“Had I not been forced to confront myself, I
might never have come to know and admire the person I am.”
“Nothing
is so deceiving as a beautiful surface,” wrote Leo Tolstoy. When dazzled by a
beautiful TV star (or handsome movie actor), who among us does not think, “How
perfect that person looks. How wonderful it must be to live that person’s
carefree life.”
The gorgeous Mary Tyler Moore won
fame for her comedic gifts, starring in two hit TV programs, yet she faced
severe trials in her personal life—divorce, alcoholism, diabetes, and the
tragic death of her only child.
In
the early 1960s for five years she played a suburban housewife on “The Dick Van
Dyke Show,” and she did it so well people actually thought that she and her
co-star were married. Daring for her day, she wore tight-fitting capris at
a time when other TV moms vacuumed in pearls and pumps. And given the quaint customs of the day she had to tone
down the tight fit of her pants to make herself less alluring.
A
few years later in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” she played a single career
woman. It was a groundbreaking role in its day because single career women were mostly
nowhere to be seen on television, especially those who dated, as she did on the show. Even before the show premiered, the producers had to tone down her character. Originally, she was to have been a
divorcee, and that was too, too much more for those times.
“Thrilled
and bursting”
The
women she portrayed on television were nearly unceasingly cheerful and
good-hearted. Their problems were resolved in 30 minutes. Their woes either
involved enduring a nitwit work colleague or keeping dinner warm for a husband on a late train out of Penn Station.
In
reality, Moore was married three times. Her first marriage to an Ocean Spray
cranberry salesman ended shortly after her first series went on the air. “During
the first year of the show, as thrilled and bursting with the excitement over
my work as I was, I was equally without emotion at home,” she wrote.
She
then wed an ad agency executive who later produced her second hit. That
relationship ended in an alcoholic blur as Moore favored “fishbowl-sized
glasses of vodka on the rocks.” (Her mother was an alcoholic, and she spent
much of her childhood living with nearby relatives because her mother was so
incapacitated. When she was six-years old, a trusted neighbor sexually
molested her. When she told her mother, she told her, “It didn’t happen.”)
Of
her second marriage she wrote, “We made these feeble attempts at
self-counseling during the so-called happy hour, the only time we had courage
enough to broach the subject….In case there’s any doubt about the acute state
of my alcoholism, and the insanity it produced, I can recall with sickening
clarity that on more than one occasion I played Russian roulette with my car,
and what’s more, some unwary, innocent people played with me.”
News
of this would have been unbelievable at a time when Moore played America’s
sweetheart on Saturday night television. Finally, during her third marriage,
she found the courage to enter the Betty Ford Center. Named after the former
first lady, this Palm Springs, California, facility serves a wealthy clientele
with substance abuse problems. Moore actually fled after only three weeks
of the five-week program. After a conversation with Betty Ford, she returned to
complete it. “That phone call saved my life,” she said.
“The
person I am”
She
came to believe that she was glad she struggled with—and conquered alcoholism. “Had
I not been forced to confront myself,” she wrote. “I might never have come to
know and admire the person I am.”
Moore,
a lifelong dancer, also had a hefty cigarette habit. She smoked two and, astonishingly, even
three packs a day. She had to find the courage to snuff out that addiction as well.
It did not help that her third husband, a cardiologist, also smoked.
Diagnosed
with diabetes while hospitalized following a miscarriage, she struggled with
keeping the disease under control most of her adult life, even though she knew
her drinking could have caused “serious” health effects. “I was never scolded,”
she wrote. “I wouldn’t have listened, anyway.”
Her
worst blow came in 1980 when her only child Richie, 24, died when a shotgun
he was handling fired. The death was ruled an accident, and this
firearm was later taken off the market because it had a “hair-trigger.”
She felt she had failed as a mother. Several years earlier he had struggled with a cocaine addiction. At his funeral, she wept, telling God, “’You
take care of him,’ I screamed at the sky.”
Moore
was well aware of her imperfections. She struggled with them all her life. “I’ve
two very distinct inner spirits who live my life for me, playing hide-and-seek
at times,” she wrote. “There does seem to be one brooding, paranoid, and
pessimistic Mary Tyler Moore….The other Mary is a supremely confident champion.
They do battle with each other, one emerging to rule for a time depending on
outside circumstance.”
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