At the beginning of 1980, Stacey and I found out we were going to have a baby in September, and soon we discovered it was going to be a little girl. We were thrilled beyond words.
Not long afterward, I found that I’d won the Italian version of the Emmy, the Telegatto, for my work as the Fonz. Not only was this very gratifying—I’d been Emmy-nominated from 1976 through 1978, but my tush never left the seat (little did I know that it would be forty years until my tush left the seat)—but it also led, in the spring of 1980, to a beautiful trip to Italy.
Oh my God, I loved the Italians! One night in Rome, Stacey and I were walking down the street—it was around midnight; I had a full beard (which Stacey loved) and I was wearing a hat—and suddenly cars were backing up and stopping: “Fonzie! Bello! Bello!”
But what a great country, for many reasons beyond that. We got to spend a magical week at the majestic Villa Serbelloni, a grand hotel on Lake Como, and though Stacey caught a bad cold, an amazing thing also happened while we were there.
One afternoon, my publicist Richard Grant and I went out and bought ice cream and Italian hard sausages and cheeses and breads, and brought it all back to the hotel to have lunch with Stacey. And the three of us sat down in a big, lovely room lined with books to have some lunch. Just then, a woman came out and said, “Oh, this is part of my suite.”
She wasn’t being unfriendly. She was a pleasant, middle-aged woman, and after talking with her for a minute, I noticed she had a number tattooed on her forearm. I asked where she was from.
“I’m from the Carpathian Mountains, in Romania,” she said.
“No kidding,” I said. “My father has always talked about the Carpathian Mountains. He worked there in the lumber business as a young man.”
“My father was also in the lumber business,” she said.
“My father worked for Baron Von Gruedl, who owned forests.”
“Oh,” she said. “Baron Von Gruedl was my father.”
Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, and in a moment she began to sob, gasping for air. When she regained her composure, she told us her story. Like my parents, she had lost her entire family in the Holocaust: for all her adult life, she had walked down the streets of various European cities, hoping against hope that she would recognize someone, or someone would recognize her. It never happened. She had felt so totally alone in the world, until this moment.
I walked her downstairs to the pay phone in the lobby, called my father in New York, and said, “I have Baron Von Gruedl’s daughter here to talk to you.”
I’m not sure which of them was more astonished.
In the weeks leading up to the birth of our first child, I said to Stacey, “Listen, make sure your mom is available, because if our baby is born on a Friday night, I can’t be there.”
“You what?” Stacey said.
“I won’t be able to be there. I have to do the show—it costs over a million dollars to shoot an episode, and I don’t have an understudy. And there’s a schedule to get it on the air.”
Stacey stared at me in disbelief.
She gave birth to Zoe Emily Winkler on September 30, 1980. It was a Tuesday. Luckily for all of us.
Jed was nine then, and he was amazing—he drove with us to the hospital in the middle of the night, sitting in the back seat with Stacey, who was starting to go into labor. “Mom, you’re doing great, Mom,” he kept saying. “You’re gonna be great, Mom.”
Then, when Zoe finally arrived, he said, “You know, could we put her back? I don’t think I want a brother or a sister. I could go for an alien. But I’m not sure about a brother or a sister.”
Now that there were four of us, we needed more space, so we moved into a big new house in Toluca Lake. That was a really beautiful house, designed by the eminent architect Paul Revere Williams, the only Black architect in LA—I got it in probate. I was bidding against this woman, and I couldn’t look at her: it took everything in me to outbid her, and not just give her the house. Like the Fonz, I had a heart with a marshmallow filling.
Jed’s room in the new house had bunk beds built into the wall and a ship’s porthole for a window. His desk was built into the wall under the window, and his drawers were filled with multiple Walkmans from Howard, his Walkman supplier. And since at this moment in time Jed was obsessed with the British royals, his collection of souvenirs from Charles and Diana’s wedding—commemorative magazines, figurines, drinking glasses, teacups, medallions, et cetera—was starting to overwhelm the limited shelf space in his room.
For the longest time, we did not want to break the news to Jed that he would never be a royal.
He knew he was an important guy, though. On the wall of his room was a photograph of—what doesn’t belong in this picture?—young Jed Weitzman sitting in the front seat of a Jeep between Ronald Reagan, then the president of the United States, and the first lady, Nancy Reagan.
The backstory: the president’s daughter Patti Davis had met Jed at a fundraiser on our lawn and thought he was such a personable young fellow that he should have the experience of spending the weekend with America’s chief executive.
Stacey and I have had dinner with a president here and there, but we have never slept over at the Western White House. Jed did. Patti took him there when she went to visit her parents. And at the end of the weekend, Jed came home with stories about his new friends Ron and Nancy.
So now we were four, and things were a little more complicated. The baby needed a lot of attention, and Jed needed a lot of attention—for one thing, he had terrible problems with his ears, had to have tubes put in. We gave him medicine for his ear infections, but when he was at his father’s, Howard didn’t always give him his medicine. When Howard and Stacey talked on the phone, you could see veins pop out of her head that I didn’t even know existed.
It was hard for Stacey, which was hard for me, and Jed was in the middle. And I can see from this distance that it confused him. So we said, “Look, the rules here are the rules here. And the rules at your dad’s house are the rules at your dad’s house. And whatever they are, that’s what it is.”
That helped, a little.
I was good at being patient with Jed, and I was good at being strict with Jed—one time he was being fresh at the dinner table, and I got mad and stood up, and he fell backward out of his chair. What I was not good at was being with Jed emotionally: still feeling like a boy inside, I was finding it difficult to be a dad. And the main thing was, I wasn’t Jed’s dad.
If he was feeling down, if Howard couldn’t come and pick him up for some reason and Jed got upset, I could take him to the movies. And we went to the movies. But it was all so confusing, because I wanted to be let into the circle, and I couldn’t find my way in. Once, when Jed was older, I think around twelve, and I was in a bad mood, he said, “You know, you could borrow my Playboy.”
The offer alone had raised my spirits. “Thank you,” I said.
“By the way, I know what oral sex is,” Jed said.
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s when you talk dirty,” Jed said.
Speaking of dirt … My love of gardening began with spider plants. When I grew up in Manhattan, our apartment had them on every windowsill, all of them the descendants of a single plant that Tante Anna—Aunt Anna—had smuggled out of Nazi Germany along with herself in, believe it or not, a coffin. When Anna and her plant reached New York City, everybody in this very tight circle of German Jews that my parents were part of got a cutting. And when I moved to Los Angeles, I took my own cutting with me.
My spider plant and its offspring occupied places of honor on the windowsills of my Reklaw Drive house; when Stacey moved in, we started to grow other things. We had a little forest of bonsai trees in front of the house, and the deck in back (we were on such a steep slope that there was no backyard) was lined with clay pots containing all kinds of flora. I was fascinated with miniature ginkgo trees, so we had several: I clipped and watered them faithfully. Together, Stacey and I tended our forget-me-nots and ranunculi. I found that there was something wonderful about putting your hands in dirt, something that took my mind away from the everyday.
When we moved to Toluca Lake, the new house was on flat land, with a big backyard: this was where my passion for gardening really came into bloom. Soon after we moved in, Stacey gave me the gift of a rose garden: two dozen rose plants of different varieties, which she immediately put in their new bed. I could hardly wait until they started to bloom, in late March–early April. My favorite was (and still is) the Piaget: the fragrance is exquisite. We also had Elizabeth Taylors, Double Delights, and (Stella Adler should only have known) variegated red-and-whites. When we eventually sold the house to Andy Garcia and his family, one of the stipulations was to leave the rose garden as it was.
The new house also had a swimming pool, and with the yard and the pool, our real commitment to dogs began. Percy the Yorkshire terrier had passed on, and Amanda, now with gray hair on her muzzle, spent a lot of time napping. Our home clearly needed some puppy energy, and Waffles, a wheaten terrier, came along to fill the bill.
Or so it seemed at first. Waffles, it turned out, had just one goal in life: to run around the pool at top speed, whether someone was in it or not. He wouldn’t even slow down to be petted. Jed, now ten, needed a dog he could interact with.
Enter Tootsie Annamarie, a beautiful black Lab. When Jed and I played catch (and as Waffles zoomed around the pool in the background), Tootsie played outfield. If Jed or I missed a catch, she brought the ball back to me, nicely coated with saliva, and politely dropped it in my mitt.
Simple pleasures. So important.
There was a pay phone in the corner of Stage 19 at Paramount that I used now and then to make calls, but there were only two occasions in the entire run of Happy Days when I received a call on that phone.
The first time was when I stopped a kid from committing suicide.
I’m being serious now, because this was a very serious matter. I was in Fonzie costume, in the middle of dress rehearsal, when somebody called me to the phone. On the other end of the line was a police officer from Indiana. “We have a young man here who’s out on the ledge of a building,” he said. “But he wants to talk to you.”
He had my full attention.
Someone handed the phone on the other end to the kid on the ledge in Indiana. “Hi, this is Henry Winkler,” I said.
“Hi,” the kid said. His voice sounded quavery. I could hear the wind blowing.
“So, tell me first of all, what do you do?” I asked.
“Well, I’m an actor,” the kid said. “And I’m—”
I interrupted him. Gently. “How old are you?” I asked.
“Seventeen,” he said.
“Seventeen,” I repeated.
“Mm-hmm,” the kid said.
“Okay,” I said. “Number one—you should know that I didn’t get the Fonz until I was twenty-eight. So there’s plenty of time for you. So get the hell off that ledge.”
All I heard on the other end was the wind blowing. For a moment I thought he had jumped. “You there?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, then here’s number two,” I said. “Do you have a record collection?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Great. Would you just go downstairs and sign the record collection over to me, so I can have it after you jump?”
He was quiet for a second. “Are you serious?” he asked.
“I am,” I said. “I love music. And I don’t know, you’ve got a whole collection. There might be something in there that’s gold.”
Now, where did I come up with the gall, the chutzpah, to think I was saying the right things to this kid? To think he wouldn’t just jump while I was talking to him? I really had no idea. All I really had was the feeling that he liked me and wanted to talk to me. And that if I could keep him talking, maybe he’d change his mind.
And he did change his mind. After we’d talked for a few more minutes, the next voice I heard was the cop’s. “Thank you,” he said.
In the late seventies, Bob Daly, the head of CBS Entertainment, along with his then-wife Nancy and their children, Bobby, Brian, and Linda, invited Stacey and me to a Christmas party at MacLaren Hall, a facility in El Monte for children who were abandoned, abused, and neglected. A bunch of celebrity actors and athletes who these kids knew from seeing them on TV traveled by bus to MacLaren and spent the day with the children.
The first child I met was Edward. Edward was five; I visited him in his dormitory room. I sat on a little chair, and Edward climbed into my lap and started to hit himself in the head. “Edward,” I said, “that probably doesn’t feel great. Why don’t we find something else to do besides hitting your head?”
“I’m bad, I’m bad,” Edward said.
“Why are you bad?” I asked.
“If I wasn’t bad, my parents wouldn’t burn me,” Edward said.
Oh my God.
Afterward, my wife said, “We can’t just do this on Christmas; we have to do more.” And so Stacey and Nancy Daly joined United Friends of the Children, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of kids in facilities like this in every possible way. For MacLaren Hall, they raised money to put in a pool, to install computers, to build a library. They got artists from around Southern California to paint beautiful scenic murals on the walls so the kids didn’t have to look at just brick. And though MacLaren Hall itself would later run into some bad scandals, the organization Stacey joined took hold. Stacey eventually became president of UFC, and she and Nancy went to Los Angeles City Hall and got the city government to separate children’s services from elderly services and make it its own entity. They would call state senators, posing as Bob Daly’s and Henry Winkler’s secretaries, inviting them on our behalf to visit these institutionalized kids in order to get more services for them. (Of course, when the senators showed up, Stacey and Nancy would tell them that Henry and Bob were both on set working.)
United Friends of the Children continued and still continues to work for kids like this in the Los Angeles area. And inspired by Stacey’s example, I began to go out myself to work with challenged children. As the Fonz, I started to visit severely disabled kids at Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey; I began attending Special Olympics events and getting to know those amazing athletes. Each one of them thought they were meeting the Fonz. I was getting an education in giving back.
And soon after I met Bob Daly—who would go on after CBS to lead Warner Brothers and then the Los Angeles Dodgers—he became an important friend and advisor. Bob was salt of the earth: born in Brooklyn, raised by his mom and sisters, he started out selling individual cigarettes on the street, and rose from office boy at CBS to the top ranks of the company. But no matter how powerful he got, he never forgot the lessons of his humble beginnings; his understanding of the human condition and the right behavior was unequaled. From the start of our friendship, I would ask for his counsel and learn.
One night many years ago, while Stacey and I were having dinner at Bob and Nancy’s house, a mutual friend who wanted to make a deal with Bob came over. This man gave Bob the contract in an Hermès bag that was so beautiful—I mean, made of leather that you didn’t even know existed on the earth. And Bob handed it back and said, “I cannot take this contract inside a gift.”
It’s 9 p.m., we’re inside Bob’s home—who would ever have known if he had taken the bag and given it to his wife? Instead, the friend had to take the contract out of the bag and give Bob the raw paper. I will never forget that.
(Though Bob did gratefully accept Stacey’s no-strings-attached gift of two hooded nuns, a breed of pigeon, to add to his collection, which harked back to the roofs of his boyhood in Brooklyn.)
I never worked for Bob, I only enjoyed his friendship, and that of his children and grandchildren. Both he and Frank Dines, my two closest male friends, are incomparably wise, and both have been important advisors to me for over forty years. Both have a deep understanding of the human condition, and both have given me—and continue to give me—invaluable perspectives and guidance.
The next time I was called to the pay phone on Stage 19 was a few years later, on a Friday morning in the fall of 1980. It was the beginning of Season 8. I’d gotten to work early, and we were about to start rehearsal. And the phone rings, and someone says, “It’s for you, Henry.” I had no idea what it could be. I flashed back for a second to that kid in Indiana.… Was it another emergency?
But this time the voice on the other end was Ron Howard’s. “Hey, Ron!” I said. “How’s it going?” Then, “Where the hell are you? You’re supposed to be here!”
“Henry, I wanted you to know—it’s going to hit the press in about ten minutes, but I wanted to tell you first—I’m leaving the show. I’m going to direct full-time.”
I was completely thunderstruck. I was devastated, I was scared—you name it, I was feeling it. It was shocking.
Ron said more. He told me how disrespected the network had made him feel—financially and personally. “You know,” he said, “ABC just really doesn’t care about me.” He mentioned his salary; he even mentioned the wallet the network gave him for Christmas, when I got that fancy videotape player. Bit by bit, all of it had chipped away at his good feelings about the series—and, finally, pushed him over the edge.
I understood completely, but my feelings were very mixed. On one hand, I was wishing Ron good luck; I thought, Well, this is something he’s got to do. We’d talked about it for years; he’d already gone off and directed the Roger Corman picture, those TV movies, and some short films that his family helped him make. I thought, This is his destiny. He’s got to do this.
But on the other hand, I was scared and sad. I didn’t know what was going to happen. My acting partner in most of the scenes on Happy Days was leaving! My entire character was based on being Richie’s big brother; everything else was ancillary. How could I ever find somebody I felt this connected to?
All these things were swirling in my brain. But mostly I felt, I love you; I want you to go out there and be unbelievable; possibly cast me.…
So Richie Cunningham got drafted into the army, and of course Ron did go out there and was unbelievable. (And did cast me.) Both directly and indirectly, ABC’s rudeness turned Ron Howard into a billion-dollar director and a major player in the movie business.
Scott Baio had come onto the show during that eventful Season 5, playing Fonzie’s cousin Charles Arcola—Chachi. He was just sixteen when he started, but he was dripping with charisma and acting talent, and at the same time, to his great credit, he was a real team player.
A quick aside about one actor who wasn’t.
There was a kid who joined the cast during the late seasons of the show—and I won’t say his name, but he had a moment. By which I mean, he started to get kind of popular, was getting written about, et cetera—all of which was lovely, and, in the team-spirit sense, great for the show. And the kid began to get fan mail. And then more fan mail. And he got very excited about it. All of which was fine.
But the thing that was less than fine was, he began to flaunt his fan mail. Started to talk about it, a lot. On the soundstage. In a surprised and happy way, but also in kind of a braggy way. Kind of obliviously to the feelings of those around him.
I took him aside. In a friendly way.
“You don’t want to be talking about your fan mail on the soundstage,” I told him.
He nodded, seemed to understand. Then he kept doing it anyway.
And I’m not saying that it was because of that, but it wasn’t long before his character got written out of Happy Days.
Scott was not like that. He was cute, young girls loved him—he could even sing!—and he got very popular right away. He got lots of fan mail. Which he did not brag about. He didn’t brag, because he didn’t have to. After Ron left, the writers started to write a lot of scenes between Fonzie and Chachi, because Scott and I had chemistry—not the same as the chemistry between Ron and me, but in its own way just as strong. And of course the rest of the cast kept being great. After seven seasons, you might expect a series to go on autopilot: Happy Days never did. The final four seasons of the show were filled with a sense of fun and discovery, and the people kept watching. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that—to my great good fortune—Scott Baio stepped up.
While Stacey and I were dating, I took her to meet the cast and crew of Happy Days. As with every other studio in Hollywood, there was a gatehouse at the entrance to the Paramount lot, with a gate—a long bar that went up and down, operated by the guy in the gatehouse: in those days, it was a nice old guy, Mr. Hawks, who’d worked there for fifty years. And as the Fonz, I’d always get a big smile from Mr. Hawks as he raised the gate and admitted me to the lot. And I would smile back at him: it was a great feeling to be known, and liked, and let in.
That day, Mr. Hawks leaned down and peered into my car window as I proudly introduced Stacey to him, and he gave her a big smile, too. “You’re a lucky fella, Mr. Winkler,” he said.
“Don’t I know it,” I told him.
But as we drove onto the lot, I said to Stacey, “Never think for a moment that there’s not going to come a day when the nice old man at the Paramount gatehouse, whoever he is then, doesn’t automatically let me through. That day will come.”
Ron has said that I did him a major solid by agreeing to appear in Night Shift, and I understand the truth in that: movies don’t get made unless the people you ask to back them feel they can make money, and one of the best ways to get distributors to fork over is to sign a big name to your project. And in 1981 I was a big name, thanks to Happy Days.
But I also felt (and still feel) that Ron did me a big favor by asking me to participate, and by giving me the chance to be directed by him. Night Shift was a darkish comedy about two morgue attendants who decide to make some side profits by opening a house of prostitution in the morgue. One of the attendants is a mild-mannered, milquetoast-ish guy named Chuck; his coworker, Bill, is a take-no-prisoners wild man. Ron told me, “You can play either role.” And I thought, Well, the Fonz is pretty flamboyant. I’m gonna play Richie Cunningham. Directed by Richie!
We saw every actor in town for the role of Bill, and then Michael Keaton came in. Michael was still just a journeyman then, working his way up the Hollywood food chain with a lot of TV parts, but he had a real presence about him, and he could really nail that crazy-eyed thing, and so he was just right.
But the one who was truly just right was Ron Howard. Poor Ron was so nervous about taking on his first big-time feature. Grand Theft Auto had been a great start for him, but Roger Corman movies were shoestring affairs: everyone working in them, from cast to crew, was just trying to rack up some experience. Night Shift, though, was a Warner Brothers picture—this was the big leagues. “Oh my God,” Ron said to me. “Everyone in this crew has been in the business for twenty-five years, they’ve all made a thousand movies, and I’m brand-new—are they even going to listen to me?”
“Yes, they will,” I told him—and I wasn’t just blowing smoke. I knew Ron. I had felt the quiet force of his personality. And from the jump, his crew felt that same force. It was really remarkable: when a question came up on the set and Ron said, “Let me think about that,” the place went dead silent. Everybody was like, “What is Ron going to say?” He had their complete respect. He was smart and passionate; he really knew what he was doing, and everyone knew it.
And as an actor himself, he really understood acting. I took home movies of the making of Night Shift, and there’s footage of Ron directing me. I’d make a choice for my character and say, “Can I do this?” And he’d say, “Well, if you did that, I’d probably print it.” And I’d say, “Oh, okay—got it. I’ll do that.”
And all of that (and much more) is why Ron Howard went on to become a great director.
From the beginning, I’d loved Ron like the younger brother I never had. One of my favorite scenes over the whole course of the show was in Season 5, when Richie lay unconscious in a hospital bed after being in a motorcycle accident and Fonzie stood beside the bed crying, praying he’d be all right.
Ron returned for a guest appearance in the final season, for a two-episode arc in which Richie and Ralph come home to Milwaukee after being discharged from the army. When Richie tells his parents he’s planning to move to LA to become a screenwriter—the writers were definitely inspired by Ron’s actual career choice—Howard and Marion disapprove, but Fonzie tells Richie he has to follow his dream. In Episode 238, Ron’s final appearance on Happy Days, Fonzie says goodbye to Richie at the door of the Cunninghams’ house, and starts to cry—and the tears in my eyes were real: that was really Henry saying goodbye to Ron.
Ron had gone out and made his way in the world. Now it was my turn to do the same. The only problem was, nobody wanted me.
What that really meant was, nobody wanted me to be anything besides the Fonz.