My father didn’t like the way Stacey held her coffee cup.
I’m not kidding.
I liked to put my hand around the cup, because the warmth felt good. And my father-in-law would look at me and make a face. “Ugh, this is not the way you hold a coffee cup,” he would say. “A real lady, a proper German lady, is supposed to hold the cup by the handle, maybe even with the pinkie extended.”
Excuse me, Henry’s father. I’m not a proper German lady.
My parents would come out to visit us, and they would make trouble. Every time. I could never believe how much damage they could do. It was like the entire house was made of china. And by the time they left, everything was broken. Every time. And yet, they had to keep coming.
At first I couldn’t understand how, after so many years, Henry could still feel so resentful. For a long time I didn’t understand the depth of what they had done to him, growing up. The disrespect, the failure to acknowledge him. It took me a long while to get my head around that.
So for years, I thought: It couldn’t have been that bad. Also, I was raised in a family where every Sunday, we went to my father’s mother’s house or my mother’s mother’s. That was what you did with parents, and grandparents. And so Henry’s parents kept coming out to see us.
My father-in-law had always been extremely disrespectful to my mother-in-law. He was utterly disrespectful to women in general. He thought he was better than other people. Like a dandy or something. Vain. Entitled.
But what happened with Henry’s parents was, as they got older, they switched roles. And my mother-in-law began to brutalize Harry. She did not treat him nicely. She only wanted to be with Henry. And the heartbreaking thing was, I believe she only wanted to be with Henry because he was now famous.
Now, all at once, my mother seemed excited to see me. She would give me a hug and a little peck on the cheek. Piefke, she called me—little pipsqueak. Schnuckiputzi—sweetie pie.
Sometimes when I do speaking engagements, I show a picture of me giving my leather jacket—Fonzie’s jacket—to the Smithsonian Institution in 1980. And I always say, “Hey, look who’s sitting behind me. The two short Germans. Who didn’t want me to be an actor, who didn’t support me being an actor, who hated the fact that I was going to be an actor instead of taking over my father’s business.
[GERMAN ACCENT] “‘Why do you think I brought the business over here?’
“And I said, ‘Besides being chased by the Nazis, Dad? Was there a bigger reason than that? Because I’d like to know.’” It always gets a big laugh. Oh my God.
We flew them out, flew them back. First-class, always—of course. And if there was anybody well-known on the plane, my mother-in-law would march right up to them and ask, “You know ze Fonz? Zat is my son!” One day she phoned and said, “Yah, Shirley MacLaine sends her best to you.”
“How do you know her?”
“I saw her on the plane!”
It was hard for Stacey to say no to them. “They’re your parents,” she’d say.
“I’m telling you,” I said. “You know what happens when they come here—do not do this. They can come for five days. Six days, tops.” And then Stacey would take up the banner for their side. She felt sorry for them.
“Henry, they’re making the trip,” Stacey would say. “They’re old. Let them stay for two weeks.”
Once, when we lived in Toluca Lake, my Yale friend Marc Flanagan was staying in the pool house, so I put my mother and father up in a hotel—the Sheraton Universal. Nice hotel, beautiful, just around the corner from us. Stacey or I would go and pick them up at 7 a.m., bring them over for breakfast. They’d stay all day, have dinner with us, then I’d take them back to the hotel to sleep.
Then Marc left. And my mother said, “Yah, so, the time we were in the hotel doesn’t count. We’re here for two weeks.”
It was impossible to get rid of them. And they would cause so much tumult. So much friction. Not only between Stacey and me, but with our children. Once, when Zoe was three, my father was trying to discipline her about something, and he slapped her in the face. And Zoe, feisty Zoe, slapped him right back.
I yelled at him. He was outraged. He said, “She slapped me in the face!” I said, “So what? You must have deserved it!”
It never even dawned on me to tell Zoe at the time that you probably don’t want to slap adults. But we didn’t punish her. I thought, Wow, slapping Harry! Isn’t that just what I always wanted to do?
My mother-in-law had no boundaries. She would walk by people and just bump into them. We had French doors leading into our bedroom, and we never locked them. The first time they came to stay with us, Ilse marched right in and got into bed next to Henry. We locked the doors after that! And whenever Henry’s parents visited, we would watch from our bed as the door handles jiggled. It was like a horror movie.
In 1989, my mother had a stroke. Stacey convinced me that I had to go see her, so I went. My mother was in my old bedroom, which had originally been my sister’s room, in a bed in the corner. She could talk, but her words were a little slurred. Mostly she just stared into space.
I didn’t know what to say to her. So I just made myself busy, organizing the top drawer of the dresser, which was full of things from Berlin—old letters and German money and stuff like that. Part of her was still back there, with her disappeared family. I looked at her, lying in bed, and realized that part of her had always been back there. After she died I found out that when I was very young, she’d been hospitalized for depression. Of course no one ever talked about it. She never got over the lie my father had told her to get her to leave Germany. And after that there were many more lies.
The fury between Stacey and Howard had calmed to a very lovely co-parenting situation. Margaret, Howard’s second wife, and I got along famously, as did Stacey and Margaret. The two of them put together Thanksgivings that you could only dream about: delicious, family-filled. And when Jed was accepted to Georgetown, it was decided that the four of us would take him to Washington to start his college career.
We pooled our resources and rented a three-room suite at the Four Seasons. Max and Zoe, now six and nine, along with Howard and Margaret’s six-year-old son, Arman, made the trek to DC with us. The trip was fun, but the fun had a bittersweet tinge: Jed was really a homebody, suffering the honest anxiety of starting a new adventure at a brand-new school in a brand-new city.
The hotel suite was lovely: the Weitzmans were on one side, the Winklers on the other, a big living room in the middle. We went to dinner, we did a little shopping, we toured the school. We came back to the suite, and Jed squared his shoulders and announced, “I’m going to the dorm.”
We were all hugging and yelling, “Congratulations, you’re gonna be great!” Then Jed picked up his bag, walked out the door, and the door clicked shut.
Reader: count to three.
Stacey dropped to the rug and started sobbing inconsolably.
Everyone knelt down to try and comfort her—I could still kneel at the time. We got her a pillow from the bed so she could at least be comfortable in her sorrow.
Stacey understood why we were in Washington. She was calm throughout the entire thirty-six hours before Jed walked out the door of the suite. But the idea that her firstborn was leaving the nest was just too much for her.
We all sat on the couch and the two armchairs for a while as Stacey continued to weep. We then retreated to our rooms to start packing to go home—and Stacey was still crying. Finally, I said, “Stace, it’s time.”
Now the sobbing turned to sniffles. “Okay,” Stacey said. She stood, and we were all able to leave Washington together—though intermittently she would start weeping again. We got home, and as any good mother would, she wanted Jed to be comfortable and not miss California too much. So she FedExed him care packages five times a week.
If a Sports Illustrated came for Jed, it went in the envelope. He loved the tacos from Henry’s Tacos, right down the road from us—and so several tacos, wrapped in aluminum foil and insulated with dry ice, went into the envelope. Other treats and reminders of home went into the envelopes. This continued during the entire first semester.
Stacey finally got a phone call from the dean of students at Georgetown. “Mrs. Winkler,” the dean said, “we are so sorry, but we must take action. We think your son is a drug dealer.”
Stacey was outraged. “What do you mean?” she said. “Our son doesn’t take drugs!”
“No, he gets four or five Federal Express packages a week, more than any other student on campus.”
“No, no, no, you don’t understand—those are tacos!” Stacey said. “I just don’t want him to miss home too much!”
Finally, an acting offer came.
Absolute Strangers was a TV movie, not a feature, but I was thrilled Gil Cates asked me to do it. Gil was not only a director; he was the head of the Screen Actors Guild. A smart, solid guy. And this was a serious drama, based on the pro-choice/antiabortion debate: the story revolved around a comatose pregnant woman who could be saved if the pregnancy was terminated. I played the husband who had to make the decision. It was my first chance to act since Happy Days had ended, and what I discovered was encouraging.
One thing I’d learned back at Yale was this: you do a play, let’s say in repertory theater, then you put that play away after you’ve done it, and you get a chance to do it again a year later. And what you find is that the character has grown in you during the time you haven’t done the play.
That’s what happened with me and acting. I hadn’t done it in seven years, but it had grown in me over all the time I was away from it. I had moved just an inch along the line. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
MacGyver came to an end in 1992, after seven seasons—the milestone required for a series to go into syndication. This was good for me financially (though nobody, especially Stacey, could have convinced me that we weren’t just two steps away from ruin), and especially good for me personally: it marked the official end of my business relationship with John Rich. The actual end had come a couple of weeks earlier, when I finally worked up the courage to tell him, “I can no longer look for a new key to open the new lock to our offices every day, and then have to reintroduce myself to you. There is no continuum between us. There is no respect. There is no warmth. I must go now.”
“Oh, okay,” John Rich said, as though I had told him I was going out to buy a pack of chewing gum. What a prince.
But I quickly found a much better producing partner in Ann Daniel, the ABC executive who had bought MacGyver. Ann had come aboard a couple of years earlier, when Rich and I decided we needed a head of the company. She was perfect: as a former network insider, she knew all the ins and outs of broadcast television (which is all there was in those days), and everything there was to know about how chilly this business is. She was amazingly diligent and productive—but she also understood that if the room doesn’t fill with celestial sunlight when you’re trying to make a sale, you’re going to go home emptyhanded.
A TV writer named Linda Moulton Howe had brought Ann the idea of a documentary series based on all things paranormal, all around the world. Ann then came to me with the idea, which we sold to Fox as Sightings. Ann and I came up with what I still think was a terrific concept: we got Dale Timothy White, the news anchor at Fox’s Washington, DC, affiliate, to host each episode in the most serious, newsman-like way (“This is Tim White. I don’t know if what we’re about to tell you is true, but we’re going to discover together whether this woman, Molly Sims, was taken by an alien”). And with the producer Steve Kroopnick running the show brilliantly, Sightings also ran for seven years. I loved that material. Ever since I was young, I’d always had the feeling that if aliens ever landed on earth, they would land somewhere in my vicinity.
Two whole years went by before I got my next part. Absolute Strangers hadn’t exactly put me back on the map. But then another TV movie came along. And this time I got to do something I’d never done before: play the bad guy. I was the dangerously disturbed ex-boyfriend of John Ritter’s character’s ex-wife. It was fun to play dangerously disturbed, but I don’t think I knocked anyone’s socks off.
The best thing about The Only Way Out turned out to be getting to work with the very lovely, very gifted, very much missed Mr. Ritter. John and I had first met in 1976, while I was making the third season of Happy Days. One night I saw a commercial for a new ABC show called Three’s Company, in which John did a daring and unexpected thing: he took a pratfall and tumbled right out of frame, something very few, if any, actors in the business would have had the nerve (and lack of vanity) to do. Then, as fate would have it, we had our own minor slapstick at ABC’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. John was sitting directly behind me, and when I moved my chair back from the table to get up, he was also moving back, and we bumped right into each other. When he turned around to see who the klutz was, I apologized—then I recognized him.
“Oh, wait a minute,” I said. “I just saw you on a commercial for your new show—it’s going to be great, because—wow, the way you fell out of frame.”
He smiled. I smiled. And we became friends. Very wonderful friends. We did the television movie together. We did animation together. We did Broadway together. And for ten years we raised millions of dollars for cerebral palsy, doing a telethon together. John could do anything, comedy or drama. He was handsome enough to be a leading man, but funny enough to fall on his ass. Ron Howard’s former costar Don Knotts once called John the best physical comedian on the planet. It was true. He made me laugh morning, noon, and night.
Six of us—Ron and his wife, Cheryl; John and his first wife, Nancy; and Stacey and I—used to go out to dinner on Mondays, the night when we’d be least likely to get bothered in a restaurant. We called ourselves the Monday Marauders. Oh boy, we had a lot of laughs. It’s so funny about time—you get into these nice little grooves with people you love, and you think it’ll go on forever. But time goes so fast, and nothing goes on forever.
Not only did I get another acting job right after The Only Way Out, I got the chance to work with Katharine Hepburn. The TV movie One Christmas was based on a Truman Capote short story, and it wasn’t just Hepburn who made the cast amazing: Swoosie Kurtz, Julie Harris, and Pat Hingle were also on the show. I wish I could say I was anywhere near their level. At the time, though—this was 1994—I just wasn’t.
Instead, I had burdened myself with the worst enemies an actor can have: self-consciousness and self-doubt. I was outside of myself. I was never in the moment. Why? I was more worried about the perception everyone would have of me than being immersed in telling the story. To do the real work of acting, you have to abandon yourself completely. That was a lesson I wouldn’t learn for a long time.
I was overawed just to be in Katharine Hepburn’s presence, but at the time, she was at the end of her great career. She had a longtime reputation for being as disagreeable as she was great, but I think she had mellowed by then. I literally held her lines on a piece of cardboard in front of my chest. Between takes one day, we got to talking about John Wayne, and when somebody spoke of him in the past tense, Hepburn said, “Oh, John Wayne—did I know that he died? Did I know him?” And her friend the TV journalist Cynthia McFadden, who was with her on the set, said, “Yes, you did, Katharine.”
“Oh, sad,” Hepburn said.
I never felt complacent about the crazy level of fame I had while I was still playing the Fonz. I was always amazed (still am!) when people recognized my voice on the telephone. And I was doubly amazed when people I considered great not only acknowledged my existence, but did it in a welcoming way. At Night of 100 Stars in the early eighties, Orson Welles said to me, “Finally we meet, Henry.”
“Wait a minute, what?” I said.
And that same night, I went up to Marcello Mastroianni and shook his hand. “Hello, my name is Henry Winkler,” I said.
“You do not have to tell me who you are,” said Marcello Mastroianni.
Did he see me on Italian TV? I wondered. (When I won the Telegatto, I got the chance to see Happy Days on Italian television: everything was dubbed except the Ayyy!)
And then there was Bette Davis.
Once, while I was still doing Happy Days, Bette Davis called me up and said she wanted to take me to dinner.
This was when Stacey and Jed and I were still living on Reklaw Drive in the Valley. And on the appointed evening, Ms. Davis showed up at our little house, where we had two couches and a chair, sat down, and lit up a cigarette. We actually had an ashtray—I was still smoking then—but ashtrays weren’t for Bette Davis. The ashes just went wherever they went. And I thought, You know what? It’s Bette Davis. That’s the way it is.
We went to a French restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, La Serre. I drove; Ms. Davis was in the passenger seat and Stacey sat in back. The restaurant put us in a private room. Did I feel self-conscious in the presence of this great star, this Hollywood icon? Of course I did. Was I awkward? Of course I was. But Bette Davis picked up the slack—she kept the conversation flowing; she was lovely. And her cigarette ashes, being Bette Davis’s cigarette ashes, went wherever the hell Bette Davis felt like putting them.
Remember I told you how Hollywood works? Despite my less than sterling track record as a director, I got another chance, through Ron Howard’s company, Imagine. The story, titled Cop & ½, was about a little boy who witnesses a murder, but refuses to testify unless he gets a chance to be a policeman. And he’s teamed with the police detective who’s investigating the killing, who hates kids.
I had a meeting with John Candy to play that role, and I had a lot to say about what I thought about the character. After the meeting, Ron called me. “Candy passed,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Why?”
“Apparently you talked too much in the meeting,” Ron said.
Would I ever learn? Evidently it was taking me a while.
But when I met with Burt Reynolds, I did my best to keep my lips zipped. And Burt took the part.
Burt Reynolds was well over fifty at the time: Deliverance and Smokey and the Bandit were far in his past, as was a full head of hair. But even though not a lot of leading-man parts were coming his way, he was still every inch the big star. As a matter of fact, in his contract, he had a new hairpiece, called “The Unit,” delivered to the set each week. He wanted to shoot Cop & ½ in Tampa, on the west coast of Florida. Why? Because he had rented a house in Clearwater, just a couple of miles away. Fine with me.
A couple of nights before we started shooting, Burt had a party at his house. Everyone was there, all the actors, the stunt guys, everyone. Like the star he was, Burt took his time about making his appearance. Finally, he walks down this grand staircase, chewing gum like a tough guy, and announces, before he even reaches the bottom, “Winkler, I just got off the phone with Ron Howard. He said I can fire you any time I want.”
I looked up at him, and in front of everybody I said, “Oh, good! Let me know as soon as possible. I’ve got another movie lined up right after this one—I can get started early.”
I have no idea where that came from—it shot out of my mouth like it was a hockey puck. But it actually stopped Burt in his tracks. He thought about it for a second. He descended the rest of the staircase, walked up to me, and said, “This is how you direct me: you just say, ‘Louder.’ ‘Faster.’ ‘Slower.’”
“Okay, I can do that,” I said.
“Oh, and by the way—I direct the kid,” he said.
We began shooting. Burt seemed pretty angry at the director most of the time—there was a lot of yelling. And in my calmest voice I’d say, “You know what? Let’s try it again.” Then we’d try it again, and I’d say, “All right. I think we’ve got that one.” He used to call me Thumper the Bunny, after the sweet-tempered rabbit in Bambi, because he could never get me angry.
Staying calm wasn’t always easy on that picture. One day, the mother of Norman Golden, the little boy who costarred with Burt, came to me and asked, “Why do you only do two takes with Burt and ten takes with my son?”
For a moment I was so stunned, my brain almost stopped. Then I gathered my wits. “Let’s see,” I said. “Burt will only do two takes. It’s your son’s first movie. He forgot a line. I think he can do better. He’s very talented. And he’s seven. I’m going to try and get his best. But if you have a thought about that, please let me know.” She backed off.
One day we were doing a big fight scene in a bar, and Burt reminded me that he directs the kid. Now mind you, this is the first time he’s ever exercised that right. Norman, the kid, is up in a window, talking to Burt, who’s out on the street before he comes into the bar. We rehearsed the scene; we’re about to shoot, and I whisper to Burt, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I believe it would be better if Norman pauses between his first and second lines.”
Burt then yells up to the kid: “Hey! Pause between your first and second lines!”
The scene continues, and in between takes, I whisper to Burt once more: “Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I think that Norman should get a little feisty when he says his next line to you.”
Burt yells up to the kid, “When you’re saying, ‘I’m not going with you,’ get a little feisty!”
I am now directing the child through Burt.
One weekend, Burt invited me to stay overnight at his house in Jupiter, Florida, where he lived with his beautiful wife, Loni Anderson, and their four-year-old son, Quinton. I didn’t know how to say no to the star. When I got there, I realized I’ve been invited to the house to be the playdate for Quinton. I go swimming with Quinton. We have a tuna-fish sandwich with the crusts cut off. And finally, I get to have adult time at dinner, after which Burt asks Miss Anderson to take me to her private collection of Disney figurines. And she shows me hundreds of these porcelain Snow Whites and Goofys and Mickeys, and then I get to go to my room.
So now shooting the movie is done; we’re all back in LA, and now we’re in looping—rerecording all the dialogue that was ruined by some noise that happened during the making of the film. Burt comes into the studio with a small bottle of water. I remember what he told me about how to direct him: slower, faster, louder, softer. We have to redo a line that he spoke when there was noise on the set. He does the line. I say, “All right, let’s try this again”—and he throws that little bottle of water right at me. I duck out of the way just in time. “You are so fucking lucky that you’re so short or I’d rip your head right off your neck,” he says.
“Burt,” I say, “I have never been so happy to be this short in my whole life.” Then, “Okay, let’s move on.”
“Did I get it?” he asks.
“Well…”
“I want to do it till it’s right,” Burt says.
We eventually got it right. And I emerged with my head still in place.
PS: Cop & ½ was a big box-office hit. But I decided to give directing a rest for a while.
I loved every nook and cranny of our Toluca Lake house. I loved its brilliantly colorful interior design, created by our dear friend Maxine Smith. I even loved the fact that Bob Hope lived around the corner—I never met him, but I was happy he was there!
Nevertheless, one day Stacey said to me, “You know, the air here in Toluca Lake is not great—I think we should move.”
“But I love it here,” I said.
“Yes, but the air here isn’t great for the children,” Stacey said. “Let’s just see what would happen if we put this house up for sale.”
In the interest of domestic tranquility, I decided to agree with my wife. More than that: we went out and bought a statue of St. Joseph and buried it upside down in the garden, amongst the irises—a traditional good-luck ritual if you want to sell a house.
Within a week, we had several bids, and our migration to the Westside began.
We first bought a house in Bel Air, but it needed work, so we rented a place nearby. And one day in January 1994, the Northridge earthquake happened—the biggest quake ever to hit Los Angeles. Zoe was screaming from the other side of the house; the walls were cracking, Stacey’s prized collection of mercury glass was shattering all over the floor. And as the house shifted, the front door became lodged in place, unopenable.
I rammed it with my shoulder, and I don’t know how, but it flew open. I have never been that strong again in my life.
My family had always laughed at me for making survival bags. Each bag contained a little cash, some medicine, bottled water, dehydrated food for five weeks, some warm clothing, and heavy wool socks. I grabbed our bags as we ran out the front door, and now, as we all sat in the family car, I handed out the clothing, and no one was laughing.
One small problem: I hadn’t updated the bags for a while, and when Max put on the sweatpants I packed for him, they were now shorts.
After a while, we drove over to check on Stacey’s mom and dad. Everyone was still shaken—literally and emotionally—and Stacey’s mom suggested we light a fire in the fireplace in order to get cozy. Instantly, the same light bulb flashed over everybody’s head: earthquake; broken gas mains. We all screamed “NO!” at the same time.
In 1993 Jed graduated from Georgetown and moved to New York City, where he got a job as an intern at Saturday Night Live, working for Lorne Michaels. Now it was just the four of us, and my darling daughter had entered adolescence as though fired from a cannon. From the moment she started to talk, Zoe had never taken any prisoners.
At the time—I was working during the day; Stacey was on a commission downtown for the rights of abused and neglected children—we were lucky enough to have a couple helping us in the house, and the husband, Terry, would drive Zoe to school and pick her up. And Zoe—she was maybe fourteen at the time—being Zoe, would convince Terry to lie down in the back seat of the car, and she would drive around Westwood, the home of UCLA.
Zoe at the wheel. As she was with so many things.
Around then, life taught me another big lesson. Marc Lawrence was a very young, wonderfully funny, and inventive writer—he used to work on Family Ties with Gary David Goldberg. And Marc sent me a pilot script, Monty, and I laughed out loud when I read it. It was about a Rush Limbaugh–like talk radio host (to be played by me) who has a gay daughter, and I loved it … but. I called Marc and said, “This is too controversial—can’t do it.”
“Just give it another read,” Marc said.
I did. Laughed out loud a second time. Thought to myself, Oh my God, don’t you dare. This is just too controversial—you can’t do it.
I read it a third time. It was so funny. I called Marc again and said, “I can’t do this, but I can’t not.”
Touchstone Television, the TV arm of Disney, was producing the show. And we sold it to NBC. Made a pilot, directed by the multitalented John Pasquin. Wonderful cast: Kate Burton, Cynthia Nixon, David Krumholtz as my youngest son—David was like a heat-seeking missile to a joke at age thirteen. Fun fact: this was one of the first jobs for both Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow, who were day players—just one scene apiece. NBC sent me my ticket to go to New York for the upfronts—the annual event where the networks offer all the advertisers the chance to buy commercial time on the new shows. And all of a sudden NBC dropped out. And asked for my plane ticket back. Warren Littlefield, the head of the network, had said yes to the show, but it must’ve finally dawned on somebody at GE, which owned NBC, what kind of political waters the network would be wading into with Monty.
Jeff Katzenberg, now also the head of television at Disney, was undeterred, and determined to sell it. So we sold it once more, this time to Fox. And very quickly, the show transformed from Rush Limbaugh having a gay daughter to Rush Limbaugh having a son, David Schwimmer, who went to college to become a lawyer, and now wants to be a chef. Transformed, in other words, from something sharp and fresh into a run-of-the-mill sitcom.
Marc’s original concept was unbelievably funny, and it came straight from his heart. He had a gay sister. He understood the material. He was passionate about it. It was brilliant. And suddenly, it was … mush.
This was when John Pasquin dropped out.
And the big life lesson I should have learned was: if you say yes to something because it is exactly right, and they change it, go home. Do not walk; run.
I did not go home. We made thirteen episodes of Monty, until it died the death it deserved. No one’s career was enhanced, least of all mine.
It was the second time, after Turner & Hooch, that I went completely against my gut instinct, and once again I was hit in the mouth by a two-by-four. When I give talks these days, I say, “Your head knows some things; your tummy knows everything.” I say it to kindergartners, I say it to seniors. I say it to everybody, because it is the law of living.
Tootsie Annamarie, our beautiful black Lab, was now in her golden years, and Max was now ten, the same age I was when I got—and then lost—Dervin. Our next dog was a King Charles Cavalier. We named him, optimistically, after the TV show I’d just started: Monty. Unfortunately, after the show was canceled, I would feel resentful every time I called Monty’s name. And you can’t change a dog’s name. (And unlike Tootsie, Monty’s version of playing ball was just watching the ball roll by him, never leaving his seated position.)
Our next puppy was Charlotte, a black labradoodle, our first. Charlotte was a love, and highly intelligent. Together we invented a game where she would guard an open doorway, any open doorway, as if she were a goalie on an Italian soccer team. Charlotte always won. She was a better athlete than I could ever dream of being.
I loved all our dogs so much—I still do. But the difference between then and now is that I’ve finally come to understand how the dogs allowed me to express the love that I found so difficult (except with our children) to express otherwise.
My father died in 1995, a month after his ninety-second birthday and—his birthday was the day before mine—a month after I turned fifty. Fifty years old, and my acting career was still more or less dead on arrival. My producing career, pulsing weakly. And Harry Winkler, this tiny man who had loomed so large in my life—and the vast majority of the time in such a dismissive and disrespectful way—was no more. Only Ilse, now a mere shadow of herself, remained.
“We have to go,” Stacey told me. Meaning, to the funeral.
Almost anyone else wouldn’t have thought twice about it. A parent dies, you go to the funeral. But it hadn’t dawned on me that I actually had to go to New York and be there at my father’s funeral. I literally thought, Okay, he’s dead, and my sister is there, and that’ll be that.
I didn’t say anything to Stacey. “We have to go,” she repeated.
“I don’t think we do,” I said.
But of course I surrendered to necessity. It wasn’t easy.
As we’ve discussed, I have an idiosyncratic relationship with money. Largely thanks to the guy who had just died.
But even more idiosyncratic was my relationship with him. Harry would often travel on business, alone, when I was small. He always brought back presents. I liked the presents! I remember a gift he once brought me from Honduras: a native headdress and a suction-cup bow and arrow. But I also remember there was this sense at home that on that trip and others, he was away for too long. Like, way too long.
A couple of years ago it occurred to me: could there have been another woman? Maybe even another family? I’ve thought about that.
But I just don’t know.
Another acting gig came my way: another television movie, A Child Is Missing. I played a mountain man, a hermit, who stumbles upon a child who’s been kidnapped, then becomes a suspect in the kidnapping. I did the movie because, once again, I was trying to show the world I could do something different from the Fonz. I channeled Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans—the way he ran through the forest, carrying his musket low to the ground.
But I wasn’t anything close to Daniel Day-Lewis. I was the 1995 version of Henry Winkler: I strained, I pushed and pulled, but I was so disconnected as an actor that I couldn’t access the kernel of authenticity deep inside. I did everything I could to find myself inside of myself, but the real me was still locked away, sheathed in yards of concrete. I knew it was in there somewhere—I just couldn’t get to it. It was my life’s ambition to jackhammer through the concrete shield that girded that spark of reality.
And that was most of my life until around seven years ago. Only now do I understand that things come in their own time. That you couldn’t have known then what you know now. That only the process of living gets you there: you must do the work in order to eat the fruit of growing—of being. In my late seventies, I am trying very hard to live in the moment and enjoy every moment. I’m thrilled, elated that I’m here now, at a kind of new beginning. But I am also incredibly frustrated that it took me until now to get here. There are other actors—look at Anthony Hopkins! Jack Nicholson!—who were able to do it from the very start. Not me.
After my stint as a self-conscious mountain man, Wes Craven got in touch with me. He wanted to have lunch. Great! I didn’t know anything about horror films, but I certainly knew of Wes Craven, the master of A Nightmare on Elm Street. We met at Iroha, a sushi restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, and we hit it off right away. He was lovely: professorial. Tweedy. Gentle. Soft-spoken. Thoughtful. And from that mind came terror. So we had lunch; we chatted—and then he said, “Look, I’m doing this movie Scream. I’ve got a small part I’d love you to play—the principal of the high school. Would you do it?”
“Of course I would,” I said.
So I went to Santa Rosa, where they were shooting the movie, and worked for a week. In the story, I am killed by the guy in the mask. I had tubes full of prop blood inside my clothing, and the blood would shoot from the tubes when I was stabbed. We did a take, and Wes said, “Do you think it might be a little more excruciating?”
“I do,” I said.
“Do you think that you could scream a little louder?” he asked.
“I will!” I said.
So they cleaned me up, re-tubed me, re-dressed me, refilled the blood capsules—and this time, as the knife was plunged into me multiple times, blood shooting all over the place, I screamed louder than I believed any human could. Then I lay on the floor with the camera lens very close to my eye—it took two hours to get the reflection of the mask in my eye just right. What you learn is that a horror film takes more cuts than your usual film, in order to build the tension. I hadn’t known that.
Anyway, I finish my little bit, and the movie gets done. And the executive in charge of the production company says, “We cannot put Henry’s name on the movie. We can’t put Henry’s picture on the poster. He is the Fonz. He will knock the balance of the horror off.”
Wes told me about it himself. I was a little hurt; he apologized. But that was the movie business—I understood.
Now the movie is tested: shown to test audiences who write all their comments on cards so the film can be reedited and improved. But what the producers did not anticipate was that at every screening, there was big applause when my character walked on the screen. And the executives from the production company who had made the very thoughtful decision not to put my name on the film or the poster now asked my agent if I would do press for the movie.
I extended my middle finger in the privacy of my own home—and went out and did press for Scream. Why? Because it benefited my friend, who had asked me to be in it, and it benefited me. It became a story that I still have in my life. People now talk to me about Scream. I did not need to put my name on the movie or on the poster. I am now forever associated with the first Scream. I am asked to sign every piece of Scream memorabilia at every Comic-Con anywhere in the world.
The moral of the story? Keep working!
My mother died on September 22, 1997. This time I realized that as little as I wanted to go to New York, I had to; we all had to. I spoke at her funeral. I made a couple of jokes about her. I said that she used to ride a white horse around the apartment, making sure everything was spotless. I said that when she came in to check on my homework, she was wearing a Prussian uniform. I was joking, but I was really just saying the truth about who she was and how she was to me. I pulled no punches; I had no grace. I only had extraordinary anger. My sister came up to me afterward and said, “That’s not the mother I remember.”
“Okay,” I said. “You had a different experience. That’s exactly the mother I remember.”
We moved into the Bel Air house. It had so many rooms that we literally couldn’t use all of them, which drove me out of my mind—I’d walk around the place, look into this or that empty room, shake my head, and close the door again. So after four years, we found a much more family-friendly house in Santa Monica. It, too, needed work, so we rented another house—which turned out to have been Cary Grant’s house: Cary’s widow, Barbara Grant, rented it to us.
One day while we were living there—Stacey was back East, taking a short vacation with her good friend Marcia—I got a call from Max’s school, Crossroads, where he had just started a month earlier as a ninth grader. It seemed Max had just thrown up in the alley. Max got on the phone and told me that one of the seniors had given him a sip of beer. I called Stacey; she flew home.
Of course there was more to the story than Max had let on. When I talked to the dean of students, he told me that the school was going to either expel or suspend Max, because although as a ninth grader he wasn’t allowed to leave the campus during the day, let alone drink alcohol, he had gone out at lunchtime with some seniors, and it wasn’t a sip of beer that had made him throw up—it was Kool-Aid and vodka that these older boys were enjoying during their lunch hour.
I said to the dean of students: “You don’t know us; you don’t know Max. All I can tell you is that Max really is a terrific young man, but whatever you decide, we can live with.”
He was suspended for two weeks; he was grounded by his parents for four. He could breathe, he could eat, he could do his homework. He was lucky water was included. His need to communicate with his friends who were not at that school was so great that he would write them letters every night and I would mail them the next day from my office. (I was producing Hollywood Squares at the time, with Michael Levitt. God, we had fun.)
What I found out years later was that Max would sneak my cell phone into the bathroom, lock the door, and talk to his friends from the shower (it wasn’t running).
All’s well that ends well—in his senior year, my son was given the Heart Award by his class at Crossroads for being a good, thoughtful, available human being, which he remains to this day.
Zoe continued to make our lives interesting. One weekend when she was about sixteen, Stacey accompanied me on one of my speechmaking trips; Terry and his wife watched the house and the kids while we were gone. When we returned, Terry came into the kitchen with a troubled look. “Sir,” he said, “I am so sorry, but my wife and I saw a man on the security camera, running through the ivy at three in the morning on Saturday.”
We brought Zoe into the kitchen and had Terry tell the story again. She interrupted him, full of outrage. “No!” she said. “What you saw was a ghost! You didn’t see a man! I didn’t have my boyfriend over! You saw an apparition running through the ivy!”
Years went by. Readers, you all know the situation: your grown kids are home for a much anticipated dinner, you’re seated cozily around the table, and all of a sudden the truth comes out about so many stories. They’re sitting there laughing hysterically: “Hey, Dad! Remember that time a tree jumped out in the road and hit my car?” Or, “Remember that time when there was a ghost running through the ivy? That was Brandon!”
We will now pass over my participation in the worst movie ever made by human beings, a picture where my name was in the credits and on the poster.
The film was called Ground Control. Never heard of it? Good!
Ground Control. They fired the writer; they fired the director. Kiefer Sutherland, who starred in it, even got to direct for a day. Then they brought in a new director. What makes a bad movie bad? People not knowing what they’re doing. People not knowing how to do it, but somehow getting the money to do it. It happens more times than you can imagine.
Out of ten directors, two and a half will be good. The others will direct you, the actor, to do something so wrong that it sets your stomach on fire. You say, “Wow. Let me try that.” And then you do—not the thing they just told you, but the thing that you know, from your years of training and experience, is right. And the director will say at the end of the take, “Didn’t I tell you it would work?”
“Yes, you did,” you say. “Thank you very much.”
Those are the terrible directors. Then, on the other hand, you get Jerry Paris. You get Bill Hader. Alec Berg. Bill Hader’s ex-wife, Maggie Carey, is also a really good director. You get all the other incredible directors in my life. You don’t get Ground Control.
The best thing about Ground Control was that one day during the shoot, I went to the men’s room, and as I was washing my hands my agent called and said that Adam Sandler would like me to play the coach in The Waterboy.
I’d first met Adam a couple of years earlier, not long after he sang his wonderful “Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live. Listing celebrities who were Jewish or part Jewish, the song contained the delicious lines:
Guess who eats together at the Carnegie Deli
Bowser from Sha Na Na and Arthur Fonzarelli
At the time, Jed had a job at the management company Brillstein-Grey, where Adam was a client. So I took the opportunity to call Adam and tell him, “I just want to say that I’m thrilled to be in your song.” And Adam thanked me, and invited me to his house. And I went, and it was awkward.
Adam hosted basketball games at his house on the weekends, and there were a lot of celebrities there: it was the first time I met Brad Pitt, the first time I met Jim Carrey. Chris Rock was there; Kevin James was there. I spent a lot of time talking with Jim. Carrey was being Carrey, talking rapid-fire about his anxiety, Catholicism, guilt; without benefit of a degree, I was trying to psychoanalyze him—and I realize now that I was talking through my hat. I thought this was the way to relate to him, but I now see that a film like a lizard’s had descended over his eyes; clearly he was thinking, What the fuck is this guy talking about? All the guys at Adam’s were old buddies and good athletes, and I was once again eleven years old and chasing the cool kids at school. I did not play basketball. I stood on the sideline, feeling left out—even though I had left myself out.
But Adam didn’t see my awkwardness, or was nice enough not to mention it. And he offered me the part in The Waterboy anyway.
To work with Adam Sandler was to form a huge admiration for him. He didn’t direct the picture—that was Frank Coraci, who is another fine director. But Adam really is in charge of every one of his movies. He knows every detail about everything that’s happening on his production. Everything. And he knows how to bring everyone in. He has a whole orchestra of musical instruments in his trailer—anybody who plays can come in and jam with him. In between scenes, he would get an easel and a canvas in there, too, and a paper bag filled with cans of spray paint, all different colors. Everybody gets a can. If an eleven-year-old walks up to him on a location and says, “Adam Sandler, I love you,” Adam says, “Hey, here’s a spray can.” Now that kid goes from being wide-eyed and overwhelmed to being part of the pack, spraying red paint on the canvas. Adam pulls everybody in: “You know what? Maybe a little more yellow right here. What do you think? Hey, red—right here.” That’s the genius, and the humanness, of Adam Sandler.
With the work finally completed on the Santa Monica house, we moved into the cozy and just-right-sized home we’ve now happily lived in for twenty-seven years. Of course, what I didn’t realize at the time was that our departure from Toluca Lake had nothing to do with air quality, and we were now living exactly eight minutes from Stacey’s mother and father.
It takes me a while to catch on.