Mary Tyler Moore, she of the carefree hat toss, died yesterday aged 80. Her death, so close after the women’s march, highlights how long we have been fighting for equal rights and her legacy, I hope, will be that comedy is a great method of breaking down barriers.
Born in Brooklyn, New York Mary decided aged 17 that she wanted to be a dancer and soon got the part of an elf for a number of Hotpoint appliance commercials. During this time Mary fell pregnant and lost the part of Happy Hotpoint the elf when her pregnancy became impossible to conceal (I suppose it’s challenging to choreograph a dance that shows off appliances but hides a swollen stomach). Mary then won several TV roles before being cast as Dick Van Dyke’s wife, Laura Petrie, in the confusingly eponymous (Dick Van Dyke played a character called Rob Petrie) Dick Van Dyke Show. Mary was a hit as Laura Petrie and won her first Emmy for the role.
In 1970 Mary and her husband Grant Tinker pitched a new show starring Mary to CBS, this became the hugely successful Mary Tyler Moore Show. As Yael Kohen writes in We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy until this show women had primarily played wives and mothers in TV sitcoms: “Network television has always been a conservative medium, and while the 1960s may have marked the start of the women’s movement in America, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the changing roles of the American woman received any real notice on the small screen…Mary Tyler Moore, the first show to depict a single, independent career woman who would, as the theme song said ‘make it on her own,’ sent the first signal that female-driven television was on a new track…”
This was a time when, according to writer Carl Reiner “we couldn’t say ‘pregnant’!” Allan Burns, the co-creator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show told Yael Kohen that originally they had wanted Mary’s character to be a divorcee, however the network was not comfortable with that, explaining that audiences apparently did not want to see “men with mustaches, people who live in New York, Jews…and divorce.” Turns out Tom Selleck, Seinfeld and Friends were way more revolutionary than you might have realised…
Instead Mary’s character, Mary Richards, was introduced as a woman in her 30s who had just ended a live in relationship. Which, even now, is pretty unusual – a woman in her 30s not chasing marriage or in fear of being left ‘on the shelf’? IMPLAUSIBLE! Mary Richards was often depicted humorously schooling her male colleagues, the show featured a gay character, Phyllis’s brother and Mary Richards even had a (discreet but outside of marriage) sex life. What was even more unusual was that Mary Richards had women friends on the show, Allan continues: “I think that was largely due to Mary’s generosity…that she had seen for the good of the show, it was better she surround herself with people who were as good as she was, and let them have the limelight too.”
Mary starred in many other TV series and films, including Ordinary People, in which she played a mother grieving for her son. Her performance won her an Oscar nomination. Mary herself lost her only son, who died aged 24 from an accidental gunshot wound. Mary wrote two memoirs which she charted her battle with alcoholism. Mary, who was diagnosed with diabetes aged 33 was chair of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
“I’ve had the fame and the joy of getting laughter – those are gifts.”
Mary Tyler Moore introduced America to the new modern woman. And she used comedy to do it.
