(2 of 8)
On her new season's series, only one priceless ingredient is missing—her longtime Minneapolis neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern. For four years Valerie Harper impersonated that adamantime Jewish waif and grew more skilled with each show. This year, hi the best show-business tradition, she was strong enough to spin off to her own production. Her new series has relocated her in Manhattan, where Rhoda has actively searched for an apartment, a job and a man—and miraculously found all three. She has also found a supporting cast that rivals Mary's: Harold Gould (Pop), who helped sharpen The Sting; Nancy Walker (Ma), a former stage comedienne whose timing could be used to set observatory clocks; Julie Kavner (Rhoda's sister Brenda), a fresh face with an oversized appetite and talent to match. Rhoda has even been given a fiance, Joe (David Groh). On Oct. 28 they will exchange vows, rings and one-liners in an expanded one-hour special starring Mary and Rhoda.
It ought to be the top-rated comedy of the year. It will join—perhaps for the last time—two of the prettiest, wittiest comics in Hollywood. Mary can wrap an insult in velvet and put down a lover so gently that he never knows what happened until he wakes up on the sidewalk outside her apartment. Valerie can sketch a character with a series of straight lines and give an audience a solid minute of funny faces—without spilling a grain of makeup or a scintilla of style.
The weekend watchers have been in love with Mary for years. They have been tracking Hurricane Rhoda for almost as long. She was in fact born in the original Mary Tyler Moore pilot show, a zaftig 150-pounder who made everybody grin—everybody except the first preview audience, a group randomly selected by CBS programmers. Those 300 sages found the tough-talking, overweight neighbor "a negative character."
MTM developed that negative anyway, and it proved another picture entirely. Rhoda turned out to be a close relative of Tevye, a fiddler on the rueful whose face could shine with puzzlement as well as wisdom while she searched for career, meaning, laughs, irony and that sine qua non of the not-quite-liberated Msfit, a husband.
RHODA: What am I? I'm not married, I'm not engaged—I'm not even pinned. I bet Hallmark doesn 't even have a card for me!
Much of Rhoda's success derives from its parents, MTM Enterprises and the company's magisterial executive, Grant Tinker, 48. The lean-jawed New Englander who was lucky enough to marry Mary Tyler Moore was also canny enough to surround her with the best talent in the business. "My career," he says, "has been an inexorable march to get as close as I could to the creative product, working through people who made the shows." That march included stints at NBC and 20th Century-Fox, where he developed a sure instinct for commercial comedy and new talent, including Writer-Producers James Brooks and Allan Burns (see box page 60), the creators of both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. Yet, as Tinker is the first to acknowledge, every supersedes owes its real velocity to its star. Mary Tyler Moore speaks for herself; her name is enough to attract 31 million viewers every Saturday night. Rhoda's secret is Valerie Harper, a soft-voiced, serious actress with a rare gift of gag.