This TV revolutionary wore the pants
Mary Tyler Moore, actress and television pioneer, didn’t plan to be an incendiary feminist. Moore voted for Richard Nixon for president (at least the first time). She married at 18. Her iconic TV character, newsroom producer Mary Richards, always deferred to her boss (played by Ed Asner) as “Mr. Grant” without a trace of irony.
Mary was a good girl, but she broke television’s chauvinist ceiling, as recounted by the new documentary “Being Mary Tyler Moore.”
The HBO original documentary is directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), and produced by Lena Waithe (“A Thousand and One”) and Debra Martin Chase (“Harriet”). As their loving hagiography of the late actress shows us, Moore began revolutionizing the TV world not because she was a bomb-throwing radical but because she had the nerve, in 1961, to say of her first leading role, in “The Dick Van Dyke Show”: “I don’t have to wear a dress on TV; I’m wearing pants.”
Yes, Moore and Van Dyke were America’s first hip TV couple.
Moore’s mentor was comedy wunderkind and showrunner Carl Reiner, who cast her after 60 others failed the audition. “She’s the one,” he says in the documentary, realizing he had found the perfect pair to deliver his humor: “The comedy of the Jew, pushed through the goy.”
Moore would benefit from unrepentant writers her entire career. In 1970, the girl who “can turn the world on with her smile” debuted her own sitcom, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” with a team that included a young James L. Brooks and Treva Silverman, the first woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing.
Once again Moore faced doubt. According to Brooks, when CBS executives saw the pilot they said, “You broke the three rules: no Jews, no one with a mustache, no divorced women.”
As TV news gal Mary Richards (with a killer ensemble cast of Asner, Gavin Macleod, Ted Knight, Betty White, Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman), Moore was unapologetically single, dedicated to her career and pals. She never fell for a Harlequin Romance. Moore was, for mainstream America, the liberated woman.
“You know what, you’ve got spunk!” Asner’s Grant told her on her first day as she stood before him in a pleated skirt and knee-socks. “I hate spunk.”
The show’s writers knew that Goody Two-shoes Mary had her detractors; they weren’t afraid to make fun of
her role. Her female co-stars were written sexier, bitchier. Moore played it straight, and she prevailed.
In the documentary footage, we see Moore candidly reminisce in conversations with interviewers Rona Barrett and Dinah Shore — and condescending talk show host David Susskind. When Susskind mocks her Richards persona, she retorts: “I actually agree with Betty Friedan … women should be human beings first, women second, and wives and mothers third.”
My own mother, like Moore an Irish Catholic urban girl born in the Depression era, welled up with tears when Moore told off Susskind. She was a hero to the Rosie the Riveter generation.
Moore kept the traditional wall between showbiz and personal life, but she didn’t hold back in her late-life memoirs. Her mother nearly killed
herself from drinking, and she lost her 21-year-old sister to pills and booze. Moore wasn’t immune and replayed much the same story, with stints in rehab herself.
In 1980, then-fledgling director Robert Redford cast Moore in a dramatic film role in “Ordinary People,” as a mother of two who can’t cope with her first son’s drowning death and the subsequent suicide attempt of the other. Audiences and critics were stunned by Moore’s portrayal of grief and depression — they didn’t realize she knew it all too well.
Just weeks after the film’s premiere, Moore’s only child, Richard Meeker, killed himself in a gun accident. In the documentary, we see archival footage of mother and son clowning with a rifle, when Richie was just a boy like so many kids who thought they’d be the next Davy Crockett. The
scene is heartbreaking.
Moore’s admirers made this biography an homage, and if you’re not already a fan, you may tire of the valentine. It wraps with a romantic ending: Moore’s 34-year marriage to her last husband, Robert Levine, who was 18 years younger when they met. When she died at age 80 in 2017, he devoted himself to her memory.
Twenty years before, at age 60, Moore took on a role that served as a sort of exorcism of her good-girl image. In David O. Russell’s 1996 comedy “Flirting With Disaster,” she played a no-boundaries mom who insists on showing off her plastic surgery boob job to her entire family — whether they like it or not.
I remember the theater audience shrieking with laughter, collectively thinking: “Mary Tyler Moore did not just do that!”
Yes, she did. Mary wore the pants once again, this time with a black lace bra. Some people have spunk, sure, and some people have timing. Mary Tyler Moore, “a human being first,” had the very best of both.