Shirley, I Jest!: A Storied Life (10 page)

I felt like it was going to be a blast, and I gave no thought to what people might think. It was risqué, but all in good fun. The only thing I had a real problem with was the nudity. There was too much of it. And I told Bruce how I felt. But being the consummate artist that he was, he said he wanted all the nudity to stay in. Many of our friends from college were in it, including Lynne. She had a scene with Ron Howard. They are sitting outside the audition room with a group of people waiting their turn to go in. Ron turns to Lynne and asks, “Is this SAG?”

I asked him how he made the decision to do it. Ron said he was interested in low-budget filmmaking and he wanted to be a part of it. (The film came out right after the first season of
Laverne & Shirley
. I was given the moniker of “Little Miss Filth Mouth” in
People
magazine under a delightful picture of me as Shirley.)

Not much had changed, I was pretty much broke and I was now living in an apartment in Hollywood that was basically empty except for a couch, a bed, two lamps, a Bible, and a box of kittens that needed homes! Aside from
The Tonight Show
and some other talk shows, nothing was on the horizon. The thought of going back to waiting tables crossed my mind. The problem was I had become too recognizable from
American Graffiti.
To wait tables in L.A. could prove to be humiliating. I thought about moving out of state where I might not be known, at least I would be far away from my peers.

And then one day out of the blue, I got a call from Francis Coppola’s office asking if I’d be interested in writing for a bicentennial spoof he was producing called
My Country ’Tis of Thee
. The premise of the movie was the history of America from its discovery through modern times done in sketches and music. It would be released in 1976 to coordinate with our American bicentennial. The pay was less than desirable, but might be enough to keep me in town for a little while longer. They were hiring two-person writing teams and wanted to pair me up with Penny Marshall. I didn’t know Penny very well. We were both represented by Compass Management, but had never met until a very memorable double date!

I had been invited to the Coconut Grove to see Liza Minnelli perform with Little Richard as the opening act. My date and I were doubling with Rob Reiner and Penny. The first time we actually met was in our seats at the Coconut Grove, seconds before the curtain went up, because my date and I arrived late. And during the performance Penny and I never exchanged words because we weren’t sitting next to each other. When the show was over, we were all invited backstage to meet Liza. I was thrilled! As we walked backstage, Penny and I fell behind our dates as they walked ahead of us. To get to Liza’s dressing room, we had to go through Little Richard’s dressing room. As Penny and I started to cross through his room, he abruptly stopped us by putting his leg across the doorway.

We stopped. He said, “You two! I want to bless you two.” Penny and I immediately bowed our heads and Little Richard proceeded to bless us, asking the Lord for his protection, along with happiness and success. When he was finished he shouted, “Amen!”

Then Penny and I shouted, “Amen!” And “the Reverend Penniman” smiled and nodded to us. We returned the gesture, smiling and nodding, and then went on our way. Years later Penny and I discussed this experience and we had two thoughts about it. Number one: we never told him how fantastic he was that night; and number two: we would always attribute much of our success with
Laverne & Shirley
to Little Richard’s blessing.

By now Penny and I were on a writing team along with Steve Martin, Harry Shearer, Martin Mull, Marty Nadler, and Carl Gott-lieb, who would be acting as producer/head writer. Penny and I trotted over to Samuel Goldwyn Studios to meet with Carl Gott-lieb and the other writers. Everyone was given the assignment of “The Pilgrims Coming to America” and how they managed the journey.

We went into our nice office for the first time. Inside was a beautiful maple desk with a big leather chair behind it and a smaller chair in front of the desk. A couch and an end table with a phone on it sat against the wall. Penny immediately took the big chair behind the desk. That left me with the smaller chair in front of the desk. We started writing the first assignment, the one everybody had to take a crack at, “The Pilgrims Coming to America
.
”

Penny and I thought,
What if we treat it like a concert?
It might be funny if everyone had to buy a ticket for passage to the “New World” on the
Mayflower
. And what if our character gets up to the window just as the last ticket was sold to the guy in front of him? The performance is sold out! Instead of scalpers, what if there’s a guy selling passage to the New World on a giant catapult that is set up on the docks next to the
Mayflower
?

We had this poor guy buy a ticket and climb aboard with his luggage. Everyone taunts him and laughs at him. The guy running the catapult whispers in his ear:
Don’t let them get to ya, you’ll be havin’ the last laugh
. With that, he cuts the ropes and
whoosh
off he goes just as the
Mayflower
sets sail. Our joke was that everyone on the
Mayflower
argues over who will be the first to set foot in the New World. And then, just as they reach land and the guy who won the honor is about to set his foot down,
whoosh
our catapult guy lands on Plymouth Rock beating him out, baggage and all!

Well,
we
thought the idea was funny! We wrote the sketch and turned it in to Carl. Carl weighed it. He had scales on his desk and as a joke he would actually weigh each person’s written assignment. We thought that was funny too.

Our next assignment was “The Salem Witch Trials
.
” We wrote a joke about a guy being accused of witchery because he continually keeps his hands in his pockets. Penny and I needed to come up with why he kept his hands in his pockets. We talked it out. I played the guy saying, “I agree. I do always keep my hands in my pockets. But I cannot be accused of witchery because—.”

I looked at Penny. She responded, “I have paper hands.”

We both burst out laughing! We had no idea what it meant, but we thought it was funny. (Maybe we’d been listening to too much
Monty Python
.) Then we had a German shepard accused of being a witch. When the judge asks the courtroom, “Why is this dog in this court? Why is he charged of witchery, what is his offense?”

The dog screams: “I am not a witch, I denounce these proceedings. I am innocent of any evil doing!” We were having so much fun creating together. We both often thought in cartoon images when we were writing.

After “The Salem Witch Trials,” Carl moved us on to “The U.S. Patent Office.”
We approached this using all the inventions of that era that were brought into the office to be patented.
And when we got to Robert Fulton and his steamboat, Penny suggested that Fulton be our main character frantically trying to get the officials down to the river so they could see his invention. We were working on this sketch one day when the phone rang. Penny answered it.

She listened for a minute and then turned to me, holding the phone out, and said, “It’s Garry. He wants to talk to you.”

I got on the phone and Garry Marshall said, “Cindy, I was just asking Penny if you girls want to come and do a
Happy Days
episode. I’ve got these parts, Laverne and Shirley, girls who date the fleet. They’re friends of Fonzie’s, and he sets Richie and himself up on a double date with them. It’d be great if you and Penny could take a week off and come over to do the show.”

Sounded like fun to me. I secretly thought,
I could use the money!
Penny agreed and Carl let us go for the week. Monday morning we left our day jobs and headed to Paramount. Penny and I talked about what our characters would do. When we made our entrance for the first rehearsal, we were chewing gum, smoking cigarettes, and adjusting our bras. We looked around for Richie and Fonzie, flicked our cigarettes across the room and began taking pin curls out of each other’s hair while arguing back and forth with each other under our breath.

Jerry Paris, who was directing started screaming at us: “Stop! Stop! You can’t do that. You can’t
smoke
on family hour and all that other stuff. What do you think you’re doing, a spinoff?”

Penny and I were slightly taken aback. Who knew about family hour? Neither of us had seen many
Happy Days
episodes and what the heck was a spinoff? We substituted gum for cigarettes, brought the tone down a little, but still arguing; still fixing each other’s hair. We managed to make it just as much fun. I got to accidentally punch “Richie” and Penny got to kiss “The Fonz.” Then it was over. We went back to our day jobs. We were in our office finishing up our “U.S. Patent Office” sketch with Fulton forming a conga line to take everyone down to the river to see his steam engine.

The phone rang, and it was Marty Nadler. He told us that everyone loved our
Happy Days
episode. They liked it so much that they wanted to do a spinoff, which meant Penny and I would have our own show. At this point it was just a big rumor. Life went on in our little office without mention of the word “spinoff” from anyone else. A week later, Carl gave us the assignment of “Sutter’s Mill.” However, I found myself alone. I hadn’t seen or heard from Penny for a couple of days. I simply couldn’t find her and we had this new assignment to write. I couldn’t get her on the phone and when I came into the office in the morning she wasn’t there. And “Sutter’s Mill” was due, one way or the other. I researched “Sutter’s Mill” and promptly started writing.

In the meantime I’d heard that Penny was writing with someone else. I was very confused. I went to Carl and asked him if he would hire my friend, Ed Begley Jr., as my writing partner. He said he couldn’t do that because of the budget. I had to finish the assignment. Ed helped me write it anyway, giving me notes and suggestions while I sat in the office and typed it up. My plan was to finish it, turn it in, and quit. Impulsively, I quit first, telling Carl that I would finish up “Sutter’s Mill” before I left. I started thinking about moving out of state again. I would have just enough money to do it.

Pat McQueeney, my manager at Compass, called and said Garry had called her and ABC was very interested in spinning the two characters of “Laverne and Shirley” off into a show of its own. Lowell Ganz, Mark Rothman, and Garry were writing a fifteen-minute presentation scene to shoot for the network. I told Pat I couldn’t think about it because I had a writing deadline. I also told her I was thinking seriously about moving out of town.

“What on earth for?” she asked. She tried her best to argue with me telling me this could be a great opportunity—a show of my own! It could free me financially. She begged me to think about it, but told me not to take too long because Garry needed an answer about the presentation scene.

Honestly, looking back on it now, I’m not sure, but I might have been in some sort of depression. Before all of this started I had been on a two-year upswing in my career and then the floor seemed to drop out from under me. I was disappointed in myself and despondent. I wanted to get the heck out of Dodge. I felt a little bit let down by show business, and more let down and hurt by Penny, who remained missing in action. The idea of waiting tables anonymously gave me great comfort. Still, I continued alone, finishing my last writing assignment
.

My manager called me day and night. My agent called me day and night. I started getting the feeling that this was a big deal. Pat said that the offer had been increased. It would be a four-show guarantee, which would mean a huge sum of money for me. I told her my reluctance was partially because Penny had disappeared on me and I couldn’t discuss any of this with her. Pat told me to call her. I told Pat I had called her until I was blue in the face.

“Well, call her again, because you can’t afford to lose this show and they’re going to test other people.”

I sat in front of my typewriter thinking of what to do. The fact that Penny had disappeared obviously affected me, but was it insurmountable? I mean, what if she had a great excuse? And did I really want to wait tables in another state? If there was a possibility I could make money here on the four shows that were being offered, wouldn’t that be the smart thing to do? I looked down at my typewriter realizing I was only a few lines away from finishing my writing. I began to type when
Bang!
The office door flew open. It was Penny. I kept typing. The conversation went something like this:

“Hi!”

“Hi!”

Silence.

“So, are you gonna do the show?” she asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I can’t think about it. I’m finishing ‘Sutter’s Mill.’”

“Oh,” she said sheepishly.

I thought,
Now’s the time, Cindy, hit her with it. Say it! Where the hell have you been?
But I couldn’t ask her. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to put her on the spot.

“Are you gonna think about it?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Okay, but don’t think too long, cause they’re testing other people.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Okay, so I’ll see ya.”

“See ya.”

“Bye!” and with that she left.

We never spoke of it again. And many tales have been told as to why I didn’t jump at the chance, in the beginning, of doing the show. But Penny’s absence was the major reason.

I finished my writing, called Pat, and said, “I’ll do it.”

Seven

The Big Show

Penny and I snuck onto soundstage 20 at Paramount Studios. We wanted to look at the
Laverne & Shirley
set that had just been built and decorated. We were very excited! The next day we would begin rehearsals after having a table read of the first episode script with the writing staff, producers, and entire cast including guest actors. Up until now we had been appearing on
Happy Days
to establish the characters for
Laverne & Shirley
as local girls and friends of “The Fonz.”

When we opened the heavy soundstage door and stepped onto the huge stage, the lights were on. No one else was around, not a soul but us! A soundstage is enormous, like a warehouse. There is usually more than one set housed within the building. For instance, on the
Laverne & Shirley
soundstage there were three sets. Laverne and Shirley’s basement apartment, the Pizza Bowl set, and one other called a “swing-set.” The swing-set is a space on the stage that can be used to build whatever is needed for that week’s show. For instance, the swing-set for our first show was a dining area in a mansion for a gala dinner that Laverne and Shirley attended. In the “Fabian” episode it was his hotel suite and the ledge outside his window.

The show was to be shot with three cameras in front of a live studio audience seated on bleachers. Above the bleachers were the sound booth and the panel where the camera coordinator sat. Through headsets, he gave directions to each of the camera crew. The cameras were on wheels and pushed around by a “Dolly Grip” with the camera operator perched on a seat watching the action through the camera lens. A focus puller traveled with the camera to make sure the shot was clear. None of this was easy on our show because we were constantly moving like a slalom team. A lot of our camera crew had previously worked on
I Love Lucy
where this method had been perfected.

Penny and I walked backstage first. The dressing rooms, hair, makeup, and wardrobe were set up. We went onto the stage entering through Laverne and Shirley’s front door. We couldn’t believe our eyes! The apartment was beautiful: Wall-to-wall carpeting, cherrywood furniture, a fancy sofa, porcelain knickknacks, and expensive-looking wall hangings. We were stunned. In the pilot episode on
Happy Days
the nicest thing about our apartment was the kitchen sink and
that
was in the living room! What happened? This set was the exact opposite of what
Laverne & Shirley
was all about. It didn’t take us long to decide what to do.

We split up! I drove to my mother’s house in Reseda while Penny drove to her house in Encino. We gathered everything we thought would represent Laverne and Shirley’s economic lack of status! I gathered my old, worn-out hooded coat from junior high, my high school albums, and pictures from my bedroom wall, stuffed animals, old movie magazines, clothes and stacks of newspapers my mother was saving for some ungodly reason. Penny was doing the same.

We met back on the soundstage and went to work. We took all the wall hangings down and hid them. We did the same with the porcelain knickknacks and the Queen Anne furniture. Penny brought a hammer and nails, her old forty-five record collection (a few of those went up on the walls), framed pictures, and old doilies my grandmother had crocheted. We started replacing the wall hangings with our own personal things. We hung all of the old clothing we brought in the entryway closet on the landing. We took the pristine magazines that sat on the pristine coffee table (nothing could be done right now about the coffee table) and replaced them with my mother’s dog-eared movie magazines. We scattered various items that would read “old” on camera around the apartment. We placed a stack of old newspapers in front of the landing. We hid as many pieces of small furniture as we could in our dressing rooms. No one came onto the stage while we were up to our covert mission. We discussed the carpet and how we couldn’t pull it up by ourselves. The set certainly wasn’t 100 percent of what we imagined or wanted it to be, but it was certainly better than when we started. We would deal with the rest in the morning.

Well, morning came and all hell broke loose! The carpenters, set-dressers, and producers were upset. Garry came down. Everyone was standing on the stage commenting on our handiwork and not in a good way! We stated our case pointing out that Laverne and Shirley were blue-collar workers and would never be able to afford the furnishings in the apartment the way it had been decorated, let alone new wall-to-wall carpeting. Luxury defeated the purpose of the comedy. For this show to ring true, we needed to be girls that had to borrow folding chairs and found their sofa at the Goodwill, lugging it back to their apartment themselves. We needed to be barely above the poverty line. We needed to be hand-me-down girls who sometimes couldn’t make the rent. The wolf always had to be nipping at our heels. We needed to be relatable to everyone. We got our way. And the carpet came up!

Our cast was great, innately funny, and we were natural foils for each other. David Lander and Michael McKean (Lenny and Squiggy) were cast due to Garry saying one day, “Laverne and Shirley need friends, people their age that maybe they went to high school with who were a rung or two lower on the mental and life skills ladder than them.” Penny knew David and Michael from
The Credibility Gap
, which was a satirical political radio show. David and Michael had a routine they performed with two characters, “Lenny and Anthony.” Penny threw a party, invited Garry, and had David and Michael perform “Lenny and Anthony.” Garry hired them for the show. They changed the name “Anthony” to “Squiggy” and we were off to the races.

Eddie Mecca was cast as “Carmine” after he screen-tested. Eddie had been nominated for a Tony for Best Actor in
The Lieutenant
on Broadway. Aside from being a brilliant singer, dancer, and comedian, he is a fine dramatic actor. Phil Foster, a great stand-up comic, played Laverne’s father and proprietor of the Pizza Bowl.

And then there was the sweetest, loveliest, ever-so-talented Betty Garrett. Betty was cast later in the series because the producers hadn’t created the character of our landlady, Mrs. Babbish yet. Carole Ita White played our nemesis, Rosie Greenbaum, perfectly. When
Laverne & Shirley
move to California, Penny and I referred to it as the unfortunate move to Burbank. We argued vehemently with Garry about the change and we lost. However, it did have its plusses. The first being the addition of the character of Rhonda, our next-door neighbor, played impeccably by Leslie Easterbrook. And then there was the ever-so-handsome Ed Marinaro who played the ever-so-handsome stunt man, Sonny.

Penny, David, Michael, Eddie, and Phil all had New York accents. Even Henry Winkler, “The Fonz,” had one when he did a few episodes. Of course their accents were natural, because they all came from New York. But my thought was that if I didn’t have an accent like theirs I’d stick out like a sore thumb. I adopted one for Shirley, and it was awful! I spoke with it through the first thirteen shows until one day Garry Marshall came down to the stage and sat me down.

He said something like, “It’s about your accent.”

“Is it awful?” I asked.

Garry said, “Yeah, pretty much so. Why don’t you lose it?”

I was so grateful and relieved because I could hear it each week in the show and it made me cringe. I returned to my natural Texas/Valley Girl blended accent.

For the first season, the scripts always included physical comedy bits for Laverne, but not for Shirley. I spoke up saying I could do physical comedy, and pleaded with the writers and producers to give me the chance. My pleas fell on deaf ears and the scripts kept being written in the same manner. I had had such fun in the pilot episode where Shirley was more physical in nature; like accidentally punching Richie. But that physicality seemed lost as we went on into the first season. I longed for Shirley to have physical things to do so I continued my lobbying. Finally one day Garry came down to the set and told me he was writing a physical bit for me to see how I did. When the script came in, I was so happy! Laverne has a vacuum cleaner hose stuck to her mouth and can’t get it off by herself. Shirley helps her. I had a lot of fun inventing ways to pull and twist that hose off of her mouth. The powers that be liked it because from then on, they wrote physical comedy for both of us.

Penny and I had a simple litmus test for comedy. If it didn’t make us laugh, it probably wouldn’t make the audience laugh; both in the studio and at home. So whatever it was, we had to laugh at it or we’d try something else until we did! And if it was a line or a part in the show that just “laid there,” we did our best to pep it up. Usually all this doctoring up occurred during rehearsals. We’d give our notes after the table read each week, but didn’t really know what was funny and what wasn’t until we were on our feet and started putting movement with the lines.

Many times we’d take it upon ourselves to change lines. You can imagine how this ticked off the producers and writing staff. Sometimes Penny and I ticked each other off as well when we didn’t agree on something. But I truly believe if we hadn’t gone through what could be termed as chaos, we never would have had the show we had. Any time we stepped out on that stage together we were 100 percent in-sync. Whatever was going on off-stage evaporated when we got in front of our audience because we were of one mind and that was to entertain and make people laugh out loud.

Our premier show had an audience of almost thirty-six million viewers and we became an overnight hit! Garry came down to the stage with the news. Once again, just as with the talk of a spinoff, Penny and I did not immediately understand what this meant. We kept on working. We worked so hard there was no time for anything social. It was work and home, work and home. There was no time for the outside world. Any function related to show business was usually something that took place on the Paramount lot.

One time they asked us to present at the
People’s Choice Awards
. We said we were sorry but we were working and couldn’t leave the set, get dressed, and into hair and makeup in time. The producers of the show told us not to worry, we could come straight from work with no need to get dressed up. Penny and I mulled it over. We would have to arrive at five thirty for the presentation. No way could we dress up. We turned it down. We were in the middle of putting together a huge physical scene and couldn’t leave the rehearsal. They begged, and word came from Paramount that it would be good PR for the show if there were any way we could make it. In our rehearsal clothes (usually jeans, sweatshirts, and tennis shoes) we dutifully went. Standing backstage we saw that everyone was dressed to the nines, except us of course. We didn’t let it get to us as we went out and presented. In the car on our way back to the studio, Penny made the observation that it was the
People’s Choice Awards
and we were supposed to be a number-one show. Why hadn’t we won a
People’s Choice Award
? I couldn’t answer. Maybe we were popular but not
that
popular, or maybe the people we were popular with didn’t bother to vote. It wasn’t a case of sour grapes. It was more of a curiosity.

One day toward the end of the first season I noticed a headline in the
Wall Street Journal
that someone had left on the stage. It read something like, “
Laverne & Shirley
Help Send ABC Stocks through the Roof!” I called Penny over. We both stood there taking in the words, reading them over and over.

Both Penny and I still thought in “cartoon” terms when it came to comedy. For instance, we would come up with “bits” to try during rehearsal and then stage them. We learned early on that life in the cartoon world doesn’t always play out the way you imagine when it comes to life on earth.

In one of our first episodes, Laverne and Shirley are hosting a lingerie party in their living room. Shirley gives the description of the garment Laverne is supposed to model, it’s a leopard teddy. The script called for her to swing in on a rope. During rehearsals, and thinking like a cartoon, we decided Penny would swing all the way across the room and then slam into the living room wall and slowly slide down (like Daffy Duck). We only “marked it” in rehearsal, which means she didn’t actually climb onto the rope and swing across the room. We just said,
OK
,
I say this, you do that and you hit the wall and slide down.

We used this format often to save our energy for the live show with the evening audience. When we actually performed it and Penny swung on the rope across the room, modeling her leopard ensemble, she hit the wall with “real-world force.” And instead of sliding down the wall slowly, like Daffy Duck as we had imagined, she fell to the floor in a heap like Newton’s apple! We had to stop filming. She had her ankle bandaged and we continued with the show.

In these days of TV, the networks were assigning censors for their “family hour” primetime shows. Their censors would attend the read-through as well as the run-through each week to ensure “moral content.” Our censor was a born-again Christian. He was a great guy, but very strict, which turned out to work in our favor. The writers and the cast were forced to be more creative. An example is vo-de-oh-doh, which said it all. When Shirley had to talk about sex in any way, she would use the term vo-de-oh-doh and that became universally recognizable, and forever associated with the show. Having a censor didn’t stop us, we were even more inventive and creative. Penny and I didn’t kid ourselves. We knew we weren’t the greatest show in the history of television. But every now and then, as a cast and as a show, we’d have a moment that was worthy of greatness.

On one show we had a scene where we were spring cleaning. It was an afternoon run-through for the writers and producers. I was supposed to be cleaning under my bed and yell to Laverne, “We’ve got dust bunnies the size of grapefruit under here!” I forgot the line and improvised, pulling out a stuffed black cat that our prop man, Rennie, had been keeping under there among other props. I looked it over and said, “Oh, look who I found, Laverne. It’s Boo Boo Kitty!”