My Mother Was Nuts (17 page)

“Penny, it’s Lorne.”

“Uh-huh.”

I was out of it.

“We can’t find Cindy,” he said.

“I just saw her,” I said.

“We can’t find her.”

“So.”

“You have to come rehearse,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“And you have to do her scenes, too.”

“Lorne, I can’t,” I said. “I have enough problems on my own show.”

“Penny.”

“Do you hear me, Lorne? I’m slurring my words.”

“I’ll send someone to get you,” he said.

Soon Danny Aykroyd and John Belushi roared up in front of the hotel on their motorcycles. They were at their best when on a mission, either from God or Lorne, though many would attest they were the same. They knocked on my door. After I opened it a crack, they pushed past me as if they were cops. When I told them I couldn’t go to rehearsal because I’d flown all night and had recently taken Valium, John pulled out a vial of coke and gave me a hit.

A few minutes later I was riding through the French Quarter on the back of John’s bike. He had a cast on his leg for some reason. During rehearsals of John and Danny’s Wild Bees sketch, I woke up. It didn’t take long. As I looked around, I got the impression that Lorne and his crew were prepared. The show was planned as a mix
of reportage from parades and parties across the city, as well as skits and musical performances, starting with Danny in the cold open as President Carter addressing the nation about tough economic times, the energy crisis, and his commitment to carry his own garment bag as well as his drunk brother, Billy.

Most of the rehearsal was spent discussing and coordinating coverage of the Bacchus parade route. Buck and Jane were assigned color commentary on the parade. Gilda was going to interview King of Bacchus, Henry Winkler. And Cindy and I were given the job of doing on-the-scene reporting from the Krewe of Apollo Ball, essentially a beauty pageant for drag queens. But we were not supposed to mention that viewers would be seeing men dressed as women. The show was airing in prime time, not late night.

While it would have been nice if Cindy had been at rehearsal to hear those instructions, she did turn up for the Endymion Parade. But she went missing again on Sunday when the show went on the air live. Only a few people paid attention, like me. The rest had bigger problems. Like the Bacchus Parade, the main part of the show. Buck and Jane were in a booth prepared to provide commentary as it passed in front of them. However, when the cameras cut to them, they were still waiting for the parade, which was nowhere in sight.

Instead, viewers saw mayhem. They were bombarded with beads. A little rubber ball bounced off Jane’s head. People tried to douse them with drinks. “It’s an incredible thing to realize that hundreds of thousands of Americans have traveled thousands of miles just to come here to New Orleans to visit Bourbon Street and to throw up,” Buck said.

The show didn’t get any smoother. Gilda was pawed and groped as she did her Emily Litella sketch. I was set up at the Krewe of Apollo Ball, still waiting for Cindy to show up. Every so often I heard a voice in my earpiece say, “Get ready, Penny.” “We’re coming to you soon, Penny.” “Have we found Cindy yet?” At one point, I did hear Randy perform, which was nice. Then it was back to them talking to me: “We’re coming to you next. Has anyone located Cindy?”

Buck and Jane had no clue Cindy was not there when they threw to us—er, when they threw to me. Similarly, I had no idea they had passed the baton, so to speak. At the time, I had just borrowed lipstick from some guy, who viewers had to think was a woman. My confusion was evident as I waited, and waited, on live TV, until I sensed that I might be on the air—at which point I very articulately said, “Now?”

When no one answered, I took that as an affirmative and began to describe the club and the setting. “Doesn’t she look beautiful?” “And she’s wearing baby’s breath. It’s lovely.” It was endless filler. “That’s a lovely satin gown.” Finally, I said, “We will be coming back to this
wonderful
ball in a few minutes. I hope Cindy will, too.”

Miraculously, she did turn up in time for our second and last segment. She said that she had changed hotel rooms and the producers couldn’t find her. By this point, I didn’t care about her reasons for showing up late. I was overjoyed to have her next to me when they threw to us to describe the crowning of the new Queen of the Krewe of Apollo.

“Isn’t he something?” Cindy said. “He’s something, isn’t he?”

“What?” I said, surprised by the secret she was revealing to viewers.

But why would she know that was off-limits? She hadn’t been to the briefing. Who gave a shit? As soon as we finished, I tossed back to Jane and Buck and lit up a cigarette. They never did see the parade. It had been diverted after someone along the route was accidentally run over and killed. In the show’s closing moments, Jane explained, “The parade has not been delayed. It doesn’t exist. It never did. ‘Mardi Gras’ is just a French word meaning ‘No Parade.’ Good night.”

In the meantime, I didn’t have a ride back to the postshow dinner from the ball. No one had been designated as my driver. Nor had I been assigned a security guard, an intern, or even a helper. A guy in the crowd saw me looking around and asked if I wanted a ride on his
motorcycle. He could’ve been a murderer for all I knew. I didn’t care. I said okay and got on the back of his bike.

Thank God, he dropped me off at a restaurant where I recognized people. I left with Herb Sargent and went back to his hotel, with Tom Schiller in the background saying, “He’s too old for you.” I didn’t care. After the trauma of the show, I didn’t want to be alone. But Tom was right. Herb fell asleep in the middle of the night.

Still awake, I had no idea where I was or how to get back to my hotel. I called downstairs for a cab, but the concierge said that wouldn’t be possible. The streets were still too crowded. Yes, I realized that half-naked drunken people were continuing to walk around down there. That’s why I had wanted a cab. I called the police instead.

“Laverne, is that you?” the desk sergeant asked.

“It is,” I said.

Two cop cars showed up and took me to my hotel. Then Cindy and I flew back to L.A. I didn’t do
Saturday Night Live
again until I was promoting
The Preacher’s Wife
with Whitney Houston in 1996. Why so long? I needed those twenty years to recover from what had happened in New Orleans.

Penny and her mother celebrating Easter in 1978
Garry Marshall

S
OMETIMES I HEARD
a tone in Tracy’s voice that reminded me of the way I had sounded when I spoke to my mother. It would make me cringe. I knew what it was like to have a mother who not only worked but was more interested in her work than doing traditional mother things. Also, I remember Tracy bringing kids home after school to play, and then they would leave. I’d ask where so-and-so went, and she would say, “They didn’t really want to be friends. They just wanted to see you and Rob.” My heart ached.

Every so often I would try to make it up to her. In June 1977, for instance, she was going through what I called her Patty Hearst phase, whining that I never took her anywhere. Well, she had been to Monte Carlo and Venice, among other places, but instead of arguing, I took her to the Plaza Hotel in New York and showed her where I had grown up.

It was my version of a trip to the old country. I took her to Rob’s building. We walked up Jerome Avenue. I pointed out the store where I had bought my 45s as well as the Jade Garden, the Chinese restaurant where we ordered takeout if my father didn’t come home for Sunday dinner. It was underneath the el, and I explained how we
would wait after placing an order and couldn’t hear shit when they called your number because of the passing train.

For me, though, the highlight of our trip was when we stood outside my old apartment building and I showed Tracy the windows on the ramp leading down to my mother’s dance school. There were three of them. She noticed that someone had spray-painted the word
FONZIE
on one of them. I liked seeing that a touch of Marshall creativity was still attached to the building, and Tracy was eager to tell her grandmother.

If only my mother had been able to fully appreciate it. She was still as much of a pain in the ass as ever—meddling, complaining about my father, or offering an opinion on work. “Why does your brother dress you so silly?” Rob could tell from the sound of my voice when I was talking to her on the phone. At family gatherings at our house, she took the grandchildren outside and taught them tap in our driveway. We would hear the scraping on the cement.

But we had begun to notice a problem. Her feistiness was turning into forgetfulness. It was first apparent in late 1977, during
Laverne & Shirley’
s third season, when we taped an episode titled “The Second Almost Annual Shotz Talent Show.” Cindy’s and my mothers were both in it. Her mother, Frances, sang and mine danced. In many ways, the episode was a tribute to my mother, starting with the person who wrote the script, Paula Roth. Paula was the daughter of my mother’s partner in the dance school, Mildred Roth.

In the second season, after the show was a hit, Garry had told me that I could give someone a life, meaning I could give someone who needed a break a job on
Laverne & Shirley
. I chose Paula. Although I had been mean to her as a kid, those days were behind us. I took her to plays and events when I was in New York. She was usually available. She was a key-punch operator going with a married guy. I didn’t think that constituted a life.

She jumped at the chance to work on the show. Garry gave her the same manual he’d given to Monica, and Paula picked up writing quickly. I did the same thing with Marty Nadler, a friend’s brother.
Garry also let Cindy give two people a life. It was easy to open the door and, in a way, it was necessary to pay it forward if you wanted to stay real amid all the hoopla of show business.

Once the door was opened, it was up to others to prove they belonged. Like Paula, whose “Second Almost Annual Talent Show” brought all of us back together for the first time since we’d been children. During rehearsals, we reminisced about how my mother had taught us how to entertain. Now, here we were at Paramount Studios, Garry, Ronny, Paula, and me, all of us influenced in some way by her. Even more remarkable was my mother’s ability to tap. She danced effortlessly, picking up steps wherever Garry instructed. She delighted all of us.

But she couldn’t remember any of her lines, not even a single short one. That was worrisome.

As we puzzled over it, Garry remembered that she’d had trouble on her previous TV appearances. The first was the “Oscar’s Birthday” episode of
The Odd Couple
in 1972. No one had told her it was lunchtime and she was found hiding on the set. The second was a
Happy Days
in 1976. She had one line—“When do we eat lunch?”—and she repeatedly said, “When do we go to the airport?”

After the talent show episode, we took my mother to the doctor. She was diagnosed with dementia or what we have since come to know as Alzheimer’s disease. I tried to make light of it. “Maybe it’s good—maybe she won’t know who I am and will like me better,” I said. But she didn’t forget me—or her sense of humor. A short time later, a reporter doing a story on our family was allowed to sit next to her during a
Laverne & Shirley
rehearsal. “It has too much sameness,” my mother said. Then she added, “You know, my son did all this for the money.”

Gradually, as the disease took hold, she would occasionally forget our names and call us whatever name popped into her head. She had done the same thing when I was a kid. She would call me Gertrude or Gladys and say, “Don’t you get tired of always being called Penny?” Despite her Alzheimer’s, she still hated my father. Their conversations
were hilarious. One day she was looking in her purse for her checkbook. She couldn’t find it or remember what it was called. She kept asking for the “long brown thing.”

My father, good with numbers but not the sharpest tack, said, “A salami?”

“A salami?” she exclaimed. “What would I do with a salami in my purse?”

At that point, we took her car away. She and my father were living in Studio City so they could be closer to Garry, Ronny, and me. She still got around on the bus, but she would forget where to get off. Several times she went to the end of the line and wandered around. Once, a cop picked her up and called my sister-in-law. They had my mother in the downtown jail, where she was regaling hookers with stories about teaching dance. They loved her.

Years later, after the disease had rendered her bed-bound and helpless, I took a Polaroid of her lying in bed. I knew she was nearing the end of her life and I wanted to remember her. I showed the picture to Jimmy Belushi, who was living in a spare room at my house. He grabbed the photo from my hand and threw it in the fireplace. “That’s not your mother,” he said.

He was right. My mother dressed in a blouse and slacks and spent her days in the cellar—or rather the ballroom—sitting at an upright piano, smoking cigarettes, drinking Yoo-hoo, and making sure her 360 students knew what it felt like to entertain.