We were supposed to work on Alan Gale’s show for ten to twelve weeks, but it closed after four weeks. We didn’t have money to fly home for Christmas, so Fred and I stayed down in Florida. While it was depressing not to be in New York for the holidays, I did get to play in a band for comedian Lenny Bruce. I was part of a trio that played behind him. He didn’t use any writers, but Fred and I learned a lot from watching him. He swore something like a hundred times in his act, and audiences in Florida knew they were watching something special and irreverent.
It was when we were in Miami Beach, laid off from Gale’s show, that we got a call from Joey Bishop. He was in Los Angeles starring in his new sitcom, The Joey Bishop Show, which Danny Thomas had created for him. After a few episodes, however, it was clear the show was not going well. The scripts were not strong enough. Joey wanted Fred and me to move to California to write for his sitcom. While I was weighing the pros and cons of moving across the country, Fred answered for both of us: “Yes.” Another lesson learned: Sometimes it is important to have a partner more ambitious than you are. Fred said it would be the perfect opportunity for us to move up. In his mind returning to The Tonight Show in New York would have been a step backward for our writing careers.
Before we made the final decision to move to California, we wrote for the lovely and talented comedian Shari Lewis and her puppet Lamb Chop, who communicated with us in a strange, calculated manner. Shari was very nice to us as writers, always offering coffee or tea and saying our jokes were funny. Her puppet Lamb Chop, however, would yell at us and say, “Boys, these pages are not funny at all. You can do better than this.” And then at the next meeting Shari would say, “Boys, would you like more donuts?” And then Lamb Chop would say, “We don’t do satire. Write better!” Fred and I would sit staring at a screaming puppet as he tore us apart. One evening when we were leaving from a big meeting with Shari and Lamb Chop, Fred said, “We are done. I can’t write for a piece of cloth any longer.” I agreed.
Still, I remained on the fence for a few weeks. I needed more information before I would make the move to California for a new job. So I consulted some other people for advice. Our agent, Frank Cooper, said “Definitely.” He said the future was in sitcom and sitcom was in television, so we should make the move. My own father said I should go because the future was anywhere other than in the Bronx. Jack Paar could have said no because he had us locked into a contract, but he let us out of our contract and told us to head west. He liked Joey and thought we would be a good fit to fix the new sitcom.
The night when everything changed was when we met Phil Foster at the Latin Quarter. Fred and I went right up to the maître d’, and he asked us if we had a reservation. We said no and then sheepishly went to sit in a dark corner to wait for Phil. It was a fancy club and we felt uncomfortable. When Phil arrived he was mad that we were hiding. He thought we should be sitting at a good table. So he chewed the waiter out.
“Do you know who those two men are?” asked Phil, pointing toward us.
“No,” said the maître d’.
“That’s Garry Marshall and Fred Freeman,” said Phil.
“I still don’t know who they are,” said the maître d’.
“That’s why you’re still a waiter,” said Phil.
It was the nicest thing anyone has ever said for me. If Phil had that kind of confidence in us, I thought, then we should have it in ourselves.
We finally moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1961. Joey said he would pay us two hundred dollars a week for six months, and that’s as far as I planned.
There was only one slight catch: I had a girlfriend I had met while writing for The Tonight Show, a singer named Ann Merendino. A sultry, chestnut-haired Italian girl, Ann was an only child, and she sang in our band. I was never very good at dating, and the fact that she was nice and didn’t have any money made me think we should get married. She got excited and planned a gigantic wedding with 400 people. My friend Bob Brunner was also dating a girl named Ann, and they were planning to get married, too. So I told my Ann as well as Bob and his Ann that I would go to California for a little while and then when I came back we would have a double wedding. Little did I know that I would never move back to New York. I called Ann a few months later, and we agreed marriage was not for us and called the engagement and the wedding off.
In November 1961, Fred and I ate Thanksgiving turkey at Schwab’s drugstore restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I was scared.
“So what if this doesn’t work out?” I asked Fred.
“Then we’ll find another job,” he said.
“But we don’t know anyone in Hollywood except Joey,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fred said.
“Do you think we’re as good as those Hollywood writers?” I asked, sharing my fear with Fred for the first time.
“We’re going to be better,” he said.
“But we don’t have the experience yet,” I worried.
“That’s the point. We’re going to learn from the guys with experience and then teach ourselves to write better than them,” he said. “We’re going to write for Danny Thomas. We’re going to be that good!”
“You are right,” I said with new confidence in our writing skills.
The last thing my mother had said to me before I left was “If you get sick from the heat, you can always come home.”
5. HOLLYWOOD
Finding Love, Laughs, and Lucy in California
AT FIRST, I FELT like Los Angeles was all a dream. I didn’t unpack my suitcase for at least a month for fear the job wouldn’t work out. I started to take pictures of every star I met. Joey Bishop. Abby Dalton. Milton Berle. Jack Benny. Zsa Zsa Gabor. I had a plan that if our sitcom got canceled and we were out of work I could open a restaurant and put these pictures of the stars on the walls to attract patrons. That, of course, was a pipe dream because I didn’t know how to cook and had no vocation for business. But still, I sent the pictures home to my parents because I wanted my mom to be proud of me and tell her friends on the Grand Concourse that her son had amounted to something. “My son, the show biz writer, lives in Hollywood,” she would tell the people in our basement laundry room.
Fred remained the confident one while I worried quietly. Fred and I began our staff writing job on The Joey Bishop Show in December 1961. We rented separate apartments; mine was just a short bus ride away from the Desilu Cahuenga Studios. I found Los Angeles a strange place because you couldn’t walk anywhere. In New York everybody walked, but in Los Angeles, I had to learn how to take the bus while I saved money to buy a car. So, as in college, I dated only girls who knew how to drive and had cars. One night I went out with a girl and we parked her car near my house. I leaned over and blew in her ear. She freaked out.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Ouch!” she said.
“What did I do? You don’t like it when a guy blows in your ear?”
“I have a hearing aid,” she said.
Who knew? The relationship didn’t last long even though she was a nice girl with a good car.
Jumping into the writing staff of a struggling sitcom is never an easy job. We had to quickly get up to speed on the characters, as well as on the politics between the writers and producers. The most important information we learned was that producers Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard were the most powerful people on the lot. Danny was a devout Catholic of Lebanese decent, and Sheldon was an intimidating man and an impeccable dresser. If they didn’t like you, your job there was history. If they liked your work and your personality, they would open doors to greater things for you. I was nervous that people in Hollywood wouldn’t like me because of my heavy Bronx accent. But the day I met Sheldon Leonard I realized he spoke just like me. When we had a conversation, we sounded like two New York gangsters. He liked me from the start.
It was pretty clear that The Joey Bishop Show was not going to be on the air forever. So Fred and I quickly started looking around to see what other sho
ws we might be able to write for. We decided that our goal should be The Dick Van Dyke Show, which starred Dick and Mary Tyler Moore. However, the show’s producer Carl Reiner knew us from New York and had us pegged as punch-up writers and joke meisters. Carl didn’t know yet that we could write a solid story. So Fred and I had to find a way to convince Carl that we could write big jokes as well as strong plots for the show. Carl was a fatherly type with an original mind. He could think on his feet better and faster than anyone I had ever seen.
In the meantime we stayed on Joey’s sitcom and traveled with him to Las Vegas when he opened at the Sands Hotel for Frank Sinatra. We made friends with Sinatra’s conductor, the young and talented Quincy Jones. Quincy said he wanted to compose music for sitcoms and we should remember his name if we ever had our own shows. I couldn’t imagine back then being the show runner of my own show. When I looked at Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard, I saw an inner confidence and wisdom that I had not yet developed. Inside I still felt like a wisecracking, fast-talking kid from the Bronx who might eat something I was allergic to and at any minute be rushed to the hospital.
I was, however, always good at recognizing an opportunity for humor. That was the case the night Fred and I went to a cast party on the Desilu lot. The party was held in the commissary, and writers from all the different shows stood up and told jokes. Fred and I knew the writing team of Bill Persky and Sam Denoff and a few other writers, but most of the people in the room were strangers to us, so it was intimidating. But I stood up and took the mike. There was a head chef named Hal who ran the kitchen where we usually ate lunch. Day after day he wore an apron that looked like it was covered in blood. That night I said, “Hal was going to be here tonight, but he couldn’t make it. He’s in Mexico, where they are having a cockfight on his apron.” That single joke brought down the house. I looked over and saw even Carl Reiner laughing. Months later writers and producers would come up to me and say, “You wrote that joke about Hal’s apron. Funny!”
During our first year writing for Joey Bishop began to take its toll on us. Fred and Joey would fight. Fred wanted more respect. Joey never had the highest respect for writers, so they were constantly getting into battles. One night Fred was explaining to Joey that we needed to strengthen the “protagonist” in the show to make him more compelling. Fred went on to define the word protagonist when it seemed clear Joey didn’t know what it meant. The fact that Fred was talking down to Joey made the star come completely unglued.
“If you don’t like it here, then get out,” said Joey.
Fred said “fine” and quit on the spot. I was stuck. Should I quit, too, in solidarity with my partner? In truth I didn’t want to quit. I was starting to like California, and I was just beginning to date a girl named Barbara Sue Wells, who worked as a nurse at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and happened to live in my apartment building. Barbara was a long-legged very pretty Midwestern girl with the warmest smile I had ever seen. But I didn’t know what it would be like to write a sitcom without Fred. I weighed the pros and cons. I didn’t want to move back to New York and write for The Tonight Show anymore. And I certainly didn’t have a future back at the Daily News. So Fred and I talked. He said it was okay to stay in California and find another writing partner. I said goodbye to Fred, and he moved back to New York and got a job on The Jackie Gleason Show.
Joey hired me to keep writing scripts for him and paid me more money. Milt Josefsberg took over as head writer on the show and Milt liked me. So I was on my own in Hollywood, without a partner but with a steady paycheck. Fred and I had been paid $300 a week, which we split. After he left I got the entire $300. I tried writing alone for a while, but I didn’t feel as productive. So I took $150 of my money and hired two writers I liked to create a team. That’s how Dale McRaven and Carl Kleinschmitt joined the staff of The Joey Bishop Show. Dale was a hippie with a long black beard, so he sort of stood out from the rest of us. Carl, on the other hand, was a redneck political speechwriter who wrote for both Democrats and Republicans.
After they’d been on the show for eleven weeks, Joey called me into his office to ask me about Dale and Carl.
“Who are those two kids hanging around the writers’ table?” he asked.
“McRaven and Kleinschmitt,” I said. “They help punch up the show.”
“Who pays them?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“With what?”
“You give me three hundred dollars a week, and I pay them one fifty of that money. It’s worth it because they make the show better.”
Joey said I didn’t have to pay them anymore and he would put them on staff. But Dale’s long black beard still made Joey nervous.
“That kid looks like a hippie,” Joey said to me one day.
“He is a hippie. But he’s a good writer, too,” I said.
“Have him shave his beard,” said Joey.
At the next writers’ meeting I told Dale he had to shave his beard. Later that night Barbara was hanging out at my apartment and we heard a loud bang on the door. Barbara was afraid, and I was, too. But I opened the door to find an envelope pinned to it with a knife. I took out the knife and opened the envelope. Inside was Dale’s shaved beard. He was giving me the proof that he had conformed to Joey’s clean-cut look. I thought it was pretty funny, but my girlfriend was not amused. “It is hard to date someone who has hippies throwing knives at his door in the middle of the night,” she told me. Barbara later became good friends with Dale, but it was clear I needed a new partner at the time. I called the first person I could think of who might know someone.
“Gordon, hi. It’s Garry Marshall. Remember, from Korea?”
“Garry. Yes! How are you?”
“Remember you said you had a funny brother?”
“Yes. Jerry. But not adopted.”
“When can I meet him?” I laughed.
I met Jerry Belson the next weekend. He was four years younger than I was. He had never been to college, and had never seen a stage play. But he had a darker, hipper sense of humor, which complimented my upbeat one. Jerry was a smiling, out-of-shape ex–fat kid with one of the most brilliant comedy minds I had ever met. I talked to Sheldon Leonard, who was in charge of all the shows under the Danny Thomas umbrella, and told him about my new partner. Sheldon knew that Joey Bishop was a tough person to write for and he admired me for sticking with Joey and his show. So he gave Jerry and me a script to write on The Danny Thomas Show.
Our first script for The Danny Thomas Show was about his daughter Linda developing a crush on a boy we named Wendell Henderson. She liked him so much that she would scrape the dirt off his Little League cleats and keep it in her room. The script was successful, so Jerry and I formed our own production company and called it Wendell Henderson. (Years later when we split up, Jerry took Wendell and I became Henderson Productions, which I remain to this day.) Jerry was a great partner because he was so productive and driven. When I got a good idea it was usually my third or fourth try. But with Jerry the first words out of his mouth were often the funniest of the day. I liked that we worked differently. Sheldon recognized our compatibility, too, and gave us another script, this time on The Bill Dana Show. After that the work did not stop coming our way.
Writing for these shows gave us the chance to get to know stars like Danny Thomas. Danny was an odd fellow. He was a great comedian who excelled by telling funny stories rather than punch lines. He was folksy in a family way, like Bill Cosby later was on his television show. Danny was also the most religious comedian we ever worked for and a legend for his charity in founding the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. One day he invited Jerry and me to his home and showed us his beautiful swimming pool. At the end of the pool was a statue of Jesus. Jerry said, “Well, you have a good lifeguard, Danny.” I chuckled inside, but Danny didn’t laugh at all. We never joked again about religion around him. He was gracious and sweet and always so good to writers. But he was complex in a way that we sometimes couldn’t understan
d. One night we went to a charity event with him in a kind of seedy neighborhood of Los Angeles. He lifted his pant leg to zip up his boot, and we saw a gun sticking out.
“Danny, you carry a gun?” I asked.
“Always,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I do charity work in many neighborhoods that aren’t safe. You have to protect yourself,” he said.
It made sense but seemed at the same time incongruous for a religious man to be packing a pistol in his sock.
Danny had a great influence on me because he was such a family man; he had a wife and kids. I wanted that, too. So with my career going so well, I decided that it was time to make a commitment in my personal life. On New Year’s Eve, 1963, I became engaged. On March 9, 1963, I married Barbara Sue Wells, whom I had been dating for over a year. We were a perfect match. I was a sick hypochondriac and she was a nurse. Originally from Cincinnati, she had moved to California in 1961, after another boy left her standing at the altar. She and her friend Donna Parmer both worked at Cedars, and before they started making money they would eat the patients’ pudding and custard in the hospital refrigerator just to save money. When you went over to their apartment, they would serve it to guests.
We got married in Las Vegas. We didn’t have enough money to fly our parents out, so we just invited our California friends. My father and her mother were mad about the fact we did not include them. Her father was fine with it and wished us well. My mother was only disappointed I didn’t marry a doctor, but I told her a nurse would take care of me just as well.
Our best man was Tom Kuhn, and Donna Parmer was our maid of honor. They were dating, and they were the ones who’d introduced us. Joey Bishop paid for our hotel room at the Sands, and Phil Foster paid for us to see a show. We paid for the rest of the wedding. Our wedding party included about twenty people altogether. To us it was perfect, but to our parents, to have their two oldest children get married without them in attendance was an eternal disappointment. We didn’t have time or money for a honeymoon, and on Monday morning we were both back at work.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 6
