My Happy Days in Hollywood (8 page)

We were supposed to work on Alan Gale’s show for ten to twelve weeks, but it closed after four weeks. We didn’t have money to fly home for Christmas, so Fred and I stayed down in Florida. While it was depressing not to be in New York for the holidays, I did get to play in a band for comedian Lenny Bruce. I was part of a trio that played behind him. He didn’t use any writers, but Fred and I learned a lot from watching him. He swore something like a hundred times in his act, and audiences in Florida knew they were watching something special and irreverent.

It was when we were in Miami Beach, laid off from Gale’s show, that we got a call from Joey Bishop. He was in Los Angeles starring in his new sitcom,
The Joey Bishop Show
, which Danny Thomas had created for him. After a few episodes, however, it was clear the show was not going well. The scripts were not strong enough. Joey wanted Fred and me to move to California to write for his sitcom. While I was weighing the pros and cons of moving across the country, Fred answered for both of us: “Yes.” Another lesson learned: Sometimes it is important to have a partner more ambitious than you are. Fred said it would be the perfect opportunity for us to move up. In his mind returning to
The Tonight Show
in New York would have been a step backward for our writing careers.

Before we made the final decision to move to California, we wrote for the lovely and talented comedian Shari Lewis and her puppet Lamb Chop, who communicated with us in a strange, calculated manner. Shari was very nice to us as writers, always offering coffee or tea and saying our jokes were funny. Her puppet Lamb Chop, however, would yell at us and say, “Boys, these pages are not funny at all. You can do better than this.” And then at the next meeting
Shari would say, “Boys, would you like more donuts?” And then Lamb Chop would say, “We don’t do satire. Write better!” Fred and I would sit staring at a screaming puppet as he tore us apart. One evening when we were leaving from a big meeting with Shari and Lamb Chop, Fred said, “We are done. I can’t write for a piece of cloth any longer.” I agreed.

Still, I remained on the fence for a few weeks. I needed more information before I would make the move to California for a new job. So I consulted some other people for advice. Our agent, Frank Cooper, said “Definitely.” He said the future was in sitcom and sitcom was in television, so we should make the move. My own father said I should go because the future was anywhere other than in the Bronx. Jack Paar could have said no because he had us locked into a contract, but he let us out of our contract and told us to head west. He liked Joey and thought we would be a good fit to fix the new sitcom.

The night when everything changed was when we met Phil Foster at the Latin Quarter. Fred and I went right up to the maître d’, and he asked us if we had a reservation. We said no and then sheepishly went to sit in a dark corner to wait for Phil. It was a fancy club and we felt uncomfortable. When Phil arrived he was mad that we were hiding. He thought we should be sitting at a good table. So he chewed the waiter out.

“Do you know who those two men are?” asked Phil, pointing toward us.

“No,” said the maître d’.

“That’s Garry Marshall and Fred Freeman,” said Phil.

“I still don’t know who they are,” said the maître d’.

“That’s why you’re still a waiter,” said Phil.

It was the nicest thing anyone has ever said for me. If Phil had that kind of confidence in us, I thought, then we should have it in ourselves.

We finally moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1961. Joey said he would pay us two hundred dollars a week for six months, and that’s as far as I planned.

There was only one slight catch: I had a girlfriend I had met while writing for
The Tonight Show
, a singer named Ann Merendino.
A sultry, chestnut-haired Italian girl, Ann was an only child, and she sang in our band. I was never very good at dating, and the fact that she was nice and didn’t have any money made me think we should get married. She got excited and planned a gigantic wedding with 400 people. My friend Bob Brunner was also dating a girl named Ann, and they were planning to get married, too. So I told my Ann as well as Bob and his Ann that I would go to California for a little while and then when I came back we would have a double wedding. Little did I know that I would never move back to New York. I called Ann a few months later, and we agreed marriage was not for us and called the engagement and the wedding off.

In November 1961, Fred and I ate Thanksgiving turkey at Schwab’s drugstore restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. I was scared.

“So what if this doesn’t work out?” I asked Fred.

“Then we’ll find another job,” he said.

“But we don’t know anyone in Hollywood except Joey,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Fred said.

“Do you think we’re as good as those Hollywood writers?” I asked, sharing my fear with Fred for the first time.

“We’re going to be better,” he said.

“But we don’t have the experience yet,” I worried.

“That’s the point. We’re going to learn from the guys with experience and then teach ourselves to write better than them,” he said. “We’re going to write for Danny Thomas. We’re going to be that good!”

“You are right,” I said with new confidence in our writing skills.

The last thing my mother had said to me before I left was “If you get sick from the heat, you can always come home.”

Finding Love, Laughs, and Lucy in California

A
T FIRST, I FELT
like Los Angeles was all a dream. I didn’t unpack my suitcase for at least a month for fear the job wouldn’t work out. I started to take pictures of every star I met. Joey Bishop. Abby Dalton. Milton Berle. Jack Benny. Zsa Zsa Gabor. I had a plan that if our sitcom got canceled and we were out of work I could open a restaurant and put these pictures of the stars on the walls to attract patrons. That, of course, was a pipe dream because I didn’t know how to cook and had no vocation for business. But still, I sent the pictures home to my parents because I wanted my mom to be proud of me and tell her friends on the Grand Concourse that her son had amounted to something. “My son, the show biz writer, lives in Hollywood,” she would tell the people in our basement laundry room.

Fred remained the confident one while I worried quietly. Fred and I began our staff writing job on
The Joey Bishop Show
in December 1961. We rented separate apartments; mine was just a short bus ride away from the Desilu Cahuenga Studios. I found Los Angeles a strange place because you couldn’t walk anywhere. In New York everybody walked, but in Los Angeles, I had to learn how to take the bus while I saved money to buy a car. So, as in college, I dated only girls who knew how to drive and had cars. One night I went out with a girl and we parked her car near my house. I leaned over and blew in her ear. She freaked out.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Ouch!” she said.

“What did I do? You don’t like it when a guy blows in your ear?”

“I have a hearing aid,” she said.

Who knew? The relationship didn’t last long even though she was a nice girl with a good car.

Jumping into the writing staff of a struggling sitcom is never an easy job. We had to quickly get up to speed on the characters, as well as on the politics between the writers and producers. The most important information we learned was that producers Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard were the most powerful people on the lot. Danny was a devout Catholic of Lebanese decent, and Sheldon was an intimidating man and an impeccable dresser. If they didn’t like you, your job there was history. If they liked your work and your personality, they would open doors to greater things for you. I was nervous that people in Hollywood wouldn’t like me because of my heavy Bronx accent. But the day I met Sheldon Leonard I realized he spoke just like me. When we had a conversation, we sounded like two New York gangsters. He liked me from the start.

It was pretty clear that
The Joey Bishop Show
was not going to be on the air forever. So Fred and I quickly started looking around to see what other shows we might be able to write for. We decided that our goal should be
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, which starred Dick and Mary Tyler Moore. However, the show’s producer Carl Reiner knew us from New York and had us pegged as punch-up writers and joke meisters. Carl didn’t know yet that we could write a solid story. So Fred and I had to find a way to convince Carl that we could write big jokes as well as strong plots for the show. Carl was a fatherly type with an original mind. He could think on his feet better and faster than anyone I had ever seen.

In the meantime we stayed on Joey’s sitcom and traveled with him to Las Vegas when he opened at the Sands Hotel for Frank Sinatra. We made friends with Sinatra’s conductor, the young and talented Quincy Jones. Quincy said he wanted to compose music for sitcoms and we should remember his name if we ever had our own
shows. I couldn’t imagine back then being the show runner of my own show. When I looked at Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard, I saw an inner confidence and wisdom that I had not yet developed. Inside I still felt like a wisecracking, fast-talking kid from the Bronx who might eat something I was allergic to and at any minute be rushed to the hospital.

I was, however, always good at recognizing an opportunity for humor. That was the case the night Fred and I went to a cast party on the Desilu lot. The party was held in the commissary, and writers from all the different shows stood up and told jokes. Fred and I knew the writing team of Bill Persky and Sam Denoff and a few other writers, but most of the people in the room were strangers to us, so it was intimidating. But I stood up and took the mike. There was a head chef named Hal who ran the kitchen where we usually ate lunch. Day after day he wore an apron that looked like it was covered in blood. That night I said, “Hal was going to be here tonight, but he couldn’t make it. He’s in Mexico, where they are having a cockfight on his apron.” That single joke brought down the house. I looked over and saw even Carl Reiner laughing. Months later writers and producers would come up to me and say, “You wrote that joke about Hal’s apron. Funny!”

During our first year writing for Joey Bishop began to take its toll on us. Fred and Joey would fight. Fred wanted more respect. Joey never had the highest respect for writers, so they were constantly getting into battles. One night Fred was explaining to Joey that we needed to strengthen the “protagonist” in the show to make him more compelling. Fred went on to define the word
protagonist
when it seemed clear Joey didn’t know what it meant. The fact that Fred was talking down to Joey made the star come completely unglued.

“If you don’t like it here, then get out,” said Joey.

Fred said “fine” and quit on the spot. I was stuck. Should I quit, too, in solidarity with my partner? In truth I didn’t want to quit. I was starting to like California, and I was just beginning to date a girl named Barbara Sue Wells, who worked as a nurse at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and happened to live in my apartment building. Barbara was a long-legged very pretty Midwestern girl with the
warmest smile I had ever seen. But I didn’t know what it would be like to write a sitcom without Fred. I weighed the pros and cons. I didn’t want to move back to New York and write for
The Tonight Show
anymore. And I certainly didn’t have a future back at the
Daily News
. So Fred and I talked. He said it was okay to stay in California and find another writing partner. I said goodbye to Fred, and he moved back to New York and got a job on
The Jackie Gleason Show
.

Joey hired me to keep writing scripts for him and paid me more money. Milt Josefsberg took over as head writer on the show and Milt liked me. So I was on my own in Hollywood, without a partner but with a steady paycheck. Fred and I had been paid $300 a week, which we split. After he left I got the entire $300. I tried writing alone for a while, but I didn’t feel as productive. So I took $150 of my money and hired two writers I liked to create a team. That’s how Dale McRaven and Carl Kleinschmitt joined the staff of
The Joey Bishop Show
. Dale was a hippie with a long black beard, so he sort of stood out from the rest of us. Carl, on the other hand, was a redneck political speechwriter who wrote for both Democrats and Republicans.

After they’d been on the show for eleven weeks, Joey called me into his office to ask me about Dale and Carl.

“Who are those two kids hanging around the writers’ table?” he asked.

“McRaven and Kleinschmitt,” I said. “They help punch up the show.”

“Who pays them?” he asked.

“I do,” I said.

“With what?”

“You give me three hundred dollars a week, and I pay them one fifty of that money. It’s worth it because they make the show better.”

Joey said I didn’t have to pay them anymore and he would put them on staff. But Dale’s long black beard still made Joey nervous.

“That kid looks like a hippie,” Joey said to me one day.

“He is a hippie. But he’s a good writer, too,” I said.