Miraculously, she did turn up in time for our second and last segment. She said that she had changed hotel rooms and the producers couldn’t find her. By this point, I didn’t care about her reasons for showing up late. I was overjoyed to have her next to me when they threw to us to describe the crowning of the new Queen of the Krewe of Apollo.
“Isn’t he something?” Cindy said. “He’s something, isn’t he?”
“What?” I said, surprised by the secret she was revealing to viewers.
But why would she know that was off-limits? She hadn’t been to the briefing. Who gave a shit? As soon as we finished, I tossed back to Jane and Buck and lit up a cigarette. They never did see the parade. It had been diverted after someone along the route was accidentally run over and killed. In the show’s closing moments, Jane explained, “The parade has not been delayed. It doesn’t exist. It never did. ‘Mardi Gras’ is just a French word meaning ‘No Parade.’ Good night.”
In the meantime, I didn’t have a ride back to the postshow dinner from the ball. No one had been designated as my driver. Nor had I been assigned a security guard, an intern, or even a helper. A guy in the crowd saw me looking around and asked if I wanted a ride on his motorcycle. He could’ve been a murderer for all I knew. I didn’t care. I said okay and got on the back of his bike.
Thank God, he dropped me off at a restaurant where I recognized people. I left with Herb Sargent and went back to his hotel, with Tom Schiller in the background saying, “He’s too old for you.” I didn’t care. After the trauma of the show, I didn’t want to be alone. But Tom was right. Herb fell asleep in the middle of the night.
Still awake, I had no idea where I was or how to get back to my hotel. I called downstairs for a cab, but the concierge said that wouldn’t be possible. The streets were still too crowded. Yes, I realized that half-naked drunken people were continuing to walk around down there. That’s why I had wanted a cab. I called the police instead.
“Laverne, is that you?” the desk sergeant asked.
“It is,” I said.
Two cop cars showed up and took me to my hotel. Then Cindy and I flew back to L.A. I didn’t do Saturday Night Live again until I was promoting The Preacher’s Wife with Whitney Houston in 1996. Why so long? I needed those twenty years to recover from what had happened in New Orleans.
CHAPTER 25
Where’s Mom?
Penny and her mother celebrating Easter in 1978
Garry Marshall
SOMETIMES I HEARD a tone in Tracy’s voice that reminded me of the way I had sounded when I spoke to my mother. It would make me cringe. I knew what it was like to have a mother who not only worked but was more interested in her work than doing traditional mother things. Also, I remember Tracy bringing kids home after school to play, and then they would leave. I’d ask where so-and-so went, and she would say, “They didn’t really want to be friends. They just wanted to see you and Rob.” My heart ached.
Every so often I would try to make it up to her. In June 1977, for instance, she was going through what I called her Patty Hearst phase, whining that I never took her anywhere. Well, she had been to Monte Carlo and Venice, among other places, but instead of arguing, I took her to the Plaza Hotel in New York and showed her where I had grown up.
It was my version of a trip to the old country. I took her to Rob’s building. We walked up Jerome Avenue. I pointed out the store where I had bought my 45s as well as the Jade Garden, the Chinese restaurant where we ordered takeout if my father didn’t come home for Sunday dinner. It was underneath the el, and I explained how we would wait after placing an order and couldn’t hear shit when they called your number because of the passing train.
For me, though, the highlight of our trip was when we stood outside my old apartment building and I showed Tracy the windows on the ramp leading down to my mother’s dance school. There were three of them. She noticed that someone had spray-painted the word FONZIE on one of them. I liked seeing that a touch of Marshall creativity was still attached to the building, and Tracy was eager to tell her grandmother.
If only my mother had been able to fully appreciate it. She was still as much of a pain in the ass as ever—meddling, complaining about my father, or offering an opinion on work. “Why does your brother dress you so silly?” Rob could tell from the sound of my voice when I was talking to her on the phone. At family gatherings at our house, she took the grandchildren outside and taught them tap in our driveway. We would hear the scraping on the cement.
But we had begun to notice a problem. Her feistiness was turning into forgetfulness. It was first apparent in late 1977, during Laverne & Shirley’s third season, when we taped an episode titled “The Second Almost Annual Shotz Talent Show.” Cindy’s and my mothers were both in it. Her mother, Frances, sang and mine danced. In many ways, the episode was a tribute to my mother, starting with the person who wrote the script, Paula Roth. Paula was the daughter of my mother’s partner in the dance school, Mildred Roth.
In the second season, after the show was a hit, Garry had told me that I could give someone a life, meaning I could give someone who needed a break a job on Laverne & Shirley. I chose Paula. Although I had been mean to her as a kid, those days were behind us. I took her to plays and events when I was in New York. She was usually available. She was a key-punch operator going with a married guy. I didn’t think that constituted a life.
She jumped at the chance to work on the show. Garry gave her the same manual he’d given to Monica, and Paula picked up writing quickly. I did the same thing with Marty Nadler, a friend’s brother. Garry also let Cindy give two people a life. It was easy to open the door and, in a way, it was necessary to pay it forward if you wanted to stay real amid all the hoopla of show business.
Once the door was opened, it was up to others to prove they belonged. Like Paula, whose “Second Almost Annual Talent Show” brought all of us back together for the first time since we’d been children. During rehearsals, we reminisced about how my mother had taught us how to entertain. Now, here we were at Paramount Studios, Garry, Ronny, Paula, and me, all of us influenced in some way by her. Even more remarkable was my mother’s ability to tap. She danced effortlessly, picking up steps wherever Garry instructed. She delighted all of us.
But she couldn’t remember any of her lines, not even a single short one. That was worrisome.
As we puzzled over it, Garry remembered that she’d had trouble on her previous TV appearances. The first was the “Oscar’s Birthday” episode of The Odd Couple in 1972. No one had told her it was lunchtime and she was found hiding on the set. The second was a Happy Days in 1976. She had one line—“When do we eat lunch?”—and she repeatedly said, “When do we go to the airport?”
After the talent show episode, we took my mother to the doctor. She was diagnosed with dementia or what we have since come to know as Alzheimer’s disease. I tried to make light of it. “Maybe it’s good—maybe she won’t know who I am and will like me better,” I said. But she didn’t forget me—or her sense of humor. A short time later, a reporter doing a story on our family was allowed to sit next to her during a Laverne & Shirley rehearsal. “It has too much sameness,” my mother said. Then she added, “You know, my son did all this for the money.”
Gradually, as the disease took hold, she would occasionally forget our names and call us whatever name popped into her head. She had done the same thing when I was a kid. She would call me Gertrude or Gladys and say, “Don’t you get tired of always being called Penny?” Despite her Alzheimer’s, she still hated my father. Their conversations were hilarious. One day she was looking in her purse for her checkbook. She couldn’t find it or remember what it was called. She kept asking for the “long brown thing.”
My father, good with numbers but not the sharpest tack, said, “A salami?”
“A salami?” she exclaimed. “What would I do with a salami in my purse?”
At that point, we took her car away. She and my father were living in Studio
City so they could be closer to Garry, Ronny, and me. She still got around on the bus, but she would forget where to get off. Several times she went to the end of the line and wandered around. Once, a cop picked her up and called my sister-in-law. They had my mother in the downtown jail, where she was regaling hookers with stories about teaching dance. They loved her.
Years later, after the disease had rendered her bed-bound and helpless, I took a Polaroid of her lying in bed. I knew she was nearing the end of her life and I wanted to remember her. I showed the picture to Jimmy Belushi, who was living in a spare room at my house. He grabbed the photo from my hand and threw it in the fireplace. “That’s not your mother,” he said.
He was right. My mother dressed in a blouse and slacks and spent her days in the cellar—or rather the ballroom—sitting at an upright piano, smoking cigarettes, drinking Yoo-hoo, and making sure her 360 students knew what it felt like to entertain.
Even though she drove me nuts, I would never forget her.
CHAPTER 26
The Remodel
Penny and close friend Carrie Fisher, who were introduced by Lorne Michaels
Michael O’Donoghue / Tracy Reiner
Penny and Carrie blowing out the candles in 1986 at one of their legendary joint birthday parties
Marshall personal collection
RIGHT BEFORE ROB quit All in the Family at the end of the 1977–78 season, we bought a home in Encino with a tennis court, a swimming pool, ample parking for friends, and a guest house. It was supposed to be our dream house, the place that said we had made it. We called it “the house that yuks built.” Jerry Belson came over one day and said, “Wow, this is a great house—if life was worth living.”
Before long we were agreeing with him. We wanted to add a master bedroom and update the kitchen. We hired an architect and a contractor, who told us the job would take six months max. So we moved into the guest house: Rob, Tracy, me, our two dogs, Barney Google and Joey, and a white cat we referred to as The Ghost of Howie for the way he coughed and wheezed like our old cat, Howie. We thought we could handle the close quarters for a while.
But two years later we were still living there. Somewhere in that time span we lost our sense of humor. Our contractor and architect would assure us that the job was coming along and then something would happen. The wrong materials arrived or they weren’t shipped at all. Or the wood we wanted to use was too heavy for the floor. When I complained, the contractor said, “You can go ahead with that flooring. But you might have a cave-in. Your call.”
To get through the annoyances, Rob and I relied on our ability to turn even hardship into humor. Without All in the Family, he worked hard. In June 1978, he and his partner, Phil Mishkin, wrote and produced Free Country, a period sitcom about Lithuanian immigrants in turn-of-the-century New York. Rob also starred in it. I think he wanted to do the Eastern European version of Roots. But the network canceled it after only five episodes. He tried a variety series the next summer, and despite contributions from Billy Crystal and Martin Mull, and the debut of This Is Spinal Tap, it also had a short run.
Rob was unaccustomed to failure. Frustrated, he struggled and second-guessed himself into a place of self-loathing. Once he was in that state of mind, there was no getting through to him. If you liked him, you were a fool, and if you didn’t like him, you were an idiot.
I knew we had problems when I got out of bed one morning and he asked where I was going. I reminded him that I had a show. He drifted and stewed about the little things that we had always tried to ignore, including my paycheck, which was now bigger than his. What did it matter? Well, apparently it did. We were out of sync. He was fiercely ambitious, and I didn’t give a shit. While he worked, Albert and I would take mushrooms and watch Family Feud. Then he would come home and find us laughing at “Show me ‘banana’!”
Egos were fragile. With our house in disarray, friends didn’t hang out as much. We had people over to swim and play tennis, but it wasn’t like the old days. I would go to New York to hang out with my SNL friends. One day I went to The Sherry-Netherland Hotel to say hi to Jerry Belson, who was working on a rewrite of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Steven Spielberg was there.
“So you’re the Jaws of TV?” he said.
Steven and I became instant friends. He gave me a small part in his movie 1941, his action comedy starring John Belushi and Danny Aykroyd about a feared Japanese attack on Los Angeles during World War II. It was a high-concept, big-budget film, and as Hollywood’s wunderkind filmmaker, he knew many in the business were looking for him to fail. When you get too successful, people want to see that you’re fallible, like everyone else.
He understood. When he offered me a couple days work on the movie, he joked, “I have a hundred and seventy-one speaking parts. If this dies, I’m going to need someone to talk to.” He covered a lot of bases because it was hard to find someone who wasn’t in the movie. Even Michael McKean and David Lander were in it; they played machine gunners defending the coast.
My scene took one day and then I spent another day on the set watching Steven work. I didn’t know shit about cameras or directing, and he knew everything. He was experimenting with a Louma crane, which was this long expandable, extendable arm with a camera at the end that could snake through crowds and fly overhead while being operated from a seated position far away.
When he filmed me, Steven was literally around the corner. I made him stick his picture on the end of the camera. I was used to talking to another person. I think I amused him. We watched movies together and discussed changes we would have made in scenes and different endings. I was endlessly fascinated. I don’t know that everyone at our place was as enamored by him. Some were intimidated. Others were jealous. Steven didn’t do drugs. He was a straight arrow, and that made some people uncomfortable.
I tried to get a Quaalude in him. They were my drug of choice. I constantly joked about wanting to know what he would be like if he relaxed.
“I want to know what’s inside you,” I would say.
“Celluloid,” he would say, laughing at me.
Carl Gottlieb had cowritten the screenplay for Jaws, and he called me one day when I was in New York with a request. He was thinking about buying the house on Martha’s Vineyard where they all had stayed while making the movie, and he asked me to go with his then-wife Allison to look at the house. He trusted my taste. Once Steven heard that I was going there, he called me with another favor. He had left his favorite pillow there and wanted me to try to find it.
“How am I going to find it?” I asked.
“It smells a little like celery,” he said.
“Celery?” I paused. “Never mind.”
The house was a large log cabin that hadn’t been occupied since they had used it as their home base. As Allison looked around, I went through each bedroom and smelled the pillows. I inhaled a lot of dust without finding a hint of celery anywhere. Carl didn’t end up buying the house, either.
Back in New York, Lorne arranged for me to meet Carrie Fisher at her place in the Eldorado on Central Park West. He was pals with singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who was dating Carrie, and they thought we’d hit it off. They were right. We’ve been best friends ever since. She and Paul were heading to St. Hip, her name for some island in the Caribbean. I helped her pack and listened to her bitch about whether she was able to keep up with Paul.
A high school dropout, she thought everyone was smarter than she was, especially Paul. In reality, she was smarter than everyone. She was brilliant. Everyone knew it. Steven, Lorne, and if you asked him at the right moment, Paul would’ve agreed, too. Carrie read voraciously. She was funny and clever. She wrote and provided nonstop, hysterical commentary on people, movies, books, and Hollywood, where she grew up the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. She was a one-woman show thirty-five years before she did one.
There was a reason I was glad to have a new best friend: I was gradually losing my old one. The remodel cost more than
we paid for our house. It also cost us our marriage. Two years in the guest house took a toll. When Rob and I finally moved in, we saw a report on TV that we were breaking up. It wasn’t a good welcome. We made a stab at normalcy, opening our doors again to friends. We welcomed back the old crowd, including Albert, Jim Brooks, and Ricky Dreyfuss, who took over the guest house. Added new faces, like Ed Begley Jr., John Landis, Jimmy Belushi, Tim Matheson, and Steven Spielberg. One night Cindy arrived with Andy Kaufman, who she dated briefly. He wanted to wrestle us.
“I don’t think so,” I said. Then I turned to Cindy and added, “Please take him home.”
I wasn’t into fighting in any way, not even with Rob. Our marriage continued to head in the wrong direction, and it wasn’t helped when we worked together on his TV movie More Than Friends. The movie was a charming romance—underrated if you ask me—that Rob wrote with Phil Mishkin about two longtime friends who debate over a couple decades whether to become lovers. Originally titled I’ll Love You and Be Your Best Friend, it was loosely inspired by our relationship. In fact, ABC promoted it as a “like story.”
Rob and I starred with Howard Hesseman, Carl Gottlieb, Michael McKean, and other friends. We shot in our old Bronx neighborhood and reconnected with past acquaintances. Jim Burrows directed, but the film was Rob’s. He often yelled cut. Our problems arose because he immersed himself in every aspect of the movie and expected me to do the same. But I didn’t want to go to dailies and watch myself. I didn’t like doing that. Nor did I want to run lines at night. I knew my lines.
New York was my playground, and I wanted to play. Rob and I got into an argument when I insisted on going to the Animal House premiere rather than staying at the hotel and rehearsing with him. I had friends there: John Belushi, Stephen Bishop, John Landis, and Tim Matheson. I was making up for the fun I’d missed as a young mother. Rob was interested in making movies.
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