At Burroughs, I started working for the Smoke Signal as a sophomore. In 1976, my junior year, Mrs. Trempe entered her selections of the paper’s best work into a journalism contest held by Pepperdine University. The college, located in Malibu, hosted dozens of California high schools in the daylong event. I was the paper’s sports editor that year and won Pepperdine’s top prize in page design. The award came with a special prize: automatic admission to the university and one year’s paid tuition. Talk about a sweet deal! Pepperdine had a great communications program and an even better setting, on a hill overlooking the blue Pacific. Just like that, I didn’t have to worry about the grueling two-minute drill that most of my comrades were dealing with to get into a college. I could just cruise through my senior year.
That felt great, but I was still laid low by other aspects of my life: no girlfriend, not much in the way of acting work, the hormonal swings of ongoing adolescence. I simply didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin. So I anesthetized myself with weed, which made me feel comfortably numb, like the song says. In fact, my high school journalism career facilitated my ability to do this. If you worked on the school paper, you were given a ton of autonomy to roam free, “on assignment.” You could even pick up a gas voucher or two. There were days where I spent only two periods in a classroom and most of my time getting high. Me and my stoner buddies called this doing the “Summertime Gumby.”
But anyone who is keeping himself numb for that long, for that much of the day, is postponing a reckoning. Because, while you’re ignoring your bad feelings, all manner of shit is building up inside of you. And at some point, it’s going to come out. Eventually, it did.
RON
So what did I think about ABC’s suggestion to rename our show Fonzie’s Happy Days? First off, I thought it was a desperately gimmicky attempt to cash in on the character that Henry had created, and I believed that the move would be viewed as cheesy. I was also incredibly insulted.
My parents, normally calm, sage dispensers of guidance, could offer no help in this predicament. Mom was simply outraged at the network. Dad had no ready advice. He understood hard work, quality storytelling, and not letting the business side of things wreck one’s love for acting and creating. But I also recognized that in his mind, mine was a quality problem to have. Hell, I was still going to be the lead straight man on a popular TV show. He would have killed for that himself. Dad was also not a hardball-playing show-business tactician. The way he saw it, I had signed a contract, my deal had nothing to do with the title of the show, no one was asking me to relinquish my top billing, and I had no enforceable say in the matter.
I can’t blame them for this, but Mom and Dad had no way of grasping the emotional toll of this situation. Or, for that matter, the true depth of my passion for chasing my primary dream of becoming a filmmaker. I was a young adult but an adult nonetheless. These pivotal decisions were now mine to make.
I kept my cool and tried to view the Fonzie’s Happy Days situation as an omen. Maybe this lousy turn of events was actually an opportunity. I decided to tell the network brass that if this title change was what they wanted, I was happy to go back to film school.
I had pulled out of USC during my sophomore year, once I realized how busy the show was keeping me—how exhausted I was and how little I was taking advantage of my precious slot at a great college. I wasn’t learning enough in the measly amount of time that I spent on campus, and I kept having to drop classes. I didn’t completely give up on school—I took two night classes at Valley College, where Cheryl had gone, in world history and business law, to keep my mind sharp. But hey, if ABC was turning Happy Days into The Fonzie Show, I was ready to apply for reinstatement at USC.
Two of Happy Days’s executive producers, Tom Miller and Ed Milkis, asked me to come in for a meeting on the Paramount lot. They weren’t corporate hatchet men; Tom, in fact, was someone I considered a friend. He had worked as a young man for the great director Billy Wilder and happily obliged me when I pestered him for behind-the-scenes stories about Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.
But they were the ones deputized to handle my “situation.” Tom cut to the chase: “Ron, Fred Silverman wants to pour a lot more money into the show, and he wants the audience to know that it’s a fresh version of what we’ve been doing. So he is very committed to adding ‘Fonzie’ to the show’s title.”