My Happy Days in Hollywood (12 page)

Another headache I had on
The Odd Couple
was with my family. They all needed jobs because they now had families. Penny had a daughter, Tracy, and Ronny was a single mom with three daughters:
Penny Lee, Judy, and Wendy. I cast Penny as Jack’s nasal secretary, Myrna Turner. Occasionally I would play her brother, Werner Turner. And in one big episode my sister Ronny appeared with us as Verna Turner. In an episode called “The Rain in Spain,” we cast Penny’s husband, Rob Reiner, as her TV boyfriend Sheldn (a clerk left the
o
off his birth certificate). The first time Penny appeared on
The Odd Couple
as Myrna I could tell she had real talent. She had not done much acting in high school or college, but she was naturally funny on-camera and she was a quick learner. Most of her scenes were with Jack, and he was gracious enough to teach her about acting. Along with Penny my dad became an associate producer on the show, and my mother even appeared as a tap dancer in one episode. This is when I began to make nepotism an acceptable art form.

While I was the boss of the show, my dad could still teach me things because he had a better head for business. He taught me that each episode didn’t need to cost the same. If I wanted to spend more money producing an episode, I could do that. I simply had to make another episode in that season for less. The budget had to balance at the end of the season. So I started doing some shows that I called stuck-in shows, which I had first learned about on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. The stars would get stuck in an elevator and we would save tons of money on building sets for that week. The episode called “Trapped” was the quintessential example of a stuck-in show. In that episode Felix and Oscar and a date were on their way to a costume party when they got trapped in the building’s basement. It was great to experiment with smaller-budget and bigger-budget script ideas.

Most of the studio notes we got on
The Odd Couple
were about the lack of women in the show. The executives worried that people might think Oscar and Felix were gay because they didn’t have girlfriends or dates in every episode. We used to shoot extra gag footage of Jack and Tony hugging and kissing each other and send it to the network just to agitate them. We were a sophisticated show, but we loved to drive the network suits crazy. In the meantime, behind the scenes, the network and Paramount began to put pressure on me to create other sitcoms while
The Odd Couple
was still on the air.
I wanted to bask in the excitement of being the producer of
The Odd Couple
, but they kept calling me and saying, “What’s next?”

I finally gave in to the pressure and created another show, called
The Little People
, with Brian Keith. He played a doctor who worked with his daughter in Hawaii. My motivation for creating the show was twofold. I thought it would make an interesting series, and it would let me take my wife and kids on vacation to Hawaii. My wife supported me in working as hard as I wanted during the television season, but in the off-season she liked us to take family vacations to Carmel Valley, visit her parents in Ohio, or go someplace entirely new, such as Oregon or Canada. We would put the kids in the car, and I would sit in the front seat penciling up scripts of
The Odd Couple
and then
The Little People
. As much as we liked our family vacation to Hawaii,
Little People
was not a hit with television audiences. So the network pressured me to come up with another idea. Network and studio executives said they liked the way I worked. I took care of the stars and relied on diplomacy. I was not arrogant. I was basically sane, and I didn’t pick fights with anyone. Plus, I had no ambition to head up a studio or production company. I just wanted to produce a good sitcom every week and go home to my wife and kids.

Another family man was Jerry Paris, whom Tony and Jack liked as a director for
The Odd Couple
. Jerry had directed some episodes of
Hey Landlord!
as well as
How Sweet It Is!
and
The Grasshopper
. I had known him since he was an actor on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, where he played Jerry Helper, Dick’s neighbor and a dentist. He had three children, and his youngest son was the same age as my older daughter. I learned a lot from Jerry because, unlike some of the other people on the lot, he prided himself on being a good dad. It was on
The Odd Couple
that he taught me the basics of how to direct a weekly sitcom. He had a positive energy that seemed to mesmerize the actors. Also, he had a lovely wife, Ruth, who had gone to Northwestern. I used to sit in the stands of the show and watch Jerry direct, taking notes on his choices and on his relationship with the actors.

Directing, however, was still not on my radar because I was so busy writing. I loved the creative excitement of producing
The Odd Couple
and from time to time writing scripts, too. Jerry and I wrote
the first episode, “The Laundry Orgy,” together, as well as “Oscar the Model,” in which an executive insists Felix shoot Oscar’s face in a big cologne ad. We had a formula in which we would put Oscar and Felix in different situations to showcase their differences. By myself I wrote the episode “Hospital Mates,” in which Felix and Oscar shared a hospital room. Felix was in for nose surgery and Oscar had hurt his knee. Phil Foster, who gave me my start in the comedy writing business, played the doctor. The classic button on the plot was that when Felix and Oscar went home from the hospital, Felix couldn’t see because of his bandages and Oscar couldn’t walk because of his knee. But still Felix insisted he could hear Oscar flicking cigarette ashes on the carpeting.

Many
Odd Couple
fans have their favorite episodes, whether they be “The New Car,” “Let’s Make a Deal,” “That Is the Army, Mrs. Madison,” “Password,” “The Ides of April,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Bird,” or “The Rain in Spain.” My favorite is called “The Odd Monks” because I wrote it out of desperation. With my journalism training from Northwestern, I was not a fussy or picky writer, and on TV you need to be on deadline. But after spending so many years writing with Jerry Belson, I worried I might be too lazy to write alone. So sometimes I looked for opportunities to make sure I still could. This episode came at a point in the season when Jack and Tony said they were getting tired of the long, complicated scripts we were giving them. The truth was they didn’t want to memorize so many lines. So I offered a compromise. I said, “Everybody take the week off. I’m writing the script this week.” In the script Felix and Oscar go to a monastery and have to take a vow of silence. For nearly forty pages there was no dialogue, thus eliminating the need for the two stars to memorize anything. The entire script was based on physical and visual humor, which I had learned from the scripts I had written for Lucille Ball. I think it was not only a funny script but one that varied the rhythm of the show. Sometimes when I watch TV with my wife I’ll come across “Odd Monks” on cable, and I have to sit and watch it through to the end. Jack and Tony, in my opinion, knocked that episode out of the ballpark.

Jack and Tony were excellent costars on
The Odd Couple
, but I
don’t think they were true friends until years later. There was tremendous pressure on them, so there honestly wasn’t time for them to just hang out and chat. Even when they were at cocktail parties, they were constantly meeting people and asking them to be on our show. One night Tony went to a party and the next day he said he’d met Allen Ludden and Betty White. So we wrote an episode for them with Jack and Tony called “Password.” Aside from the show the only thing Jack and Tony shared back then was an agent named Abner “Abby” Greshler of the Diamond Artists talent agency. When we filmed the show in front of a live audience, we would throw bite-size candies into the bleachers during intermission. Abby was so cheap that at the end of the night he would collect the candy that had fallen through the bleachers and take it home and serve it to guests.

The Odd Couple
was never number one in the ratings, but it was always in the top twenty. It won awards and received critical acclaim but was not a ratings superstar. That didn’t bother us. After four years we looked toward the fifth season as our last because we just all felt it was time and wanted to do other things. Jack, Tony, and I made a pact at one of our Hungarian Monday lunches that we would leave after five years. Most shows today run much longer, but to us quality was superior to the number of years we wanted to be on the air. I knew it was time for
The Odd Couple
to come to an end, but I was not ready to leave television. Another producer on the lot, Tom Miller, and Michael Eisner, who ran Paramount, and I had an idea about a show that took place in the 1950s. They thought I should pursue it. It was about young people, and I thought that sounded like a good show to follow
The Odd Couple
. I had done a show about older men, now it was time to tackle youth.

As it came time to film the final episode of
The Odd Couple
, in the spring of 1975, we performed a prank. Early on we all took an oath never to do any spitting in the show. Comedians on television shows often did “spit takes” to get an easy laugh. So we vowed to take the more sophisticated road. For 114 episodes no one on
The Odd Couple
spat. But the last show we shot a series of outtakes in which we did a salute to the spit take. It was a montage of Tony, Jack, and other cast
and crew members spitting when a funny line was said. It was one of the funnier behind-the-scene things we did as a cast and crew.

During
The Odd Couple
my daughter Lori attended the Westlake School for Girls, where Neil Simon’s daughter Nancy also went. One day, around the third season of the show, I received a letter from Neil. He said his daughter had told him to watch our show because she thought it was funny. He watched a few episodes, and much to his surprise, he liked it. He wrote that he thought we were doing a good job. So after I received his letter, I called him up and invited him to guest-star on the show, and he did, playing himself. We grew from Neil hating the show in the first season to his smiling upon us in the end. He and I have been friends ever since.

The friendship of Jack and Tony grew beyond the final season of
The Odd Couple
, too. Years later when Jack was diagnosed with throat cancer, Tony rallied to his side at the hospital. When Jack got better Tony galvanized a group who with Jack performed a live version of
The Odd Couple
onstage. Then when Tony got sick Jack was right there supporting him in the hospital. Illness brought them closer to each other than the television show had. They talked on the phone every day when they were ill. They were there for each other until Tony passed away, in 2004. They were an odd couple, but in the end the portrait of a true and lasting friendship. And I am so lucky that I got to know and work with them both because they also changed my life. After running
The Odd Couple
, I had confidence for the first time. The insecure “what if we fail?” “How will I make a living?” guy had gone away. I was responsible. I could deal with big-time people like Tony and Jack, and the networks. I understood the “game.” After
The Odd Couple
I could play with whoever, wherever, whenever.

Tony’s daughter Julia is now an actress and had a small role in my movie
New Year’s Eve
. With her dark hair and alabaster skin, she reminded me so much of her father the day we shot her scene. I smiled inside, and I hope Tony looked down on us working together and smiled, too.

Hanging Out with the Cunningham Family and Friends

H
APPY DAYS
was
a rare show in that it stayed in the Tuesday night time slot all of its eleven seasons. That was a gift from the network gods because audiences always knew where to find us. The fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons
Happy Days
was at the top of the ratings, at 1, 2, or 3, gloriously floating on sitcom air. We remain one of ABC’s longest running sitcoms. The success of
Happy Days
gave me more confidence as a creator, writer, and producer. It is my favorite television show that I created because it rarely gave me a headache or a stomachache.
Happy Days
was for me the quintessential television success story. I had followed my instincts, and they had turned out to be right.

Years earlier I had followed my instincts and they were wrong. Jerry Belson and I created a show called
The Recruiters
during the height of the protests against the war in Vietnam. We should have looked out the window and seen people protesting and burning draft cards, but we were too myopic with our idea. I was determined to strike a more successful chord with
Happy Days
. I wanted to write about youth, but our country was still at war. How could I create a comedy about teenagers with Vietnam as the backdrop? I decided to go in a different direction altogether.

I would not create a modern show, thus avoiding the issues of war, sexual liberation, dangerous drugs, and the darker side of rock and roll. I went back to the 1950s, a time that at least in my own life and mind was much less complicated and politically charged.
I based the entire show on the images of poodle skirts, hula hoops, malt shops, bubble gum, and squeaky clean music. The fact that
Happy Days
helped viewers travel to a different era caught people’s attention immediately. Only a few other shows, like
The Waltons
, had found success tapping into simpler times. People in the 1970s seemed happier with the past better than the present or future.