Mary Tyler Moore, who died Wednesday at the age of 80, didn't really make that much television when you get right down to it. She starred in just two series that lasted a total of 12 years.
But, man, did her characters and those series resonate.
I cannot think of a 20th century TV performer who had a bigger aspirational impact on her generation than Mary Tyler Moore. Her characters of Laurie Petrie on "Dick Van Dyke Show" (1961-'66) and Mary Richards on the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" (1970-'77) will be rattling around in the shared memory of baby boomers until every member of that generation is gone. I guarantee it.
"The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" were two of those TV creations that click with something in the larger culture and take up residence in a rarified realm of the popular imagination where most pop culture never gets close to going.
As I wrote in a 2004 interview I did with her, Moore's Laura Petrie, wife of New Rochelle comedy writer Rob Petrie, was the middle-class version of Jackie Kennedy, who entered the White House with her husband, JFK, at the very same time that Laura and Rob arrived in our living rooms.
Later, as Mary Richards, Moore embodied the energy, optimism and best hopes of the women's movement at a time when it was regularly being distorted and even vilified in much of the rest of the mainstream media.
"I can't tell you the number of people who talk to me about how our show was the inspiration for them individually to get into television, or journalism, or just plain (make) it on their own. And that's a very heady arena to be in," Moore said of the "Mary Tyler Moore" show in our 2004 interview.
But Mary Richards runs even deeper than that in the psyche of some viewers. In his book "Imaginary Social Worlds," University of Maryland anthropologist John L. Caughey interviewed women who so identified with the character of Richards that in moments of confusion or crisis, they would ask themselves, "What would Mary do?"
Some of them said they felt more connected emotionally and intellectually to Mary Richards, a TV character, than they did real members of their family. Caughey was the first to document that cultural phenomenon of the intense ways in which some of us connect to fictional TV characters � and Mary Richards was one of the first to inspire it.
"That gives me chills," Moore said when I told her about the "What would Mary do?" testimony in Caughey's book.
"Do you remember when Marla Hansen, the young model, was knifed (in 1986 by thugs who slashed her face)?" Moore replied. "She said that same sort of thing immediately to the newspapers that were interviewing her. She said, 'I was so scared that I just kept saying to myself, 'Now what would Mary do?'"
If that sounds exaggerated, you need to go back and school yourself on what baby boomer women had to overcome to gain entrance to the workplace even after graduating college and professional schools � and how few role models there were for them in primetime TV at the time.
Mary Richards, the associate producer who worked at the fictional WJM-TV newsroom in Minneapolis, embodied the optimism, hope and grit of women from that age who did not immediately want the stay-at-home role that many of their mothers lived as women of The Greatest Generation.
The face of patriarchy in the series was the gruff but ultimately approving one of Ed Asner's character, Lou Grant, Mary's veteran boss who ran WJM's newsroom. But it was still patriarchy even in a sweetened, primetime TV flavor.
One of the series most famous scenes features Lou and Mary standing face to face in the newsroom.
"You know what?" Grant says to her. "You've got spunk."
"Well, yes," says Mary slightly embarrassed at what she hears as a compliment.
"I hate spunk," he growls in her face.
But this being a TV sitcom, even Lou came to love Mary and appreciate how smart, hard-working and winning she was. In sitcom language, she was the sane person in a room full egomaniacs and nuts.
"The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" were not her first forays into TV.
Moore worked in the lower rungs of the early TV world before becoming a star. She says her career began the day after her senior prom in 1955, when she started a job as a kitchen pixie for a series of Hotpoint Appliances television commercials that aired during "The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet."
She continued to work in minor roles in television during the 1950s as a dancer in the chorus of "The Jimmy Durante Show" and as a sensuous-sounding but never seen woman at a telephone-answering service in the 1959 season of "Richard Diamond, Private Eye."
And then came Lauri Petrie, she of the Capri pants, and Moore was on her way to becoming the persona that millions remember today.
As we discussed in her interview with the Sun, life was not so magical for the real Mary Tyler Moore since tossing Mary Richards' beret in the air for the last time in 1977 in that iconic TV opening to her show.
In 1978, a younger sister, Elizabeth, died of a prescription-drug overdose combined with alcohol. In 1980, her son, Richie, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that was ruled an accident.
The next year, she and her second husband, Grant Tinker, then the head of NBC, divorced. Together they had founded the famed MTM production company home to such series as "Hill Street Blues."
Moore became hooked on a deadly combination of vodka and Valium, she said. In 1983, she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic. She said she fell off the wagon a number of times before permanently gaining sobriety.
Moore, who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 32, spent much of her adult life as a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Diabetes Association. She was also deeply passionate about her work with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
During our last interview, I heard a kind of joy in her voice when she talked about the horses and dogs that she and her third husband, Dr. S. Robert Levine, a cardiologist, rescued and brought to live at their home in the Hudson River Valley.
I had never heard that kind of joy before from her. So, I asked her where it started.
Here's the way I reported her answer then. I liked it so much, I didn't want to get in the way by changing a word:
"That began when I was 9 years old and I was coming home from school one day and I saw a man beating a dog with a stick."
Moore says she unsuccessfully screamed at the man to stop.
"So, finally, I dropped my schoolbooks and ran and jumped him and beat him with my fist and my shoes, and he backed away slack-jawed.
"And the dog kind of shook himself, trotted off and then stopped and looked over his shoulder at me _ and then he lifted his leg and peed."
She laughs at the memory.
"So, you don't always get the thanks that you want immediately, but that passion has stayed with me ever since. I have never lost my fierce protective feelings for and admiration of animals.
"It's the kind of bond that gets you through these awful times we're living in _ with al-Qaida, with man's inhumanity to man. ... It's very difficult to deal with this stuff. And I find there is a closeness to a deity that exists for me with animals.
"I fully expect when I get up to heaven _ and I'm determined to get there _ I'm going to be greeted by a creature that says something like, 'Ruuffff, ruuffff, ruuffff.' "
