The stars of television series tend to be moreinteresting on the screen than in life, and it is often startling and disappointing to meet them and discover there is less there than meets the eye. Not so with Valerie Harper. I liked her instantly, impulsively, intuitively. As a matter of pure fact, I found myself in the rare journalistic position, when interviewing a celebrity, of talking with her about both of us--as if we'd been college roommates catching up on each other after a long separation.

Lunch has been prepared for us in her trailer dressing room on the set of "Rhoda," her new television show that shot right into the number-one slot the first week it was on the air.  Her secretary (who looks exactly like Mary Tyler Moore and, in fact, worked for her before Valerie) is a gourmet cook and has put together a lovely, cold chicken-something surrounded by fruit and vegetables, very low-cal.

We start out talking about diets: Food is the perennial demon in her life. Valerie is five feet six and weighs in at 130 right now, but looks about 15 pounds thinner. "It's very easy for me to gain and easy to lose. I was about one hundred and fifty when I started as Rhoda on Mary's show, and my weight was the subject of a lot of jokes. After the first year I went to Weight Watchers--a wonderful event in my life.  It really broke the back of my eating habits, so I'm no longer capable of the kind of binges and splurges I used to go on. There was a time I could easily eat six doughnuts at a sitting. I can't do that now, and it's wonderful." Her big, nearsighted eyes grow larger with the pride only a compulsive eater can fully comprehend.

"I went to Weight Watchers with Gavin Macleod, who plays Murray on Mary's show.  He was the only man. I said to him, 'Isn't it wild?  All the potbellied guys are home drinking beer, looking at Playboy, while the wives are at Weight Watchers, sweating to be beautiful, so they can hold on to the fat guy!' That's so typical of women and men."

It becomes immediately evident that Valerie Harper's head is quite feminist, her consciousness and energy fully raised. Whatever we talk about--weight, marriage, the series, the television industry--her conversation reflexively returns to the topic of women. Often it is with anger, sometimes with wry, ironic humor, always with keen intelligence.

"I really identify with Rhoda's losing weight and still carrying around the image of being fat. With women, we are what we look like. Men are what they do. And Rhoda's a perfect example of a woman struggling for some image that she's not. Our breasts are never big enough or up enough, our nose is never quite the right shape, we're never quite Raquel or Marilyn enough. And while we're suffering with that one, we're getting older on top of it. In a man, graying temples are distinguished. Graying temples on a woman? Get thee immediately to a salon!" The laugh, raucous, Rhoda-like, fills the air.

As an actor, Valerie is perhaps more conscious of sexism than many women. (She refers to herself, quite purposefully, as an "actor." "You never hear people say 'doctoresses' or 'writeresses,' " she explains.) For the same reason, she won't tell people her exact age, although it's obviously in the general Rhoda-range of 30 to 35. "I'm not quite consciousness-raised enough," she says, "but soon I will be. It's just that if they're casting a part for a thirty-one-year-old and you admit to being thirty-two, you're dead immediately. We're all commodities, products in this business. Pieces of meat. In the outside world it's what women feel all the time."

In the same spirit, Valerie exerts a light-handed control over the writing of "Rhoda," firmly insistent that the character be--if not liberated--surely dignified. Now Rhoda is certainly no Gloria Steinem; she is, rather, a middle class, Jewish-American princess who clearly wants to be married and has not been prevented from achieving that noble American dream by a career or feminist pressures, but because Mr. Right failed to show up. Valerie explains: "We played the marriage thing so that Rhoda thinks she's hip, Ms. nineteen seventy-four, and will be happy just living with Joe. But then she finds out that she really wants to be married. She says to her mother, 'Ma, all your good work didn't go in vain.'

"In the original script they had me crawling up on the couch, begging Joe to marry me. Six guys sat in a room and wrote that men don't want to be married and women trap them into it. And I wouldn't play it. I told them, 'Joe has to want to marry me, too, or he's a jerk.' So they rewrote it on the spot, and now both Joe and I jointly decide to get married."

Rhoda, as everyone on this planet surely knows by now, was Mary Tyler Moore's kinky neighbor from the Bronx for four years, a character so lovable to even skeptical TV viewers that she was rewarded with her own series this year. During the week that I spent with her, Valerie and "Rhoda" between them accomplished a seemingly impossible feat--they knocked out "All in the Family" as number one in the national ratings. In television land, that's mammoth news, and Rhoda Morgenstern, in the face of such titanic triumph, would undoubtedly do flip-flops.  Valerie Harper does not. Her manager phones her at 11 o'clock on the night of the big news and says: "Hey, it's not bad to go to bed knowing I manage Number One." It is the first time I have seen her explode into excitement. But it is his excitement that turns her on; she's delighted for him. No kidding.

Valerie Harper is so unstarlike, so "real," as they say in Hollywood, that in the beginning one is suspicious. She has, after all, reached the pinnacle of television--her own enormously successful series. She is making $25,000 a week, plus having a piece of the show.  She is on the cover of national magazines. Therefore, how can one trust, given what we know about celebrities and the corrupting power of success, her outward appearance--a star who drives an olive-green, 1968 Pontiac Firebird with two dented  enders, who buys all her clothes at a middle-priced Hollywood boutique and who, in the current redecoration of her house, has decided against papering the laundry room in order to save a few hundred dollars? She not only does not suffer sycophants gladly but she tends to bustle around her dressing room and house incessantly asking guests if it's too hot and opening windows, or too cold, and shutting them, pouring end-less coffee, being, in point of fact, the quintessential Jewish Mother.

To talk to her colleagues is to hear accolades that are not only unanimous but boring in their praise. One aches for an off-the-record whisper of, "She's really rotten to her mother," or some minor gossip. Instead, from Mary Tyler Moore, whom I ask for key adjectives to describe Valerie: "Sympathetic, intelligent, sensitive, open, eager. Everybody comes to her with their problems. She really is an earth mother."   From Nancy Walker, who plays Rhoda's mother: "She's questing, vivacious, inquisitive, incredibly warm." David Groh, who plays Joe, remembers that Valerie read with every single actor--around 150--who auditioned for his part, an unheard-of phenomenon. Jim Brooks, the show's executive producer, says Valerie Harper is the strongest woman he's ever met.  One assumes strength is synonymous with drive and aggressiveness, yet he recalls the after-noon that Valerie's feelings were hurt by something that occurred on the set and she stood in the middle of the stage, told everybody she was hurting and wept openly. "It takes tremendous human strength to do that in this town," says Brooks.

She was born in Suffern, New York, the daughter of a traveling sales-man of industrial lighting fixtures and a mother who gave up her nursing career to raise three children (Valerie has a sister in Seattle and a brother who lives in Oregon). The family shuffled about from Massachusetts to California to Oregon to Michigan to New Jersey, where Valerie spent most of her childhood. Her parents divorced when she was 18.

Valerie wanted to be a ballerina, and most of her early memories focus on
lessons and recitals. "My mother didn't push me at all, but was totally supportive. She had stopped her own career, and she wanted me to have one." At this point Valerie interrupts herself--a frequent characteristic--to tell me that she recently bought her mother, who has returned to nursing, a subscription to Ms. Magazine, whereupon her mother promptly led her nurse co-workers in a strike. "She's really happy now," Valerie says, "as a career gal."  She interrupts herself once again, laughing: "I hate the word gal. Cloris Leachman always says, 'You know what a gal is--an old girl.' "

Although her parents were Protestant, Valerie attended a convent in Michigan when she was ten and became immersed in Catholicism until she lost interest at 15. "If there's any religious area in me," she says, "I guess it would be Catholic. The church is very satisfying in its theatrics--the smells, the pomp--it's aesthetically pleasing." Here again a reference to women enters: "I remember the priest saying once that a man's superior is God and a woman's superior is the man. And I thought, Wait a minute. But I didn't really realize what that meant; it was just an early mini-'click' of awareness."

At 16 she entered the Radio City Music Hall's corps de ballet, where she made $61 a week and danced five shows a day. But it was the big time and she adored it--"My God, I was so young. It was scary and fantastic and incredibly hard work." At 17 she made the chorus line of the Broadway musical Li'l Abner, which also happened to be the first Broadway show she ever saw. She still has some wistful, nagging regret that she didn't pursue classical ballet. "I wish I'd danced in a ballet company for one season anyway.  I never wanted to be Margot Fonteyn.  Mostly I wanted to travel around Europe as a swan."

After Li'l Abner she worked regularly, although she was quite heavy for a dancer, a fact that has apparently given her a permanent self-image of being fat. "I'd stand next to these emaciated girls in tights, and I'd be one hundred forty pounds and think of myself as gigantic. So it's forever emblazoned in my head, the words I'm fat. And I'm not. It's ridiculous!"

In 1964 her roommate introduced her to Dick Schaal, a writer-actor in the original Second City troupe. They were married less than a year later. Working together in New York in those years, they wrote and acted in improvisational theater workshops and briefly did a television talk show, which, one gathers from her chuckling reluctance to discuss it, was a disaster. They moved to Los Angeles in the late '60s with Second City and, to Valerie's dismay, remained there: "The first year I ate myself up to one hundred sixty pounds, didn't work, stayed in the house in Laurel Canyon and bitched."

Rhoda Morgenstern was her first important role and the easiest job she ever won. Jim Brooks clearly remembers her audition four years ago. "The script that was Rhoda's debut called for her to be washing windows outside Mary's living room. Valerie arrived for the audition carrying a pail and mop. I was struck by how serious she was. She read for the part, picked up her pail and left. No small talk."

As Valerie walked into her apartment after that audition, the phone was ringing. It was her agent calling to say she'd gotten the job. She started out at the low television salary of $700 a week; in her four years on the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" she won three Emmys and became one of television's most treasured weekly faces.

The night that "Rhoda" jumped into the number-one place, we were having dinner at her house in West-wood, a suburb of Beverly Hills, the first home the SchaaIs have ever owned.  A house so pleasantly nonopulent, so un-Hollywood that despite its recent face-lifting, her only bow to her new success, it still looks more like the haven of a UCLA professor. Old wood pieces, wicker, a four-poster bed, no dishwasher; a comfortable, shoes-off house, rare in a town famous for its outsize and frequently atrocious taste. We drink lots of coffee that night and talk about her marriage. Again I had the sense of being engaged in a college bull session where the talk ranges from Clothes to Life to Men, without any holding back.

She tells me that an interviewer, just the day before, asked whether she isn't afraid that success will threaten her marriage. She had flared up at him, saying: "You'd never ask that of a successful man, would you?" She sighed, thinking back on it. "That whole area is the deepest sexist propaganda handed out to women. I told this guy, if men feel endangered, that's their problem, not the woman's problem. Thank God I happen to have somebody who doesn't feel that. All I can say to those other men is, 'Work on it because that's a sick area. You're talking about another human being.' I've often wondered why any man would want to spend his life with an inferior. I know I wouldn't.

"This man I've lived with for ten years--his masculinity, his humanness, his stature--is not dependent on my subservience. He's a separate person and he's always encouraged me. No, not encouraged. Demanded. He'd had a traditional marriage before and didn't want it again. He said, 'Listen, babe, don't think you can live through me. You live your life and I'll live mine and then we'll have something to share.'  So we've always both worked. And now he's delirious for what's happened to us. It's our money, not his or mine; he relished my success as he would if it were a friend. And he is my best friend."

Dick, who resists interviews in the role of Mr. Valerie Harper, does not appear that night. He is in the process of opening a theater in Westwood, putting together a kind of Second City troupe, and works as many hours, with as much passion, as Valerie. I try to get Valerie to dissect the success of her marriage, when the odds would certainly decree against it: show business, ten years, her careening career--all the traditional harbingers of marital death.

"Dick doesn't force me to be 'a wife,' whatever that is," she says. "We don't feel bound by marriage. He'll say, 'God, I haven't seen you in a week,' and I'll say, 'Yeah,' so we'll spend a weekend doing nothing, sitting by the pool.  But we don't clutch at each other, or do as many activities together as other couples. We're tired, and time together is usually rest time. There's no owning, no possessing, no you're-compelled-to-because-you-belong-to-me.  That's the evil that I see destroying most marriages."

"Then would you call yours an open marriage?" "I don't know," she says.  "I haven't read the book." "How do you keep the spark alive after ten  years?" I insist. "Well," she responds, with a Rhoda-like chuckle, "the spark changes location a little, you know.  "I never feel hurt if Dick wants to sit and think or go off by himself. And the other day, when I felt I had to be alone and go to the beach, he didn't say, 'Are you meeting somebody at a Malibu motel,' and I didn't have to say, 'Come with me.' Last spring I went to Europe by myself since he didn't have the time to go. So I don't see myself as Working At My Marriage; it's more like Live and Let Live."  Because of the energy each puts into work, children haven't been part of their scenario. Dick's daughter, Wendy, by his first marriage, now 20, lived with them for ten years and neither he nor Valerie felt they could devote the needed time to raise another child. Yet Valerie said to me that night: "Suddenly, in the last six months, I'm thinking about it a lot, and I don't know why. I'm not rushing into it, but I am listening to the voices in my head.  Maybe I'm getting tired of working,  I don't know."

How much of Valerie Harper is Rhoda Morgenstern? Valerie herself is sexier, less ethnic--but with periodic, startling lapses into Rhoda gestures or Rhoda's funny inverted sentence structure ("I told the writers, a coffee pourer I'm not going to be").  She also seems to have more confidence, to be less like one of the ex-walking wounded than Rhoda.... Yet Nancy Walker says Valerie is as hell-bent on self-improvement as Rhoda. Julie Kavner (who plays Brenda, Rhoda's younger sister) sees Valerie's humor, kindness and lifelong weight struggle as similar to Rhoda's, and David Groh says they both have the "same incredible ability to mock themselves."

Lorenzo Music, one of the show's producers, says: "We took the strong areas of the actress Valerie, the things she does and feels intuitively, and developed them in a character. So a lot of Rhoda's feelings are Valerie's. But Rhoda could easily have been a brash, loud woman were it not for Valerie's tempering her with humor and her phenomenal lovingness. The biggest contrast between them is that Rhoda's much simpler than Val; she's not a career person. Valerie is a quiet freight train. She's a mensch, which means in Yiddish 'a real person.' But she's always been headed for the top. All this didn't just happen to her. She made it all happen. That's the part of Valerie that doesn't show."

How does Valerie compare herself with her alter ego? "Well, Rhoda's much funnier than I am, obviously. I mean I'm all right, but she has these fantastic writers putting jokes in her mouth one after another. There's a basic thing about Rhoda that delights me and that I wish was more in my own life, and that's a freedom, a whimsy, a real kookiness. Our main similarity is that she is someone who doesn't like herself very much."

Aha, Valerie. A connection in that private place? Funny, you don't look like a woman who doesn't like herself much. You look like a woman, to me, who's grabbed the biggest trophy in your game and who's handling it like a mensch. A woman who, when you say to me, waving your arms like Rhoda arguing with her mother, "You know what all this success means so far? It means I get to have a cleaning lady more than once a week"--I really believe means it. I really do.