MARY MARY QUITE CONTRARY
LISTEN TO MARY TYLER MOORE TELL ME ABOUT HER LOVE OF FOX NEWS AND THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HER MOTHER'S ALCOHOLISM AND HER OWN
(Mary and Mary. Credit: Corbis/Getty Images)
I finished watching Being Mary Tyler Moore, the documentary on Max (née HBOmax) last night. Directed by James Adolphus and produced by Ben Selkow, James Adolphus, Lena Waithe, Rishi Rajani, Debra Martin Chase, Andrew C. Coles, and Laura Gardner, it captured this complicated woman’s artistic and cultural achievements with both empathy and aplomb, the two lineaments that limned her own talents along with a tenacity that underlay and toughened her litheness and light comedic touch. The documentary, like her, was keen-eyed and never resorted to sentimentality. It made it clear that contrary to her early image as the distaff dishy Petrie and then the richer Richards dish of career and birth control pills and not needing marriage to mold her into womanhood, she - thrice-married - was thrust into our cultural consciousness through those characterizations that were themselves what costumed her public persona. Robert Redford, the documentary points out, spotted her sadly walking alone along a beach and knew in that moment he spied her specific pensiveness - the perfect posture of her solitude with no need for the posturing that came so innately to her in the prowess of her performative self - that he had found the person - not just the actress - to portray the mother in Ordinary People, a role for which she was Oscar nominated.
I once spent an afternoon with Mary at her home in Connecticut for a column I was writing for Parade magazine. I cherish those hours we spent talking by her fireplace. Here is an excerpt from that column back in 2009:
“Mary Tyler Moore swings open the door of her Greenwich, Conn., home, and I am suddenly greeted by her four dogs.. Her laughter is a lovely counterpoint to the barking all around us and calms the canine brood. It calms me, too. This lightness is one of the secrets of her appeal. Another is her still-balletic carriage at age 72 as she walks to her favorite fireside chair for an afternoon chat.
“Moore’s light touch has helped leaven a surprisingly difficult life.. In her new memoir, Growing Up Again, Moore chronicles her 40 years of living with type 1 diabetes. Proceeds from the book will go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, of which she is the international chairman. ‘I’ve had the fame and the joy of getting laughter—those are gifts,’ she tells me. ‘Now I want others to learn how I fell down and picked myself up.’
“Moore also has been public about her alcoholism. She says she hasn’t had a drink since 1984. Her mother was an alcoholic and her father an emotionally distant man whose approval she never felt she achieved. She has been divorced twice. The original ‘cougar,’ she has been married to her third husband, Dr. Robert Levine, for 25 years. He is 18 years her junior. In 1980, her only child—Richard Meeker Jr., from her first marriage—died at 24 from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“We talk about all this and, as Moore stares into the fire, I ask if she has finally forgiven herself for not being...
“‘...a good mother?’ she quietly finishes my question. ‘No, I haven’t. I still feel as if I weren’t a good enough mother. I didn’t break any rules. I didn’t cause my son any pain. But I did bring to my life some of my father, who was very controlling and very remote. I was working a lot. I wasn’t there enough.’
…
“To lighten things up, I mention three great sex symbols she worked with: Elvis Presley, Robert Redford—and Ed Asner. Which one was most her type?
“‘I think maybe Elvis, because he went so against the grain,’ Moore says. ‘The only leading man I ever had a crush on was James Garner.’ She pauses. ‘And Frank Sinatra did come on to me once.’ She was separated at the time from her second husband, Grant Tinker. ‘Frank had his assistant phone me and ask if I would take a call from him. I said, “Please, by all means.” For two days, no call. Then, Grant and I were out having dinner and thinking about getting back together. Not two feet away from us sat Frank Sinatra. He came over to say hello. I never heard from him after that. The only other man who ever looked at me the way Frank did was—and don’t take this the wrong way—Pope John Paul II. Both men seemed to look into my soul and instantly know me.’
“Moore stares into the fire again. ‘Quick,’ I say to her. ‘Fill in the blank. Mary Tyler Moore is _____’
“‘Trustworthy,’ she answers. ‘Honest.’ Her laughter—that lovely lightness of it—fills the room. ‘Unless I’m lying,’ she says, smiling.
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I was honestly shocked at how honest she was about her politics and love of Fox News - something the documentary didn’t get into. You can listen to us talking about that below. In the second snippet of my recording of our conversation that day, she even gets up and calls out for her husband Robert to help her remember the name of the Fox News commentator they admire so much. I would like to think that Trump would have been a political bridge too far for a Republican of her cultural ilk.
Politics aside, she was so warm and vulnerable and open that day. She lived up to the multiple make-believe Mary’s I expected to meet - Laura Petrie and Mary Richards and Ordinary People’s Beth Jarrett - but the real one was so much more interesting - incongruous, carefully garrulous, so deeply grown-up she was no longer affronted by her girlish allure that could leave her resentful of it. By the end of our afternoon, her diabetes made itself known and she began to fade and slump in her wingback fireside chair, the elegance of her ever graceful presence both elongated yet somehow shrunken before me, a manifested incongruity with which she left me as I bent down to hug her gently goodbye. I am glad in this late stage of her life, this remarkable woman who could be so hard on herself found some gentleness with which to say hello to her emotionally healed self even as the diabetes dealt her body many final physical blows.
Part of that emotional healing involved her life in recovery from her alcoholism which we discussed in this next recorded snippet of our conversation. Let’s end with healing, which was a beginning for her.
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