Valerie Harper

Nine years ago, my father took me to see Looped, a comedy starring Valerie Harper as the great stage actress Tallulah Bankhead, at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City. An outsized personality who was known as much for her unconventional lifestyle as her drawling voice (“Dahh-ling…”), Bankhead originated roles on Broadway but also inspired screenwriters to fashion the likes of Margo Channing and Cruella de Vil. She didn’t make many movies, but did appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) — a movie I’d seen one year before the play. In that film, Bankhead is first seen sitting alone in the eponymous watercraft, floating amidst the debris of a shipwreck. She wears a sumptuous mink coat, smoking a cigarette. She stares at the water as if it offends her. You get the impression that she’s desperate to find other survivors — not out of humane concern, but for the sake of having an audience.

Looped’s action unfolds at a Los Angeles recording studio in 1965. Ms. Bankhead is due to “loop” several lines of dialogue from her latest movie, i.e., re-record audio from filming that came back unintelligible. The session’s producer is pacing across the stage, agitated. Ms. Bankhead is running late. But before he can call to check with her hotel, she arrives: Valerie Harper, in the flesh, looking every bit like Tallulah in Lifeboat: fur coat, sunglasses, the whole twelve yards. She throws open the studio door and sputters a fabulous, unprompted rejoinder: “Fuck Los Angeles.”

I remember the audience bursting into applause, battling the sound of its own laughter. Ms. Harper proceeded downstage, discarding her coat, removing her glasses. “All these goddam streets have Spanish names and don’t seem to go anywhere. It’s impossible. In New York, everything is numbered. Any idiot can find his way. If you get lost in New York, you don’t deserve to be found.”

Thinking of it now, what I find most striking about this entrance is not so much Harper’s embodiment of Bankhead as its likeness to Harper’s entrance in the role for which she is best remembered: Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). In the pilot episode, Mary Richards (played by Moore, whose character is fleeing a failed long-term relationship) is shown into her new Minneapolis apartment by an old friend, Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), who is also the building’s landlord. Before Mary can settle in, though, Phyllis’ daughter appears and reminds her mother that the woman who lives upstairs is determined to move into this larger space. Sure enough, when Mary pulls back the curtains to her living room, she finds Rhoda outside, washing the windows.

Helping this stranger in from the Minnesota cold, Mary introduces herself. “Nice to meet you,” Rhoda offers. “Now get out of my apartment.”

We are only two minutes into the show, and already Rhoda has become a formidable presence in Mary Richards’ new life. Abrasive and forthright, Rhoda remains in fight mode for the rest of the episode, insisting that the place belongs to her.

“You know,” Mary admits after a particularly pointed exchange, “in spite of everything, you’re a pretty hard person to dislike.”

Rhoda concedes to this insight with a mild shrug. “I know what you mean. You are, too. We’ll both have to work on it.”

For the next four years, they did work on it, but not in the way Rhoda meant. More than forty years after its initial run, it’s clear that Mary and Rhoda constituted one of the most significant (and delightful) friendships in television history. Produced at the height of the Women’s Liberation movement, The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a cultural landmark in its depiction of an independent woman who worked by day and cooked dinner with her friends at night. Even though Mary dated, she was never actively looking to get married and “settle down.” She didn’t have to — she had Rhoda to come home to.

By contrast, Rhoda (who remained in the apartment upstairs for four of the show’s seven seasons, before leaving for New York and her own spinoff, Rhoda [‘74-78]), was always on the prowl for a man, full of musings on the follies of her love life. Hilarious at the surface, her self-deprecating humor was also quietly maddening: how could any red-blooded heterosexual male not jump at the opportunity to link up with Valerie Harper? Years later, as Tallulah Bankhead, Harper would utter the following quip: “You know darling, there are two kinds of men I encounter in life — those who want to screw me, and those who want to be me.” Although I couldn't articulate it at the time I saw Looped (I was fourteen, and had starting watching Mary Tyler Moore a couple years earlier), I’d already become a passionate exponent of the latter variety.

Spirited, stylish and drop-dead gorgeous, Valerie Harper was an embodiment of human vitality. The comic virtuosity that clinched her performance as Tallulah Bankhead was more than evident decades before: as Rhoda, she had a way of stealing a scene, but just a bit at a time. Mary was the protagonist, Rhoda the support; Harper managed to defer to her co-star without once receding into the scenery or diminishing her own radiance. The show’s design team equally contributed to Rhoda’s brilliance — her clothes were a high-’70s explosion of color (baubled necklaces, flowy pants, silk scarves), and the little apartment she’d been itching to ditch was all camp: shag carpeting, wicker furniture, a wall decoration of the abbreviation “etc.” She bustled with creative energy, yet leveled it with dry punchlines and a lean New Yorker’s wit. She was cosmopolitain yet breathtakingly accessible. The girl next door to the girl-next-door.

As soon as Harper left the L.A.-reproduced Minneapolis of Mary Tyler Moore to lead her own series, the mother show began its decline into mediocrity. So infectious and vital was Rhoda’s presence to the show’s dynamic that the latter never quite recovered. It’s a bit heartbreaking to watch episodes from the fifth season: Mary’s wistful chats with her remaining friends (“What would Rhoda do in this situation?”) sound like confessions from the writers’ room — from a creative team baffled at what to do without so grounding a figure. Mary Richards had lost her Sancho Panza, and the mill of her existence churned slowly onward before finally grinding to a halt.

Thirty-three years later, back in New York, I waited for Valerie Harper at the Lyceum stage door with my dad. I’d prepared my usual adolescent ploy for soliciting celebrity attention: a pen-and-drink drawing of Harper as Bankhead. She came out, started signing autographs, then turned to me. It was the middle of February, and I stood there shivering in my thin wool jacket and soggy sneakers.

She took one look at me and said, “You need a better coat.”

I think that this fall, I’ll take Ms. Harper’s advice: I’ll go out and buy myself something big and green with a high collar — the type of coat she was wearing when Mary Tyler Moore helped her through the window and into one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Heck, I may pick out a bright orange scarf while I’m at it — not to mention some ferns and a string of cerulean beads.

We could all do with a little et cetera in our lives. Thank you, Valerie Harper, for showing us that.