047 Proud Mary transcript (Mary Tyler Moore)

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[00:00:00] Amit: This is Famous and Gravy, a podcast about quality of life as we see it one dead celebrity at a time. Now for the opening quiz to reveal today's dead celebrity.

[00:00:11] Michael: This person died 2017, age 80. At age 17, she was hired to appear in a series of commercials for hot point alliances in the role of a Cape dancing androgynous elf in the body stocking.

[00:00:27] Friend: Is Florence Henderson still alive?

[00:00:29] Michael: Not Florence Henderson. She entered the Betty Ford Center for Treatment in 1984 for alcoholism.

[00:00:35] Friend: Here's some trivia for everyone. I am two miles away from the Betty Ford Clinic. Go over and check the records, Dan. Let me run over quick.

[00:00:44] Michael: She was chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, and spoke openly about her own struggle with the disease. She was also a vegetarian and an outspoken proponent of animal welfare.

[00:00:56] Friend: I am positive it is Shirley Temple.

[00:00:59] Michael: Not Shirley Temple. We actually did her on the show in 1980. She won a Golden Globe and she was nominated for an Academy Award.

[00:01:07] Friend: What was on TV back then? We had green channels. Betty White.

[00:01:14] Michael: Not Betty White. Her 1970s TV show was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the workforce. Her character faced such issues as equal pay, birth control, and sexual independence.

[00:01:28] Friend: I mean, 1970s. I'm thinking like Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda. Not Mary Tyler Moore is it? Mary Tyler Moore.

[00:01:34] Michael: Today's dead celebrity is Mary Tyler Moore.

[00:01:58] Archival: A short time after we closed up shop at MTM Studios, they put up a plaque that said, on this stage, a company of loving and talented friends created a television classic. The Mary Tyler Moore show. The plaque is still there and we're darn proud of it. Goodnight.

Welcome to Famous and Gravy. I'm Michael Osborne.

[00:02:28] Amit: My name is Amit Kapoor.

[00:02:29] Michael: And on this show we choose a celebrity who died in the last 10 years and review their quality of life. We go through a series of categories to figure out the things in life that we would actually desire and ultimately answer. A big question, would I won that life Today, Mary Tyler Moore died 2017 a 80 category one grading the first line of their obituary.

Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top rated television shows in the 1960s and seventies helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 80.

[00:03:14] Amit: Okay. Why didn't they name the shows?

[00:03:16] Michael: Well, probably because it's called the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and that would've felt redundant, like one of them, right?

[00:03:21] Amit: The other one was the Dick Van Dyke show. They could have done something clever like saying the Dick Van Dyke show in one bearing her own

[00:03:27] Michael: name. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, let me tell you my first reaction. I don't like that they're talking about these things with a level of. These two top rated shows.

I get it that they are equal in terms of their popularity, but to me they are not equal in terms of their significance.

[00:03:45] Amit: Hardly anyone would say the Dick Van Dyke show or her role in it had cultural significance.

[00:03:50] Michael: Well, I don't think that's quite true. I think it was, and did I? They make a big hubub about her wearing pants and that was a sign of progress.

[00:03:59] Amit: You think maybe omit the illusion to the Dick Van Dyke show entirely from the first

[00:04:03] Michael: line or one up at who? You know, Mary Tyler Moore, who's witty and graceful performances first on the Dick Van Dyke Show, and then more significantly on the Mary Tyler Moore show helped define a new vision of American womanhood.

I mean, I think that there was a leveling up that happened and a leap forward with progress, how women were portrayed on American TV between these two shows. That's not accounted for here.

[00:04:27] Amit: One was a step. One was a leap.

[00:04:29] Michael: Yeah. Yeah. One's a tiny step forward. One's a giant

[00:04:31] Amit: step forward. Is that what Neil Armstrong said?

I forget.

[00:04:35] Michael: Uh, no. It was just one step

[00:04:36] Amit: for him. So the Dick Van Bike Show was one small step for Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler, the Mary Tyler Moore Show was one giant leap

[00:04:44] Michael: for womanhood. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to the first line of the obituary here. Other things here I really like who's witty and graceful performances.

That's a nice combo. She's, yes. And those feel true to me. And

[00:04:57] Amit: there's an illusion to her, like beauty, which is just, it's sort of a

[00:05:00] Michael: homely beauty. A girl next door is it sometimes described. Yeah. But yeah, graceful is good for that. And then I do think that this line is absolutely essential, helped define a new vision of American womanhood.

So, you know, for the most part I'm pretty good with this first line of the obituary in terms of verbiage, but not in terms of overall framing and significance.

[00:05:24] Amit: I'm not loving the adjectives as much as you are the witty and graceful. I think they're both good, but I think they're something better out there.

[00:05:32] Michael: They're kind of off the shelf.

[00:05:33] Amit: Yeah. It's like what I would use if I was writing the obituary. Yeah.

[00:05:36] Michael: I actually don't have a problem with these off-the-shelf words in a way, because I do think that like there's a lot I love about Mary Tyler Moore. We're gonna get to it, but there is some sort of like, I don't know, vanilla aspects to her.

Right. There are some ways in which she is talented to be sure. Yeah. And brings a lot to her characters. But there's also a distance between the human and the characters, between the woman and the characters, where there's a lot of room and you could fill it in a lot of different ways. And I'm pretty satisfied with witty and graceful.

So I'm actually much more comfortable with these words than you. I think

[00:06:13] Amit: maybe relatable is what I'm looking for. Like a bigger, something like relatable, but on a, a more complimentary basis. Okay, that's fair. That's true. So successfully relatable or

[00:06:24] Michael: charmingly? Relatable. That's a good point. All right. I think I got my grade.

I may give it a six. I think it's better than average. Yes. I think that the verbiage could use a little bit leveling up. I am primarily frustrated with the equating of the Dick Van Dyke show and the Mary Tyler Moore show, and they don't even identify them. So I feel like a six is even generous here. They could have done a lot better.

That's my score. Well, I

[00:06:48] Amit: will punch them in the gut then Michael. Cause I'm gonna give them a five cuz I think you convinced Oh right. So much for positive. Yes, I know, I really, I really took it on the chin with Norm McDonald. No, I agree with you and I think you convinced me that those two characters or those two shows are not on equal level.

You know, I do like that they related her characters to being, helping define a, what was the word? A new level of womanhood. But I don't, I wanna talk about that a lot more. I don't think that's the best summation, but at least they referenced it. So yeah. Five, that's all you get. Five and a

[00:07:18] Michael: six. They could have done better.

They could have done better. Category two, five things I love about you here. Amit and I work together to come up with five reasons why we love this person, why we want to be talking about them in the first place. Amit, I think you should go first today. Okay.

[00:07:34] Amit: Uh, I'm gonna use the words liberal centrist, which is what she used to describe herself.

So this is picking up right where we left off on the conversation about the two shows. So the Mary Tyler Moore show specifically was the first about a single woman on her own who is a professional that hadn't been done in sitcoms before. I mean, it's a drag

[00:07:56] Michael: saying you're 30 and single all the time. You know what it's, I know, I know.

And then Mary, that ever popular question, how come a girl like you has been married? How come you are still single? Right. You know, sometimes Rhoda, I think that I could discover the secret of immortality and people would still say, Look at that single girl discovering the secret of immortality. That

[00:08:17] Amit: is exactly what I'm talking about, mayor.

So she had kind of become a little bit of an icon of the feminist movement just by virtue of the fact that she played that character. She herself was not a huge champion of progressive women's rights. I think it's complicated. Correct. And she had been asked by the likes of like Betty Fredan and Gloria Seim and all to be like an actual champion for the women's movement.

But the extension, and I got some stuff on that later. But yeah, go ahead. But the extent she really did it was she just wrote and played these characters because of that. She was labeled a little bit liberal leaning. But throughout her life, her politics kind of switched. So she was very big on Jimmy Carter.

She liked him a lot, but then she was, she really just kind of towed the middle line, I think through the eighties and nineties and even up until her last decade, like she was, I think, believe she endorsed John McCain. Yeah,

[00:09:10] Michael: she See, I saw that she said she was like willing to go out and campaign for 'em.

[00:09:14] Amit: So here's what I like. I like the fluidity. You know, I'm not a politics guy. I don't believe that. Like, you know, you identify with a side or a party and you should stick with it with your whole life. I don't think that's necessarily representative of your values. Cause what happens in politics, it's more of a reflection of just who happens to be representing the party at the time.

So I kind of like Mary as a flip flapper here, as being a Democrat, as a swing vote exactly as being, as being a swing vote. I don't think you see that much in Hollywood. You're staunchly one or the other very often, and especially with what was handed to her as having to be this symbol of a movement. You know, she still made her own choices.

She very much believed in feminism and women's rights and wanted to contribute to define that era of womanhood. But maybe that was the extent of it. The rest of it was up to her own values.

[00:10:09] Michael: Is it that you like her relationship with political life and ability to be sort of persuaded by different arguments?

Or is it that you like that she was one political identity and then became another? What I like here is sort of a willingness to be persuaded and to grow and evolve and change in your views, but not necessarily have that be the thing you're all about and embracing the symbol that the character Mary Richards was on the Mary Tyler Moore show.

Yes,

[00:10:38] Amit: I think that's exactly right. I think you put it perfectly, her ability to change and evolve and be persuaded. Not that she was one thing and switched. Listen, I just don't believe in in party affiliation that much. I mean, it's become Yeah, sort of necessary I think in the climate of whatever you wanna call it, the last decade or more, the polarized world we live in.

Yeah, yeah. But I just, I, I never liked it about America, I guess, and I liked that she didn't do it, and that's not that common. And so I like it and I'm okay with your phrase as the summary of this is just call it Mary Tyler Moore Swing

[00:11:07] Michael: voter. Okay. Okay. Okay. I like it. All right. Uh, should I go into my thing number two, Uhhuh.

I really want to talk about the show in part because much like David Bowie, this was a kind of like, I knew Bowie was an artist to be discovered. For those who had not yet done the deep dive into his catalog, I knew the Mary Tyler Moore show was something to be understood. I didn't realize how good it was.

I'd never seen it before. Prior to this episode. I knew it existed, but I'd never watched it. It is still really good. It is still genuinely funny. Um, has the job been filled? Yeah. Oh, but there is another job. Oh, I figured I'd hire a man for it. Oh, we can talk about it. How old are you? 30.

[00:11:57] Amit: Divorced? No. Never

[00:11:58] Michael: married?

No. Why? Why? Hmm. You type Mr. Grant. There's no simple answer to that question. Yes, there is. How about, no, I can't type, or Yes I can. There's no simple answer to why a person isn't married. How many different reasons can there be? 65

or it's per minute? My typing question? Yes. Look, miss, would you try answering the questions as I ask them? Yes, Mr. Van? I will. But it does seem that you've been asking a lot of very personal questions that don't have a thing to do with my qualifications for this job. You know what you got Spunk. Well, yes.

I hate Spunk. I did see that it was ranked by Rolling Stone as the seventh best sitcom of all time and the 10th best TV show of all time. You know, I was sort of alluding to this to a second ago. I think it's such really rare for TV shows to be funny 50 years later. I can't think of anything I'm watching from the sixties or seventies that like still gets me.

It still cracks me up. I mean, comedy has a way of aging out and I think that a lot of reasons that. TV show comedies don't persist is that they play on you go back and watch 'em and you see a lot of homophobia or a lot of sexism or a lot of racism or, or whatever. Like these things become more apparent with time that they were playing to, you know, sort of cheap laughs.

Mary Tyler Moore show does not do that. Mary Tyler Moore show is still, you know, kind of like relevant and that's incredible for something that was created. 50 years ago, I wanna read a quote from an article by this woman, Jennifer Keisha Armstrong, I believe is her name. It's hard to overstate the lasting cultural impact of Mary Richards in the Mary Tyler Moore show.

As a character, Mary showed us for the first time on television what it looked like when a woman prioritized herself in her career over romance or family. She served as the model for generations of single women characters to come. Murphy Brown, Ali Mcbe, Carrie Bradshaw, Liz Lemon Leslie, Nope. One could even trace Mary to other Marsha's lineage of liberated, unapologetic, and flawed women characters straight through to girls and Fleabag nearly every successful sitcom that's been on the air since.

Oh, some Debt to the Mary Tyler Moore show's unique qualities, combining pathos and humor. Like the Office or Orange is the New Black, depicting a professional woman in her workplace family and exploring strong friendships between women friends, CoStar, David Crane side of the show's Pitch Perfect finale as inspiration.

Jerry Seinfeld has called it one of his favorite shows. This show is incredible and I encourage people to go watch it. I absolutely loved it. The thing I love about Mary Tyler Moore in. As, I'm gonna call it a leadership skill and it's leading on and off camera. For a show like this to work, you really want an array of characters.

This is why Arrested Development and The Simpsons and Seinfeld and all the great sitcoms have a lot of different entry points and different senses of humor. That's absolutely true with the Mary Tyler Moore show, but it completely falls apart unless you have a strong lead. And I think that she combines all those things.

I think she is like holding ground in this silly as fuck world, and she's doing that on and off camera. And so I'm calling this leadership for being an aspirational figure as my thing. Number two, and I think it's like best expressed in this sitcom together, the three of us created an extraordinary triangle.

Mary was the person that you wanna be. Rhoda is the person you probably are, and Phyllis is the person you are afraid of being. You got that right pal. That's what made the show special. The characters seemed real because they were given room to grow. You haven't allowed yourself one minute's pleasure out of this whole thing.

The way you make fun of your appearance, the way you describe yourself. It, it's not so easy to say nice things when you describe yourself. You try it Mary, me? Yes. I'm, you know, okay. You do the same thing yourself, Rhoda. It's not the same thing. It's, no, it isn't. Look, I may not say terrific things about myself, but Rhoda, I don't say that.

I'm nothing sure. But you don't have to worry about someone

[00:16:23] Amit: beating you to it. I dig it. You, you teed me up perfectly, Michael. I love it when you do that. I think number three, um, Elon Musk. Here's how I'm gonna get there. So, uh, you,

[00:16:35] Michael: you're really going after some polarizing hot point.

[00:16:38] Amit: Uh, no, I just wanted to throw in that word out there as like click bait, word bait.

I don't know. Uh uh Yeah, no, I just wanted to throw in Elon cuz he, he does come up here. In the analogy I'm gonna make, so the Mary Tyler War Show spun off three separate shows, all which were reasonably successful. Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant. So going back to Elon, this reminds me of PayPal, the advent of PayPal in the late nineties.

The people that were part of the first 50 employees at PayPal have gone on to basically like create some of the most influential companies in modern media behind

[00:17:14] Michael: that, Reed Hoffman, Peter Thiel, like there's a lot of Exactly. That's PayPal,

[00:17:18] Amit: mafia's, like Ren, yes. Elon Musk founder. We know of Tesla and SpaceX and now c E of Twitter as well.

Reid Hoffman, the guy that founded LinkedIn, the founders of YouTube, three of them all worked together and Yelp was the other one. The two founders of Yelp came all out of those first 50 people. So I like the Mary Tyler Moore as an incubator. You look at Saturday Night Live as like this only thing that we really consider as this great incubator of what they go off to create all these individual careers and characters.

But this show did it. And I think that is part of that innovative leadership that you talked about, that she set by sort of example setting, but also creating characters and roles and attitudes that didn't previously exist.

[00:18:02] Michael: I agree. Like it is an institution that much like the PayPal Mafia has transformed Silicon Valley.

The Mary Tyler Moore show transformed Hollywood.

[00:18:11] Amit: Yeah, very much. And not just in the Mary Tyler Moore show, if you look at her later shows of just, I believe just Mary is what it was called that started the career of David Letterman. So she's a bit of a, uh, king and queen maker.

[00:18:23] Michael: All right, great one. Okay.

Shall I take number four? Yes, it is a little bit of a hard one. There's some real personal tragedy in her life, and it'll come out in the categories, but I wrote dignified work in Progress. You don't hear this much in the TV interviews, but you absolutely see it in the autobiographies. So she has many loved ones who die.

She goes through a miscarriage, is diagnosed with diabetes. She enters the Betty Ford Clinic, but there is a sort of, Public vulnerability and wrestling with herself while also recognizing the importance of Mary Richards to, you know, progress for women. There's one short passage I wanna read that I read to my wife.

So she's talking to her about her son and she's writing this in 1996, are thereabouts. She says, as he grew to be a toddler, I took great pride in his accomplishments, both small and major, but I was always comparing the progress he was making. I would worried if he trailed in walking, speaking, or general play skills.

I was fearful that any stutter step might indicate future shortcomings and troubles. I saw the present as preparation for the future. Looking back on Richie's first year, I realized today the biggest mistake I made as a mother. I saw him as an adult in the making, not who he was at the time. A child. Why was there no little sense of the moment when he was in my care?

That's a real honest reckoning with what kind of mother you are once upon a time, and I found that passage really powerful as a parent. It's really tempting to approach parenting as prep for the future. You know, you need to learn how to play football so that you don't get beat up on the school playground.

You need to know how to read so that you don't fall behind. You need to, I don't know, learn social skills so that you'll fit in. Like that's future trip and shit. And as a parent, I feel like the more you spend time with them in the present, like the more loved they are for who they are today and that's all that matters.

And like, I mean, these are really eloquent words, right? And there's stuff like that all throughout her autobiography where she is looking at the very troubled life. She came from alcoholic family and looking at all the pain she endures from a whole bunch of personal tragedies that befall her and she's still like working on it in this really dignified way.

And it's a way that's specific to her as a woman, not to her as a TV character. And I love that. Okay.

[00:21:07] Amit: Yeah, dignify my, so that's my number four. I like it. I like the wording. Yeah. Okay. Uh, I guess I'm closing it out then I've got what I'm calling, uh, exceptional Superstar. Oh, interesting. And you alluded to this earlier, she's not that overwhelmingly talented.

She's kind of above average talent. What I like about that is that she still came to define this era and have huge, huge impact. And I think it kind of speaks to serendipity and timing. So I'm not saying what I love about her is luck, but I'm saying what I love about her is that reasonably above average can make huge impact in this world.

[00:21:46] Michael: I think that's excellent. Ahed, I have to say, I think there's more substance to that observation than you may be given at credit for. I saw her in an interview. Somebody asked her, are you naturally funny? And she said, no. But like her character on the Mary Tyler Moore show is hilarious because she's got great writers and she's got an ensemble cast.

What I really like about your thing, number five there is how she played the hand. She was dealt. That's a real famous and gravy thing to me. But it's sort of like you bring what you have to the table and then you hope circumstances and serendipity and luck and, you know, talent around you elevate you.

And I learned such a, an important lesson from Dick, and that is, which was surround yourself with the best. Hmm. And the better they are, the better you'll be. You know, that's, I think what we all want outta life because we only have so much agency and power over what we can do and where we go. So there's a little bit of, even create your own luck in there.

Yeah. It,

[00:22:47] Amit: it's the material that keeps dreams alive and makes dreaming worthy. You put what you can out there in the universe and it does sort of work out sometimes that you are an incredibly important figure of an entire half century.

[00:23:02] Michael: What I like even more about that is it sort of eases the burden, you know, for us to sort of strive for individual exceptionality.

If I really take stock of myself, I, I'm good, but I'm not exceptional, right? But I feel a burden to achieve exceptional things or have exceptional experiences. And I'm not trying to like be too self-critical or immodest or whatever. All I'm trying to point to is that nobody should feel like they, the individual are supposed to be top zero 1% talent.

Like we should all hope for luck on some level. That's a healthy way to approach life. I love that one. Dude. I think that's a really good one. I

[00:23:42] Amit: think it was an exceptional observation on my part. No.

[00:23:45] Michael: Ah, shucks. Uh, that's recap. So number one, swing, vote number two, leadership on and off the camera for an aspirational, iconic figure.

Number three, you said PayPal Mafia number four. I said dignified work in progress. And number five, you said exceptional superstar. Yes. It's a good list, man. That is a good one. All right. Category three. Malkovich Malkovich. This category is named after the movie being John Malkovich, in which people take this little trap door into John Malkovich mind, and they get to have a front row seat to his experiences right behind his eyes.

Okay, this gets a little bit at the pressure she felt to be a feminist icon. So this is from her autobiography after all, in 1980, Gloria Stein. Calls her and says, I need you to come from New York to Washington, DC because we are organizing a group to put pressure on Congress to advance the Equal Rights Act.

Tip O'Neill, who is the Speaker of the House, a democratic leader, uh, said he'll meet with this group if Mary Tyler Moore is there. Now, Gloria Steinem had had some real kind of rocks to throw at Mary Tyler Moore's show during its heyday. One of the kind of criticisms that new wave feminists had was that Mary never called her boss by first name.

She always called him Mr. Grant, not Lou. And there's even a clip, Mr. Grant, and it won't work. If you're calling me Mr. Grant, call me Luke. Thank you, Karen. Mary call you. Not Mr. Grant. Sure. Well, I'm glad it's okay. Ah, yes. It's okay to say

call me Mr. Grant. Thank you. So this is 1980. By this point, Mary Tyler Moore show has concluded, has finished, and Mary Tyler Moore says, I was always afraid to speak in public as myself. If I'm playing a character, I can get up on stage or I can get behind the camera, but if I'm talking as me, I don't want to do it.

So she tells Gloria Steinem, I can't do it. I got an ear inflection and I cannot get an on on an airplane. Doctor's orders totally makes up a lie. Gloria Stein is very frustrated, says, okay, calls her back a half hour later and says, I've got a solution. Take the train from New York to DC and Mary Tether Moore realizes, fuck, I don't have.

I'm out here. I'm caught in a lie. And so she boards a train, uh, from New York to DC and goes down to uh, DC and, uh, meets Gloria Steinem and the women there organizing this protest. You know, before she makes the speech. Tip O'Neill, the Democratic House leader says, where is Mary Tyler Moore? That little cutie?

I want a hug. Which, you know, to hear her describe it sounds very sexist. So anyway, she ends up giving a speech. It goes over pretty well. Gloria Steinem goes off to join other affairs. Mary Tyler Moore gets back on the train for the four hour trip home. My malkovich is, I want to be behind her eyes on the train ride.

A lot of things are happening here that I love. One, I love being caught in a line like this and like, ah,

[00:27:08] Amit: shit, I gotta f And having to go the distance to

[00:27:12] Michael: go the distance and like, I don't want to sit on this goddamn train. I think that she is ambivalent about what she's doing there. Gloria Steinem in this instance manages to talk Mary Tyler Moore into it, and she says in her autobiography, I'm proud of what I said, and I think I stood up for a good cause.

But then she also has this like, you know, pretty sexist interaction with Tip O'Neill and I just wonder what like she's thinking about like, This is actually to your point number one, I just wonder like what's going through her mind at that point. She knows on some level how important Mary Richards is as a figure.

She knows about Gloria Steinem and that she's been at times critical of the show at times, praised it and she's like, how the hell the, how am I supposed to play this? And I think that there's sort of no better moment for a reflection of all that than sitting on a train car gazing out the window between.

DC and

[00:28:10] Amit: New York. I like it. I like the imagery too of thank you. Of her staring out the train car. So, uh, mine, I'm gonna go, I think, I believe this is 1983. So Mary Tyler Moore has been twice divorced now, and we're gonna get into that because we have a category about love and marriage. But at this particular time, she is single, which is kind of funny because the Mary Tyler Moore show her character, Mary Richards, uh, was this single professional woman, and Mary Tyler Moore, the actual person finds herself at the age of 40 actually being.

A single professional woman for the first time. So in 1983, she takes her mother to the Vatican, and I guess she's famous enough to have sort of special Vatican access. So returning from this fam Vatican trip, her mother comes down with a bronchial infection and they're in New York and their regular doctor is not available.

And so they call and they say, well, we've got another doctor on call that we can send to your house and check out your mother. So the guy comes, his name is Dr. Robert Levine. Uh, he is 15 years younger than Mary, and uh, she kind of feels an immediate attraction to him. So I'm gonna pull out the actual autobiography right now.

He says to her, this is my home phone number. I'm off tomorrow, but if either of you has an emergency, I want you to call me. And that witty Mary Tyler Moore says, does loneliness come under the heading of an emergency? So she's throwing this pickup line at this. Doctor, this non Hollywood person, 15 years younger than her.

So one, I, I just wanna earmark that. I like that. I like a good line. I like a sharp witticism. I like just to be inside that snap brain. That's good. And then that night she goes to dinner with a friend, and Mary Tyler Moore did have a drinking problem, which she had not yet resolved at the time, but her drinking problem was more solo drinking.

I don't think necessarily these, these outings with friends were as problematic. She goes to dinner with a friend, they have a lot of wine. They come back to her house and they're up late and near 3:00 AM She calls Dr. Levine that same day and says, Hey, do you know how to cook? And he was like, no, not really.

And she goes, well, I guess we'll have to go out to dinner for our first date. I love it. It's just so, it's a beautiful malkovich because one, I like the. Gall of I am a celebrity and I'm just gonna make the moves. I didn't know that this happens. You know, that like Hollywood people like hit on non Hollywood people.

And so I like it and I like the confidence and I also just like the flattery, she's also. Giving him, you know, she doesn't have to do that. He's a, he's a doctor in New York, which has its own cache, but you're not getting calls from Mary Tyler Moore at three in the morning, the f after the first night you met him.

I like the expansion of boundaries, you know, coming to my age as I am at, at 45, like I used to be one of those people that was like, I wouldn't even like date someone if they're divorced, you know, or like, I could date somebody like seven years younger than me, or like up to three years older than me. But like, I don't believe in any of that anymore.

If you become single in your forties as Mary Tyler Moore did, as as I am, you have to be very open-minded. And I like Mary Tyler Moore being very open-minded at this

[00:31:35] Michael: moment. That is awesome. Uh, that is beautiful and that is a great segue to our next category. But let's first take a break,

[00:31:45] Amit: Michael. You know, when we go to restaurants and I don't know what to order, then ultimately I'll just ask the server, well, what should I order next?

Yeah. And I wish a similar thing existed for other things I consume, like, like books did you say? For books.

[00:32:01] Michael: For books. Oh. Well that's easy if you go to half price books. There are all kinds of people who work in the store who are excellent at recommending books. Have you ever done this?

[00:32:12] Amit: No, I've never known to ask them.

I thought they were just, they

[00:32:16] Michael: are knowledge keepers. They are readers and they're there to say, Hey, how can I help you? What are you reading

[00:32:22] Amit: these days? What are you into? What are you

[00:32:23] Michael: looking for? I mean, every time I've gotten into a conversation with one of the half Price Books employees, I've always walked out of there with something new.

[00:32:31] Amit: That was excellent. So you're saying I can go ask a half-Price Books book seller if I don't know what to read next, or I'm looking for a gift idea?

[00:32:40] Michael: I think that's exactly right. You don't need to know what you're gonna buy when you walk into half-price books. And if you just need a book, these people are there to help.

And you know what? Half Price Books is the nation's largest new and used book seller with 120 stores in 19 states. And Half Price Books is also online@hpb.com.

Category four, love and marriage. How many marriages? Also, how many kids? And is there anything public about these relationships? This is a doozy. Yeah, it's a doozy. And uh, how's your husband? Which one? Whoa, three marriages. First one. Richard Married, 1955 divorced. 1962. Mary is 18, fresh outta high school. He was 27.

He's about nine years older. They divorce when she's 26. They have one son, Richard. We'll talk about him in a second. She has shockingly little to say about this man. She even sort of says in her autobiography, I have no real lasting memories of this. She describes this marriage a little bit as a act of defiance against her parents.

Her mother's an alcoholic and she was raised in a very strict Catholic household. She says her parents are intellectuals, but not particularly well to do. And I think that there was just a lot of. Stress and I think it was a very typical alcoholic family in a way. She's a child of an alcoholic and I think some of the volatility that comes with that, you know, leaves an lasting impact on her.

This first marriage is a little bit of a rebellion around that. We'll come back to Richard in a second. Her son. Let's talk about the other marriages first. Second husband, grant Tinker. Married 1962. So not much of a gap between husband number one and husband number two. They're divorced. 1981. She is 26. Um, he's about 12 years older.

This is a real power couple thing. So they meet around Dick Van Dyke time. She's been cast in that role by this point. Uh, he's initially with Proctor and Gamble, but he wants to make a move to Hollywood. He does. They end up forming mtm, the company that would produce the Mary Tyler Moore show in close cahoots with c b s.

And we can talk more about. Success of MTM later, but they have a very powerful relationship. I think Total Power Couple is the way to put this. MTM becomes a real juggernaut and is very successful. No kids in this marriage. There was a miscarriage at, uh, age 33. I wanna talk about that more in a second.

That marriage dissolves around 1979. They separate and then they are officially divorced in 81 when marriage Tyler Moore is 44. That separation

[00:35:31] Amit: was interesting cuz it was like all, it was like a public separation.

[00:35:34] Michael: Yeah. They both have kind of, you know, nice enough things to say about each other in public going forward.

And maybe that's just because of the sort of politics and business of it.

[00:35:44] Amit: Yeah, I mean, they co-own this massive production

[00:35:46] Michael: company. He ends up actually having to sell his interest in it because he goes on to lead N B C in 1980. Okay. Marriage number three was your Malkovich Category number two, Robert Levine.

They're married when Mary is 46 years old. He is 15 years her junior, and they're together until her death at age 80. So from 1983 to 2017,

[00:36:10] Amit: they're together. Levine was 15 years younger, and then we talked about the first two husbands, generally about 12 years older. So Mary Tyler Moore has like about 27 ish years of a wingspan here.

[00:36:26] Michael: It's striking how age is kind of just a number here. I think we gotta address something here. Richard, her son dies in 1980. The, the circumstances around this are kind of extraordinary. He dies from a gunshot wound. Initially, it looks like they weren't clear if it was suicide or not. It's later ruled an accident, and this gun was eventually taken off the market.

You know, he hunted, he liked guns. It also, the timing of this is really incredible because it happens three and a half weeks after the movie Ordinary People comes Out and Ordinary People, which was Robert Redford's. Directorial debut is about a family suffering from a child who's died and a son who attempts suicide.

The movie debuts three and a half weeks later, her son actually dies. It's an extraordinary sort of art meeting, real life, crazy cosmic shit, and you know, one of the greatest tragedies of her life, but not the only one.

Yeah, so those are the facts.

[00:37:30] Amit: What do you wanna talk about? Yeah, well there's, there's a little more to this son, to the Richie thing. Like she had a lot of complications with motherhood, which you talked about. Like she really saw herself as a failure of a mother, and he kind of went in and out of her life, I think up until his late teens, he developed a drug problem, I think in his late teens, and they thought maybe that would be like, he got pretty close to overdosing that.

And then he cleans up and you know, sort of gets his life in order. He even starts to make a foray into the film world. But he was a gun collector and that just in his apartment, that's where this accident

[00:38:04] Michael: happened. You know, when he dies, her first husband, Richard Maker and her soon-to-be divorced, husband all come together and are supportive.

So I think there was a, this is a great tragedy, let's be together and set aside our differences around ourselves.

[00:38:20] Amit: Correct. The second husband was very much a stepfather to this

[00:38:22] Michael: child too. Yes. And he had four children from a previous marriage. And it does sound like she was somewhat close with at least some of those children.

[00:38:31] Amit: She. Also had a miscarriage.

[00:38:34] Michael: The miscarriage is in 69, we should say. So that's between Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. And that is with husband number two. So right

[00:38:41] Amit: around the time that her son dies, her youngest sister, who is actually pretty much the exact same age as her son, that's another very weird life thing to go through.

Is that when she

[00:38:51] Michael: is Yeah. Her mom got

[00:38:52] Amit: pregnant late. Yeah. Yeah. Her mom got pregnant when she got pregnant, basically. Right. And so she was having a A sister and a son. Yeah. And so that woman died around the same time as Richie, but she did die of an overdose. So a lot of tragedy baked into Mary Tyler Moore's family

[00:39:09] Michael: life.

This category is love and marriage. You know, we could go in a lot of different directions from here. I think it's important to have laid out the personal tragedies

[00:39:18] Amit: that she faced as it, well, it's just so weird in this case, because they are so closely related to love and marriage. Everything is just so intertwined in all the trauma of her life.

Yeah.

[00:39:29] Michael: I mean, the thing that I love, I think the most husband number three, 15 years, her younger is kind of. Awesome. Right. I mean, I, I do love the, you know, what you were saying a minute ago about like, why do we have these boundaries? She did say, you know, him being younger and him being a doctor and me being a, a famous celebrity and older, you know, there was a kind of equality that we felt like we could bring to the marriage and I think that's really

[00:40:00] Amit: cool.

Equality. Explain that. I

[00:40:02] Michael: mean, that's how she describes it anyway. Cuz I mean, she is a fucking a-list celebrity in the seventies, right? She is up there with Sally Field and Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda. I mean, she is as powerful a woman in Hollywood as existed. But her husband is 12 years older and in some ways even more powerful behind the scenes.

So, you know, one of the things that's so hard about a marriage, about any marriage is equal status because how do we define status? You have your different income streams, you have, you know, your own power dynamics, but marriages I think are at their best when there's a. Equal ish amount of power and different strengths that individuals bring to the relationship.

She, I think, struggled to find her equal after her marriage with Grant disintegrates, and she encounters all these tragedies and she finds it in a man 15 years younger who doesn't really watch much tv. Yeah,

[00:40:59] Amit: doesn't have much, isn't in Hollywood.

[00:41:01] Michael: Yeah. Well it didn't even like nose her from the Mary Tyler Moore show, but didn't, wasn't like that, wasn't like his show.

But they find, you know, a kind of equality there. So that's what I mean by

[00:41:11] Amit: equality. But I think the point you're making is that like, if she's in a relationship with other Hollywood people, equality is a very tough thing because one is, it's gonna be blatant who is more powerful than the other. But she just basically said, okay, I'm just wiping that category out.

You know, it's, we're basically just both powerful ish people in completely separate world. There's a whole lot of tragedy that led up to it. And maybe that was the sum of all the tragedy. It's just like she's gotta just completely open her mind cuz she's been through so much. And I think, you know, when she meets him too, she's still drinking a lot.

This has come up in our show a lot is that we have a lot of like men that we talk about that they find, uh, woman who finally is like the inspiration that they need and cleans them up. And here we actually have the reverse, like he is actually the one that helps her get into recovery. He is kind of the caretaker and the cleaner upper here.

[00:42:03] Michael: I mean, I think all of this for me anyway, gets back to my thing. Number four, the work in progress. Like it, I think this emerges out of problematic family roots for her. And I think the power dynamics and the distance that she feels from her first two husbands are a result of early childhood trauma or problems or, or upbringing, you know, Robert, which really does look like a soulmate, is the consequence of like growth.

He's the guy she gets because she worked on herself and she worked on the marriage. And I, it's a good story in a way, even with all the tragedy underneath it.

[00:42:43] Amit: Yeah, it, it wraps up

[00:42:44] Michael: nicely. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a good way of putting it. All right. Category five. Yes. Net worth. I saw 60 million. Yeah, 60 million looks about right.

And feels like a pretty good

[00:42:57] Amit: number. Yes, totally. And a lot of it was the production company, the MTM Enterprises. She had in her early roles. She had that role in the detective show where she went basically confronted the producers because she was She was the appeal. Yeah. She was never

[00:43:12] Michael: on camera. She was just her

[00:43:13] Amit: voice and her legs.

Yeah. But she was the reason people were watching, and this was one of her first TV shows and she feel like she wasn't getting enough money cuz she was basically carrying the show and she asked for a raise and they fired her. But then at the same time, we talked about this hot point elf, you know, which came up in the quiz that paid extraordinary, like this was a big, big gig.

She used to get paid the equivalent, or in today's money it would be $75,000 for a five day shoot. This was not just some small, little like local advertisement like this. This was big. This was important. Yeah. This was being like flow in progressive or

[00:43:48] Michael: so. I think we need to talk briefly about MTM the studio, because in addition to creating the Mary Tyler Moore show, you mentioned some of the spinoffs from Mary Tyler Moore.

There's also Bob Newhart, hill Street Blues saying elsewhere and

[00:44:04] Amit: W K R P even going all the way up to like in the eighties had the distribution rights to America's Funniest Home Videos. I

[00:44:11] Michael: saw that. Uh, and you mentioned also the ill-fated variety Hour that launched the career of David Letterman. Ladies and gentlemen, our announcer David Letterman.

Thank you ladies,

what

[00:44:24] Amit: are you doing out here? You wanna do

[00:44:26] Michael: something that's cute and entertainment to open the show with answer questions from the audience?

[00:44:32] Amit: Questions from the audience? Oh, come. It's

[00:44:34] Michael: surefire. It can't miss. See, I'm not always that quick with jokes. I mean, you know, I can't be funny all

[00:44:40] Amit: the time. Bounce.

[00:44:40] Michael: You don't have to be funny.

Just be honest. They'll ask you real easy questions like, what's your favorite color? Yeah, well see. I like a lot of colors. All right. That's a toughie, but you'll be able to handle questions. I was expecting sort of a bigger number initially, like I wouldn't have been surprised if it was north of a hundred million, but then she also isn't doing a whole lot of money making activities after.

You know, kind of the early to mid eighties. Yeah. She's, she transitions

[00:45:12] Amit: into film a little bit and then,

[00:45:14] Michael: yeah, yeah. But, but it's mostly advocacy work. It's mostly raising awareness around diabetes and animal welfare and, you know, OCA occasionally, even if she's, uh, faking an illness, responding to calls from Gloria Steinem.

So it, like, it does, her life looks like one that largely shifts towards advocacy and philanthropy in between hanging out on a farm in, you know, Connecticut with Robert and horses, uh, and, and dogs real animal lover. So the number, like, after thinking about it that way, that like the money making sort of enterprise and the, the job of going out and making your fortune kind of like crests in the early eighties, if that's the story, then 60 million looks about.

And feels like a pretty good number. Yes,

[00:45:59] Amit: totally. And a lot of it was the production company, the MTM

[00:46:03] Michael: Enterprises. I think the years between the end of the Dick Van Dyke show and the Mary Tyler Moore show are really interesting cuz there is a world in which she drops off the face of the map. She goes and does, uh, a Broadway adaptation of breakfast at Tiffany's playing Holly Go lightly after Dick Van Dyke and it is a complete flop.

Then she does this hilarious movie with Elvis Change of Habit, which she planes a nun and uh, Elvis plays a singing surgeon. It's Elvis's last feature link film, Elvis Presley. In a change of pace role of a doctor doing his best to keep the lid on a red hot ghetto. Mary Tyler Moore dedicated to her calling, but at heart a woman.

Could he change her life? Could she forget her vows and follow her heart? That's no fucking good. She was really at risk of being relegated to irrelevancy. What revives everything is they do this like special where she with Dick Van Dyke, where it's like a one hour celebration of those two again. And from that c b s says you need a TV show.

And she and Grant come up with Mary Tyler Moore show. They hire the writers and didn't test well at all. It's like sort of notorious. Anyway, the point is like she was right on the precipice of irrelevancy and then everything comes together for the Mary Tyler Moore show. All right. Anything more to say on that worth or shall we move on?

No, I think we covered it. Okay. Category six, Simpson Saturday Night Live or Halls of Fame. This category is a measure of how famous a person is. We include both guest appearances on SNL or the Simpsons, as well as impersonations. So on The Simpsons, she never voiced herself. She is mentioned in an offhanded way.

In a season three episode, one of Marge's sisters. Patty is getting a haircut. She wants it like Mary Tyler Moore and then Barney, uh, Homer's alcoholic friend compliments her. Are you Mary Tyler Moore Saturday Night Live? She hosts in 1989. It wasn't as funny as I'd hoped. She does have a Hollywood star, which she got in 1992 and there is no appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show, which I have to say it kind of makes sense because I was talking earlier about the shelf life of Mary Tyler Moore.

One way in which it does not hold up at all is that show is white as fuck. There is one black figure. The guy John Amos, who's in Good Times, and then he's in Coming to America, he plays the dad of McDowell's. He's in Mary Tyler Moore show. That's like the only prominent black character in the whole of the show.

You know, once again, I feel good about the way we've organized this category, the fact that there's not anything in the Simpsons, but there is like hosted snl. That's a sort of interesting contrast and does say something about like the fame and audiences that she has cache with. She is a name. People know and don't know why they know it.

Yeah, I think that's

[00:49:03] Amit: true. So I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna challenge you on The Simpsons a little bit. So James L. Brooks is a creator of The Simpsons and was also a creator of the Mary Tyler War Show. So there could be kind of a deference there is that there's such peers that she couldn't really like to become, Anna's a voice actor.

You're kind of, uh, anointed. Like he could have been just nervous about approaching her. But the other thing, the notoriety is honestly, when you hear Mary Tyler Moore, what is the very first thing you think of? Red hair, I think of Weezer

[00:49:38] Michael: Mary Tyler Moore. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:49:42] Amit: yeah. Um, and I honestly think for a lot of people, that could be it. That could be all. Mary Tyler Moore is, is that line after Buddy Holly? You know, that song came out in like 1994 or so maybe. And I remember thinking about that as they're like referring to this like long forgotten star, you know, almost in the same way that you hear.

And we didn't start the fire, how he refers to Marilyn Monroe. She was already like gone from memory. She was already a thing, not of my generation. And so my point is, I, by the mid nineties, I barely knew who she was, is like identifying her in a Weezer song. I don't know that that Mary Tyler Moore is even gonna be a recognizable name in 10 years.

[00:50:25] Michael: It could remain an important fictional property 10 years from now. Yeah. It

[00:50:30] Amit: could be worth watching, but nobody's watching it except for you and I who like found it on Prime though, over the

[00:50:36] Michael: last week, you're, you're probably right that she'll be forgotten. But I mean, most of the celebrities we cover on this show are forgotten.

I think that there's no,

[00:50:43] Amit: that's not true. We've made, we've made some arguments for longevity here. Oh,

[00:50:46] Michael: okay. In that case, I would make an argument for longevity. I think that this will remain important in, in, in, in terms of its symbolism and, and the issues raised.

[00:50:56] Amit: Yeah. I don't think we agree on that. I, I agree of its importance, but I think I, I think it did its job and it's gonna be forgotten who did that job and her name

[00:51:03] Michael: will be forgotten.

That's

[00:51:04] Amit: your point. Who did? That job is just gonna be

[00:51:06] Michael: for. I can't wait until 25 years from now. I get to, can we set a Google calendar? Yeah.

[00:51:11] Amit: I'll set a timer on my phone. Okay. Yeah. Let's set a call, a conference call for 25 years from today.

[00:51:17] Michael: I'll send you a calendar invite. All right. Category seven over under.

In this category, we look at the life expectancy for the year somebody was born to see if they beat the house odds and as a measure of grace. So the life expectancy for an American woman born in 1937 was 62.4 years. She died at 80 with diabetes. With diabetes, which we haven't talked about much. She was diagnosed at age 32

[00:51:42] Amit: or 33.

It's when she had that miscarriage

[00:51:44] Michael: that she was diagnosed. It's when she had a miscarriage that she's in the hospital recovering, that she, the running test, the doctors say you're a diabetic, which in 1969 I think was really terrifying and I think, you know, translated into some physical deterioration as she aged.

I mean, I think she loses vision at one point and uh, she's less mobile and she's a dancer. I mean, she's very light on her feet. Graceful.

[00:52:07] Amit: Yes. I think there's a pretty graceful demise largely outta the public eye, despite the physical deterioration that she had to deal with. It sounds like this farm life in Connecticut was a pretty good exit and like we talked about, I mean, really after the early eighties, she's not even playing the acting game anymore.

She's pretty much just doing advocacy.

[00:52:28] Michael: Obviously as a diabetic, she has to be very vigilant about her own diet, the move towards vegetarianism and animal welfare, you know, long walks. It sounds like, I mean, I, I think there's a lot of grace here.

[00:52:39] Amit: Yeah. And let's not forget she was a very heavy drinker until her mid forties.

She beat a lot of odds. There is some things to want about this luck of longevity with her when you were drinking.

[00:52:52] Michael: Yes. That's direct sugar, isn't it? That? Yes. How can a diabetic drink? Well, you can't, and I'm very lucky that, um, I have not been severely punished for the idiocy of my youth. Yeah,

[00:53:03] Amit: you are lucky.

Yes. I think this is a good segue to take a break. I

[00:53:08] Michael: agree. Let's pause. Larry Bird alive. The rules are simple. Dead or alive. Correct. He's 66 years old. Shell Silverstein alive. I'm afraid the sidewalk has ended. No, and they in 1999. Oh, shoot. Really? That long ago? Yeah. Jonathan Goldsmith, who's that played?

The Doak. He's most interesting man in the world. Oh, dead. He's still with us at 84. Oh, wow. I know. Good for him. Test your knowledge. Dead or alive? app.com. Category eight. Man in the Mirror. What did they think about their own reflection? All right. Before I give you my take, I have a question for you. Mm-hmm.

Is this category about hidden insecurities? In part, yes. There are absolutely hidden insecurities in her life yet. I'm inclined to keep this simple and say she's confident in her own looks. Even if there are deep insecurities.

[00:54:11] Amit: Yes, but that's only part of it. I think it's also about self delusion or self-acceptance.

So it could be insecurities or it could be the complete opposite of

it.

[00:54:20] Michael: I, I think she likes a reflection, but I do think that there are hidden

[00:54:23] Amit: insecurities here. So if we're playing the analogous card on this category, I'm gonna go with a no because of those hidden insecurities. Yes. I think overall she may like the way she looks, but there are just a couple of signs.

Her mother was an alcoholic and continued to drink through her pregnancy, and so she was apparently concerned about like facial defects. So this sort of. Cute mousey look that we attribute to Mary Tyler Moore. Some it is like fetal alcohol traits, having like sort of the buttoned nose. She was denied apart opposite Danny Thomas because they said her nose was too small and it didn't look like real.

It was unbeliev. It wouldn't be believable that she was actually Danny Thomas's daughter. In the later years of the Dick Van Dyke show, they had to use a special light to kind of hide her wrinkles. There was just lots of signs. Despite her being this figure of a new level of womanhood in Hollywood, like she was just, seems like there was constant derision and concerns and like insecurities

[00:55:26] Michael: around her appearance.

I do think that she has one of the best smiles of all time. I mean, her fabulous mouth is a. Very, very striking feature. Right? I mean, Mount Rushmore of Great smiles up there with Julia Roberts and Beyonce and Curly Neal, and Curly Neal for that matter. Uh, how often do those names get mentioned in the same sentence?

Yeah, I hear your point, and I think it's a good one. And I agree. I think this is one of those where it's really on the line. I think that there's a good case to be made for. She does like her reflection and a good case to be made for. She doesn't, and you know, this is the binary that is our show.

[00:56:00] Amit: Yeah. Add another just thing in my corner though, is also, you know, somebody that comes to that level of alcoholism where they're exclusively drinking alone on their bed, I think, um, points to

[00:56:11] Michael: something.

Yeah. I mean, and, and she would, you know, keep everything close to the bed, the tv, the t. There's no question, and there's a, you know, a lot of trauma and pain, some of which you talked about. All right. Category nine, outgoing message, like man in the mirror. How do we think they felt about the sound of their own voice when they heard it on an answering machine or outgoing voicemail?

And would they have used that default setting or would they record it themselves? You know, you mentioned that TV show, Richard Diamond, a private detective where it's just her voice. Who's this? This is Richard Diamond of the Disin King Diamonds. Are you presentable? Sam? Would I be talking to you if I weren't just checking for Dorian Crane's sake?

Bye sultry and you know, sexy and all that. Her speech pattern is very articulate and clear. The range is good, but I kind of wondered here how she feels about her voice. I kind of went, maybe she doesn't like it, but I'm not sure I can tell

[00:57:11] Amit: you why. Yeah, I'm kind of with you. So the range was interesting.

You talked about that deep sultry voice. She kind of in the Mary Tyler Moore show and even the Dick Van Dyke show, she kind of had this high pitchiness No, no, no,

[00:57:23] Michael: I like it.

[00:57:24] Amit: Associate producer. But then you see the interviews with her just as herself going into the seventies, eighties, and even afterwards.

And it's not that natural to me here. You

[00:57:34] Michael: seem to love to work. I do. Sure. Don't you? Yeah, I do love to work. I mean, but is it, is it almost therapeutic for you? Sure it is. I think it is for everybody, don't you? I think, uh, to be able to express yourself, to do what you do well. As much as you want to. Sure. I agree.

In fact, I find her whole demeanor a little bit, like there's a little bit of a put on there, and I'm not faulting her for it necessarily, but I feel sort of like celebrity distance, even when she's chatting with somebody who she's comfortable with. Like David Letterman.

[00:58:05] Amit: Yeah. It's like as relatable as she is as an actress and a character, she doesn't really invite you in with her voice when giving interviews and not acting.

There

[00:58:13] Michael: are defense mechanisms up part of her autobiography I think is about that, but yeah, I agree. I agree. Do you think she would've recorded her own voicemail? I kind of think she might not have.

[00:58:24] Amit: Really? What are the, what's the evidence

[00:58:26] Michael: she understands? She has a lot of value. That her time and her voice and her like, if I'm gonna make time for an interview or if I'm gonna make time for your TV show, like I'm bringing some real swagger to the thing.

I'm not sure. I'm just giving away my voice on the voicemail.

[00:58:40] Amit: Yeah. I'm gonna go with you on that. I'm gonna agree i's just, I'm, I'm gonna reduce it. Just saying. I just, she just didn't seem that cool.

[00:58:46] Michael: I hate to say it, but I agree. All right. Category 10 regrets. Public or private. What we really want to know is what, if anything, kept this person awake at night?

I have one public and then I have something to say about private. Can I lead? Yes. And

I

[00:59:01] Amit: wonder if your public is the same

[00:59:02] Michael: as my public. Well, uh, I heard her say she wished she had more kids. After learning about her story and the timeline, I had to go back and replay some of it in my head. So let's look at the miscarriage, which she has in 1969.

Um, again, that's between the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Mary Tyler Moore show. That is with husband number two, who already has four kids. She has the miscarriage, which sounds harrowing. Then she gets diagnosed with diabetes. This is all still in 1969. Then in 1970, the show takes off and it really has a momentum to it.

She's about 33 or so when the show's taking off. I think it had been a hard time to get pregnant again. If I were her, I would have reservations about it. One, because of the success of the show, and two, because you're still coming to terms with what it means to be diabetic and do you risk another miscarriage?

Like these days, you, you think about like when Julia Louis Drefus got pregnant on Seinfeld and they sort of like figured out a way to work around the production schedule so that she could have her child while still being, you know, a prominent member of that cast. I'm not sure people had made those kind of accommodations and I seriously doubt it throughout the seventies.

And this is kind of. Her window, you know, so she says, I lost the one child I had and I wish I had more kids. I think she's got love in her heart for more kids, and I think she would've been a better mother, you know, with more children. She never talked about all those considerations I laid out, but I think that plays into it.

If you just look at the, the timeline. Then for private regrets, what I wanted to say is I do see a lot of self-judgment, but without a ton of regret. In a way. I think that a lot of her life is about things that kind of happened to her. A lot of it's outta her control and out of her

[01:01:04] Amit: power. Yeah, I agree with you on all of those traumas that we talked about.

It's hard for her to feel a lot of guilt because she didn't have a direct hand that necessarily causing those things. I see. Some creative regrets possibly. I mean, the Mary Child War show did end kind of against her will after seven seasons cuz the, all the creators and writers just wanted to move

[01:01:27] Michael: on to other projects.

Yeah. And the And the ratings were

[01:01:30] Amit: starting to fall. Yeah. And then she did all these series of shows for over the next decade. They were all just like little clones of it. And they were called like the Mary Tyler Moore Hour and then one was called Mary and they were just like little variations of all of this, like trying to get back to what she once was.

And it just, at this point, looking back on it, it, there's a kind of a desperation, but you look at like,

[01:01:52] Michael: don't you feel like you might feel a little fucking cursed with the ordinary people story? Yes. Right. Like, I mean, you do a movie that then. The, the, the fiction of it and the trauma of it then comes to pass.

I don't know. Like I, I, I wouldn't want to do heavy dramas, you know? That's, that's a lot to ask. That's a, I mean, that is like the worst fucking trauma, right? That's the worst fucking trauma. That's everybody's nightmare. Yeah. We've talked

[01:02:18] Amit: about that with Neil Armstrong. I mean, anyone we've talked about in this show that's, that's lost a child.

That tends to be the prevailing part of their personal biography of just the, the most damaging thing they've had to deal with. Uh, yeah. Yeah. I think those

[01:02:32] Michael: are our regrets. Category 11, good dreams, bad dreams. This is not about personal perception, but rather does this person have a haunted look in the eye?

Something that suggests inner turmoil, inner demons, or unresolved. I went with a pretty resounding bad here. Yeah. I think for all the reasons we've talked about, when Robert Redford decides to cast her in ordinary people, he apparently said that he used to watch her walk on the beach and wonder about the darker side of Mary

[01:03:00] Amit: Tyler.

Yeah. Cause she looks so contemplative. Yeah. And I think that goes back to what I perceived as kind of a fakeness in the voice and in the interviews and which you call defense mechanisms.

[01:03:10] Michael: Well, look man, I think that that's the reality of the haunted look in the eye and the answer to bad dreams. It's usually because of what's happened to you in life.

Not that you were born with bad dreams or

[01:03:20] Amit: that you necessarily made terrible choices. Right, right. It's mostly these things happened to you. That's trauma. That's where that comes from. Yeah. It's a really important distinction actually. I'm glad. I'm glad you brought that up.

[01:03:33] Michael: Category 12 cocktail coffee or cannabis.

This is where we ask which one would we most want to do with our dead celebrity. This may be a question of what kind of drug sounds like the most fun to partake with this person, or another philosophy is that a particular kind of drug might allow access to a part of them that we are most curious about.

I've got a very strong answer here. Oh, I would love for you to start. Vodka martini. I want to hang out and get drunk, and I know she's a recovering alcoholic. She doesn't drink anymore. That's fine. So she gets one free pass to hang out and drink with me, and it's because I want the walls to come down. I am very curious to have the conversation with her about her relationship to the character Mary Richards and her understanding in popular culture as a feminist icon.

I think it's complicated, but I also think it's very important. And in fact, I am certain she's proud of it because she said that, she said, for whatever feelings I have, I know I. Created something and I was part of something that transformed lives for women across America. And not many people can go to their deathbed saying that.

So I want to have that conversation with her and I want those walls to come down. Yeah.

[01:04:47] Amit: So we are having the same conversation, but probably after some, like weed gummies. Uh, interesting. So I'm going cannabis, and I have the same questions of who are you, how do you see yourself of being your first line of your future obituary lotting you as, as somebody that ushered us into a new era of womanhood?

I mean, how do you, how do you feel about that? Do you want that on your shoulders? Do you believe that? You know, something I liked about her was the swing voter is, but you also kind of wanna get inside the head of a swing voter because that, there's some really interesting stuff. If you can be persuaded, you've got good arguments probably both ways.

It doesn't mean that you're neutral and apathetic. It means that there's, there's a lot to you. You're a complex character and, uh, it's gonna take a little bit of unwinding, I think. And I'm just choosing a different route. And maybe that's because of the defense mechanisms we talked about that maybe the vodka martini that you're having in my eyes isn't gonna get deep enough.

[01:05:44] Michael: Something that happens a lot on our show is we try and get closer to the truth of somebody and somebody's inner life and so forth. I never found the thing that totally did that for me. There's lots of documentaries, there's autobiographies, there's no countless interviews, and there's the shows and performances themselves really hard to get at the core of this gal, you

[01:06:03] Amit: know?

Which is so crazy cuz she's an icon of like liberation.

[01:06:07] Michael: Well, maybe that's not coincidental. I mean, I feel like to be a great figure. This is true. I think of political figures often there has to be enough distance so that people can fill in the gaps and project their aspirations and ideas onto you. That may be distance is part of, you know, iconic status, whether you want it to be or not.

Yeah. All right. Final category. We've arrived the VanDerBeek named after James VanDerBeek, who famously said in Varsity Blues, I don't want your life. Based on everything we've talked about. The big question is, do you want this life? I wanna lead off with an idea before we get to it. Okay. You and I have talked about how hard it is to sort of broach the question of when somebody dies.

Young deaths. Mm-hmm. Right. This started with a bis marque episode where I, I just don't know how to think about it because it's something that's only so much in your control within your power. You can treat your body healthy as much as you can, but you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. Mm-hmm. Right. And how does that factor into the question of the VanDerBeek?

I bring that up here because it's not death, but it's certainly pain with Mary Tyler Moore, that there is so much about her life that sort of happens to her. I think she's very resilient and she even, I heard her in one interview, said, When asked about the death of her son, she's like, yes, it's painful every day, but the alternative is to not go on living.

And that's unacceptable. But I guess where I'm going with this, Amit, is the same way. I don't wanna be too blunt about saying, well, they died young, therefore I don't want their life. I also wanna be careful about being too blunt and saying, well, they endured so much pain that I don't want their life. Yes.

You know, there's this question here, and this gets to your thing, number five, about what you love about her. Cuz what we're looking at with the VanDerBeek is the cards themselves and how you play it. I guess I just wanna be careful with how I weigh those things, whether it's a premature death or whether it's encountering a lot of pain and tragedy in your life.

Mm-hmm. With that said, it's sort of hard to get to a yes here. Is it? It is for me. I don't child. It just speaks to my worst

[01:08:27] Amit: nightmares. So does that close off all the rest of the conversation? No, I mean,

[01:08:32] Michael: it doesn't quite, our show is not about legacy and impact, but it factors in and the symbolism of being part of something very important and being strong and persevering as an individual and as a character really fucking matters.

This is a great pathway to legacy in a way. I kind of love the fictional character and being part of a fictional character and having a kind of distance in relationship with that. And distance in relationship with your impact on politics. I mean, I think it's not a conversation ender necessarily. It comes pretty close.

It's not just that, it's all the tragedies too. I mean, I'm, I'm backing away a little bit on what I said a second ago. What's the strong case for a yes on the Vander Bake?

[01:09:24] Amit: So this is where I'm gonna take it, is, you know, you and I are both in our mid forties and approximately when she turned her life around, when she met Dr.

Levine, when she finally got into recovery, she was pretty much this age and she'd already achieved a lot professionally in her shows. But the next half of her life from this point onward wasn't a ton of acting. It was largely charitable. It was single partner, it was out of the limelight. She endured a whole lot of pain up until this point, but she made it, you know, and this is very cliche because the theme song is she's gonna make it after all, it sounds painful.

It sounds awful. I, there were so many ahead of it that I would choose. She still made it through dignified, as you said. I think it's good and I wouldn't say good enough. It's not desirable, but it's ki it's lucky given everything that she went through and, and that speaks somewhat to the resilience that she had.

I mean, none of us want any of these things that happened to her in the personal life, but to persevere through it and have that much of a notoriety and to be given credit for really. Being an icon for half the population, right? Like this was a big thing at the time that she was dealing with all these tragedies.

So I think, like, I think it sucks. I don't think it sounds fun to be Mary Tyler Moore. I don't think it looks fun to be Mary Tyler Moore in aggregate. I think there's a lot of individual moments, but the making it in the, beating the odds, I mean, I'll take it, I will, there's, uh, hundreds or thousands that I'll put in front of it that are less painful.

You know, if this is in the median, it's still above the median in terms of doing the best you can and still providing meaning and hopefully internalizing meaning. So yeah, I want your life. Mary Tyler

[01:11:21] Michael: Moore. I wish I'd answered no before I heard all that. It was a very compelling case on it. Something that I don't know how to think about exactly.

The character is important, I think, because she makes people feel seen. And I don't know how important that is to me to like show up as my true, authentic whatever and, and, and helping people feel seen and helping people feel like they're part of the stream of life. Like is it, is it better to do it through art or is it better to do it through pure unfiltered, you know, individual humanity?

Does that make sense? Yeah. I don't think I want this life, and I think my answer feels a little chicken shit, but it is because of the fear I have of absorbing this much trauma. But you make a goddamn good case. Like given that I want to be able to say yes, but if the question is do I want this life or no, I don't think I do.

[01:12:26] Amit: You're a swim boat, but you're

[01:12:27] Michael: a no. No. I don't want your life. Mary Tyler Moore. Well, we've arrived the end of our show. We are at the Port of the Gates Ahed. You are Mary Tyler Moore. You've died, you've ascended to, uh, meet St. Peter, the Unitarian proxy for the afterlife. The floor is yours,

[01:12:46] Amit: St. Peter. Can you believe that?

Prior to 1970, there was not a female lead in a TV show who was a single professional. I created a show and I created a character. That showed that that was possible. Can you believe that? 1970, I opened it up. The possibility in the eyes of women, of young girls, you don't have to pursue a husband. You can get your education, you can find satisfaction in friendships and relationships in work.

And it's not all about finding a spouse and producing children. People knew that they, they had a drive, they had something with them, but they didn't have a model for it. And I became that model and I made it entertaining and relatable and funny. And that's what made the model believable. I opened up that world of possibility and here we are 53 years later and see how it's.

Let me in.

[01:13:55] Michael: Famous and Gravy listeners, before you leave, I have a request. If you are interested in participating in our opening quiz where we reveal the dead celebrity, then send us an email. You can reach us at hello famous and gravy.com. Send us an email. We can find time for a recording. It's usually pretty fun and it only takes about five or 10 minutes.

We love hearing from you, so if you're interested, drop us a note. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you're enjoying our show and you don't feel like emailing us, then tell your friends about us. You can find us on Twitter. Our handle is at Famous and Gravy. We also have a newsletter which you can sign up for on our website, famous and gravy.com.

Famous en Gravy was created by Amit Kapoor and me, Michael Osborne. This episode was produced by Jacob Weiss, original theme music by Kevin Strang. Thank you for listening. Tell your friends. See you next time.