My Happy Days in Hollywood

by Garry Marshall

  Could I tell he was talented from the beginning? Yes. Did I know if he could carry an entire sitcom? No. But I knew I could build a show around him because he had the kind of talent that Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis had. He would be the hip, modern, and zany centerpiece of the show, and we would surround him with calm, talented actors whom he could riff off of.

  First, however, I wanted to put him to the test, so I put him on an episode of Happy Days. He guest-starred in an episode called “My Favorite Orkan,” which ran in February 1978, during the fifth season of Happy Days. In the episode Robin plays an alien named Mork, who travels down from his planet, Ork, and wants to take Richie to his people to show them an example of a normal human. Fonzie stands in his way and protects Richie. Ron Howard and Henry Winkler were two of the more generous actors working in television, so when Robin guest-starred on the show, they gave him not only the support he needed but also the room to shine on his own. Robin’s portrayal of the alien was so innovative and fresh, with his body language and quirky electronic noises, that it didn’t take a genius to see this man needed his own sitcom. When Robin took his curtain call the audience gave him a standing ovation, giving even me the chills. Again, I was so happy to have a live audience, because they were the true arbiters of what was special. The Tuesday night the show aired on ABC, I got a call from my Paramount boss, Michael Eisner, who said, “Garry, I heard you have a Martian who got a standing ovation. Can you build a series around him? Do it fast.” The impetus for the phone call was that it was pilot season. During that time the network executives review all of their choices for the coming season. It just so happened that this particular season, ABC and Paramount didn’t have a lot of strong pilots to choose from. So when they came to us and said, “What do you have?” they were ready to buy something right away.

  I wasn’t thinking so much of the television show My Favorite Martian from the 1960s but more along the lines of a Martian from Saturday Night Live. So we threw together a pilot over the phone with ABC executive Marcy Carsey, who had seen Robin’s first appearance on Happy Days. We needed a colead. Carsey and her partner, Tom Werner, were instrumental in developing several of my TV shows. Tom then went on to own the Boston Red Sox. However, to play opposite Robin, I remembered an actress I had seen in a pilot that never sold, written by my friend Bob Brunner. The actress played a nun. But even with the nun’s veil covering her head, I could tell she had a sweet face. So I told the network to get me that nun. Her name was Pam Dawber, and I hired her without ever meeting her. She had an honest, all-American girl face that I thought would provide a calming and steady counterbalance to Robin’s zany, leaping, hair-flying demeanor. I think she was shocked to get a job without having to audition. We never even shot any new material. Marcy simply spliced footage from the nun pilot together with scenes from Happy Days and we sold the show off that assemblage. I was vacationing at a resort on the Caribbean island of St. John with my wife when a call came in on a phone that was attached to a tree. I stood under the tree, answered the call, and heard Paramount executive Gary Nardino say, “You just sold Mork & Mindy.”

  Another exciting casting detail about Mork & Mindy was the fact that I got to hire one of my idols, the jazz musician Conrad Janis. When I was in high school I would go downtown to the Child’s Paramount Theatre to see Conrad Janis and the Tailgaters. They were a great Dixieland band, and Conrad was the best trombone player I had ever heard. When we were casting Mork & Mindy, I heard Conrad had moved out to Los Angeles, where he was playing music and going out for television auditions. We brought him in to read for the part of Mindy’s dad, who owned a Boulder music store in the series. Hiring Conrad was a great casting choice and also allowed me to finally meet the idol whose music I had admired for so long.

  Fonzie put his arms around Mork from Ork and introduced Robin Williams to America, a hit series was born, and we all ran with it. Robin burst on the scene and grabbed the audience’s attention, whether they liked it or not. Happy Days was sweet and charming, and Laverne & Shirley was funny and slapstick; but Robin’s humor was topical and edgy. And his quirky and charming Martian was irresistible—even to my son, Scott. He began to watch Mork & Mindy and walk around the house saying “Nanoo, nanoo” along with legions of other television viewers. Scott would also pretend to drink water with his finger and crack an egg on his head. Now my son was a fan of mine as well as Lucas, and I felt like a big success in one of the most important places: my own home.

  During the first season we set up different situations to showcase Mork as a fish out of water (or an alien come to earth). For example, he went on a date with Laverne DeFazio (played by my sister Penny), fell in love with a mannequin, experienced snow for the first time, faced his first violent fight, learned the meaning of Christmas, and received his first human kiss. We were finding our way with new characters in new situations, and the audience seemed to love it. In the second season we got more complicated with our plots and invited more guest stars to join us. Roddy McDowall played the voice of a robot named Chuck, and Raquel Welch played another alien and romantic interest for Mork. When she arrived for work the first day, I asked Raquel if there was anything I could do for her. She startled me when she said, “Buy me a television.” I, of course, wanted to make her as happy as possible, so I bought it for her. I thought she wanted it for her dressing room, but she took the TV right home.

  Some of those episodes of Mork & Mindy were great, while others—when Mork became a Denver Broncos cheerleader—ventured too far into the land of zany and silly. Our ratings, however, stayed high, and we plowed ahead through the second season.

  When Mork & Mindy went into production, in 1978, I was busier than I had ever been in television. I still had Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley on the air, and the network was pressuring me to create more shows. I read and approved the premises of all three shows. I would literally wake up in the morning and say, “Which show has the biggest problem to solve?” and then by the afternoon I was asking my secretary to close my door for thirty minutes so I could take a nap.

  I was so busy that I couldn’t have just one secretary. I needed to hire one secretary for each show, plus another secretary to oversee those three. The studio was very accommodating and paid for the extra help. They wanted to keep me as productive as possible so I would create more shows for them. I hired a supervising secretary named Diane Perkins Frazen, who had worked for the actor Jackie Cooper. Diane was then a single, peppy, very organized Boston woman who was my age. She grew to care about me, as well as about my wife and three kids. Over the next twenty-two years we could not get through a day without Diane. She was family.

  The network was constantly pressuring me to make spinoffs of my successful series. Executive Fred Silverman had taught me about spinoffs, and we had big success with pairing Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley back-to-back on Tuesday nights. So immediately when Mork & Mindy went on the air the network wanted me to pair it with something else on Thursday nights.

  To go with Mork, I created a show called Angie starring Donna Pescow. She played a poor girl who married a rich doctor, played by Robert Hays. Donna had been a big hit playing the part of Annette in the movie Saturday Night Fever, so casting her made good marketing sense. I also cast my good friend Doris Roberts as her mother; years later she was the mother in Everybody Loves Raymond and the grandmother in my son Scott’s feature Keeping Up with the Steins. The show was sweet for a year and went well with Mork on Thursdays, but it didn’t last beyond that. If I’m completely honest with myself, I have to say Angie as a sitcom just wasn’t funny enough. We tried but just couldn’t take it to a higher comedy level.

  Mork & Mindy was the money show to watch. It had the talent of Laverne & Shirley without the stress. Robin knew we would protect him, so he felt free enough to push his own limits and those of the network censors. Very often the preshow live audience warm-up was funnier than the script because Robin could be more irreverent and use bad language, which can be very funny in the
right hands. He would always try to make Pam Dawber laugh. Sometimes he would even walk out, offstage and then come back naked. He used any means he could to shock Pam and make her mouth literally fall open. Over time the on-screen relationship of Pam playing the straight woman to Robin’s funny man became even better-defined and more reliable. The audience knew every time that if Robin did something crazy, Pam would react in a shocked and embarrassed way, like the proper character she was playing.

  In the third season we tried to do things we hadn’t seen on television before. For example, we aired an episode called “Mork Meets Robin Williams,” in which Mindy tries to get an interview with the actor Robin Williams and Mork ends up meeting Robin and doing the interview himself. In the fourth season we tried to hold our audience with romance by having Mork ask Mindy to marry him. After their wedding and honeymoon on Ork, Mork got pregnant and gave birth to Jonathan Winters. We thought Jonathan was a good choice because he was one of Robin’s comic heroes. These might seem like far-fetched plots, but it was obvious we were starting to struggle by the fourth season and would do anything to win our audience back.

  When Robin and I were alone we would talk about his son Zak (he had only one child at the time), movies, and theater. During the show he was going through a bad divorce from his first wife but was always the hardest worker on set, in perpetual motion. I did get the feeling, however, that he was not 100 percent comfortable and happy unless he was on the nightclub stage, which to me looked like his home. Just give Robin a microphone and an audience, and he could entertain until the last person was ready to call it a night. Sometimes he would get through the filming of the show and then stay up all night at a comedy club. We couldn’t control this. It was just the way he was wired. He’d be tired the next day, but he would always show up, ready to play Mork. Sometimes just the fact that he could shock Pam the actress as well as Mindy the character energized him.

  Mork & Mindy ran for four years, but it was probably a great show for only the first two years. After that the network decided to put the show on Sunday night opposite All in the Family. The problem is that many kids don’t watch a lot of television on Sunday nights, so we were basically sent to the wolves. We couldn’t beat All in the Family. I think the time slot move was based more on greed than on intellect, and it ruined the show. Also, in the third and fourth seasons, I knew that Robin started dreaming of making movies. It is difficult to maintain the momentum on a sitcom when your star has one foot out the door and the rest of the cast and crew know it.

  We will always have a lot to reminisce about from Mork & Mindy. David Letterman appeared in a small part during the first season, and my sister Ronny tried to recruit another funny comedian named Larry David early on, too. But when Larry came in for the audition, he penciled up the scene he was supposed to act in. Ronny asked him what he was doing, and he said punching up the script. He thought he was auditioning as a writer. He didn’t think he was an actor at all. Years later, when he developed his series Curb Your Enthusiasm, he would think differently.

  During Mork & Mindy, I decided to branch out from television again, this time to try my hand at a Broadway play called The Roast. I cowrote it with Jerry Belson, who was eager to write a play. The Roast was about a group of stand-up comedians who gathered to roast a philanthropic comedian about whom they had complicated feelings. While the comedian was in part based on Danny Thomas, whom we had worked for, we gave the character many traits and mannerisms from other comedians we had met over the years.

  We did a reading of the play, and Carl Reiner loved it so much he agreed to direct it. Paramount, so pleased with the work I was doing for them in television, said they would put up the money for the play. However, their investment came with some strings attached: They would put up the $1 million if I would develop more television shows with Tom Miller, Bob Boyett, and Eddie Milkis, who had developed Happy Days with me. I agreed. I would have agreed to pretty much any deal in order to do a play again. While I was making my living in television, I still dreamed of finding success in theater.

  We cast Rob Reiner as a younger comedian and Peter Boyle (Everyone Loves Raymond) to play the philanthropist. We relocated to Boston to launch the show before moving it to Broadway. It was a tricky time for me personally because Rob was in the middle of a divorce with my sister Penny. The headline in one of the local newspapers said LAVERNE & MEATHEAD SPLIT. Rob, normally gregarious and witty, was not that way in Boston. Penny had started dating musician Art Garfunkel, while her best friend Carrie Fisher was dating Paul Simon. All the while Rob was not happy in the lead of our play and was struggling emotionally.

  I called up Penny and asked her to come and give me notes on the play. Penny, however, hesitated because she knew if Rob saw her it would upset him. I needed her notes regardless, so we ended up dressing Penny and Art Garfunkel in disguises and snuck them into the back of the theater so Rob wouldn’t know they were in the building. Penny came, saw the rehearsal, gave me notes, and left without Rob ever knowing she was in town.

  Playing the part seemed to be putting Rob under too much pressure. One day I looked out my hotel room window to see Rob sitting in one of Boston’s famous swan boats with his head in his mother, Estelle’s, lap. That same day we got word that Rob could not go on the first night in New York because he was clinically depressed. So we planned to put his understudy, Jeff Keller, in for him. I said to Jerry, “There’s our star floating in a swan boat in his mom’s lap and we are opening on Broadway with a competent but unknown actor named Jeff Keller. This is not a good sign.”

  Jerry and I flew in our friend Harvey Miller, the comedy writer, to help us punch up the script. Harvey didn’t think he had the credentials to call himself a script doctor, so he ran around our hotel room calling himself a script nurse. Jerry and Harvey sometimes did drugs to help them stay awake, but my vices were now ice cream and cashew nuts, and a few strong cups of coffee one night. I hadn’t had coffee in more than twenty years, since getting out of the army. But that night I was so desperate to stay awake that I drank coffee anyway, not realizing the jolt of caffeine might be too much for me to handle. I suddenly thought I was having a heart attack instead. I was rolling on the floor and I couldn’t catch my breath. My secretary Diane helped get me into a cab at three in the morning and we went to the emergency room. It turned out it was an anxiety attack coupled with the effects of the strong coffee.

  My anxiety attack was well-founded. When the play opened in Boston the reviews were bad. The premise lacked romance. We had fourteen men, two girls, and no romance. I would never make that mistake again. When Michael Eisner read the reviews of the play in Boston, however, he no longer wanted to offer his financial support. He wanted to get me back to producing television rather than give me the additional $250,000 to take the play to Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. He did say he would consider giving me money for another play another time, but he didn’t see the value of putting any more money into The Roast.

  I had a dilemma: I wanted to go to Broadway, but I didn’t have great faith in the play. Despite that fact, Jerry and I hadn’t come this far and worked this hard just to see our play fall short of Broadway. I told Eisner to forget his money and I would find another way. Despite the headaches the cast of Laverne & Shirley gave me, Penny and I have always been very close. Whenever I have an ethical dilemma I ask for her advice. “Should I give up?” I asked. She said, “No. You’ve never been to Broadway. Go for it. We are people who learn from our experiences whether they turn out good or bad. So I would shoot for Broadway if I were you.”

  “But how am I going to raise the money?” I asked. “Paramount pulled out.”

  “I’ll give you some, and then I’ll raise the rest from friends. Give me a day or two,” she said.

  Penny wrote a check, and she got Cindy Williams and Jim Brooks to write checks, too. Cindy wrote me a note with the check that read something like, “I don’t know what you are doing in Boston but without you I wouldn’t have a care
er. So here is some money.”

  Jerry and I knew it was a long shot, but we went ahead and opened The Roast at the Winter Garden. Our friends, family, wives, and children flew in from Los Angeles to see us make our Broadway debut. Unfortunately, we lasted through only eleven previews and three nights; then we had to close the show. As we were leaving the theater we saw two men putting up a sign for a new show.

  “Cats?” said Jerry as he read the sign.

  “A show about pussycats?” I asked, mockingly.

  “It will never last,” said Jerry.

  My friend Joel Sterns, always a great lawyer and adviser, said to me, “You helped Cats.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “You lowered the bar,” said Joel.

  Cats went on to run for eighteen years on Broadway, making it one of the longest running shows ever. The Roast ran three nights. That’s show business. But I don’t regret it. I got to live my dream of seeing something I had written on Broadway, if only for eleven previews and three nights. And the three nights was even a stretch. We had to stay open those nights in order to collect the insurance money. However, Rob Reiner was able to come back and resumed his starring part for the last two nights, and he was terrific.

  When we realized The Roast was a failure, we had to close it. Jerry took the first flight home to Los Angeles. I wanted to stay and throw a goodbye party, and his wife Joanne decided to stay with me and host it. I always feel you have to stay as a leader for better or worse. You can’t leave the ship. We had a nice party, but the closing of the play still came as quite a blow to all of us. My eleven-year-old son, Scott, couldn’t understand the injustice. “But they laughed, Dad. I heard the audience laugh.” I learned that in theater, and later in movies, you need more than just “funny.” You have to have a story with depth and emotion that people can follow. Unfortunately, while I was working on The Roast, ABC canceled Mork & Mindy. The show had a lot of problems, but one of them was that I was not there to produce, supervise, and spearhead as I had done during the first two seasons. I was too busy working on The Roast to give Mork & Mindy the time and attention it deserved.