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"I'll never forget going to a movie premiere," she recalls, "and being shoved out of the way by a screaming mob of photographers. 'Step aside, lady,' said one of them, 'here comes Mario Thomas.' " No one would ever step aside for Mary any more—or so it seemed at the tune. After a miscarriage, doctors discovered that she was severely diabetic. Since then she has had to give herself two insulin shots a day.
After the sadness of the late '60s, Mary needed some good news. It came from Dick Van Dyke. If the comedian had inadvertently ruined her career by quitting his show, he advertently restored it in 1969 when he appeared with his old co-star in a nostalgic special. The show drew enormous ratings and critical acclaim. CBS offered Mary the series of her choice. Given her husband's producing skills, the Neil Simon-and-soda scripts and the cast of aces, Mary soon owned Saturday night.
The success came too late to turn her head. She flashed the same radiant smile for double takes or disasters—including last year's two-month estrangement from Grant. Even now, no one, perhaps not even the principals, knows exactly what went wrong. It is a mark of Tinker's corner-office manner that he refers to the relationship as a kind of long-running show that had somehow slipped in the marital Nielsens. "We didn't have one of those grand jarring arguments," he says. "We had a great marriage from the beginning, but it had fallen below that standard."
MARY: / think you 're asking a lot of personal questions you have no right to ask.
LOU: You know you 've got spunk? I hate spunk.
Mary adds that "one cause of the separation was that I was too dependent on Grant, my best and only friend. I leaned on him too much." The air-conditioned temperament and the dispassionate self-analysis often make her seem to be an ice princess. But occasionally friends, and even viewers will catch a sudden, instantly covered vulnerability, an intimation that all is not Happy Hotpoint redivivus. Indeed Mary's own preference is not for her show's merry confrontations but for the occasional crying scenes. "Mostly," she says, "because I do them well. There's a childlike quality hi those scenes that I treasure." They are also a pressure valve. On one memorable show, Mary wailed to her boss, "You don't know what it's like being a perky cute person. No one realizes what's bubbling underneath: the doubts, fears, worries, tensions." She played it for laughs, but the scene had an undertow of genuine melancholy —and worked twice as well because of the contrast.
Since the reconciliation, Mary seems less likely to need the breakdown bits.
Her manic dieting has ceased. "Grant says it's all well and good," claims Mary, "but to remember that somewhere along the line Totie Fields looked like me on the way up." Still, the ex-dancer works with a ballet instructor four days a week and remains vain enough not to watch her old Dick Van Dyke shows because "it's like Dorian Gray in reverse."