Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, March 26, 1992                   TAG: 9203260088
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Medium

REUNION TURNS INTO A TRIBUTE TO MARY TYLER MOORE

Moore - the star, boss and raison d'etre of one of the smartest and funniest sitcoms in TV history - had indicated to friends that shemight show up anyway, as a way of trying to take her mind off her grief. As late as Saturday morning she was reportedly still considering an appearance. But the show went on Saturday night without her.

Among those who did appear were cast members Valerie Harper (Rhoda Morgenstern), Ed Asner (Lou Grant), Gavin MacLeod (Murray Slaughter), Betty White (Sue Ann Nivens) and Cloris Leachman (Phyllis Lindstrom).

This tribute to "Moore," which aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977, was the finale, and a grand one, of the ninth annual Los Angeles Television Festival sponsored by New York's Museum of Television and Radio.

The 600-seat auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art sold out almost the instant the reunion was announced, and dozens of anxious hopefuls stood outside the hall before showtime hoping for no-show's or obliging scalpers.

Two episodes were screened via a giant production system: "The Lars Affair," which marked the first appearance of White as Nivens, the cunning "happy homemaker" at WJM-TV in Minneapolis, where the series was set; and "Chuckles Bites the Dust," a tour de force for Moore, whose Mary Richards was the last holdout among WJM staff members making jokes about the demise of the station's kiddie-show host. He was "shelled to death by a rogue elephant" while dressed as Peter Peanut in a circus parade.

What a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful series it was.

But it got off to a very shaky start, as the producers and stars recalled. Many CBS executives insisted a series about a single working woman wouldn't fly. "CBS really had no faith in the show," recalled Jay Sandrich, who directed most of the episodes (though not "Chuckles"). He has just completed eight years as principal director of "The Cosby Show," whose last episode airs on NBC in April.

Sandrich said CBS was readying a replacement show for "Moore" even before it got on the air.

Further, network executives told Grant Tinker, then head of MTM Enterprises (and Moore's husband until their divorce in 1982), to fire James L. Brooks and Allan Burns, the two gifted writers who created the show, before it premiered. Burns, with tears in his eyes, recalled how Tinker stood up to network brass on that and on other changes they demanded.

"He never blinked," Burns said.

A Tuesday night run-through before a test audience in the spring of 1970 was a bomb, everyone agreed; the audience didn't laugh, and the premiere was to be filmed that Friday. It was, said Brooks, disastrous: "I can't tell you how disastrous. It was really terrible."

"You must have gotten an earful from Mary on the way home that night," Burns said to Tinker. Moore was known for her even keel, but even she panicked at the calamitous reaction. "Mary just went to pieces at the house and cried as only Mary can cry for three hours," Tinker said.

He calmed her, he recalled, by phoning the studio at 1 a.m., knowing Brooks and Burns would still be there working on the script. "I said, `Fix it,' and I went back upstairs and told Mary, `It's done,' " said Tinker.

Seated in a long row of chairs across the stage, members of the "Moore" team were asked to name their favorite episodes. Leachman, dressed a bit like Peter Pan (in tights and a top), confessed, "Most of the Mary Tyler Moore shows, I never saw." She said her private life had been in turmoil at the time and she rarely caught an episode of the series.

"I wish I could go back and be in all of them and see all of them," she said. "You can see them," said Harper, seated next to her and dressed like a gypsy fortuneteller. The reruns are still rerunning, Harper noted.

"I never met a less selfish star than Mary," Asner said. "She was absolutely original - still is," said White. "Just by example, she shaped all of us up." Harper, praising Moore's "generosity of spirit" and "casual humanity," said, "She was just fabulous."

There couldn't have been anybody on the stage, or in that audience Saturday night, who disagreed. How we love our Mary! \

AUTHOR Tom Shales is TV editor and chief TV critic for The Washington Post.