Funny thing about “stars.” Sometimes we meet them and they disappoint us beyond belief. Other times, they surprise us by being everything we hoped they’d be and much more. That was Valerie Harper; lovely, beautiful, smart, funny and one of the nicest, caring people you’ll ever meet.
I got to know Val during the run of Charles Busch‘s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife. My then client, Jana Robbins, was co-starring with Val on Broadway and also on the National Tour. Jana was doing her acclaimed Cy Coleman show at Don’t Tell Mama and we wanted to get Cy in to see her. I had worked with him on both The Will Rogers Follies and The Life on Broadway, but try as I might, neither Jana nor I was successful. Enter Valerie Harper. With one phone call, Cy was there, praising Jana in a TV interview with Valerie smiling for having made it all happen. That’s the kind of woman Valerie Harper was, doing whatever she could to help a friend with her career.
Valerie Kathryn Harper was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Suffern, NY, about 32 miles north of New York City. Her father, Howard, was a salesman and her mother, Iva, was a nurse. Her heritage was a European and French Canadian mix. She was not Jewish and grew up Catholic. In her biography I, Rhoda, she described how her family moved every few years to keep up with her father’s career. The Harper family moved to California, Michigan, Oregon and Jersey City, where she went to high school. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager and her father’s second wife was an Italian-American woman from the Bronx, who she said was a model for Rhoda.
Valerie Harper started out as a dancer at Radio City Music Hall, honing her comedic skills at Second City and working her way onto Broadway in supporting roles in musicals throughout the 1960’s, appearing in Take Me Along, Wildcat (with Lucille Ball), Subways Are for Sleeping, Something Different and Paul Sills’ Story Theatre. She loved the theatre and the improv games made famous by Paul Sills and his mother, Viola Spolin. She described improvised comedy as “like a ball team, playing together. That’s when it is at its most beautiful.” She was a member of the Second City improv troupe in Chicago, where she met her first husband, Richard Schaal. They divorced in 1978.
Harper returned to Broadway twice in more recent years, succeeding Linda Lavin in Charles Busch’s Tony-nominated The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife in 2001 and in 2010 as Tallulah Bankhead in Matthew Lombardo’s Looped, a performance that earned her a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play.
But it was her casting as Mary Richards’ best friend Rhoda, the single, Jewish, wisecracking window dresser, that secured Harper’s place in history, first on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then her own spinoff, “Rhoda.” She won four Emmy Awards as Rhoda, three for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and one for “Rhoda.”
The part was for Mary’s upstairs neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, a weight-conscious, self-deprecating, blunt Jewish expatriate from New York City who would serve as a foil for Ms. Moore’s prim, sweet-tempered, every-hair-in-place and emphatically non-Jewish Mary. “Rhoda felt inferior to Mary, Rhoda wished she was Mary, Rhoda looked up to her,” Ms. Harper said in an interview in 2009. “All I could do was, not being as pretty, as thin, as accomplished, was: ‘I’m a New Yorker and I’m going to straighten this shiksa out.’”
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” premiered in September 1970 and the characters meet in the opening moments of that first episode. Mary, moving into a new apartment, encounters Rhoda entering through a window from a ledge. Rhoda had been washing the window, thinking the apartment was going to be hers.
“So you’re, uh, Rhoda?” Mary says.
“Morgenstern, right.”
“And I’m Mary Richards.”
“Hello,” Rhoda says. “Get out of my apartment.”
By the middle of the episode, however, Mary has told Rhoda that she’s a hard person to dislike.
“I know what you mean,” Rhoda responds. “I’m having a hard time hating you too. We’ll both have to work on it.”
The chemistry between the actresses was immediately apparent and infectious and Harper became an audience favorite. In Harper’s memoir I, Rhoda, she wrote that the situation comedy “reflected the way more and more real women were living in the 1970’s. It was refreshing and invigorating and addressed the changing attitude towards women in the workplace that had been rippling across the country.”
About the character of Rhoda, Harper said, “Mary is who you wish you were. Rhoda is who you probably are. And Phyllis is who you’re afraid you’ll become.”
In “Rhoda,” which made its debut in 1974 and ran until 1978, the character moves back to New York City and becomes a kind of “everywoman” alternative to Mary Richards’s ideal American sweetheart. She re-connects with her family; a sister with a weight and self-esteem problem (a younger version of Rhoda, actually) played by Julie Kavner, Ida, the quintessential meddling Jewish mother (Nancy Walker) and Martin, the doting papa (Harold Gould). And she finally lands a husband, Joe Gerard (David Groh). Their wedding, a special hour-long episode in the middle of the first season, began on the morning of the ceremony, with a thrilled and nervous Rhoda reassuring her sister that a day like this was in her future as well. “Well, someday it’s going to happen for you, Brenda,” Rhoda says. “You meet a wonderful guy, fall in love, decide to get married and be just as nauseous as I am right now.”
John Leonard, the NY Times critic wrote, “We have gathered together before, as a nation, in front of the TV set, usually in mourning (after an assassination), sometimes in fear (war seems imminent), occasionally in wonder (setting foot on the moon). But this time we got together as a nation, in anticipation and retrospection, to watch a marriage.” A marriage, I might add, performed by Bernard Barrow, Johnny Ryan of the acclaimed daytime drama, “Ryan’s Hope” and my Masters adviser at Brooklyn College. The episode was one of the most watched television shows of the 1970’s.
She acted in many made-for-television films and made numerous guest appearances on series including “Touched by an Angel,” “Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place” and “That ’70’s Show.” She also starred in a short-lived sitcom, “City,” set in a city manager’s office.
Harper’s film credits include the action comedy Freebie and the Bean, with Alan Arkin and James Caan, and Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, also starring Caan and Marsha Mason. She played the title role in Golda’s Balcony, the screen adaptation of William Gibson’s one-woman play about Golda Meir.
Her “Mary Tyler Moore Show” costar Ed Asner, 89, tweeted Friday that Harper was “A beautiful woman, a wonderful actress, a great friend and with balls bigger than mine. Her brilliance burst through and shined its light upon all of us. Goodnight beautiful. I’ll see you soon.”
Moore died in 2017. Surviving members of the cast, besides Asner, are Betty White, 97, Cloris Leachman, 93 and Gavin MacLeod, 88.
About five weeks ago, Harper’s husband, Tony Cacciotti, wrote of her long fight and never flagging hope, saying he “can’t… and won’t” place her in hospice care as doctors had recommended. Harper was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in March, 2013. “For those of you who have been in this position, you will totally understand that ‘it’s hard letting go,’” he posted on Harper’s Facebook page. “So as long as I’m able and capable, I’ll be where I belong, right beside her.”
She is survived by her husband, Tony Cacciotti and their daughter Cristina.
