Victorious Loser

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.

But when they brought in the audience and set the cameras rolling, something clicked. "Why am I eating 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 up with his wife. Said Rhoda: "I'd like to introduce you to my date, Mr. and Mrs. Armand Linton."

"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 a plausibly bachelor career girl, she tones down her striking good looks beneath caftans and kimonos and by appearing with unwashed hair.

Off-camera is another matter. Dark and vivacious, she is in perpetual motion, hands gesticulating, expressions changing like neon signs. Her conversation is a Catherine wheel of intelligent, breathlessly unfinished sentences about a dozen topics from Watergate to cat breeding to the weaknesses in the Stanislavsky method of acting. She will not, however, go on talk shows: "I'm not into glamour. I don't want to sit there like a box of cornflakes."

Born in Suffern, N.Y., the daughter of a nomadic industrial lighting salesman, Valerie and her family settled in Jersey City, N.J., when she was 12. A victim of the movie The Red Shoes, she decided to become a ballerina. "I was heavy into recitals, a real little dancing queen," she recalls. "I tapped Tea for Two in silver lame, and I used to do a sexy In a Persian Market in a mock leopard costume with a bare midriff."

At 16 she became a $61 a week Radio City Music Hall dancer--"not a Rockette; we were the ones in the corners on tiptoe waving ribbons and little umbrellas." Then she graduated to Broadway chorus jobs, and eventually wound up in Chicago with Paul Sills' Second City after marrying one of its actors, Richard Schaal. Along the way she supported herself by appearing in industrial shows introducing new products to out-of-town distributors. Her most memorable roles: a stripteaser in a peanut-butter show, and a dancer who pirouetted around a Chevrolet singing, "The mighty voice of Chevrolet rings out across the land."

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 you ought to get a Chicano girl, but if you're going with Sandra Dee, then take me."

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