From Hotpoint to Hot in Cleveland: A Mary Tyler Moore Slide Show

In the grand scheme of things, there is really no coincidence that Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Gautier, who happened to perform together in a single episode of her popular TV series in 1973, likewise happened to pass away less than two weeks apart in January of this year. However, the Moviehouse can't help but acknowledge the coincidence that both actors were pop television icons of the '60s and '70s: Dick for the cult following he enlisted as a deadpan robotic secret agent named Hymie in "Get Smart," as a mischievous Robin Hood in Mel Brooks' "When Things Were Rotten," and as a toothy fixture in a bazillion game shows, and Mary for not once but twice singlehandedly reinventing the image of women in prime-time sitcoms.

Any additions here to Mary Tyler Moore's achievements, accolades, and afflictions would be superfluous to what every fan already knows and what has already been printed, aired, and replayed. Our desire in the Moviehouse is to page through a virtual scrapbook, if you will, to highlight moments, memories and minutiae omitted in the main stream.

Let's face it, Moore's career was built from her legs up. Determined to be a dancer from adolescence, she debuted on television as a spritely, leotard-clad pixie called Happy Hotpoint in appliance commercials that aired in the mid-1950s on the sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." Thirty-nine ads in five days earned her $6000.

She appeared as a leggy but anonymous model on the covers of numerous vinyl recordings.

Our favorite part of this record cover is the blurb:
"featuring GREAT HOLLYWOOD VOCALISTS."

Mary Tyler Moore auditioned unsuccessfully for the role of Danny Thomas' daughter on the comedian's sitcom "Make Room for Daddy." Years later Thomas joked that Moore missed landing the part "by a nose. No daughter of mine could ever have a nose that small."

When Moore did pick up a recurring role on a TV series, it was, again, her legs that enabled her to get her foot - make that feet - in the door, as a telephone receptionist in "Richard Diamond, Private Detective." Filmmaker Blake Edwards created the show as a radio serial in 1949, featuring versatile Hollywood song-and-dance man/producer/director/studio head Dick Powell.

David Janssen, television's future "Fugitive," was cast in the title role (pictured above) when Powell's production company, Four Star Television, premiered "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" as a TV series in 1957. Moore, who joined the program in its third season, would be heard but only seen as hands operating the phone switchboard and, more memorably, as legs, often with a shoe dangling from the foot of a crossed gam, inspiring the behind-the-scenes publicity photo shoot seen below.

Many online data bases and trivia sources cite "X-15" as Mary Tyler Moore's feature film debut. The 1961 film, a fictionalized docudrama about test pilots for the historic rocket program pioneered by NASA and the U.S. Air Force (a topic touched on in the early moments of Clint Eastwood's 2000 picture "Space Cowboys"), which starred a young Charles Bronson and was narrated by actor and retired Air Force Brigadier General James Stewart, was the first motion picture for filmmaker Richard Donner, later noted for directing Hollywood blockbusters like the Christopher Reeve "Superman" movie and the "Lethal Weapon" franchise, as well as producing "X-Men" films.

Mary Tyler Moore (center) and the other brave
Air Force wives keep their eyes on the sky in "X-15."
Playing Charles Bronson's son is TV's future Chip
Douglas on "My Three Sons," Stanley Livingstone.

However, Moore - thanks again to her shapely legs - actually made her big screen premiere three years earlier, in an uncredited role as a dance hall girl in 1958's "Once Upon a Horse," a western spoof produced to capitalize on the popularity of the nightclub comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin (pictured below).

Actually, dancing roles in various TV series came frequently to the lithesome ingenue in the late 1950s and early '60s, including a part as yet another saloon entertainer in an episode of "Wanted Dead or Alive," starring Steve McQueen, in 1960 (pictured below).

Mary Tyler Moore was cast as comedy writer Rob Petrie's wife, Laura, in "The Dick Van Dyke Show" by creator-co-producer-head writer Carl Reiner on the recommendation of Danny Thomas, whose company produced the series (as well as "The Andy Griffith Show"). Thomas had remembered her as "the girl with three names" who had tried out for a role in his own show. Laura's background in the program's premise had her as, appropriately, a 17-year-old dancer with the USO who met Rob when he was serving in the U.S. Army (pictured below).

After Moore's passing, Carl Reiner related to Conan O'Brien his difficulty in casting Moore, who almost skipped the audition. "I saw 26 girls!" he recalled, but he was struck by her "great gams" and her reading. He immediately led her to executive producer Sheldon Leonard and announced, "I found her!"

"She was grace personified," Reiner told Variety. "She could never take a wrong step. The fact that she started out as a dancer was indicative of everything she did after that. Her grace was unmistakable. I saw it the first time she walked into my office."

Until Mary Tyler Moore came along, typical baby-boomer TV moms
were personified by the likes of Barbara Billingsley in "Leave It to
Beaver," Donna Reed in "The Donna Reed Show," Jane Wyatt in
"Father Knows Best," and the grandmother of sitcom housewives,
Lucille Ball, in "I Love Lucy."

Portraying a stay-at-home mother, Moore wasn't content with having her character continue the fashion trend of so many contemporary sitcom housewives in dressy frou-frou skirts and blingy accessories (as pictured above). Instead, Moore put Laura in comfortable, close-fitting capri pants, an almost subversive notion that raised eyebrows of studio suits and sponsors alike. She told TV Guide in 2004, "I had Laura wear pants because, I said, 'Women don't wear full-skirted dresses to vacuum in.'"

Well, OK, so she's not vacuuming,
but she is in her living room.

Sponsors were concerned that the pants were too conforming; Moore remembered that they used the phrase "cupping under." Moore said, "And I can only assume that that meant my seat - that there was a little too much definition."

Moore recounted, "CBS said, 'You know, we're afraid that housewives are going to be a little annoyed because she looks so good in pants.' So they made Carl promise not to let me wear pants in more than one scene. We went along with that for about three episodes, and then finally, I was just wearing the pants." Capris became her trademark, and the success of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" made the pants a popular style choice.

Not only can Mary Tyler Moore make capris look alluring, but
who else could make an avalanche of nuts seem sexy?...From the
unforgettable sci-fi nightmare episode "It May Look Like a Walnut."

One individual who had a particular issue with Mary's capri pants was show creator Carl Reiner's adolescent son, Rob Reiner. On a March 1993 episode of "Late Night with David Letterman," Moore related how the teenaged Reiner "walks by me and gives me a little swat on the butt...I, being the righteous young actress that I was, went straight to Carl Reiner and told him what his son had done." In a 2016 interview with Howard Stern, Rob recalled, "I was 14 years old, and she was like 25, I guess...The hormones were going, and I just went and grabbed."

Four years after the "incident," 18-year-old Rob Reiner,
standing alongside pop Carl, looks like he still has an eye
out for capri pants to swat in this 1965 photograph.

While Mary asserted that Carl "took Rob aside and really laid into him pretty good," Rob remembered the outcome differently: "My father called me into his office, and he said, 'Did you grab Mary Tyler Moore by the ass?' And I said, 'Uh, yeah.' And he said with a big smile on his face, 'Don't do that anymore.'"

Although it was Mary Tyler Moore and her then-husband, TV executive Grant Tinker, who pitched the idea to CBS for what would become "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in 1970, Moore was initially hesitant about committing to a new series, afraid that a new role would suffer in comparison with the beloved Laura Petrie from "The Dick Van Dyke Show." "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," of course, proved to be a breakout hit, and the series' innovative premise, depicting the life of an independent, single working woman, both on the job in the newsroom of a Minneapolis TV station and at home, became a staple of television sitcoms and dramas to follow - often imitated, never duplicated.

(Left) The original 1970 cast of "The Mary Tyler Show" included
(clockwise from bottom, center) Moore, Gavin McLeod, Valerie
Harper, Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, and Ted Knight. (Right) The
final 1977 cast featured (from bottom, right) Moore, Georgia Engel,
Betty White, Ted Knight, Gavin McLeod, and Ed Asner.

During its seven season-run, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" presented several hilarious vignettes that immediately became regarded as television classics, most notably (without question) the episode titled "Chuckles Bites the Dust," which concerned the accidental death of the host of the station's kiddie show who was hired as grand marshal for a circus parade. As bluntly stated by gruff news executive producer Lou Grant (Ed Asner), "It was a freak accident. He went to the parade dressed as Peter Peanut and a rogue elephant tried to shell him." Mary grows increasingly appalled at the string of grim jokes made by her coworkers (Lou: "Lucky more people weren't hurt, lucky that elephant didn't go after more people." / Murray: "That's right; after all, you know how hard it is to stop after just one peanut") until, after a slow, masterfully timed buildup, she disrupts the funeral service with suppressed laughter, followed by uncontrolled bawling.

...About to lose it just before the minister eulogizes, "And what did
Chuckles ask in return? Not much. In his own words: 'A little song,
a little dance, a little seltzer down the pants.'"

In 1997, "Chuckles Bites the Dust" was voted #1 on TV Guide's "100 Greatest Episodes of All Time."

A 1975 episode that rivaled the impact Laura Petrie's capri pants had on the burgeoning hormones of adolescent males, not unlike 14-year-old Rob Reiner, was titled "You Try to Be a Nice Guy," guest-starring the late actress Barbara Colby, repeating her role as Sherry, a hooker Mary had met after being jailed for refusing to reveal a news story source. Now an aspiring fashion designer, Sherry presents Mary with one of her designs - a daring cutaway dress aisles away from what Mary's modest character would normally shop for - which she tries on at the most inopportune of times...

...when Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), the station's vain but dense news anchor, and his fiancée, Georgette (Georgia Engel), turn up to show off Ted's recent honorary doctorate.

Mary: "Ted, please don't look at me that way."
Ted: "It's all right, I'm a doctor!"

In a husky voice, Ted gasps, "I know this may sound insane, Mary, but on those occasions when I dream of you, you're dressed exactly like that!" When Georgette asks, "Do you want me to get a dress like that?" Ted wheezes, "I want every woman in the free world to get a dress like that!" The episode's payoff is when Lou Grant arrives unexpectedly at Mary's apartment and reacts slack-jawed to her sultry greeting, "Hi, big fella!"

Barbara Colby (pictured below, with Mary Tyler Moore), a sad-eyed comedic actress gifted with a deadpan, sarcastic delivery, subsequently found herself cast as Cloris Leachman's boss in the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" spin-off series "Phyllis."

On July 24, 1975, after completing three episodes of "Phyllis," Barbara Colby and an acting friend, James Kiernan, were walking to their parked car after teaching an acting class in Venice, California, when they were gunned down by two men. Colby apparently died instantly, while Kiernan only lived long enough to describe the shooters. There was no attempt to rob either victim, and over four decades later, the crime remains a cold case.

...Of course, a few years before the steamy green dress, there was the "go-go dancer" nightie that Rhoda (Valerie Harper) had slipped into Mary's overnight bag for a tonsillectomy...

...But that's another story...

For six seasons, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" remained in the top 20 ratings. When it dipped to #39 in season seven, the producers boldly opted to end the series, allegedly before the show wore out its welcome and damaged its own legacy. The finale, positing the impossible but brilliantly conceived outcome that everybody at the TV station gets canned except for the monumentally inept Ted Baxter, evoked genuine tears from cast and viewers alike, prompted by Ed Asner's emotional on-camera admission, "I treasure you people!"

 

A year and a half after "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" wrapped, Moore returned to series television with the ill-fated, much-maligned comedy-variety show titled simply "Mary." Her repertory company of players included actor James Hampton (best known as the atonal bugler on "F Troop" and as "Caretaker" in Burt Reynolds' "The Longest Yard"), Tony Award-winning actress Swoosie Kurtz, comedic actor Dick Shawn, David Letterman, and an up-and-coming actor named Michael Keaton.

By 1978, viewers interest in variety shows had declined considerably; earlier that year, after 11 seasons, "The Carol Burnett Show" wisely called it quits. Following just three episodes, "Mary" was canceled. But a lasting friendship between Moore and David Letterman had been forged, and she would become a frequent guest of his on both NBC and CBS.

Letterman always counted on Mary Tyler Moore to tell a joke, which would, more often not, turn out to be of a salty nature, revealing a bawdy side of her rarely seen by audiences. One evening, she related the story of an aspiring and talented song-and-dance who wowed an agent with his brilliant performance. When asked his name, the show biz hopeful said, "Penis Von Lesbian." Well, the agent admitted, something would have to be done with a name like that. "I got it," he exclaimed, "Dick Van Dyke!"

Five months after the unceremonious death of her stab at a variety program, Moore came back with "The Mary Tyler Moore Hour," a sitcom about a variety program. Michael Keaton returned from the previous series, portraying a goofy studio page (pictured below). This attempt lasted 11 episodes before the network axed it, inspiring Mary to move on from television for a time.

On Broadway, Mary Tyler Moore starred in a revival of "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" (in a gender reversal, playing the part originally written for a man) and won a 1980 Special Tony Award. She followed that with a movie role that cast her completely against type, as the ice queen of motherhood in 1980's "Ordinary People," which marked the directing debut of actor Robert Redford.

"America's Sweetheart Plays Rough in 'Ordinary
People'" proclaims Rolling Stone magazine,
featuring a cover photo by Annie Leibovitz.

Moore's compass-reversal performance as a harridan garnered an Oscar nomination as Best Actress. "Ordinary People" won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as did Redford for his directing, Timothy Hutton for his portrayal of the tortured son, and Alvin Sargent for his adapted screenplay.

"Ordinary People" was not Moore's first crack at motion picture stardom. After "The Dick Van Dyke Show" left the air in 1966, studio executive Lew Wasserman brought her to Universal. According to Moore's autobiography, After All, Wasserman was impressed with her success as a comedic actress on television and hoped to transform her into "the next Doris Day" in light comedies. "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (1967), conceived as a romantic comedy, was intended as such for her portrayal of a naive former orphan who gets caught up in madcap misadventures in New York City of the 1920s. However, when Julie Andrews came on board in the title role, the film suddenly became a musical that focused on her character. The picture was directed by George Roy Hill, better known as the Oscar-winning director of "The Sting" and for making "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Alongside costar Carol Channing, the spotlight-stealing Julie
Andrews gives upstart Mary Tyler Moore the stink eye.

Although Moore suffered the indignity of having her solo song cut from the finished production, she did enjoy a pleasurable, jaunty dance over dialogue with Andrews in an innovative, choreographed elevator duet (pictured below).

Moore would pleasantly recall that she always thought
of the tap dancing scene whenever she saw an elevator.

Next up for Mary Tyler Moore's attempt to be the screen's next Doris Day for Universal Pictures was a dismissible, and dismissed, romantic comedy titled "Don't Just Stand There" (1968) costarring Robert Wagner, with Harvey Korman and Barbara Rhoades.

Still trying to fill Day's pumps, Moore paired with George Peppard in 1968's "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" an amusing but obscure bit of whimsy about an errant exotic toucan that infects New York City with a virus that spreads happiness and good will. The rampant euphoria affects the sales of alcohol, cigarettes, and tranquilizers, all of which is naturally regarded as a threat to the civic economy by authorities ranging from the mayor to the federal government (personified by Dom DeLuise as - what else? - a bumbling presidential envoy). The movie is so little-seen that it has never been released on video or DVD.

Mary Tyler Moore plays the bohemian girlfriend
of beatnik dropout George Peppard in
"What's So Bad About Feeling Good?"

Moore's fourth and final movie under her brief contract with Universal Pictures was 1969's "Change of Habit," an almost-musical drama that was, as well, Elvis Presley's final (of 31) "dramatic" film roles. Ed Asner, Mary's future TV boss, played a police lieutenant.

Not unlike "Thoroughly Modern Millie," "Change of Habit" was originally planned as a starring vehicle for Moore, playing a novice nun on the mean streets of a ghetto neighborhood in New York City (filmed in Los Angeles and the Universal Studios backlot), until Elvis was signed. Mary Tyler Moore would not make another feature film until "Ordinary People" (pictured below).

Following "Ordinary People," Moore's big-screen appearances remained few and far between. "Six Weeks" was a tearjerker that cast her as the mother of a 12-year-old aspiring figure skater dying from leukemia (played by real-life skater-principal ballerina Katherine Healy). Mary's character, a cosmetics tycoon (a role first turned down by Audrey Hepburn, then Faye Dunaway), develops a short-lived romantic relationship with a California politician (played by London-born Dudley Moore). Roger Ebert deemed "Six Weeks"(pictured below) one of the worst films of 1982, while Mary garnered a Razzie Award nomination as Worst Actress (Pia Zadora won).

What's wrong with this picture?

"Just Between Friends" (1986) was another handkerchief-wringer, costarring Christine Lahti, Ted Danson, and Sam Waterston, written, produced, and directed by Allan Burns, who co-created "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." "By the end of the movie," Roger Ebert noted, "we don't believe in the emotional honesty of anything that happens because it all happens on cue. In fact, it happens on musical cue. The movie's soundtrack has the irritating habit of tipping us off to emotional changes about to take place."

Mary Tyler Moore seemingly had better luck, critically and popularly, in movies made for television. In 1978's "First, You Cry," her portrayal of real-life NBC news correspondent Betty Rollin's battle with breast cancer garnered an Emmy nomination as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or a Special. "Heartsounds" (1984) cast her as the courageous wife of James Garner's character, a urologist confronted with his own failing health and a flawed medical institution. "Finnegan, Begin Again" (1985) was a romantic comedy about a May-December romance between Moore and Robert Preston.

Mary Tyler Moore poses with costar Anthony Perkins
on the set of "First, You Cry."

Eight years after playing the cold-hearted Beth Jarrett in "Ordinary People," Mary Tyler Moore essayed another shrewish wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose mental state slowly unravels once Abraham Lincoln (Sam Waterston) arrives in Washington in 1861, in the TV miniseries "Lincoln," based on the best-selling historical novel by Gore Vidal.

To prepare for her Emmy-nominated role, Moore read extensively but avoided watching earlier film and television portrayals (such as Ruth Gordon's breakthrough movie role as a particularly petulant Mary Todd in 1940's "Abe Lincoln in Illinois"). "Mary was an enigma," Moore said, "an educated woman in an age when women weren't supposed to be educated, obsessed with spending in a European tradition that royalty must impress their subjects. She also slipped into insanity. Yet I am convinced that Mary was important to Lincoln - an integral part of his life and a great influence on him." She added, "When I first read the script, all I asked was to see more of my character."

Mary Tyler Moore added another wrinkle to her résumé of unsavory characters when she was cast against type as a nasty slattern who fronts a baby-for-sale ring (pictured above), based on the true story about the head of a black-market adoption agency in 1940s Tennessee, in the 1993 TV movie "Stolen Babies." Four years later, in "Like Mother Like Son," Moore pulled out the stops as true-life homicidal socialite Sante Chambers Kimes, who, along with her son, was convicted of the cold-blooded murder of their wealthy landlady (played by Moore's sometime Emmy rival Jean Stapleton, of "All in the Family").

The real-life Sante Kimes and her son, Kenneth Kimes Jr., are
pictured alongside their fictional counterparts, Mary Tyler Moore
and Gabriel Olds in "Like Mother Like Son."

"Payback" (1997) reunited Moore with Ed Asner (pictured below) in a turgid crime melodrama about a corrupt cop.

Mary Tyler Moore and Valerie Harper reprised their series role in the 2000 TV movie "Mary and Rhoda." Neither James L. Brooks nor Alan Burns were credited for creating the characters, and neither they nor any writers or producers from the original show were involved in the project that was intended as a pilot for a revival series, although longtime fans were disappointed, as were critics, among them David Bianculli of New York Daily News, who conceded, "With Laura Petrie from 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' and Mary Richards in her own series, (Moore) already has delivered two of the most charming, funny, memorable and significant characters in the history of American television. That's an act that even she can be forgiven for finding difficult to follow - much less reprise."

In 2003, Moore and Dick Van Dyke were reunited in "The Gin Game" (pictured below), based on D.L. Coburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning two-person play about a pair of elderly residents of a nursing home who grow acquainted over a series of games of gin rummy that develops into a contentious competition of one-upmanship.

The 2004 CBS television film "The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited," written and executive produced by original program creator Carl Reiner, was presented as an episode of the series, 40 years later, when Allan Brady (Reiner) hires Rob (Van Dyke) to write his eulogy. Besides Van Dyke, Moore, and Reiner, the movie reunited surviving cast members Rose Marie (Sally Rogers), Larry Matthews (Ritchie Petrie), Ann Morgan Guilbert (Millie Helper), and Jerry Van Dyke (Stacey Petrie). Inexplicably, Ray Romano, then the network's top comedian, "hosted" the production.

(Clockwise, from lower right) Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van
Dyke, Rose Marie, Larry Matthews, Ann Morgan Guilbert,
Jerry Van Dyke, Carl Reiner...Where are the capri pants?

Speaking of TV series, Mary Tyler Moore apparently couldn't get them out of her system. Following a six-year absence from series television, she starred in the 1985 sitcom "Mary," portraying a former fashion writer hired by a second-rate tabloid. The supporting cast featured John Astin (pictured below), James Farentino, Katey Sagal, and James Tolkan (best known as Principal Strickland in "Back to the Future"). Deemed a lackluster clone of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," the poorly rated series was canceled after 13 episodes.

"Annie McGuire" (1988), a sitcom about career-driven newlyweds with children from previous marriages, was canceled after 10 episodes. In the 1995 dramatic series "New York News," Moore was reduced to a supporting role, as the hard-nosed editor-in-chief of a struggling tabloid, whose team of reporters included Gregory Harrison and Madeline Kahn. George C. Scott had a cameo role in three episodes as "Ollie the Hot Dog Vendor." Moore was unhappy with her unsympathetic, unglamorous character and was negotiating in being written out of the program when the series was mercifully canceled after 13 episodes.

Quick, before the show gets axed! The cast of "New York News" poses
for their portraits: (clockwise, to Moore's right) Gregory Harrison,
Melina Kanakaredes, Kelli Williams, Madeline Kahn, Joe Morton...
Apparently, George C. Scott is out on the sidewalk, selling hot dogs.

It was fitting that Mary Tyler Moore ended her career as a guest star on series television. On two especially nostalgic episodes of "Hot Cleveland," in 2011 and 2013, she portrayed an old acquaintance of series regulars (and former "Mary Tyler Moore Show" cast mates) Betty White and Georgia Engel, who played on the same bowling team dubbed GLOB (Gorgeous Ladies of Bowling) 30-some years earlier. The 2013 episode, not at all subtly titled "Love Is All Around," brought in sister "Mary Tyler Show Moore" performers Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman as former teammates. The sentimental reunion included, of course, several in-jokes regarding their earlier program.

Elka Ostrovsky (Betty White): "Looks like she made it after all."
Mary Tyler Moore poses with Valerie Bertinelli, Valerie Harper,
Cloris Leachman, Wendie Malick, Betty White, Georgia Engel,
and Jane Leeves.

Postscript

Mary Tyler Moore was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard in September of 1992.

In 1996, on a book tour promoting her memoir, After All, as well as commemorating, more or less, the 20th anniversary of the end of the Minnesota-based "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," Moore made personal appearances in Minneapolis, including tossing out the opening pitch at a Twins game (pictured below).

Prior to her debut on the pitching mound,
Mary Tyler Moore was coached by David
Letterman on how not to throw like a girl.

Pictured above, Moore cheerfully reenacted the opening title shot from her beloved series inside the Metrodrome. Everybody remembers the iconic freeze-frame when she tossed her blue tam o' shanter in the middle of the Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis (pictured below).

Just as memorable was the frumpy, get-off-my-lawn expression on the face of the passerby wearing a blue kerchief in the background, an image frozen in time that the poor woman had to endure week after week, and then in continuously aired reruns. It was during her 1996 visit to Minnesota that Moore was finally "reunited" with the random bystander at Bloomington's Mall of America. Mary introduced the now 88-year-old woman, Hazel Frederick (pictured below), a lifelong Minnesota resident, as her "costar."

Mary Frederick, who passed away in 1999, explained
her puzzled expression in the freeze-frame came from
a concern that Mary Tyler Moore was standing in the
middle of the street amidst passing buses.

On May 8, 2002, Moore was in Minneapolis again and returned to Nicollet Mall to unveil an eight-foot bronze statue of her character tossing her hat in the air, which had been commissioned by the network TV Land. The statue was located near the intersection of the original filming. Onlookers had been distributed 3000 tams to toss into the air at the dedication.

Carl Reiner last saw Mary Tyler Moore at a recent show business function of one sort or another. Allegedly, her eyesight was nearly gone due to a lifelong battle with diabetes. "She didn't recognize me until she heard my voice," Reiner recalled for Variety, "and then we hugged and talked awhile...she still looked beautiful."

For People magazine, cardiologist Robert Levine, Mary's husband of 33 years, wistfully remembered,  "And she had that smile. Oh, to see her smile that smile, just once more."