Presenting

WOMEN IN HISTORY Above: Moore with Grant Tinker at the 25th Annual Emmy Awards. In 1970 Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, formed the television production company MTM Enterprises, the creator and producer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," among other hits. Right: Mary Tyler Moore and her son Richard Meeker Jr. at a benefit on Feb. 17, 1968. Dyke Show," my very first encounter with Mary Tyler Moore as an actress. She played the stylish, slightly high-strung wife of T V writer Rob Petrie and was the very picture of elegance. At the initial pitch of "e Mary Tyler Moore Show," executives worried that if they established the storyline that Mary R ichards was a recent divorcée heading to Minneapolis to start a new life, viewers would associate her with Laura Petrie and assume that she had le Rob. Horrors! Divorce was still a bit of a taboo subject in the early '70s, so this idea was collectively rejected. Instead, Mary was introduced as a woman making a new start aer a broken two-year engagement, a scenario they felt would sit beer with the audience. I can't speak for others, but I nevertheless have a difficult time separating Moore from the Laura I knew her as…so it's not surprising that I feel just a twinge of regret for the sweet, suburban life being le in the dust as Mary drives to the big city during the opening credits. e ironic thing about Moore's role on "e Dick Van Dyke Show" is that she plays the epitome of the picture-perfect w ife and mother: planning important business dinners for her husband, pack ing lunches for her son and essentially running the household. In truth, her personal life was a bit of a mess. She had a strained relationship w ith her son R ichard, who was born in 1956 when Moore was a child herself, only 19 years of age. She had married R ichard Carleton Meeker the year before and made a variet y of T V appearances, but wasn't yet well k now n in the industr y. "e Dick Van Dyke Show" is what catapulted her to fame when it began in 1961. By then she had divorced Meeker and had goen married a second time—to Grant Tinker, a CBS executive, in 1962 . e show's shooting schedule kept her busy on set, so she was not much involved in her son's upbringing. In 1969 aer suffering a miscarriage, she was diagnosed w ith Ty pe I diabetes. Later, Moore revealed that it was during the show's peak popularit y that she developed a drink ing problem w ith which she struggled for the rest of her life. In her 1995 memoir, Aer All, she w rote, "ere is no question about it. By the time R ichie was five, I had already let him dow n. When he needed me the most, I was busier and even more self-concerned than I had been when he was an impressionable infant." is v ision of herself as hav ing neglected her son contrasts sharply w ith the doting mother she played to actor Larr y Mathews' on T V (whose character was also named R itchie). Moore's relationship w ith her only child continued to be a roller coaster of emotion over the years. He moved to the west coast for a while to live w ith his father, only returning home to Moore like the prodigal teenage son aer a particularly frightening encounter w ith drug dealers w ith whom he had goen involved. e mother-and- son relationship was just beginning to strengthen and show signs of repair when Moore received a 5am phone call from her ex-husband in 1990. R ichie was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. e small shotgun he had used, part of his extensive gun collection, was later determined to have an unstable " hair trigger" and was yanked from the market. R ichie's death, with the corroboration of an eyewitness to the shooting , was deemed an accident. Moore was inconsolable. A er feeling that her son had been a victim early on to her success and alcoholism, he was now taken from her aer they had managed to mend their relationship and were working toward building a new start. Moore later spread her son's ashes in the Moore received a total of seven Emmy Awards over the course of her career. 78 | GRAVITAS MAGAZINE GravitasMag.com

• Cover