She played one on television, but Thursday it was Mary Tyler Moore’s chance to address real-life journalists at the National Press Club. And given the fact her show debuted three months before the club even started to admit women, seems like she finally “[made] it after all.”
Moore was in town on behalf of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation to discuss her own personal 40-year struggle with the disease — one that she kept secret until the foundation asked her to be its international chairwoman.
“It was my best-kept secret, to now my lifelong crusade,” Moore remarked about how thankful she was to finally have publicly acknowledged her battle with the immune deficiency.
But why the stigma in the first place? After all, she shares company with Elvis, Elizabeth Taylor, Halle Barry, Dick Clark, Larry King and Johnny Cash.
She said she was worried that people watching her act would wonder if she had some “weird” disease.
So then what made her finally decide to come out, as one audience member asked?
“I started being attracted to other women,” she joked, before adding it was really due to the foundation.
While the topic of her Type-1 diabetes was the purpose of her trip to D.C., Moore appeased the audience with stories of her times on the small screen.
Her favorite episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show?”
“The one where I keep opening Rob’s mail” and one package inflated into a huge raft.
And favorite moment from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show?”
“It was the casting of [my character’s newsroom producer] Ed Asner … he was just awful,” she said, before explaining that he tried out again, nailed it and became a “blessing from heaven.”
Recalling her shows clearly made her let loose as compared to the scripted speech she gave via the two teleprompters — she dropped the F-bomb when describing the “colossal job” she did at screwing things up in her role as Van Dyke’s wife. We hope the live recording on CSPAN missed that.
And yes, her eponymous show went off the air in 1977, but most were shocked and amused that Moore forgot her “trademark line.”
Luckily her husband — who is a doctor with the foundation — was on the panel. He whispered it in her ear where upon she prepped herself up, took a deep breath and in her whinny high pitched yelled, “Oh, Rob.”
