A New Life for Moore

By T.E. Kalem

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY? by Brian Clark

Mary Tyler Moore has come to Broadway, and it's a love match. Her kind of natural, straightforward appeal defies resistance. She has shown considerable temerity in taking over the role of a quadriplegic, first played by Tom Conti with virtuosic skill. The audacity of Moore's undertaking is redeemed by the high caliber of her performance.

Whose Life Is It Anyway? concerns the right to die. Claire Harrison (Moore), a sculptor, has suffered a spinal injury in an auto crash that has left her paralyzed from the neck down. Her keen, sprightly mind is scalded by her vision of the future. Never to work. Never to love again. To be robbed of her own will by the hospital chief (Josef Sommer), who feels free to sedate her with a tranquilizing needle during a fit of depression.

Angry and proud, Claire resolves to fight back. Employing a ruse, she secures a lawyer (Susan Kellermann), who brings in a sympathetic psychiatrist (Joseph McCaren). A judge (James Higgins) finally presides over a crucial trial in Claire's room. He declares her psychologically fit to make the mortal decision to leave the hospital. Near the end of the play, Claire utters a kind of farewell monologue to life. As delivered by Moore, it provokes the sting of involuntary tears.

Since Playwright Clark has only minimally rewritten the role, the switch from male to female does result in certain dissonances. It is unlikely that a woman would tell a string of off-color jokes or make raunchy remarks to female nurses.

Lines that left Conti's mouth as self-mocking witticisms seem more like sarcastic putdowns coming from Moore's. It is scarcely due to her inflections but to the fact that rightly or wrongly, one expects a woman to respond differently to personal calamity than a man does.

As for Mary Tyler Moore, she has tackled the play with aplomb. Her eyes are pools of pain across which imps of mischief sail. Her charm could heat igloos. Without taking a single step, she has made the transition from TV to the stage in perfect stride. --T.E.Kalem

Backstage just after an exhausting performance, the star brims with energy. She hugs well-wishers and exults at the surprise appearance of a California friend. Wiping her damp ginger hair away from her forehead, she smiles easily, deep lines creasing the corners of her famous large brown eyes. Sipping a Tab, she jokes about an opening-night telegram sent by Actor Edward Asner (Lou Grant): NICE TO KNOW ALL THOSE DANCING LESSONS HAVE PAID OFF AT LAST. When one visitor notes how plain her dressing room is, Mary Tyler Moore laughs. "I've had beautiful dressing rooms in terrible shows," she says. "I'm glad to settle for it the other way around."

What Moore has settled for--playing the bedridden Claire Harrison--is unlike anything she has ever done and especially unlike the two sitcom characters that made her famous: the perky housewife Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66) and the spunky TV news producer Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Says Moore: "I felt an affinity for Claire. She has a wonderful sense of humor, but she also knows very definitely what she is about."

Playing the part of a woman who literally makes the choice of her life comes at a time when Moore, 42, has made a big decision: in December she and Husband Grant Tinker separated after a marriage of 17 years. The union was considered one of Hollywood's closest and most private. Tinker guided his wife's career. Today Moore admits to mainly "nodding and smiling prettily" whenever she and her husband socialized with others, which was not often. "I've spent my whole life being protected," says Moore, who left her Los Angeles home at 17 to marry her first husband. She was divorced less than six months before marrying Tinker. "It is amazing that it has taken me so long to say, 'Hey, wait a minute. I'm a person on my own.' "

The marriage grew shaky after the end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore proceeded to bomb in two CBS variety shows ("Shows go in cycles, and this was not the time for variety acts") and to score in a CBS drama special, First, You Cry. Without a regular series to consume her days, she grew increasingly edgy and restless. She doubled up on her tennis games and dancing classes and began seeing her psychiatrist more frequently. "I hated it when the press called me an ice princess, but I did share only my up experiences with friends. When you allow only those feelings to come through, it makes for cold relationships. That's been changing in the past six months."

Before coming to Broadway, Moore undertook her first serious film role in Robert Redford's first directorial effort, the forthcoming Ordinary People. Now she plans to do Whose Life for at least nine weeks. She also hopes to campaign for the ERA. "I've always been a supporter, but seldom have I lent my body and voice," says Moore. "Some day I will call Gloria [Steinem] and say, 'Here I am.' " She is under contract to CBS for an eventual new series, but has not thought about a project: "I wish to God there were some options to the slapstick, superficial sitcoms on now," she complains. "I am not frivolous, and I don't intend to spend years playing that kind of person."

Frivolous Mary Tyler Moore never has been, but she is also no longer the kind of person she once was. "I really have broken out of a shell," she says. "I am doing the things I want to do rather than should do. It's essential that I make my own decisions." With a self-deprecating laugh, she adds, "I really am a late bloomer when you stop to think about it." Whose life is it now? Clearly, it is very much Mary Tyler Moore's. -

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