My Mother Was Nuts (16 page)

My brother, who went back and forth between shows, played peacemaker, writer, chief negotiator, psychiatrist, older brother, and boss. He scratched his head a lot. He didn’t like confrontation. When one of us did something wrong, he would talk to the other person. If I messed up, he told Cindy. I could hear it. Cindy and I would look at each other, wondering if we had lost our minds.

From the beginning, Cindy worried that I would receive preferential treatment because it was my brother’s show. She would point out that I called one of the producers Dad. She was right, in a way. I was treated differently than the rest of the cast and crew. I was treated worse. One week my father got mad at me and locked my paycheck in his desk drawer.

He told my brother that I had been “fresh” to him and he wasn’t going to give it to me until I apologized. Garry said, “Listen, Pop, that’s not the way it works.” It wasn’t an allowance. He made him give it to me.

Cindy didn’t see it that way. The problem was her insecurity and her manager, Pat McQueeney. Pat was always on the set, conferring with Cindy. She counted lines and kept track of laughs. From the time I got that reaction in the hospital scene, she insisted that I was getting more screen time than her client. Also better lines, more jokes, and all that. She said it was due to my family connections. She constructed a whole conspiracy theory—everyone was out to get Cindy—none of which was true. But that didn’t matter. It was her leverage with her client. And basically she drove Cindy nuts. She made her insecure about a job that she was doing extremely well.

We’re all insecure. I’m insecure. I wanted to be prettier. I hated my posture. My self-esteem fluctuated more than the stock market. But I didn’t have a manager telling me all that shit every day.

I would have been perfectly happy if Cindy had all the lines. I didn’t like memorizing lines. I was content to make milk and Pepsi or add whipped cream to something. I did props very well. She dated David briefly, so I had to move over and stand with Michael in our two-shots. Then when she and David broke up, I moved back into two-shots with Cindy. I had to put up with that shit. I didn’t care. I tried talking to her about the shit Pat was putting in her heard. It was wrong, and besides that, it was stupid and missed the point. To me, we were like
The Odd Couple
, which had taped on our same stage. Jack Klugman got the laughs, but it was only because Tony Randall could go to the moon and back. He was the real actor and everybody knew it. We were the same. I may have gotten the laughs, but so did she, and everyone knew it was Cindy’s acting talent that made it possible.

In early November, Pat pushed Cindy over the edge. We were on our eleventh show, an episode titled “Guilty Until Proven Innocent.” In it, Shirley tries to get Laverne out of jail after she’s wrongly arrested for shoplifting. Jim Burrows was directing, and the veteran comic Louis Nye was a guest star. In the middle of the week, work suddenly stopped. Cindy had apparently reached her breaking point, and Pat had stormed into my brother’s office demanding changes, immediately.

The next thing we knew, writers were fired, including Lowell Ganz and his partner, Mark Rothman, and word spread that Cindy was bringing in her own writer-producer, someone more sensitive to her needs as an actress. Then in walked Monica Johnson, one of my best friends. She was Cindy’s writer.

As this went down, Pat and Cindy came into my dressing room. Monica followed. She wanted to shut down production for a week to get a sense of the situation, talk with Cindy, and write new material.
Pat also wanted to shut down. She claimed it was for the good of the show, but it was really about her exercising control. Cindy was simply upset. As I recall, she was about to throw a bottle against the wall when David and Michael walked in wanting to know what was going on. It was like a scene out of the show.
Hello
.

Their timing couldn’t have been worse—or more perfect. It shut Pat up and let me take control of the conversation. I kicked everyone out except Cindy. I wanted to talk to her alone. I told her that I was a fan of Monica’s and if having her on the show made her happier, I was all for it. But we couldn’t stop work. It was a waste of money, it would create bad press, especially for her as the one who stormed off the set, and I didn’t want to come back to the episode.

“None of us do,” I said. “I mean, do you want to take a week off and come back to this?”

Cindy agreed. Then I spoke to Monica, who also understood why we couldn’t shut down, and why, by finishing the episode, she would look like a hero, someone who came on the set and solved the problem rather than creating an even bigger one. We had the next week off anyway. She could get acclimated then and write new material.

I had one last point, my own stipulation: Lowell Ganz had to stay. I needed someone I trusted, someone I could look at in run-throughs and know whether it was funny, and for me, that was Lowell.

Monica always said she hated producing the show because it meant she had to be someplace on time. That was evident. She arrived on the set wearing a nightgown and bathrobe, with her hair in curlers. Like her brother, Jerry Belson, she knew funny. However, she had no idea how to produce a TV show. If my brother hadn’t saved her life by writing a how-to manual, we might still be there, hearing her soft, feathery voice ask, “Now what do we do?”

Penny and Toni Basil in the 1978
Laverne & Shirley
episode “A Chorus Line”
Use of photo still from
Laverne & Shirley–
Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

W
HILE MONICA RETOOLED
the show, Cindy and I went on our first publicity tour. It was November, and the show was red hot. We were also plugging our
Laverne & Shirley Sing
album, a collection of oldies we had recorded the previous summer. (Cindy had taken it very seriously while I was happy to just say, “One …” “Two …” on “Sixteen Candles.” And oh boy was John Belushi mad that I hadn’t let him be on the album.) In Milwaukee, a crowd of screaming fans greeted us at the airport and more waited at a local radio station.

Then we went to Philadelphia for
The Mike Douglas Show
and were mobbed again at a record store.

We were shocked. This was our first time out in public as Laverne and Shirley, and although we weren’t naïve about fame, neither of us had the self-esteem that let us understand why thousands of people would get excited to see us. What we needed was an instruction book like the one my brother wrote for Monica. No one tells you how to be famous, and it confuses the shit out of you when it happens. I remember Rob getting mobbed by his fans and I got pushed down the block. They didn’t know who I was. After
Laverne & Shirley
hit, Rob liked my fans better because they were kids.

After Philadelphia, Cindy and I went to New York for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We drove there in a limo. It was our first time in a stretch limo. We didn’t even know how to open the sunroof—or the moon roof, as it was called then. In Manhattan, cops pulled our car over in Central Park. Our driver did something wrong. However, as soon as the cops saw us in the back, they let us go.
Hey, it’s Laverne and Shirley! How you doin’?
We were big with cops.

We got the star treatment at the Plaza Hotel, too. The first thing Cindy and I did was compare rooms, flowers, and gifts from the network, and blah, blah, blah. We couldn’t help ourselves. We turned into twelve-year-olds again. On the night before the parade, Cindy and I had a party in our rooms. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd,
Saturday Night Live
writer Herb Sargent, and Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson were among those who partied with us while I made signs for us to hold during the parade that said “Happy Thanksgiving Rob and Tracy.”

In the morning, Cindy and I got up early and rode in a car amid the giant helium balloons and marching bands. We waved at the crowds lining the streets and shouting our names as we passed them. Cindy and I elbowed each other every block or two, as if to say, “Can you believe this?” At one point, part of the crowd broke through the barricades and rushed toward us. Even the cops pushing them back wanted autographs. It was insane.

Our lives were never the same afterward. How could they be, when suddenly everyone in the world recognized us? Although my brother has told me that we came back from that visit on a power trip, I disagree. It was an eye-opener without question. But there’s a difference between being recognized and really knowing someone, and while I can’t speak for Cindy, I knew how I looked and felt when I crawled out of bed in the morning, and not even Rob cheered when he saw that pretty picture.

Now, with even more perspective on the phenomena, I can provide the lowdown on fame that I wish had been there for me. For starters, it’s scary. I remember Farrah Fawcett coming up to me when
we were both on
Celebrity Challenge of the Sexes
. Her famous poster had turned her into an overnight sex symbol and she was petrified by the way people were reacting to her. “They’re making me out to be something I’m not,” she confided.

I understood. But what was frightening to Farrah was intoxicating to others. One night John Belushi called me and exclaimed, “Penny, I can sleep with models now. They want me!” I said, “John, it’s not because you’re suddenly more attractive. You’re famous.”

I like the way Louise Lasser and I handled it. We bumped into each other at a party. I congratulated her on the success of her new series
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
, and she said the same to me about
Laverne & Shirley
. We were very mature and professional. Then we slipped into the bathroom and jumped up and down, screaming, “We’re famous! We’re famous!”

Then there was Princess Grace of Monaco. She had the best perspective that I ever encountered. Rob and I were on the celebrity tennis circuit, and Merv Griffin invited us to his first annual Merv Griffin Money Tennis Classic in Monte Carlo. Bill Cosby and Wayne Rogers were among the group. We flew on a chartered plane and played tennis on beautiful red clay courts. At night, we dined in the palace, where, as I did years later at the White House, I made sure to use the bathroom. Why not? You have to check it out, right? Anyway, before leaving, I chatted with the Princess, who was as gorgeous as I remembered her in movies when she was Grace Kelly, the star from Philadelphia. When I asked if she missed acting, she smiled and said, “What do you think I’m doing now?”

Penny’s mother, Marjorie, dancing with Frances Williams, makes a special appearance in the 1977
Laverne & Shirley
episode “The Second Almost Annual Shotz Talent Show ”
Use of photo still from
Laverne & Shirley–
Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

C
INDY WANTED TO DO
Saturday Night Live
. I had already done the show and didn’t care whether I was on it again. But Lorne didn’t know Cindy, and he asked, “Why would I want her without you?”

It was 1977. The two of us had agreed to be princesses in the Endymion Parade, the largest and rowdiest of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parades, and Henry Winkler had accepted an invitation to put on the crown as Bacchus and lead the Sunday-night parade that ended the weeklong celebration. Somehow these events coincided with Lorne’s decision to produce a Mardi Gras special from New Orleans. He had convinced NBC to fill a hole in its Sunday-night schedule with a live show from the French Quarter, featuring the
SNL
cast plus guests Eric Idle, Buck Henry, Randy Newman, Henry Winkler, Cindy, and me.

He approached it with the confidence of a general leading his seasoned troops on their first major campaign across the continent. But you didn’t have to be Einstein or a network censor to foresee the potential for disaster in unleashing John and Danny and new cast member Bill Murray, as well as writers like Michael O’Donoghue, on the Big Easy.

I was too preoccupied to realize what I was getting into. Cindy and I were working on our second-to-last episode of the season, and immediately after the last run-through of the week, we hopped on a redeye flight for New Orleans. Cindy brought Pat and some assistants; I was by myself. We landed and went straight to our hotel. Exhausted, I took a Valium and got into bed. I guess Cindy changed her room a few times. She wasn’t my responsibility. Then, as I dozed off, the phone rang.