Valerie Harper

Valerie Harper and Dick Schaal

On October 28, 1974, some 50 million Americans watched a 33-year-old New York Jewish girl named Rhoda Morgenstern marry a building wrecker named Joe. That was far and away the season's biggest turnout for a TV series came close to topping the all-time record Lucille Ball established more than 20 years ago when she delivered her I Love Lucy baby just out of range of the cameras.

Yet a few nights after the wedding was screened, the real Rhoda--a brown-haired, green-eyed actress named Valerie Harper, who is neither a New Yorker nor Jewish--could have been found standing unnoticed in line with her husband, Dick Schaal, waiting for the box office to open at a local movie house a few blocks from their home in Westwood, Calif.

That's what the Schaals usually do on Saturday nights. They did it before Rhoda became a national habit, and they still do it. Incredibly, not much else in their life-style has changed, either. They seem almost detached from the fact that Rhoda is the most sensational overnight success in TV history. Dick Schaal--a hulking, deliberate, plain-spoken man with humor in his eyes--shrugs. "Maybe I'm too close to it, but I'm still arguing with her about putting too much soap in the washing machine."
 

And Valerie Harper--trimmer than she's ever been and just as ebullient--says, "Nothing has changed in our lives, really. We are thrilled over those top ratings, but we still have to learn next week's script. Work is a great leveler, a
great equalizer. We're aware of the action, but we don't really see it."
 

The action is spectacular. When Rhoda and her TV husband, Joe, were married in an hour-long special, the show attracted well over half the TV viewing audience.  Dozens of wedding gifts--some camp, some serious--poured into the North Hollywood studio where Rhoda is filmed. And across the country, hundreds of wedding parties were held by otherwise rational people before and after the marriage on television. One Washington, D.C., hostess summed up the feelings of millions of Rhoda fans, "She's real. We're all like her in some way."
 

On the weekend before the wedding went on the air, Dick Schaal was trying desperately to persuade his wife to buy a new car. Valerie drives a 1968 Pontiac with dented fenders because she says it "feels comfortable" to her. "She drives it," says Dick, "because as long as she does, she doesn't have to make a decision about a new car. She hates decisions." Val had almost committed herself to a certain small foreign car when she learned she'd have to make a choice of color. She asked her husband for advice, and he proposed settling for a model with a black exterior and red upholstering. "But," said Valerie, "I certainly don't want black." And so she is still driving her seven-year-old model.

Late in 1973, soon after she had decided to leave the security of second banana on The Mary Tyler Moore Show to launch a show of her own, I sat with Valerie Harper on the patio of her home in the West-wood section of Los Angeles and talked with her for Good Housekeeping.  Readers perhaps will remember that she was very emphatic on one point: "I don't want it to be the Valerie Harper Show," she told me. "That would be destructive to me. It's about a character they created and to which I gave life. I want to stay separate from Rhoda." (See GH, February 1974.)

More than a year later, on the same patio, I read her that quote and asked
for any second thoughts. 

Her answer came fast.  "I still feel exactly the same way," she said. "I'd have to, or I'd be insane. People can see me as Rhoda, butthat's them, not me. Rhoda is my work. When I'm Rhoda, I'm me, Valerie, the actress, working, finding the best way to make this character true and real. I'm not getting sucked into the identity of Rhoda. Just the opposite. I'm more aware of myself than I've ever been.  Listen, I can't believe it, but I have more time now! I have a secretary and don't have to be on the phone all the time. And I have a housekeeper three days a week. That gives me more time with Dick.

"I can't be defined by other people--by writers or audiences or critics. I have to get to know who I am myself and stand on that. That's where I have to live--and I think it takes a healthy head. I don't know that I'm all the way healthy, but I'm feeling better every day. I really have great hopes for the future, for my forties and fifties."

When I asked her husband, Dick Schaal, how much of Rhoda is Valerie, he hesitated for a very long time before saying- "I really don't know. The superficial things--like the accent--are not hers. But whatever substance and beauty are there are hers. And Rhoda's wit is close to Valerie's. Val's not really insecure, but, like Rhoda, it's tough to get her to make a decision--whether it's a dinner menu or a new dress. What I think is important is to understand that Val approaches Rhoda as an actress. She could be doing the Greek heroine, Medea, and she'd do her just as well as Rhoda."

Schaal is a more deliberate person than his wife. A little later he returned to the parallels between Rhoda and Valerie. "I think," he said, "that what they've got in common will become more apparent as the marriage between Rhoda and Joe develops. That hasn't come clear yet. When it does, I think it will be depicted as a completely honest marriage--which is the way Valerie sees marriage, and the way we live."

Dick Schaal is an actor, and a good one. Ever since they've been together, he and Valerie have taken turns as breadwinner, depending on who was working at the moment. They don't quibble over roles. Valerie says of her husband: "He's a quick course in psychiatric help for me. Marriage isn't 50-50, it's 100 percent. We each have our own life; then we have something to share. I've read all this stuff that marriage puts women in a degrading position, and it can, if the man perceives it that way. But mine doesn't. Dick is an incredible humanist; he's not a feminist, which implies something else." Says Valerie's friend, Mary Tyler Moore: "One of the big reasons Val has dealt with all this success so beautifully is that she has a really good marriage."

I watched Valerie and Dick work together for several days on the Rhoda set. Dick had previously done a guest bit as Joe's old friend, Charley, and it had worked so well that he had come back to do another. (Audiences will probably see more of Charley in future months, although there are no plans to make him a running character.) There's something a little spooky about watching the Rhoda cast rehearse. Although the show is filmed before a live audience, most of the cast's time is spent rehearsing on a silent, cavernous stage with no outsiders present. It's a strange feeling to see a handful of people working away in splendid isolation, knowing that soon they'll be in millions of living rooms and that more millions of people will be laughing and crying right alongside of them.

After one long day of rehearsal, Valerie retreated to her dressing-room trailer, slipped off the bandanna around her head, tossed her hair, folded her glasses (she's needed them to read since she was ten years old) and opened a can of grape pop ("It's funky but it's good").  "This has been one of the best weeks we've ever had," she said. "It always is when Dick and I can work together.  I trust him implicitly. We're such good friends that we don't get into a lot of games that husbands and wives play who never quite liked each other enough. I think too many people get married for the wrong reasons-- because they're supposed to, because it's practical, because of sex. But you know, it's really liking each otherthat makes a marriage last. If you're really comfortable with each other, you can be alone if you want to be, and the other doesn't feel rejection. Mutual respect, that's what it is. To a friend, you can say: 'Look, I don't want to talk right now.' But too often, if a husband or wife says that, the other one gets hurt. So many people have tried to suggest that because Rhoda is so successful, it must have put a strain on my relations with Dick. That just isn't true. He's busier than he's ever been with his own things. And that's great. He's a very secure man."

It's pretty much been that way ever since Val and Dick were married ten years ago. As tons of newsprint devoted to Valerie Harper in recent months have described, they met in New York when Val was dancing in Broadway musicals and Dick--a Chicago building contractor turned actor--was performing in the Second City Revue. Val's father--he was a hockey player turned contractor--traveled a lot and often took his family with him. Ballet training was about the only thing in her childhood that didn't change. When she was 17, her parents divorced. ("They stayed together because of the kids. There were a lot of tensions when I was growing up. Mom and Dad are great, but not together.")

Val danced at Radio City Music Hall when she was 15 and might have made it as a ballerina had she not switched to Broadway when she was offered a job in the chorus of L'il Abner. A year of idleness when she had hepatitis had put too much weight on her, and she remained rather chubby. ("I think I was hiding from boys. I was the vestal-virgin type.") But her talents as a dancer kept her busy in spite of her weight.

Valerie met Dick--whom she calls "Schaal"--through her then-roommate, actress Arlene Golonka. By that time, Val had discovered social causes, and Dick remembers waiting for her at a restaurant for an hour and a half on their second date. Finally, a friend came in breathlessly and told him Val was in jail. She had been arrested by the New York Police while marching with a group of pickets protesting the building trades unions' failure to hire minorities at the New York World's Fair. Dick found her at the Women's House of Detention, where he bailed her out. Val insists she was there to make sure other women pickets got fair treatment; Dick says she was in jail. Period.

They went together for a year--including one long separation--before they were married. Valerie studied acting with John Cassavetes (and philosophy and anthropology at the New School for Social Research) while she and Dick worked with reasonable regularity in New York-on Broadway, in television, in revues, in summer stock. Finally, five years ago, they came to Los Angeles with Paul Sills' Story Theater. That's when Val auditioned for the part of Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and started toward her three Emmys as "best supporting actress in comedy"--and ended up in her own prime-time slot.

Why has Rhoda taken off so spectacularly? Even the people involved aren't sure. And they don't really have much time to think about it.

"You've got to remember," says Valerie, "that this is no overnight success, even though it seems that way. Rhoda has been going for five years now--the character, not the show.  That gave us a wonderful leg up. Even so, I didn't expect the response we got.  So many letters--including millions from girls who say it's nice seeing somebody get married in a white dress, even if she isn't a virgin! Maybe it's the mood of the country. After Watergate, I guess people are exhausted and hurt a little.  The Nixon years kind of diluted our sensibilities. So maybe the public wanted to watch a wedding. It's a beginning, you know, a happiness."

Dick Schaal puts it this way: "The stories on Rhoda contain a truth. If it was just an entertainment, it wouldn't work so well. But it's much more than that.  There's a direct connection, between the characters here and the people out there.  That's what makes Rhoda swing. It's the connection that counts."

And while Rhoda connects, Valerie and Dick live in a kind of gold-plated isolation, not by choice but because of the demands of work. "We're both sociable people," says Dick. We don't do the cocktail-dinner-party circuit, but we have a lot of good friends we like to see. The trouble is when Rhoda's filming, there's simply no time. And when the weekends come, we close the door and stay home, because we really want to be alone together.

"Home is a standard California house in a neighborhood of moderate homes just a few blocks from the campus of UCLA and downtown Westwood.  It's the first house the Schaals have ever owned, and they bought it only under pressure from their business manager to invest for tax savings. "We were both worried about taking on a trap for ourselves," says Dick darkly. "I told Valerie, 'If we buy this house, baby, we've got to know that we can walk out the front door any time we feel like it and not look back.' "

Their only concessions to new wealth are a swimming pool that Dick de- signed, plus extensive improvements inside the house that he helped build.  Their living style has changed only slightly. They used to have a cleaning man once a week. Instead, they now have his wife three times a week.  When they eat in, Valerie does the cooking--and she's "terrific" according to Dick. Val wouldn't go that far. She admits she's a good cook, but no gourmet. "I hate grocery shopping because it takes so much time, but, you know, now that I have someone to shop for me, I cook more than I used to. I'm learning slowly to let other people help me, but it's taken a little while. I haven't any  bjections to it; it's just that I didn't know how." To the Schaals, a night on the town is still a movie or a meal at a neighborhood restaurant.

Living this way, it's hard for Valerie to judge the impact of her show. She's had only one real taste, when she visited New York for a friend's wedding in late October. She went to the theater to see Over Here and was mobbed when she came out. "They really got kinda hysterical," she recalls in wonderment, "hollering 'Rhoda, Rhoda.' I signed a couple of autographs when I first came out which was probably a mistake. Then they really started to press me and I had to duck back into the theater through the stage door. I remember thinking: 'What are you doing? Don't you know I used to work here in the chorus?' It was weird, and I didn't really enjoy it very much."

Until a few months ago, Dick's daughter by a previous marriage--20-year-old Wendy--lived with Valerie and Dick. Now she's going to college and living away from home. Her interests are in drama, and she comes home once a week to work with her father's little theater group. "It's transition time for Wendy," says Val, "and it's good that she's on her own, paying some of her own bills. I don't think she'd hesitate to come to us if she needed help and I'd use every bit of influence at my disposal to help her get into the work she wants." Says Dick: "Wendy's pretty hip, but she's kind of a loner, too. She's had one boy friend for years. Her style is closer to mine than to Val's."

Dick and Val generally agree on basic issues, but not on how to support them. Val--whom some of her associates call Earth Mother--wears her causes on her sleeve. She talks and marches and pickets and bleeds. (She tried to sell me a ticket to a theater party raising funds for an organization devoted to prison reform and rehabilitation of released convicts.) "Val is bursting with social causes," says Mary Tyler Moore. "The handle for Valerie," says her husband, "is social conscience." 

But where Val is out front, picketing, Dick remains behind the scenes, maneuvering. For example, when Establishment banks were refusing to lend
money to black businessmen, Dick quietly persuaded a few fat-cat friends to make sizable deposits in a Harlem bank that was underwriting black business ventures. "Valerie never leans on me to join her causes," says Dick.  "That's one reason our relationship is what it is. We don't force our convictions on each other."

Valerie also subscribes to her own special brand of feminism. She was distressed by the script of a recent show in which Rhoda's mother said she made $100 a month by picking up her husband's loose change at night. "The lack of dignity, the dehumanization of the woman, the suggestion that it's the man's money and his wife is picking his pockets--that was all pretty disturbing to me. We could have gotten a laugh, but it was a cheap shot and the writers agreed to take it out. I feel a huge sense of responsibility because we go into so many homes. We've got to be honest."
 

Valerie is still extremely reluctant to assert her new star status. When conflicts developed between the Rhoda schedule and lunch- hour dancing classes, which she used to enjoy taking with Mary Tyler Moore, Val gave up the lessons. It simply never occurred to her to ask for an earlier lunch break on that day.  She doesn't think that way.  It's to be hoped she never will- although there are times when she is forced, simply by circumstances, to change her style. Her secretary, a wafer-thin, efficient young woman named Prehudi (a religious name she's adopted) says that "it's difficult for Val to ask someone to do something for her. Seeing people treated unjustly angers her; she wants evenhandedness between everyone. Some- times it's hard to reconcile that feeling with her growing need for help doing things she used to do for herself. But she seems to accept help more easily lately. She's more preoccupied than she used to be, has a lot more on her mind."

Although she often plays the emotional, scattershot role, Valerie is highly disciplined when it comes to work. "Once she's on that set," says Mary Tyler Moore, "it's all work. Val will always dig deeply inside herself to add dimension to a scene."  The Rhoda set is generally a tight ship, reflecting not only the discipline of Director Robert Moore (Boys in the Band, My Fat Friend) but also the serious approach of the star of the show. Skylarking--at least while I was watching--was minimal, although there is one running gag that invariably breaks up the cast at least once a week. A rubber chicken was used as a visual prop in one of the early Rhoda shows. Now, it turns up unexpectedly--in-side a cooking pan, a pocket, a coat sleeve--at least once in every show.

Says Julie Kavner, the young drama-school graduate who was a clerk-typist at UCLA when she tested for, and won, the role of Rhoda's younger sister: "We don't pay much attention to ratings. We're here to work. I haven't felt any changes in attitudes since the show got famous. From the beginning, there's been an ensemble feeling that revolves around Bob Moore's creative working atmosphere."

Val has spent many extra hours working with nervous bit players auditioning and having trouble mastering their lines. She almost gave up a role in a movie because she felt a Mexican-American actress should get the part.  When she entertained on a cruise ship a few years ago, she got as many of the cast together as she could and put on an extra, free show for the crew. She does such things easily, spontaneously. Says her producer, Alan  Burns, "Valerie mothers men, women, dogs and other actresses. I can't understand how anyone can be as giving and still be an actress. She's the most delightful person I've ever worked with."

But she can be hardheaded, too. "It isn't easy to conher," says her husband. "She isn't so much tough as just clear and pretty flat- out honest--in causes or in business." Says Mary Tyler Moore: "I've seen Val put down people who deserved it, let people have it--and she's very effective; not outraged, but cool about it.  From the beginning she let people know that she was not to be herded about or treated like an empty-headed starlet.  Most of the time, Val is her easy, happy self, spreading her love on everybody in sight. But these other sides of Val are terribly important because they give her depth and dimension. Her angers never last long and they are always directed more at situations than individuals. She simply won't put up with pettiness or injustice from anyone."

The thing that distresses Valerie most about sudden success is what Prehudi describes as "the way some people cater to her." Val resists this sort of thing by the tone she deliberately sets on the set. But still, she says, "people I knew before have changed in their attitude toward me. Not my close friends; they're just thrilled, and they go on forever. But new people and people I haven't known that well treat me strangely. And I tell them: 'Don't do that. Deal with me straight, and I'll do the same with you!'

"These are still weird shoes for me to be standing in--and not altogether comfortable. But that's okay. I guess it goes with the territory, and you deal with it. The concept of star is special, isolated. There's a separation in the very word. People would make you into a product, a commodity, a thing--but that's them, and I'm not going to accept it."

Val has no consciousness of being rich. "I don't make half what they're saying," she insists, but then admits that Rhoda will probably make her a millionaire. "I'm too middle class to understand that," she says. "I never was interested in piling up bundles of money. It doesn't dazzle me, isn't some- thing I've always wanted. The way things are in this country, it could be gone overnight, and if that happens, we could go back to our $200-a-month apartment without looking over our shoulders."

Valerie is kept on a tight rein byher business manager who doles out herspending money. "That's the way toconceal your money from yourself. Wejust see a paper with numbers. I do keep an eye on it, but I don't write checks any more. It's all second-hand."

Her husband says Valerie will stay with Rhoda "until the adrenaline quits running. Until it no longer entertains the imagination. Until there's nothing in the scripts to investigate further.  But I don't think that will happen with this company. They've got some of the finest writers around, there's a good mood on the set, and everyone cares about quality. If there's any sort of lie - even inadvertent--everybody jumps on it."

Valerie can probably pretty well write her own ticket now if she wants to reach into other entertainment fields during her time off from Rhoda in the spring. She's already done one motion picture cameo role, with Alan Arkin, in a film called Freebie and the Bean --a satire on a tough-cop pictures that leaves Valerie with decidedly mixed feelings. ("I thought my part came off all right, but I don't think any kind of brutality is funny, and that's one big reason I didn't want to do this at first.") She also had a minor disaster with the Broadway theater just before Rhoda got under way. She spent two months rehearsing and trying out the Herb Gardner play, Thieves, before she was replaced in Boston by Gardner's girl friend, Marlo Thomas. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience that Val doesn't like to talk about now.

She's reading movie scripts when she can, but hasn't been turned on yet. ("I just know I want to do something that is not Rhoda.")

Meanwhile, long-range plans are being made by the producing team responsible for Rhoda. Valerie had just come from a planning session when I saw her the last time. The main topic of conversation was whether or not Rhoda should have a baby. The consensus: she should not have one next year. Possibly the year after, depending on what happens to Rhoda and Joe.

That's a production decision and Val wants it clearly understood that it has nothing to do with the personal decision of Valerie and Dick Schaal to have a child. "We've been talking about having a baby," says Val, "and we know if we're going to do it, it will have to be pretty soon. But one thing I won't do is have a child of my own concurrent with Rhoda having a baby. I told them that. There's something not good about it to me. It's too public. It's got to be a very personal affair with us. It's all a part of where we started talking, you know. I'm an actress and Rhoda is going to have to live her life separate from me. All the way."