Penny Marshall: A Penny for your Thoughts

Marshall says she had no intention of staying, but then she got a job playing Oscar Madison's secretary on TV's "The Odd Couple," a show her older brother Garry helped develop. In 1975, Garry, who was by this time producing "Happy Days," created two lower-middle-class girls to double date Richie and Fonzie. The next season, Penny and Cindy Williams had their own show, "Laverne and Shirley." It ran for seven years, and along the way, it got better ratings than "All in the Family," which featured her second husband, Rob Reiner.

Marshall and Reiner's home was known as "Comedy Central" or "The House That Yucks Built" Their TV comedy peers used the place as a clubhouse. According to Bob Woodward, John Belushi once stopped by with some heroin, which Marshall flushed down the toilet. I ask if she and husband Rob ever saw each other during those days. "Hardly," she says. "He started working, and then I started, then he stopped, and I kept working, and soon he realized that I wasn't home. That was a problem. I'd be going out the door, and he'd say, 'Where are you going?' and I'd say, 'You remember that show I'm doing?' "

Then they made the mistake of adding on. "You hire an architect, and you assume that he knows what he's doing. Wrong. It turned into 'Goofy and His Wife Build Their Dream House.' " Her infrequent exchanges with Reiner went something like this: "You pick out the doorknobs!" "I thought you were picking out the hinges!" "I can't. I'm working!" She leans back on the couch and takes a long drag on a cigarette. "Oh God," she sighs.

Marshall's refuge from the stress of a showbiz marriage was the Paramount lot where "Laverne and Shirley" was done. For an actress in a hit show, there's probably no more safe and secure environment than the Paramount "campus," where grown men get around on bicycles and producers shoot baskets and the guards at the gate smile and wave. Marshall would wile away the time between tapings in the commissary with her pals, Henry Winkler and Ron Howard and Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and her brother Garry. Marshall gets all dreamy-eyed when she relives those days. "Actresses are pampered. You get flowers. Plus I'd always close my deal with a little present to myself. I'd get a washer/dryer or a refrigerator. Like I was on a game show. And the agents can't take a commission on that."

I'd always heard Marshall didn't like acting, but she denies this. "An actor can stay the baby. Directing is more lonely." Would she like to change places with Julia Roberts? "I'd like to look like Julia Roberts and not have to act."

If Paramount was a cozy college campus, Garry Marshall was the BMOC, and Penny's career blossomed under his tutelage. Toward the end of "Laverne and Shirley's" run, the producer--that is, Garry--gave her a chance to direct. She wound up doing four episodes. "It was funny directing people I'd been working with. They'd look at me, and I'd say, 'What are you looking at? Just do it, and I'll tell you what's wrong.' "

When the show ended, Marshall was divorced and tired. She took a three-year break. Then, in 1984, Debra Winger asked her to direct Peggy Sue Got Married, in which Winger was set to star. Marshall was handed the job, but three weeks into pre-production, she was fired. "The producers told me that the film had gotten too big for a first-time director. I said, 'You knew I was a first-time director three weeks ago, what's changed?' I guess they figured they had Winger, so they could get rid of me. But then Debra quit." Francis Coppola ended up making the film, and Kathleen Turner starred. "Francis called me later and said, 'What happened?' I said, 'I don't know. I didn't even have a camera in my hand.' "

Another year went by, and Marshall decided to leave town. But just as she was packing to move to New York, the phone rang. Director Howard Zieff had just been fired from Jumpin' Jack Flash, the Whoopi Goldberg comedy thriller that had nothing to do with the Rolling Stones. Would Marshall like to step in? She would, and did. The film was a bomb, but it kept Marshall around long enough for Jim Brooks to plop the Big script down on her desk. "This is your next film," he said.

Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Up until Awakenings, Marshall seems never to have actively sought a directing job. Instead, the mountain has come to Marshall. And (to continue the religious imagery), this is in a town where it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a former sitcom actress to direct a feature. It's not as if she's an avid film buff. She says she's never watched a movie twice. She doesn't write, and she knows nothing about lenses ('I didn't take that course.") She's become a director the way mold becomes penicillin.

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