The Boys : A Memoir of Hollywood and Family(91)

None of us fully grasped how popular Happy Days was until the summer of ’74, when, ahead of our second season, ABC sent Henry, Donny, Anson, and me on a promotional tour. To maximize the show’s exposure, they deployed us in teams of two: Henry and Donny were one team and Anson and I were the other. A lot of it was cheesy and depressing: appearances in department stores, signing crappy, insta-published Happy Days YA novels that separated impressionable kids from their cash.

Kids is the operative word. Live, we were drawing a primarily teenage audience, throngs of rabid girls of high school age and younger. I wasn’t prepared for this; it seemed like a throwback to the era when I struggled to write out my autograph at the Roosevelt Hotel. In Detroit, ABC partnered us with Seventeen magazine, making us pose for pictures with teen models, which was uncomfortable for Anson because he was twenty-four and for me because I had Cheryl. I confided in Anson that I hated this PR tour—it was tiring, it kept me from home, and, as my inner Rance Howard was telling me, it had nothing to do with acting or directing.

But our experience was nothing compared to what Henry and Donny were going through. We kept getting field reports that wherever Henry went, huge crowds were gathering. Fonzie, we were learning, had captivated viewers more than any other Happy Days character. The Nei-man Marcus flagship store in Dallas was completely overwhelmed by a turnout of over twenty thousand people, most of them screaming girls, most of them screaming “Fon-zeee!” The security team there was unprepared, and Henry and Donny were trapped at one point, separated from their limousine by an unregulated mass of humanity. Crisis was averted only when Henry put on his Fonzie voice to address the crowd. “I want to tell you something now,” he said. “You’re going to part like the Red Sea.” He snapped his fingers, the same way he did on the show to summon chicks. The crowd obediently opened up a pathway to the car.

When all four of us met up in Philadelphia, Anson and I got a sense of how intense Fonzie-mania had already become. Our appearance at Wanamaker’s department store was like Beatlemania: girls screaming at us, throwing themselves at our limo, tearing our clothes. I chased down a girl who grabbed my ballcap. Sorry, no Richie Cunningham souvenirs—even when I still had a full head of hair, I loved my caps, and by god, I was not going to let anyone steal them from me.

I had made my share of public appearances for The Andy Griffith Show. But they were always agreeable and low-key, not unlike the show itself. This was something else entirely—and pretty terrifying. But on some level, it was fascinating, being at the eye of a teenybop storm. It was apparent that Happy Days was becoming something bigger than us, a cultural phenomenon. It was not about any single one of us.

Well, maybe one of us more than the others. We finished up our stay in Philly by appearing on The Mike Douglas Show, the nationally syndicated daytime talk show. After a pleasant interview, Mike opened up the floor to questions from the audience. The first was from a young woman. “My question is for Henry, who I think is super,” she said. “Do you believe in sex before marriage?”





20


Fonzie-Mania


RON


Henry, Donny, Anson, and I were fast friends. Four guys who had not previously known one another, apart from my filming the earlier pilot with Anson, discovered that they were simpatico not only on the set but off the lot.

On Monday nights, Cheryl and I took to dining out with Henry. It was our way of socializing and trying out new restaurants on a quiet night; already, weekend dining was a nonstarter because our newfound popularity precluded us from getting through a meal unhassled by throngs of fans. Henry called us the Monday Marauders. As time went on, our group expanded to include his girlfriend and future wife, Stacey Weitzman, and, when Three’s Company became a hit on ABC, John Ritter and his wife, Nancy Morgan.

Donny gamely agreed to play the lead in a naturalistic indie movie that I was making on weekends. It was called Leo and Loree. I was trying to emulate the improvisational style of John Cassavetes. Donny was Leo. Loree was played by Linda Purl, who Happy Days fans know as Richie’s girlfriend Gloria in the show’s first season and Fonzie’s steady, Ashley, in the later seasons. (I never finished the film, though it was later reshot by Jerry Paris, Happy Days’s main director, and received a limited release through United Artists.) As for Anson, he and I hatched plans to produce films together. Eventually, we actually made one, a TV movie called Skyward.

So, from an interpersonal standpoint, Happy Days was a terrific place to work. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of colleagues. If The Andy Griffith Show was my de facto hometown, where I felt safe among the set’s kindly grown-ups, Happy Days was college and the army rolled into one, where I met my once and forever confidants and drinking buddies. (Not that I’ve ever been much of a drinker.)

An added benefit to working on the show: the early 1970s were a cool time to be on the Paramount lot. In my wanderings, I happened upon a private advance screening of Roman Polanski’s next film, Chinatown, and was waved in to catch it before it hit the theaters. I caught glimpses of Francis Ford Coppola, who was busy putting the final touches on The Godfather, Part II. I felt the same electric excitement in these moments that I had experienced while making American Graffiti—the next wave of American culture was upon us, and I was surfing it in real time.

I needed this boost, because Happy Days was wearing me down physically and mentally. Initially, it was a single-camera rather than three-camera show. This means that it was shot more like a feature film, with no studio audience and each scene’s various angles and takes captured by the same camera. It’s a laborious way to work that requires long days with hardly a break between camera setups—and I was in nearly every scene of Happy Days. This was gratifying, but I was also still trying to carry a course load at USC while coaching Clint’s intermediate-level baseball team. To better situate myself for this peripatetic way of life, I moved out of my dorm and rented an apartment in Glendale. I was clueless about how to live as an adult. My cupboard contained nothing but boxes of Wheat Thins. When I got home from work, I ate half a box for dinner.