Remembering the Life and Career of Valerie Harper: There Was So Much About Her That You Didn’t Know

Early Days

She was born Valerie Kathryn Harper (her first and middle names reportedly coming from that year’s doubles tennis champions, Valerie Scott and Kay Stammers) on August 22, 1939 in Suffern, New York. Eventually she cultivated an interest in ballet that led her to study at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey, and graduated from the Young Professionals private school in New York City. Her showbiz career began as a dancer and chorus girl on Broadway, appearing on stage with Lucille Ball in Wildcat and Jackie Gleason in Take Me Along, among others. She was also cast in the play Destry Rides Again, but fell ill and was forced to leave.

In her interview with the Archive of American Television, Valerie reflected on her early days, noting that when she was 16 or 17 she was able to utilize her ballet at Radio City Music Hall. “This was the ’50s,” she says, “and they did four or five shows a day and the movie showed in between. So it was a movie theater you went to and the stage show was thrown in and there was maybe a dog act or a magician. There was also a big opening number that everyone was in. I think the Rockettes were in that, too, but you didn’t know they were Rockettes, because they were just singing or doing something pictorial with umbrellas and flowers. It was a massive opening number, and then these acts would come on. And then the ballet girls; they called us the Quarter Ballet. It was a great first job. It really plunged me into show business, even though it was ballet dancing. I treasured it, because it was my first professional job.”

During Valerie’s early stage success, her roommate, actress Arlene Golonka (best known for playing Millie Hutchins, eventually Swanson, on both The Andy Griffith Show and its spin-off Mayberry R.F.D.) more or less came to her rescue. “Arlene Golonka did a lot of stage work,” explains Ed Robertson, “and, I believe, was nominated for a Tony as well, but she first came into prominence around 1964 or ’65 as part of a spoken word comedy album You Don’t Have to Be Jewish.

“It did very well,” points out Ed, “and a year later there was a sequel called When You’re in Love the Whole World is Jewish, but Arlene wasn’t able to do the follow-up album, so she recommended her friend and roommate Valerie Harper to the producer. That’s what put her on the map.”

Joining The Second City

Following the recording of that album, Arlene continued to help Valerie, encouraging her to join the Chicago-based comedy improvisational troupe The Second City. “There,” says Ed, “she honed her skills and improved. From there, one thing led to another.” One of those things was Second City performer Dick Schaal, to whom the actress would be married in 1965 (they would eventually divorce in 1978). “He was one of those character actors who did TV a lot throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

As she continued to work, Valerie came to believe her strength came much more from performing on stage than in front of a camera. “On stage,” she says, “you’re not thinking, ‘What’s my line,’ you’re feeling what the character feels and only that line can come out. That happens on stage, because you do it so many times and each time you do it, it’s different, because different people are receiving it. The real magic is in the space between us. I don’t want to speak against the wonderful camera that has made my life wonderful through television and movies, but that is a record of what has happened. In the theater, it’s happening then and there. Every time there’s different people; different audience members. That’s why the audience in a theater is actually part of the action. It’s like a PTA meeting or a political rally or a church meeting. It’s happening right there in that room. It’s not on the screen to be wonderfully seen by many, many people for years and years. I think that’s why theater actors, if they can make the jump to film, are the best, because they understand that moment of making the moment improvisational, even if the words aren’t.”

‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’

Up until 1970, Valerie pretty much ignored television and had only had a few uncredited roles in the films Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956), Li’l Abner (1959), Trash Program (1963) and With a Feminine Touch (1969). Then, of course, The Mary Tyler Moore Show entered her life. That seminal ‘70s sitcom features at its center former Dick Van Dyke Show star Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards, associate producer of the WJM evening news and part of an ensemble that includes Ed Asner as producer Lou Grant, Gavin MacLeod as writer Murray Slaughter, Ted Knight as bombastic newscaster Ted Baxter, Betty White as “Happy Homemaker” host Sue Ann Nivens, Cloris Leachman as Mary’s neighbor, Phyllis Lindstrom, and, of course, Valerie as the star’s best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern. The show would ultimately run from 1970 to 1977, garnering 29 Emmy Awards along the way and remains one of the most popular sitcoms ever.

Herbie J Pilato, host of the streaming Classic TV talk show Then Again with Herbie J Pilato and author of, among other books, Mary: The Mary Tyler Moore Story, details, “Valerie was a stage actress and was doing small roles in and around LA in little theaters. Ethel Winant, the head of CBS casting, had attended one of her plays and when the part of Rhoda came along, she just went hog wild looking for her all over LA and finally found her. And that really began Valerie’s TV career — and Rhoda was a part that she was just born to play.”

Adds Valerie, “I was doing a theater piece in a little 50-seat black box theater … the Limelight comes to mind (I don’t know if that’s so). Ethel Winant really started my career. She remembered seeing me, but I didn’t have an agent or anything; I was very new to the city. She said, ‘I remember this girl that played Eva Braun’ — that was one of my characters. Going for Rhoda ended up being the most wonderful audition process I’ve ever been through.”

“When she auditioned for Rhoda, it just didn’t get any more real,” opines Herbie. “She was so real in that part and it wasn’t like she wasn’t acting — she was just speaking truth, you know? Which is a real key component for all performers, whatever character they’re playing. She spoke truth so real and there were no rehearsals for that. She just came out of the womb talking like Rhoda. And that delivery she had was just magic.”

Valerie reflects, “That audition was in the apartment where Mary and Rhoda are looking at the same place and Mary is, like, ‘Hello, I’m Mary Richards.’ ‘Hello, I’m Rhoda Morgenstern. Get out of my apartment.’ And everyone was laughing. It was a good audition, but I didn’t know how it went. Later they called me and said, ‘We’d like you to come back and read with Mary again.’ It was another audition, but I’d been auditioning for ages, so you do your best, but you don’t put a lot of stock in it. So I went in and there she was, and she was so adorable. Then they wanted me to do a screen test. This is Hollywood, they’re not going to take me from seeing me sit with Mary for a minute, but then I was told, ‘No, no, no, you got the part.’ So it was the easiest, most pleasant audition process that I ever went through with this extraordinary outcome that was the wind in the sails of my entire career to this moment.”

Says Herbie, “The connection between them comes from the idea that opposites attract or whatever you want to call it. There was that Yin/Yang thing going on that everybody saw when Valerie auditioned. What’s funny is that usually when a show starts out, it’s raw, you know? And it really has to find its footing. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was no different; it still had to find its polish. If you look at the first season and you jump to the third season, Mary’s hair is different and all of the characters were not as animated as they were in the first season where they were kind of like caricatures to a certain extent. But Rhoda was the same throughout her entire time on the show. It was that New York sensibility that Valerie had that she brought to Rhoda. Mary was the all-American girl, but Rhoda was the first cultural icon, really. Certainly a woman who happened to be a Jewish icon on weekly television. Either Mary or Valerie once said that Mary Richards was the person that every girl wanted to be, and Rhoda was the person that every girl was.”

For her part, Valerie says of the character, “She thought of herself as a loser, but she kept at the game of life fully. She had a marvelous sense of humor — remember, the greatest comedy writers in the world were writing jokes for her, but the character had a sense of humor. What made her funny was that she would say the unsayable, and it was nice juxtaposition to Mary who was a perfect lady. I remember one show where Ted Knight as Ted Baxter brought in something he’d written and asked us to read it. Mary said, ‘Well, Ted, um, it’s um, it’s interesting, and it has..’, and Rhoda says, ‘Ted, it’s the worst thing I ever read in my life.’ It got a huge laugh, but she would say things in a New York brash, unedited way. I think that was part of her charm. Plus the fact that she was terribly insecure. I think Rhoda’s appeal to people is that all of us — men, women, gay, straight, black, white, young, old — knew that they felt like Rhoda felt at some time in their life and that most of us are just trying to get through and bumping into life with our families and our work.”

‘Rhoda’: The Series

The ‘70s were all about spin-offs (just check out the sheer number of them that came from shows like All in the Family and Happy Days), and Mary Tyler Moore wasn’t immune from the syndrome, the decision being made that Rhoda should get a show of her own. “It got to the point where Rhoda was, in essence, an overwhelming presence,” Herbie points out. “Where she just had to have her own show. Other networks wanted her for her own series and that’s when CBS and MTM Enterprises were, like, ‘Oh, no, we’re keeping you. We’ll give you your own show. We’ll spin off Rhoda.’”

Ed Robertson explains, “MTM had produced a few shows between the premiere of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the premiere of Rhoda in 1974. I know they did one with Paul Sand and that went 13 and out. For some reason, they did one with Diana Rigg but it didn’t work. So Rhoda was not only the first successful spinoff of Mary Tyler Moore, it was their second successful show when you think about it. It played a major role in extending MTM Enterprises as a powerhouse through the 70s.”

As Valerie tells the Archive of American Television, from the very first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show then CBS programming chief Fred Silverman began talking about spinning off the Rhoda character. “I thought I was being fired until I asked somebody what the term meant,” she explains. “By the fourth year they were ready for it to happen and I said, ‘I don’t want to go. Why do I want it?’ Mary said, ‘You don’t want to be my sidekick all your life, do you?’ I said, ‘Yes I do. What if it fails?’ She said, ‘If it fails, you’ll move back to Minneapolis and I’ll have you back in my life again.’ I thought, ‘That’s working with a net.’”

Even today it’s difficult to understand exactly what happened with the Rhoda series. It came out of the gate huge, with the character moving back to New York City and interacting with her sister Brenda (Julie Kavner) and parents, Ida and Martin (respectively Nancy Walker and Harold Gould). Soon after coming to Manhattan, she meets and falls in love with Joe Gerard (David Groh). The two marry eight episodes in and the audience loves it, the show pulling in more than 52 million viewers. In its first two seasons it came in #6 and #7 in the ratings (higher than The Mary Tyler Moore Show), yet the decision was made in season three that the happy couple should break up. So they did. And the fans hated it. Ratings plummeted and nothing could stop it, the series coming it at #32 in year three, #25 in year four and #95 in year five.”

Ed reflects, “Rhoda had a very interesting on-air history in that on the one hand, if you followed the character from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, you were happy that Rhoda finally found a good guy and peace and happiness in her world. On the other hand, it hurt the show, or they felt that they had lost something, by making Rhoda content. That’s why they manufactured the break-up and they felt that they needed to get Rhoda back on her own.”

“The whole appeal of the character,” adds Herbie, “was that she was doing fine on her own. That’s where her humor came from. And when she gets married, the humor gets lost in contentment. I don’t know who said it, but comedy is someone in trouble, and she was no longer in  trouble until she got divorced. And then this poor thing — I’m talking about the show — like The Doris Day Show changed formats every season. It might have worked if they kept her like Ann Marie on That Girl and Donald Hollinger: single, dating, etc. But they married her. Look, they married off Jeannie in the fifth season of I Dream of Jeannie, and that was the end of the show. 99 and Maxwell Smart got married on Get Smart!, and that was the end of the show. On That Girl, Marlo Thomas didn’t want the characters to get married, because she didn’t want to say that marriage was the answer for every woman’s life.”

Looking back at it from more recent years, Valerie offers, “The problem with the show is that they wanted to write Mad About you, but it was too early; Mad About You was in the ‘80s and it was a real modern marriage. That’s what they were trying to write, but we still had people saying, ‘He’s got to have a pajama top’ or ‘I don’t know if they can be in the same bed.’ They should be. The twin beds were over, but just barely.”

Life Beyond Rhoda

Following the end of Rhoda, Valerie appeared on the big screen in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, and in a number of TV movies, among them The Day the Loving Stopped, Farrell to the People, An Invasion of Privacy and The Execution.  From 1986-87, she starred in her own series again, Valerie (more on that in a moment).  “When you think about it,” muses Ed, “she was on television nonstop for nine or 10 years throughout the ‘70s. Then she was doing movies and specials during that five-year-interim and was back with Valerie. So that’s someone who was on television nonstop for about 15 years. Not too many people can say that.”

Valerie made its debut in 1986, and saw the actress cast as Valerie Hogan, a mother attempting to juggle her career with raising three sons (the oldest of which was played by Jason Bateman). In the second season, Valerie and her second husband, producer Tony Cacciotti, began negotiating for more money and, long story short, it culminated with them off the show, Sandy Duncan moving in and the show’s title changing, first to Valerie’s Family and, then, to The Hogan Family. It ended its run 1991.

Comments Ed, “The dispute she had behind the scenes has been well-documented. I guess the best way I could put it is she was a New Yorker in every sense of the word in that she stood her ground and wasn’t afraid to stand her ground. She was not afraid to fight for principle even if it cost her. Now that may rub people the wrong way, but that’s the way New Yorkers roll. Unfortunately she found out that she was not indispensable and the network got another three years out of the show with Sandy Duncan. Jason Bateman ended up being the defacto star of it. There are, actually, a lot of stories like that where you come up with a project, it’s a project designed for you, you find out that you no longer have control of the project and you find that you’re no longer on the project.”

“It was a great show,” states Herbie. “It was produced by Lorimar from the Perfect Strangers machine; they knew how to turn out this type of show. One of the issues is that they had a scene-stealer in Jason Batemen to the point where they may have well called it Jason. Ironically, Mary would later do the series Annie McGuire and she wanted to make sure none of the kids were charismatically talented or scene stealers, so they got very average looking kids for that show. So she had learned from Valerie to never hire or work with super-talented kids.”

Reflects Valerie, “If I were a new actress at the time, I think my career would have been over, but I was 18 years in and a lot of writers and people were saying, ‘Valerie, difficult? What?’ So we went to court, they lost big time and you go on. What happened was we wanted to participate on a level that was fair, and they said no.”

Moving On

Following her exit from Valerie, the actress starred in the 1995 CBS series The City (1990) and 1995’s The Office (not the NBC series of the same name); returned to the stage for such productions as Death Defying Acts, All Under Heaven, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Looped and Nice Work if You Can Get It and starred in a variety of TV movies.

Explains Herbie, “Valerie really struggled after that. She came back a couple of times with something called The City, and I think she did something else, but after that, there wasn’t really a lot that I can recall or that stands out. And that’s sad, because she’s so talented.”

‘Mary and Rhoda’

One of the TV movies she starred in was 2000’s Mary and Rhoda, a comedy-drama bringing together Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie in their most famous roles. Mary is a recent widow and Rhoda a divorcee, and the story has them coming together again in New York and attempting to rebuild both their lives and their careers.

“We’d been talking about it for a long time and then ABC said, ‘Let’s do a pilot film, but let’s do it like a complete movie,’” says Valerie. “I was very thrilled to go back and work with Mary again. It was wonderful to have done it and it was wonderful to remember the old rhythms and the love and the way we were together. That pair of women, each together were greater than each by ourselves, I think.”

One would be hard-pressed to find much to praise about the film. Points out Herbie, “The reboot or reunion movie is a very unique animal. Once you do a reboot, whether it’s for the big screen, the small screen or whatever, there has to be the original mythology. And the way the original was made has to in some way be replicated. They did it very well with The Fugitive film. That was a unique movie that was  going to the heart of the original series and created something beyond it while still keeping the feeling of the show. Roseanne replicated itself perfectly until she blew it, and then they did The Conners. But even The Conners replicated itself perfectly with the same sets in front of a studio audience. They just picked up where they left off. Mary and Rhoda started out as a half hour sitcom in front of a live audience, but then somewhere along the line the idea died. Then they created this film and there were a couple of things going on. You can’t remake a half-hour sitcom or do a reboot or sequel to a half-hour sitcom that was filmed in front of a live audience and throw so much of it out. You can’t take two characters out of that universe and put them in a two-hour movie that is filmed like a movie without an audience. It’s like a Bizarro Mary and Rhoda. It wasn’t the Mary and Rhoda that we knew.”

Rhoda and Women’s Lib

These days, Mary Tyler Moore and the show bearing her name are credited with helping to change the perception of women in the workplace not only on television, but in real life as well. The question is how much of an impact Rhoda had on the Women’s Lib movement of the 1970s.

“Her role in the Women’s Lib movement was a lot, but not in as direct a way as Mary,” suggests Herbie. “Mary was out there in the forefront of the movement, but Rhoda was Robin to Mary’s Batman. Rhoda did make an imprint in terms of guts. Mary was the elegant and classy woman’s libber, and Valerie as Rhoda was courage and guts and a straight shooter. An independent thinker in that way; a ‘Nobody’s going to give me any s— type.’”

Ed interjects, “When we first got to know her, I won’t say Rhoda was man-hungry, but she was a woman in her 20s who wanted a boyfriend, wanted a husband, and certainly had to deal with that whenever her mother visited. But because we saw her with Mary, either one-on-one in the apartment or in Mary’s living room during one of Mary’s disastrous parties, she seemed comfortable; I never thought of Rhoda as lonely. I thought of Rhoda as a strong female friend who’s the kind of friend all of us hope we’ll have in life. Someone who’s there for us through thick and thin, especially when we find ourselves in a new situation, sort of out of our element as Mary was in the first year of that show. But Rhoda, for all her neuroses on the surface, seemed very comfortable with who she was.”

Valerie’s Legacy

The one thing about Valerie Harper that hasn’t been dealt with in detail here has been her continuing battle against cancer, the reason being that this piece was designed more as a celebration. But the truth is that she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, and four years later she went public that she had developed the rare disease leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, with the diagnosis that she could have only three months to live. In September 2017 she made the comment, as reported by Fox News, “People are saying, ‘She’s on her way to death and quickly.’ Now it’s five years instead of three months … The thing is, everyone is going to die in one way or another. So why don’t you fight it? I’m going to fight this. I’m going to see a way.” At the time this is being written, her situation is reportedly dire and Valerie is in need of care 24/7.

In considering the legacy of Valerie Harper, Herbie offers matter of factly, “Guts. She is so freaking truthful, down to Earth, and filled with such sincerity. She’s an everywoman, and I don’t know how to overstate that.”

Adds Ed, “She began her career as a stage actress and never really left the stage. She did television to be visible, and obviously it paid well, but she never turned her back on the stage and would find stuff to do. But something I was thinking about is that I remember six years ago when she was diagnosed and it was very public when it was reported she was not expected to live three months. For whatever reason, it wasn’t her time to go yet. But I remember she shared her story with the public, which, being a performer, I suppose that’s part of your life blood; it’s natural for you to do that and it kept her in front of the story. And she continued to work for as long as she could. Rhoda was plucky and Rhoda was a survivor. And I suppose, in a way, maybe she channeled some of that the last seven years.”

“I must tell you, I’m not a believer in the good old days,” Valerie says in her interview regarding the legacy she has left behind. “Seize the day. That’s what’s important. Live it moment to moment; don’t look so far ahead. I don’t mean be crazy and spend all your money and go in the poor house. But live fully in the instant. The most important moment is right now.”