My Mother Was Nuts (10 page)

Like Phil Crummett, a handsome, energetic actor with a big singing
voice, who was involved in theater in town. Older and ambitious, he was putting together a production of
Oklahoma!
, and he hired me to be his assistant. As he auditioned people, he asked for my opinion. Then one day he asked if I wanted to audition for Ado Annie.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Okay.”

I didn’t have any confidence yet. And during rehearsals, I discovered that I couldn’t sing worth shit, but I could sell. Once the play opened, reviewers agreed. One local paper called the production “superlative” and said, “the two comic leads, Bill Cook and Penny Henry, almost steal the show.” Another paper also applauded the show but created a problem for me by saying that Phil was “up and down throughout the show” while my “rendition of a girl that can’t say no is head and shoulders above the rest of them.”

After that, Phil Crummett hated me.

The next summer, I played Ado Annie again in a production of
Oklahoma!
staged at a theater-in-the-round in Durango. Going away for more than a month motivated Mickey and me to get divorced. Both of us agreed there was no point belaboring the situation any longer. We were living separate lives. We didn’t want to end up hating each other.

We didn’t have anything to haggle over. “Here are half the pots and pans,” I said. “What else do you need?” Mickey didn’t want anything. And all I wanted was my name back. I dropped “Henry” as quickly as possible. I was tired of hearing the joke, “Penny Henry, the sky is falling.”

The only trouble we had came from our parents. As soon as we decided to make the split legal, his mother and grandmother hid Tracy from me. They were afraid I was going to take her to New York. What made them think I’d move back in with my parents? My mother heard about Tracy and came out to get her back. It seemed like a fight was about to break out.

But after she talked with Mickey’s mother, the two of them went to court and asked for custody of the baby. Or so she said. Mickey
and I never actually went to court. My mother could have made the whole thing up. I don’t know. What I do know is that she and Mickey’s mother made us feel so inept that we believed her when she said the judge awarded them joint custody.

Who knows?

It didn’t matter.

Mickey’s mother and grandmother took care of Tracy most of the time anyway. What was done was done. Mickey came over and we cried together. We didn’t know how all this had happened. We were just young and in over our heads. It was time to start over.

Penny’s first friends in Hollywood: her brother, Garry Marshall, and his writing partner Jerry Belson
Marshall personal collection

A
FTER THE PRODUCTION
in Durango, I decided to move to Los Angeles. Where else was I going to go? New York with my parents? I don’t think so. Two guys from the play—Bill Cook, who had played opposite me, and his boyfriend, Randy—were going to L.A. I decided to go with them. I sold my Chevy Corvair to my friend Gerry Puhara, who was also in
Oklahoma!
, and I was ready to go.

On the night before we left, Bill, Randy, and I went to the drive-in and saw
The Trip
, director Roger Corman’s movie about a TV director who takes LSD and goes on a mind-bending journey. Bill lit up a joint, and I smoked pot for the first time. It didn’t even make me hungry.

Except for a flat tire in Arizona, our road trip was uneventful. I collected matchbooks from every place we stopped. They didn’t take up much room. All I had was a little bag of clothes. In L.A., I stayed with Betty Vaughn, a girl who had also been in
Oklahoma!
She lived in Canoga Park, a suburb in the northwestern part of the San Fernando Valley—so far away from everything that when I checked in with my brother, he asked, “Where’s Canoga Park?”

Garry’s career was on the rise. After graduating from Northwestern, he spent two years with the Army in Korea, despite fourteen typewritten pages of allergies (they gave him a special, hypoallergenic uniform and put him on the USO radio shows), and then returned to New York. He tried stand-up comedy and wrote jokes for Phil Foster and other comedians. My mother worried that he was going to get hooked on reefer. My brother, with all his allergies, wasn’t going to get hooked on reefer.

His only addiction was work. In 1961, he and his writing partner, Fred Freeman, a friend from college, had moved to L.A. to write for Joey Bishop and
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
. After they split, Garry met Jerry Belson, the funny, smart, pot-smoking younger brother of an Army buddy from Korea. Although opposites (my brother was upbeat and clean-shaven, Jerry was dark and had long hair and a beard), they were a perfect match—and prolific. They wrote for
The Danny Thomas Show, The Lucy Show
, and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, the Emmy-winning series created by Carl Reiner, who had once lived across the street from us in the Bronx.

One time Garry took Jerry back to the Bronx to show him where he had grown up. He took him down to the cellar to meet my mother and show him her famous dance school. One of the women there turned to my mother and asked, “Which one is your son?”

“Not the one with the beard,” my mother said.

“Oh, thank God,” the other woman said.

When I arrived in town, they were involved in TV, movies, and even talent management. Since I had last seen him, Garry had acquired a wife, Barbara, a former nurse, who had been his neighbor in his old apartment building. His life was perfect. He was writing, and he had live-in health care.

He offered to help me. He asked what I wanted to do. I didn’t know.

“What are you good at?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“When was the last time you were happy?” he asked.

“When I was sitting on the Parkway fence watching the boys play softball,” I said.

While telling him about my performances as Ado Annie and the other shows I’d done with the Civic Light Opera, Garry saw a glimmer of light in my eyes. As he knew, for me, that was equivalent to doing cartwheels. He suggested that I try acting in TV and movies. I would need lessons, he explained, but he would give me names of teachers. It sounded good to me. But not everyone agreed. My mother called in a panic. She told me to change my name.

I didn’t want to change my name. I had just changed it back to Marshall.

I told Garry.

“Mommy said I should change my name,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “What was her reason?”

“She doesn’t want me to embarrass the family,” I said.

“Don’t listen to her,” he said. “She’s nuts.”

Garry had me move into his office, a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood where he and Jerry wrote every day. He and Fred Roos, a friend from Korea, also ran Compass Management from there. Compass represented a bunch of young actors, including Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, Candy Clark, and Cindy Williams. The girls were known as “the Compass cuties.”

Although living there was convenient, it wasn’t ideal. They started work in the morning and I slept late. Garry moved me into an apartment just off Sunset Boulevard that belonged to a friend who was out of town for a couple months. He also provided the names of people I should meet. He said one guy was good for lunch, another would talk to me about acting, this one would tell me about unemployment, another was a good contact but don’t go to his office by myself, and so on.

I took Harvey Lembeck’s improvisational workshop. I also signed up for classes with acting coach Justin Smith (who I called “Just in
Time” so I could remember his name). And I tried a workshop run by The Committee, an improv group based in a theater on Sunset whose members included Alan Myerson, Leigh French, Del Close, Don Sturdy (who later changed his name to Howard Hesseman), Carl Gottlieb, Larry Hankin, Richard Stahl, and Garry Goodrow.

In Justin Smith’s class, I discovered a knack for making people laugh just by talking about myself. I introduced myself, as was the protocol, and started describing my family and childhood. People were cracking up. Maybe it was the sound of my voice. Maybe the stories were funny. I didn’t know. I was just being me. Garry suggested I try stand-up. There weren’t many female comics. He thought his pal Buzz Cohen could write an act.

“Why don’t you do that?” he said.

I didn’t even consider it. Being on the road alone was not my idea of a life. I wasn’t so good on my own.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

I also liked Jeff Corey’s acting class. He started on time, and he let you do your scene if you came prepared. One day he questioned the scenes I chose.

“Are you always going to play the victim?” he asked.

I thought about it for a moment.

“Yeah, why not?”

I wasn’t going to play the sexy bombshell. I had been insecure about my looks my whole life, and being in Hollywood raised that insecurity to a new level. I thought actresses had to be beautiful. You only had to look at the top TV shows and movies to see that I was right. My brother, ever the realist, warned that I might not work until I was older. Perky girls like Sally Field and Karen Valentine were hot, and as both of us knew, I wasn’t perky.

Still, there was reason to smile. My friend Gerry Puhara moved to L.A., arriving in my old Corvair, and we got an apartment together on Hayworth. Both of us got temp jobs, me sorting W-2s and W-4s at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and her on
Let’s Make a Deal
. Then
my brother gave me a job on the movie
How Sweet It Is!
, a comedy about a photographer (James Garner) who takes his wife (Debbie Reynolds) and teenage son to Paris on an assignment, and I was part of a group of girls on a summer vacation tour.

Garry and Jerry had written the script, and their
Dick Van Dyke Show
pal Jerry Paris directed the film. The job began with a working cruise to Acapulco. We went there and back. I lived on Dramamine. But even seasickness was better than typing numbers. I was in a bunch of scenes, but my big one was at the Louvre (it was re-created on a soundstage), where I was in a montage of girls smiling in front of the
Mona Lisa
. When my turn came all you saw was a mouthful of braces. It was a visual joke.

I was probably the only actress who would agree to have real braces put on for the week. Jerry sent me to his dentist in the Pacific Palisades. My teeth hurt like hell. I whined to my brother, who wanted to kill me. But once they said, “Penny, you’re on,” I was perfect. Then, after we cut, it was back to complaining.

As a reward, they gave me a line to speak. I was supposed to say, “It was made in Japan.” Determined to do a good job for my brother, I shouted it as if I was onstage with the Civic Light Opera. The soundman nearly fell off his seat. Garry rushed to my side.

“We aren’t in the theater,” he said. “We have microphones.”

I felt stupid. But I looked around and nearly everyone was laughing or had a smile on their face. Maybe I wasn’t terrible.

Penny in costume in 1972 as a member of the Celanese Players, a group of actors and writers that included Steve Martin and Valerie Curtin
Nurit Wilde

F
RED ROOS, MY BROTHER’S
partner in Compass Management, put me in an episode of
That Girl
, the popular sitcom starring Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell. I played an assistant librarian, and I had one line—actually one word. As Marlo walked by, the head librarian said, “There goes a girl with a head on her shoulders.” I said, “Who?” And the librarian replied, “
That
girl.”

For saying that one word I was paid $140—more than I made during an entire week of temping in the dental lab where I was being driven crazy by the sound of drilling all day. For $140 a word, I figured I could say “What?” “Where?” “How?” and be both wealthier and saner. So I quit temping and signed up for unemployment.

At that moment, I became a real actress. In Hollywood, unemployment is a lifestyle. You have to work hard to get on it. Then you’re free to go on auditions, as well as to sit around and drink coffee, smoke, and flirt with whoever’s cute in your acting class. I’m not going to lie, though. It helped that my brother had an important job in the business. He made it clear that he wouldn’t risk his career for me, but he would open doors. It would be up to me to get through them.