My Mother Was Nuts (13 page)

During the brief, nonreligious ceremony, Rob said, “I’ll love you and be your best friend.” I replied, “I’ll love you and try not to make you nervous.” The justice of the peace marrying us then turned us around and said, “Presenting Mr. and Mrs. Rob Reiner.” Rob had instructed him to refrain from any unnecessary comments, which that was considered to be. So he cursed under his breath all the way down the aisle. He had already fought with his mother about what to serve for dinner before settling on Chinese takeout from Ah Fong’s. So that was nice.

We partied well into the night. Harry Shearer’s girlfriend played a song on the guitar. Albert made a toast that was more like a stand-up routine. And actor Martin Landau, a close Reiner family friend, read a charming fairy tale he had written about two people who had lived
across the street as children but didn’t meet until they were adults. Around midnight, our friends followed us back to our suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we kept the festivities going until Rob and I left the next day for our honeymoon at the Kona Village on the Big Island in Hawaii.

Somehow, we managed to keep that to just the two of us.

A month later,
All in the Family
won several Emmy Awards, including Best Comedy, and all of a sudden the series caught fire. Viewers discovered Archie, Edith, Gloria, and Michael. The Bunkers’s living room became a flash point for the country’s take on politics, race, sex, and culture. For the next five years, it was America’s number one rated TV series. Rob was surprised but proud. Having grown up around famous people, he was largely unaffected by the attention. If anything, success made him work harder.

I did my bit, too. I went to every dress rehearsal and taping for
All in the Family
. I sat with Carroll’s and Norman’s wives and did needlepoint. I even hooked a rug there. And after each show I told Rob that he was good, which he was.

My career trickled along. I appeared on two Dick Clark–produced music-variety series, played Cinderella opposite Don Adams in a Hertz commercial, and had a small role as a bank teller in my brother’s very funny TV movie
Evil Roy Slade
. I was also in an episode of pop star Bobby Sherman’s series
Getting It Together
, directed by Jerry Belson, who also cast Rob and Carl Gottlieb as old rock ’n’ rollers in a band called Mona and the Moonbeams.

My break came when Garry gave me a recurring role on
The Odd Couple
as Oscar Madison’s whiny secretary, Myrna Turner. The series had premiered on ABC in September 1970 with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman as mismatched friends and roommates Felix Unger and Oscar Madison. They shot the first season with a single camera, but for season two they switched to three cameras and an audience and added more characters, including Myrna.

When it came time to cast her, Jack went to my brother and said, “Why don’t you get your sister? She’s the one who made me do this in the first place.”

“Do you think I can get her by Tony?” Garry asked.

Tony Randall was an actor’s actor, as well as a perfectionist. He expected the same from his fellow cast and crew.

“No,” Jack said. “But
we
can get her by Tony.”

As it turned out, I got myself by Tony. All I had to do was prove I was funny, and the way I laughed as Myrna cinched the deal. The way it came out was an accident. During a run-through, I was reading the script and it said, “Myrna laughs.” So I pretended to laugh: “Heh-heh-heh.” I didn’t know how to laugh yet. Cindy Williams would teach me later. I sounded like an injured goose. But everyone cracked up. So that became Myrna’s laugh—and I had a job.

Still, I had no idea what to do on a three-camera show where actors were always in the scene unless they exited. Seeing that I was petrified, Jack took me under his wing. He made sure I always knew where my mark was and had something to do. He was very kind and generous. Even so, I developed my own method of calming my nerves. Right before I entered a scene, I would take a deep breath, say the dirtiest words I could string together—“fuck, shit, piss!”—and then walk through the door and calmly whine, “Hi, Mr. M.”

Jack and Tony were pros. Like their on-camera personalities, they were complete opposites off-camera. Tony adored opera, and Jack was always making bets on the horses. The writing staff might have been funnier than the show. Veteran comedy writer Harvey Miller, who also directed some of the episodes, would sit at the table and crack jokes as Jackie Hitler, Adolf’s stand-up comic brother. Jackie was one of Harvey’s go-to characters. Jerry Belson was also hilarious. But the show was never a ratings hit and my brother had to fight with the network for a pickup every one of its five seasons.

With steady incomes, Rob and I bought a house on Hesby Street in North Hollywood. It had better parking, more room, and a swimming
pool. We brought our cats, Howie and Rhoda, and added a dog, Barney Google, who liked to take money out of my purse and eat it. When Rob closed our bedroom door, he stood outside and growled. He reminded me of Albert in that way.

After we settled in, Tracy also joined us. Mickey had moved to Colorado and had another daughter, and I think there might have been a little rivalry there. Tracy gave a more practical reason for the change. We had more TV channels. We adjusted in our own ways. Rob bought himself a Mercedes, and soon after Tracy used the cigarette lighter to burn a design of holes in the carpeted floor mats. My therapist at the time said she might be angry.

“About what?” I said. “She’s away from her stepsister and she has her own color TV.”

She joined a busy household. In addition to
The Odd Couple
, I did an episode of
The Bob Newhart Show
, where I met director Jay Sandrich, who put me in his TV movie
The Crooked Hearts
. Jerry Paris also found a role for me in his TV movie
The Couple Take a Wife
. As for Rob, he wrote a handful of
All in the Family
episodes and launched
The Super
, a sitcom he created with Phil Mishkin. Its ten episodes aired in 1972. I worked on one of those, too.

Rob took up tennis and decided he wanted to be Hollywood’s number one celebrity player. He also put a sauna in the backyard, where he and Albert and Ricky would disappear for a
schvitz
. They were from Beverly Hills, but once in the sauna, they turned into eighty-year-olds with thick Jewish accents. Success changes some people. They aged.

As the stable couple, our house became a hangout for comedy’s elite. In addition to Albert, Phil, and Ricky, regulars included Harvey Miller, Jerry Belson, Charles Grodin, Billy Crystal, Ted Bessell, and Jim Brooks. These were the pot-smoking years, and a lot of it was smoked at our house. I cleaned the seeds and stems in a shoebox top. It was a skill, and I was good at it.

Some of the guys occasionally brought a girlfriend, but this was
mostly a guys-only atmosphere, as was comedy in general, and they didn’t care what women had to say. If a woman tried to make conversation, they just glared at her. They were a bit hostile.

The only woman they were sort of impressed with was Louise Lasser, but only because she’d been married to Woody Allen and starred in
Take the Money and Run
and
Bananas
, movies they respected. I was also allowed to talk. But it was hard for anyone to get a word in with quick wits like Jerry Belson and Harvey Miller telling stories. “When I went to Emerson College, it was new and desperate for students,” Harvey said. “My father took me, and in the bookstore he wrote a twenty-five-dollar check. They put him on the board.”

Albert was always breaking in new material, too. If he was in the mood, he could do twenty minutes easily. Sometimes he didn’t stop until Jerry interrupted. “Can we take a break to smoke a joint?”

Albert was notorious for getting the munchies, drifting into the kitchen, and eating the brown bag lunch I had prepared for Tracy to take to school the next day. She resented him for years. What were you going to do? Jim Brooks had created
Room 222
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
. Ricky Dreyfuss was a standout in the movie
American Graffiti
, along with my friend Cindy Williams, who had also appeared in
Travels with My Aunt
and
The Conversation
. Ted Bessell was beloved as Donald Hollinger on
That Girl
. This was a special group of people coming into their own and our house was where they let down their guard.

But it wasn’t just our living room. Carl Gottlieb organized The Celanese Players, a group of actors and writers that included Steve Martin, Valerie Curtin, Larry Hankin, Richard Stahl, Howard Hesseman, Murphy Dunn, myself, and others. We made more than 150 sixty-second, improv-style commercials for the Celanese Fiber Company, manufacturers of double-knit pants and dresses. They paid what was then a record sum of $3 million to air a completely new, unique, and hopefully funny ad on
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
every night all through 1973.

We wrote and shot them on the weekends in San Diego, driving back and forth every Thursday and Sunday. Sometime during this period Albert had some kind of breakdown on our couch and stayed there for a long time. I went away one weekend and he was fine. When I came home he was comatose.

“Albert, do you want something to eat?”

“Eh.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Eh.”

Okay. I didn’t pass judgment. Who doesn’t want to lie down for a month or two?

Penny with Jim Brooks, who gave Penny one of her first starring television roles, in
Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers
Ted Bessell

D
URING A BREAK
from
All in the Family
, Rob and I went to New York and saw the
National Lampoon’s Lemmings
, a sketch comedy show at the Village Gate. Rob was a huge fan of Tony Hendra, the Cambridge-educated British humorist who had written, directed, and produced the show and cast it with then-unknowns Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Christopher Guest, who Rob knew.

It was brilliant. After the show, Rob and I took John and his wife, Judy, out to dinner. Something about John drew both of us to him. At the table, Rob and John spent two hours doing Marlon Brando impressions, and I began a lifelong friendship with John and Judy. He was my naughty, relentlessly funny, unpredictable friend. I told him how, after I moved to L.A., my mother had predicted that I was going to take acid and jump off a roof.

I expected him to say, “What a nut!” Instead, he leaned forward, furrowed his eyebrows, and asked, “So have you?”

He showed up at Hesby a few times. My brother recalls me introducing him to John and saying, “Garry, this guy’s going to be big.” Garry said, “Hi, how’re you doing?” Apparently John couldn’t put
sentences together too well at that moment, and Garry thought he was mixed up. I explained this was the off-hours version. I knew John was special, and I was right.

I had a simple rule for navigating Hollywood’s confusing roads: Stick with the most talented people you know. I was lucky. I knew a lot of them. But that didn’t prevent frustrations or failures. When Paramount refused to give me a $100-an-episode raise on
The Odd Couple
, I asked my brother what to do. “One day you’ll get even,” he said. He had started
Happy Days
, so I took Jim Brooks up on his offer to costar on his new series,
Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers
.

It starred actor Paul Sand as a musician with the Boston Symphony who had endless problems with his girlfriend; his brother, played by Michael Pataki; and his sister-in-law, played by me. I knew that Jim was an exceptional writer, and along with his partner, Alan Burns, I trusted him implicitly. He had the magic touch, and listening to him talk about the characters made me feel like it had a shot.

Then the problems started. During rehearsals, I discovered that I was allergic to Michael. Every time I kissed him, I broke out in a rash. The same thing happened later with Michael McKean. It was something about their skin. Or else I’m allergic to guys named Michael. Before production started, the pretty blonde who played Paul’s girlfriend had a nose job, and that was the end of her. Once you get your nose fixed, you’re no longer as funny.

They changed the show’s premise to Paul’s date of the week, and unfortunately Paul wasn’t a date-of-the-week kind of guy. Then Jim left for reasons that were never clear to me. His parting words to me were to watch and observe everything. What I saw was that without Jim at the typewriter the show had a different sensibility. It was no longer the same show.

They brought in Jerry Belson’s sister, Monica Johnson, to write. Monica was nuts but funny as shit. She wanted to marry a dentist, she said, because she didn’t have the self-esteem for an M.D. In reality, she had already married and divorced the first two of her eventual
seven husbands. We became fast friends. Like me, she acknowledged that nepotism had been her get-into-show-business-free card. Her brother had hired her to type
The Odd Couple
scripts, and she added jokes as she typed. Three years later, she won an Emmy.