The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(87)
It was at this point that Garry Marshall politely raised his hand and notified ABC that they had a pretty promising pilot for a ’50s show in their vaults already. As a matter of fact, it starred one of the leads in American Graffiti.
19
Clocking in to the Nostalgia Industry
RON
ABC wasted little time in putting together a new version of Garry’s 1950s show. American Graffiti took off in the summer of 1973. The network was determined to get its ’50s program on the air no later than January 1974.
This fast-track process forced me to do some fast-track thinking. Should I compromise my education at USC by joining a series again? Could I reduce my course load and do college and TV at the same time? Would signing a seven-year contract—the wildly optimistic but standard length of a commitment that an actor made when he joined a new show—postpone or even unravel my dreams of directing?
I decided to go for it. Happy Days, which is what ABC was calling the new show, had much to recommend it. The pay was good, $3,500 per episode. The program was being built around my character, Richie Cunningham. Isn’t that all that anyone in my business could ask for?
“Yes,” I told my agent, Bill Schuller, “I’m in.”
Then Bill dropped a bomb. I wasn’t a shoo-in. They wanted me to screen-test for the Richie role. This exasperated me. I hadn’t even tested for the original pilot! I mean, come on! I was one of the damn stars of the movie they were trying to emulate! What does a guy have to do?
My competitive juices flowing, I agreed to the test. I was once again paired with Anson Williams, who reprised his role as Potsie. We were given a four-page scene to read, with Garry Marshall directing; the footage would be screened for various suits at ABC and Paramount Television. Garry later told me that he allotted Anson and me a generous three hours to work out our scene, as opposed to one hour apiece for the other paired actors, to tip the scales in our favor; he wanted us all along. The only other serious candidate for the Richie role was a handsome, talented newcomer named Robby Benson, who, like me, was a budding multihyphenate. A few years later, he starred in a terrific movie that he wrote with his father, One on One.
Anson and I thankfully recaptured our roles. A few weeks later, I drove my VW Bug to the Paramount lot, where I gave my name to the guard in the gatehouse and he told me that I was on the list, with a reserved parking space awaiting. To this day, hearing this always gives me a rush of satisfaction.
After I found my spot, we did the first read-through of the first Happy Days episode. I reconnected with Marion Ross and shook hands with Tom Bosley, our new Howard Cunningham. I instantly had a good feeling about Donny Most, a jovial fellow redhead who was playing the new character Ralph Malph, one of Richie’s and Potsie’s friends.
I was really curious about who would be playing Fonzie, another new character, who had six lines in the first episode. He was a likable tough guy modeled after Paul Le Mat’s character in Graffiti, John Milner, and Danny Zuko in Grease, as well as the haimish hoodlums who Garry knew growing up in the Bronx. Fonzie’s real name was Arthur Fonzarelli—like Garry himself, whose father changed the family name from Masciarelli to Marshall, he was Italian American.
This fact notwithstanding, I expected Fonzie to look like Steve McQueen, rugged yet pretty, a glamour biker. But no one in the room fit that physical description. Then one of Happy Days’s executive producers, Tom Miller, took me aside and said that he wanted to introduce me to an amazing actor who had blown everyone away at the auditions.
He was not what I expected: more of an Al Pacino–Dustin Hoffman type, on the small side (five foot six), with floppy, center-parted dark hair and a scruffy beard. He was a worldly, educated native New Yorker who had earned an undergraduate degree at Emerson College in Boston and a Master of Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama.
He offered his hand and smiled. “Ron, it’s so nice to meet you,” said this man, who was almost twenty-eight and seemed so much more gracious and grown up than me. “I’m Henry Winkler.”
I shook Henry’s hand, and so began a relationship that, in unexpected and sometimes complicated ways, would transform my career—and, indeed, my life.
CLINT
We were happy to see Ron stay in the acting business. Work is work, and a series could be a lucrative job. Directing could wait for a while. We were happy to see Ron, period. Though I seized the opportunity to claim his old bedroom, the best one in our house, I missed having my brother around every day. Still, he checked in fairly often—our place was close to Cheryl’s—and he sometimes met with Dad to work on scripts.
The year that Ron got Happy Days, he came by to hang out when Dad was away on a location shoot, leaving Mom and me by ourselves. Dad was in North Carolina, working on a movie called Where the Lilies Bloom. It was a great gig, one of the best of Dad’s career. The film’s producer, Robert Radnitz, was riding high on the critical and commercial success of his previous film, the Oscar-nominated Sounder, and this was his follow-up.
Like Sounder, Where the Lilies Bloom was a family-friendly movie about poor folk in the South: in this case, a widower and his four kids who work as sharecroppers in the Great Smoky Mountains. Dad played the widower, Roy Luther, a sickly man who instructs his children to bury him in an unmarked grave when he dies. By concealing his death, the kids will not be made wards of the state and split up. Roy meets his maker relatively early in the film, but for Dad, who was accustomed to being Mr. Two Lines, this was a substantial role, a lot to sink his teeth into. And it was a substantial film, well received upon its release in 1974.