Photos:  Terry O'Neill

TV sitcoms of course make strange bedfellows: who would have thought to match up B-movie journeyman Carroll O'Connor with Broadway (even Shakespearean) headliner Jean Stapleton? Or standup comic Bob Newhart with fading starlet Suzanne Pleshette?  Now television seems to be making bedfellows into strangers in the case of Valerie Harper and Dick Schaal. She is entering her second season as star of Rhoda. Her husband debuts as Cloris Leachman's pal in the new season's Phyllis, another spinoff of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and runs his own theater company on weekend nights. They both have scripts to study work-day evenings. And so it has become increasingly difficult for them to get together alone. "We have to call each other a lot," says Dick. "But we finally met the other night at about 11:30 and sat outside with the pool lights on, talking for an hour and a half. It was the longest talk we'd had in a month. It was nice seeing her." Schaal sounds as if he is recalling some distant college romance. Valerie and Dick have been happily married for 11 years, but won't have a weekday off together until Christmas.

"It's a unique marriage-Valerie and Dick are best friends first, then husband and wife," says a Rhoda producer, Charlotte Brown. "They are two complete individuals who happen to be married. They don't ever need to take on the other's identity." They certainly are regarded as separate entities on the old Mack Sennett lot in Hollywood, now humming with six MTM productions, where they work three sound stages apart. (Their two shows will run back to back on Monday night starting this week.) "Valerie's the second major star on the lot," notes another colleague (MTM herself being first), "and Dick's the third co-star in a new series that might or might not make it. They are treated as such. There's a definite caste system around here and no place in it for the 'husband of the star.' " Schaal, however, is likely to move up in the pecking order if Phyllis becomes the ratings hit predicted.

There was a lot more togetherness when the two were on their way up. They met in 1964 when the legendary Second City revue, with Schaal aboard, moved from Chicago to New York. Valerie, a plump Broadway chorine, joined the cast and married Dick a few months later. She is now 34; Dick won't say-"it would ruin my casting chances"-but he is at least 10 years older. "He was my mentor," Valerie says. "He totally brought me into acting. He's read me lines for years and been nothing but supportive. He absolutely built the character of Rhoda with me. I always thought Dick was the brains of the operation, but he kept me from 'daddifying' him. He gives me unbelievable room. He told me, 'l can't be you too. I have enough trouble being me.' "

Valerie was born in Suffern, N.Y. to Catholic parents, followed her nomadic salesman father all over America, but stopped now and then to take dancing lessons at her mother's insistence.  "I used to do a sexy In a Persian Market in a fake leopard leotard with bare midriff " she recalls wistfully. At 15 she was dancing specialty numbers at Radio City, then joined a long chorus line of musicals. One of them, Li'l Abner, took her to Hollywood in 1958, and there she came down with hepatitis. A doctor prescribed sweets and Valerie puffed up to the 150-pound schlepper who became ultra-thin Mary Tyler Moore's frumpish foil 10 hardworking years later. Down to 122 now, thanks to Weight-Watchers, Valerie guards her slim new image-even bankrolls a yoga class on the Rhoda set.
 

Schaal (pronounced "Shawl") was born and grew up in Chicago, worked as a commercial artist (he's a photographer in Phyllis), builder and window dresser-Rhoda's TV job. Later, studying at Northwestern, he got into theatricals. Second City, New York and Valerie followed that. For awhile, they co-hosted a low-budget daytime talk show called The New Yorkers. Then, when they moved to Hollywood, Dick started a theater company, Children of Paradise, which today includes 21-year-old Wendy, Dick's daughter by a previous marriage, whom he and Valerie have raised since she was 14.

Apart from Dick's new job ("I really like having to be someplace at 9:30 every morning"), there have been other changes in the Harper-Schaal life-style. For one, Val, who is adored by most of her colleagues, has shown a few flashes of previously unseen star temperament. This summer she refused to sign a new Rhoda contract until her salary was increased $2,000 to $17,000 for each of 22 episodes. She demanded that her TV mother, Nancy Walker, be given her own dressing room. And, in Valerie's own, she strongly suggested a stereo be installed. The producers capitulated on Aug. 22, her 34th birthday.

Another change is the arrival of Valerie's 15-year-old nephew, Victor, her sister Leah's child, to live with her and Dick in their eight-room ranch house in Westwood Village. Victor and Dick decided on the arrangement without Val's knowledge, but she's cool-and is even wondering about a baby of her own. "I used to go into a panic when my period was late," she says. "But if I got pregnant tomorrow it'd be okay."

Nothing has affected Valerie and Dick so much as their enthusiastic acceptance, along with 50,000 other believers, of the pop-philosophy program of onetime encyclopedia sales-man Werner Erhart (ne Jack Rosenberg). Two ego-bending $250 weekend marathons of EST (for Erhart Seminar Training) with one of Erhart's eight "trainers," and a third with The Master himself, Val and Dick say, have revolutionized their lives. Dick now finds himself "the best company I've ever been in my life-infinitely more human." His wife (who first thought it was "just more of that L.A. booga-boo-ga, like astrology and tarot") claims that EST has taken "the effort, sweat and strain out of what I do. I can handle the daily upsets better. I used to get some ego thing out of saying I wasn't a star, just an actress. Forget it. I'm a star. I wanted it, I worked for it, I got it.  Werner helped me take the lie out of what I was doing."

Whatever else, EST seems to have reconciled Valerie and Dick to their newly imposed separate bliss, which the gossip columns and fan mags have managed to build into a split. It doesn't seem likely. "Divorce is virtually out of the question," says Dick. "Val and I couldn't get together long enough to go over the terms."