Valerie Harper and Mary Tyler Moore

Valerie Harper and Dick Schaal

Valerie Harper and a director

Valerie Harper and Dick Schaal

One of America's favorite stars tells how she'll miss her TV sidekick and real-life pal when "Rhoda" moves onto her own show next fall

Last spring, one episode of our television show called for an elderly woman. The 75-year-old lady who was cast in the part was a fine actress, but she had lots of trouble getting into her lines. The great family of people who make the Mary Tyler Moore Show work have been together long enough to know one another's eccentricities and we tend--when things are going right--to move along briskly. Well, this lady was slowing things down. Quite some. And before the day was over we were getting pretty impatient.

But not all of us. As soon as Valerie Harper (who plays Rhoda Morgenstern on the show) sensed the beginning of bad vibes--and her antennae are tuned with perfect pitch to all people in trouble--she was down on her knees in front of that elderly actress, working lines with her for a scene in which Val wasn't even involved. Whenever there was a break, Val was back with her, reading, sympathizing, prodding gently. Val was the only one of us who took the time to understand that this woman saw herself as youthful and vigorous and was subconsciously resisting the doddering impression the story required. So the director kept putting on pressure and the actress kept getting more and more uptight--until Val finally suggested she play the scene as if she were 120 instead of 75. That got through to her. She did it right--and the tension broke.
 

Small thing? Sure, but when you multiply it by a few hundred similar incidents every year, it becomes very big--almost as big as Valerie Harper's capacity for seeing the best in people and letting them know it. She's the most extraordinary tension relaxer I've ever known.  And also the best friend.  She's going to leave us  next year, and there will be a void on this show that can never be filled. I don't mean Val's character of Rhoda Morgenstern. Our writers are the best and they'll come up with new characters as real as Rhoda. But they can't come up with another Val. She's an original, an irreplaceable human being.

When CBS first came to us to talk about putting Val in her own series, built around the Rhoda character, my heart sank a little. Unselfishness doesn't come easy to me at a time like that. But when Val finally asked "Whaddye think?", I was able to bite my knuckles and tell her this was a natural progression, that she was ready for it and she had to reach out. "But, God, I'll miss you," I told her. And, God, I will. 

I haven't really known Val all that long. She says we met seven years ago when I was Laura Petrie on the Dick Van Dyke Show and Val's husband, Dick Schaal, acted in one of those segments and we were introduced afterward. I don't remember that at all--but then there are times I don't remember seeing my own husband right after I've done a show. My first recollection of Val is reading with her in our producers' office when they were looking for an actress to play Rhoda. Val was in Los Angeles doing Henny Penny--among other things--in Paul Sills' marvelous Story Theater, and her agent sent her to us just as the part was about to be offered to another actress. I had said, "Let's wait just a little longer" because I thought someone else might turn up who would be more Rhoda. And then Val came along and there was that chemical thing between us almost instantly. Val brought an extra dimension to Rhoda that had never been there before--and she's been making Rhoda grow ever since.

Once Val joined the cast, our friendship grew quickly. I remember when a pompous actor appeared on one of our early shows, Val and I saw him instantly the same way. We've trusted each other ever since. Val is out front with everybody. I don't mean that she's shallow; there's a very deep person behind that wonderfully funny exterior that I suspect she doesn't show to anyone except maybe her husband. But the part of Val that hangs out is so expansive and kind and aware and sensitive of everything and everybody--no matter how young or old or important--that it's impossible not to return good measure to her. Or at least to try. And that isn't easy for me. Basically, I'm a pretty buttoned-up person. I don't share my own deep feelings very often, but somehow Val and I have never been stingy with each other emotionally.  Because we've always had so many scenes together, we found ourselves in intense contact on the show--and this closeness moved into our private relationship. But it's typical of Val that she never pushed.

I see myself as part of an ensemble on this show and I don't want special treatment. But Val has never accepted that. She insists on giving me small tokens of deference because I don't expect them. Three months into the  show, she asked Cloris Leachman--another dear friend who also has a running role--to go to lunch with her to discuss a problem. Cloris told me that Val said: "You and I are going to have to make an effort to see to it that Mary is treated like a star because she isn't going to do it herself. She makes no demands on anybody and does what she's told.  So every once in a while, you and I are going to have to say, 'Now Mary, what do you want?'" There's always been a little hint of that in our relationship--but only because that's Val's way. I know it's going on and I'd rather it didn't, but there's nothing I can do about it.

Like many close friends, Val and I seem--on the surface, at least--to be almost total opposites. People who know us compare us with the two executive producers on our show, Jim Brooks and Allan Burns. Allan dresses nattily and knows all the right social responses.  Jim is 'Hey, man' and hip, and thinks he's dressed to the teeth if he's buttoned his shirt. Val is that way, too, loose and free.

The contrasts just start there. Val's a theater person; I'm not. (My only venture in the theater was the disastrous Breakfast at Tiffany's from which I still carry scars.) Val is bursting with social causes; I'm likely to be suspicious of them. Val's tendency in any uncomfortable situation is, as she puts it, "to shine it on"; mine is to pull back. Val is last minute (but always there, which is important); I'm ahead of time and waiting. Val's open; I'm reserved. Val commits herself totally and zealously to anything she believes in; I weigh and evaluate. Val instinctively takes the liberal position in political and philosophical discussions; I tend to be more moderate--even conservative.

We don't really talk very much about politics or religion-but we don't avoid the subjects either. Val's temperate approach to the church is typical of her thought processes. She went to a Catholic school when she was a child but later left the church because, as she once told me, she couldn't "get with it. I had too much respect for it to stay." If Val can't believe completely in somehing, she simply has to get out. As for our political differences, even if I'm a registered Republican and Val a registered Democrat, our hearts are pretty much in the same place: seeking social justice and political leaders in whom we can really believe.

So we're very seldom far apart in principle--only in degree. Take the women's movement, for example. Val and I both like women, but recognize that lots of people don't. Women over the years have let themselves be made into unlikable creatures; permitted out once in a while to make big talk with the men. If women don't like themselves, how can other people like them? Well, Val and I both believe this, but she's passionate about it while I'm forever tempering my views with other considrations that have become more a part of my life than Val's. 

But Val can also be very patient in argument if the situation calls for it. I remember one of those long-ranging, freewheeling discussions on the set one day about the title, "Ms." Ed Asner, who plays my boss on the show, simply couldn't understand the need for such a title. Val explained patiently that "Ms" has nothing to do with women's lib at all, that "Ms" is female, just as "Mr." is male--while "Mrs." defines one human being in terms of another, instead if in terms of herself. And she finally won her point. I know, however, that Val isn't against being a "Mrs." and that she regards neither marriage nor homemaking as degrading at all--except when the man involved perceives it that way. She has no such problem in her own home. Her husband, Dick, a warm, talented, funny and honest guy, is a humanist who's all for equal rights for women and thinks they're liberating for everyone--men as well as women.

He and Val have put that into practice in their own lives. They believe firmly that being employed, being in charge, being rich or poor doesn't really matter very much. What does matter is mutual respect and the desire to be with each other. All their married life they have alternated bringing in money--and they have had no problem dealing with this occasional switch in roles.

I can accept these things intellectually, but I still have a tougher time than Val accepting them emotionally. I still tend to defer to my husband, to accept his dominant role. And even though the areas men and women can explore together have been broadened so much in recent years, there are still female things I like to talk over with women friends--and Val fills this role admirably. She's straight with me, and that's why she's my friend. We may be divergent in a lot of ways, but we meet and we lock in.

And we aren't all contrasts. We have a lot of things in common and dancing has got to be high on that list. There's a tacit common ground that ballet dancers share with one another--a knowledge of hurt and exhaustion and pain and discipline and starry-eyed dreams of being part of a magnificent dance company--I sensed in Val immediately.

Val's been dancing since she was a tiny girl, and she started formal ballet training when she was nine. Her father was a hockey player who met her mother in Canada, where they were married. He later became a lighting contractor and the family moved around a lot before her parents were divorced.  But wherever Val put down, she studied dancing, and by the time she was 15, she was good enough to work in special dance numbers at the Radio City Music Hall. Two years later, Val had to make a basic decision when she was offered a chorus job in a Broadway musical called Li'l Abner. She was still studying classic ballet then and she was good, but she took the Broadway job and changed the whole direction of her life. When Li'l Abner closed, Val went into other Broadway shows and began to find most of her friends among actors.  One of them was an actor-writer named Dick Schaal, who was a leading light in the Second City Revue that came out of Chicago to make such a splash all over the country. When Val and Dick were married nine years ago, Val joined the Second City company, where she learned improvisation.

Val and Dick did a TV-talk show together for several years in New York in between theater jobs before they came to Los Angeles for the opening of Story Theater--and the birth of Rhoda Morgenstern. Through all this, Val never lost her love of dancing. Neither have I. So twice a week, during the noon break, Val and I attend a dance class. I thought about that a lot when I found out Val was going to have her own show; now I'm lobbying to have her show done close enough to ours so we can still make those dance classes. 

People who look for the contrasts between us are forever--and mistakenly--pointing to my discipline and Val's apparent lack of it. No one who really knows Val could possibly accuse her of lack of discipline. She may look relaxed and hang-loose, but she's one of the most disciplined performers I've ever known. I remember last year she came back from a CBS promotional junket totally exhausted. She had to report for work the next day, and she should have collapsed in bed. Instead, she sat up half the night reading old scripts of our show so she could get into the rhythm of the Rhoda characterization again. That's discipline.

Val draws her discipline from inside somewhere, and she seldom needs a crutch. Where I might go to an expert for help, Val will read a book. Where I might pass up a late-night TV show I wanted to see because I know it will slow me down the next day, Val will stay up and watch and be the better for it. Sure, I carry a bigger load than she does right now, but I doubt very much if she'll change her basic style when she has her own show.

I hope she doesn't because I don't think Val realizes how very disciplined she is. Once she's on the set, she's all business. I tend to rely on standard procedures; I know the tricks in my bag, and if they work in a given scene, well, why not? But Val will dig much deeper inside herself to add dimension to a scene. One big reason she does that so well is her improvisational training.  And that's an area where I feel totally lost. When we're floundering, I just want to send it back to the writers. But not Val. She wants to keep trying to work it out onstage--and she can often get us over a block that way.
 

She can also be tough--but her anger is seldom directed at individuals, only at situations. She won't put up with pettiness or with horsing around when there is work to be done or with silly misunderstandings among people close at hand. When those things come up, she tries to get them out in the open and correct them on the spot. And once in a great while, I've seen Val put down people who really deserved it. I can't be specific without hurting  omeone but I can tell you that when Val lets a person have it, she's very effective. If the necessity arises, she makes it very clear, very quickly, that she's not to be herded about or treated like some empty-headed starlet.
 

But those things happen so very seldom. Most of the time, Val is her easy, happy, ebullient self, spreading her love on everybody in sight. But these other sides of Val are terribly important because they give her depth and dimension. A writer who did a story about her recently left the impression that
 he was a kind of good-natured chatter-box. Jim Brooks read it and said sadly, "That guy captured all of Val's words and none of her music."
 

You don't have to be around her very long to hear the music. Young people hear it especially. Val doesn't have any children, but she regards her 19-year- old stepdaughter, Wendy, as her own, and they have a warm and close relationship. (Wendy is a drama major in college, and Val told me once that she'd "pull every string at my disposal to help Wendy get into the work she wants to do.") My 15-year-old son, Richie, is in love with Val, too. He got acquainted with her when he would visit our set and race around. I worried about his bothering people--as any parent would--and Val would always fuss over him when he'd been told to cool it. He's an easy, open, gregarious boy, and he and Val hit it off instantly. She always approaches kids as people- because that's the way she really feels--and they pick up on it when they know it's real.

My son tells me about his talks with Val, and I must admit it generates a certain amount of healthy envy in me, even though I understand that it's a lot easier for young people to confide in outsiders than in their own parents. But with Val, it's more than that. I don't draw people out very well, and she does. She thrives on people, on who they are and what they're about. And she really cares. I need people, too, but I tend to let them come to me, while Val takes the initiative.

I've long been grateful that she took some initiatives in our relationship, because her instincts are often to spend her waiting time on the set with the people behind the scenes--the grips and seamstresses and secretaries. I think she feels a lot more comfortable chatting with a secretary than with an ad-agency account executive or a network big wheel--and I suspect she finds them more interesting, too. But if our producers ask her to meet with visiting brass, she'll do it. She'll do practically anything we ask of her for the good of
the show.

Nowhere was that better demonstrated than last year when her weight was running up and down like a yo-yo. One of the agonies of Rhoda, as she was originally written into our show, was that she was rather dumpy and not too attractive to men. Val weighed about 150 pounds during that period and was dumpy--something she didn't like at all.  Then when we started our dancing classes, Val began to lose weight. And near the end of the year, she actually came to me, terribly concerned, and asked if I thought she should put it back on so the jokes wouldn't be ruined. I told her to go ahead and lose, that
she didn't want to be my chubby side-kick all her life anyway.

Well, that summer she went to Florida where Dick was in a play, and when Val saw all those windblown chicks in bikinis on the beach, she cut her hair and went on a diet and really lost weight.  And when this svelte number who used to be Rhoda Morgenstern showed up on the set for the start of a new season of filming, everyone was pretty nervous--especially our writers. They had a meeting with her and said, "Look, we're doing all these fat jokes in the new scripts and you aren't fat any more, so what are we gonna do?" And Val, bless her heart, said: "You're absolutely right. How selfish it was of me to have lost all that weight. I'll eat Italian dinners for a few weeks and put it back on."

And she did. But nobody had really thought she would, so the writers had begun dreaming up thin stories for her new figure. By the time she was back to her old dumpy self, they had a bunch of them ready to go. So she took the weight all off again--and kept it off.  The old movie cliche that says the leading lady must be chic and slim and the sidekick squat and ugly doesn't impress our writers. They ignore such rules--which is one big reason our show works so well.

So I guess when Val goes into her new show, it will be Rhoda--thin--and that's the way it should be. At this writing, the show still hasn't been named, but Val got downright incensed when someone suggested The Valerie Harper Show. She said, "It's not about me. It's about a character our writers created and I gave life to. I want to stay separate from Rhoda."  She'll probably have it her way--for a while at least. But I suspect that within a year, Valerie Harper is going to emerge over Rhoda Morgenstern--and then it will be her show in name as well as in fact.

A lot of people--including Val--are wondering how we'll write her out of our show--and how Val will deal with the new responsibilities of carrying her own series.

The details haven't yet been worked out, but the premise is that Rhoda will be moving back to New York--in the story, that is. In actuality, I think--and hope--she'll be working on the stage next to us in California.

As for her new responsibilities, I only know that once she finds out what they are, she'll deal with them in the same professional way she deals with her work here. There may have to be some surface changes in her life-style to accommodate things like publicity or socializing with network executives which she has little interest in. I see that as part of my job, but Val has never had to look at it that way. Soon, she will. She's also going to have to start thinking in terms of a housekeeper and maybe even a secretary. Right now, she runs her own home, does her own food shopping, cooking and cleaning.  That won't be possible when she has her own series, simply because no human being has enough time or stamina to fill both roles.
 

She's scared of these changes, but I know she'll deal with them beautifully. One of the main reasons I'm sure is because she has a really good marriage.  Dick Schaal has a cool head and both feet planted firmly on the ground. I remember so many times in the early days of my series coming home filled with self-doubt and negativism to the point of dissolving in tears, and Grant would calm me down and reassure me--and mean it. And because I trust him and have faith in him, it helped me so much.

The same thing is true of Val and Dick. When Val was trying to decide what to do, Dick told her that she had scarcely scratched the surface of Rhoda and that now she would have a chance to deal with Rhoda's life instead of the way she relates to Mary. I remember Val coming to work the next morning and telling me: "Dick's a quick course in psychiatric help for me. He's my best friend, and I'm very lucky. I keep telling myself: 'You must be worthy of all this since Dick loves you and he's perfect.' "
 

Well, I know what she means, I know how vital that support is when the ratings are down or the scripts aren't working or the leading character seems flat and uninteresting. She can survive those times as long as Dick is strong with her--and he will be.

It saddens me when I admit to myself that we'll see a lot less of each other when Val goes to her own show. Dick Van Dyke--who is an old and dear friend--has been working 200 yards away from our stage all year, and I've seen him just once because the star of a show simply has no time to drop off the set to visit. But I don't think this is going to diminish the friendship between Val and me one bit because it's a strong and ongoing thing that doesn't have to be reinforced every few minutes. I'm sure if I didn't see her for five years and we ran into one another, we could pick up instantly where we left off and be very close again and share the details of our life in between.
 

Meanwhile, I'm savoring every week we still will be working together. And I like to think she is, too. The other morning I came into my dressing room and found a little box with a card from Val saying: "Because you deserve the best." And inside the box was the most beautiful string of Indian shells I've ever seen. I was deeply touched. There was no reason for it, no special occasion. It was just Val, spreading her love.

She says it's just because she wants to be liked. Maybe so. I don't really care about the reason. I know the love is genuine. And I suspect there's plenty to go around for a very long time.