The awful things are glossed over.
Funny people suffer. Though viewers memorize every inch of every constructed set on their shows, they still view comedic talent as not carefully constructed, but inherited or easily acquired, and that no blood was shed.
When women tell the truth about their lives, readers behave like Moore’s mother. It didn’t happen. How women dare to be funny is beyond me. Moore’s achievement was to transcend the pain of her life. I love her for this, but I do not understand how she did it, the trick of it. hmallick@thestar.ca