Mtm’s New Book Tells Of Her Life With - And As - Mary Richards

Could be, we don’t need to read a book by Mary Tyler Moore to get to know her. We already know her pretty well.

And have for more than 30 years, thanks to the characters she gave us on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and on her own beloved sitcom, produced from 1970 through its much-mourned farewell in 1977.

After that, Moore would play a variety of roles in films, on the stage and on television - currently as the tough editor of a Manhattan tabloid on CBS’s struggling Thursday drama “New York News.” But it was with Laura Petrie and, even more so, Mary Richards that Mary Tyler Moore made the audience’s hearts flutter (and still does in reruns on cable’s Nickelodeon).

Those two young women may seem all the more reflective of the actress who created them - that is, all the more autobiographical - for those who read Moore’s new autobiography, “After All.”

Of course, Mary Richards didn’t endure two broken marriages, an alcoholic mother, her own battle with the bottle, the accidental death of her only child at age 24 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, her sister’s fatal overdose, diabetes, or a failed attempt to help her cancer-ravaged brother commit suicide. Well, at least not if memory serves.

Moore, now 58, wastes no time in “After All” drawing a distinction between personas she labels “Mary” and “MTM.” The book’s clever prologue consists of a scripted exchange wherein Moore confesses to her “old friend” Mary that all the time the viewers “were watching the show and wishing they were you - so was I!”

During a recent interview in her very un-Mary Fifth Avenue apartment - vast, elegant and nary a wall-mounted, decorative “M” in sight - Moore likened being linked with Mary Richards to “growing up with a mother who is a very famous actress. There are all kinds of wonderful perks that go with it, and then there are little resentments, too.

“My life is inextricably intertwined with Mary Richards’ and probably always will be.

“She certainly was never a character that I had to develop when we were doing the show,” Moore says.

“Everything I did was by the seat of the pants. I reacted to every written situation the way I would have in real life.”

Moore then hastens to compare herself unfavorably to Mary Richards in the patience-and-empathy department, although the ever-deferential Mary Richards would have probably done the same thing.

Mary, as the theme song drilled into our psyches, could “turn the world on with a smile.” That’s a hard act for anyone to follow, especially when, as with Mary Tyler Moore, she was your act.

But is Mary Richards all that ideal?

As with any full-bodied character, she has her faults as well as virtues. She is caring and kind, filled with hope for the future and faith in humanity. But she is also high-strung, insecure, dithering and somewhat of a doormat - traits, by the way, that Moore reveals in herself in “After All.”

Like Mary Richards, Moore also seems, even now, a bit self-effacing.

She assigns full credit to her second husband and business partner, Grant Tinker, for the success of MTM Enterprises, the talent-nurturing dream factory that produced “Mary Tyler Moore,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues” and other wonderful series. All Mary did, she says, was to star in her own little show.

Those of us who are honest with ourselves know it can be as painful as it is amusing to watch “Mary Tyler Moore,” which in its final episode sends Mary to the unemployment line along with the rest of her WJM colleagues - everyone having been fired by the station’s new management but the preening, clueless anchorman, Ted Baxter.

Thus does it remain forever unanswered whether Mary Richards, dealt cruelly even by her own sitcom, actually did “make it after all.” Or ever will.

Mary Tyler Moore, on the other hand, has. She has triumphed over alcohol and diabetes, and found happiness in her third marriage, to Dr. Robert Levine, whom she wed 11 years ago. She stays busy and she has now discovered writing, found the pleasure of secluding herself, she reports, “with a yellow pad, a pencil and an electric pencil sharpener.”

The result is “After All.” Like Mary Richards, it’s got spunk.