My Mother Was Nuts (20 page)

Artie and I spent the night at Ricky Dreyfuss’s apartment. He was out of town and left the keys for me. We floated inside, knowing we’d had a sensational evening. I wouldn’t have guessed it could get better, but it did when Artie serenaded me with an absolutely beautiful rendition of “There’s a Place for Us.” He filled that song with emotion and meaning from both of our lives—his grief, my new life, the fact we’d found each other—indeed, at that moment, it was about us.

How could you not fall in love with that?

Penny and Art Garfunkel on their motorcycle trip through France and Italy
Penny Marshall/Art Garfunkel

O
NE OF THE FUNNIEST
Laverne & Shirley
episodes we ever did was “Not Quite South of the Border.” Our one hundredth show, it had the girls going on a vacation somewhere
near
Mexico (we weren’t allowed to insult Mexico) where everything went wrong. They checked into a bungalow that was missing two walls (it was literally a hole in the wall). They had to share it with a stranger with Montezuma’s revenge. Their luggage was lost. And then a hurricane hit.

The hurricane itself was one of the most spectacular scenes we had ever attempted, and we’d done a lot of physical bits over the years. When we shot it, Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, and Steven Spielberg came to watch. My brother was nervous with Steven there, especially afterward, when Steven was silent.

“What’s the matter?” my brother said. “You didn’t like it?”

“No,” Steven said. “The opposite. It would take me eleven days to do what you just did in a couple hours.”

Early on, the studio had given us small apartments in an area known as Lucy Park where Cindy, David, Michael, and I gathered every Tuesday night after we finishing taping and unwound while watching a tape of the show that had aired on the network that night
and commenting about what had been cut. David and I had the same conversation every week for eight years.

It was these late nights that put an end to my driving. I would find myself driving back to Encino on the freeway, thinking I was speeding, when in reality I was only going twenty miles per hour. I asked for a driver and got one, as did Cindy, thanks to the most-favored-nations clause in our contracts. After Tracy graduated from junior high school, Rob and I sold our Encino house and I rented Gore Vidal’s house in the Hollywood Hills. I kept the driver even though I lived much closer to Paramount.

It simplified my life.

That in turn left more time for something closer to my heart: Art Garfunkel. Artie came back to town to guest on “The Beatnik Show,” a fun episode in which the girls went to a coffee house after Shirley wanted to become a beatnik. In it, Cindy did a strange dance, I played the bongos, and Artie was a poet playing a tree. Teri Garr and Carol Kane sat at tables, too. At that point, Artie and I—to quote the show—welcomed each other into our lives as “ham welcomes cheese to the rye bread of friendship.”

He was just the distraction I needed. After five years of
Laverne & Shirley
, we had burned through nearly every comedy writer in town. The same was true for actors. We brought them in, said can you lift me? Can you kiss me? Can you come back in three weeks? We ended the season with our lowest ratings since going on the air. We didn’t face cancelation, but changes had to be made.

As soon as we went on hiatus, Cindy and I flew to the South of France for an international TV festival in Cannes. Once a series completed five years, there were enough shows for a big syndication sale, and our job was to drum up excitement. But neither of us looked like cheerleaders as we checked into the Hôtel du Cap, the famous old resort in Cap Ferret. We were jet-lagged, and the gray skies and chilly temperatures sapped whatever enthusiasm we had left.

The hotel was empty. Although we probably weren’t the only
people there, it felt like it. As we wandered from the front desk and down the cavernous hallways, the former nineteenth-century mansion reminded me of
The Shining
. I turned to Cindy and chanted, “Redrum, redrum.” She gave me a dirty look. She was sensitive about such things and didn’t want me to mess with her.

I suggested taking a walk around hotel’s expansive grounds before we faced meetings with international TV buyers and reporters at the convention. We followed a path along flowerbeds revealing the first colors of spring and past clusters of thick trees. Then we turned a corner and found ourselves standing at the entrance to a graveyard. But this was no ordinary graveyard. The headstones all were very small. We didn’t know what to make of it.

“Redrum,” I said.

“Shut up,” Cindy said.

I thought they might be for the hotel staff. Or perhaps some of the hotel’s guests.

“Don’t say that,” said Cindy.

She figured out the graves were for the hotel’s pets. As an animal lover, she thought that was sweet.

The walk re-energized us through most of the press conference, though I had trouble with a Dutch journalist who said his people didn’t think
Laverne & Shirley
was funny. “I don’t think the Dutch are known for their sense of humor,” I snapped. Later, at dinner with some TV executives from Belgium, Cindy and I crashed, literally, head first onto our plates, sound asleep. We blamed it on the time change. I suppose we did our job anyway.
Laverne & Shirley
broke new syndication records.

Back home, as I recounted the trip to Artie, his eyes lit up at my description of the South of France. Well-traveled, he had been through the South of France many times before, including the Hôtel du Cap, and my enthusiasm for Europe inspired him to suggest another type of trip: motorcycling across Europe. Just the two of us. Going wherever our mood and the road took us.

I had never done anything remotely like that in my life. Who lived
that kind of life outside of characters in novels? Artie did. To me, it was one more reason to fall in love with this man. His father had been a traveling salesman, and Artie liked to rack up the miles, too. In the short time I had known him, he had periodically called and said, “How about Austria?” “How about Istanbul?” I was employed Monday through Friday. He, on the other hand, picked up and left for two or three months on a whim.

I said yes. The motorcycle adventure was something I would have done in my early 20s but I already was a mother then. However, now was even better. I had the time, the money, and the perfect traveling companion. Artie and I flew to Paris, where we spent a week with Jim Brooks and his then-wife, Holly, and Lorne and his girlfriend, Susan, who all happened to be there at the same time. It was a party.

Then, one morning, after bidding good-bye to our friends, Artie and I stood in front of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, secured two small suitcases to the back of his rented BMW motorcycle, and took off. Someone asked where we were headed and Artie simply said, “South.”

The ensuing days were wonderful, amazing. Avoiding highways, we drove at a leisurely pace on back roads through small villages and gorgeous countryside. I had a Michelin guide, but we stayed in whatever charming place we found, whether it was a five-star hotel or an inexpensive pension. Every four or five days, we boxed up our dirty clothes and sent them to his place in New York. Artie preferred to buy a new T-shirt and underwear rather than do laundry.

After nearly two weeks, we parked the bike in Avignon so I could fly to Boston for an event that nearly qualified as a family get-together. My brother and Jerry Belson were workshopping
The Roast
, a play they had written about an old comedian whose tribute dinner is spoiled when dark secrets are revealed. It starred Rob and Peter Boyle, and Rob’s father, Carl, directed. Was it odd that we were all still working together? Not to me. That’s show business.

I watched from the back of the theater and gave notes. I don’t
think they helped. In May, the play went to Broadway and closed after three days. (As it closed, the sign for
Cats
went up.) My brother blamed his and Jerry’s inability to agree on an ending. I’m sure he was right. Onstage, you have to tie up the loose ends neatly and send the audience home with a resolution they like. In real life, as was evident, that’s not as easy. I was familiar with indecision. My life was a play in the midst of a rewrite. But was that bad? I didn’t think so. In fact, I had asked my therapist why I had left a marriage that was comfortable and predictable for a great big question mark.

“Were you happy?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He shrugged.

That cost me a fortune, but he was right. Sometimes the most complicated questions have simple answers.

Were you happy?

I was learning that I didn’t have to have everything figured out. Often the point was to live and see what happened. Artie was a great person with whom to discuss such matters. He thought about the big questions and read deep books. My approach was far simpler. I remember once laughing at our differences when I noticed the books we were carrying through an airport. He had Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
and I had Xaviera Hollander’s
The Happy Hooker
.

After Boston, Artie and I flew to Washington, D.C., and met up with Carrie and Harrison Ford for the premiere of
The Empire Strikes Back
. The dressy event was a benefit for the Special Olympics, a favorite organization of mine. My first husband worked for the Special Olympics in Albuquerque, and I had once volunteered as a “hugger” at the finish line during one of his events. I recommend the experience to everyone.

The D.C. premiere was a hit with everyone except, ironically, the Special Olympics kids. The spaceships and Wookiees traumatized them. Artie and I tagged along with Carrie, Paul, and Harrison to
London, where they attended a royal screening of the movie. Not among the invitees, we stayed at our hotel, where Artie left the bathtub running while we went out for dinner. When we returned, the place was flooded. We spent the night on our hands and knees, cleaning the goddamn hotel room. It was very
Laverne & Garfunkel
.

Carrie and Paul and Artie and I then traveled to Portugal, where we were engulfed by a dense fog that never lifted. When Carrie and Paul began grating on each other, Artie and I broke away and found a hotel that had been a monastery four or five centuries earlier. The rooms were small, austere, and claustrophobic—perfect for decades of meditative silence. Artie liked that, but I didn’t. Late at night, we got into an argument and decided to leave. But locating the monk or night manager—whatever he was—at that hour to check us out was next to impossible. I think we ended up finding it humorous.

By the time we picked up the motorcycle in Avignon, we had patched things up. Our bike broke down on the way to Eric and Tanya Idle’s house in Cotignac and all I could talk about after we arrived was how I had fixed it. Again, another life lesson for which I had Artie to thank.

We also visited my friend Carol Caldwell in a one-horse village in the French countryside where, it seemed, only two things happened: In the morning the sheep were herded out over a hill and at night they were brought back. They wore bells around their necks. We would hear them coming and going like a rustic symphony.

From Carol’s, we drove south to Nice and into Italy. As we crossed the border, Artie and I were struck by some of the contrasts: how well the French roads had been marked, the silence of the French countryside, and then the noise in Italy, where people honked and screamed at one another. We knew we were among Italians.

Then the best scenery of all: We climbed through the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Alps and crossed into Switzerland. Inspired by the majesty of the views and unable to contain myself, I burst into songs from
The Sound of Music
. Artie reminded me that I wasn’t Julie Andrews.

“Please don’t sing,” he said.

I wasn’t insulted.

We rendezvoused with Tracy and my niece Wendy in Geneva. We picked them up at the airport, rented a car, and resumed our travels with one girl on the back of the bike and the other in the car with me. I taught both girls, recently turned sixteen, to drive on the country roads in France. Why take lessons in the San Fernando Valley when you could practice finding sixteenth-century cathedrals in Annecy?