Being Mary Tyler Moore

There can't be anybody in the United States

that doesn't know, like

and admire Laura Petrie

of The Dick Van Dyke Show

otherwise known as the beautiful and talented Mary Tyler Moore.

Welcome.

Mary Tyler Moore.

The world should know that your name is really Mary Tyler Moore Tinker.

Yes, isn't that darling?

Should be Mary Tyler Tinker Moore.

- Yes. - Was the wife you played there

kind of an idealization

of the American wife?

There is no such woman.

Most of them are wretched nags.

I don't think so. Yes. I think we all have our moments.

Some of us have the... the nagging personality

come to the fore more often than others.

But Laura Petrie broke down and cried

and she used ploys to get her way

and she was nasty and short-tempered.

And she was also sweet and soft, and she was many things.

Oh, no, I think she was sort of a...

a strained idealization of the American woman

as she thinks she is.

But they had no connection with reality.

I mean, the woman that's talking all the time in a restaurant

I claim that you can walk into an average restaurant

and if you have observed life enough...

American female-male relationships...

you can look in the restaurant

and tell who's married and who's single.

Where the woman is just yakking like crazy.

And the man has a hurt, bored expression.

- Yes. - They're real married.

I know. I know.

And where she's listening and he's just elecutioning

and she's just wide-eyed and attentive...

they're engaged.

Oh gosh. I'll probably get in trouble saying this

but I really do think more wives

should investigate the possibilities of working

because I agree with Betty Friedan

in her point of view in her book, The Feminine Mystique

that women are, or should be, human beings first

women second, wives and mothers third.

It should fall in that order.

And that if there's enough thought and effort put into this attempt

that it will not hurt the family, it will not hurt the work

that they can function very nicely together. I'm proving it.

Just consider what visitors

from outer space might think

if they were confronted

with the last 20 years

of television and films

as the only evidence of what American women were like.

It would be quite clear

that we slept in false eyelashes and full makeup

and indeed spent all of our lives

with such ornamentation on us.

Some of us would be taken to be a servant class of some sort.

Some of us would be taken to be sex-crazed

others totally puritanical.

Most of us would be man junkies

very strange creatures

who were thought to need men for our identities.

If we lived alone, we would almost have to be widows

at least until recently on television.

That's begun to change.

I could discover the secret of immortality

and people would still say, look at that single girl.

It stems from a love of what you're doing.

It would be unnatural

not to have ambition, I would think.

Her seven Emmy awards

her three Golden Globe Awards

and her Academy Award nomination

are only the beginning of the story.

While I would never consciously choose pain for myself

sometimes you have to have a little pain

a little disappointment.

Oh, Rob!

Are you saying it's my fault?

Every woman in America

must have dreamed about being just like her.

Please welcome Mary Tyler Moore.

Believe me, Millie.

- It wasn't quite like this. - Oh well, I believe you

but how you gonna convince 40 million other people?

What should we know about you?

Well, most of the things that you should know about me

I'm not gonna tell.

I don't take huge risks, though. I'm not a foolish person.

You know what's got me really upset?

- I have no idea. - I just sounded nuts.

Mary!

It's your first nomination.

How do you feel tonight?

Wonderful!

What she really needed to do

and ultimately gets the last chance to do

is have a life of her own.

I don't think anyone

in the entertainment business

has gone through more changes than you have in this...

Wait a minute, that can't be true.

In this past year, I guess one would call it a midlife crisis.

I hate that term, crisis, though.

- Midlife change. - A midlife change. Okay.

And the courage to... follow through

with what you perceive as a necessary change.

It may be difficult for people to understand

because they see somebody like me

who has been working for a long time

and has been relatively successful

and they think, oh, that's independence.

It is not necessarily true.

I was born December 29th, 1936 in Brooklyn, New York.

As my father reminds me, though, of impoverished nobility.

I was a feisty kid.

I was always in fights with the neighborhood kids

possibly because it was an ethnically-charged situation.

By that time, it had become an Orthodox Jewish community.

And here I was this English-Irish Catholic kid.

I knew at a very early age what I wanted to do.

Some people refer to it as indulging in my instincts

and my artistic bent.

I call it just showing off

which was what I did from about three years of age on.

And my grandfather once said of me

this child will either end up on stage or in jail.

What part did your father play in your life?

Oh, a very important part.

He was a rather intimidating force.

I always wanted his respect.

I knew I could never reach him on the intellectual level.

So in order to win him over, I had to do it on some other plane.

And for me then, it was... performing

which my father was never very good at.

My mother was an alcoholic.

She was most at ease at a party or having a party.

Everybody's good-time, best gal

not the most attuned to parenting that I would have liked.

She would start drinking in the day and she would not stop

until somebody found the bottle and took it away.

I didn't know anything about alcoholism at the time

and I thought that she was getting drunk at me.

That if she really, really loved me, she could stop.

My aunt and grandmother who lived together

had taken me for weekends from the time I was an infant

making it easier for my mother and father

to have a good time on their own.

I thought, the best way to get my parents' attention and approval

is by succeeding as a dancer.

I started studying when I was eight years old

when we moved to California.

That was just after World War II.

And I had a very successful uncle named Harold Hackett

who was with MCA.

He had been luring the family

to come to this land of sunshine

and promise for all called Hollywood.

And since my father was working for ConEd

and didn't really have what you'd call a career

and my Aunt Birdie who was working for radio

she decided that she could take care of herself out there.

And so the whole family moved.

And at that point the whole family

included my seven-year younger brother John.

I started taking dance classes right away

that my Aunt Birdie paid for and drove me to

and for which my grandmother made the costumes for the recitals.

It was pretty locked into my mind and heart and soul

that that's what I was going to do.

When you went out for your very first job

did you get it?

Yes. Yes.

The very first job was the day after the high school graduation prom.

And what was the job?

And that was the series of commercials

on the Ozzie and Harriet television show

in which I played a pixie

representing the Hotpoint appliances. I was Happy Hotpoint, oh.

Happy Hotpoint at your service.

I really liked doing that.

But I had also married

very soon after

that first commercial was filmed.

And despite my best intentions

I found myself pregnant two months later.

And that was a difficult moment

to live through for the Hotpoint people too

because there I was with these emerging breasts

in my little gray leotard

not looking very much like the logo they had in mind.

So that had to be truncated.

And I went on to become Richard's mother.

I think there's a terrible

contempt for women

still in our society