Mackenzie Phillips is looking back on her years on One Day at a Time—and sharing memories of the stars on the beloved CBS sitcom. During a recent conversation with her longtime friend and co-star Valerie Bertinelli, Phillips, 66, revealed that one castmate “wasn’t very nice” to her in the early days of the series but ultimately apologized to her years later.
“One person, and I have made peace with this person and we’ve spoken, but Richard Masur wasn’t very nice,” Phillips told Bertinelli on the Getting Naked podcast. “He wasn’t very nice.”
When Bertinelli recalled that the actor “was only around for the first season,” Phillips repeated, “He wasn’t very nice.”
“And then when I met him, it was like at a Comic Con or something,” Phillips continued. “I saw him and he said, ‘I don’t even remember what it was. I don’t even remember what I said, but whatever I said, I’m really sorry. And I’ve always thought you were so incredibly talented and we were all so young,’ and you know that kind of thing.”
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One Day at a Time followed divorced mother Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) and her teen daughters Julie (Phillips) and Barbara (Bertinelli). Masur played Ann’s divorce lawyer turned fiancé, David Kane, in the first season of the show, but his character was written out after a few episodes in the second season.
Masur had mixed feelings about doing One Day at a Time.
Speaking with Smashing Interviews in 2021, the actor, now 77, recalled shooting an early, unseen pilot for the show with Franklin, Phillips, and Marcia Rodd. Series creator Norman Lear later called to tell him that he wanted to remake the pilot and that “CBS said they’d buy the show” if Masur were in it.
“I said to Norman, ‘I’m not sure how I would fit into this. I don’t think I want to do it. I don’t want to spend the next five or seven years holding Bonnie Franklin’s coat,’” Masur continued. “I like her. I thought she was very engaging and sweet and had something. But I don’t want to be Bill Macy to Bonnie Franklin’s Maude … that’s not what I am looking to do. Norman said, ‘It won’t be that. I promise you.’”
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Masur asked Lear to promise him that if he was unhappy he would let him off the show—and that’s exactly what happened.
“In the pilot, they had me proposing to Bonnie,” he said. “What I said to Norman after we read the pilot was, ‘If you have me proposing to her in the pilot, then this character is going to burn up in no time. He can’t be that clueless and feeble that he’s going to have this unrequited relationship with this woman.’ …So around the sixth or seventh episode, I had now proposed to her three times, and we’d had conversations around that several times also.”
Masur was not happy when his character apologized for having an affair with another woman, and that marked the end of his role.
“I promised Norman I would do four episodes in the second season before I left,” Masur added. “He’s my godfather in the business. …I could’ve handled all that better and have since told him that, to which he replied, ‘Don’t be silly.’ But it was a completely mutual agreement that things couldn’t work out the way I’d hoped they would with my character. Norman was completely generous and honorable about letting me out.”
CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images
Masur told The A.V. Club he asked Lear to kill off his character so he could never come back. Lear refused, and David did make one more guest appearance in Season 6.
“Listen, I am so grateful for One Day at a Time, even though for years and years and years people would go, ‘Oh, you were on One Day at a Time,’” the actor added. “I [am on the show] for about seven months and then this haunts me for the rest of my life. No, I had no regrets. I was very grateful.”
On the new podcast, Phillips also expressed gratitude for working with Lear, noting that both she and Bertinelli felt very protected on the set of One Day at a Time under the legendary producer’s guidance.
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