TV icon Mary Tyler Moore carried the weight of her only son's death on her shoulders for nearly four decades and regret haunted her until she died in 2017 at age 80.
It was 1980 when Moore’s 24-year-old son, Richie Meeker, shot himself. There was talk of it being a suicide but Moore and others claimed he accidentally shot himself. The death left her racked with guilt.
Author Herbie J. Pilato, who earlier this year released a book titled "Mary: The Mary Tyler Moore Story," spoke about Moore's vulnerable moments as a mother in an interview with Fox News published Wednesday.
"She admitted that she was not the best mother," Pilato said. "She was devastated by her son’s death and faced a lot of guilt for feeling like she wasn’t the best mother she could have been."
Pilato explained that, after Ritchie's death, Moore said she wished she had children later in life, or more than one child, so that she could have done a better job at being a mother.
Ritchie was born the same year that his father, Richard Meeker, and mother split in 1961. Following the divorce, Moore threw herself into her work, taking on numerous projects including "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which put her on the showbiz map.
Her hard work had paid off but it had also strained her relationship with her son.
"I demanded a lot of Richie," Moore admitted in her 1995 memoir "After All," according to an excerpt published by Us Weekly. "I was responsible for a lot of alienation. There is no question about it. By the time Richie was 5, I had already let him down. When he needed me the most, I was busier and even more self-concerned than I had been when he was an impressionable infant."
Then the tragedy struck in 1980.
Richie, who was a gun collector, was at the University of Southern California when he died.
According to reports he had been loading and unloading a short-barreled gun when it went off. It was not long before word of suicide began to spread but Moore denied it.
"A colleague of mine actually worked with Richie at CBS," Pilato said. "It seemed like everything was fine in his life. He never seemed like an unhappy person. But the whole suicide aspect became an unfortunate rumor when he died."
Pilato's book touches upon sensitive subjects but the author said his aim was to show the world another side of Moore.
"I did not set out to write a salacious biography," he told Fox News. "This book is not salacious, but it is the closest thing to the objective truth that I came to with the most dignity I could muster to tell her story."
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