TOSS YOUR BERET HIGH INTO THE AIR
Happy-go-lucky Mary Tyler Moore — tossing berets skyward and cheerfully chipping away at the television industry’s glass ceilings, doting on its daffy Rob Petries and then chastising its many grumpy Mr. Grants — is the Mary Tyler Moore most remembered in the wake of her death Jan. 25, at 80. It’s the statue people visit in downtown Minneapolis.
That’s the Mary we naturally revere most, the comic actress who, first as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show and then in her own eponymous sitcom, mastered an uncharted territory that separated early 1960s-style perkiness from a ’70s-style awakening of personal pride. Turning the world on with your smile is one thing. To break barriers, Moore had to do more than be pretty or funny.
But something should also be said of the frostier, big-screen Moore, the one who followed her success as both a TV star and producer with a risky swerve into a drama so painful that it still causes a lump in the throat whenever one sees it. In Ordinary People (1980), Moore plays Beth Jarrett, a mother trying to keep up appearances and suppress her grief after the death of her older son, thereby alienating her surviving teenage son, Conrad (Timothy Hutton), and husband, Cal (Donald Sutherland).
“Tell me the definition of happy,” Beth seethes, when a friend suggests that she cheer up. “But first you better make sure your kids are good and safe, that they haven’t fallen off a horse, been hit by a car, or drowned in that swimming pool you’re so proud of.”
Moore earned an Oscar nomination for the role. Sadly (and weirdly), weeks after the movie came out and the accolades began to amass, her only son died of a self-inflicted, accidental gunshot. Less than a year later she divorced her second husband, TV network executive Grant Tinker. Even now, watching her in Ordinary People is, to me, far more revelatory than watching Laura Petrie sing and dance in her living room or Mary Richards crumble with laughter in a failed attempt to sit quietly through a funeral for Chuckles the Clown.
In Ordinary People, we get a sense of a film legend who might have been, if the roles had made themselves available — a difficult ask for any actress in her 40s back then, especially one so recognizable for her TV work. Robert Redford, who directed Ordinary People, approached Moore not long after her Mary Tyler Moore Show ended, saying he intended to adapt Judith Guest’s novel into a film and that he saw Moore in the role of Beth.
“He went on to spend three months auditioning every other actress in town,” Moore recalled in a 2010 interview with the Archive of American Television project. Once she had the part, Moore didn’t have to dig all that far to access empathy for the character’s pain and tendency to shut down her own emotions.
“I saw (Beth), as very reminiscent of my own life,” she said. “It was disappointing to me, though, how many people would say of Beth Jarrett, ‘Boy, she was a bitch.’ Because I don’t see her as that. I see her as a victim. I see her as a woman who wanted to do the right thing and was taught how to do the right thing and never let (feelings) spontaneously erupt.”
It would be another decade or so before Moore’s fans and the media became accustomed to an edgier, less perky side of the Mary we thought we knew. When Vanity Fair photographed her and Van Dyke for a 1995 magazine spread, one of the photographs playfully imagined the Petries as late-in-life S&M aficionados, with Moore clad in shiny dominatrix latex astride Van Dyke’s back. It’s a fate that awaits anybody who stays famous long enough — warding off aging with sexual innuendo. (Ask the expert, Moore’s 95-year-old friend and former co-star, Betty White.)
As Moore appeared in a few other films and attempted to jump-start another TV series or two (or three or four), one more memorable film role came in David O. Russell’s unheralded 1996 comedy classic Flirting with Disaster, in which she plays Pearl Coplin, the overbearing adoptive mother of Mel (Ben Stiller), who sets off on a misguided journey to find his biological parents. “Why does he have to do the ‘Roots’ thing?” Pearl laments to her husband, Ed (George Segal). “Aren’t we good enough parents?”
Years ago, at a dinner for Kennedy Center honorees, we happened to be seated at the same table. Moore patiently rolled with my need to tell her that I loved her more as an icy mother than as America’s liberated sweetheart. No pressure to turn me on with her smile, a cold shoulder would do just fine — which is pretty much what I got. The world’s most cheerful cold shoulder.
In 1995, Charlie Rose asked her: “What is the biggest misperception
I see (Beth) as a victim. I see her as a woman who wanted to do the right thing.
of you? Seeing you as Mary Richards?”
“Maybe,” Moore said. “And yet I’m not so different from her. I think there’s a lot about us that is similar. We’re earnest, we mean well. We have a good sense of humour — she had much better writers than I do . ... I’m a little more insecure and fearful, a little paranoid sometimes.” “Happy?” Rose offered. “What is happy?” asked the woman credited for spreading so much of it around.