My Happy Days in Hollywood (4 page)

“I heard there is a throw-up bag on the plane. So if you get nauseous, be sure to use that,” she said. Then she hugged me goodbye.

I didn’t throw up, and I remember the flight as the time I felt the closest I had ever felt to my father. He didn’t talk much on the ground but was quite chatty in the air. After my teachers Lou Katz and Doc Guernsey believed in me and helped me apply to college, it seemed my dad suddenly believed in me, too. He joked that he wanted me to go to college in the Midwest so I would lose my nasal New York accent. But I knew that he thought my college admission was my ticket out of the Bronx, and he wanted that for me and secretly for himself, too. He knew there was a life beyond the Grand Concourse, and he wanted me to see and experience it firsthand. My mom had gone to a junior college for gymnasts and dancers called Savage, and she would vote for acting over academics any day. Dad, however, had the experience of a traditional four-year college. So when Dad and I boarded that plane headed for my own college experience, I felt like he was right by my side, supportive and proud.

Dad and I had done research together beforehand and decided I should join an on-campus fraternity so I could meet a strong network of people. Dad helped me write letters to some of the fraternities to introduce myself. While my dad could lack warmth in person, he had a superb gift in the area of introductory and thank-you letters. His penmanship was excellent, and he had a fine collection of embossed personalized stationery. The one thing he didn’t like about me was my nickname Flip, which I carried throughout high school because I had a knack for flipping a baseball from shortstop to first base in one motion. “Don’t tell the people at Northwestern that your nickname is Flip. Please tell it to them straight: My name is Garry Kent Marshall. Two
r
’s in Garry,” he instructed. Dad didn’t like any funny business in a name or much in life. He was the antithesis of zany, and he wanted me to be that way, too. “Now that you are going away to college, we are spending hard-earned money on you, Son,” he told me. “So don’t be a wise guy.”

When our plane landed in Chicago a student from the Alpha Tau Omega house was there to meet us. My dad said it was a well-connected fraternity. He used the term
well-connected
a lot. We thought the student was going to take us to my dorm, but it turned out the dorms were already full and they were in the middle
of building more. So my freshman year I was assigned to live in a Quonset hut. When Dad saw the makeshift housing he was appalled. I had to admit it looked strange to me, too. I came expecting to live in ivy-covered buildings like I had heard about on a radio show about college life called
The Halls of Ivy
. My Quonset hut was not covered with any ivy. So Dad convinced the ATO brother to let me stay in their chapter house even though I was not yet a pledge.

Before Dad left he taught me some basic skills, like how to write a check and manage a small checking account. I found the lessons tedious, but I tried to pay attention as best I could because Dad said, “It’s time to grow up. No more fooling around.” I had never been on my own before, and everything seemed new. The one thing I was certain of was that journalism was a good choice for me. My teachers at DeWitt Clinton thought so. I came with my experience as sports editor of the
Clinton News
as well as the sports editor at my newspaper at Camp Greenkill. So it seemed like a good road to follow. My mother said, “Writing is a good profession for you because you won’t break any bones.” And Dad thought it was a good fit because I could write even if I was in bed with aches and pains. I knew I was not talented or strong enough to play professional baseball or basketball, but I could certainly write about them.

Dad shared with me one more piece of information before he left: “The guys from the Bronx who you grew up with aren’t going to amount to very much.”

“Dad, don’t say that. They’re great guys.”

“I know, but they are never going to go to college and make something of themselves like you are,” he said. “But the people you meet in college will be different.”

“Different? How?”

“They are friends with a future, and you are going to want to stay in touch with these people. They will go on to do important things. They are well-connected,” he said.

After Dad left I went through the rigors of fraternity rush. It was a strange series of meeting and parties that left my head spinning. In my mind, I had come to college to figure out how to make a living and how to meet girls. So joining a fraternity seemed right. The guys
would take me into a room with lots of smoke and ask me to sign papers. I honestly didn’t know which fraternity was the perfect right fit for me, but ATO had a mixture of athletes and academics, and I thought I could blend in well. The true turning point came when I met a heartfelt, smiling upperclassman named Jack Morossy from Cleveland. One night at a party he came over to talk to me.

“I hear you play the drums, kid,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” I said nervously.

“Well, if you join the frat, then you can be in our band, the ATO combo,” he said.

“Really? Do you think I’d be good enough?”

“Sure. And if you’re not I’ll help you along,” he said. “I play the bass and I’ll keep you in rhythm with the music until you have our tunes down.”

His method reminded me of how my mother had taught me to play the drums when I was six years old by tapping the rhythm on my back with one hand as she played the piano.

“And we’re going to make money,” added Jack.

“Huh?” I said.

“We’re going to make money with our band. You know, play at all the sorority parties and charge money. So you’ll make a dollar, too.”

That statement sealed the deal. I knew I wanted to make money to buy clothing and other things. My father only paid for books. So I joined ATO and then shared a room with four other pledges. Most of the guys in the fraternity had wealthy-people names like Robert Perkins, John Gardner, William Dye, and Lee Rodgers. I wasn’t used to that because in my neighborhood my friends had names like Lefty Farrell, Duke Wellington, Joe Finley Straus, the Big Ragu, Push ’Em Up Tony, and Al Jello. Most of the guys I met at Northwestern wore crisp white shirts and penny loafers. I wasn’t used to that either. So I was feeling uncomfortable until I heard an accent in line while I was registering for my classes. I introduced myself to the accent.

“You from the Bronx?” I asked.

“No. New Jersey,” said the student. Other people at Northwestern
were from places like Nebraska, Indiana, and Illinois. So to meet a guy from a state like mine made me feel an instant connection. He didn’t dress like the swells either. He dressed in wrinkled clothing like me, and was even in journalism school like me. His name turned out to be Joel Sterns, and he was from Montclair, New Jersey. Joel was a funny, heavyset kid who was an overachiever who walked around like he owned the place. He would be my first college friend and a friend for life. He later became an important lawyer, proving my dad was right. Most of my college friends did go on to have great careers.

Joel had to work to put himself through college. He got a good job at a coffee shop called the Hut. I started looking for a job for myself, but most of the good ones in town were already filled. I asked around the fraternity to see if anyone had any leads. It turned out you could work at a sorority or fraternity in the dining room. I started out as a waiter at the Kappa Delta sorority. However, I was a daydreamer, and keeping track of the orders for ninety girls was overwhelming for me. So I went to the head cook, Hattie, and asked if there were any jobs inside the kitchen, behind the scenes so to speak. That’s how I become the head dishwasher at Kappa Delta. There was no mechanical dishwasher, so I had to spray, clean, and dry every plate by hand. It was a job tailor-made for me. I could wash dishes for hours and daydream as much as I wanted to.

While I was a good dishwasher, I lacked a certain amount of sophistication about other things. My freshman year the professor in Journalism 101 gave us this assignment: Go to the library, do some research, and write up a famous person’s obituary. Everyone in the class was given a different famous person to write about. I was assigned Danny Kaye. I tried to go to the library but got sidetracked by a girl. So when I got back to the classroom I typed up, “Danny Kaye, who was reported dead earlier today, didn’t die at all. It was a false alarm. He was sick, but he recovered.” My classmates thought my answer was funny and irreverent. But my professor was not amused and gave me a C minus.

After I had been at Northwestern for two years, my sister Ronny came as a freshman. I was happy she chose to attend Northwestern.
She dressed much better than I did, joined Chi Omega sorority, and ran with a fancier crowd. Sometimes I would look out the window from my dishwashing job at KD and see her walking with her fancy friends through the sorority quad. I would call out her name and then hold up a wet dirty dish rag and wave to try to embarrass her. But we got along well, and my parents were happy to have us at the same school, too. We also could ballroom dance and made quite a good jitterbug team. It made our mother proud that we were putting our dance skills to work at college.

Academically, Northwestern opened many new doors for me. It was the first place I learned that words mattered and could lead to a real job. I knew that sportswriting was a possibility, but at college I was exposed to so many different kinds of writing. I loved Hemingway but didn’t understand Faulkner. I remember reading
The Grapes of Wrath
for the first time and was fascinated that Steinbeck composed a whole scene in which the words were written to the beat of a square dance. I was amazed at the power of words. And while I knew I couldn’t write as well as Steinbeck, I was convinced I could write material that made people laugh. It was my hope for the future.

In addition to Steinbeck, I read a lot of plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who along with Paddy Chayefsky and Neil Simon had gone to my high school, DeWitt Clinton). But my favorite book of all time proved to be Peter Wagner’s recommendation, J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
. Like Peter and many of my peers, I made a connection to Holden Caulfield because he seemed like a regular guy trying to find his place in the universe. He was a misfit like me. I felt like a fish out of water trying to make it at Northwestern. The winters were brutally cold, and I was sick all the time with asthma and allergies. But come springtime, when the snow thawed and the weather turned warm, Northwestern looked to me like the most beautiful college campus ever. Finally the
Halls of Ivy
.

Once in a while there was a teacher who truly appreciated my humor, and that was the case with Professor Nathan Leopold, a dignified history professor. He knew I loved humor and recognized that I felt confined when I had to write straight, so he would let me hand in papers written in a more creative vein. I would still get the essence
of the assignment and understand the material we were studying, but instead of writing reports, I wrote dialogue and scenes. When studying Frederick the Great, I learned that he liked only tall soldiers. So I wrote a whole scene of Frederick reviewing the potential troops. “Too short, too short, too short. You’re a shrimp. Go be a jester. Oh, here’s tall. Go get a gun.” Professor Leopold gave me a good grade, too. (I tried very hard to pass all my courses. And I just made it. My freshman year I got fifteen Cs.)

Northwestern felt like a big camp with a lot of smart campers. When I wasn’t studying I was constantly on the lookout for new activities to join. Soon I started playing intramural sports on Long Field, near my fraternity. We played baseball, basketball, and touch football. I had good hands. I went to some fraternity and sorority events and played with the ATO band at many. I also dated a few girls but no one seriously. I only dated girls with cars because I didn’t have one. And I wasn’t very good at dating. In high school I had gone out with an olive-skinned, pretty Italian girl named Jeanie Bartalotti and taken her to our senior prom. We continued to date long distance even freshman year at college. The most serious girlfriend I had at college was a bright, curvy dancer named Cindy Peterson, to whom I gave my fraternity pin our senior year. I didn’t think very much about marriage back then, only having a date to go to a formal with. Sometimes Ronny and I would double-date, and she had an endless supply of potential suitors. My mother was always encouraging Ronny to meet a nice wealthy boy from the Midwest and settle down.

Volunteering for
The Daily Northwestern
newspaper also seemed like a good activity for me. I wrote a sports column called “Sport in Short.” We did not have winning sports teams. My senior year our football team was one win to eleven losses. So I wrote the humorous side of losing: “Our team was behind two touchdowns by the time the national anthem ended.” I also opened each column with a quote from a Greek philosopher named Estes. I wrote about many sports controversies, including Northwestern’s misfit placement in the Big Ten league. In my last column I confessed there was no Greek philosopher named Estes. I’d made him up. I tried anything to make
my writing seem different and unique. While I was often praised for my humor, I was taken to task time and time again for either getting the facts wrong or not proofreading carefully enough. I was on the copy desk the day the headline meant to say
BIG TEN PARTNERSHIP
actually ran as
BIG TEN FARTNERSHIP
.

One of the most exciting things to do on campus for actors, performers, and writers was the Waa-Mu show, the annual variety show. I signed up to write skits for it and worked alongside other students such as Paula Prentiss, Richard Benjamin, and Warren Beatty. Just like my mother used to put on shows in our basement, I found my niche writing comedy for the stage in Scott Hall at Northwestern.

My senior year I heard they were looking for writers for a show called
Fashion Fair
, so I volunteered and was paired with a sophomore from Chicago named Fred Freeman. Fred was a serious-looking kid with Clark Kent glasses. He was a little more intellectual than I was, so I thought he elevated my work. For the first time I was writing with a partner and I liked it. We put more humor into the
Fashion Fair
than ever before. I remember the show was such a big hit on campus that I was depressed when the two-day event closed. I couldn’t imagine how we could top ourselves after being such a success. But Fred had plans for us. He thought we could write together beyond college. I just didn’t know it yet.