Rachael gives TV legend Mary Tyler Moore an especially warm welcome, including a full choir belting out the theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. "Do you still love that song as much as we do?" Rachael asks the star. "Yes!" says Mary, adding, "I actually do know the lyrics."

It's been nearly 40 years since Mary first entered the fictional WJM newsroom with Ed Asner, Ted Knight and Gavin MacLeod, where Mary says they had as much fun as it looked on screen. "We never took ourselves seriously," she recalls. "You can't keep a straight face around Cloris Leachman if you tried!" Rachael asks what Mary would do if she were able to spend another day with her character, the lovable Mary Richards, and the real-life Mary has a simple response: "We'd probably head for the sweet shop," she says, "and we would sit there and order the most sugary thing that we could find, because in fiction I am not a diabetic!"

She was diagnosed as an adult, and she recounts her experience with the disease in her new book Growing Up Again: Life, Loves and Oh Yeah, Diabetes. Mary describes herself as a "rebel" who initially balked at her diagnosis by continuing to eat donuts and other prohibited foods. "They were not smart behaviors and I didn't mean to be so self-centered and so stupid, but I'm hoping that people who read this book will see that you have to be careful. And the more careful you are, the less work it seems," she says. Mary's proceeds from the book will benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, which is where Mary found her own inspiration to take the disease seriously when she started to volunteer with children. "Because I'm supposedly their leader, and they're the ones that seem to do it so much better than I ever did!" she says. "I wasn't going to be outdone, so I decided to grow up after all."

Related Links

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation