Rose Marie Had Beef With Mary Tyler Moore on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’
They say, “Write what you know,” and that’s just what Carl Reiner did when he created The Dick Van Dyke Show. Why make Rob Petrie an insurance salesman or dentist or ad executive when the job that Reiner knew was working as a comedy writer for a big TV star (like he did on Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar)? Reiner set out to recreate his experience as a workplace sitcom.
The center of the show, as conceived, would be the comedy writers’ room for The Alan Brady Show. Van Dyke would play head writer Rob Petrie, and Rose Marie would play his partner in comedy crime, Sally Rogers. Rose Marie was already an established TV star, a regular on early sitcoms like The Bob Cummings Show and My Sister Eileen. She was also the one who suggested Amsterdam for the third member of the team, Buddy Sorrell.
Mary Tyler Moore, the actress Reiner cast as Rob’s wife, Laura, was the one with no comedy experience. She was only 23 when the show began, intimidated by the veteran comedy talents that surrounded her. Her job on the show? “Mary was first hired as an ‘ear’ — she was there to listen to Dick talking about his troubles at work,” says director John Rich in The Dick Van Dyke Show: Anatomy of a Classic. “She was there at first to do very little.”
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That changed in an early episode when Laura dyes her hair blonde to spice up her marriage. Moore knocked it out of that park and from that point forward, “Carl began writing episodes in which I could not only be the straight man, which I essentially was as Laura Petrie, but a straight man who could get laughs,” remembered Moore.
Great for Moore, but not so good for Rose Marie, who began The Dick Van Dyke Show with the idea that she’d be the female focus. “Mary was up and coming,” Georgiana “Noopy” Guy Rodrigues, Rose Marie’s daughter, told Fox News. “There was a little bit of conflict between my mother and Mary on the show.”
The two actresses had a chilly relationship, according to Rodrigues. “Originally, my mother was told that the show was about the writers,” she said. “And then as the show progressed, it started to go more toward the home life with Dick and Mary.”
Van Dyke certainly noticed. “The attention that Mary got didn’t sit well with Rosie,” he wrote in his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. “She felt Mary’s part should be a more minor one.”
Rose Marie told the New York Post in 2017 that the two actresses never hit it off. “We were friendly enough, but we weren’t very close,” she explained. “She wanted to be a big star, and she accomplished that.”
Moore agreed that things were friendly enough, thanks to a “truce-like” working relationship. “We were polite to each other,” she wrote in her book After All, “even if we didn’t laugh at each other’s work.”
The two got friendly at reunions, although they never became close. “I really think I was jealous,” Rose Marie explained in her memoir, Hold the Roses. “She was younger than I was, she was prettier, and she had a better figure, so I was jealous... Do you blame me?”