‘Making It on My Own,’ With Mary Tyler Moore as a Guide
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Version 0 of 1. Can I finally admit that my role model was a sitcom character? Mary Richards — played to perfection by the beloved Mary Tyler Moore — was more than a role model, she was a template. Even in fashion and home décor — my choices mimicked hers. Mary Tyler Moore had shown up just when everything about women’s lives was about to change. Her show debuted in 1970, when I was 19, still in college and not imagining a career in television — or a career in anything. But two years after Mary first joyfully threw her tam hat up in the air and joined WJM-TV in Minneapolis, I began my television career in a city also ending in ’apolis. That part is coincidental, of course — but my home? Mary lived in a studio apartment with a pullout sofa bed, and not coincidentally so did I. And if my apartment was not quite so charming, it wasn’t for lack of copying. I didn’t yet have a style of my own, so whenever possible I borrowed Mary’s. A few years later, when to outward appearances, I was making it on my own, I was on the cover of Chicago Tribune magazine holding a flea-market find — a large gold number “5” — for Channel 5, my new broadcast home. But in truth, the inspiration was Mary. She had a big gold-toned “M.” It was affixed to the wall, part of the furniture, just like her highboy chest of drawers. I also had one of those. In Chicago, I moved up into a one-bedroom condo in a high rise. Mary had also moved out of her studio and into a condo where she gives herself a housewarming. Her parties — this was a running gag — were always dull. Sitting alone on the floor after her last guest has left, she surveys her modern new home and says, “I HATE IT.” I loved her for that. The ’70s were my formative years, and when my career got way out ahead of me, I still had Mary to fill in some gaps. We viewers were never given a peek inside her walk-in closet, but Mary would walk out of it in one cute outfit after another; usually a smart knit. I gravitated in that direction, too — if not with the same effect. For my farewell show in Chicago, on the eve of my debut on the “Today” show, I chose a knit ensemble in alternating wide stripes of brown, orange and white — possibly inspired by the colorations of a clown fish. I was thinking of Mary. Not long after, Tom Brokaw looked at me across the anchor desk one morning and said, “Burn the dress.” Not Mary’s fault. I’m sometimes described as a “pioneer” in broadcast journalism — which is preposterous. The chair I settled into in 1976 had been recently vacated by the real thing, Barbara Walters. Barbara was indisputably the highest-ranking woman in television news at that time, but she was not the best known or most beloved. That distinction belonged to “Mary.” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” started several years before two words, “and women,” were inserted into an F.C.C. affirmative action clause pertaining to television station hiring. That might have helped women like me get a job, but Mary Richards may already have opened as many doors; she had made a woman in the newsroom seem normal. Mary was ahead of her time, but not too far. She was not superwoman; she was someone you could be. She was someone you wanted to be. Mary was plucky, but not driven. When starting a new life in Minneapolis, she was just looking for a job, not a career. And though uncommonly beautiful, Mary made it O.K. to be dateless on a Saturday night — which I often was. (I wasn’t alone. On Saturday nights, as Oprah recalled, she would put the conditioner in her hair during “The Bob Newhart Show” and rinse it out before “Mary.”) Mary Tyler Moore, was “our Mary.” She was the right woman at the right time. And I loved her for it. |