Tears for TV icon, 80, but we’ll always have laughs
She shined in two iconic sitcom roles
She really did turn the world on with her smile.
Mary Tyler Moore, a pioneering, effervescent star of megahit TV sitcoms throughout the ’60s and ‘70s, died Wednesday in a Greenwich, Conn., hospital.
Moore was 80, and had for weeks been fighting a series of health issues, including diabetes and pneumonia.
She died surrounded by friends and her husband of more than 33 years, Dr. S. Robert Levine, said her publicist, Mara Buxbaum.
The Brooklyn native won seven Emmys in a career that spanned seven decades, from her first television appearance at age 17 in 1955 — as a shapely, cavorting pixie in a black and white Hotpoint appliance commercial — to her star turn as herself in the 2015 television tribute, “Mary Tyler Moore: A Celebration.”
Moore’s hourglass figure and capri pants as the frazzled but dot- ing stay-at-home New Rochelle mom Laura Petrie were hallmarks of the “Dick Van Dyke Show,” which ran from 1961 to 1966.
But it was as the 30-something “career girl” star of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that she will be best remembered.
The show, which ran from 1970 to 1977 and produced 168 episodes, was groundbreaking.
Moore played Mary Richards, a smart, independent assistant producer in an eccentric-crammed Minneapolis TV newsroom — clacking away on a manual typewriter, ripping wire copy from a dotmatrix printer, and taking no guff from tough boss Lou Grant, who in the show’s first episode told her, “You’ve got spunk . . . I hate spunk!”
Most radically, “Mary” lived alone in a Minneapolis studio apartment and dated a cavalcade of men — chastely, but just barely.
“I’m an experienced woman,” her character says at one point.
“I’ve been around. Well, all right — I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been nearby.”
When Mary tossed her hat skyward on a Minneapolis street corner during the show’s opening theme song, the hearts of a generation of women across the country leapt in tandem.
“College people were poohpoohing television at that time, saying it was silly, but we got letters from kids,” “MTM” co-star Gavin MacLeod told Gannett newspapers in a 2015 interview.
“Young women were staying home on Saturday night in their dorms to watch ‘ The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ She made quite an impact.”
Former First Lady Michelle Obama called the show formative.
“I was probably 10 or 11 when I saw that, and sort of started thinking, ‘ You know what? Marriage is an option. Having a family is an option. And going to school and getting your education and building your career is another really viable option that can lead to happiness and fulfillment,” Obama told Variety last year.
Moore would continue to per-
form in movies and on Broadway, most notably in 1981 Best Picture “Ordinary People,” which earned her an Oscar nomination.
A devoted Manhattanite, she shared a Park Avenue apartment with her third husband, who was a retired cardiologist, and was a passionate advocate for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Moore joined in protesting when the co-op board at her Upper East Side building removed the nest of red-tailed hawks, Pale Male and his mate Lola, in 2004, successfully lobbying for the restoration of the nest.
Throughout her life, she struggled to overcome diabetes, alcoholism, which she addressed in her autobiography, and family tragedy.
She was born in Brooklyn Heights on Dec. 29, 1936, the eldest of three children; both parents were alcoholics, she said.
The family moved to Los Angeles while she was in grade school.
Moore’s sister, brother, and son, Richard, all died tragically.
In 1978, Moore’s sister, Eliza- beth, died of a drug overdose.
For years, Moore was estranged from her only child; they reconciled in the late ’70s, but in 1980, he died from an accidental, selfinflicted gunshot wound.
Moore’s brother, John, died of cancer in 1992.
Her first marriage, at age 17, to salesman Richard Meeker, and her second, to NBC CEO Grant Tinker, ended in divorce.
“I’ve been able to turn every bad thing into something positive,” she once said. “Except for the death of my son.”
On Saturday, fans in Minneapolis laid flowers at a bronze statue depicting Moore and the iconic hat toss.
“I hope when a little girl walks by the statue, she’ll ask her mother who that was,” Moore said in 2002, when it was unveiled.
“And it’ll be explained to her that she was a young woman who had a dream and followed it through.”
MARY Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, did something no one else ever did in the history of television: She starred in two landmark sitcoms playing two very different characters.
She would be granted a share of immortality if she had only been just Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or Mary Richards on “Mary Tyler Moore.” But to have been both Laura and Mary?
Unprecedented then, and 40 years after the final episode of “Mary Tyler Moore,” still unprecedented.
They weren’t just great shows. They also captured lightning in a bottle and remain signature sociological documents of their time. Watching them now gives you a profound sense of the America from which they came.
Both of Moore’s characters epitomized the white American upper middle class at the time she was playing them. She was the glamorous American suburban mom at the beginning of the 1960s on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and she was the rising American single career woman on her own eponymous show at the end of that decade, and well into the 1970s.
Here’s what made her so special in both shows: She was gorgeous, and she was five seconds away from a nervous breakdown. Laura wasn’t the calm, wondrous center of the American hearth and home, like other TV moms of the day — Donna Reed, say, or Barbara Billingsley on “Leave It To Beaver.”
Laura was young, brittle, surprisingly humorless, oddly intimidating and always a bit unsatisfied. She made mistakes and Rob, her husband, paid for them — like when she revealed to a reviewer that his vain TVstar boss was bald and wore a hairpiece.
She cried more than she smiled, and her hilarious whiny invocation of her husband’s name — “Roooobbbbbbbb” — always signified trouble ahead.
For the first time in the medium’s young history, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” offered a portrait of a marriage that was neither idealized nor caricatured. And the key was Mary Tyler Moore, whose portrayal of Laura now seems entirely awash in the “problem that has no name,” diagnosed by Betty Friedan in her pioneering 1963 tract about the woes of suburban housewives, “The Feminine Mystique.”
A more confident, more mature, more rational Moore arrived on the scene in 1969 in the show that bore her name — and that changed television forever. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was the first television program centering on a woman that did not take place in the home.
She had many boyfriends, and it is clearly suggested she was not abstemious when it came to sex, but the pursuit of marriage and children wasn’t the object of her life. No, Mary’s home was her office.
Moore had become for her own show what Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie was on his — the sane center around which a bunch of crazies revolved.
And yet even here she wasn’t all that sane. Mary was easily shocked, quickly offended, never far from utter exasperation. Things never quite worked out for her. Every party she tried to throw was a disaster. Every innovation she attempted on the evening news show for which she worked went awry.
And in the classic episode called “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” Moore finally and indelibly burst out into true comic mania.
When her TV station’s kidshow clown is killed in a freak accident involving an elephant, she’s horrified by the mordant sick jokes told at his expense by her colleagues. Her self-righteous indignation is turned on its head at the episode’s astounding climax.
When she listens to the alltoo-serious minister at the funeral invoke the names of the characters Chuckles played (Mr. Fee Fi Fo) and his catchphrase (“a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants”), Mary starts to giggle and, as the assembled look on in horror, erupts into gales of laughter at the most inappropriate time.
It is without question the single greatest sitcom episode, and Moore’s turn in it may be the greatest single sitcom performance. Indeed, in embodying both Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Mary Tyler Moore enshrined herself as the greatest female star the television medium had seen up to that point — and up to now.