By Tucker Carden

Terry Sims ’74 is a busy man. Or as he puts it, “I’m a workaholic.”

That tends to happen when you work as a hospital administrator in New York City with a multi-million-dollar budget.

Or when you serve as executive assistant to one of the pioneers of American television and entertainment – Mary Tyler Moore.

It also happens when you’re the associate producer of an Emmy-nominated documentary – Being Mary Tyler Moore – focused on the life, career, and activism of your former boss.

That’s what Sims has been up to these days, and his journey to this point has been full of surprises.

Born in Kentucky, Sims’ family moved to Alabama when he was three years old, where they settled in Frisco City. Soon, they moved to Bay Minette, where he went to high school.

When it came time to choose a college destination, Sims felt that he was “born and bred to go to the University of Alabama.” But when he visited campus, it just felt too big. Instead of packing up and heading to Tuscaloosa, Sims’ piano teacher helped him get a scholarship to Birmingham-Southern, where he found a real home away from home.

On the Hilltop, Sims majored in piano and music education, as well as singing in the Concert Choir. “Hugh Thomas [Professor Emeritus of Music] is a god to me,” he says. These activities drew him to musical theatre and show business, which would become the primary subject of his life’s work.

After graduation, Sims taught music in several schools in the Birmingham area, including Fairfield High School, and even got a master’s degree from Montevallo. This work, along with his experiences as a student, made him develop “a taste for theatre.” And his hunger was only getting stronger.

So, in 1981, he moved to New York City “with no job and no place to live.” Soon after the move, he got a temp job at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, not necessarily the industry that he was looking to get into, but it stuck. “Every time I tried to leave the hospital,” Sims says, “I got a raise and a promotion.”

Mt. Sinai ended up sparking a major turn of events in Sims’ journey. There, he connected and worked with Dr. Robert Levine, who just so happened to be married to entertainment royalty: actress Mary Tyler Moore. “I met her through him,” Sims remembers, “and I told her to get me out of here.”

“It took about two years for it to really fall into place,” he says, “and originally it was set up where I would work for Mary two or three days a week and in Robert’s office as a consultant for two or three days a week.”

That set up didn’t last long, though.

“I think I only worked in Robert’s office for two weeks before Mary said, ‘You can’t have him; he’s mine,’” Sims says, “and I did that for the next twenty-five years.”

For Sims, working with Mary Tyler Moore was a joy. “Mary would always say that I ran her life,” he says, “I never left her alone; I was always by her side.” Agents and managers had to “get through” him before they could speak to Mary. “I would just make sure that she was in the right place at the right time and had what she needed to keep moving in the right direction,” he says.

Through it all, Sims won’t hesitate to tell you how she was “always so generous and so good to me.” He recalls one instance when this was more apparent than ever.

“It seemed like we were always traveling on my birthday,” he says, “whether we were in California filming something, or I think we were even in Australia one year.” This particular year, they were on a book tour for Moore’s newly released autobiography – After All. At each stop on the tour, Moore “would give her speech that lasted about an hour and have a question-and-answer period with the audience, and that was it.”

But this night was different.

“Before she left the stage at the end of her part,” Sims remembers, “she said ‘Well you’ve been such a great audience, but I wonder if I could ask something of you.” Given the level of attention the crowd had given to Moore that night, they were ready to do anything for her.

Sims recalls Moore telling the audience that “‘today is my best friend’s birthday, and I wonder if you would join me in singing Happy Birthday to my friend Terry.’” She then beckoned Sims out on stage from his usual spot in the wing.

From there, thousands of people sang at the top of their lungs, helping Terry Sims ring in another year of life.

“Talk about tearing up,” he says, “because 3,000 people singing Happy Birthday to you doesn’t happen very often, especially when Mary Tyler Moore is leading the way.” Sims is sure that he’ll always remember the “special time” that was had that night. “That’s just the way she treated me,” he says, “and that says a lot about her.”

Sims continued working for Moore until her health took a turn for the worse. “It got to the point where she didn’t need my help as much as she needed medical help,” he says. So he went back into the medical profession, ending up as the administrative director of cardiology surgery and anesthesia at NYU Medical Center. “After eight years of that,” Sims says, “I thought I’d had enough, so I retired.”

His service to Mary Tyler Moore wasn’t done just yet though. After her untimely death in 2017, Sims helped plan a celebration of life for her in California. Not long after, Dr. Levine called him back to work on a documentary about Moore. The film, titled Being Mary Tyler Moore, was released in May on Max and was recently nominated for an Emmy Award.

Sims found out about the nomination on a Zoom call for another Moore-adjacent project he’s involved with – The Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative – focused on bringing an end to blindness caused by diabetes. “That was a great way to find out,” he says, “it’s very exciting.”

The release of Being Mary Tyler Moore has given Sims a chance to reflect on a job and a friendship that was deeply meaningful to him, especially leading up to the premiere of the documentary, when he was asked to gather all the magazine covers that Moore had appeared on.

“I knew she had been on twenty-two TV Guide covers and on a lot of different magazines and newspapers,” he says, “and it took me several weeks to pull all of those and get them sent to LA.” Sims wasn’t yet aware of the surprise that waited for him there.

“The night of the premiere, when Robert and I got there,” says Sims, “they took me and said, ‘Terry, we want you to see this before anyone else.’” They led him into another room where he saw “a giant wall of all the photographs” that he’d gathered and sent. “It was a collage of all the magazine covers, interspersed with some photographs of her early career,” Sims says, “and I just started crying.”

“It was just overwhelming and meant so much to me. That was one of the highlights of my life, to be there and to be recognized for my work, and I knew Mary would have loved it.”

Being Mary Tyler Moore, presented by HBO Documentary Films, was released on May 26 and can be viewed on the Max streaming service. Read more about the movie here.