My Happy Days in Hollywood (3 page)

I loved playing sports with my friends. However, I was envious of the fact that most of them could play any day of the week while I was so often stuck in bed. I could open my bedroom window and listen to my friends hitting balls in the street. Sometimes I would even take my baseball glove and throw my ball against my bedroom wall pretending I was in the street. I could even work up a sweat. When my mom came in to check on me, I would hide my glove and ball underneath the bed. She would take my temperature and after finding it high exclaim, “He’s relapsed! Another fever.”

To pass the time, in addition to my stamp collection, I started keeping a joke book beside my bed. I would clip cartoons and comics from magazines and newspapers and then rate them.
G
was for good,
F
was for very funny, and
E
was for excellent. A joke was not deemed excellent if it made me laugh only once. To receive an
E
, a joke had to make me laugh a second or third time days after I originally saw it. I didn’t know about television reruns or residuals then, but something inside of me understood that a joke that stood the test of time was a much better joke than one that made people giggle once and was then forgotten.

When I was feeling healthy, I would walk with my friends
on Saturday afternoons to see movies at the Tuxedo Theater on Jerome Avenue under the elevator train. The running serials
The Lone Ranger, Captain Marvel
, and
Flash Gordon
were our favorites. We had an aversion to love stories and instead liked movies about the Dalton Gang and Gene Autry. Inside the Tuxedo Theater lobby there was a recruiting display run by the Boy Scouts of America. If you joined a troop and ran the display, you could get into a movie for free all week. I made Gideon volunteer with me. Unfortunately, the week we joined we were saddled with a terrible movie. It was called
Gaslight
and starred Ingrid Bergman, whose husband was trying to drive her crazy. I thought it was the worst movie I had ever seen. Nothing happened. People just talked, and there wasn’t one single joke in the entire movie. We ended up seeing the movie twelve times anyway because it was free.
Gaslight
became a famous movie.

Walking home from the theater, we would reenact the scenes of cowboys and soldiers that we had seen on the big screen. We felt like kings of the Grand Concourse.

My parents were not big movie fans. My mother preferred live theater, and Dad didn’t see much worth in entertainment except if it made him money. However, we did listen to the radio as a family along with Nanny and my two sisters. Nanny’s husband, Willy Ward, whom I loved, lived in an apartment next door and often he would come over and listen to the radio, too. Willy was a wise, chubby, round-faced man with white hair and a Santa Claus smile. Willy and I would listen to Jack Benny and the very hip Fred Allen. I probably listened to the radio more than anything because I could do it from my bed. I thought Jack Benny was just hilarious. He was famous for being cheap, and in one episode he described how a robber came up to him and said, “Your money or your life.” And then there was a long pause as Benny pondered the seemingly difficult choice. It turned out the joke was written by Milt Josefsberg who later hired me to write for Lucille Ball.

Later, when I was in high school, I met a friend named Ira Levin, who also liked to laugh. Together we would take the bus to Union City, New Jersey, to see the burlesque shows. Once Ira taught me how to get there, (I’m geographically dyslexic), I took other
friends, too. My parents had no idea where we were going, but they didn’t worry about us. As Ira and I sat in the audience of adults and watched the show, we found the strippers boring after a while but the burlesque comedians who performed in between them mesmerized us. We agreed we had never seen men deliver funnier jokes. Soon I started to bring along a notepad so I could write down the skits that worked and made people laugh. I wanted to remember the good ones. Sometimes I would rewrite them for us to perform back at school. Ira and I felt like pioneers, venturing into the wilds of New Jersey to bring back superior humor for our friends and fellow students of the Bronx to enjoy.

I was good at sports, and thought sports were the key to a successful life until I went to camp for the first time. Most of my friends in the Bronx were praised for their athletic ability, or for dressing well; both Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren hailed from the Bronx. If you couldn’t play sports you had to know how to throw a punch well to protect yourself. But at age thirteen I learned a new way of life when I went to Camp Greenkill, a YMCA camp in New York’s Catskill Mountains. The first summer I went for two weeks and it cost my parents fourteen dollars. The next summer I wanted to stay longer, so the camp said I could be a waiter, as well as a junior counselor, which extended my stay to four weeks. Although it was a Christian camp, there were some Jewish campers there, too. When the staff heard I knew a few Yiddish words, they put me in charge of the Jewish campers. I would take them out to the woods and lead them in weekly services, which I improvised.

My best friend at Greenkill was named Pete Wagner, a cool, silent type with penetrating eyes. He was from Yonkers, and I would later base the character of Fonzie in
Happy Days
on him. Pete had the confidence, self-esteem, and “cool” quality I admired and wanted to cultivate for myself. He told me the best book you could read was
Catcher in the Rye
, and he was right.

I had a great counselor at Greenkill named Bob Jacobs, and he asked if I wanted to be in a play. I had never thought of acting before. I was a drummer. To be honest, I thought acting was for
sissies. But Mr. Jacobs and Camp Greenkill opened a giant door that showed me an array of activities outside sports. I saw that people were heralded for their acting, their ability to paint and build sets, and even their writing. I tried my hand at writing original skits and was the master of ceremonies at our talent show. At night I would entertain the kids at the campfire performing silly routines. I was also the sports editor for the camp newsletter. There were so many ways I could make people laugh at Greenkill. In addition, I liked my new job as a camp waiter.

However, one night as we were walking home, I overheard some boys talking about who they were going to nominate as the captain for the color war games. Someone said, “What about Garry?” Another boy said, “He’s too much of a clown.” So quickly I learned how to tone down my inner clown when necessary. I saw that people who were too silly were not looked up to and applauded as leaders. You could make people laugh, but you had to have a serious, controlled, and dignified side, too.

When I came home from camp I felt like a changed person. I had discovered that a sickly kid like me could find his own niche. There was hope for me after all. That confidence helped me muster up the courage to do something that would change my life forever.

My dad hoped I would be a lawyer or a businessman. My mom would have liked me to be the next Fred Astaire. But since I had no talent or interest in either, I had to find my own path. I knew in my heart that my humor was my power and that I had to figure out a way to make money writing jokes. So I joined the newspaper at DeWitt Clinton High School. I walked right in and said, “Sign me up. I’d like to be a reporter.”

It didn’t matter that I didn’t exactly know how to be a reporter. I knew I liked writing, and they had an opening for a sports reporter. I thought I would be great at that because I was such a sports fan. They put me right to work, and my column was called “Warmin’ the Bench.” Raphael Philipson was the adviser for the paper. He had absolutely no sense of humor, but he let me stick around because I showed enthusiasm for writing and sports. I also found my inspiration from two other teachers. My homeroom and English teacher
was named Lou Katz, a smooth-talking mustached man. And I had a history teacher named Doc Guernsey, a balding, heavyset man and master of the frighteningly stern look, who used two canes because he had once had polio. Together Katz and Guernsey pushed me beyond my comfort zone and told me to keep writing. I remember the day I got up the courage to ask about colleges.

“I think I’m going to play it safe and apply to City College of New York, New York University, and Queens College,” I said.

“Why just those?” asked Katz.

“Isn’t that enough?” I asked. “How many do I need to apply to?”

“What about the Ivy League or the Big Ten?” Guernsey asked.

I knew my father would love the suggestion about the Ivy League because he had delusions of grandeur. My mother, however, would probably say, “Stay in the Bronx. You’ll get sick if you leave.”

However, both Katz and Guernsey thought I should aim high.

“You think I should apply to some of those?” I asked.

“Let’s look at some catalogs and find you a college with a good journalism school,” Katz said.

And so together my teachers, my dad, and I made a list of all the colleges that had good writing programs. My choices included Northwestern, University of Missouri, and Emory, where I thought I could play basketball. I imagined there might be a lot of cows in the Midwest, but Chicago sounded like a good town where I could get a part-time job playing drums in a nightclub. So Northwestern became my first choice.

As we looked at brochure after brochure, I realized something magical: It was entirely possible that I could go to college and learn how to become a sports reporter. Not just a high school, silly-nilly sports reporter but a grown-up-salary-earning sports reporter who wrote about the big leagues. The day I got my acceptance letter from Northwestern University, everything changed. I finally had my one-way ticket out of my bed and out of the Bronx.

Attending College with the Thickest Accent Anyone Had Ever Heard

I
GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL
, and while I was deciding what to do next a funny thing happened. My dad noticed me. He knew I was his son and I lived in the apartment. He would yell a lot and whack me on the head once in a while, but he never said very much to me. He once grunted approval about my sports column in the high school paper, but he never came to see me play ball. The reason was that I played “amateur” sports as he called them. I played in the Police Athletic League, the Kiwanis Club, and the American Legion but not high school sports. But his attitude toward me changed the day he said, “Well, let’s pick a college.” My father was the only one in his family to go to college. He graduated from New York University, and it was there that he changed his name from Masciarelli to Marshall. So to him a name and a college with a good name and reputation were extremely important.

I had enough credits to graduate early from high school, in January 1952, and I didn’t need to go to Northwestern until September. So my dad helped me get a job at WNYC radio station in Manhattan, where I worked from January through June. I was the station’s intern, and unfortunately for me, they did not cover sports. It was a classical music station for serious music and opera lovers. While the content was not to my personal taste, I did love the location. I would take the subway to work and spend my days writing for a show called
Sunrise Symphony
. I scripted the introductions for the disc jockeys and also ran errands.

The longer I was there the more responsibility they gave me, including writing commercials from time to time. My sense of humor, however, was a little far-fetched for my bosses. They were working on a campaign to promote cleaning up New York City streets. I submitted, “Don’t be a cheat and throw it in the street be a man and throw it in the can.” But they wanted something straighter and more traditional, like “Don’t be a litterbug.” My favorite part of the job was lunch. I brought a sandwich from home, and I would walk around the neighborhood near Delancey Street, browsing through the different novelty shops. I would save money to buy stamps for my collection. And then in June I headed to Camp Onibar in Pennsylvania to work as a waiter and bellhop to make money to take to college.

As I headed off to Northwestern, I felt a little like a pioneer because I was the only one from my neighborhood going out of state to school. Some of the guys were going straight to work, and of those who were going to college, most were headed to City College of New York, with the exception of Marty Garbus, who was going to Columbia in prelaw. Going to a college in another state seemed special and rare to me. I figured if it didn’t work out I could always come back and apply to CCNY with my friends. I wasn’t afraid of failing. In my eyes, college seemed like four years in which you could experiment without anyone making a big deal about it. When you failed in college it wasn’t a disaster. When you failed in life you lost your job and it could be a disaster.

The first time I ever flew on an airplane was with my dad when we traveled together to drop me off at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. We dressed in suits and ties as people did in those days when they flew and boarded the plane bound for Chicago. Because of his business trips, Dad knew his way around an airplane. My mother, sisters, and grandparents on both sides, however, had never been on an airplane before. When I left for the airport that morning in September 1952, Mom gave me one piece of advice.