Garry was a good Red Auerbach to my Cooz. He instilled in me a sense of pride in what I was accomplishing. I hadn’t completely banished my belief that I should really be honing my chops as a director. But in the moment, I had to acknowledge how awesome it was: one of the Big Three networks had made me the lead of a prime-time show. The Andy, not the Opie.
HAPPY DAYS MADE its debut as a midseason replacement program, on January 15, 1974. Our time slot was Tuesday at 8 P.M. We found a dedicated audience right away, finishing our half-season ranked number 16 in the Nielsen ratings, good enough to guarantee us renewal for the 1974–75 season.
The demographic breakdown of the show’s viewership was telling. In the 18-to-49 category, we ranked even higher, seventh place, attracting young viewers and their parents. We were second overall in our time slot because we were up against Maude, Norman Lear’s audacious, very adult-themed sitcom starring Bea Arthur, which had spent two years in the top ten. But we took a significant bite out of Maude’s ratings, so much so that CBS decided to move the show from Tuesday to Monday nights.
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