It's a warm, spring morning. The phone rings. It's Valerie Harper. "Dick and I are getting a divorce," she says, without preamble. Oh? "Yes, we decided the marriage was cluttering up a good relationship. There's no bitterness and we're not involved with other people; we just recognized that we had been hanging onto the form of the marriage after the content had gone out of it. We're still living together and even sharing the same bedroom, but I'll be moving out soon. We're still friends.  Some people would probably say that our marriage failed. It didn't, though. Our marriage worked out. This just happens to be the way it worked out . .with divorce."
 

Only a few weeks earlier, Valerie Harper had been sitting in a Hollywood restaurant on a cold, rainy afternoon, playing with her salad and her hot tea. She was talking about Rhoda Morgenstern. "The big difference between me and Rhoda," she said then, "is that I'm still married. I guess it's surprised an awful lot of people. I mean, we've been married for 13 years -and I would say that for at least seven or eight of those years there's been talk that we're breaking up. I don't know why. We have a terrific marriage."

The husband she has been married to for 13 years is Dick Schaal, a moderately successful actor who never quite made it to stardom. Could it be that Valerie's big success as Rhoda had something to do with the breakup of the marriage? That wasn't the way she saw it on that rainy afternoon.

"The fact of the matter is that a lot of people recognize Dick in public without recognizing me. It's true that I'm making more money right now than he is, but he's starting his own series next month [Please Stand By] and may soon be earning more than I do. The important thing is that he's my best friend, and I feel totally supported by him emotionally, which happens to be the only way that matters."

The conversation wandered: to stardom, "est," movie magazines and food. She likes stardom. "There's a joy in being able to afford things," she said. "I still love getting into a limousine. But I think so-called stardom has changed me far less than the experience of est."

While some skeptics may scoff at what Werner Erhard has wrought with his controversial self-realization program, Harper is not one of them. In fact, there are some people who think Harper's image hasn't changed so much from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan but to an est-trained parrot. She has very nearly made a second career of promoting est projects on talk shows.  And to hear her talk about Erhard, who has, in other quarters, been described as the Svengali of the upper class and the American Rasputin, you'd think God had been created in his image.

Still, there was no doubting her sincerity when Harper said, "I went through est training three years ago and it turned my head totally around.It's difficult to explain it to anybody who hasn't experienced it, but, basically, it makes you become more honest with yourself and more responsible for your own actions. I've stopped blaming the world or my background or my husband or any of those other handy scapegoats that we all tend to fall back on.

"For instance, I'm still petty sometimes, but I don't lie to myself about it. I can be big about being small. I can't stay conceited for more than a few minutes at a time because, after that, l observe myself being conceited-and it's a hoot, and I just have to bust out laughing at myself. Another thing: I used to suffer because of the irresponsible movie magazines. But, thanks to est, I finally owned up to the fact that I'm famous and I'm going to be written about. I can't let myself worry about whether I'm being depicted as a bitch."

Almost no one, these days, talks of Valerie Harper that way. But when Rhoda was first spun off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there were tales of temperament and unbridled ego involving its star. As happens so often when you try to track down gossip, the sources tend to slip back into the woodwork.  Harper admitted, though, "A few people might have gotten their noses bent out of shape that first sea- son when our director, Bob Moore, decided to close the set and I backed him up. When you're putting a show together, the first three days is not a spectator sport. I didn't want tourists coming through when we were rehearsing. Fortunately, the people I work with are stage-trained, and they all felt the same way. There's no way you can maintain your concentration when people are sitting up there in the bleachers, eating their lunches and talking."

The fact remains that, at the time, Harper had just emigrated from four years with Mary Tyler Moore, where in spite of the fact that the set was always open they managed to collect enough Emmys to open their own store. It is likely that Harper's decision to close the set was largely based on her understandable desire to give vent to an occasional holler without having
it blown up in the gossip columns as an example of star temperament.

In the restaurant, Valerie stared without much interest at a sliced egg on her salad plate as she pondered the next question. The question was whether she had outgrown the role, whether she should go on to something else.

But questions about her career don't turn Valerie on. She answered in terms so vague you had to figure that, if everything else fails, she can always go to work for the State Department. "I love acting. TV, the movies, stage- I love it all. I have a wonderful manager who's guiding my career just right."

When she was asked what besides her career really matters, passion welled up in her voice as she replied: "The Hunger Project. I used to think starvation was like death and taxes. But there's plenty of food in the world, The problem is distribution. We have to ask ourselves why there are 28 people starving every minute. As a member of the advisory board of est, I'm proud that we began The Hunger Project. But anybody can become involved. You just have to be willing to dedicate yourself to the fact that hunger will be wiped out within 20 years-by 1997. It's an idea whose time has come. We'll  look back then on hunger the way we now look back on the bubonic plague. As for me, maybe I'll be doing a series. Maybe it'll still be Rhoda. Who knows? I won't be that old. I'll be in good shape."

The state of her shape is certainly a concern that's never too far from her thoughts. When she started shooting Rhoda last year, she had gotten her weight down to an admittedly gaunt 119. "I looked like a cadaver, except for my hips, which still managed to weigh a ton. But now I'm back up to about 128, and I'd like to stay there."

The talk turned to hobbies. "I don't have any," Harper claimed, "so I spend most of my time cleaning out my closets and rearranging stuff in the drawers. I just can't stand clutter; I like things neat. We're moving to a bigger house soon, so I'll have more closets to clean."

Home at the time was a modest place in Westwood, a mile or so from UCLA.
She was sharing it with Schaal and his parents. It was an unusual living arrangement, but Harper said, "They're lovely people, and both Dick and I are family oriented. It seems a tragedy of American life that there's so little intermingling of the different generations."

Later, at the Westwood establishment, Harper lived up to her reputation by  taying busy in the kitchen, changing the paper in the drawers. Schaal was sitting barefoot in the den, surrounded by Indian art and blankets, trying to decide how Valerie had changed most in 13 years. "She has more consciousness. She used to be very superstitious and full of irrational fears. For instance, she used to be so afraid of sharks, she had nightmares about them. And this was before 'Jaws.'  Now, even when we go out in my boat and she sees them up close, she's no longer terrified. She'll swim in the ocean these days."

When asked whether he'd felt any strain on their relationship as a result of the fame, the Emmys and the money that playing Rhoda has brought his wife's way, Schaal said, "Just the opposite. We've managed to put all the lies out of our life. Val's a much nicer person now, since all the success has come her way. All that validation and acknowledgment have been extremely beneficial. She used to try to be very domineering. Now she's far more relaxed. She used to be loaded with barriers that made her try to appear to be magnificent; now she just is magnificent."

Schaal, a longtime acting coach, also critiqued his wife's ability: "After all this time, Rhoda's a pretty easy job for her. In the beginning, of course, it was a far reach. Even now, after a hiatus of a week or two, it will take her a while to get the accent back. She had a really far reach in the movie Freebie and the Bean,' in which she played Alan Arkin's Chicana wife. I mean, she was fantastic. She was Mexican all through her body. She's a hell of a fine actress."

Valerie left the kitchen long enough to talk about her stepdaughter, Wendy, who's 23. "I loved helping to raise her. In fact, I can't think of anything that has enriched my life as much as having Wendy with us all those years. Maybe that's why, now that Wendy's married and off on her own, I've been thinking of having a baby. Actually, Dick and I have been talking about it for the past few years. It could present a bit of a problem if I showed up pregnant on the show, now that Rhoda is single again. On the other hand, if I'm going to do it, I better do it soon, before my eggs atrophy."

That, of course, was before spring came to Hollywood and before divorce came to Valerie Harper. 

As she was leaving the restaurant on that cold, rainy afternoon, there was time for one last question. Is she happy? "Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm happy."  At that moment, her eye fell on a slice of devil's-food cake being devoured at a nearby table. "Now that's what I call happiness. Let's face it-having to settle for salad and hot tea in a chocolate-cake world is a darn high price to pay for stardom." And maybe a marriage that breaks up after 13 years is an even higher price.