In the 1970s, Joyce Bulifant had a recurring role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, playing Marie Slaughter, the wife of Gavin MacLeod’s lead character Murray. But Bulifant didn’t appear in the iconic series finale in 1977, despite being told she would.
The famous episode “The Last Show” aired on March 19, 1977, on CBS and featured the main cast members (Moore, Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Gavin MacLeod and Betty White) as well as Georgia Engel’s Georgette Baxter, for the emotional newsroom farewell and group hug.
Speaking with Katchy Klassics with Kathy & Larry, Bulifant told podcast hosts Kathy Garver and Larry Dasilva that her part was cut from the iconic Mary Tyler Moore Show finale shortly after she married TV producer William Asher in 1976.
“That is a sad story for me,” Bulifant, 88, recalled. “I was going to do a musical called I Do! I Do! in Kansas City, and I got a call from the Mary Tyler Moore people saying, ‘We want you to be in the final episode.’ And I said, ‘Oh my gosh!’”
Bulifant said she got herself out of the commitment to the Kansas City musical and then received another phone call.
“A few weeks later, I got a call saying, ‘We didn’t have enough time to fit your story in, so you won’t be doing it,’” she shared. “But for some reason, and I don’t know what it is to this day, and I’ve asked everybody who worked on the show that I knew—producers, writers, actors—Mary, suddenly, when I married Bill Asher, she just dropped me as a friend, as anything on the show. I mean, everybody would go out to lunch, and she wouldn’t include me.”
“And it hurt, you know,” Bulifant continued. “And I wonder if Mary just said… I don’t know. I was never asked to be on the shows where everyone got together to do a reunion or anything. It was very sad, and it’s so sad to not understand.”
Bulifant divorced Asher in 1993, and Moore died in 2017 at age 80.
The actress previously told Closer Weekly that it was interesting to work with Moore.
“It’s interesting because as a person she was much more like the roles in the movies she did,” Bulifant recalled. “But her comic timing [was so good] that she was perfect as the show’s Mary.”
She also said she was honored to be part of the legendary sitcom.
“It’s very nice when people say, ‘One of the stars of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ but I really wasn’t. I was a recurring character,” she clarified. “But when people think about me, they think about Marie Slaughter. I’m still always amazed.”
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In past interviews, Bulifant has said The Mary Tyler Moore Show cast members were always kind to her.
“The whole cast was wonderful,” she told Still Here Hollywood host Steve Kmetko earlier this year. “It was fun for me because I was doing three shows at the same time and that’s why I couldn’t always be there as Gavin’s wife, because I was doing a show called Love Thy Neighbor and I was doing the first Bill Cosby show… So, they had to get Georgia Engel because they needed a wife in there. And when we were on the set together, people said it sounded like stereophonic sound.”
“They were [a tight ‘knit’ group],” Bulifant added of the cast, noting that she developed close friendships with MacLeod and co-stars White and Valerie Harper.
Related: ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ Alum, 88, Opens Up About Losing ‘Brady Bunch’ Starring Role
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