They Made It After All
"Mare" and Rhoda are back in a TV-movie (and Mary still can't throw a party)
by Frank DeCaroThe woman who could turn the world on with her smile has graduated from an apartment in Minneapolis to a luxurious New York City penthouse--a duplex overlooking Central Park. But there is still a golden M hangingg on Mary Richards' living-room wall. Some things never change. Well, actually they do. On closer inspection, the beloved piece of bric-a-brac isn't exactly the one we remember from all those bad parties and good laughs in the 1970's. The letter is the same, but the font is different. And so it goes with Mary and Rhoda.
The two-hour TV-movie is a nostalgic reunion of two of TV's most beloved actresses, Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper, and their alter egos--Minneapolis newswoman Mary Richards and New York window dresser Rhoda Morgenstern. But they're not exactly the characters we knew from seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and four seasons of Rhoda (1974-1978). Like the actresses who play them, they're older and more philosophical now. "Oh Rhoda, are we in our twilight years?" Mary asks at one point. "I think we're pre-twilight, Mare," Rhoda replies.
The question is whether audiences used to seeing these characters immortalized on Nick at Nite will want to see them pushing 60. As Mary and Rhoda director Barnet Kellman (Murphy Brown, Mad About You says, "The challenge will be to see whether people will love them at a different time in their lives. People remember them so happily, there's a chance they'll say we should have left them where they were."
But for Moore and Harper, updating Mary and Rhoda was a risk they wanted to take. Harper, 59, calls the movie "a leap of faith and an act of courage" and says that she and Moore felt compelled to return to these characters for many reasons, not the least of which was because "as actresses, these are great jobs." She adds, "You can't let the fear of it not working out stop you from doing it." Moore, 63, is convinced the movie will work because the film brings them firmly into the 21st century. Except for an opening montage of vintage photographs, the film is devoid of clips. "This is Mary and Rhoda moving on," Moore says. "They're very vibrant and attractive women."
In the TV-movie, Mary Richards has recently lost her husband, a congressman. She has a daughter, Rose (Guiding Light's Joie Lenz), a New York University student who dreams of being a stand-up comic. Mary reenters the TV news business when she discovers that her husband didn't leave them as well off as she'd thought. But faced with a boss half her age (Elon Gold of the short-lived You're the One), she wonders if she'll ever be taken seriously again. "So I am a token golden oldie, is that it?" she asks. Meanwhile, Rhoda Morgenstern Gerard Rousseau is just back in New York after years of living in Paris, having divorced her second husband, a philandering Frenchman named Jean-Pierre. Her daughter, Meredith (Marisa Ryan of Major Dad and the new series Falcone), is a premedical student at Barnard. Rhoda, who has been on a spiritual quest--"I've found myself right there between Jewish and Shaker, so now I can make my own furniture and sell it retail," she explains--finds work as a photographer's assistant while trying to get a show of her own photos.
Fleshing out the characters' histories has made for a hellish three years. Moore, who is married to prominent New York surgeon S. Robert Levine, signed a lucrative deal with ABC in 1997 to do a series version of Mary and Rhoda. But the network actress (who serves as coexecutive producer of the film) could not agree on the show's premise. Executives, Moore said, were expecting pilot scripts to be as polished as episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. After various writers tried in vain to update the characters, Moore nearly scotched the idea of a reunion entirely. But then she and the network decided to try a TV-movie. The script, written by Katie Ford, struck the right balance between comic nostalgic warmth and contemporary comedy. "I would be the last person to besmirch the memory of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore says.
Although the world is harsher now than when Mary Richards first tossed her hat up into the air and Rhoda Morgenstern first threatened to apply a chocolate bar directly to her hips, the chemistry between Moore and Harper has never diminished. Harper's earthy strength as Rhoda still works as a foil for Mary's earnest optimism. "Rhoda wishes she were Mary," Harper adds. "But it doesn't manifest itself as jealousy. She knows that Mary may have the great job and the great figure, but Rhoda's from New York. She knows she's got to straighten this shiksa out."
Sitting in a trailer on Central Park West between takes on a sunny afternoon--Moore dressed in a beige turtleneck and an embroidered skirt; Harper in a silk dressing gown and hair rollers--the actresses finish each other's sentences, cognizant of what each contributes to the pop-culture mythology they've helped create. "Our rapport hasn't changed one iota," Moore says. "It's not just our friendship: It's knowledge of each other's timing. I felt a real ease falling into Valerie's arms." Harper, who is married to theatrical producer Tony Cacciotti, likens it to "dancing with a favorite parnter. We don't see each other that often but can just pick up where we left off."
That was apparent on the set of Mary and Rhoda, particularly in the scene in which Rhoda sees Mary get into a taxi and then chases it down Central Park West. The two come face to face after years apart. "They fell into the most spontaneous kind of rush to fill the space of 20 years' absence," says Kellman. "That was the keynote to the atmosphere on the set."
Still, 23 years is 23 years, and the shoot wasn't easy on either actress. "It's rough," Moore admits. "We've been working 12-hour days. We've been flexing muscles that haven't been trotted out in a while." For Moore, whose battles with diabetes have been well-chronicled, the shoot was particularly grueling. For a scene in which Mary leaps over a barrier to catch a stray dog, Moore insisted on doing the jumping herself because a stuntwoman's attempts looked too athletic." She missed slightly and tripped and broke her wrist in the process," Kellman remembers. "We were absolutely horrified. Mary looked up and said, 'That looked great, didn't it?'" Moore wore a removable cast for the rest of the shoot.
Although the film focuses on Mary and Rhoda, it also introduces their adult children and uses them to define how the characters have changed over time. "You want to see how these ladies would be as mothers," explains Kellman. "We had to find people who were very young but had the level of skill to play with such comedic veterans." They found them in Lenz, 18, who recently graduated from high school in New Jersey, and Ryan, 24, a New York City native best known as detective Nell Delaney on New York Undercover. As expected, the roles were highly coveted, with actresses trying anything to convince producers they could play the offspring of two of TV's most famous characters. "there were girls in the room who had kerchiefs on their heads," says Ryan.
But the producers were not looking for actresses to copy Rhoda's signature fashion accessory or to impersonate Mary's vibrato cries. What they wanted was subtler than that, Ryan says. "You had to conjure them up a little bit." For Ryan, who grew up on the Lower East Side, it wasn't difficult. "When Valerie and I hung out on the set, we were alike in some ways. We kibitzed a lot." Despite her youth, Lenz wasn't intimidated by the iconic status of Moore and Harper--perhaps until she was cast in the TV-movie and producers sent her some tapes of the series, she'd seen only a few episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. "I grew up without cable," Lenz explains. But she was a quick study. "It was interesting to see how Mary could take an ordinary line and make it one of the funniest things you've ever heard."
Though many connected with Mary and Rhoda were hoping the TV-movie would serve as a "backdoor pilot" for a half-hour series, Moore has decided for now not to pursue it. "I really enjoyed doing the movie, but I think I would rather do other things now," she told TV Guide at the recent Television Critics Association press tourin Pasadena, California.
Kellman expects Mary and Rhoda to do well based on the drawing power of its stars. "It's two series leads for the price of one," he says. Coexecutive producer Susan B. Landau is convinced that the movie taps into the audience's need to see life work out for the characters. "In [an age] when people don't have time for friendship, people are interested in the enduring friendship of Mary and Rhoda," she says. "People are looking forward to visiting that world again," adds Ryan. As she quickly learned in her visit to that world, "There's not anywhere on TV where you can find the likes of Mary and Rhoda."
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