My Mother Was Nuts (11 page)

The formula seemed to work. Dick Clark, who liked my brother,
gave me a small part in
The Savage Seven
, a low-budget movie he was producing about a biker who falls for an Indian girl on a reservation, angering her brother and leading to a lot of fighting. It was a good group of people. Richard Rush was the director, future Oscar-winner Lazlo Kovacs was the cinematographer, and the cast included Robert Walker Jr., Joanna Frank, and Larry Bishop, Joey’s son.

Despite having only one line of dialogue, I was on location for three weeks in a couple of not-so-beautiful desert towns in California and Nevada. But I had fun. Walter Robles, one of the stuntmen, taught me to ride a motorcycle, and Hell’s Angels boss Sonny Barger spent a few days on the set. I regretted having to go home. I’d had the same problem as a kid when camp ended. After making new friends, I didn’t get to see them again. It made me lonely. I told my brother I might not want to do any more movies. “You’ll make new friends,” he said.

Veteran producer Sheldon Leonard, who mentored my brother and Jerry Belson on numerous TV series, cast me in the role of a secretary in the pilot of his new detective show
My Friend Tony
. It was the first of God-knows-how-many secretaries I played. All I had to do here was pick up the phone and say, “Hello, Woodruff -Novello Private Investigators.
”

But Garry and Sheldon asked the near impossible. They wanted me to say the line without sounding like I was from New York. Accents were not and never would be my forte. I talked the way I talked. But I couldn’t say that to Sheldon and my brother. So I practiced different options in my head and ultimately decided to add an extra
R
to the word “investigators.”

When I answered the phone it came out as, “Hello, Woodruff-Novello Private
Investergaters
.” Yes, I mispronounced the word. But no one noticed. Garry and Sheldon, both of whom spoke with the strongest New York accents of any two people I knew, thought it was perfect.

That summer, Garry put me in the movie
The Grasshopper
. He and Jerry Belson had adapted the script from a novel about a beautiful girl who runs away from her small British Columbia home to L.A. to be with her boyfriend and ends up letting her looks lead her down a troubled path of bad jobs and worse men. Jerry Paris directed again. I played “the plaster caster”—look that up if you need to—and in my brief scene as a wild rock chick I held up a tape measure.

One day Jerry Paris, who, like my mother, was famous for saying whatever popped into his head and not ever censoring himself, introduced me to the movie’s star, Jacqueline Bisset.

“Look at her. Isn’t she beautiful?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“She can’t act. But look at that face!”

Jacqueline smiled, showing only a touch of annoyance, as if Jerry’s comment was one of those things she had to endure for being so breathtakingly beautiful. I bet she lived for those moments when people complimented her work and praised her talent. Despite my brother, I wasn’t shielded from Hollywood’s cruelty. My first commercial, for instance, was for Head & Shoulders shampoo. I played one of two roommates primping in the bathroom. I was the girl combing her hair, and Farrah Fawcett was the girl in the shower asking to borrow my shampoo.

“I know it really works against your dandruff,” she said. “But what about my gorgeous hair?”

“Your gorgeous hair will love it,” I said.

The implications were obvious. Although Farrah was a doll who went out of her way to make sure I didn’t feel insulted, it was still hurtful. I went home feeling horrible about myself. If I had been able to think of an alternative career, I might have quit the business. I felt like I was on the verge anyway.

But I did another episode of
That Girl
and then I landed a part on the opening episode of
Then Came Bronson
, a new series starring Michael Parks as a disillusioned journalist who quits his job at
a newspaper and jumps on his motorcycle to find the real meaning of life. It was the first job I got on my own, and it kept me in the business.

At the audition, the director, Marvin Chomsky, told me the story of the episode: Jim Bronson visits a former girlfriend at a camp she runs for children with special needs. I got it. She had found her life; he was looking for his. Yes, but Marvin asked what I knew about summer camp. My face lit up with confidence.

“I went to camp for twelve years,” I said. “I love camp. I know everything.”

“No,” he said. “This is about a camp for disturbed children.”

I told him about the pyromaniac who had burned down the staff bunk at Geneva.

“My mother thought it was me,” I said.

“Why’d she think that?” he asked.

“She thought highly of me,” I said.

Excited, I told my brother that the episode was shooting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He wanted to know who else was in the episode besides Michael Parks. I told him the biggest names: Jack Klugman, former child actor Mark Lester, and Karen Ericson. Garry told me to introduce myself to Jack and ask if he wanted to be in a new TV series that he and Jerry had in the works.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“
The Odd Couple
,” he said. “We’re adapting the Neil Simon play. I want him for Oscar.”

“All right,” I said.

So I went to Jackson Hole, where I’d never been, and it was a very nice place. There was plenty of down-time between scenes. And Jack and I both liked to sit in the sun. One day the two of us were lying out on chaises beside the lake and I remembered my brother’s request. I’m fearless when it comes to talking to people. I’ll ask anything. So I got Jack’s attention and said, “Would you be interested in doing a TV series based on
The Odd Couple?
”

Jack was confused. He had barely noticed me, yet here was this girl pitching him on a TV series.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Penny,” I said.

“Why are you asking me this?” he said.

“My brother is Garry Marshall, and he is going to do
The Odd Couple
as a TV series. He wants to know if you’d play Oscar.”

I’m not sure what either of us said next. It’s not important. What matters is that Jack obviously didn’t say no and as a result went on to costar with Tony Randall in one of TV’s greatest sitcoms. I also learned it never hurts to ask. You never know until you do.

Penny celebrating Christmas with a young Tracy in 1966
Anthony Marshall

T
HEY SAY IF YOU
remember the ’60s, you weren’t there. (I feel that way about the ’80s.) Because I had a child, I was largely unaffected by the decade’s changes—that is, until 1969. That was the year my mother told Ronny that I knew Charles Manson. For the record, I didn’t. It was also the year she told people that I was going to take LSD and jump off a roof. She was wrong. That was the ’80s.

In 1969, I moved several times, changing roommates for reasons that aren’t interesting and offering my couch or floor to whatever friends from the Bronx had come out to sample the culture. There were more than a handful of them, like Arlyn Dunetz, who crashed on our floor until she went off with a guy in a van. The next time I heard from her, she’d changed her last name to Phoenix, lived on a commune, and had seven kids, including River, Rain, and Leaf, all of whom she wanted to get into acting—and of course she did.

My mother, my father, and my grandmother were the last three people I expected to see near the Sunset Strip, yet they arrived midyear, reeling from financial losses and upheavals in the neighborhood. My father had lost his best accounts and much of his income
when his friend who was head of the American Medical Association retired and his replacement hired another agency. My mother’s dance school had also declined. The hippies didn’t send their children to learn tap and ballet the way parents had in previous decades.

My brother said he could help them if they moved to L.A. As unthinkable as it seemed, my mother closed her school and soon arrived with my aging, blind grandmother. She made an entrance, too. At the airport, she jumped on the baggage carousel after missing her luggage and rode it around, yelling at Garry and his wife to get her bags and watch Nanny.

Nanny went into an old folks’ home in Hollywood while my mother moved into a place on Laurel Avenue. My father, who stayed in New York to close the apartment and tie up loose ends at work, arrived a few weeks later. He was not given a warm welcome.

“I’d kill myself,” my mother told us, “but I can’t find my suicide jar.”

Garry covered their $155-a-month rent. My mother handled the rest of their finances, keeping track of every penny and putting my father on a strict allowance. One month she refused to give him $100 for his car insurance because he still owed her $50 for repairs from the month before. “If I give him money,” she told me, “I’ll never get it back.” She talked about applying for work at one of the local department stores. Garry also tried to set her up at a talent agency, but she proved too difficult. She thought everyone was a moron.

My father went to Garry’s office nearly every day as if he worked there. I think he used the phone. I’m sure he wanted to get away from my mother. He wasn’t used to spending time with her. Garry said he could work for Compass, but the management company shut down before that happened. All their actors went with Pat McQueeney, and Herbie Molina took the writers. The only one without a place to go was my father, and it annoyed the hell out of my mother. “I’m not his slave, Pen,” she said. “He doesn’t even look for a job.”

I spent a lot of time with my mother. If I was free, I met her for breakfast or lunch, and when she couldn’t get ahold of me, or when I didn’t call as planned, she left a message on my service asking where I was. She needed someone to tell about the minutia in her life, and that was me. She told me what she made for dinner, how much money the managers of her building had in their saving accounts (compared to her and my father, who had nothing), and even whether she was having “loose movements” that day or nothing at all.

“It’s this unpredictable, hectic life I lead,” she said one day with a sigh. “If only I had my suicide jar.”

She babysat for Garry’s children, and told me how Gary’s wife, Barbara, slipped her cash—but never in front of my father. It was her mad money, she said, and it kept her in cheap dresses and visits to the hairdresser. She also helped take care of Tracy, who was now five and spent summers with me. She was better off with Mickey, who was remarried and had the more stable home.

Look, my mothering skills didn’t suddenly materialize between June and August. If Tracy woke up early, I sent her to the corner store to pick up breakfast—a Fudgsicle for her and cigarettes for me. My mother hadn’t been June Cleaver, and I wasn’t Mrs. Brady.

My grandmother grew harder to manage. We once picked her up for a doctor’s appointment and she got in the front of the car, except she stepped on the seat and sat on top of the head rest, not realizing her head was pressing against the roof. My mother grabbed her ankles and yanked her down until she was properly seated.

At least my mother’s sense of humor remained intact. She needed it. Once, after buying my grandmother a bright, new housecoat, she came back to find Nanny had cut off the sleeves, made pockets, and sewn them onto four other dresses. At one time she would’ve railed about the waste of money. Now, she laughed. “The gray background with pink and green flowers on her yellow, blue, and white checked dresses looks stunning,” she told me.