My Mother Was Nuts (14 page)

Even with Monica onboard,
Paul Sand
struggled. The characters didn’t have any chemistry. It was like forcing puzzle pieces to fit. My mother said she thought Marvin Hamlisch should take over for Paul. The series was canceled after fifteen weeks. What made one series work and another not? What was the difference between a hit and one that was merely well done?

Those questions dominated conversations among those in our living room. Everyone wanted to figure out the magic formula. Even though Jim and my brother clearly had the touch, they had their hits and misses. After I appeared on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
several times as Mary’s neighbor, Paula, Jim briefly mulled over creating a spinoff with me and Mary’s other neighbor, Sally Jo, who was played by Mary Kay Place. But our on-screen chemistry wasn’t right.

In the meantime,
Happy Days
was a smash for my brother. With his own kids at TV-watching age, he had wanted to create a show his whole family could enjoy, and everything he did on that series worked. The lesson that I observed, and that I think my brother and others would agree with, is that while no one really knows how to make a hit, the people running the studios know even less. Every fall TV season offers proof, but let me tell a specific story.

I was on an episode of
Chico and the Man
. I played a waitress named Anita Coffee. The show was a hit, and so one day Paramount’s head of TV, Michael Eisner, called my brother to his office and told him to add some Puerto Ricans to
Happy Days
.

“Is there a need for them?” Garry asked.

No, but Eisner wanted them. My brother disagreed. They had a heated discussion, and my brother, who has no sense of direction and to this day only makes right turns when he drives, walked out of the meeting, with Eisner right behind him. Not knowing where he
was going, my brother led the executive straight into a boiler room, where they continued to argue.

Eisner showed up at the next
Happy Days
run-through. Afterward, he and Garry met again.

“Where are the Puerto Ricans?” Eisner asked.

“They were there,” my brother said.

“Where?” Eisner asked.

“They were working in the back,” Garry said.

That’s comedy.

Penny and her grandmother, “Nanny,” at Ronny’s 1958 wedding
Marshall personal collection

ME:
When did Nanny die?
RONNY:
I was already out here. I got divorced and moved here in 1971, and it was a few years after that.
ME:
What do you know about it?
RONNY:
We’re not big on funerals.
ME:
We had her cremated, right?
RONNY:
Yeah. No one wanted a funeral and a burial. We didn’t do that. And she wouldn’t know the difference. She was dead.
ME:
But I remember we did have some kind of service.
RONNY:
We went to Pierce Brothers Mortuary. It was Mom and Dad, Garry, Barbara, Penny, and Rob. We were put outside in a spot with a big wall in front of us. All of us sat down in a row of seats. The seats were canvass and connected to each other.
ME:
If one person moved, the other person went up.
RONNY:
Right.
ME:
I remember we were standing up and sitting down when the minister came in. I mean I guess he was a minister.
RONNY:
He just appeared. We didn’t know who he was. He
could’ve been anyone.
ME:
He didn’t know my grandmother. He had no idea.
RONNY:
But he rambled on about her.
ME:
Without ever saying she was a pain in the ass.
RONNY:
The cement wall behind him had square cutouts with a box in each one, nine boxes in all. There were three rows of three. And Nan’s urn was in what looked like a gift-wrapped box in the middle.
ME:
And Rob leaned over and said, “Look, she’s got the center square.”
RONNY:
So we all started to laugh, and the minister kept talking about her even though none of us was paying attention because we were laughing so hard.
ME:
Then Garry and our mother stood up and shifted all the rest of us in our seats because if one person moved everyone else did, too.
RONNY:
We laughed even harder.
ME:
But Nanny always had a good sense of humor.

Dan Aykroyd, Penny, and John Belushi in 1980
© CORBIS

I
T’S HARD TO IMAGINE
a time when Saturday nights didn’t include the phrase “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.”
Saturday Night Live
is such an institution that you can forget or may not know that tuning in at 11:30 p.m. was once an adventure into the unknown, a true television event. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore were among those who gave name recognition to John Belushi, Danny Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and other cast regulars, although it wasn’t long before
SNL
writers such as Anne Beatts, Tom Schiller, Herb Sargent, Alan Zweibel, now-Senator Al Franken, and Michael O’Donoghue had their own fans. They were brilliant, stoned, fearless, and fucking funny, and word went out that this show was hot even before it aired.

Lorne Michaels was the show’s creator and executive producer, the calm head in the middle of the storm. He came out to L.A. before
SNL
’s October premiere, wanting Rob to guest host. He had signed up George Carlin and Paul Simon for the first two shows, and he asked Rob to do the third. He also asked me to do it with him. I wondered about his judgment.

“Why? I’m nobody,” I said.

“I’ve seen your work,” he said.

Lorne is one of those people who knows what he wants—and more important, he knows how to get it. Although I had just met him, I learned within five minutes of trying to wiggle out of
SNL
that there’s not much point to arguing with him. So Rob and I went back for the week. It was packed with meetings with writers, rehearsals, dinners, and late nights with Lorne, who was a welcoming, entertaining host still trying to sell his show.

I was already sold, but I still had no idea why I was there. I kept saying, “I don’t know why I’m here. You aren’t writing for the girls to begin with.” Lorne replied, “You’re here because I paid for your ticket.”

“I’ll pay you back,” I said.

We went back and forth like that all week. I had a great time. It was my kind of atmosphere. No one slept. Or if they did, they just dropped onto the floor and you stepped over the bodies. In one sketch I was supposed to play a Russian shopper in a shoe store, and I think the only reason it got as far as it did was because John and Danny wanted me to do an accent. The second I said I couldn’t, they began trying like crazy to change my mind. It was a game. But I don’t do accents, so they couldn’t use that one. But they had more than enough.

As the clock ticked down on Saturday night, a different, more intense energy filled the studio. Rob opened the show as a Vegas lounge singer. The sketches that followed included John doing his Joe Cocker impression for the first time, singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” It was brilliant. After Laraine Newman played Squeaky Fromme pulling a gun on Jane Curtin, Andy Kaufman lip-synced to “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and then Rob and I hosted a show of fashion mistakes.

Then there was a short film from Albert, who’d been hired to make films for the show. But his piece ran thirteen minutes, hardly short. When Lorne wanted to cut it, Rob defended his friend. Lorne compromised
by putting a commercial in the middle of it. Everything else moved fast. The crew was involved in a ballet of set changes and movement that was impressive for only the third show. We square-danced in a piece where Danny was an evil hoedown caller and toward the end of the show Rob and I played a couple in deep conversation at an Italian restaurant when John, Danny, Jane, and others dressed as the Bees interrupted us.

“I don’t want the damn Bees!” Rob shouted, pissed off.

“You don’t have to be so hard on the Bees,” I said. “They just did it because they thought it would help the show.”

“They’re NOT helping the show! They’re ruining the show! I don’t need Bees! I don’t need Bees! I’m a major star! I’m on the number one television show in America!”

John then stepped forward as a spokesperson for all the Bees.

“I’m sorry if you think we’re ruining your show, Mr. Reiner,” he said. “But you don’t understand. We didn’t ask to be Bees. You see, you’ve got Norman Lear and a first-rate writing staff. But this is all they came up with for us.”

John went on about how the Bees were in the same spot he had been in years earlier; they were a bunch of actors looking for a break. Rob felt guilty. I made him feel even worse by saying I was embarrassed. Then I tried to comfort him, saying, “It’s all right, honey.” But that appeared to add salt to the wound.

“Don’t say ‘honey,’” he said.

At the after-party, I thanked Lorne for allowing me to have a wonderful time even though I still didn’t understand why I was included. Laughing, he asked what I thought of the week now that it was over. I reminded him of what I had said to him after our first night in New York. I said, “I think you’re the most manipulative human being I’ve ever met, and you do it beautifully.” Now that I had seen him in action, I admired him even more.

Lorne and I have been friends ever since.

Penny and Cindy Williams in Fonzie’s apartment, filming the 1975 pilot of
Laverne & Shirley
Use of photo still from
Laverne & Shirley–
Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

I
N NOVEMBER
1975, a
Happy Days
episode that Cindy Williams and I had taped finally aired. I was not expecting anything to come of it. About eight weeks earlier, my brother had called and asked what I was doing. I was working with Cindy on a Bicentennial-themed satire that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to produce. Carl Gottlieb had rounded up a bunch of people to write sketches, including Harry Shearer, Martin Mull, and us.

“Do you want to do a
Happy Days?
” my brother asked. “We need two fast girls who put out. If Cindy wants to do it, she can play opposite Ron. They were good together in
American Graffiti
. You can play opposite Fonzie. If she doesn’t want to do it, you can play whichever part you want.”

I asked Cindy. We were making $30 a week working at Zoetrope, Francis’s studio. We both said yes.

In the episode, titled “A Date with Fonzie,” we were two loose girls that Fonzie called to help Richie Cunningham out of a dating slump. Cindy was Shirley Feeney, and I was Laverne DeFazio. She knew Ron Howard from the movie, and Henry Winkler had worked with me in the
Paul Sand
pilot. After it aired, my brother was at a conference
with ABC executives. Fred Silverman, the network’s president, was looking for new sitcoms. He asked my brother if he had any spinoff ideas.

“I’ve got a couple of bottle cappers who work in a Milwaukee brewery,” he said. “How about them?”