My Mother Was Nuts (15 page)

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.

Penny behind bars during the 1976
Laverne & Shirley
episode “Guilty Until Proven Innocent”
Use of photo still from
Laverne & Shirley–
Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

W
E 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.

Within a few weeks, I would also realize this marked a point in the show’s young history when the writers had basically given up on expository scripts in favor of more traditional three-camera block comedy. In a block comedy, you write to a big scene—or a block. Like
I Love Lucy
, everything builds to a big moment. If it’s not funny, it hurts the entire script. We weren’t shy about telling our writers what we thought of their scripts. That’s why my brother wouldn’t bring his children onto the set.

We were tough. Not just Cindy and me. All of us. David Lander and Michael McKean, originally hired as writers, were kicked out of the writers’ table because they were very critical. David once threw a script into the garbage and that earned all of us a reputation for throwing scripts. The truth was, the script he threw was printed on pink paper, meaning it was a first draft, and everyone knows that pink stinks. But we didn’t throw scripts. We did swear. And sometimes we yelled. I would question things. I was a stickler for logic. I believed things should make sense. So the writers didn’t want me around. Cindy would go off on her Boo Boo Kitty tangents about inserting animal rights messages or this or that, whatever kick she was on that week, and so they didn’t want her, either.

If the dialogue sucked in read-through, Lowell, who sat next to me, could hear it in my voice and he would sound the alarm. “Uh-oh, we lost Penny on page fifteen.” If the writers didn’t fix it by rehearsal,
I showed my displeasure in various ways. Once, I tossed popcorn into Cindy’s mouth. Other times we wore stupid hats. Sometimes the tension between us and the writers was like an undeclared war. However, that determination to make each show as entertaining as possible was where a lot of the great jokes came from, as well as business like the milk and Pepsi. I would try to figure out something that was funny.