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There is in fact a large gap between the show girl and the real one. For a long while, Mary's life was a string of situations without comedy. Like Valerie, Mary Tyler Moore is a lapsed Catholic and an early starter. The day after she graduated from high school in Los Angeles, where her father worked for a utility company, the young actress won her first TV assignment. She was unforgettable as Happy Hotppint, a sexless elf in appliance commercials. "Nothing can surpass the thrill when I saw myself on television," she remembers. "In fact, I was so excited I almost forgot about the pain. I was supposed to be a flat-chested neuter elf. Well, I wasn't flat-chested, and it was painful."
At 17, the elf wed a 27-year-old salesman, Richard Meeker. "I used him as a way to get out of the house," Mary confesses. "It was a pathetic reason to get married." Soon after the Meekers' son Richard was born, Mary landed her first dramatic television role. It was Happy Hotpoint all over again. As the velvet-voiced secretary on Richard Diamond, Mary was invisible, save for her hands and legs.
Still, they were nice legs, and it was better than being entirely off-camera. Mary was soon interviewed for the role of Danny Thomas' daughter in Make Room for Daddy. It was an epochal audition. Thomas turned her down gently: "With a nose like yours, my dear, you don't look like you belong to me." But a few years later, when Thomas was casting The Dick Van Dyke Show, he called for "the girl with the three names and the smile." By then Mary's marriage was all but finished; it was finally canceled in its eleventh year.
While the pilot for The Dick Van Dyke Show was being filmed, the recently separated Mary was introduced to an NBC executive whose own marriage had just dissolved. Mary and Grant were married three years later. The network elevated Tinker to vice president in the programming department and made his headquarters Burbank, Calif., where his bride happened to be working. A five-year idyll ended in 1966, when NBC ordered Tinker back to Manhattan, and Dick Van Dyke decided to leave his show to pursue a film career.
"I hated living hi New York again," says Tinker. "I didn't stay a year and asked them to let me out of my contract." In the meantime, his wife tried Broadway—and found fiasco.
The show was the Broadway musicalization of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. After disastrous previews, Breakfast was ceremoniously folded by Producer David Merrick, who was no kinder to Mary than he was to Valerie; the Prince of Darkness referred to the flop as "my Bay of Pigs."
Back in Hollywood, says Mary, "I told everybody that doing Breakfast at Tiffany's had strengthened and enriched me and that I had developed valuable scar tissue to make me tougher. Except that none of that was true."
LOU: lean't see myself with that sort ofwoman.
MARY: How many men is a woman allowed to have before she becomes "that sort of woman ?"
LOU: Six.
There was more scar tissue to come.