My Happy Days in Hollywood Read online

  From HAPPY DAYS and

  THE ODD COUPLE

  to

  PRETTY WOMAN and

  THE PRINCESS DIARIES

  Tales from a Hollywood Legend

  Copyright © 2012 by Garry Marshall and Lori Marshall

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marshall, Garry.

  My happy days in Hollywood / Garry Marshall.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Marshall, Garry. 2. Television producers and directors—

  United States—Biography. 3. Motion picture producers and

  directors—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN1992.4.M37A3 2012

  791.4502’33092—dc23

  [B] 2011042598

  eISBN: 978-0-307-88502-9

  Jacket design by Laura Duffy

  Jacket photograph by Reza Estakhrian/Getty Images

  v3.1

  For Barbara Sue Wells

  and my children and grandchildren

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  1. THE BRONX

  Growing Up Allergic to Everything but Stickball

  2. NORTHWESTERN

  Attending College with the Thickest Accent Anyone Had Ever Heard

  3. KOREA

  Welcome to the United States Army, Mr. Marshall

  4. NEW YORK CITY

  Writing for Stand-Up Comedians and Being Paid in Corn Beef

  5. HOLLYWOOD

  Finding Love, Laughs, and Lucy in California

  6. THE ODD COUPLE

  Running My First TV Show with Oscar and Felix

  7. HAPPY DAYS

  Hanging Out with the Cunningham Family and Friends

  Insert 1

  8. SCHLEMIEL! SCHLIMAZEL!

  Laverne and Shirley Are Driving the Writers Crazy

  9. MORK & MINDY

  Managing a Martian and a New Playwriting Career

  10. YOUNG DOCTORS IN LOVE

  Directing an Outrageous Hospital Comedy as My First Movie

  11. THE FLAMINGO KID

  Going Back to My New York Roots

  12. NOTHING IN COMMON

  Working with the Great Ones—Hanks and Gleason

  13. OVERBOARD

  Capturing Love on the Ocean with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell

  14. BEACHES

  Exploring Female Friendship with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey

  15. PRETTY WOMAN

  Meeting a Hooker with a Heart of Gold and a Girl Named Julia

  16. FRANKIE AND JOHNNY

  Pfeiffer, Pacino, the Claire de Lune, and Me

  17. EXIT TO EDEN

  Taking a Wrong Turn into the Land of S and M

  Insert 2

  18. DEAR GOD

  Building Stories in a Post Office and a New Career as an Actor

  19. THE OTHER SISTER

  Striving for a Different Kind of Love Story

  20. RUNAWAY BRIDE

  Walking Down the Aisle Again with Roberts and Gere

  21. THE PRINCESS DIARIES

  Giving the Royal Treatment to Andrews and Hathaway

  22. RAISING HELEN

  Directing Kate Hudson and the Next Generation

  23. GEORGIA RULE

  Jane Rules and Lindsay Misbehaves

  24. VALENTINE’S DAY

  Turning the Camera on Love and My Favorite Day of the Year

  25. NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Celebrating the Splendor of New York City

  My Tips for Actors

  Professional Credits

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  by Hector Elizondo

  THE FIRST TIME I met Garry Marshall I almost knocked his teeth out. The year was 1979. I had flown in from New York City to L.A. to co-star in a series for CBS, Freebie and the Bean with Tom Mason.

  I had been working onstage since 1960; in repertory theater, off-Broadway, as well as Broadway. I had already established myself in movies and television, including starring in my own series, Popi, for CBS in 1975 (which was, coincidentally, knocked off the air by the wild success of Happy Days). But I wasn’t familiar with TV producers’ names yet. So, when I was invited by my pal and agent Mark Harris to play in the longest running basketball game in Hollywood—it had been ongoing every Saturday morning since The Flood—I said, of course! The game would take place on the home court of writer/producer and soon-to-be-director-extraordinaire, Garry Marshall. “Who’s that?” I say. “You know,” Mark said, “the guy who created Happy Days.” “No kidding,” I replied.

  Somehow, the day of the game Mark failed to introduce me to Garry. I had no idea that the tall guy with the wrapped knees who was guarding me like Velcro was, in fact, our host, Garry Marshall. Now Garry has very fast hands (he’s a drummer, after all) but not a very fast face: my quick, behind-the-back pass to my teammate was intercepted by Garry’s mouth. My host thereby dropped to one knee, whereupon he spat into his hand to check how many teeth he had lost. They were all there. That was good. He motioned me to come over. That was bad. He looked at me with a straight face and said, “You’re a terrific actor but a lousy passer. I have a project to talk to you about.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

  Garry and I have a lot in common: both from New York City (he from the Bronx and me from Manhattan); both kids during WW II; and both products of the great New York City public school system. Then there were the street games, baseball, basketball, and music, music, music. Whatever differences we have are complementary.

  My first movie for Garry was Garry’s first movie. It didn’t take me long to realize that he’s a master of comedy and a natural mentor to budding talent. I’ve watched him time and again inspire young people who showed an aptitude and zeal for the work, whether it was writing, acting, or producing—and always with humor and kindness.

  A brief but important moment for me as an actor was when I needed an angle on the character of Barnard Thompson, the hotel manager in Pretty Woman. I went to Garry. He paused for a moment and said, “Just create the guy you’d like to work for.” Simple as that. No long discussion. No deep analysis. A slight suggestion and I made it my own. We’ve done seventeen movies together that way.

  We were in sync from the start. It’s very much like jazz, the music we grew up with. Or like a baseball double play; scoop, second, first, and out. Rhythm.

  I have a tendency to get stuck in bemoaning the human condition. Garry pauses—and then moves on. He celebrates life. Like Fellini, he loves parades, clowns, and birthdays. Someone said that Garry doesn’t shoot a movie—he throws one, like a party. It’s true, and he’s not beyond the occasional pie-in-the-face like he did to Matt Dillon during The Flamingo Kid. That loosened Matt up while giving him dessert. Since then, Matt has become a fine actor and human being.

  Actresses love to work with Garry because they can trust him. What a parade of talent has flocked to him: Julia Roberts, Bette Midler, Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, and Julie Andrews. And then there’s his big, magical raptor, the Falcon Theatre in Toluca Lake, California, named after his boyhood social group in the Bronx. It’s one of Garry’s dreams come true—as is his family.

  My life with Garry has been a slow and steady revelation of steadfastn
ess and passion in one’s work coupled with a deep sense of responsibility to one’s community. Garry—not bad for a kid from the Bronx.

  Oh, and by the way, did I mention we both love ice cream and happy endings?

  From the start it has been the

  theatre’s business to entertain people …

  it needs no other passport than fun.

  —BERTOLT BRECHT

  1. THE BRONX

  Growing Up Allergic to Everything but Stickball

  MARJORIE WARD MARSHALL, my mother, was the first director I ever met.

  Wearing an apron and teaching tap dancing in the basement of our Grand Concourse apartment building, she was a Bronx housewife and a tap dance teacher you didn’t want to mess with. She ran a tight ship, and little girls never dawdled in putting on their tap shoes and costumes in front of Mom. She believed that dancing and performing were good for children because they gave them self-esteem and a purpose all their own.

  My mother taught us that the best thing in life was to entertain people and make them laugh. The biggest sin in life was to bore people.

  “Beware of the boring,” she said.

  “What is boring, Ma?” I asked.

  “Your father,” she said.

  Mom was a born entertainer who thought performing was not just a hobby or even a profession but a way of living that was as essential as breathing or eating. She was a five-foot-six-inch slacks-wearing perky blonde with a dancer’s body and a comedian’s mouth. Mom was always “on” from her hyper-cajoling of her dance students to her late-night intensity when she would type out the songs, dance routines, and skits for her dance recital. I would be in my bed and still hear her typewriter as I went to sleep. Her typing sounded like rain. Always working, she would go to Broadway shows, steal the routines, and come back and type them up for her students to perform. I knew right from the beginning that if I could make my mom laugh, then I could make her love me.

  If Mom had been born at another time in history, she could have become a stage performer or actress herself. Born in 1910, Mom just missed the feminism movement and was faced with raising three children in the Bronx during the 1940s. Her goal in life was to teach as many kids as possible—including her own children, Garry, Ronny, and Penny—to tap dance. There was Ronny, the middle child and nice daughter, and Penny, the youngest child, whom my mother seemed to crown “troublemaker” the moment she came out of the birth canal. And I, of course, was the oldest child and the one who was always sick.

  Mom’s students adored her because she was funny and irreverent whether she was charming your pants off or hurting your feelings. She commanded a kind of power and respect as a director that even Orson Welles and Martin Scorsese would find enviable. She could be encouraging to the students with talent, but spoke with a bite to those who didn’t show potential.

  “You—the pretty girl with the fat legs. You should play an instrument instead of dancing.”

  Or she might move someone behind the scenes altogether.

  “Hey, Zelda, or whatever your name is. You have two left feet. You can pull the curtain for the show.”

  Traditional motherhood duties took a backseat to the curtain, the audience, and showtime. Since we were always running low on milk, Mom invented the family drink “Pepsi and milk” to make our dairy supply last longer. When she didn’t have time to simmer and cook fresh tomato sauce, she told us that Campbell’s tomato soup with noodles was just as Italian as spaghetti. If we were rushing to get down to the basement to make our curtain calls, she might squirt ketchup on our pasta and call it a night. My mom could make us smile, laugh, and cry all in the same hour. On my birthday one time she said, “Garry is celebrating eleven years of being round-shouldered.” When my sister Penny had an overbite, she said, “When I want to open a Pepsi bottle, I do it with Penny’s teeth.” She taught us that to dwell on our problems was a waste of time and to make entertainment for others was supreme.

  This did little to impress my dad. My father, Anthony W. Marshall, was a good-looking suit- and tie-wearing art director and advertising executive who invented his middle name, Wallace, because he thought it made him sound more distinguished. Born Anthony Masciarelli, he looked like a character from the television show Mad Men. He liked to wear suits, carry a monogrammed briefcase, and drink martinis in hotel bars. We rarely saw him drink at home, but sometimes he would stagger in and look like he’d had a few too many someplace else. My father was not the kind of dad who would throw a ball in the street with you like the Jewish dads, Catholic dads, or even other Italian dads in our melting pot neighborhood. Throwing a ball might mess up my father’s tie. He didn’t talk very much but instead wrote us notes like “Sorry you had to get a tooth pulled. It’s over now.” When he did talk he told stories of business trips where he met men who were working on a new device called television. He traveled for business to Florida and California and brought home oranges for us. For a long time my sisters and I imagined that both states were filled with fruit instead of people. He instilled in us the idea that there was a world outside the Bronx and that we should set sail for it as soon as we were old enough.

  I was born November 13, 1934, Garry Kent Marshall, and we lived for most of my childhood along the Grand Concourse. First opened to traffic in 1909, the Grand Concourse was modeled after the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It was four miles long and populated by Jewish and Italian families when I lived there. My apartment was in a five-story building, with empty lots on either side. We were on the first floor. It was called Argonne Manor and housed mostly Jewish families and my family. We were Italian and Christian. Most of the other Italian families lived on Villa Avenue across the street. Because I was Italian, I fit in both neighborhoods easily.

  My address was 3235 Grand Concourse. My favorite number has always been thirteen, and the numerals of my Bronx address added up to it, too. Like my father, I was given an arbitrary middle name, Kent, to give me dignity. My first name, with the rare two-r spelling, came from a sportswriter named Garry Schumacher. My parents didn’t know him personally, but my mother liked the spelling.

  My happiest moments of growing up in the Bronx were when my mom would bring home a new sports magazine from the candy store. I would jump out of bed and grab it from her. Then I’d rip the front cover right off and tape it to my bedroom wall. I would reposition myself comfortably in bed and look up at all of the athletes who floated above me like heroes and angels.

  Often I would turn on the radio, lie in my bed, and listen to the Yankees baseball game. I’d dream about my hands-down favorite player, Joe DiMaggio, and the day when I might be able to have a job that I could do well, too. There were many baseball players who were just as famous but who didn’t impress us, like Billy Martin and Ted Williams. To be able to make a living playing a sport you loved was what made Joe our favorite. I didn’t know what job I might be destined for, but my dad told me it better be something I could do with a headache or a toothache, because the whole family agreed I was not destined for good health. As a child I was often sick, plagued by some ailment or allergy, or my ability to hang on to a perpetual sniffle or wheeze from one winter to the next. My baby book read like a list of the greatest diseases of all time. I once heard a doctor say that if we didn’t move to Arizona, I might die. I packed my bags. The next day I woke up to see if anyone was packing their bags. No one was.

  “Dad, when do we leave for Arizona?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere. We can’t afford it.”

  I thought they were trying to kill me.

  Despite being sick all the time, I seemed to be destined for a career in show business. My mother sent my three-year-old baby picture to a contest in the Bronx Home News. I won the prize for cutest kid in my age division, and received a check for fifteen dollars. This encouraged my mom to think I could go on to become a child model. I auditioned and got cast in a milk commercial. Unfortunately, I spit up all over the director, and my modeling career was s
hort-lived.

  When I was five years old my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning I remember we all played together and I thought it was the greatest day ever. We were a band, and I imagined us practicing and performing as a family band for years to come. Unfortunately, Dad never played the saxophone with our band again. That Christmas morning remains imprinted in my mind as one of the few times we all got along. In general my dad thought entertainment was a waste of time and did little to support my mother’s dance studio or our performing aspirations.

  Dad’s ambivalence, however, did not stop my mother or us. One day Dad was at work and Mom had a show to put on but she didn’t have a babysitter. Her mother, Margie, whom we called Nanny, used to watch my sisters and me when we were small. She was an Irish-German rail-thin brunette with a mild New England accent. As we got older, Nanny became blind and refused to go to the doctor. Without her sight it became difficult for her to mind us and us to mind her. Sometimes Penny would sneeze and then trick Nanny by saying, “It was Garry.” The girls blamed me for many things because I was often too sick to put up a fight. With all of my sneezing and wheezing and pneumonia not once but twice, Nanny didn’t know how to help me. I once fell down in the street and hit my head, and she said, “I’ll give you a dollar if you stop bleeding.” Her reluctance to go to the doctor helped make me a hypochondriac. Nanny didn’t even know what to feed me because I seemed to be allergic to everything under the sun, including the sun.

  I was lying in bed one day, covered in compresses and trying to feel better, when my mom came into the room.

  “Get up. Let’s go to the cellar. You’re going to be in the show,” she said.

  “But Mom, I’m sick. I should stay in bed and get better,” I said. I was six years old at the time, and I carried the perpetual smell of mustard plaster.

  “Nonsense. Nanny can’t watch you anymore and I have a show to put on. So let’s go,” she said, pulling the covers off my bed.