MARY’S BACK IN CHARACTER

Mary Tyler Moore, in the role of newspaper “helpline” columnist Mary Brenner, was about to lose her cool. The venom seemed to well up inside her, threatened to blow her head off as James Farentino, playing Frank DeMarco, editor of the third-rate Chicago Post, did his best to bait her.

“You should really slap me around for that,” Farentino said, edging his chin into Moore’s swinging range.

“I’d like to,” she said in a nervous quaver. “I’d like to sooo badly. I’d like to tear your . . . and dig my . . . into your . . . “

She never does, of course. Not America’s beloved Mary . Brushing back the coiffed hair, adjusting the smartly stylish business ensemble, the title character of “Mary,” Moore’s new sitcom now filming for a Dec. 11 premiere on CBS, quickly retracted her talons. “One of us still has some dignity,” she concluded.

Anyone who was not a practicing ascetic in the ‘70s should have no trouble recognizing the character of Mary Brenner, a former fashion writer and divorcee. From the first few minutes of viewing at a recent rehearsal, it was clear that she is a slightly more worldly wise version of TV news producer Mary Richards, Moore’s character on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from 1970 to 1977.

“It’s going to be real evident right away that this is not the ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’ of seven years ago,” Moore, dressed in black leather pants and looking paper clip-thin, said last Thursday, the day before filming the new series’ second half-hour episode. “But the essence for me remains the same: I am that lady and she is me. The names are different now, but in essence the character is the same, having grown up, having spent some years away from the audience.

“It’s hard for me to articulate how I’ve changed,” Moore continued from the comfort of her trailer inside the MTM sound stage in Studio City--the same trailer and stage she called home for seven seasons. “I just know that I’m wiser. . . . “

The growth in Moore and the character she plays are simultaneously evident, each seeming to hold up a mirror to the other. Two months away from her 48th birthday, divorced from former MTM Enterprises president and current NBC Chairman Grant Tinker and now in her third marriage, Moore still has the cool veneer of self-inflicted perfection. But like Mary Brenner, she now at least lets her darker side show a bit.

“I’m getting better at that,” she said. “Yesterday, the scenes were not playing as well as they are today, and I felt, ‘Oh my God, it’s not working, the whole thing is going to be a disaster.’ And I felt myself not exhibiting this but holding it inside me. I knew that everyone else could sense that I was tense.

“We talked about it today around the table, and everybody said, ‘Hey, let it show; it would make us more comfortable.’ ” She never actually blew up, though. “No. But I talked about it, and that’s a step in the right direction.”

Moore seems a jumble of confidence and self-doubts. On the set, she is the well-composed pro. She adds her own touches to a scene, improving the laugh quotient with a new inflection or turn of the head. In her trailer, 20 steps away, she scrutinizes publicity photos to determine which can be released and which need retouching.

But only a week before her adrenalin had been at a “killer level” as “Mary’s” debut episode was filmed before a live audience and Moore officially returned to series TV. “In my intellect, I know there is nothing to it, that it is an ensemble effort all the way down the line. But in my gut--and it’s a quality that’s been with me since my infancy--I guess I feel that I’ve got to do everything . Be everybody’s mother, sister, best friend--whatever--and make it all happen.

“As a result, when something doesn’t go well I take full responsibility; when something is a huge success, I say, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I had nothing to do with it.’ So it’s ultimately a self-defeating character flaw.”

If it is indeed a flaw, Moore continues to use it to comic advantage. Mary Brenner, like Mary Richards before her, is the voice of sanity surrounded by a coterie of comic characters. They range in realism from Farentino’s DeMarco, who provides Mary with employment as well as romance, to David Byrd as Tully, a legally blind copy editor at the Post.

In between:

--Susan Wilcox, Brenner’s good-natured pretty blond neighbor, a yuppie who wears ankle socks over her nylons. Played by former “Best of the West” star Carlene Watkins, Wilcox is a city planner by trade, but her own life is in constant disarray.

--Ed LaSalle, self-important theater critic for the Post and author of the column Steppin’ Out With Ed LaSalle. John Astin (“I’m Dickens--He’s Fenster,” “The Addams Family”) returns to series TV as the man who eschews musicals but will rave about any production staged in a basement.

--Jo Tucker, the young but curmudgeonly writer of the Post’s hard-hitting Mainline Chicago column. When a shooting on the morning train holds up traffic for 1 1/2 hours, Tucker complains, “How long can it take to draw a chalk outline?” Tucker is played by TV newcomer Katey Sagal, a former backup singer for Bette Midler and older sister to TV twins Jean and Liz Sagal (“Double Trouble”).

--Lester Mintz, Wilcox’s fiance, a crook with a heart of gold. When Mintz, played by James Tolkan, can’t exchange his Dom Paragon ‘78, as he calls it, for a ‘77, he makes up for the faux pas by visiting “a station wagon parked around the corner” and returning with “soft-sided luggage for everybody.”

“We tried to shape the series in such a way so that each of the characters somehow played off an aspect of Mary,” said former “Cheers” writer-producer Ken Levine, who along with partner David Isaacs is “Mary’s” executive producer.

The most complex and difficult to cast, everyone involved with the show agreed, was DeMarco. In Levine’s words, the character is “hero and antagonist rolled into one.”

More important, the actor who played him had to be old enough, strong enough, good-looking enough and funny enough to be paired romantically with Moore.

Filming was postponed two weeks until Farentino was cast, said Danny DeVito, who directed the first two episodes. Farentino took the role over a number of big-name actors who either weren’t funny enough or didn’t click with Moore, DeVito added. “I’d love to show you the list,” he said. “Nobody we thought of came near to Jimmy. Boy, they look great together, don’t they?”

Though Farentino is a veteran of five TV series, the closest he came to comedy on screen was in the made-for-TV movie “Something So Right,” for which he had to appear fat and balding. Between rehearsals, he pulled his thick wavy hair and kiddingly noted that “this is all mine.”

Someday Mary Brenner will be running her fingers through the same hair, representing the rare TV romance between two series leads in their mid-40s. “Eventually, Frank and I will have a love scene,” Moore said. “If after we’ve done that the audience throws up en masse, we won’t do it anymore . . . “

Moore, more than any other actress today, seems to belong in the public domain. When she was introduced at Friday night’s filming, the crowd went wild with applause.

DeVito said that in Chicago, while shooting a montage sequence, “wherever we went, people got so excited just seeing her on the street.”

“People love her,” said John Astin. “Men and women. There’s a certain decency in her that taps a decency in all of us.”

When asked how she responds to this public adulation, Moore laughed. “Adulation is what you give Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli or Elizabeth Taylor. You give Mary Tyler Moore friendship .” One of the things she likes about New York--where she lives with her cardiologist husband Dr. Robert Levine when not filming--is that “truck drivers will pull up and say ‘Hey Mare, looking great, kid!’ ”

Moore returns the friendship. At the filming, she introduced her parents, seated in the front row, to the rest of the audience as if to friends. Her co-workers say that there is little evidence around the set that the star of “Mary” is also an owner of MTM Enterprises, the company that produces the show and signs their checks.

“God knows, people know I’m human by now--if they had any doubts,” Moore said.

When being human isn’t quite good enough, Moore, like many of her fans, will think about Mary Richards and Mary Brenner. “I, Mary Tyler Moore Meeker Tinker Levine, will sometimes say subliminally, ‘How would Mary , that other Mary, handle this situation?’ ”