Mary Tyler Moore Was Nervous Auditioning For ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ Because Of A Crush

Today, she’s a television icon who changed the cultural landscape within the industry and without, but before all that, even the legendary Mary Tyler Moore got audition butterflies. It just so happened she was overcome with nerves before auditioning for The Dick Van Dyke Show because of a crush she was harboring—but not on the leading man.

Moore was cast to play Laura Petrie, wife of Van Dyke’s Robert “Rob” Simpson Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show, a role she maintained for 158 episodes. It’s an audition Moore very nearly didn’t pursue after receiving some bad news not long before the big day and she just wasn’t feeling strong enough for more disappointment. But, likewise, series creator Carl Reiner was demoralized in a way that only Moore was able to alleviate.

The search for Laura Petrie was going horribly

In his decorated career as a comedian, screenwriter, and director, Carl Reiner amassed 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to his name. But one of his most celebrated works, The Dick Van Dyke Show, encountered some unexpected problems before the cameras even started rolling.

“First time I saw Mary Tyler Moore was when I was auditioning to find a girl to play Laura Petrie,” recalled Reiner, remembering his colleague after her passing; Moore was 80 when she died in January 2017. “I already found Dick Van Dyke. Casting Dick Van Dyke to play Robert Petrie was easy—most talented man I ever met. When I had to cast Mary, the part of Laura, I was at my wits-end.”

He explained, “I had auditioned literally 23 or 27 girls and I told Sheldon Leonard, our executive producer, ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’ I said, ‘None of these girls seem to work.'”

Fortunately, executive producer Danny Thomas had one more idea, but there were just a few more road bumps to get through.

Mary Tyler Moore had to work around her crush on Carl Reiner plus the crushing ache of rejection

Thomas suggested he could reach out to Moore, who had auditioned for him in the past. However, Moore initially did not want to pursue the audition offer because she had faced one rejection after another not long before.

In her memoir, After All, Moore recalled, “I had a brief moment of recognition: this was mine, and it had come for me. But what I heard myself saying was, ‘I just can’t take another rejection, especially not this one.'” A friend helped convince her otherwise, and everyone was a winner because of it.

“She walked into the room, I looked at those eyes, the smile and those legs and I said, ‘I found her,'” said Reiner. “I wanted to see if she could talk, so I gave her a script…she read one line, the first line and I heard this intelligent ping…and I said, ‘That’s it.'”

Unbeknownst to Reiner, Moore had just endured a bout with some serious nerves on the way over to the audition. “On the way to the studio, I tried to imagine how I was going to maintain any adult, wifely composure while reading the script with the author himself, Carl Reiner,” she recalled in her memoir. “On Your Show of Shows, he may have been Sid Caesar’s straight man, but to me, he was the closest thing to a sex symbol since my crush on Jerry Lewis.”

Lastly, there was trepidation from Van Dyke himself, who worried about the two having over a decade between their ages. “Dick was a little nervous about the fact she was 23 and he was 30-something,” shared Reiner. “There was a 12-year difference or something and he was very worried about that and I said, ‘Nobody’s going to notice.’ And nobody ever mentioned the fact that they were not a couple. They were a couple from the moment they kissed in the main title.”

Former child star Rose Marie, whose fame would skyrocket thanks to her own time on The Dick Van Dyke Show, would see the program shift focus less on the writers and more on the couple, led by Van Dyke and Moore, much to her own chagrin as she built her own career up. As a result, “There was a little bit of conflict between my mother and Mary on the show,” Marie’s daughter, Georgiana “Noopy” Guy Rodrigues, revealed. “They never became close.”

However, she also noted that Moore herself had to fight hard to work well outside her comfort zone. “Mary was… not really that outgoing as far as [being] personable with everybody because she was new,” Rodrigues explained. “She was starting. She was learning.” Learn she did, becoming a pioneer of television who reshaped people’s perceptions of women and relationships for decades to come, right until her death in 2017.

Reiner himself, once the object of Moore’s affections, died in January 2020 at the age of 98.