Now that I was married, my job, salary, and responsibilities were carried to a whole new level. When Milt Josefsberg was head writer on The Joey Bishop Show, he was very generous to me. He gave me the credit as “script consultant” every sixth show. He taught me everything he had learned from writing for Jack Benny. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Joey fired Milt. I couldn’t imagine why Joey would do such a thing, but again, he asked me to stick around. Joey was very combative with other people, but not with me. So I brought in Jerry Belson, and together we wrote scripts for Joey. Just when I was starting to really make a living, my mother and my blind grandmother moved to California. My mother had not gotten along with my father for years, and she heard that California had some nice retirement homes for the blind, where Nanny could live for next to nothing. They arrived shortly after Barbara and I got married. Unfortunately for my mother, my dad followed her out west a few months later. I told them I could help them out with rent, but I didn’t have enough money for them to have separate apartments. So they would have to find a way to live together. My mother joined a group called Mothers of the Stars and made fast friends with Lucille Ball’s mother and Carol Burnett’s mother.
In December 1963, my wife gave birth to our first child, Lorraine Gay Marshall. The night before the baby was born I stayed up writing a charity skit for Lucille Ball. I remember thinking that now that I was going to be a father, I needed to step up the pace and work harder than ever. I was responsible for a wife and a daughter, and writing for Lucy seemed like the steady dad kind of job I should have. But again you couldn’t just send in your résumé and get a job on these shows. You had to prove yourself and be handpicked by either the star or the producer. And luckily, Milt Josefsberg liked me and was running Lucy’s show.
Milt had landed as head writer on The Lucy Show. Immediately he called and asked if Jerry and I could write some episodes, and we jumped at the chance. At the time we wrote for Lucille Ball, she was divorced from Desi Arnaz and married to Gary Morton. Gary was a comedian we had met before; he showed us his closet, in which he had over a hundred pairs of shoes. I couldn’t imagine wanting or needing that many shoes, but Gary acted like it was a dream come true. When we wrote scripts for Lucy, she was funny and talented but sometimes also difficult and hard to please. She was at a vulnerable point in her career because she had never run a show without Desi. So I think part of her wanted to appear tough, and the other part was scared and ambivalent about being the boss. I was fortunate that she remembered me.
“Garry, you’re the one who wrote that funny skit for me at the Writers Guild charity event last year,” she said.
She was right. I wrote that script for no money because I hoped the more I wrote for charity the more people would know my work and hire me. My plan had clearly worked with Lucy. However, the first script Jerry and I wrote for her didn’t go over as well. She wrote on the front cover THIS IS SHIT and gave it right back to us. Jerry and I were in shock. We had wanted to please Lucy and had ended up offending her in some way. Milt told us not to worry. Sometimes the pressure of running her own show made Lucy cranky. So we rewrote the script with a fresh cover, and she liked the second draft.
We quickly learned the key to writing for Lucy: start with a funny situation and then build the whole script toward it. We wrote the episode in which Lucy ended up at a fancy banquet wearing a ball gown with roller skates. As the story went, her feet were swollen and she couldn’t get the roller skates off. The script called for her to go through a reception line with the roller skates on. During rehearsals she crashed into a row of waiters. The sight of this threw Jerry and me into a complete panic. He said, “Do you think we’ve killed Lucy?” But she quickly got up and dusted herself off as we ran over to apologize. “No. No. I’m fine,” she said. “It was my fault. Keep writing this kind of script and I’ll keep going at it.” She was brave and strong, and she could tell what was funny and what would fail. She didn’t care so much about plot; she wanted that big comedy scene that fans would remember, so that’s what we gave her.
As much as we liked writing for Lucy, we still wanted to break into The Dick Van Dyke Show, because it was a classier show. We were going to leave Lucy completely, but Milt cautioned me. “You have a daughter now, Garry. You need security. Writing for Lucy is like taking out an insurance policy. Lucy’s shows are going to run forever.”
Milt was right. Residuals were the new way to make money, and he knew Lucy would be a residual gold mine. So instead of six scripts for Lucy that year we wrote three, and at the same time we wrote episodes for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Writing for Van Dyke was not always easy either. We broke into the show by doing scripts for Mary Tyler Moore because the veteran writers only wanted to write for Dick. But one of our first scripts Mary read she threw across the room, nearly hitting us in the heads. It turned out it wasn’t so much that she didn’t like the script as it was that she was trying to quit smoking. Jerry and I learned early on that you can’t take stars’ anger personally. You have to write and rewrite until you can make them smile instead of scream.
While I was busy working my sisters were both having a hard time. Ronny had three little girls and had decided to divorce and leave her husband back in Illinois. She came out to California with her daughters. As if that wasn’t enough, Penny arrived from New Mexico with a baby and no husband. So in one year my entire family moved to California and I was the only one working. I felt pressure and shared it with Jerry. We stayed up late into the night writing scripts. He took pills and smoked pot, and I ate Fig Newtons and Oreos.
Shortly after, Jerry got divorced and had to pay alimony. So we had to make even more money. We decided to write some scripts using pseudonyms. I became Samuro Mitsubi, and Jerry was Tawasaki Kwai. We took the names because our agent said we were too big to write under our own names for so many shows. He wanted us to remain in high demand for the top-rated shows.
Whenever someone asked us to write a script, we said yes. Sometimes we had ten scripts going at once. We even ghostwrote other people’s scripts and they would pay us cash in brown paper bags. Later on when my wife was making dinner I would put four hundred-dollar bills underneath her dinner plate. All through dinner the baby and I would wait for her to lift up the plate and then laugh out loud. We were a team in demand. By the end of the 1963 television season, Belson and Marshall (using our real names) had written thirty-one produced sitcom scripts, which was more than any team had ever written before. After writing that many scripts, when my hands weren’t typing, they were shaking with exhaustion. And that is when I looked at my wife and baby girl and said, “We need to take a break or I could die.”
We decided to move to Palm Springs, just two hours south of Los Angeles. I didn’t know how long we would be there, I just knew I had to go someplace and rest. Barbara had quit her nursing job right before the baby was born, so it was easy for us to pack up for a while. We rented a small house with a swimming pool, and friends from Los Angeles, including my parents and sisters, would visit us on the weekends. I decided I wanted to write a play about my mother and how she was never able to fulfill her dreams professionally or personally. I called that play Shelves, and after I finished it I put it in a drawer. I didn’t know if I was ever going to do anything with it, I was just happy I had written it. After six months of swimming, sleeping, eating, and pushing my daughter’s baby carriage along the streets of Palm Springs, I felt rejuvenated. That’s when I got the call from Jerry.
“Garry, we sold a pilot,” he said.
“Hey Landlord!” I asked.
“Yes. The network wants us to executive-produce it. Can you come back?” he said.
“We’re packing up now,” I said.
So Barbara, Lori, and I headed back from Palm Springs to produce my first television series. Sheldon Leonard had told me that, to be successful, Jerry and I needed to create our own series so we could own a piece of it. Having our own show also allowed us to give other people writing, producing, and
directing jobs. It was a watershed moment in my career because as one of the producers of the show, I was allowed to hire myself as one of the directors, too. I had never directed anything aside from my home movies, but I had learned from watching others. Our first director on the show was John Rich, a well-known television director who had done episodes of everything from The Twilight Zone to Mr. Ed. John was one of my early directing mentors. But he soon got another job, so we hired Jerry Paris, who had been an actor and director on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Jerry took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about directing.
Hey Landlord! starred Sandy Baron, Will Hutchins, and Michael Constantine. The NBC series premiered in 1966, after it took us more than a year to develop, write the scripts, and cast the show. Hey Landlord! was about a young man from Ohio who inherits a New York brownstone from his uncle, then shares it with a stand-up comedian. To write the show we hired people we knew—Arnold Margolin, Dale McRaven, Carl Kleinschmitt—and young actors, Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner, who was Carl’s son. We used to see Rob hanging around the set of The Dick Van Dyke Show and thought he was funny, in a dark and hippie comedic sort of way. Once we were able to hire Quincy Jones to do the music for Hey Landlord!, we were on top of the world.
With Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard as our producers, we thought we had all the makings of a hit sitcom. While the scripts were funny, Sandy and Will didn’t have the experience to carry a whole show. Only Michael Constantine got big laughs, and his was a small part. One night Will was appearing in a musical and Jerry and I were supposed to attend to be supportive. But on our way out the door our daughter pulled away from the babysitter and ran after us. She fell and hit her eye on the front door, and we had to take her to the hospital for stitches. When I called Jerry at intermission from the emergency room to tell him our daughter had fallen and needed stitches, he said, “You’re having more fun than me.” The show was canceled after one year, but we didn’t regret getting our feet wet. It was a lesson in how to be show runners, and Jerry and I had a lot to learn. I found it similar to being the captain of a baseball team. People’s feelings got hurt, but at the end of the day the buck stopped with me and I was fine with it, or at least secure.
Then, the final ratings came out; we were ninety-ninth out of a hundred shows. I clipped the ratings from the newspaper and kept them in my wallet to remind myself that I had no place to go but up. Failure wasn’t going to ruin my career just yet. It made me a little sad and depressed, the same way I felt when Lucy wrote THIS IS SHIT on our first script for her. But I knew from that experience there was no need to dwell. We just had to write and rewrite something new.
Jerry and I next created a television movie called Evil Roy Slade, the tale of a notoriously mean villain in the Wild West who tries to give up his life of crime when he falls in love with a schoolteacher. While Evil Roy Slade got a great review in Life magazine, we were unable to sell it as a television pilot called Sheriff Who? Once again we were at a crossroads. What should we do next?
We decided to write a few comedy specials for Danny Thomas’s company. One was called The Road to Lebanon, and the other was called It’s Greek to Me. When we handed in the specials Danny wasn’t totally happy with them, and he asked for a lot of rewriting. Jerry and I were grumbling about the rewrites one day in the writers’ room, where there were coffee and donuts. An old writer, Harry Crane, heard us complaining. He came over, took my face and Jerry’s face, and pushed them together.
“Look out the window, boys,” Harry said. “There are men outside wearing hard hats. You could be outside wearing hard hats and working in hundred-degree heat. Instead you’re inside with air-conditioning, donuts, and coffee. So shut up. Do the rewrite and stop complaining!”
Jerry and I exchanged a quick look of recognition and headed right back to our typewriters.
My wife and I wanted to have another baby, but we were having trouble getting pregnant. So we took our daughter, Lori, to Ohio to stay with Barbara’s parents and we went to England and Ireland for a month and came back pregnant. Europe gave us fertility. With a second baby on the way, I felt the need to get back to work right away, so Jerry and I moved into the movie business. If we could produce a television series, we thought we could produce a movie, too. How different could they be? The first movie we produced was called How Sweet It Is! and starred James Garner and Debbie Reynolds. The film was bankrolled by a company called National General. It was a fluffy romantic comedy about a professional photographer who takes his wife and hippie son on a work assignment in Paris. We hired Jerry Paris to direct.
There were so many differences between writing for a television show and writing for a movie. We got paid $3,500 per episode for a television script, and $75,000 for our movie script. When we wrote for television we had to answer to producers and show runners. But on How Sweet It Is! we were the writers as well as the producers, so Jerry and I had to learn to step up and be bosses. On television we worked during the day and worked late only on the nights we shot the shows. On the movie, however, we seemed to be working all day and night. The pace was tiring but also invigorating for us creatively.
My wife gave birth to our second daughter, Kathleen Susan, on December 16, 1967. On January 17, 1969, following the release of How Sweet It Is! our son, Scott Anthony, was born. All three of our kids were conceived in the late spring, typically hiatus time for television, which makes sense because there isn’t a lot of time for making babies during the regular season.
Jerry and I liked the experience on How Sweet It Is! even though the picture wasn’t a hit. So we approached National General about making another movie. The script was called The Grasshopper and starred a very young Jacqueline Bisset and the former football player Jim Brown. It was a tale about a nineteen-year-old girl from Canada who lands in Las Vegas, becomes a showgirl, and falls into a relationship with a former NFL player. While Jerry Paris wanted to direct the movie, we decided we wanted to go with a more famous and edgier director, someone who had more clout and more movies under his belt. So we hired Don Medford.
There was trouble from the start. Every time we got ready to start, he said he needed another week to prepare. After five weeks National General said we had to fire Don. Jerry and I were nervous wrecks because we had never fired anyone before. I don’t love confrontations, but I learned to deal with them. After we broke the news to Don, we left in a hurry. I realized when we reached his apartment lobby that I had forgotten my glasses; we didn’t dare go back. It was easier for me to buy a new pair.
We knew we had made a big mistake, and we wanted to get Jerry Paris back. However, Jerry was in Italy with his wife and three kids. My wife thought it was very poor taste to call and interrupt his family vacation, but we felt we had no choice, and Jerry was the only director we knew. So we called him in a remote village in Italy and explained our problem. He left his wife and kids and jumped on the first plane out. Two days later he was on our set as the new director. He said his family understood.
The movie was plagued with production problems from day one. One day my wife brought all three kids to the set, and things were behind schedule.
“Garry, the kids can’t stay all day. When are you going to start?” asked Barbara.
“As soon as I get my star out of jail,” I said.
“What?”
“Jim Brown had an altercation with his girlfriend. I have to go and bail him out.” Jim was not a bad guy. He was just going through a rough time.
Despite our hard work The Grasshopper got mixed reviews. But I was still proud of what we had done. I liked movies. The problem was that making movies seemed like a bad fit for a dad. The kids had events at school and activities after school that I was unable to attend because I had to be on location. So my mind started drifting back to television. Working as a television producer and show runner seemed much better for a father of three.
In 1969 Jerry and I got a call from Paramount and ABC to produce The Odd Couple for television. I
remembered what Sheldon Leonard had told me a few years earlier. “Write your own shows, boys. That’s where the money is.” But Jerry had stomach problems, and he didn’t like the idea of doing a weekly sitcom. He wanted to pursue movies. Still, I convinced him that now that we both had kids, television was where we wanted to be. So we became the producers of The Odd Couple. It would mark the first sitcom hit of my career as a producer. The day we reported for work we opened the newspaper and found out that Neil Simon was furious that we were making a television show of his play. It was not the best news to get on your first day of a new show, particularly because we both idolized Neil Simon.
6. THE ODD COUPLE
Running My First TV Show with Oscar and Felix
THE YEAR WAS 1970, and I found myself, along with my writing partner, Jerry Belson, the producer of ABC’s much anticipated new comedy The Odd Couple. This show took me from being a producer of pop art to being the critics’ delight. Not only was The Odd Couple my first critically acclaimed show but it also made me the envy of other television producers. Holding a job that others desired made me almost overnight someone people wanted to talk to and work with on other projects in development. One well-respected show, and suddenly I was a player in show business. To this day when I tell people I produced The Odd Couple, they are impressed, which always makes me smile inside because it was a show that impressed me, too.
People are also amazed that I produced The Odd Couple when I was only thirty-six years old. Barbara and I had bought our first house, in the San Fernando Valley community of Toluca Lake. The single-level home, on a corner with a broad front yard, cost $50,000. We were looking for something in the $35,000 to $38,000 range, but we just fell in love with this house on Arcola Avenue. Bob Hope and his wife lived across the street, and I thought living across the street from a comedy legend would be lucky. Also, my new office at Paramount was just a short freeway hop away. I loved the neighborhood’s small-town feel and was comfortable buying a house because my career was finally taking off. Some of my friends were buying houses in Brentwood, Westwood, and other cities on the Westside. But those neighborhoods were not for us. Barbara and I were both low-key, low-maintenance people, and Toluca Lake seemed like a great place to raise children. After we moved in I would take my three kids to the local miniature golf course on Riverside Drive and teach them to hit golf balls just as my dad had taught me.
My Happy Days in Hollywood Page 7
