Sitcom viewers in the 1960s were more naive about their favorite comedies in at least one aspect — they believed perfect TV couples like The Dick Van Dyke Show’s Rob and Laura Petrie must be married in real life.
In fact, that’s the reason Mary Richards wasn’t one of television’s first divorcees on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That was the original plan, but CBS balked, worried that viewers would believe the character (who wasn’t Laura Petrie) had left her beloved Rob. “In 1970, that was a controversial idea,” one of the show’s creators, Allan Burns, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Mary loved the idea, (Mary’s real husband and producer) Grant (Tinker) loved the idea. Both of them were divorced and understood it, but the network had a sort of cardiac episode.”
On the 1969 special Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, Moore confessed to viewers that everyone still believed she and Van Dyke were married in real life, despite several years passing since they’d been an on-air couple. “Oh boy,” said Van Dyke. “So much so that I often had trouble checking into a hotel with my real wife, Margie.”
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Van Dyke was effusive about his platonic affection for Moore in his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. “What wasn’t to love?” he wrote. “I adored her from the moment we were introduced. I think both of us had each other at hello.”
However, the actor worried that viewers would think he was too old for his TV wife, “the most delightful co-star of my career.” He was 12 years her senior in real life. Carl Reiner convinced Van Dyke that the audience wouldn’t notice — and he couldn’t have been more right.
In a 1965 interview with the Wausau Daily Herald, as reported by MeTV, Moore said she was often asked if she and Van Dyke would ever get married. Moore replied that Van Dyke had vetoed the idea (and amusingly, not because the two stars were married to other people at the time — Moore to Tinker and Van Dyke to “real wife Margie”).
According to Moore, Van Dyke nixed a potential romance because he considered himself a “marshmallow type,” too mushy and pliable for such a formidable woman as Moore.
Moore sounded like she was down for it when she defended Van Dyke. “If Dick is a marshmallow type, it’s over a steel core,” she told Wausau Daily Herald. “He’s one of the strongest men I’ve ever known. But he’s quietly strong.”
Oh, just shut up and kiss already!
Per a Scripps Howard News Service profile, via MeTV, that’s just what Moore wanted to do. “The amazing thing is, we never had an affair,” she confessed. “I always thought it was a terrible waste.”
