My Happy Days in Hollywood (9 page)

“Have him shave his beard,” said Joey.

At the next writers’ meeting I told Dale he had to shave his
beard. Later that night Barbara was hanging out at my apartment and we heard a loud bang on the door. Barbara was afraid, and I was, too. But I opened the door to find an envelope pinned to it with a knife. I took out the knife and opened the envelope. Inside was Dale’s shaved beard. He was giving me the proof that he had conformed to Joey’s clean-cut look. I thought it was pretty funny, but my girlfriend was not amused. “It is hard to date someone who has hippies throwing knives at his door in the middle of the night,” she told me. Barbara later became good friends with Dale, but it was clear I needed a new partner at the time. I called the first person I could think of who might know someone.

“Gordon, hi. It’s Garry Marshall. Remember, from Korea?”

“Garry. Yes! How are you?”

“Remember you said you had a funny brother?”

“Yes. Jerry. But not adopted.”

“When can I meet him?” I laughed.

I met Jerry Belson the next weekend. He was four years younger than I was. He had never been to college, and had never seen a stage play. But he had a darker, hipper sense of humor, which complimented my upbeat one. Jerry was a smiling, out-of-shape ex–fat kid with one of the most brilliant comedy minds I had ever met. I talked to Sheldon Leonard, who was in charge of all the shows under the Danny Thomas umbrella, and told him about my new partner. Sheldon knew that Joey Bishop was a tough person to write for and he admired me for sticking with Joey and his show. So he gave Jerry and me a script to write on
The Danny Thomas Show
.

Our first script for
The Danny Thomas Show
was about his daughter Linda developing a crush on a boy we named Wendell Henderson. She liked him so much that she would scrape the dirt off his Little League cleats and keep it in her room. The script was successful, so Jerry and I formed our own production company and called it Wendell Henderson. (Years later when we split up, Jerry took Wendell and I became Henderson Productions, which I remain to this day.) Jerry was a great partner because he was so productive and driven. When I got a good idea it was usually my third or fourth try. But with Jerry the first words out of his mouth were often the
funniest of the day. I liked that we worked differently. Sheldon recognized our compatibility, too, and gave us another script, this time on
The Bill Dana Show
. After that the work did not stop coming our way.

Writing for these shows gave us the chance to get to know stars like Danny Thomas. Danny was an odd fellow. He was a great comedian who excelled by telling funny stories rather than punch lines. He was folksy in a family way, like Bill Cosby later was on his television show. Danny was also the most religious comedian we ever worked for and a legend for his charity in founding the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. One day he invited Jerry and me to his home and showed us his beautiful swimming pool. At the end of the pool was a statue of Jesus. Jerry said, “Well, you have a good lifeguard, Danny.” I chuckled inside, but Danny didn’t laugh at all. We never joked again about religion around him. He was gracious and sweet and always so good to writers. But he was complex in a way that we sometimes couldn’t understand. One night we went to a charity event with him in a kind of seedy neighborhood of Los Angeles. He lifted his pant leg to zip up his boot, and we saw a gun sticking out.

“Danny, you carry a gun?” I asked.

“Always,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I do charity work in many neighborhoods that aren’t safe. You have to protect yourself,” he said.

It made sense but seemed at the same time incongruous for a religious man to be packing a pistol in his sock.

Danny had a great influence on me because he was such a family man; he had a wife and kids. I wanted that, too. So with my career going so well, I decided that it was time to make a commitment in my personal life. On New Year’s Eve, 1963, I became engaged. On March 9, 1963, I married Barbara Sue Wells, whom I had been dating for over a year. We were a perfect match. I was a sick hypochondriac and she was a nurse. Originally from Cincinnati, she had moved to California in 1961, after another boy left her standing at the altar. She and her friend Donna Parmer both worked at Cedars, and before they started making money they would eat the
patients’ pudding and custard in the hospital refrigerator just to save money. When you went over to their apartment, they would serve it to guests.

We got married in Las Vegas. We didn’t have enough money to fly our parents out, so we just invited our California friends. My father and her mother were mad about the fact we did not include them. Her father was fine with it and wished us well. My mother was only disappointed I didn’t marry a doctor, but I told her a nurse would take care of me just as well.

Our best man was Tom Kuhn, and Donna Parmer was our maid of honor. They were dating, and they were the ones who’d introduced us. Joey Bishop paid for our hotel room at the Sands, and Phil Foster paid for us to see a show. We paid for the rest of the wedding. Our wedding party included about twenty people altogether. To us it was perfect, but to our parents, to have their two oldest children get married without them in attendance was an eternal disappointment. We didn’t have time or money for a honeymoon, and on Monday morning we were both back at work.

Now that I was married, my job, salary, and responsibilities were carried to a whole new level. When Milt Josefsberg was head writer on
The Joey Bishop Show
, he was very generous to me. He gave me the credit as “script consultant” every sixth show. He taught me everything he had learned from writing for Jack Benny. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Joey fired Milt. I couldn’t imagine why Joey would do such a thing, but again, he asked me to stick around. Joey was very combative with other people, but not with me. So I brought in Jerry Belson, and together we wrote scripts for Joey. Just when I was starting to really make a living, my mother and my blind grandmother moved to California. My mother had not gotten along with my father for years, and she heard that California had some nice retirement homes for the blind, where Nanny could live for next to nothing. They arrived shortly after Barbara and I got married. Unfortunately for my mother, my dad followed her out west a few months later. I told them I could help them out with rent, but I didn’t have enough money for them to have separate apartments. So they would have to find a way to live together. My
mother joined a group called Mothers of the Stars and made fast friends with Lucille Ball’s mother and Carol Burnett’s mother.

In December 1963, my wife gave birth to our first child, Lorraine Gay Marshall. The night before the baby was born I stayed up writing a charity skit for Lucille Ball. I remember thinking that now that I was going to be a father, I needed to step up the pace and work harder than ever. I was responsible for a wife and a daughter, and writing for Lucy seemed like the steady dad kind of job I should have. But again you couldn’t just send in your résumé and get a job on these shows. You had to prove yourself and be handpicked by either the star or the producer. And luckily, Milt Josefsberg liked me and was running Lucy’s show.

Milt had landed as head writer on
The Lucy Show
. Immediately he called and asked if Jerry and I could write some episodes, and we jumped at the chance. At the time we wrote for Lucille Ball, she was divorced from Desi Arnaz and married to Gary Morton. Gary was a comedian we had met before; he showed us his closet, in which he had over a hundred pairs of shoes. I couldn’t imagine wanting or needing that many shoes, but Gary acted like it was a dream come true. When we wrote scripts for Lucy, she was funny and talented but sometimes also difficult and hard to please. She was at a vulnerable point in her career because she had never run a show without Desi. So I think part of her wanted to appear tough, and the other part was scared and ambivalent about being the boss. I was fortunate that she remembered me.

“Garry, you’re the one who wrote that funny skit for me at the Writers Guild charity event last year,” she said.

She was right. I wrote that script for no money because I hoped the more I wrote for charity the more people would know my work and hire me. My plan had clearly worked with Lucy. However, the first script Jerry and I wrote for her didn’t go over as well. She wrote on the front cover
THIS IS SHIT
and gave it right back to us. Jerry and I were in shock. We had wanted to please Lucy and had ended up offending her in some way. Milt told us not to worry. Sometimes the pressure of running her own show made Lucy cranky. So we rewrote the script with a fresh cover, and she liked the second draft.

We quickly learned the key to writing for Lucy: start with a funny situation and then build the whole script toward it. We wrote the episode in which Lucy ended up at a fancy banquet wearing a ball gown with roller skates. As the story went, her feet were swollen and she couldn’t get the roller skates off. The script called for her to go through a reception line with the roller skates on. During rehearsals she crashed into a row of waiters. The sight of this threw Jerry and me into a complete panic. He said, “Do you think we’ve killed Lucy?” But she quickly got up and dusted herself off as we ran over to apologize. “No. No. I’m fine,” she said. “It was my fault. Keep writing this kind of script and I’ll keep going at it.” She was brave and strong, and she could tell what was funny and what would fail. She didn’t care so much about plot; she wanted that big comedy scene that fans would remember, so that’s what we gave her.

As much as we liked writing for Lucy, we still wanted to break into
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, because it was a classier show. We were going to leave Lucy completely, but Milt cautioned me. “You have a daughter now, Garry. You need security. Writing for Lucy is like taking out an insurance policy. Lucy’s shows are going to run forever.”

Milt was right. Residuals were the new way to make money, and he knew Lucy would be a residual gold mine. So instead of six scripts for Lucy that year we wrote three, and at the same time we wrote episodes for
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. Writing for Van Dyke was not always easy either. We broke into the show by doing scripts for Mary Tyler Moore because the veteran writers only wanted to write for Dick. But one of our first scripts Mary read she threw across the room, nearly hitting us in the heads. It turned out it wasn’t so much that she didn’t like the script as it was that she was trying to quit smoking. Jerry and I learned early on that you can’t take stars’ anger personally. You have to write and rewrite until you can make them smile instead of scream.

While I was busy working my sisters were both having a hard time. Ronny had three little girls and had decided to divorce and leave her husband back in Illinois. She came out to California with her daughters. As if that wasn’t enough, Penny arrived from New
Mexico with a baby and no husband. So in one year my entire family moved to California and I was the only one working. I felt pressure and shared it with Jerry. We stayed up late into the night writing scripts. He took pills and smoked pot, and I ate Fig Newtons and Oreos.

Shortly after, Jerry got divorced and had to pay alimony. So we had to make even more money. We decided to write some scripts using pseudonyms. I became Samuro Mitsubi, and Jerry was Tawasaki Kwai. We took the names because our agent said we were too big to write under our own names for so many shows. He wanted us to remain in high demand for the top-rated shows.

Whenever someone asked us to write a script, we said yes. Sometimes we had ten scripts going at once. We even ghostwrote other people’s scripts and they would pay us cash in brown paper bags. Later on when my wife was making dinner I would put four hundred-dollar bills underneath her dinner plate. All through dinner the baby and I would wait for her to lift up the plate and then laugh out loud. We were a team in demand. By the end of the 1963 television season, Belson and Marshall (using our real names) had written thirty-one produced sitcom scripts, which was more than any team had ever written before. After writing that many scripts, when my hands weren’t typing, they were shaking with exhaustion. And that is when I looked at my wife and baby girl and said, “We need to take a break or I could die.”

We decided to move to Palm Springs, just two hours south of Los Angeles. I didn’t know how long we would be there, I just knew I had to go someplace and rest. Barbara had quit her nursing job right before the baby was born, so it was easy for us to pack up for a while. We rented a small house with a swimming pool, and friends from Los Angeles, including my parents and sisters, would visit us on the weekends. I decided I wanted to write a play about my mother and how she was never able to fulfill her dreams professionally or personally. I called that play
Shelves
, and after I finished it I put it in a drawer. I didn’t know if I was ever going to do anything with it, I was just happy I had written it. After six months of swimming, sleeping, eating, and pushing my daughter’s baby carriage along the
streets of Palm Springs, I felt rejuvenated. That’s when I got the call from Jerry.

“Garry, we sold a pilot,” he said.

“
Hey Landlord!
” I asked.

“Yes. The network wants us to executive-produce it. Can you come back?” he said.

“We’re packing up now,” I said.

So Barbara, Lori, and I headed back from Palm Springs to produce my first television series. Sheldon Leonard had told me that, to be successful, Jerry and I needed to create our own series so we could own a piece of it. Having our own show also allowed us to give other people writing, producing, and directing jobs. It was a watershed moment in my career because as one of the producers of the show, I was allowed to hire myself as one of the directors, too. I had never directed anything aside from my home movies, but I had learned from watching others. Our first director on the show was John Rich, a well-known television director who had done episodes of everything from
The Twilight Zone
to
Mr. Ed
. John was one of my early directing mentors. But he soon got another job, so we hired Jerry Paris, who had been an actor and director on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. Jerry took me under his wing and taught me everything he knew about directing.