My Happy Days in Hollywood (17 page)

“Not a lot. I’m too busy working on
Happy Days
,” I said.

“Come on. You must have something else,” he said. “A spinoff?”

The truth was I did have one idea I had been mulling over. My sister Penny and actress Cindy Williams had appeared a few months earlier on
Happy Days
playing romantic dates for Fonzie and Richie. Their characters were girls from the wrong side of the tracks set against the supersmart Richie and cooler-than-ice Fonzie. The studio audience seemed to love Penny and Cindy, and I wondered if I could build a new show around them. Cindy was an adorable, rubber-faced actress who could also sing. Together the girls were unpredictably funny. To create a popular show, however, I knew I needed to find a
niche that wasn’t currently being filled on television. So I brought up my idea with Fred.

“I was thinking that there are no blue-collar women on television,” I said.

“What do you mean? Tell me more,” he asked.

“There are all these middle-class or these fancy wealthy women on television like Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore—well-dressed women with perfect hair and good diction. But no women who do factory work or talk like regular working-class single people from the neighborhood,” I said.

“I love the idea. Make it a show,” he said. “I love a spinoff.”

Affable Fred Silverman had written his college thesis on how to schedule network shows. He got an A.

And just like that I was handed the green light for another sitcom deal. Actually, Fred liked Penny when he was at CBS and Penny was on
Paul Sands in Lovers and Friends
. When that series was canceled, Penny and her friend Cindy were a struggling writing team. They were not really sure they wanted to be actresses.

Coincidentally, that same week my mother called and told me to get my little sister another acting job. Penny had done a great job on
The Odd Couple
as Oscar’s secretary, Myrna Turner. But when
The Odd Couple
ended, Penny was out of work again. So I thought if I could create a blue-collar show starring Penny, then I could make Fred Silverman and my mother happy at the same time.

To create the characters of Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney, I took pieces from their
Happy Days
appearance and then borrowed material from two characters I had once seen in Brooklyn. The year was around 1958, and we were all out of the army. My friend Jimmy, who had served in Korea with me, and I went out one night after playing in a nightclub. We met some girls and took them to a coffee shop around 2:00
A.M
. Suddenly another girl said something rude to my date. My girl turned to me and said, “Garry, would you hold my coat?” And then my date beat up the other girl. I had never seen two girls fistfight before, and it fascinated me. The tough-as-nails quality of
Laverne & Shirley
was based on that single night fight in Brooklyn.

I cast Penny, and I was able to hire Cindy as the other lead. I
knew Cindy well because she had once dated Fred Roos, who was now a producer for Francis Coppola. We also adopted our family dog from Cindy, and named her Cindy. I wanted the new show to involve a lot of physical comedy, and Penny and Cindy were both willing and able to tackle stunts. Penny was athletic and had once dreamed of being a stunt girl. Cindy was athletic as well and once told me, “I’m so little I better be brave.” They also had the look that I wanted. I could put them in smocks and place them in a bottle-capping factory and they would be believable as regular, hardworking girls from Milwaukee. Casting for me is key, so to get one of my comic mentors, Phil Foster, to join the cast as Laverne’s father made me secure, too. Penny and Phil had New York accents, and the show took place in Milwaukee, so we made believe they had moved back to Wisconsin from New York to explain their New York accents.

We shot the ten-minute pilot for
Laverne & Shirley
one night after
Happy Days
and paid that crew overtime. The studio and network liked the ten minutes so much they gave us money to make a full pilot that aired. Cindy Williams, however, decided after making the ten-minute segment that she didn’t want to sign on for a sitcom. So we made another ten-minute presentation with Penny paired with an actress named Liberty Williams, who was no relation to Cindy. We gave both ten-minute segments to Michael Eisner. He decided he liked the one with Penny and Cindy best and said he would talk Cindy into signing a deal. And he did. Penny and Cindy went on to become television stars, and I don’t know what ever became of Liberty. I always wondered how Michael talked Cindy into signing the contract if she didn’t want to star in a sitcom. I imagine he probably told her it would run for one season, thirteen episodes, and then the show would be off the air. What happened, of course, is now television history, because
Laverne & Shirley
ran for eight years.

The day after
Laverne & Shirley
first aired I ran to check the ratings.

“Honey, I can’t find it,” I said to my wife at the breakfast table.

“What do you mean? It must be there,” she said. “They list all the shows.”

“No. Honestly. I don’t see it. I’m going crazy,” I said.

My wife took the ratings sheet, looked at it, and then smiled as she showed it to me.

“You weren’t looking high enough,” she said. “
Laverne & Shirley
debuted at number one!”

I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen anything like it before. It was a miracle. Suddenly Penny and Cindy were in a hit television series, and I was my sister’s new boss. My mom was happy, and Fred Silverman had his spinoff. We were all surprised at how quickly the show had found an audience.

Today, when I am feeling compassionate and kind, I think back sympathetically toward Penny and Cindy and how hard it must have been for them to suddenly be stars of a top-rated sitcom. A television show is so demanding that few can live up to the challenges. The job paid well, but the hours and pressures of performing in front of a live studio audience, and carrying an entire show on their backs, were an awesome responsibility for two actresses with hardly any experience who weren’t even sure they wanted to become actresses. But when I’m not feeling compassionate toward them, I am saddened and disappointed that they were too immature to handle the job. If there was ever a show that was full of joy, it was
Happy Days
. If there was ever a show full of headaches and people taking aspirin, it was
Laverne & Shirley
.

Nobody knew exactly how big the show was until Penny and Cindy were in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade the first season. They were asked to ride on a float, and from the top of their float, they could see their success. Penny described the scene to me later. More than 100,000 fans were cheering their names. “Laverne and Shirley! Laverne and Shirley! Laverne and Shirley!” Not only were fans asking for their autographs, but most of the policemen running the parade asked for autographs, too. After that trip Penny and Cindy knew they were famous. What they did with that information and power became the problem. That moment made them feel in charge of the show. Fame can be a wonderful thing as well as a destructive force. It has ruined the lives of so many actors in Hollywood. Penny and Cindy weren’t able to balance their lives with the
notoriety. To me they both always seemed anxious, never settled or content. Also, despite their fame Penny and Cindy didn’t think they deserved it. They thought it was a fluke and an accident, and in a few days or months it could all disappear.

It was the 1970s, so drugs and alcohol were prevalent on many television shows, except, I’m pleased to say,
Happy Days
. My challenge was to police the adversarial writers and cast and crew of
Laverne & Shirley
. Their meetings, whatever the reason, were bound to go off-track and I had to mediate. It drained me to the point that I started losing weight from stress and I had to drink high-calorie protein shakes to stay healthy. Penny and Cindy thought that they knew more than anyone else and that the writing staff was without talent. The writers, on the other hand, thought Penny and Cindy were mean, too young to be so bossy, and narcissistic. On a daily basis there was infighting, yelling, cursing, and so much more. My dad taught me that when other people are misbehaving around you, you need to find the strength to behave so you don’t get caught in their drama. I tried to remind myself of that every day on
Laverne & Shirley
, but sometimes the stress got to me.

One day I got out of the shower at my house. I toweled off and reached for the blow-dryer. I stood there for several minutes until I suddenly realized something. There was no hot air coming out of the dryer. The reason was simple: I was holding the telephone receiver. The pulsating beep of a dial tone brought me back to reality. Another time I had lunch with an actress. While we were talking outside the restaurant, the valet brought my car around. I said goodbye to her as I opened the car door and stepped inside. It wasn’t until I closed the door that I realized I was sitting in the backseat. These things could happen to anyone under stress, but they happened to me a little too often during the eight tumultuous years of
Laverne & Shirley
.

Penny and Cindy would plow through writers, leaving me constantly looking for replacements. Sometimes I would go over to
Happy Days
and entice a writer or two to come and take a spin on
Laverne & Shirley
. I pretended it was an easy, breezy show to write for, but most of the writers on
Happy Days
knew better. When you
hire actors or actresses for a series, you look for people who have well-rounded lives with supportive friends and family. But when hiring writers, you look for people with no lives so they will be willing to stay as long as you want them to in order to get the script rewritten before the cameras roll. I searched in comedy clubs, workshops, and bars for writers with no lives who would work late on any episode, difficult or not.

When I see a problem, I don’t like to let it sit there and get worse. I like to search for new ways to solve it. I thought if only I could give Penny and Cindy a writer they truly loved and bonded with, then everything would settle down. So one day I asked Arthur Silver to move from
Happy Days
to
Laverne & Shirley
. He agreed. Arthur is a man with a calm and quiet demeanor, and I thought he could bring serenity to the set of
Laverne & Shirley
just like he had to
Happy Days
when he produced it with Bob Brunner.

However, after only a few weeks in his new position, Arthur asked to have a private meeting with me.

“Garry, something happened last night,” he said, looking ghostly white.

“What happened, Arthur?” I asked. “Please tell me. How can I help?”

“It was late and I had finished up on
Laverne & Shirley
. I got into my car, and as I was pulling out of the parking space, I saw Penny, Cindy, Lenny, and Squiggy up ahead. That is when I realized that my foot was on the gas pedal. I wanted to run them down. So I have to quit the show. It is too much stress for me.”

“Ah, Arthur,” I said with sympathy. “We can’t have that.”

“I know. I need off the show,” he said. “Please can I go back to
Happy Days
?”

“Of course. I understand completely. I only wish I could go with you. Thank you for trying.”

After Arthur I hired a very funny writer named Monica Johnson, who was the sister of my writing partner Jerry Belson. Shortly after Monica started I saw her walking across the lot on her way to the set. She was wearing pajamas, a fur coat, high heels, and curlers in her hair. That was how she would come to work. She didn’t
bother to take the time even to dress, and was clearly coming unglued from the stress of her job. I hoped her quirky attire and ability to call meetings at odd hours might be a good fit for Penny and Cindy. But Monica did not stay long at the
Laverne & Shirley
writers’ table either.

We tried other solutions, including bringing on Paula Roth, a woman from the Bronx who had been friends with us growing up. Paula had no experience writing, but she seemed to get Penny’s voice down right and the girls considered her a friend of the court instead of an enemy. Paula had tap-danced and performed with Penny, Ronny, and me in my mother’s recitals. So what she lacked in experience she had in familiarity.

As the years went by, Penny’s and Cindy’s personal lives caused another layer of conflict. Penny got divorced and Cindy broke up with a boyfriend. Now they were still making a lot of money but were not happy because neither had a boyfriend or a husband to share it with.

The fact was my parents never accepted Penny’s success. My mother had a linear mind. If you were good you should find success, and if you were bad you should find failure. In my mom’s mind, Penny had been a bad kid, so her success as an adult didn’t make sense. My mother couldn’t get her brain around the fact that Penny was now more famous than all of us put together. Whenever I asked my mom if she liked the show, she would say, “Put more tap dancing in it.” Mom was jealous. People would come up to my mom and say, “Wow, your daughter is famous,” and Mom would remain unimpressed. And Dad found it baffling that both Penny and I were making more money than he was.

One day Penny came to me and said she had not gotten her paycheck. I said I would find out where the problem was. After a quick trip to the payroll department, I found out my father was the problem. Dad was now an executive producer on
Laverne & Shirley
, and that week he had not signed Penny’s paycheck. He was withholding her wages for some reason. No one in the payroll department knew why, so I went to talk to my dad.

“Penny didn’t get paid this week,” I said.

“I know,” said Dad.

“That’s a seventy-five-thousand-dollar paycheck,” I said.

“I know.”

“So where is it?”

“In my desk drawer,” he said. “Safe.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She was fresh with me today. And I’m not giving her the check until she apologizes,” he said.