ME: And Rob leaned over and said, “Look, she’s got the center square.”
RONNY: So we all started to laugh, and the minister kept talking about her even though none of us was paying attention because we were laughing so hard.
ME: Then Garry and our mother stood up and shifted all the rest of us in our seats because if one person moved everyone else did, too.
RONNY: We laughed even harder.
ME: But Nanny always had a good sense of humor.
CHAPTER 20
Live from New York
Dan Aykroyd, Penny, and John Belushi in 1980
© CORBIS
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a time when Saturday nights didn’t include the phrase “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night.” Saturday Night Live is such an institution that you can forget or may not know that tuning in at 11:30 p.m. was once an adventure into the unknown, a true television event. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore were among those who gave name recognition to John Belushi, Danny Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, and other cast regulars, although it wasn’t long before SNL writers such as Anne Beatts, Tom Schiller, Herb Sargent, Alan Zweibel, now-Senator Al Franken, and Michael O’Donoghue had their own fans. They were brilliant, stoned, fearless, and fucking funny, and word went out that this show was hot even before it aired.
Lorne Michaels was the show’s creator and executive producer, the calm head in the middle of the storm. He came out to L.A. before SNL’s October premiere, wanting Rob to guest host. He had signed up George Carlin and Paul Simon for the first two shows, and he asked Rob to do the third. He also asked me to do it with him. I wondered about his judgment.
“Why? I’m nobody,” I said.
“I’ve seen your work,” he said.
Lorne is one of those people who knows what he wants—and more important, he knows how to get it. Although I had just met him, I learned within five minutes of trying to wiggle out of SNL that there’s not much point to arguing with him. So Rob and I went back for the week. It was packed with meetings with writers, rehearsals, dinners, and late nights with Lorne, who was a welcoming, entertaining host still trying to sell his show.
I was already sold, but I still had no idea why I was there. I kept saying, “I don’t know why I’m here. You aren’t writing for the girls to begin with.” Lorne replied, “You’re here because I paid for your ticket.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I said.
We went back and forth like that all week. I had a great time. It was my kind of atmosphere. No one slept. Or if they did, they just dropped onto the floor and you stepped over the bodies. In one sketch I was supposed to play a Russian shopper in a shoe store, and I think the only reason it got as far as it did was because John and Danny wanted me to do an accent. The second I said I couldn’t, they began trying like crazy to change my mind. It was a game. But I don’t do accents, so they couldn’t use that one. But they had more than enough.
As the clock ticked down on Saturday night, a different, more intense energy filled the studio. Rob opened the show as a Vegas lounge singer. The sketches that followed included John doing his Joe Cocker impression for the first time, singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” It was brilliant. After Laraine Newman played Squeaky Fromme pulling a gun on Jane Curtin, Andy Kaufman lip-synced to “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and then Rob and I hosted a show of fashion mistakes.
Then there was a short film from Albert, who’d been hired to make films for the show. But his piece ran thirteen minutes, hardly short. When Lorne wanted to cut it, Rob defended his friend. Lorne compromised by putting a commercial in the middle of it. Everything else moved fast. The crew was involved in a ballet of set changes and movement that was impressive for only the third show. We square-danced in a piece where Danny was an evil hoedown caller and toward the end of the show Rob and I played a couple in deep conversation at an Italian restaurant when John, Danny, Jane, and others dressed as the Bees interrupted us.
“I don’t want the damn Bees!” Rob shouted, pissed off.
“You don’t have to be so hard on the Bees,” I said. “They just did it because they thought it would help the show.”
“They’re NOT helping the show! They’re ruining the show! I don’t need Bees! I don’t need Bees! I’m a major star! I’m on the number one television show in America!”
John then stepped forward as a spokesperson for all the Bees.
“I’m sorry if you think we’re ruining your show, Mr. Reiner,” he said. “But you don’t understand. We didn’t ask to be Bees. You see, you’ve got Norman Lear and a first-rate writing staff. But this is all they came up with for us.”
John went on about how the Bees were in the same spot he had been in years earlier; they were a bunch of actors looking for a break. Rob felt guilty. I made him feel even worse by saying I was embarrassed. Then I tried to comfort him, saying, “It’s all right, honey.” But that appeared to add salt to the wound.
“Don’t say ‘honey,’” he said.
At the after-party, I thanked Lorne for allowing me to have a wonderful time even though I still didn’t understand why I was included. Laughing, he asked what I thought of the week now that it was over. I reminded him of what I had said to him after our first night in New York. I said, “I think you’re the most manipulative human being I’ve ever met, and you do it beautifully.” Now that I had seen him in action, I admired him even more.
Lorne and I have been friends ever since.
CHAPTER 21
Ready for Prime Time
Penny and Cindy Williams in Fonzie’s apartment, filming the 1975 pilot of Laverne & Shirley
Use of photo still from Laverne & Shirley–Courtesy of CBS Television Studios
IN NOVEMBER 1975, a Happy Days episode that Cindy Williams and I had taped finally aired. I was not expecting anything to come of it. About eight weeks earlier, my brother had called and asked what I was doing. I was working with Cindy on a Bicentennial-themed satire that Francis Ford Coppola wanted to produce. Carl Gottlieb had rounded up a bunch of people to write sketches, including Harry Shearer, Martin Mull, and us.
“Do you want to do a Happy Days?” my brother asked. “We need two fast girls who put out. If Cindy wants to do it, she can play opposite Ron. They were good together in American Graffiti. You can play opposite Fonzie. If she doesn’t want to do it, you can play whichever part you want.”
I asked Cindy. We were making $30 a week working at Zoetrope, Francis’s studio. We both said yes.
In the episode, titled “A Date with Fonzie,” we were two loose girls that Fonzie called to help Richie Cunningham out of a dating slump. Cindy was Shirley Feeney, and I was Laverne DeFazio. She knew Ron Howard from the movie, and Henry Winkler had worked with me in the Paul Sand pilot. After it aired, my brother was at a conference with ABC executives. Fred Silverman, the network’s president, was looking for new sitcoms. He asked my brother if he had any spinoff ideas.
“I’ve got a couple of bottle cappers who work in a Milwaukee brewery,” he said. “How about them?”
Fred liked the idea immediately. From then on, everything moved at an absurdly fast pace, especially for television. Along with Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman, the writers responsible for the Happy Days script, my brother created a presentation for the network. ABC ordered the series immediately and put it on the midseason schedule for January. Everyone had the same reaction: Holy shit! We had barely two months to get the show written, cast, and taped. And that was just the first episode. The network ordered fifteen.
We couldn’t afford any delays if we were going to deliver on time. But there was a major snag right away. Cindy wasn’t sure she wanted to do TV. A trained actress, she was concerned that a TV series would sidetrack her film career. Today, it seems like a silly concern. Everyone does everything—TV, movies, commercials, infomercials, You-Tube videos. At the time, though, people in the industry thought that if you did movies you couldn’t do TV and vice versa. Cindy wanted
to be a movie star. I didn’t blame her.
But I was among a chorus of people, including my brother, who told her that Laverne & Shirley was a rare opportunity. We had something special. Everyone who saw our Happy Days episode agreed. She didn’t have to give up movies, I told her. If we were a hit, she might become an even bigger star. She could make films between seasons.
I sensed that Cindy agreed. Her manager, Pat McQueeney, was the holdout. She didn’t seem to know what to do. As a result, Cindy was indecisive. Until she made up her mind, I read with every actress who seemed like she might be able to play Shirley. We auditioned them in Fonzie’s apartment. I spent so much time in that garage I should have just moved in. Frustrated, I called Gilda Radner in New York, thinking she might be available. She wasn’t, and she didn’t even want to talk about leaving SNL only weeks after it had started.
An actress named Liberty Williams came closer than anyone to being cast as Shirley. Like Cindy, Liberty had short, dark hair and a cute, round face. But as soon as we called her back for a test, Cindy changed her mind. I was thrilled. In my mind, Cindy was the only one I could ever see as Shirley.
Once she was in, we worked out the fine details. We agreed to “equal but staggered” billing—my name would be first, but Cindy’s would be higher. As for money, Cindy told a TV Guide reporter, our new salary was going to be “an amount of money I didn’t know existed.” She was openly worried that I might get preferential treatment since the show, as she told people, was something of a family business, with my brother in charge, my father one of the producers, and my sister, Ronny, in charge of casting.
You could see her point. But we made that concern a nonissue by agreeing to a most-favored-nations clause in our contracts. If one of us got something, the other one got it, too.
The rest of the pieces fell into place as if they had always been waiting for someone to put them together. Garry cast Phil Foster as my father. Way back when, Phil had given him his first break as a joke writer, as well as the best advice, telling him to stick with writing instead of stand-up, and this was my brother’s payback. Garry is the most loyal person in the business. If you knew him in high school, college, or Korea, you’ve probably been in one of his movies.
Garry cast Eddie Mekka, a Tony-nominated Broadway veteran, as Cindy’s boyfriend Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa. He thought one of us should have a boyfriend. Laverne would continue to play the field, but not as she was originally conceived. The girls were no longer loose. They were re-virginized, as I liked to say, for the family hour.
I pitched Michael McKean and David Lander. They were part of the comedy group The Credibility Gap and regulars in Rob’s and my living room. With little or no encouragement, they did these two characters, Leonard Kosnowski and Anthony Squiggliano, who were ridiculously funny. Squiggliano’s name was later changed to Andrew Squiggman because we thought there were already too many Italians on the show. I thought they’d make good last-ditch dates for us.
Garry hired them as writers based on my recommendation, but then he warmed to the idea of them as characters after he saw them at our house. He nixed the idea of them as dates, though.
“There has to be somebody lower than the two of you,” he said. “That’s Lenny and Squiggy.”
Back then you couldn’t do better than having Fonzie usher you into living rooms across America, and that’s the way my brother and ABC set us up. As the first script was written, Cindy and I ran next door to the Happy Days set and popped into scenes, trying to create familiarity with viewers. Then Henry came over to our set, on Stage 20, and guest-starred on our first show. At sixty pages, the script for that episode was double the normal show length. We did endless pickups—retakes of lines that were rewritten and tweaked until writers were carried out on stretchers. The taping turned into an endurance test.
But the effort paid off. Laverne & Shirley premiered on Tuesday, January 27, between Happy Days and The Rookies, and we woke up the next day as the stars of the number-one-rated show in the country. We hadn’t even been home to watch the premiere because it was a Tuesday night and we taped new episodes on Tuesday nights. The feat was great for my career, not so good for my marriage. The show we pushed out of the top spot was Rob’s, All in the Family.
Celebrations were postponed. We were behind schedule from the get-go. It seemed like we worked nonstop. We figured out our characters as we went along. Until the sixth episode, Cindy spoke with a New York accent. You couldn’t blame her for being confused. Between Phil, Eddie, David, Michael, my brother, and me, she was surrounded by people who sounded like they just stepped off the subway. Finally my brother told her to stop.
“You’re in Milwaukee,” he said.
At the beginning of any TV series you have to repeat who you are, where you’re from, and what you do for a living so viewers will get to know you. The writers often need that help, too. Everybody is getting to know these characters. But I didn’t want to have to constantly say we’re two bottle cappers from Milwaukee. It’s boring as shit. Nor did I want to hear Cindy say “Laverne” all the time. I thought if I put an L on my shirts and sweaters I would eliminate that part. I was wrong. We still had to say those lines. She still had to say my name.
The part people did remember from the start was the show’s introduction. Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! It came about one day when my brother was working on the opening montage and asked me what that funny saying was that I used to do with my friends in the neighborhood. I had a lot of them, but he was remembering specifically “that schlemiel thing.” Well, Ronny was on the set that day, too. I turned to my sister and said, “Do you remember it?” She did, and soon we were teaching Cindy the song: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight! Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!”
What did it mean?
I don’t know. It’s what we sang when we went to school. We had to walk seven blocks.
We constantly drew from our childhood. I put pictures of Julius La Rosa and Audie Murphy in Laverne’s bedroom because I’d been a fan of theirs when I was a kid. All of Laverne’s 45s were my actual 45s from childhood. Anytime we had to choose, we did One Potato, Two Potato. Every time we had to dance, we did something from my mother’s school. And Laverne’s milk and Pepsi? I actually drank that as a kid. At kosher camp, they couldn’t drink milk with meat so they had Pepsi. I wanted Pepsi, too. But my mother made me drink milk first. Then she gave me the soda. Sometimes she didn’t rinse out the glass. Sometimes it wasn’t even empty. Eventually it became half and half.
When I did it on the show I knew it would get a reaction. And it did. People related to those little details.
They also liked the way we said “voh-de-oh-doh-doh” in place of anything related to sex. The word “sex” was off-limits. Even the word “it” was controversial. For instance, we couldn’t say, “Did you do it?” Someone came up with the silly substitute voh-de-oh-doh-doh. It turned the whole issue into a bigger deal than it would’ve been, and made it much more humorous, like this classic exchange:
SHIRLEY: I do not voh-de-oh-doh-doh!
LAVERNE: Oh, you voh-de-oh-doh-doh.
SHIRLEY: I do not voh-de-oh-doh-doh.
LAVERNE: You voh di oh.
SHIRLEY: Once.
Almost everyone had a theory about why Laverne & Shirley took off. My brother said it was because we were doing Lucy. Cindy thought the show tapped into a nostalgia for simpler times. David and Michael had no clue; in fact, David says he never knew who Lenny and Squiggy were saying hello to when they came through the door. But once audiences laughed and applauded for them, they didn’t care. I didn’t overanalyze our success, either. I thought it was simply because Laverne and Shirley were poor and there were no poor people on TV, but there were plenty of them sitting at home and watching TV. What mattered most, of course, was that the show was funny.
CHAPTER 22
Chick Fight
Penny behind bars during the 1976 Laverne & Shirl
ey episode “Guilty Until Proven Innocent”
Use of photo still from Laverne & Shirley–Courtesy of CBS Television Studios
WE MADE LAVERNE & SHIRLEY on Stage 20. This was home to America’s favorite family show. Yet my brother wouldn’t allow his children to go inside. They could visit the Happy Days set on Stage 19. But we were off-limits. Garry told them that it was because some of the people working there used bad words. “Even Aunt Penny?” his daughter asked. Garry nodded somberly. “Yes, even Aunt Penny.”
But screw it, we worked hard and, yes, sometimes it got contentious and bad words were tossed around, though honestly, bad words were the least of anyone’s problems. What Cindy and I wanted—and in fact insisted upon—were funny words. Our first season had set the bar very high. When we came back for season two, we were determined to keep it there, if not take it even higher.
We knew what we were doing. Although some would say we thought we knew more than we actually did, I think it evened out very quickly. One of my best shows of the entire run was the season’s second episode, “Angels of Mercy.” It was when I came into my comedic own. Laverne and Shirley were volunteering as candy stripers in a hospital. In the key scene, Laverne had to make a bed with a patient still in it. The script contained descriptions of things the writers thought would be funny for Laverne to try. But they weren’t logical. They only made sense to a guy sitting in front of a typewriter, not a real person trying to do the job.
During rehearsal, instead of following the script, I simply tried to make the bed. At one point, I tugged on the sheets, lost my footing and slipped under the bed. A light went off in my head. I realized that I could take the bit even further. The next time I practiced it I asked the prop man to powder the floor. When I did it again, I slid almost all the way under the bed. I heard the crew laughing, and even better, I saw my brother wiping tears from his eyes. I knew I couldn’t get a bigger compliment.
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