My Happy Days in Hollywood (10 page)

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.

Running My First TV Show with Oscar and Felix

T
HE 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.

It also was an exciting time because on
The Odd Couple
I was finally the boss. When I was working for Joey Bishop, Danny Thomas, and Lucille Ball, I was always a “writer for hire” and told what to do. But on
The Odd Couple
, I was the producer and show runner, equivalent to my mentor the great Sheldon Leonard. Producing
Hey Landlord!
had merely been a test drive in producing television.
The Odd Couple
was, from anyone’s vantage point, the big leagues. Would I make it? Or would I fail? And if I failed, where would I go? Could I pay my mortgage on the new house? On the first day of shooting that summer in 1970, all I knew was that Neil Simon was telling the press how much he hated the show. It was not the best way to kick off a new TV series.

Neil was mad because he’d gotten a raw deal from Paramount. The studio had given him money to do
The Odd Couple
as a Broadway play and movie but had stiffed him on the television rights. Neil had no creative control over the project, and we felt bad that he was getting the short stick. However, Jerry and I didn’t feel bad enough to turn down the job of running and developing our first major television series. Neil had done the hard part of creating well-written and complex comedic characters that we knew would translate well to the small screen. There was no need for us to improve on his finicky Felix Unger and messy Oscar Madison. The ever-bickering duo were the picture-perfect tribute to male friendships everywhere. At first the challenge for us as producers was not further character development, but casting.

The studio pitched Jerry and me some possible combinations: Martin Balsam and Eddie Bracken, and Dean Martin and Mickey Rooney. But no combination seemed up to snuff compared to Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, who had done the movie. We needed to get closer to Matthau and Lemmon. I remembered an actor I had seen opposite Ethel Merman in the Broadway production of
Gypsy
.
He played the stage manager, and basically for two hours Merman sang loudly and sprayed saliva on him while he faced her with his back to the audience. At the end of the show the people in the audience were in love with him. I had never seen such stage presence before, nor a more expressive, regular-kind-of-guy face. I asked the casting department at Paramount to find Jack Klugman, and they sent me a man named Jack Kruschen, who had a mustache.

While Klugman and Kruschen are similar names, the appeal didn’t compare and only one had a mustache. So when Klugman finally came into my office, I knew I had my Oscar. He had what you need more than anything else in television—likability. Audiences would want Jack Klugman to walk into their living rooms once a week. Finding our Felix was not as difficult. Tony Randall had been in dozens of films and was known for his comedy timing and elegance. We had to convince Tony to move to Los Angeles from New York in order to shoot the show. But once he agreed to move we had our cast. Tony and Jack were reluctant to step into Matthau’s and Lemmon’s shoes, though. Who wouldn’t be? We convinced them we would protect them and not let them fail. Who knew if that was true? But Jerry and I were optimistic and eager to get the show off the ground, so we promised whatever it took. Jack was a man’s man with crumpled clothing. Tony was an opera-loving guy with a suit and tie. They were both leery of us and it turns out each other.