Mary Tyler Moore: Three Names for Unlimitted Talent

Growing up in the 1960’ and 70’s, there were two kinds of people:  Those who loved watching Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961-1966), and those who loved watching Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-1977, and which was officially titled just Mary Tyler Moore).

Moore’s married Mrs. Petrie and single Ms. Richards were and remain monumental and groundbreaking television characters of their respective eras.

In real life, Moore has seen her share of personal struggles.  She has battled Type 1 diabetes, admitted to excessive plastic surgery, and has married three times.  Her first husband was Richard Carlton Meeker (1955-1961), with whom she had a son named Richie, who committed suicide.  She partnered with second spouse, Grant Tinker (1962-1981), and together they incorporated MTM Enterprises, a powerhouse TV production company responsible for a slate of hits in the 70’s and 80’s (including The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, and other successes including Rhoda, Phyllis and Lou Grant, all three spun-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show).  But after their two-time failure to resurrect the variety show format in her favor (with a CBS skit comedy show in 1978 simply titled Mary, which was revised in 1979 as The Mary Tyler Moore Hour), their marriage crumbled.

Fortunately, she’s been more happily married to her present partner, Dr. Robert Levine, since 1983.

In the fictional world, more specifically on The Dick Van Dyke Show, the multi-award-winning Moore was spouse to Van Dyke’s amiable Rob Petrie, and became one of television’s first single-minded wedded women.  She loved and respected her husband, who was a TV writer for the fictional Alan Brady Show (starring Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner), and she adored their TV son Richie (coincidentally named after Moore’s real life son, and played with earnest innocence by Larry Matthews).  But she was different from the traditional small-screen wife and mother of the day.  As Laura, Moore donned stylish Capri pants, and retained an independent spirit.  She and Van Dyke’s equally-impeccably-dressed Rob Petrie were the intelligent, stylish couple of the then-modern age, presented in the mold of John F. and Jackie Kennedy.

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore performed opposite a cavalcade of charismatic stars which later starred in the aforementioned spin-off shows of their own: Valerie Harper played Richard’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Rhoda Morgenstern, and Cloris Leachman was Phyllis Lindstrom, Mary and Rhoda’s landlord.  At work, Richards was the associate producer at the fictional WJM-TV channel in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Her co-workers included writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin Macleod, later of The Love Boat), Ted Baxter (Ted Knight, future lead of Too Close for Comfort), Betty White (The Golden Girls), and Ed Asner, who played Mary’s boss, Lou Grant (another spin-off character, this time leading an historic one-hour drama series of the same name, the first of its kind to spawn from a half-hour sitcom).

On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore was the lead female character (the second was Rose Marie’s Sally Rogers who, along with Morey Amsterdam’s Buddy Sorrell, worked as co-writers with Rob for The Alan Brady Show).  On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore was top banana.

In either case, Moore’s pleasant, All-American sweetheart persona shined through.  Every red-blooded American straight male wanted to marry Laura Petrie and/or wanted to date Mary Richards.  Laura was the ideal wife and mother model for every female home engineer.  Mary Richards picked up where Marlo Thomas’ Ann Marie left off on That Girl (ABC, 1966-1971), when it came to being the fictional visual voice in the Women’s Liberation Movement.  Wives and moms of the 1960s aspired to be like Laura Petrie, and single women were empowered in the work force because of Mary Richards.  In fact, Oprah Winfrey has touted for years the media-based premise of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the main inspiration for her initially pursuing journalism as a career.

For the mainstream viewer, both Laura Petrie and Mary Richards were and again - remain - appealing to the eye, heart and mind.  The Laura/Mary persona was kind as all-get-out, and witty and bright in all the right places and at all the right times, but she was never intimidating, rude or off-putting.  Both were consoling, yet daring; charismatic, yet approachable. Moore played Laura and Mary as welcoming without being a doormat.  The actress somehow single-handedly created a dual tour de force of relatively opposite yet very similar characters.

Before and after she portrayed Laura Petrie and Mary Richards, Moore delivered a delightfully versatile dance of characters, roles and parts for the big screen as well as small.  Just prior to playing Laura, Moore portrayed David Jansen’s alluring, yet facially unseen secretary with the attractive legs on Richard Diamond, Private Eye (CBS/NBC, 1957-1961), and she was the “Happy Hotpoint” girl in a series of TV commercials.  Following her five-year run on the Van Dyke series, Moore dabbled on Broadway with stage productions like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in 1966,  and made several motion pictures, including Thoroughly Modern Millie (with Julie Andrews in 1967) and Change of Habit (with Elvis Presley in 1969).  She reunited with Van Dyke in 1969 for a CBS TV variety special titled Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, which convinced the network’s executives that she deserved to lead a sitcom of her own.  Following her seven-year-stint on now legendary self-titled sitcom, Moore returned to the live stage in 1980 with the drama revival of “Whose Life Is It, Anyway.”   That same year, she delivered an Oscar-nominated, heart-wrenching dramatic performance as Beth Jarrett, the grief-stricken mother in Ordinary People (directed by her idol Robert Redford), and in other motion pictures such as Six Weeks (1982, co-starring Dudley Moore).

 

Throughout the 1980’s and mid-1990’s Moore once more returned to television and CBS with two different one-hour variety programs (the aforementioned Mary, 1978; The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, 1979), two additional half-hour comedies (one also called Mary, 1985-1986, the other Annie McGuire, 1988-1989), and New York News (1995), a one-hour drama in which she seemed to be portray a character that echoed and combined Mary Richards and Lou Grant with-a-rigid-twist (and flaming red hair!).

Into the mix, Moore has appeared in a long list of highly-rated and critically-acclaimed TV-movies and mini-series such as Run A Crooked Mile (1969), First, You Cry (1978), Heartsounds (1984), Just Between Friends (1986), Lincoln (1988), Blessings (2003), and Pay-Back (1997), the latter in which she re-performed with two of her former sitcom co-stars Ed Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Dennis Arndt (Annie McGuire).

   

In 2000, the actress reunited with her former Mary Tyler Moore Show co-star, Valerie Harper, for a TV-movie and back door pilot (which did not go to series) called Mary & Rhoda, in which both actresses resurrected their most famous television roles.

In 2002, she reunited with the entire cast of iconic sitcom for a CBS special documentary called The Mary Tyler Moore Show Reunion., and the cast did the same with a surprise visit to The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008.

In 2003, Moore reunited once more with Van Dyke for the PBS special based on the play,  “The Gin Game,” and in yet again in 2004, this time reprising her Laura Petrie part for the CBS/TV Land special, The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited, and once more with Van Dyke on The Rachel Ray Show in 2011.

In 2012, Van Dyke presented her with the Lifetime Achievement Award on the televised Screen Actors Awards Show. 

In 2013, Moore further reconnected with Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, and Georgia Engel, the entire female cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, for a group guest spot on White’s hot TV Land hit, Hot in Cleveland.

According to a recent cover story on Moore published in Closer Weekly Magazine, her close friends Valerie Harper and Betty White said she has almost completely lost her sight due to what Harper called “the ravages of diabetes.”  In general, Moore has not made public appearances for the past three years, not even in advocacy against diabetes, and her presence has been sorely missed.  As Closer Weekly reported, one mother of a child with diabetes said n Facebook, “We need a cure for Type 1 diabetes.  When someone who has advocated for those battling and living with this disease, someone who is well known and successful, isn’t immune to devastating effects, then you know a cure needs to be found.  Best wishes to Mary for her health.”

Overall, whether she is best known as Laura Petrie or Mary Richards, or any of her other countless stage, film or television characters of interest, Moore is never less.  Despite of her numerous personal and health struggles, the adored and adorable actress continues to face her life and career celebrations and challenges with candor, courage, and class, all of which will forever define Mary Tyler Moore as an original. 

In Memory of Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery

Elizabeth Montgomery is best known for playing Samantha Stephens, the good witch-with-a-twitch, on television’s classic sitcom, Bewitched, which originally aired on ABC from 1964 to 1972 – and for which she received eight Emmy nominations (among other accolades).  A staple in syndication ever since (and available on DVD), the show marks its 50^thAnniversary this TV season, while May 18^th commemorates the 20^th Anniversary of Montgomery’s demise (from colon cancer).

As Samantha, Montgomery delivered a down-to-earth sincerity and, in the process, made an earnest connection with the home viewer.  But her most famous role was by-far not her first – nor certainly her last.

Born April 15, 1933 to heralded film and TV actor Robert Montgomery and Broadway actress Elizabeth Allen, the daughter Montgomery made over 200 appearances on stage and screen before Bewitched.  Her television career ignited on December 3, 1951 in the “Top Secret” episode of her father’s anthology series, Robert Montgomery Presents, in which she played none other than her father’s daughter.  On October 13, 1953, she made her Broadway debut in “Late Love,” for which she received the Daniel Blum Theatre Award for Most Promising Newcomer.  She went on to appear in movies like The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed? and Johnny Cool (both released in 1963, the latter of which was directed by future Bewitched director/producer William Asher, her third husband.  (Her first was New York high-roller Fred Cammann, her second and fourth: actors Gig Young and Robert Foxworth.)

But it was on the small screen where Montgomery assuredly made her undeniable mark with shows like The Twilight Zone, The Untouchables, and 77 Sunset Strip, the latter of which holds particular significance in the scope of her career and in TV history.

In the Twilight episode, “Two” (debuting on CBS, September 15, 1961), she and future film star Charles Bronson were the only cast members playing the last two surviving soldiers from opposite sides who meet five years after an apocalyptic world war.  There was only one word of dialogue in the episode, and Montgomery spoke it: pryekrasnyy, the Russian word for “pretty.”

On The Untouchables, the beloved actress received her first Emmy-nomination for playing a prostitute in “The Rusty Heller Story” (debuting on ABC January 7, 1960).

In the Sunset segment, “White Lie” (ABC, October 23, 1953), she portrayed Charlotte DeLavalle, the conflicted half-white, half-black granddaughter of a character named Celia Jackson, who was played by the iconic Juanita Moore.

“Lie” featured a monumental premise that Moore had previously explored with her Oscar-nominated performance as Annie Johnson in the ground-breaking 1959 movie, Imitation of Life.  The “White” episode also showcased a substantial and historic theme that Montgomery would revisit on Bewitched - which began rehearsals on November 22, 1963 – the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Bewitched initially aired during the era of race rioting, the Vietnam War, amidst additional cultural and political challenges and assassinations (Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King).

For Montgomery, it was all very personal.  She and then-husband William Asher were good friends with President Kennedy (Asher directed Kennedy’s famous Inaugural event at which Marilyn Monroe sang a breathy “Happy Birthday”), and she felt the central message of Bewitched was prejudice.  “Yes, “she once wistfully intoned.  “That’s what it’s all about.”

In her view, Samantha loved her mortal husband Darrin (double-played by Dick York then Dick Sargent) despite their cultural differences (and the fierce objection of from Samantha’s mother Endora played by Agnes Moorehead), as they focused on what made the same: their common humanity.  “It was really a love story,” Montgomery said.

Bewitched bespoke other noteworthy themes including a strong work ethic, family values and priorities, and female independence.  Montgomery’s Samantha was one of the first liberated women of the television age, before Marlo Thomas as Ann Marie on That Girl (ABC, 1966-1971), and prior to Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970-1977).  On Bewitched it was Samantha’s choice to live the mortal life.  She could have easily left Darrin in the lurch, but she chose to stay with her “human-half” because she loved him for who he was, and not for what he could buy her or do for her.  Because whatever he could buy or do she could twitch up something better.  In turn, Darrin objected to Samantha’s use of her special powers only because he nobly sought to care for her in what she frequently termed as “the every-day mortal way.”

Beyond Bewitched, Montgomery’s resume proved equally expressive and impressive, if not only for her theatrical abilities as an actress, but for the content of her work – on and off-screen.

In yet another Emmy-nominated performance, Montgomery played a woman who was raped twice in the TV-movie, A Case of Rape, premiering on NBC, February 20, 1974, a film that helped to change the laws of domestic violence and abuse.  She was a political activist throughout her life and career offering her name, time, money and efforts to a number of charitable causes, including UNICEF, the disabled community, and those suffering from AIDS.
As the daughter of wealthy and famous parents, Elizabeth Montgomery could have easily adopted an arrogant celebrity persona.  Instead, she did the exact opposite and, in the process, encouraged and instilled the same approachable demeanor into her three children (with William Asher: Bill, Robert and Rebecca Asher), inspiring her millions of fans along the way.