My Happy Days in Hollywood (13 page)

People always ask me how
Happy Days
got on the air, and the truth is, it all started with a snowstorm. Snow, it turns out, is lucky for me that way. Snow coated my childhood memories in the Bronx. Snow lined the streets of Sheridan Road when I went to college at Northwestern. Snow fell on my helmet when I served in the army in Korea. And then a snowstorm on the East Coast brought about an idea that would change my life in television forever. During a snowstorm everyone has to take time to pause.

Here’s what happened: The year was 1973, and Michael Eisner, then the head of Paramount, was delayed on the East Coast with the up-and-coming Paramount executive Tom Miller. Not sure when their flight would take off, the two men started pitching sitcom ideas that they could develop for ABC, their partner network at the time. Eisner brought up the idea for a family show with the feel of the old show
I Remember Mama
, which was about a Norwegian family. Tom mentioned my name to produce it because
The Odd Couple
was headed toward its final season. When they pitched the idea to me, I was not exactly rushing to do it.

“
I Remember Mama
? The show about Swedish people?”

“Norwegians,” said Miller.

“Either way. Swedes or Norwegians, I don’t think I can create a show about guys named Lars and Hans in the 1930s,” I told them. “I don’t know families like that. But what about a family show about the 1950s? That I know. That’s when I grew up, and I can give you a nostalgic show about that.”

Eisner and Miller liked my idea. So I wrote a pilot episode about a family in the 1950s who were the first in their neighborhood to get a television set. The story was a personal one for me. I remember when we got our first television set, and how special it made me feel. Mel Ferber directed the pilot, which starred Harold Gould,
Marion Ross, and Ron Howard. We pitched it to ABC, and they didn’t buy it. They just didn’t see the demographic appeal of a show in the 1950s airing during the early 1970s. But I saw beyond their vision: I knew the show had a “dated” feel to begin with, so in the reruns it would never go out of style. ABC, however, was simply not ready for
Happy Days
. So in 1971 Paramount put it on the series
Love, American Style
, otherwise known as the graveyard for dead pilots. The episode was called “New Family in Town,” and after it aired we thought
Happy Days
was indeed dead.

But then the tide suddenly turned: My friend from Korea Fred Roos was producing a film with George Lucas called
American Graffiti
about the 1950s. They wanted to see my 1950s pilot because they were thinking of casting Ron Howard as the lead of their movie. They liked Ron, cast him, and
American Graffiti
was a big hit. Then a play called
Grease
hit Broadway, and it further reinforced the popularity of the 1950s. The executives at ABC called Eisner, and he remembered my pilot about the 1950s.
Happy Days
was repitched as a midseason replacement and given a second life three years after it appeared on
Love, American Style
. Television is a derivative medium. If something is hot, television will copy it and frequently make it a success.

Money became a big issue when I created
Happy Days
. I began working with a young agent named Joel Cohen, who worked for my previous agent, Frank Cooper. Joel was a serious man who told boring stories but that is what made him such a great agent. He would bore people to death so they would give in and make a deal. Together Joel and I crafted my deal memo for
Happy Days
. He asked me what I wanted. I said I would like a basketball court on the Paramount lot, and a malted milk machine in my office. I was serious. That’s what I knew would make me happy. I also said maybe a car. At first I said a Volkswagen, because it was the first name of a car that popped into my head. But then my clearheaded wife called Paramount herself and said, “Garry doesn’t know anything about cars. He meant to say a
Mercedes
.” As far as salary went, I thought I should ask for the same amount I got on the fourth season of
The Odd Couple
. But Joel had another idea up his sleeve.

“This new show,
Happy Days
, do you believe in it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I would have given a more ambivalent answer about a show like
Hey Landlord!
but I knew
Happy Days
was good from the moment we sold the pilot. And for me the show also was important because I was writing about my own childhood, and I knew I would never run out of stories.

“Well then, why don’t we shock them?” Joel said. “They are fighting about giving you a raise on
The Odd Couple
, so we will say fine to that. We won’t even put up a fight. They’ve offered you average money per episode on
Happy Days
. So let’s shock them even more, and say you’ll take less per episode on
Happy Days
. In exchange for that, you will ask for a larger ownership piece of
Happy Days
.”

It was a gamble for sure. We were betting on the fact that
Happy Days
would turn out to be a hit, and we were right. I never had a strong head for making deals, but Joel was brilliant at it. Jack and Tony owned most of
The Odd Couple
, and I owned very little. With
Happy Days
, however, I had much more to gain. We didn’t know the show would run eleven seasons, but I did have a feeling from the beginning that it was something worth betting on.

I also loved the creativity involved in launching
Happy Days
. In
Grease
and
American Graffiti
, there were clearly identified bad guys. Eisner wanted me to have a gang element in
Happy Days
, but we couldn’t afford a whole gang. So I created a character who could be a one-man gang. I based him on a few guys I had known growing up, namely Peter Wagner, who had owned a motorcycle and had gone to YMCA Camp Greenkill with me. All the guys in my neighborhood thought Peter was cool. Even when he wasn’t riding his motorcycle we knew he had a bike, and that was cool enough. He could just be leaning against the bike and he was tough. While we were all fast-talking, wisecracking kids, Pete was a man who said few words, but each one packed a powerful punch. Also, he was from a mysterious land called Yonkers, where few of us had ever been.

On
Happy Days
, I wanted to call my cool character Mash after my Italian name, Masciarelli, but Larry Gelbart already had an army hospital show called
M*A*S*H
, so that seemed too confusing. Bob Brunner, my writer friend from the
Daily News
, suggested we
call him Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzie for short. I liked the sound of that name. (I had brought Bob out to Hollywood earlier to help write on
The Odd Couple
. Bob went on to be the show runner and producer for two series called
Webster
and
Diff ’rent Strokes
and did quite well for himself.)

I created the characters for the new sitcom and we launched a major casting search for likable actors, but one of the keys to the success of
Happy Days
was director Jerry Paris, who directed for us on
The Odd Couple
. During the first year we shot
Happy Days
with one camera and he directed some of the thirteen episodes. In the second year, when we went to three cameras and a live audience, he became our series director, a job he held for the next ten seasons. To have a nurturing father figure like Jerry Paris as director on a series that starred so many young people was invaluable. It allowed Jerry to form close working relationships with all of the actors. This is not to say that Jerry couldn’t drive us all crazy. Whenever his daughter was selling Girl Scout cookies, he would bug every single cast and crew member until all the boxes were sold. But most of the time Jerry was everything we wanted him to be as a director: sensible, stable, reliable, and funny. Wearing his famous red V-neck pullover sweater, Jerry was at the helm every Friday night. He had more energy than any person I had ever worked with. We filmed in front of a live audience. Unlike
The Odd Couple
, which had primarily an adult audience,
Happy Days
had an audience filled with little kids, teenagers, and adults. The energy was exciting, festive, and always fun.

I was forty years old when I started producing
Happy Days
, and I reached a defining point in my relationship with my writing partner Jerry Belson. We decided to go in different directions. After
The Odd Couple
, Jerry didn’t want to produce
Happy Days
with me. He wanted to write movies, and to be honest, he viewed the true
Happy Days
as too optimistic for him. His own humor skewed darker, more esoteric. When Penny bought a new house I said, “Isn’t her house great?” And Jerry said without missing a beat, “It’s a lovely house to live in if life were worth living.” A ninety-three-year-old actress we both knew died, and when I asked how he said simply, “Skiing.”
Funny things were always coming out of Jerry’s mouth, and together we laughed all the time while working. The friendship and the laughter we shared would outlast even our writing partnership.

I wanted to continue to work in television because I thought it would allow me to be a better dad, too. Belson, though a good father, didn’t have that same ideal. Jerry and I once took our kids to the zoo together and he was bored to death, while I loved it. I liked seeing things through children’s eyes, especially those of little kids. And I loved television for the flexibility it offered me as a parent. If my son had a T-ball game on a Tuesday, I could be there. If my daughter Lori needed help with her tennis tryouts or her homework, I could be there. If my daughter Kathleen had a swim meet, I could be there, too. (To be honest, swim meets can be a little boring and long. You watch your kid swim the butterfly for five minutes and then wait another hour for the backstroke. I would sometimes bring my typewriter and write or read scripts in between races. Occasionally I talked to other dads. One said to me, “You think this is boring. My other daughter does twirling.”) Being a dad meant showing up. I could be there for my kids and work on a hit TV series. I’d always dreamed of being the kind of hands-on dad my own dad had not been.
Happy Days
would allow me to do that.

Another difference between Belson and me was our attitude toward young actors and writers. Jerry knew his sense of humor was superior, while I was more interested in sharing my experience with the up-and-coming writers. Jerry thought they would steal material from him and eventually take his job.

One of the most influential men in my career was Tom Miller, the producer of
Happy Days
. Tom had grown up in Milwaukee, and that’s one of the reasons the series was set there. His parents owned a dry cleaning business, and we figured we could get free dry cleaning when we shot on location. Tom was always promoting my career. He would say things in network meetings that I would never say myself, like “Garry is a major talent.” Tom loved making entertainment, and before he went into television he had worked as director Billy Wilder’s assistant. Tom wore the creative producer hat on
Happy Days
, and our other producer, Eddie Milkis, wore the
technical one. Together the three of us made a great television producing team because we each brought our own talents to the table without too much ego to complicate things.

As with
The Odd Couple
, I put together a writers’ table with faces new and old. Some got overwhelmed by the pace and we had to let them go. One writer locked himself in his office, started playing his guitar, and wouldn’t come out. He didn’t last long. But when writers left we replaced them the next day. When Lowell Ganz finished up on
The Odd Couple
, I moved him over to
Happy Days
to write and produce. Lowell broke up with writer Mark Rothman, and we brought in new writers such as Brian Levant and Babaloo Mandel. I also hired older writers, like Walter Kempley and Bob Howard, who had worked in New York with me on Jack Paar’s
Tonight Show
. We even had a very young writer who had just gotten out of Chino State Prison for juveniles, and another one who lived out of his car until he saved enough money to rent an apartment. Again, you didn’t need the perfect education to write for
Happy Days
. It didn’t matter what background you had as a writer, you just needed to be funny and be able to stay up late. Stamina and quickness counted for a lot back then, and I was not afraid to fire those who didn’t have both.

Happy Days
will always be remembered most for the cast. Within the first season we all went from new friends to old friends. I didn’t know Henry Winkler before he auditioned for the part of Fonzie. And I remember he was not at all the type of actor I was looking for. I thought I wanted a tall, handsome blond, and in walked a short, dark-haired actor from Emerson College and the Yale School of Drama. But before I could dismiss him, I hired him. His audition taught me something. Casting isn’t always about what you’re looking for. Sometimes it is about recognizing potential and what is standing in front of you. Henry wasn’t Fonzie, but he could “act” like Fonzie.

We had no idea at the time that Henry’s portrayal of Fonzie would become so popular with the television audience. In fact, Fonzie began as a secondary character with very few lines. When he started drawing so much focus, we had to adjust the scripts. Henry was very energetic and was becoming a more important force on the show. At one point Fonzie was so wildly popular that I got a
call from ABC saying that they wanted to change the name of the show from
Happy Days
to
Fonzie
. Ron Howard, who played Richie Cunningham, and Henry both knew about this suggestion, but we didn’t have to spend much time to decide what to do. Changing the name of the show would be insulting to Ron, our kind and steady star. Henry agreed with me and wouldn’t support any change in the title. So Henry proved to be not only a talented actor but a sensitive gentleman as well. Another actor might have taken the new title and run with it, but that wasn’t Henry’s style, and it still isn’t.