Gavin MacLeod and the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show
“Who would have thought?” asks actor Gavin MacLeod, “It went off [the air] 40 years ago, and we’re still watching it!”
McLeod is talking about the first TV show about TV news: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which still airs in syndication nearly four decades after its final episode.
TVNewser caught up with MacLeod last week – just one day after his 85th birthday – in the Palm Springs area, where he resides with wife Patti.
MacLeod, who played Murray Slaughter, the head news writer at Minneapolis TV station WJM, originally auditioned for the role of news director Lou Grant, eventually played by Ed Asner.
“I would never have believed myself being Mary’s boss!” MacLeod recalls. “And I knew I couldn’t be the newscaster. But [I thought,] Murray? Hey, I kinda like that guy. Maybe I can do something with him!”
Murray became a fan favorite with his witty one-liners and an everyman appeal. Viewers “loved him because he was the brown-bagger, he was like them” MacLeod said. “He had to get a second job to try to buy his wife an anniversary gift.”
MacLeod still receives fan mail from all over the world, and is approached regularly by viewers who recognize him both as Slaughter and from his subsequent role as The Love Boat’s Captain Merrill Stubing.
Gavin MacLeod, 2016
(Photo: Alissa Krinsky)
“I’m sure [MTM] inspired a lot of people to get into the news business,” he says. “I think a lot of women.” That, of course, was due to groundbreaking main character Mary Richards, a single woman who joins WJM as an associate producer.
Murray Slaughter sat alongside Richards in the newsroom, faithfully banging out copy for anchor Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) on a manual typewriter. As for what MacLeod was actually typing during filming? A lot of “z’s, l’s, a lot of ‘fmbla’, ‘fmbla’ – because I had to listen all the time for cues!”
And there were a lot of cues over the 7 Seasons, during which MTM ruled Saturday nights on CBS. MacLeod says the show was enormously popular with Tiffany network news staffers, counting among its fans the legendary journalists Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite famously made a 1974 cameo on the program, prompting the studio audience to erupt in applause. “They stood up and went crazy,” says MacLeod, “So we had to stop shooting!” (The interruption was rare, according to MacLeod, happening only one other time during the show’s tenure – while taping the famous “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode.)
Murray Slaughter Meets Walter Cronkite, 1974
When it comes to his favorite newsers today, MacLeod singles out a fellow Ithaca College alum, ABC’s David Muir. “I love him, I think he’s fabulous. I think he’s great for the network, he’s very credible.”
A native New Yorker, MacLeod has enjoyed his many years in Southern California. (TV spouse Joyce Bulifant, who played Marie Slaughter, leaves nearby as well in the Coachella Valley.) The father of seven adult children from his two marriages, and the grandfather of ten, he remains busy with occasional TV appearances, as well as work in his native medium, the theater. He’s also an ambassador for Princess Cruises, a position he’s held for three decades, dating back to his time on The Love Boat.
MacLeod wrote a 2013 autobiography, This Is Your Captain Speaking. The same year, he starred with fellow MTM castmate Betty White in an Air New Zealand flight safety video which became a viral smash-hit.
In addition to White and Bulifant, MacLeod keeps in touch with many of his MTM colleagues, including Moore, Asner, Georgia Engel, Cloris Leachman, and Valerie Harper.
“When ‘Mary’ ended, we were all crying, we were all very sad. We were all very close,” he reflects. The cast and crew, he says, were “so grateful” for the show’s success, and its ability to make viewers laugh.
“If you can laugh every day, you can get healthy. You get those endorphins going in the body,” says MacLeod, who’s thankful for a fulfilling life. “God’s been looking out for me. I enjoy every day.”