Mary Tyler Moore life and biography

"Sidelights"

On the strength of the engaging sitcom characters she has created, Mary Tyler Moore is one of the most recognizable and most significant figures in the history of American television. Her career has been marked by many failures as well as many successes, on television and in the movies, but her successes have been notable enough to garner her six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, one Academy Award nomination, and a spot in the Television Hall of Fame. She also achieved status as a major figure in the women's rights movement because of the character she played for seven years on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. As chairman of the board of MTM Enterprises, she has also become a very successful and wealthy businesswoman.

Mary Tyler Moore was born December 29, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York (although she gave her birthdate as 1937 for many years) to George and Marjorie Moore. George Moore was an auditor for Consolidated Edison until 1946, when he quit that job and moved the family to Los Angeles. His brother-in-law had landed him a job there as a production assistant on the Abbott and Costello radio show. It was the first introduction young Mary had to show business, but it was short-lived, as the show lasted only nine months. George returned to his previous vocation, and worked with the Southern California Gas Company for the next 37 years.

Mary attended Catholic school in California, and was raised strictly Catholic by her family, although she later said she was less than a model for her religion. She confessed in MacLean's that "I was told that prolonged kissing was a mortal sin, but I knew that I liked it and I was probably going to do it again." When she was 18 she married her next-door neighbor, Richard Meeker, a 27-year-old food salesman. Her father told Maclean's, "She got married primarily so she could stay out later at night." She became pregnant just months after getting married, and gave birth to Richard, her only child, the following year.

Also in 1955, Moore got her first show business job playing Happy Hotpoint, a leotard-wearing pixie who danced over stoves in TV appliance commercials. The job paid $10,000 a year, but she had to give it up when her pregnancy became obvious. She worked as a chorus dancer for Dean Martin, Jimmy Durante and others, then faked her resume to break into the acting business. She appeared, sort of, on the TV series Richard Diamond, Private Eye, from 1957 to 1959, but didn't show her true acting ability: only her legs and hands appeared on screen in her role as the title character's secretary.

Her sporadic television guest spots gained Moore an audition for the role of Danny Thomas's daughter on his series Make Room for Daddy. Thomas decided she was physically wrong to play his daughter, but when he and Carl Reiner were casting actors for The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1961, she won the role of Laura Petrie, wife of the star's character Rob Petrie. The role as a perky housewife garnered Moore her first public acclaim, as well as two Emmys and a Golden Globe Award. The series ran five years, going off the air in 1966.

During the run of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore's personal life went through dramatic changes. After the show's first season she divorced Meeker, and in 1963 she married NBC executive Grant Tinker. She miscarried what would have been the couple's only child in 1966, and in the aftermath of that misfortune was informed by her doctor that she was diabetic. In the future Moore would control the disease with insulin shots and diet, would serve as a spokesperson for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, and would generally be regarded as the best-known person with the disease in the United States.

After the demise of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore went four years before appearing on another TV series. She spent the intervening years doing a pair of television movies, as well as four theatrical releases, most notably Thoroughly Modern Millie with Julie Andrews and Change of Habit with Elvis Presley; none received particular critical acclaim. But a television special reunion with Van Dyke in 1969 was so successful that all three networks offered her a series.

On the advice of her husband, Moore chose to go to CBS, whose offer allowed the two to create an independent company to produce the show. They called the resulting company MTM Enterprises, a name which would become familiar to television viewers over the years.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show cast Moore as Mary Richards, a television journalist living and working in Minneapolis. The writers, James Brooks and Alan Burns, whose track record included Room 222, a comedy program noted for social relevance, wanted to make Moore's character a divorcee. CBS executives, concerned that she was too familiar to viewers as the wife of Dick Van Dyke, preferred that her character have a more conservative past. Thus was launched one of the most famous characters in television. Richards became a symbol for a whole generation of television viewers as a single woman who had left a man she had been living with to pursue her dreams.

The timing of the show and the subject matter were a natural match. With the women's liberation movement gaining momentum and old stereotypes of the working woman in search of a husband falling out of fashion, Mary Richards--an independent, single woman--caught on with viewers. Moore won Emmys for the show in 1973, 1974 and 1976, and created an identity which many people would associate her with for the rest of her life. The Mary Tyler Moore Show stayed on the air for seven years, with sagging ratings forcing Moore and Tinker to retire the show in 1977.

Moore's career following the cancellation of The Mary Tyler Moore Show often seemed to lack direction. She continued to work, despite having amassed great wealth, but her successes were more sporadic. Her 1978 variety show, Mary, lasted only three weeks, and a second variety show, The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, didn't do much better in 1979. But she did play a serious role in a 1978 television movie, First You Cry, about a woman with breast cancer. The film didn't turn many critics's heads, but Moore's performance garnered some praise and broadened her horizons to set her up for the next big role she would play, in the 1980 theatrical film Ordinary People. In this film, Moore played the mother of a son who dies, and another son who is wracked with guilt over his brother's death. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Moore was nominated for an award but did not win, instead taking a Golden Globe Award for the role.

It was later in 1980 that Moore faced the most tragic crisis of her life. Her son, Richie, fatally shot himself while playing with a gun. The death was ruled accidental, although Richie's roommate said he had been playing Russian Roulette. In 1995 Moore told the New York Times Magazine, "It could not have been possible that he committed suicide. He had nothing to be upset about. He was about to start work at CBS. He was going on an audition, and he and I had enjoyed an almost two-year discovery of each other and an acceptance, similar to the discovery and acceptance of my father that I feel now. Maybe I could have rewritten it a little better, but it is what it is, and there are no intentional villains here."

Richie's death was the largest of a string of personal setbacks which began in 1978 when Moore's sister, Elizabeth, died of an overdose of Darvon and alcohol at the age of 21. Another crisis came in 1981, when her marriage to Tinker ended in divorce. In 1982 Moore was returning with her parents to New York from a European vacation when her mother became ill with a bronchial infection on the flight. Moore called for her mother's doctor immediately upon their landing, but he wasn't on duty. His answering machine recommended she call his backup, Dr. Robert Levine. Levine treated Marjorie, and gave Mary his telephone number in case of an emergency. She told People that her response to him was: "Does extreme loneliness come under the heading of an emergency?"

On November 23, 1983, Moore and Levine were married. It wasn't an obvious coupling at first glance: Levine is Jewish and 17 years younger than Moore. "There was a road to travel to gain acceptance; Mary's not being Jewish was less of an issue than our age difference," Levine told People. "But we all have a soulmate, and it's very hard to find that person."

In 1984 Moore confronted a problem that had been simmering within her for some years. She checked into the Betty Ford clinic for help with her alcoholism, which had been complicating her diabetes. The death of a favorite dog had triggered the binge which forced her to seek treatment, but drinking had been a major part of Moore's life for a long time, dating to her days on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and her marriage to Tinker. "I never saw Mary staggering," her co-star from that show, Valerie Harper, told People. "I just thought she was having a great time." There was a genetic precedent for her problem: Her mother and her brother were both alcoholics. "Drinking during the day was my mother's trait," she wrote in her 1995 autobiography, After All, as quoted in People. "I could no longer pretend that I wasn't really an alcoholic. I was my mother."

The 1980s were a spotty decade for Moore professionally. She starred in a pair of highly regarded, made-for-television movies: In Heartsounds she played opposite James Garner as a woman whose doctor-husband suffered a series of debilitating heart attacks, and in Finnegan Begin Again she played opposite Robert Preston in a middle-age romance story. Two theatrical releases weren't as well regarded, however, and two TV series, Mary (1985) and Annie McGuire (1988) failed to survive their first seasons. Moore also appeared on Broadway in two plays during the decade: Whose Life Is It Anyway? in 1980, and Sweet Sue in 1987.

Moore continued to deal with difficult times in her personal life into the 1990s. In 1991 her brother, a recovered alcoholic, died of cancer. John had begged her to help him commit suicide, she wrote in her autobiography. So she spoon-fed him painkillers mashed in ice cream while Levine increased his morphine dosage. John's body had developed an immunity to the drugs, however, and he didn't die until late in the year. Three months later Marjorie Moore, who had been sober for seven years, died of a brain hemorrhage.

Moore kept working through the 1990s, primarily starring in made-for-TV movies. She had her most notable success with the black comedy Thanksgiving Day, and the 1993 release Stolen Babies, for which she won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Special. In 1995 she took another shot at a weekly series with a role in New York News, but she quit the show early in its run, complaining that she didn't like the way her character was developing.

But the crowning moment of Moore's career came in 1985, when she was elected to the Television Hall of Fame. Her legacy for future generations will probably consist primarily of reruns of her two long-running TV series, The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which continued to find an audience in syndication in the 1980s and on cable in the 1990s. "When I walk in New York invariably I hear a cab driver or truck driver yell out the window: 'Hey, Mare, great to see ya. Lookin' good, kid.' That's syndication speaking out and keeping me alive," she told Maclean's in 1986.

PERSONAL INFORMATION

Born December 29, 1936, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of George (an auditor for a utility company) and Marjorie Moore; married Richard Meeker (a food salesman), 1955 (divorced, c. 1962); married Grant Tinker (a television executive) 1963 (divorced, 1981); married Robert Levine (a cardiologist) November 23, 1983; children: Richard (born 1957, died 1980).

AWARDS

Emmy Award for Dick Van Dyke Show, 1964, 1965; Golden Globe Award for Dick Van Dyke Show, 1965; Emmy Awards for Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1973, 1974, 1976; Golden Globe Award for Ordinary People, 1981; named to Television Hall of Fame, 1985; Emmy for Stolen Babies, 1993.

CAREER

Appeared in TV series Richard Diamond, Private Eye, 1957-59; Dick Van Dyke Show, 1961-66; Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970-77; Mary, 1978; Mary Tyler Moore Hour, 1979; Mary, 1985; Annie McGuire, 1988; New York News, 1995; movies X-15, 1961; Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1967; Don't Just Stand There, 1968; What's So Bad About Feeling Good, 1968; Change of Habit, 1969; Ordinary People, 1980; Six Weeks, 1982; Just Between Friends, 1986; TV movies Love American Style, 1969; Run a Crooked Mile, 1969; First You Cry, 1978; Heartsounds, 1984; Finnegan Begin Again, 1984; The Last Best Year, 1990; Thanksgiving Day, 1990; Stolen Babies, 1993; TV special How to Survive the Seventies, 1978; Broadway plays Whose Life Is It Anyway?, 1980; Sweet Sue, 1987; TV miniseries Gore Vidal's Lincoln, 1988.

WORKS

* After All, Dell, 1995.

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