Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics

by Ronald Brownstein

they thought it would be exciting to have Moore play a character who was divorced. (“I think every writer in Hollywood had a script in his trunk about divorce, because probably most of the comedy writers in Hollywood were divorced,” Burns said later.)44 More modestly, they wanted her character to be tethered to the world outside by as many specifics as possible: a career, a social life, an identifiable age. Each of these ideas unnerved CBS. Perry Lafferty, CBS’s West Coast production chief, told them, “Fellas, people are going to think she divorced Dick Van Dyke.”45 Lafferty even resisted specifying the character’s age as early thirties. Brooks and Burns won the point about her age, but CBS absolutely drew the line at divorce.46 At a hellish meeting in New York City with Michael Dann and other top CBS programming personnel, Mark Golden, the same executive who had loved the British show that inspired All in the Family, told Burns and Brooks that there were only four things that American viewers would not accept: New Yorkers, Jews, men with mustaches, and divorced women.47 Grant Tinker rejected a demand from CBS to fire the writing duo (not even telling them about it until years later), but Brooks and Burns were forced to regroup.48 Over the next few days, they rearranged the pieces: rather than a divorce, Mary would be rebounding from a broken relationship with a boyfriend who welched on marrying her after she put him through medical school and lived with him along the way....