My Mother Was Nuts (18 page)

Even though she drove me nuts, I would never forget her.

Penny and close friend Carrie Fisher, who were introduced by Lorne Michaels
Michael O’Donoghue / Tracy Reiner

Penny and Carrie blowing out the candles in 1986 at one of their legendary joint birthday parties
Marshall personal collection

R
IGHT BEFORE ROB
quit
All in the Family
at the end of the 1977–78 season, we bought a home in Encino with a tennis court, a swimming pool, ample parking for friends, and a guest house. It was supposed to be our dream house, the place that said we had made it. We called it “the house that yuks built.” Jerry Belson came over one day and said, “Wow, this is a great house—if life was worth living.”

Before long we were agreeing with him. We wanted to add a master bedroom and update the kitchen. We hired an architect and a contractor, who told us the job would take six months max. So we moved into the guest house: Rob, Tracy, me, our two dogs, Barney Google and Joey, and a white cat we referred to as The Ghost of Howie for the way he coughed and wheezed like our old cat, Howie. We thought we could handle the close quarters for a while.

But two years later we were still living there. Somewhere in that time span we lost our sense of humor. Our contractor and architect would assure us that the job was coming along and then something would happen. The wrong materials arrived or they weren’t shipped at all. Or the wood we wanted to use was too heavy for the floor.
When I complained, the contractor said, “You can go ahead with that flooring. But you might have a cave-in. Your call.”

To get through the annoyances, Rob and I relied on our ability to turn even hardship into humor. Without
All in the Family
, he worked hard. In June 1978, he and his partner, Phil Mishkin, wrote and produced
Free Country
, a period sitcom about Lithuanian immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York. Rob also starred in it. I think he wanted to do the Eastern European version of
Roots
. But the network canceled it after only five episodes. He tried a variety series the next summer, and despite contributions from Billy Crystal and Martin Mull, and the debut of
This Is Spinal Tap
, it also had a short run.

Rob was unaccustomed to failure. Frustrated, he struggled and second-guessed himself into a place of self-loathing. Once he was in that state of mind, there was no getting through to him. If you liked him, you were a fool, and if you didn’t like him, you were an idiot.

I knew we had problems when I got out of bed one morning and he asked where I was going. I reminded him that I had a show. He drifted and stewed about the little things that we had always tried to ignore, including my paycheck, which was now bigger than his. What did it matter? Well, apparently it did. We were out of sync. He was fiercely ambitious, and I didn’t give a shit. While he worked, Albert and I would take mushrooms and watch
Family Feud
. Then he would come home and find us laughing at “Show me ‘banana’!”

Egos were fragile. With our house in disarray, friends didn’t hang out as much. We had people over to swim and play tennis, but it wasn’t like the old days. I would go to New York to hang out with my
SNL
friends. One day I went to The Sherry-Netherland Hotel to say hi to Jerry Belson, who was working on a rewrite of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and Steven Spielberg was there.

“So you’re the
Jaws
of TV?” he said.

Steven and I became instant friends. He gave me a small part in his movie
1941
, his action comedy starring John Belushi and Danny Aykroyd about a feared Japanese attack on Los Angeles during World War II. It was a high-concept, big-budget film, and as Hollywood’s
wunderkind filmmaker, he knew many in the business were looking for him to fail. When you get too successful, people want to see that you’re fallible, like everyone else.

He understood. When he offered me a couple days work on the movie, he joked, “I have a hundred and seventy-one speaking parts. If this dies, I’m going to need someone to talk to.” He covered a lot of bases because it was hard to find someone who wasn’t in the movie. Even Michael McKean and David Lander were in it; they played machine gunners defending the coast.

My scene took one day and then I spent another day on the set watching Steven work. I didn’t know shit about cameras or directing, and he knew everything. He was experimenting with a Louma crane, which was this long expandable, extendable arm with a camera at the end that could snake through crowds and fly overhead while being operated from a seated position far away.

When he filmed me, Steven was literally around the corner. I made him stick his picture on the end of the camera. I was used to talking to another person. I think I amused him. We watched movies together and discussed changes we would have made in scenes and different endings. I was endlessly fascinated. I don’t know that everyone at our place was as enamored by him. Some were intimidated. Others were jealous. Steven didn’t do drugs. He was a straight arrow, and that made some people uncomfortable.

I tried to get a Quaalude in him. They were my drug of choice. I constantly joked about wanting to know what he would be like if he relaxed.

“I want to know what’s inside you,” I would say.

“Celluloid,” he would say, laughing at me.

Carl Gottlieb had cowritten the screenplay for
Jaws
, and he called me one day when I was in New York with a request. He was thinking about buying the house on Martha’s Vineyard where they all had stayed while making the movie, and he asked me to go with his then-wife Allison to look at the house. He trusted my taste. Once Steven
heard that I was going there, he called me with another favor. He had left his favorite pillow there and wanted me to try to find it.

“How am I going to find it?” I asked.

“It smells a little like celery,” he said.

“Celery?” I paused. “Never mind.”

The house was a large log cabin that hadn’t been occupied since they had used it as their home base. As Allison looked around, I went through each bedroom and smelled the pillows. I inhaled a lot of dust without finding a hint of celery anywhere. Carl didn’t end up buying the house, either.

Back in New York, Lorne arranged for me to meet Carrie Fisher at her place in the Eldorado on Central Park West. He was pals with singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who was dating Carrie, and they thought we’d hit it off. They were right. We’ve been best friends ever since. She and Paul were heading to St. Hip, her name for some island in the Caribbean. I helped her pack and listened to her bitch about whether she was able to keep up with Paul.

A high school dropout, she thought everyone was smarter than she was, especially Paul. In reality, she was smarter than everyone. She was brilliant. Everyone knew it. Steven, Lorne, and if you asked him at the right moment, Paul would’ve agreed, too. Carrie read voraciously. She was funny and clever. She wrote and provided nonstop, hysterical commentary on people, movies, books, and Hollywood, where she grew up the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. She was a one-woman show thirty-five years before she did one.

There was a reason I was glad to have a new best friend: I was gradually losing my old one. The remodel cost more than we paid for our house. It also cost us our marriage. Two years in the guest house took a toll. When Rob and I finally moved in, we saw a report on TV that we were breaking up. It wasn’t a good welcome. We made a stab at normalcy, opening our doors again to friends. We welcomed back the old crowd, including Albert, Jim Brooks, and Ricky Dreyfuss,
who took over the guest house. Added new faces, like Ed Begley Jr., John Landis, Jimmy Belushi, Tim Matheson, and Steven Spielberg. One night Cindy arrived with Andy Kaufman, who she dated briefly. He wanted to wrestle us.

“I don’t think so,” I said. Then I turned to Cindy and added, “Please take him home.”

I wasn’t into fighting in any way, not even with Rob. Our marriage continued to head in the wrong direction, and it wasn’t helped when we worked together on his TV movie
More Than Friends
. The movie was a charming romance—underrated if you ask me—that Rob wrote with Phil Mishkin about two longtime friends who debate over a couple decades whether to become lovers. Originally titled
I’ll Love You and Be Your Best Friend
, it was loosely inspired by our relationship. In fact, ABC promoted it as a “like story.”

Rob and I starred with Howard Hesseman, Carl Gottlieb, Michael McKean, and other friends. We shot in our old Bronx neighborhood and reconnected with past acquaintances. Jim Burrows directed, but the film was Rob’s. He often yelled cut. Our problems arose because he immersed himself in every aspect of the movie and expected me to do the same. But I didn’t want to go to dailies and watch myself. I didn’t like doing that. Nor did I want to run lines at night. I knew my lines.

New York was my playground, and I wanted to play. Rob and I got into an argument when I insisted on going to the
Animal House
premiere rather than staying at the hotel and rehearsing with him. I had friends there: John Belushi, Stephen Bishop, John Landis, and Tim Matheson. I was making up for the fun I’d missed as a young mother. Rob was interested in making movies.

Back home, as Rob put together the movie, he began talking about wanting a beach house in Malibu. We had never gone to Malibu. We weren’t beach people. He also kept referring to it as
his
house. I realized what was going on. There weren’t other people. Neither of us had cheated. We just weren’t making each other happy anymore.

In March 1979, we decided to split, but then we stayed together another six months because Ricky Dreyfuss, who was living in our guest house with his Best Actor Academy Award for
The Goodbye Girl
, couldn’t handle us breaking up. He cried. The three of us probably should have gone to therapy together.

Finally, in August, Rob moved to the beach house. I stayed in Encino so Tracy could continue going to the same junior high school. We didn’t rush to split everything or sign divorce papers. We remained friendly. I think both of us felt guilty. Maybe, though, in the end, I did make him sick.

I had a harder time than I let on. As this went down, Cindy and I were shooting the two-part
Laverne & Shirley
episode “You’re in the Army Now.” It aired early in the fifth season. I completely fell apart during a scene when we parachuted down from a helicopter. All of a sudden I went blind. As we dangled on ropes above the set, I told Cindy that I was having a breakdown.

“I know my lines,” I said. “Just make sure I get on my mark.”

With her pushing me from one spot to another, I made it through. I don’t shut down for nothing. But a few nights later, I looked and sounded like I was ready to fall apart. I arranged to have dinner with my brother. I wanted to tell him about Rob’s and my decision to divorce. We met at a restaurant near my house. I had never been there. It looked okay from the outside. I thought he would find something that agreed with him.

What we found instead were waiters who came to the table and talked with puppets on their hands.
What’s your order?
Oblivious to my tears, they were auditioning for us, hoping to get a job. It was absurd. I laughed and cried at the same time.

Carrie helped me through the roughest patches. In addition to being available on the phone or in person, she played matchmaker, introducing me to Art Garfunkel, the singer. He was in town and staying at an out-of-the-way hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. She was
having a fight with Paul that day, and who better to complain to about Paul Simon than his on-again, off-again partner Art Garfunkel?

We went to Artie’s hotel, and although Carrie consumed most of the attention, Artie and I hit it off. He was still depressed following the suicide of his longtime girlfriend, Laurie Bird, the year before, and I was depressed, too. It was perfect. We were proof of the cliché that misery loved company.