My Mother Was Nuts (22 page)

Afterward, a bunch of us went to a club where Cher sang and
Robin Williams entertained. Following hours of standing around and taking direction, we all let loose and partied. I went to the bathroom and overheard Bobby De Niro and Al Pacino outside the men’s room, saying, “So who’s taking Liz [Taylor] home?”

I kept thinking one major star was missing from the festivities: my friend John Belushi. John had dropped off my radar—and most everyone else’s—after making Larry Kasdan’s movie
Continental Divide
. I heard he was bored. I wasn’t at my best when I was bored, and John was worse. Merely walking down the street with him was an experience. People gave him drugs. They pressed it into his hand or shoved it into his pocket—and he’d do it.

With John, there was no such thing as casual drug use. I knew John Landis had fought with him on
The Blues Brothers
about the amount of coke he did. I had witnessed him in action myself. We were once at a party where he led me into the bathroom and pulled out a bindle of heroin. He said I could try some, too. I flushed it down the toilet.

“Don’t fuck with that stuff,” I said.

I had tried heroin once. It made me carsick. The person who gave it to me said it was an acquired taste. I didn’t need to acquire that taste. Artie didn’t like it, either, thank God. When others were chipping on weekends, he was my ally in not doing it, and I will always be grateful to him for giving me the wherewithal to keep saying no.

I wish John had done the same. Around this time, Paramount-based producer Don Simpson asked me to direct
The Joy of Sex
, an adaptation of the bestselling how-to book by Dr. Alex Comfort. He showed me a script from John Hughes, the first one from the prolific screenwriter who went on to write
Sixteen Candles
and
Home Alone
. It was done as a series of vignettes, and it was funny. I thought the parts that didn’t work could be easily fixed.

With
Laverne & Shirley
going into its eighth season, I liked the idea of a new challenge. I received encouragement from friends, including Jim Brooks and Steven Spielberg. Steven compared directing
to babysitting. He jokingly pointed out that I already sat on the phone with half of Hollywood at night, dispensing advice. Why not get paid for it?

I asked Barry Diller what he thought I should do. Even though
The Joy of Sex
wasn’t his kind of picture—he made
Reds
, after all—I knew he would tell me the truth—and he did.

“Penny, you have a lot of friends, and they’re very smart and very funny,” he said. “But when it comes to directing a movie, and committing your life to making a movie, you cannot listen to any of them. You have to see if there is something in there that you identify with, something that makes you
need
to do it. And remember, we are the studio. We are not your friends.”

The message came through loud and clear. I still wanted to move forward. To ensure I had enough time, Mike Ovitz secured me a November 2 “out” date from
Laverne & Shirley
’s next season, meaning I would be finished three months earlier than usual. But I started right away. Wanting to get a feel for the script, I arranged a reading at my house that included Teri Garr, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, and Jack Klugman. Steven Spielberg took pictures.

Unbeknownst to me, as I began to develop the project, Don and some of his colleagues at the studio decided they wanted John Belushi to star in the movie. They thought he would be funny in a diaper. When I finally heard about it, I didn’t understand. There was no diaper mentioned in the entire script. Besides, I knew John wanted to do the movie
Noble Rot
, which he and Don Novello had adapted from a Jay Sandrich script. He was going to discuss all this at Paramount on March 6. But the meeting never happened.

On March 5, during a long night of partying at the Chateau Marmont hotel, John overdosed on a speedball, a combination of heroin and cocaine. Drug dealer Cathy Smith admitted to injecting him multiple times with the lethal combination of drugs. I once heard her name mentioned in connection with John. Someone said, “Watch out for her. She’s bad news.”

I was devastated when I heard about his death. The following days
and nights were a blur. Tracy kept an eye on me while I talked endlessly about it to friends on the phone, piecing together what had happened and trying to understand why. It didn’t make sense. His death made me extremely angry. What kind of person would inject him with drugs? What if I had known the studio had wanted him to be in the movie? Would he have been at my house for the reading? Would he have avoided Cathy Smith?

There were too many what-ifs.

I tried to hold on to the good memories of John and Danny Aykroyd crashing at Rob’s and my house in North Hollywood. Later, John and his wife had stayed with us in Encino. John had been sweet with my daughter, who was in junior high. He had insisted on making her dinner and when I checked on them, they were laughing, but there were spaghetti sauce handprints all over the walls. He was irascible. In New York, he would refuse to leave my hotel room. He would come in and out of the bedroom as a different character. I couldn’t not laugh. The phone would ring at 2 or 3 a.m. It would be Judy.

“Do you have him?”

“Yeah, I got him.”

“Good. Keep him.”

None of us could believe he was gone. John always said he was indestructible, and we believed him.

He was John.

Penny filming the 1982
Laverne & Shirley
episode “Lost in Spacesuit”
Use of photo still from
Laverne & Shirley–
Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

O
VER THE YEARS
I had seen Cindy in a number of relationships, but never one where she fell as fast or as hard as she did for Bill Hudson. Best known as one-third of the musical comedy trio The Hudson Brothers, he had split with Goldie Hawn following a brief marriage that produced two children, Oliver and Kate, before meeting Cindy at a celebrity softball game in 1981. In March 1982, Cindy got pregnant, and two months later, after Bill finalized his divorce from Goldie Hawn, they married. I went to the wedding. There was a lot of pink. Everything seemed good.

I was happy for Cindy and supportive. I thought,
She’s pregnant; let her be healthy and happy, and we’ll figure out a way to deal with her growing belly on the show
. At the time, we were headed into our eighth season. We had the show down. I didn’t see why it had to be a big deal.

But it was. In May she told the studio about her pregnancy and began negotiating an out date of her own. I was in New York and followed the details long-distance. She was due in November and only wanted to act in thirteen episodes, insisting she finish in October so that she could rest through the end of her pregnancy. She also indicated a willingness to make small appearances after the first of the
year if more episodes were ordered. In any event, whether she did thirteen or slightly more, she wanted to be paid for a full season of episodes, and she wanted her hours kept to a minimum.

Everyone said okay. A month later—the same month Tracy graduated from high school—Bill, now acting as her manager, delivered an additional set of demands, including more money, a Winnebago trailer, and shorter workdays not to exceed eight hours. I think Bill wanted credit, too. But Paramount balked. I guess they’d had their fill of demands the previous month. By the time we began shooting in July, Cindy was one very unhappy pregnant actress.

I thought I could talk sense to her the way I had years earlier, alone and logically. I said, “Take all the dialogue. Go home after four hours. Have them write all your scenes with you lying in bed. Be the biggest pain-in-the-ass pregnant person. I’ll do the running around. Let’s just do the work.” But she deferred to Bill. She was in love and thought Bill was taking care of her. Whatever the reason, we managed to get through the first two episodes, “The Mummy’s Bride” and “Window on Main Street,” and then she was gone. It all just blew up.

I tried calling Cindy at home, thinking I could work out the problem. Bill refused to let me speak to her. I ended up not talking to her for years because Bill wouldn’t let me. Soon lawyers got involved, allegations flew, and she went to the press, claiming the studio wanted to exclude her from the series or “drastically reduce her participation.” She also told
TV Guide
, “What they want to do is axe me out of the show, and finally give it all to Penny.”

It was all absurd. As this transpired, I realized that I had to get out of directing
The Joy of Sex
. I couldn’t handle developing a movie at the same time the show was blowing up.

I jetted to New York, where I hid out at Lorne’s house in Amagansett while the studio negotiated with Cindy. If she wasn’t going to do the show, I didn’t want to do it, either. It was
Laverne
AND
Shirley
. However, my agent said I had to come back. Mike Ovitz explained that walking out, or in my case, hiding out, was not an option.

“We did enough episodes,” I said. “Let’s just stop.”

“That’s not the way it works,” he said. “It’s not your call.”

“I don’t want to come back,” I said.

“You have to,” he said. “They’ll sue you.”

I flew back and met with Gary Nardino, Paramount’s president of TV. I asked for double or nothing. I didn’t even go to Ovitz. I said, “Since I’m here and it’s
Laverne
AND
Shirley
, I get her money and her points. If she comes back, it reverts. But if I’ve got to do it alone and explain to the goddamn audience why she ain’t here, it’s got to be worth more money.”

They gave me the money.

I went back to work, but the show was a mess. Although the show’s title stayed the same, Shirley was edited out of the opening montage and her absence was explained in a note she left behind saying that she moved suddenly overseas with her husband. I recall the log in the
TV Guide
saying that Laverne was depressed and then angry that Shirley would only write a few words and not say good-bye. I felt the same way in real life. I was depressed, angry, and hurt.

The following week things went from bad to worse. I was injured on the set. In the episode, Laverne takes a job at an aerospace company. Bored, she slips into an antigravity suit. As we shot the big comedic scene, I was in a harness attached to wires and spun all over the room. During rehearsals, my brother and I had a to-do because I didn’t wear a helmet. It was hot.

“I don’t care,” Garry said. “The next time you do it, you put on the damn helmet.”

That was at the taping. I did as my brother said. I wore a helmet—and I was lucky I did. As I flew over the stage, one of the wires snapped and I fell to the floor with a thud that just stopped time. Everyone froze. Director Tom Trbovich yelled cut as my driver, Clarence, watching from the wings, raced over to me. I told him not to touch me. I stayed down and assessed the damage. My toes moved. My fingers moved. I was breathing. But my upper body hurt like hell.

Phil Foster was already entertaining the audience, distracting
them with jokes that Garry had written for his act twenty-five years earlier. Ironically, my brother wasn’t on the set that night. I heard someone say they were going to take me to the hospital. Then I could come back to finish. No, I didn’t think so.

Slowly, I got up on one knee and said I wasn’t going anywhere. I called the cast together and said I didn’t want to come back and do this shit over again. Instead, I showed those who still had scenes with me where they could touch me (my head, the right side of my body) and where they couldn’t (my left shoulder, the left side of my body). Then we finished the show. I could’ve sued, but I didn’t want some prop guy to get reamed. Shit happens.

Later, I did go to the hospital. That was funny—trying to explain to the ER doc that I hurt myself while flying across the room in an astronaut suit. Luckily, nothing was broken. I’d heal. I went home, took a Quaalude, and reported to work the next day.

The rest of the season was simply painful. At least I still had my November “out” date from the movie. I wouldn’t have to work through March. To get through the remaining episodes, I called friends, including Laraine Newman, Carol Kane, Louise Lasser, Anjelica Houston, Jimmy Belushi, and Larry Breeding, who I’d gone out with for about a month while Artie was off walking God knows where. Carrie also came on; she was a Playboy bunny with me.

We taped that episode (Laverne gets a job as a Playboy bunny) the same week Tracy left for Bennington College. My niece took her; I had to work. I was in a bunny costume as I hugged her good-bye in front of the soundstage. Carrie cracked, “Study hard and one day you can be as successful as your mother.”

Finally, after 178 episodes,
Laverne & Shirley
taped its final episode (“Here Today, Hair Tomorrow”). The series went out with a whimper. The last show focused on Carmine (Eddie Mekka). I was barely in it, Michael had left to work with Rob on
This Is Spinal Tap
, and Cindy was long gone. Although lawsuits from her departure made the end more bitter than sweet, the memories from the eight seasons
were positive. We had done more good episodes than bad ones and provided millions of people with laughs. I was proud. Between reruns and syndication around the world, I felt confident that
Laverne & Shirley
would always be best friends.