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Garry Marshall, RIP
I have two stories about Garry Marshall, the legendary television writer, producer, creator and motion picture director who died today at 81.
The first, I can’t really tell. Not here, anyway — it requires a very ferocious violation of our beloved CofC. And also: it may not even be true.
But the second one is easy:
Garry Marshall created some of TV’s most enduring hits: “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & a Mindy.” He was the Executive Producer and head writer for the (to me, anyway) too much unsung television masterpiece, “The Odd Couple.” He directed one of the most perfect movies ever, “The Princess Bride.” He was dazzlingly talented. [UPDATE: SEE BELOW]
(Let’s make this easier: if you don’t know who I’m talking about, just Google him.)
Someone once asked what, to him, was the secret to great television. And his response, more or less, was this: Great television happens on a screen in someone’s home, in a box against the wall, with noise and commotion and household chaos all around it. So the only way to be successful is to break through all of those distractions. To cut through the noise with some entertaining signal. What you’re going for, he said, is a “Hey Mae!”
A “Hey Mae,” to him, was the guy on the sofa watching television and calling to his wife in the other room — Marshall was Old School, so he imagined the wife in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. The guy’s on the sofa and he sees Henry Winkler, playing the iconic and super-nova popular character “Fonzie,” enter the scene and he calls out, “Hey, Mae, get in here! That guy is on!”
Or Mae is in the the kitchen and the husband is on the sofa and he sees Robin Williams, playing Mork from Ork, drinking from a glass using his finger. As the studio audience laughs, the guy calls out, “Hey, Mae, get in here! There’s a guy drinking with his finger!”
Hey Mae. You need to have a Hey Mae moment or two (or seven) in your show, if you want a hit. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about the television business. Garry Marshall knew that in his bones.
Okay, well, to heck with it. Here’s the other (probably apocryphal) story, with the CofC violations removed:
Garry Marshall and Henry Winkler are walking down the studio path — it was Paramount Studios, where I worked for 15 years, in, as it happens, Garry’s old office — and Henry is at the peak of his fame. He’s gone into the stratosphere of celebrity, playing Fonzie, the lovable motorcycle greaser on the biggest show of the 1970’s, “Happy Days.” They’re walking and talking and they pass a studio tour group. The tourists are starstruck. The tour leader asks if Henry has a moment to say hello. Henry — and not in a nasty way at all, according to eye-witness reports — demurs by saying that he’d love to but he’s busy in a conversation with his boss, Garry Marshall. The tour moves on, Garry and Henry walk a bit, and then Garry grabs Henry by the collar and drags him into an alcove.
(The alcove, for trivia buffs, is the southern entrance to the Bob Hope Building on the Paramount lot. This is where Garry Marshall’s — and Rob Long’s — office was.)
He pushes The Fonz against the wall and says, according to legend: “I put your face on TV and I’ll take it off. Now go back there and say hello to those people.” In your mind, insert a common Anglo-Saxon epithet in front of every third word, and you’ll approximate the delivery.
At which point a dutiful and chastened Henry Winkler hurried back to the tour group and shook hands, posed for photographs, signed autographs, and chatted for longer than necessary, or efficient, or expected. But he had been schooled by the best, Garry Marshall, and that was all it took.
It’s worth noting at this point that this story could be totally false, or about someone else. Henry Winkler is one of the few people in Hollywood about whom everyone — everyone — agrees: he’s a lovely and decent man, a gifted actor and a generous person. So maybe this story is about someone else, or maybe it’s about a younger Henry Winkler, but one thing for sure: it’s a perfect emblem of the kind of person Garry Marshall was: funny, profane, and deeply respectful of his audience. He wanted his stars to treat them well, and he wanted his shows to get them to stop what they were doing for a moment — Hey Mae! — and laugh and marvel and be entertained.
Garry Marshall, at 81, RIP.
[UPDATE: I realize that this is wrong. Rob Reiner directed the near-perfect “Princess Bride.” What I was thinking of was “The Flamingo Kid.” For some reason I typed “Princess Bride,” maybe because Marshall directed “The Princess Diaries” which sounds the same, and was, for a time, Rob Reiner’s brother-in-law. I mean, that’s what I think happened but only a neurologist knows for sure. What I meant was “The Flamingo Kid” which is great, stars a very young Matt Dillon, and if you haven’t seen it, you should. Apologies.]
Published in General
Rob Reiner is the one who directed The Princess Bride. I read part of Cary Elwes’ recent book about that experience a few months ago.
Agree. I assume Rob thinking of “The Princess Diaries” or “Runaway Bride”?
I liked his shows. Good clean American fun. Not all preachy like Norman Lear.
So I guess the real question is, “Who directed The Runaway Diaries?”
Garry Marshall directed ‘Runaway Bride’ – IMDB
He directed “Nothing in Common” with Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint, and, of course, Hector Elizondo. It was Gleason’s last film, and a most underrated movie.
I haven’t checked, but I think Marshall cast Elizondo in almost all of his movies. They must have been very close friends.
Boy, when Rob wakes up, he is going to be a stinker when he reads this!
“League of Their Own”, “There’s no crying in baseball” and the luminous Geena Davis.
Getting back to Garry Marshall, I always liked him as an actor, playing the crazy, impossible to deal with, guy in charge.
To Rob, they are merely interchangeable ethnic-types who wouldn’t be allowed in the country club.
[quote corrected]
Now you’ve got Rob’s quote attached to me?
As mentioned above, Garry Marshall was great as a director who acts. I especially liked him in Tootsie. Wait, that was Sydney Pollack (see what I did there), although he would have made a decent Sheldon Leonard It’s a Wonderful Life bartender.
Garry Marshall was a great actor on Murphy Brown though…
Wasn’t that about Jon Voight writing his memoirs on a freight train?
I grew up watching Happy Days reruns and remember fondly a very particular moment emulating Fonzie when I was 6 years old. He was one of the authors of my childhood. I look forward to sharing Princess Bride with my own girls.
Mr. Marshall…Have fun storming the castle!
I acknowledge the genius of Gary Marshall but always felt that Happy Days was a sterile depiction of the actual period (the early 60’s) that was better depicted in American Graffiti (the origin of Happy Days). Illicit drinking, drag racing, actual sock hop dances with overly hormoned teenagers were truer to spirit than what Happy Days depicted.
What a great post and great tribute, Rob. Thank you.
And what an actor he was! Here’s Garry Marshall, perfectly cast, as a casino executive in Albert Brooks’ criminally under-rated “Lost In America” [ Video here ]
Garry Marshall wanted to program for the audience and not preach to it.
Yet Happy Days, et al, ushered in the era of sitcoms having “A Very Special Episode”, where Fonzie/Mork/Venus Flytrap showed us the evils of racism, sexism, and other isms, all of which wrapped up neatly within 22 minutes and without any protests in the street.
We had a “Hey, Mae” moment: I grew up overseas and came back to the U.S. for college. I vividly recall that summer evening that my mom and I arrived at my grandparents’ home and were greeted by my Uncle Dom (an Italian-American who was a teenager in the 50s) saying, “Quick, quick, come see the TV! There’s a show on called Happy Days! You’ll love it!
Great post! Thanks, Rob.
I wrote this:
And I have no earthly idea why my brain did that.
What I meant was “The Flamingo Kid,” which I saw when I was 18 — I remember it clearly — and loved and thought, wish I could do something like that.
Apologies for the stupidity.
See note below. It was like some kind of brain accident.
“You’re the bold ones…”
Great performance!
No, I’m just realizing it’s the onset of dementia.
Eat more blueberries.
I grew up on Happy Days and Mork & Mindy among other things. He was a brilliant creator, and could apply that talent to himself. I loved the times he would appear on Murphy Brown as Stan Lansing. He’d steal the scene and had near-perfect comic timing.
Drink bullet-proof coffee.
?
Inconceivable!
Sorry, brother. Know you already copped to it, but I couldn’t not.
Except for the first season, I agree. The first season was not filmed in front of a live audience, and was a more realistic depiction of the time. Even Fonzie had a darker side.
Though I became sentient in the early 1960’s not the 50’s, I was still able to relate my early experiences in life to that time. I remember the phrase, “Don’t be a Benedict Arnold.” It was something we said when I was a kid, and I remember one of the Happy Days first season episodes using it too.
Another example, this from the ending of the very first episode, was the television station signing off (24 hour television or radio was rare or non-existent in those days) with the Star Spangled Banner. Both Ritchie and Howard Cunningham stood up in their living room and put their hands on their hearts while it played. Fade to black.
I did that stacked coin trick-duder a zillion times as a kid.
Thanks for the flashback, Rob.