My Happy Days in Hollywood (18 page)

“Dad, you can’t treat Penny like a child. She is a grown-up with a mortgage.”

“I don’t care how old she is. She was fresh with her father and she needs to apologize,” he said.

So eventually, Penny apologized and Dad gave her the paycheck. A small victory, but at least something on
Laverne & Shirley
was resolved. There were some good days on the show, but most were days filled with quarrels, fits, and fires I needed to put out. After a few years Cindy would listen to me when I said, “I have to go home to be with my family and rest. We will discuss the script tomorrow.” But Penny wouldn’t take no for an answer. If she had a complaint or concern, she would have her driver follow me home. I would be having a meatball supper at the dinner table and my wife would say, “There’s Penny at the gate again. Now she is trying to climb over it.” But she was my little sister, and she knew I would always answer the door and take her phone calls.

Penny and Cindy were not out of touch with reality. They knew they were tough on the writers and they knew they were driving me crazy. Animosity grew like mold in the walls of the
Laverne & Shirley
soundstage. However, it is customary for the stars of a television show to give the cast and crew Christmas gifts. One year Penny and Cindy gave out dartboards. The bull’s-eye was a picture of the two of them dressed in costumes from an episode in which they played Santa’s elves. It was the hands-down favorite gift of everyone who worked on the show. The writing staff, composed of some of the best in the business, couldn’t wait to sharpen their darts and take
aim at Penny and Cindy. Most of the writers I know from that show still have their dartboards in their garages and basements. I have to admit I still have my dartboard in my office.

I wished every night for eight years that Penny and Cindy could find happiness with the show. One night we were filming before our live audience and the show was just exceptional. It was so terrific that the studio audience gave Penny and Cindy a standing ovation. I have never seen anything like it before, not even on
The Odd Couple
or
Happy Days
. There was such appreciation in the room.

I turned to my sister, so proud of her.

“Penny, isn’t this wonderful?” I said. “You are a gigantic success.”

“Sure, but what am I going to do tonight? I have no boyfriend and bad hair,” she said, and she meant it. One of Penny’s first jobs in the business had been a Head & Shoulders shampoo commercial. A young Farrah Fawcett was cast, too. Penny was the girl with dandruff hair, and Farrah was the girl with clean hair. While Penny and Farrah were getting their makeup done, their stand-ins stood on their marks to light the shot. Farrah’s stand-in wore a sign that said
BEAUTIFUL GIRL
, while Penny’s stand-in wore a sign that read
DANDRUFF GIRL
. Farrah tried to cross out
DANDRUFF
, but the damage had been done. Penny always wanted to be the beautiful girl with the clean, fluffy hair, and she spent the rest of her life fighting to be her. Penny had been married to actor Rob Reiner, but as his show
All in the Family
was going off the air,
Laverne & Shirley
was becoming a hit. The incompatibility of their careers put too much pressure on their marriage. Penny was fine being the second banana to Rob early on in their marriage. But she had no tools to learn how to be more famous and powerful than he was. Her whole sense of self-worth appeared to be based on men rather than achievement.

Less than fulfilling home lives left both Penny and Cindy feeling that their television success didn’t mean enough. They worried all the time about being pretty enough, about dating, and about girlie things that I had no experience with. They made Jack Klugman and Tony Randall look like perfectly behaved Prince Charmings. I thought if we worked hard, put in long hours, and made a decent
salary, we would all find contentment on
Laverne & Shirley
. But they were never satisfied. Time and time again I would find myself drifting over to the set of
Happy Days
to hear about people getting married and having babies and being content. I was thankful to have at least one show where people were finding success on the set and off.

Laverne & Shirley
was a television show that broke new ground, something I had never been accused of that often. Who would expect that a show about two female brewery bottle cappers would introduce the audience to a slapstick kind of humor that was designed as a tribute to Lucille Ball? I never had the chance to talk to Lucy about what she thought of
Laverne & Shirley
, but I think she would have been proud. I took the lessons she had taught me about comedy and taught them to my sister Penny and our friend Cindy. I was forever grateful for the time I spent writing for Lucy, because that training made me a stronger writer and producer for the rest of my career.

Like Lucy, Penny and Cindy were both fearless performers. To this day I admire them for that. They wanted to make
Laverne & Shirley
the very best sitcom it could be. They would be ranting and raving in the writers’ meetings, but the moment the audience was there, they would rise to the occasion. They were both born to perform. They would never let the crew or the audience or the writers down in the final hour. They might drive us all crazy until the
final
hour, but they showed up when we needed them.

So as much as they frustrated me, I respected them both. Penny and Cindy were insecure and contrary but not without incredible talent and timing. That was the conflict: If they weren’t talented, the series would have crashed and burned within the first few years. But they are two of the funniest comedians I have ever worked with in television. And I remember the day they both blew me away. It was an episode in which Laverne and Shirley worked as candy striper volunteers. In one scene I put a fat man in a hospital bed and told them they had to change the sheets with the man in the bed. I watched as they tackled the scene. Penny tried to pull the sheet out from under the patient and slipped halfway under the bed. We did
the scene again, only this time I greased the floor so Penny slid all the way under the bed.

I think Cindy and I both knew that day what we could not say out loud: Penny’s comic talents had surpassed us. Cindy would have to work hard to keep up with her, and I would have to work harder to find them both material to keep Penny on top and Cindy right on top with her. Penny had raised the bar of talent and timing for all of us. The episode remains my favorite one of
Laverne & Shirley
. My kid sister had surprised me and impressed me that day and earned new respect in my eyes forever.

Toward the end of the show’s run, things got worse when Cindy’s manager, Pat McQueeney, an old friend of mine, started making more demands. Eventually, Cindy left the show to have a baby. Penny went on for another season alone. Things ended with some hurt feelings, but now everyone seems to be friends again because most of us are too old to hang on to old anger. I think Cindy finally found happiness raising a family and Penny found her niche in directing movies. Penny became the first woman director ever to make a movie that earned more than $100 million,
Big
. She repeated that feat with
A League of Their Own
. But in my opinion her finest film did not make the most money. It was called
Awakenings
and starred Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. One day she called me and said she was very sad. Neither Robin nor Robert had noticed that she had gotten a cute bob haircut. She was still doing fine work while worrying too much about her hair.

Working with Penny and Cindy for eight years made me realize something else very important about myself: I was tough enough to work with any actress in the business. After I’d survived Penny and Cindy, no actress could bring me down, depress me, frustrate me, or make me yell at the top of my lungs. Bring me Bette Midler. Bring me Goldie Hawn. Bring me Lindsay Lohan. Bring me Jane Fonda. I was desensitized to every woman with a Screen Actors Guild card. I could handle them because Penny and Cindy made me tougher and better than I ever was before. I went forward into television producing and film directing with a new skill and a new label called women’s director. From time to time people would say to me, “Oh,
you don’t want to work with that actress. She’s too tough.” And I would look them right in the eye and say, not with hubris but with pure confidence, “Sure I can.” My wife said something good comes out of all bad things. She was right. I knew if I could survive
Laverne & Shirley
for eight solid years, I could get along with any actress in town. I still try so hard to make people happy, but I am always left with the knowledge that the one person I never made completely happy was my sister Penny.

Managing a Martian and a New Playwriting Career

E
VERY FAMILY HAS
its favorite stories, and one of our best is about how Mork from Ork was born.

I had noticed that my daughters, Lori and Kathleen, were just crazy about
Happy Days
. The girls couldn’t wait for Tuesday night to come around so they could watch Henry Winkler and Scott Baio and the rest of the gang at Arnold’s. The girls were always clamoring to bring their friends to the live filming Friday night on the Paramount lot. My son, Scott, however, was not interested in
Happy Days
at all. The year was 1977, and the first
Star Wars
movie had just come out. Scott was eight years old, and he walked around the house pretending to be R2-D2 or C-3PO during most of his waking hours. I found it unsettling that Scott was a fan of George Lucas but not a fan of mine. I had to find out why.

“Why don’t you watch
Happy Days
?” I asked him one day while he was playing with some of his
Star Wars
action figures.

“There are no space aliens on
Happy Days
,” he said very matter-of-factly.

“But it’s the nineteen fifties. Kids are playing with hula hoops and wearing poodle skirts. Where does a space alien come from?”

He paused for a minute and then looked directly at me with the clarity and wisdom that seemed to belong more to a network executive than to an eight-year-old boy and said, “Fonzie could have a dream.”

There are times when you are insanely grateful to have children,
and this was one of them. I never would have thought of such a thing. On
Happy Days
, we were running out of adversaries or villains for Fonzie to fight with. I realized Fonzie could have a dream, and we could have a villain from outer space. We’d created Fonzie as a gangster with a heart of gold, and Mork was crafted as an alien with a heart of gold. I was big with hearts of gold.

Once the premise was constructed, we had one major hurdle left—to cast the right alien. I wanted the actor John Byner, who had a wild look in his eyes and the off-beat wit I thought would be good for the alien. With my funny co-producer/writers, Dale McRaven and Bruce Johnson, and my very calm and efficient sister Ronny (now my casting director), we arranged a meeting with Byner, and made a tentative deal for him to star in the series. Then an odd thing happened: Close to shooting, Byner decided he didn’t want to play an alien on a television series. Then we were stuck with no alien and only a few days before shooting was set to start. Ronny contacted the William Morris Agency, who represented Byner, to see if they could suggest anyone else. A new agent named Alan Iezman tried to sell us Richard Lewis and Jeff Altman, but they were not quite right.

Iezman then asked Ronny to see a new comedian who he was representing named Robin Williams. When I asked Ronny what his credits were, she said he did street performing on corners and passed the hat for tips.

“You want me to build a major network sitcom around a man who passes the hat for tips?” I said.

“It is a VERY full hat,” said Ronny.

Iezman started begging me to see him. It is not often you get an agent begging. So I sent Ronny and director Jerry Paris to check out this comedian. Ronny came back and told me Robin was indeed special, and now she begged me to see him, too. It is also hard to refuse a begging sister, so I said yes. The next week I walked into my office and the street performer was sitting on my couch upside down on his head. When he saw me, he stood straight up, and started pretending to drink a glass of water with his finger. That is how I first met Robin Williams. Ronny was right. Iezman was right. He was special.

Could I tell he was talented from the beginning? Yes. Did I know if he could carry an entire sitcom? No. But I knew I could build a show around him because he had the kind of talent that Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis had. He would be the hip, modern, and zany centerpiece of the show, and we would surround him with calm, talented actors whom he could riff off of.

First, however, I wanted to put him to the test, so I put him on an episode of
Happy Days
. He guest-starred in an episode called “My Favorite Orkan,” which ran in February 1978, during the fifth season of
Happy Days
. In the episode Robin plays an alien named Mork, who travels down from his planet, Ork, and wants to take Richie to his people to show them an example of a normal human. Fonzie stands in his way and protects Richie. Ron Howard and Henry Winkler were two of the more generous actors working in television, so when Robin guest-starred on the show, they gave him not only the support he needed but also the room to shine on his own. Robin’s portrayal of the alien was so innovative and fresh, with his body language and quirky electronic noises, that it didn’t take a genius to see this man needed his own sitcom. When Robin took his curtain call the audience gave him a standing ovation, giving even me the chills. Again, I was so happy to have a live audience, because they were the true arbiters of what was special. The Tuesday night the show aired on ABC, I got a call from my Paramount boss, Michael Eisner, who said, “Garry, I heard you have a Martian who got a standing ovation. Can you build a series around him? Do it fast.” The impetus for the phone call was that it was pilot season. During that time the network executives review all of their choices for the coming season. It just so happened that this particular season, ABC and Paramount didn’t have a lot of strong pilots to choose from. So when they came to us and said, “What do you have?” they were ready to buy something right away.