Happy Days did indeed knock out J.J. and Good Times. We beat them in our shared time slot that season, finishing eleventh in the ratings. They slid to number twenty-four. The following season, CBS moved Good Times to Wednesdays and Happy Days became the top-rated show on television. We entered our imperial phase, ranking in the top five for three seasons in a row.
In the mid-1970s, Henry was not merely a TV star but one of the biggest stars in the world, period. In 1976, his annus mirabilis, he, his ducktail hairstyle, and his iconic black leather jacket were all over the newsstand. Henry’s face was on the cover of People, the music magazine Crawdaddy, the kids’ magazines Dynamite and Bananas, the teen magazine Young Miss, and even Mad, where the famous illustrator Jack Rickard drew him wearing a false nose, mustache, and glasses.
TV Guide paired Henry with me for one of its covers that year, both of us dressed in character as we flanked a hot rod. There was no doubt that the Fonz was good for all of us on Happy Days. It was like being on a baseball team with a slugging young superstar batting cleanup—why wouldn’t you want your manager to play him every day? Especially if this slugger was a considerate, collaborative man who was impossible not to love. Marion, Tom, Anson, Donny, Erin Moran, me—none of us begrudged Henry for becoming so popular or the show’s creatives for running with what worked. I was particularly impressed by Lowell Ganz, a tall, rail-thin guy who had a facility for writing fun, playful scenes for Henry and me. Lowell made me laugh off camera, too; he told me he came from an area of Queens that he pronounced “more Jewish than Tel Aviv.” We became good friends, and, eventually, creative partners; Lowell cowrote four of my first seven features, Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho, and Parenthood.
But sometimes, the changes to the show made me feel a little out of my depth. The Andy Griffith Show was built on heart and gentle, idiosyncratic humor. That was where my skills and taste lay. Apart from a few set pieces for Don Knotts or Howard Morris, we seldom went for hard laughs. The first two seasons of Happy Days were like that, too. The new format, by contrast, was predicated on getting hard laughs: framing up jokes, setting them up beat by beat, and building to an explosion. Playing to that live studio audience, going for the comedy throat.
Garry Marshall expanded the writing staff to include sharper, hipper minds from the ’70s comedy scene, some of whom were working as stand-ups. Jerry Paris, our director, was absolutely in his element. He had made his name directing The Dick Van Dyke Show, one of the first sitcoms to have a live studio audience. Jerry was a tall, manic man who always wore a bright red V-neck sweater on shooting days and kept a motormouth Don Rickles–style patter going at all times. When I expressed worry about nailing a comedy beat, he grabbed me by the face and said, “Look at this cute little punim! How can someone with a punim like this act so neurotic and Jewish? We should just bar mitzvah you and get it over with!”
Jerry was a master at comedic staging and energizing a scene, and he loved the dynamic between Henry and me. He said that I reminded him of Dick Van Dyke, a conventionally attractive goy who was expert at playing off funny Jewish guys like Carl Reiner and Morey Amsterdam. （Henry, Anson, and Donny are Jewish.） That comparison is monumentally unfair to Dick, a comic genius in his own right. But it shows how much the creative side of Happy Days, people like Jerry, Garry, and Lowell, appreciated me and what I had to offer.
OUR SET WAS loose and playful. On rehearsal days, we often broke out in tape-ball fights, which are the same thing as snowball fights, only with balls made of wadded-up gaffer tape. We liked to gang up on Jerry Paris, an avid gambler, as he placed bets on the set’s pay phone, literally taping him to the phone stand as he barked to his bookie, “Put two hundred dollars on the Rams!”
This camaraderie carried over into our private lives. We consulted with each other on buying our first homes. We attended each other’s weddings. We toasted the births of our respective firstborns. Happy Days was a happy place.
It was the network side that continually disappointed me. Just ahead of our Christmas break that third season, the cast was hanging around on Stage 19 at Paramount, comparing notes on the holiday gifts that we had received from corporate. “Hey, Howard, I got a wallet,” said Anson. “How about you?”