Mary Tyler Moore Turned The World On With Her Smile, But She Hid So Much About Herself (Exclusive)

In the Beginning

Mary’s truth began on Dec. 29, 1936, when she was born in Brooklyn, NY, to George (a clerk) and Majorie (a housewife). She would eventually be the oldest of three siblings, though both her brother George and sister Elizabeth would die young, at ages 47 and 21, respectively. His death was attributed to kidney cancer, hers to a combination of painkillers and alcohol.
 
When Mary turned 17, she decided that she wanted to become a dancer, which led to her first acting role: as Happy Hotpoint, a dancing elf who danced around Hotpoint appliances during commercials on the Ozzie and Harriet TV show in the 1950s. In 1957, her legs and her voice made their debut as a part of the series Richard Diamond, Private Detective (which starred David Janssen, who would go on to The Fugitive). Film and TV roles followed, but then she got her big break when series creator Carl Reiner cast her as Laura on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1961 (a show which ran until 1966).

Similarities Between Mary Tyler Moore and Elizabeth Montgomery

While career-wise it sounded like things were moving steadily forward, there were definitely behind-the-scenes struggles. In fact, an interesting discovery for Herbie while researching the biography were similarities between both Mary Tyler Moore and Elizabeth Montgomery.
 
“Both had demanding fathers,” he says, “both felt intimidated by their fathers who were annoyed at them regarding their careers. In Mary’s case, her father was on her, as was her mother. They were not loving, kind, sweet parents. Her father, in particular, was very demanding, and although she came to peace with them later, she spent her life, just like Elizabeth, trying to please him and trying to do good, but they never really supported her creative endeavors when she wanted to be a dancer. In addition to that, by her own admission, Mary was sexually abused by a neighbor when she was a child, and studies have shown that those who have been sexually abused oftentimes have a tremendous amount of self-loathing. I think Mary did have that.
 
“The amazing thing,” he continues, “is that as performers they can please millions of people through their shows or films, but then they have dreadful personal lives or they just don’t know how to be happy themselves. And certainly, there were the traumas in her life as well. She was not a happy person in general, but those things exacerbated her issues.”

‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’

Her private life had taken some unexpected turns on the way to The Dick Van Dyke Show. When she was 18, she married Richard Carleton Meeker in 1955, and found herself pregnant within six weeks, giving birth to Richard, Jr. on July 3, 1956. The couple divorced in 1961 as Mary fell into a relationship with CBS executive Grant Tinker, who would later become chairman of NBC. The two of them were married in 1962, and Grant was, according to Herbie, one of the driving forces making sure that Mary was prominent on the sitcom.

The Dick Van Dyke Show focused on the work and home life of Rob Petrie, head writer on The Alan Brady Show. Mary plays his wife, former dancer, Laura, and the two of them have a son, Ritchie. At work, Rob’s co-workers are fellow writers Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie), all of whom deal with the show’s producer, Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon). Carl Reiner plays Alan Brady. On the home front, the Petrie’s next door neighbors are Jerry (Jerry Paris) and Millie (Ann Morgan Guilbert) Helper.

“Grant was the number one supporter of her on The Dick Van Dyke Show, let alone The Mary Tyler Moore Show later on,” Herbie notes. “Grant really helped her and made it clear to those involved with the show that she needed to be pushed to the forefront of that series. And that created a lot of controversy with Rose Marie because this wasn’t making her happy. Mary was getting all the attention and in the original conception of the show, it was primarily going to be an office show with a little bit at home, but it got switched around.”

Moving on After Five Years

Whatever was going on behind the scenes, it was obvious that an instant connection was formed between Dick Van Dyke and Mary. “You could see that there was sexual energy between them,” he observes. “And they admitted they both had crushes on each other, but they were both married at the time. Her first husband, though, was a marriage of convenience. She wanted to get out of the house, and here was this guy who was giving her an out. But she also wanted a career, and he wanted her to be a stay-at-home wife and that just wasn’t going to happen. So she went West and the marriage went South.”

The Dick Van Dyke Show ended its run in 1966, according to Herbie more because of Mary and Grant than anything else. Muses the author, “From what I understand, Grant and Mary are the ones that really wanted the show to end, because Mary wanted to do features. Now Dick Van Dyke was already doing features, and I believe he would have been open to staying with the show. He was doing Mary Poppins and all of those amazing movies that he did. In today’s world, TV and films stars go back and forth between them. In those days, if you’re a TV star and you don’t do something else, you were always going to be considered a TV star. So that was Mary’s thing; she wanted to move on.”

Mary Meets Elvis on the Way to Her Own Sitcom

What this translated to were the films Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968), Don’t Just Stand There (1968), and the Elvis Presley film Change of Habit (1969), which saw her cast as a nun. There was also a disastrous musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s called Holly Golightly, which failed in previews to the point that it never made it to Broadway. In 1969 she appeared on the CBS special Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, which brought the two stars back together in a variety setting.

“It was because of that special that CBS said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to give this girl her own show,’ and that’s when she and Grant formed MTM productions and created The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

In 1969, the dichotomy of Mary’s life became apparent in the sense she and Grant started MTM, which, in addition to her classic sitcom and its spin-offs (Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant), would go on to produce The Bob Newhart Show, The Texas Wheelers, WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, Friends and Lovers, St. Elsewhere, and Hill Street Blues. But then it was the same year that Mary, who was a recovering alcoholic, was diagnosed with Type I diabetes following a miscarriage. MTM nonetheless pushed forward with the new sitcom.

‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’

The Mary Tyler Moore Show cast her as the unmarried Mary Richards, who moves to Minneapolis and becomes associate producer of the television newscast at TV station WJM. As such, she interacts with one of television’s finest comedy ensembles, producer Lou Grant (Ed Asner), head writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod, before he decided to set sail on The Love Boat), anchorman and resident idiot Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), WJM Happy Homemaker host Sue Ann Nivens (a delightfully biotchy Betty White), best friend Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), and friend Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman). Besides just being funny, the series is credited — following Marlo Thomas’ That Girl and preceding Calista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal — with helping to change the perception of women in the workplace.

“They wanted to shift the paradigm,” Herbie points out, “but the most important thing is that they wanted to make a good show. They were just looking for quality. The fact that it did end up becoming what it became was so much the better, and they were truly dimensional characters. Mary Richards on a whole had more texture than Laura Petrie; there was more meat to those roles. More depth. The show was a sophisticated comedy of its time, but you can watch it today and still laugh your ass off. It’s not really dated.”

The show ran from 1970 to 1977, and for the first six years it was a regular fixture in the Top 20 in terms of ratings, but for some reason year seven (the same year, incidentally, it took home the Emmy Award for Best Comedy Series) it dropped to number 39. Everyone involved decided it was better to end the series rather than risk damaging all that it had achieved by overstaying its welcome. In the end, it took home a then-record-breaking 29 Emmys — a record held until 2002 when Frasier won its 30th.

Life After ‘Mary’

As she had done with The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary quickly attempted to tackle something completely different, which led her to try a pair of variety shows which had actually followed a pair of specials: Mary’s Incredible Dream and How to Survive the ’70s and Maybe Even Bump Into Happiness (a title which inadvertently may have captured more of her real-life feelings than anyone suspected). Her first variety series was titled Mary, and gave her supporting performers David Letterman (yes, that David Letterman), Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz, and Dick Shawn. A quick cancellation led to The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, a show within a show with Mary playing a variety TV show star attempting to put together a variety show on a weekly basis. Eleven episodes in, it was canceled.

“When The Dick Van Dyke Show ended,” says Herbie, “she wanted to distance herself from it. And then after The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended, she wanted to distance herself from that. She tried the variety show, which was another bomb, largely because Carol Burnett had taken the genre to perfection, but the variety show in general was ending.”

She would attempt several more series over the years, but for one reason or another, none of them clicked with the audience and they were short-lived.

‘Ordinary People’

The early 1980s continued the trend in Mary’s life of creative success and personal pain. For starters, she was featured in the film Ordinary People (earning herself an Academy Award nomination), as a mother mourning the accidental death of one son, and becoming cold and detached from the other (Timothy Hutton), who, filled with guilt over what happened, has attempted suicide and is now trying to recover from that.

The film was released in September 1980. A month later, tragically, her son Richard (who was 24), was handling a .410 shotgun and accidentally shot himself in the head (the weapon was criticized and taken off the market for its “hair trigger”) and died. The following year, she and Grant divorced. The latter wasn’t entirely surprising to Herbie.

“With Hollywood relationships,” he says, “if the female is a star and the man is the producer or manager when those two get married it oftentimes becomes more of a business partnership than a marriage. When Grant and Mary met, I’m sure they loved each other, but I think it became, ‘Let’s make superstars of ourselves and let’s combine and form this business.’ I think that happened with Sonny and Cher, Carol Burnett and Joe Hamilton, and Elizabeth Montgomery and William Asher. When their shows ended, the marriages ended.”

Her Charitable Contributions

Mary donated a great deal of time and effort in the battle against diabetes, raising funds and awareness of the disease as the International Chairman of JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation); and as an animal rights activist. She also continued to work, appearing on different TV shows and in TV movies (some quite dramatic), and writing a pair of memoirs, After All and Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes. The former included her admission of being a recovering alcoholic, while the latter, as the title suggests, deals with her battle with the disease.

During all of this — and, again, here’s the other side of her personality — she also began undergoing various plastic surgeries, the results of which were more damaging than beneficial. “It was hard to watch,” Herbie acknowledges. “We looked at Mary and we saw beauty. She looked in the mirror and she didn’t see beauty. Isn’t that incredible? It’s so sad, and it wasn’t just surgery she had on her face; she’d also had several teeth implants. She just couldn’t stop. And, honestly, it’s amazing she lived as long as she did, because when battling diabetes you’re not supposed to undergo that type of surgery, or drink a lot of alcohol, but she didn’t stop. She even admitted in one of her books that, ‘This doesn’t look right,’ but she kept on doing it. I don’t understand it.”

With Marriage, the Third Time’s the Charm

Mary did find happiness in the arms of her third husband, Doctor Robert Levine, who she married on Thanksgiving Eve in 1983. The couple was together for 33 years, and he stood steadfastly by her side through all of her battles with alcoholism, the plastic surgeries, various health issues and more. In 2011, she had a benign brain tumor removed. Three years later, as a result of diabetes, her friends reported that she had developed heart and kidney problems, and was nearly blind. On Jan. 25, 2017, she passed away from cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia. She’d been placed on a respirator the previous week. She was 80-years-old.

The Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore

The bottom line is that no matter what her personal problems may have been, Mary lives on in the hearts of the untold millions she touched through The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She did indeed turn the world on with her smile and continues to do so.

“My perception going into this book,” Herbie considers, “was that she was Laura Petrie and Mary Richards. I had known she was a very respected and tough businesswoman, and that in many ways — and she said this herself — she was more like the character in Ordinary People in real life. People would say to her, ‘I loved you as Mary; she was so sweet.’ She was completely associated with that, and she’d say, ‘Yeah, I wish I was as sweet as her. I wish I could be as nice as she was.’ So she was real open about that. I really kind of knew what to expect; that it wasn’t all sweet and sugary. But I adored her and wanted to handle all of that with respect for all parties concerned.

“Whatever flaws Mary may have had,” he closes, “it doesn’t mean she was evil or a horrible person. You can’t dedicate your life to charity like she did and be a bad person. She was a very private person, and I give her a lot of props for being as open about herself, the good and the bad, as she was.”