I was also hardened by the unsatisfying experience of having done The Smith Family. My first time out on a series, I was on a hit that ran for eight seasons. My second time out, I was on a dud. Now I was at the point where I believed that the good fortune that I’d experienced on The Andy Griffith Show was a once-in-a-lifetime blessing. Happy Days might go for a season or two and that would be that. When it died its inevitable death, I would collect my last paycheck, go back to film school full-time, and resume my quest to become a director.
THIS CALCULUS CHANGED in my very first read-through with Henry Winkler. Instant chemistry. Fonzie was only a supporting player in our first official Happy Days episode, which centered around a date that Potsie had set up for Richie with Mary Lou Milligan, a girl reputed to be “fast.” Anson and I had by far the most dialogue, but there was a scene near the end in which I had to screw up the courage to tell the Fonz that I had lied to him: I had not gone “all the way” with Mary Lou.
“I’m gonna fuh-get it this time,” Henry-as-Fonzie said. “But no more lyin’。 I’ll do all the lyin.’”
Henry’s conservatory training was evident from the start. Happy Days was far from fully formed that first season. At the beginning, it was flagrantly lifting ideas from American Graffiti, with vintage cars everywhere and a prominent soundtrack of oldies like Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” and Elvis’s “Hound Dog.” But Fonzie arrived fully formed. He already did the thumbs-up gesture. He already had that magical wordless bit where he pulled his comb from his back pocket, checked himself out in the bathroom mirror, and acknowledged with a confident shrug that he looked perfect as he was. Off camera, Henry had a menschy, almost professorial manner of speaking, but as Fonzie, his speech assumed a jabbing, edgy cadence. “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it, Cunning-ham.”
Above all, he knew how to find laughs that weren’t on the page, that came through pauses, gestures, and improvisation. Henry later told me that part of this approach came from being dyslexic; he had trouble reading from a script, but if he absorbed its gist in advance, he could come up with a performance that worked.
Henry crackled with the same energy, intellect, and creative inventiveness as Rick Dreyfuss. They reminded me of each other in a lot of ways: short Jewish guys a few years my senior who were generous of spirit and had a lot to teach me. And they were both so inherently funny.
I was surrounded by comedy savants: Tom Bosley, who was a Tony-winning musical comedy star on Broadway; Marion Ross, who had done sitcoms since the 1950s; Anson, with whom I had already developed a buddy-comedy rapport; and Donny, a Brooklyn guy with vaudevillian timing.
You know who I didn’t find particularly funny? Me. I brought this up with Garry Marshall right before we began shooting, as we were doing camera tests. Garry was a relentlessly upbeat man, with a wide smile of Chiclet teeth and a sweet, Jewish-mother-like way of talking, even though his background was Bronx-Italian. He specialized in two things: getting laughs and putting people at ease.
I approached him in all earnestness and declared, “Garry, I’ve been thinking about this, and I want you to know: I’m really not very funny.”
Like the truly funny person he was, Garry hit me with an instant comeback. “Now you tell me?” he said.
Then he gently talked me off the ledge. He explained that my role was to be like Andy in The Andy Griffith Show: the leading man as straight man, behaving sensibly when everyone around him is kind of nuts. He had an even better metaphor for what I was doing from a comedic standpoint. “You’re the Bob Cousy,” he said. Cousy was the Boston Celtics’ point guard at the beginning of their dynasty years, the Houdini of the Hardwood. His great gift was for dishing out assists to the talented players around him, guys like Bill Russell and Tommy Heinsohn. But Cousy was also adept at taking the shot himself when the situation called for it.
I loved this metaphor. Later on, when we started filming Happy Days before a live studio audience, Garry sometimes warmed up the crowd before the show by doing introductions, and mine was, “Here he is, folks: Ron Howard, the Bob Cousy of Comedy!”