Word: rhoda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Before Actress Valerie Harper got the part of Rhoda Morgenstern-Mary Tyler Moore's scatty Bronx Jewish neighbor-her agent warned her that she was really not right for the role. Neither Jewish nor a native New Yorker, Valerie had little in common with Rhoda except the soft, lumpy look of a girl with a weakness for cheesecake, cookies, cupcakes and brownies. At rehearsals, Valerie got few laughs in the role...
...this piece of candy? I ought to just apply it directly to my hips," Valerie would say, and hundreds of fans would write in describing their own caloric calamities. When she had a confrontation with the TV mother, Jewish mothers all over America volunteered advice. In a few weeks Rhoda Morgenstern became TV's favorite wisecracking overweight spinster, and Valerie Harper emerged as a winningly wacky comic actress. Before the season ended, she won the first of her three Emmy awards, for a show in which Mary fixed up a date for her with an old flame-who showed...
...People identify with Rhoda because she's a loser," says Valerie. "The human condition is one of self-doubt. But Rhoda is able to laugh it off, coming out on top-so she's a victorious loser." By the end of last season, Rhoda had become such a winner that jokes about her weight and looks were discontinued. This season, notes Ed Weinberger, executive producer of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: "we've cut out man-chasing jokes." The reason? Valerie joined Weight Watchers and dropped from 160 Ibs. to 140. Now, in order to remain...
Five years ago, Valerie and her husband moved to Los Angeles. "Things were going well for Dick," she recalls, "but I just sat in Laurel Canyon sobbing and eating Sara Lee cakes all day." That was pre-Rhoda. Now, when the new Mary Tyler Moore season begins next week, her role will be upgraded so that she appears with the star in the weekly opening footage. And recently she branched out to her first film role, playing the Mexican wife of Alan Arkin in the forthcoming Freebie and the Bean. "When they offered me the part," she says, "I said...
Though it was early in the morning when Mrs. Rhoda Katchen, of East Orange, N.J., arrived in New York City's Chinatown, she was not the first patient to join the queue outside the small herb shop at 11 Mott Street. Six others, one of whom had been there since 4:40 a.m., were already waiting for Dr. Huan Lam Ng, a China-trained acupuncturist. Soon 35 patients-none of them Chinese-were on line for treatment...