My Mother Was Nuts (21 page)

As we headed back to Paris, we ate lunch on the side of the road. At dinner, Artie harmonized with the girls. In Paris, we showed them Notre-Dame and walked along the Seine. I was living a dream, yet it was my life, and when it was time to go home, I felt recharged and ready, sort of. Tracy admired me for being adventurous, but really, Artie deserved the credit. He had given me a gift. He had opened my eyes to travel and exposed me to a new approach to life.

The rest was up to me.

Penny playing the tambourine onstage with Paul Simon and Mayor Ed Koch at New York’s Palladium Theater in 1980
Marshall personal collection

W
ITH THE HIGHS
came lows. It was fall 1980, and I had flown into New York to see Paul Simon perform at the Palladium. I arrived in the grip of a deep depression. Sometimes the feeling is beyond control. This was like a strong current that took me out to sea. Deep down, I knew that the stuff I had run away from by going to Europe was catching up to me. Luckily, my friends were sympathetic. Paul suffered from bouts of darkness, and Carrie had a whole wardrobe of mood swings hanging in her closet. Before the show, Paul said, “Why don’t you come onstage and sing at the end when I play ‘Amazing Grace’?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not a singer.”

“Penny, we’ll have a large gospel choir backing you up—as well as Mayor Koch,” he said. “No one will hear you.”

“They won’t know who I am,” I said, sounding depressed.

“What are you, nuts?” he said. “Come on out and see what it feels like,” he said.

After turning in an amazing two-hour-plus show, Paul got to “Amazing Grace” and motioned to me on the side. Reluctantly, I walked out and stood next to him, and I will forever be glad I did. As
we sang, the cheering from the audience was like a gust of wind that blew away some of my depression.

I wasn’t cured, but it made dealing with the stuff that had depressed me a little easier when I got back to L.A. I was still a little sad about Rob. Every so often feelings of remorse would sneak up on me. My mother was also fading, and that was not so nice. And then there was the show.

While I had been off motorcycling with Artie, my brother had huddled with the show’s producers and studio executives and decided to give
Laverne & Shirley
a reboot. For its sixth season, they reset the show in 1964—just after the Kennedy assassination and just in time for the Beatles—and moved everyone to Los Angeles. They also added Ed Marinaro as stuntman Sonny St. Jacques and Leslie Easterbrook as our wannabe actress neighbor.

I thought the whole thing was a mistake. L.A. didn’t make sense to me. Even poor people there have a house with a lawn and a couple of trees. They dress like they’re on vacation. They don’t look poor.

Laverne and Shirley were poor. That was part of their appeal. They were regular folks. I thought they should go to New York, where they would face new struggles and we could use different actors. But my opinion counted not so much. In the season’s opening episode, titled “Not Quite New York,” Laverne and Shirley lost their bottle-capping jobs to machines and moved to Burbank, California, as did everyone else.

Despite my criticism, we still did some excellent work, including the episode “I Do, I Do.” In it, two British rockers try to marry Laverne and Shirley so they can stay in the United States and escape the high British taxes. Eric Idle and Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits played the rockers, and I added songwriter Stephen Bishop to their band for authenticity. Lenny and Squiggy arrived dressed as Simon and Garfunkel and went looking for Mary Jane in the bedroom. Numerous other drug jokes kept this show from being re-run again.

At one point, I was supposed to play the intro to the Rolling Stones’
classic “Satisfaction” on the guitar. I got lessons from Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Stephen Stills and Snuffy Walden, a rocker who was becoming one of TV’s leading composers. Stephen Bishop also tried to teach me. I never got it right. Finally, Eric Idle said, “Forget the fingering and just pretend you mean it.”

That worked.

That season I also directed two episodes: “The Dating Game” and “But Seriously Folks.” It wasn’t my first time behind the camera. I had directed “The Duke of Squiggman” the previous season. I didn’t think it was a big deal. By this time, everyone had directed—Cindy, Michael, the first assistant director, the camera coordinator, and even the script girl. So when they looked in my direction, I said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”

Why not? It was easy. After a hundred-plus episodes, everyone knew their characters. How many doors can you walk through? “Go do what you’re supposed to do,” I told everyone. “I’ll tell you if it’s wrong.”

Laverne & Shirley
writer-producers Marc Sotkin and Arthur Silver also asked me to direct the pilot for their new sitcom,
Working Stiffs
, starring Jimmy Belushi and Michael Keaton. “Well you’re down at the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you?” I said. After it sold, though, John Belushi yelled at me. “What are you doing putting my brother on television?” he said. “He’s a better actor than I am.”

This was an exciting time to be at Paramount. In addition to
Laverne & Shirley
and
Happy Days, Bosom Buddies, Mork & Mindy
, and
Taxi
were among the shows produced there. On any given day, Tom Hanks, Danny DeVito, Henry Winkler, Robin Williams, and I were poking our heads into one another’s sets or grabbing lunch together in the commissary.

I didn’t like the studio’s commissary. It was new, and it blocked the straight path we had taken for years to our parking spaces. All
of a sudden we had to walk all the way around to Poughkeepsie, you know, and it took forty minutes because of the little decorative squares of grass they put in the cement. Jim Brooks got tired of hearing me bitch about it.

“Why complain to me?” he said. “Call Barry Diller and tell him we need the Gower Gate open.”

“Okay,” I said. “Give me his number.”

What he failed to mention was that Barry was the chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount; he’d been appointed to the position in 1974, at age thirty-two. He was brilliant, demanding, and tough. But I didn’t know who he was. For all I knew, Jim said to call him because he was in charge of parking lots—which, I guess, he sort of was.

I got on the phone and asked for Barry Diller. His assistant picked up and for some reason put me through.

“Hi, this is Penny Marshall,” I said. “I work on the show
Laverne & Shirley
.”

“Hello,” he said.

“Are you Barry Diller?”

“Yes.”

“You know that new commissary you built?” I said.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?”

“Well, yeah, it’s sort of nice,” I said. “The secretary’s heels get stuck in the grass but that’s another thing. Look, I work on Stage 20 and we can’t get to the parking space because of the commissary and your little squares of cement. So could you please open Gower Gate?”

“Hmmm.”

“Look, the TV department is carrying the studio right now, and you’re wasting money by making us take so much time to walk. We all could work longer if we could get to our cars quicker.”

At the end of the day Barry opened the gate and left it open for about a year. He couldn’t figure out who I was and why I mattered, and furthermore why or how I knew all the same people he knew: Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and even David Geffen. Later, we became
friends. I loved and trusted him. He’s the most honest person I’ve ever met. And like me, he’s committed to the work.

When the season ended, Artie was off on his own someplace, as periodically happened with my peripatetic friend, but now I had the travel bug. I asked one of our producers, Chris Thompson, to meet me in Athens, after he dropped off his grandmother in Yugoslavia. We saw the sights there, then went to Mykonos, and then on to Italy, including Lake Como. Finally, I told Tracy to come to London, where, now bored with Chris, I pointed him toward Paris and Tracy and her friend Mark Getty and I caught a flight to Salzburg and then drove back to Rome before venturing to outlying cities in search of our Italian ancestors.

We ended up on a Sunday morning in a little town called San Martino sulla Marricina, where we asked locals if they knew anyone named Masciarelli. Everyone there said they were Masciarelli. It was like the scene in
Spartacus
. They broke into the hall of records, but didn’t find any close relatives of mine.

Later that summer, I rafted down the Grand Canyon with a group that included Jeffrey Katzenberg, producers Don Simpson and Craig Baumgarten, Tony Danza, and some of their wives and girlfriends. Director Tony Scott arrived late, walked into the canyon, and bodysurfed down the river until he caught up. On our way out, Don sprinted the nine miles to the top, whereas I huffed and puffed, stopped for a cigarette, and then started up again. Other vacationers on the trail were stunned to see me.

“Hey, Laverne, what are you doing here?” one guy said.

“Trying to get the fuck out,” I replied.

In truth, I enjoyed myself. It was like I was back in junior high or camp. I had always liked hanging around with the guys, and they liked me, too.

Penny with her close friend John Belushi in New York in 1976. John passed away in 1982.
Jack Winter / Judy Belushi

T
HE END OF THE SUMMER
was always bittersweet. As a child, it meant going home after camp, saying good-bye to friends, and starting school. For the past six years, my life had followed a similar pattern. I had to dial back on the fun and return to ten-hour days on Paramount’s Stage 20. But thanks to good friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, I managed to squeeze a little extra fun into my calendar before starting the seventh season of
Laverne & Shirley
. Who could blame me?

Paul and Artie were reuniting for a free concert in Central Park. Except for two songs on
Saturday Night Live
in 1975, they hadn’t performed together in concert since 1972. Well, there was that night in Paul’s apartment when I asked them to sing. Maybe that contributed to them getting back together. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t going to miss it. I told
Laverne & Shirley
’s producers to write me light in early September because I wanted to see the concert and spend at least a week there getting ready.

By that time, I had left Gore’s place and was renting Tommy Chong’s house in Bel Air. It was large and airy and, best of all, directly across the street from my friend Ted Bessell, who told me to have fun at the concert. It was a night to envy. I hung out with Carrie while the
guys rehearsed after negotiating for months about what they’d play and who would back them. The concert was the night of September 21, 1981. We had a police escort through the park and directly to the stage, where we looked out on a crowd estimated at more than five hundred thousand. It was a sea of people as far as one could see.

Both guys were tense. Paul made Artie wear a hairpiece, which he didn’t like. From the side of the stage where Carrie and I watched, I never saw Paul and Artie look at each other. But those were minor details that didn’t affect the concert. They sounded magnificent. They played twenty songs in total, and from the opening notes of “Mrs. Robinson” to the closing refrain of “The Sound of Silence” at the end, I had chills. Everyone did.

Except for Artie. When it was all over, we got in our separate town cars. Paul and Carrie went to his place, three blocks away on Central Park West, and Artie and I headed toward his building on Fifth Avenue. Artie liked to give everything a grade. A trip was an A–, a meal would be a B+, and so on. He was impossibly analytic and self-critical. In the car I asked what he had thought of the performance. He thought about it for a moment and said, “A C–.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “It was sensational. People are still singing the songs as they’re leaving the park.” I rolled down the window. “Can you hear them? Don’t you hear? They loved it!”

You never know what goes on behind the scenes.

In early 1982, I participated in the
Night of 100 Stars
, a fund-raiser for the Actors’ Fund of America. Taped for TV, it was a clusterfuck of confusion once Warren Beatty, Elizabeth Taylor, Diane Keaton, Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli, and others descended on New York’s Radio City Music Hall. I went with
Saturday Night Live
writer Tom Schiller, and we were there all day and some of the night. I saw Gina Lollobrigida sleeping against a coat rack, and the producers forgot a frail and aged James Cagney was waiting beneath the stage in his wheelchair.