To top things off, Happy Days, to everyone’s surprise, was floundering in its second season. Rather than building on the momentum of our debut season, we slipped precipitously, finishing at Number 49 in the Nielsen ratings.
This was partly attributable to the sitcom Good Times, a Maude spinoff in its second year. In 1974, CBS’s hard-charging head of entertainment, Fred Silverman, moved Good Times from Fridays to Tuesdays so that it could go head-to-head with Happy Days. What we had done to Maude in the previous season was now being done to us: Silverman’s revenge. Like Happy Days, Good Times was a breakout midseason hit with a breakout star. While we had Henry as the Fonz, whose catchphrase was “Ayyy!,” Good Times had Jimmie Walker as J.J. Evans, whose catchphrase was “Dy-no-MITE!” Unlike Fonzie, who was still a supporting character, J.J. was front and center in Good Times. His “Dy-no-MITE!” was heard with more frequency than our show’s “Ayyy!” Walker was having a major cultural impact.
It was a wake-up call when “Dyno-MITE!” demolished us in the ratings. We needed to up our game. As our second season neared its end, ABC decided to conduct an experiment. We temporarily became a three-camera show, with an open, stagelike set and a live studio audience. （The three cameras maneuver around within a “pit” area in front of the set, capturing the action from three different angles simultaneously.） Garry Marshall brought in a hotshot young writing duo from The Odd Couple, Lowell Ganz and Mark Rothman, to write a special episode for the occasion. It was centered around—Guess who?—Fonzie.
In this episode, Fonzie, the consummate ladies’ man, shocks Richie, Potsie, and Ralph by telling them that he is getting married. But when he and his bride-to-be come to the Cunninghams’ house for dinner, Howard Cunningham recognizes the Fonz’s fiancée. Far from being the virtuous librarian Fonzie believes her to be, she is a burlesque-show stripper who Mr. Cunningham remembers as “the entertainment” at a hardware convention that he attended in Chicago. At episode’s end, the engagement is sundered and the Fonz, to the relief of every girl in America, remains single.
In our cast, I was the absolute neophyte in terms of working in front of an audience. Apart from those low-stress county-fair appearances with Andy and Don and one little summer-stock play that I did with my dad up in Shasta Lake, California, when I was eight, I had not performed in front of living, breathing spectators. I had become accustomed to the safety net of the second take. Now I had to memorize and rehearse every scene with the expectation that I would nail it in one pass, with strangers watching! It was a daunting prospect, especially given that all the other principals in Happy Days had theater experience.
I almost threw up before we started filming. But Henry, Marion, Tom, and our show’s director, Jerry Paris, worked with me all week, teaching me how to play to an audience. Once we were rolling, I found my rhythm and acquitted myself well. Still, if you watch the episode “Fonzie’s Getting Married,” you can see how pale and clammy I am from nerves.
When we were done, though, I was exhilarated. I loved feeding off the audience’s energy and getting real laughs instead of anticipating the spots where the laugh track would be dropped in.
ABC liked what it saw and Happy Days was renewed for a third season—on the condition that it was now going be a three-camera show with a studio audience. I was creatively excited by this development, but I wasn’t prepared for the other big change they had in store. Fred Silverman had recently been lured from CBS to ABC. Our old tormentor was our new boss. In this capacity, Silverman was keen to do to Good Times what he and Good Times had done to Happy Days just a year earlier. As he put it with characteristic bluster, “I think Fonzie can knock J.J. out.”
Fonzie. Not Richie or Potsie or Ralph. That didn’t upset me, though. What shook me to my core was when I was notified that the network was planning on changing the name of our show. They were now going to call it . . . Fonzie’s Happy Days.
Nope, I wasn’t imagining it. I was being marginalized by my own show.
IN MOMENTS OF crisis, you assess. You take stock and figure out what really matters to you. When I did this, I realized that what mattered to me most were directing, my family, and, above all, Cheryl.