Watching Mary Tyler Moore in Long-Ago Real Time

But it was as a single woman living among other single women, without desperation or indignity, that Mary Richards may have made her biggest mark. I was a recovering pseudo-hippie, just returned from an island in the Mediterranean and working as a waitress at a soul food-and-jazz joint when the show started. I still had tie-dyed curtains in my exposed brick walk-up apartment, a little dog I bought so I could attract guys on the street, and becoming as skinny as Mary mattered enough to me to achieve that goal. I was too stupid to know that not wanting what we still called “the straight world” was a defense for being afraid of the challenges and rejections of that world. It was easier to sit at my desk and type, on my electric typewriter, little profiles for brand-new Ms., or book reviews (and the occasional memoir of capricious drug-running) for Rolling Stone.

I had an upstairs neighbor named Dana Dolan, a friend a few blocks away named Eileen Stukane, and another friend a few more blocks away named Carol Ardman. On the nights The Mary Tyler Moore Show aired, I would make what all three recall as seriously elaborate salads (such was the beginning and end of my culinary career), and we’d all sit cross-legged on the floor eating them, watching Mary and Rhoda, on what Dana recalls as “your tiny TV” (in those days, for us, stereos ruled), modeling a respectively peaceful, un-anxious and noisily bumptious independence that was a casual mirror to our own lives. “We dressed as snappy as Mary and had a sense of humor, too,” Dana, who was an assistant at Newsweek, remembers. “Mary dated without finding a husband, just like us.” Eileen, a writer then and now, remembers walking up my rickety stairs (she had them too) where, while watching Mary, we “commiserated about our love lives, encouraged each others’ careers, and laughed with Mary. We knew we were the first real wave of single women on their own in the country. She gave us roots and wings.” And Carol, also a writer (she, too, had rickety stairs; I guess rickety stairs were the early ’70s version of artisanal pork belly) remembers that my mother used to call from California to find out what I was doing; why I wasn’t out on a date; was I alone or was there a guy there? I would often just let the phone ring, my friends and I avoiding her like Mary and Rhoda avoided their hilariously annoying older neighbor, the pompous, dopily opinionated Phyllis (perfectly limned by Cloris Leachman).

When, two years into the series, I had a year-long relationship with a stylishly “spiritual” and “evolved” older filmmaker who was self-centered, casually domineering, and totally full of shit, I would rush from his big house and packed agenda to my by-now pathetic-seeming little apartment, and the glorious, illicit relief I felt in being alone there, in ostensibly reduced circumstances. I was validated by the confidence with which Mary handled her single life. “Mare? Mare?”: it was much better to have a woman neighbor knock on your door like Rhoda than be a couple with a man who looked good on paper but who effortlessly assumed you would live in his life. “But Mister Gra-ant…”: Mary’s exasperated plaint—only several inches from a breaking point and projecting an unfairness we knew she knew she was too smart not to conquer—gave me comfort: In 1973, we’d been consciousness-raised on steroids; we now suddenly hated our sexist boyfriends, who just half a year earlier we were dying to keep and please. But did that head-spin doom us to forever-aloneness? It was a high-barred (and not un-scary) dilemma, but we’d figure the fuck a way out of it, kind of like how Mary cleverly figured dozens of little office-politics things out every week.

I never thought of Mary as a role model; that was the beauty part. Susan Sontag and Carly Simon and, soon after that, Rickie Lee Jones, were my role models. If Mary had been my role model, it would have been too cloying, too obvious. I wouldn’t have absorbed her lesson in the subtle, effective way I did.

At the end of the last episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in 1977—by now I was living with the man I would later marry (but living with him in that emotional, dramatic mid-’70s way that matched the turmoil of the soulfully bankrupted and desperate city)—Mary says goodbye to the newsroom. She has done her job. Her desk is empty, all is neat. She walks out and closes the door. Then she remembers she hasn’t turned off the light. She walks back in and does so. Punctilious to the end, about to take her honed over-competence to that next plateau that the vibrant new feminist culture, and her show, helped create for us.

To me, the remembering-to-turn-the-light-off gesture also meant something else: Turning back. Mildly regretting. Being humble and doubtful and wistful. Being honest enough to know we can’t jettison our striving, less-formed, insecure—rickety-stairs—selves. After all, they can teach us the most.

Sheila Weller is the author of seven books, including 2008’s New York Times bestseller Girls Like Us and 2014’s The News Sorority, a writer for Vanity Fair, former senior contributing editor at Glamour and contributing editor at New York, contributor to many more magazines and recipient of nine magazine awards. Author photo by Laura Pedrick.