1976 interview with Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams!!!

[catlover79]

I found an old book via Amazon, published in mid-1976, called TV Talk 2, by Peggy Herz. It was published by Scholastic, so I think it was aimed towards younger readers. But it is still a fun read, and interesting to see what these sitcom stars of the time had to say. Here's all who was interviewed:

1. Lindsay Wagner (Bionic Woman)
2. Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams (Laverne & Shirley)
3. Gregory Sierra and Hal Linden (Barney Miller)
4. Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time)
5. Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul (Starsky & Hutch)
6. Gabe Kaplan, John Travolta, Ron Palillo and Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs (Welcome Back, Kotter)
7. Devon Scott (The Tony Randall Show)
8. John Schuck (Holmes & Yoyo)

I will transcribe each interview and paste it on the respective show pages - hope everyone enjoys!!

[catlover79]

Two brewery workers from Milwaukee hit TV with the zing of a popping champagne cork. Laverne & Shirley came on their air in January 1976 - and surprised everybody by zooming to the top of the ratings. Overnight, the show became the biggest new comedy hit of the season. Ever since, it has been rolling off the assembly line with great success. It has been knocking down its competition - and tapping millions of viewers' funny bones. And why not? It's like a cool breeze on a hot day. It's different.

Laverne and Shirley are gutsy, fun-loving, fast-talking originals. They aren't like anybody else on TV. They aren't glamourous secretaries, elegant fashion designers, or sophisticated TV producers. They work in the bottle cap division of Shotz Brewery. They punch a tme clock, do their work, go bowling, eat pizza, and dream about the future.

They don't live in a beautiful penthouse apartment with a maid and a butler. They live in a basement apartment. The men upstairs aren't tall, dark and handsome. They are Lenny and Squiggy - and Prince Charmings they aren't! You need earplugs when Lenny and Squiggy are around which, in fact, is most of the time.

Laverne and Shirley struggled through high school together. Now they are struggling to make it out in the "real world" and it isn't always easy, even with Carmine, Lenny and Squiggy to help them!

Producer Garry Marshall came up with the idea for Laverne & Shirley. At first, the two girls were to be in one episode of Happy Days and that was all. Garry decided to keep it all in the family. He called his sister Penny. "He asked me if I was doing anything that week," Penny recalled with a smile. "I said no, so he asked me if I wanted to play a bimbo on Happy Days. I said sure. Then he asked Cindy Williams to play Shirley and she agreed. We did the show and had a good time."

But that wasn't the end of Laverne and Shirley. Viewers liked the two zany characters. Three weeks later, Garry Marshall pitched the idea of a Laverne & Shirley series to ABC. The network liked the idea. "It all happened very fast," Penny acknowledged. "I was already under contract to ABC. I figured if this show didn't go I'd have a shot at another one." Penny needn't have worried. The show went through the roof in the ratings.

"When someone told us the ratings of the first show, we were all in a state of shock," Penny recalled. "We didn't really know what the numbers meant but we knew they were good. I think it made us nervous. We just looked at each other!

"We had to do the first shows so quickly. When we looked at them later, we saw that there had been too much yelling and and that Shirley and I were too 'hyper.' We have toned the show down since the first two episodes - in volume at least!"

For Penny Marshall, being in a hit TV show meant having two hits in one family. Penny is married to Rob Reiner, one of the stars of All in the Family. "Rob and I understand each other," she said. "He knows the pressures of being in a weekly series."

Does Penny identify with the character she plays? Penny smiled at the question."I look like her. I talk like her," she replied. "But I'm not as tough. I get scared when we drop a rating point. I say, 'See, we're on our way down!' I worry about what kind of show we're doing, whether we're doing valid shows or not. The characters we played on Happy Days were one-dimensional. Now you see that a lot of Laverne's toughness is based on insecurity - and you see other aspects of both our characters. That's good."

Penny grew up in NYC. "In the Bronx," she said. Her father was a filmmaker, her mother, a dancing teacher. "I loved junior high school," she said. "But I didn't like high school. I went to an all-girls high school. The lack of guys around was not a thrill. That happened to be the school in my district. To get to a coed school I would have had to to take two subway trains and a bus.

"School wasn't the center of activity, anyway," Penny added. "The neighborhood was. Kids in the neighborhood went to all different schools. Then we'd meet on the fence after three o'clock. I didn't join a lot of school activities, but I hung out on the fence a lot. I didn't want to miss anything! From there you could see what was going on on the parkway, you could see what was going on in the candy store, and so on. Then on Friday nights we'd all go to the movies in a group."

One thing Penny loved was going to camp. "I went every summer from the time I was 8," she said enthusiastically.

Having a mother who ran a dancing school meant that Penny took a lot of dancing lessons, whether she wanted to or not. "I didn't want to dance, but as little kids, everyone took dancing. I tended to be a troublemaker. Since my mother was right there, I got punished! Every year I threatened to quit," Penny admitted. "My mother would say, 'OK, you do the grocery shopping and the cleaning like all the other kids do on Saturday.'" Penny laughed. "I didn't know anybody who did that but it kept me in dancing school. Whenever one of my dates came to the door, my mother would ask him, 'Do you dance? Sing? Wll you pull curtains for the show?'

"I took dancing through high school. It was precision tap, like the Rockettes. Part of it was fun. My mother would say, 'Why do you hang out on the parkway?' She'd name 300 kids who weren't there. I'd say, 'Yeah, but there are 60 kids out there - they just don't take dancing lessons!'"

Penny was put in an honors class during her sophomore year in high school. "I had a high IQ, but I was a total underachiever. I was not a good worker. I tried to get out of the honors class. I wanted to be like everybody else," she said. "I wanted to be in the regular class. Being in honors meant that during your senior year, which is usually a breeze, you end up taking things like solid geometry and physics. I wanted a nice little art course!

"Boys were my only great interest at any time. Acting didn't come until I had dropped out of college. In junior high I was in a play only because it could get me out of science and math. I was very embarrassed, though."

Penny smiled. "I had a lot of friends," she said. "I was always joking. The guys I liked didn't necessarily like me on a going-steady basis, but friendship was better than nothing. I was not an attractive child - plus I was a tomboy on top of it."

Penny went to college at the University of New Mexico. "I wanted to go to Ohio State," she said, "but New Mexico was eager for out-of-state students. My mother wasn't too good at geography. She thought New Mexico was closer to New York than Ohio! She also liked it because it had a new infirmary and a new cafeteria. Those were her main requirements: Eat and be well."

Penny married a football player and dropped out of college during her junior year. "One of us had to go to work," she explained. At first, she worked as as a secretary. Then, after her daughter was born, she decided to teach dancing. "I needed something physical to do," she said. "I had gained a lot of weight." So all her dancing lessons came in handy after all. Eventually, they led her into acting.

A little theater group in town asked her to direct the dances in a show. "I said no, but I agreed to be in the chorus," Penny recalled. "I got good reviews. People began to encourage me to take up acting."

One aspect of acting really appealed to her. "They stay up late at night!" Penny exclaimed. "I like that! I come alive at 4:30 in the afternoon and like to stay up until about 3 AM."

Gradually she began to get speaking parts in plays. Her marriage ended in divorce, but her acting career was just beginning. "I decided I wanted to get out of Albuquerque," she said. "I had two choices: I could go back to New York and have my parents treat me like a 16-year-old or I could go to California, where my brother Garry was."

She picked California. In the summer of 1967, she headed for Los Angeles with her baby girl. At first, things weren't easy. "I worked for a temporary employment place," she said. "At one point I worked for McDonald's. I used a calculator to figure out profits and losses. I also worked for a hospital. I knew everybody who didn't pay their bills.

"The mainstay of acting is sticking it out. If you're around long enough you'll get it. I never felt that I absolutely had to act. I just did it because I enjoyed it. I once had one line on a TV show and I got paid $150 for it. I said to myself, 'Hey, this is easier than sitting at a calculator at McDonald's!'"

Bigger and better acting parts began to come along. Penny played Jack Klugman's secretary in The Odd Couple and had roles in other TV series. But nothing captured the hearts of TV viewers like her portrayal of Laverne DeFazio.

Laverne is a realist. "This is it. This is our life," is her attitude. Her friend, Shirley Feeney, is a dreamer. She is waiting for the man of her dreams to drive up in a sleek car and whisk her away. Only Lenny and Squiggy are available at the moment? Shirley will wait.

"Not the powerful impact of a Fonzie"

Cindy Williams, who plays Shirley Feeney, wasn't really sure she wanted to do a TV series. "My career revolved around films and the theater," Cindy told me. "Being in a TV series locks you into playing a certain character for a period of time. I didn't want to be typecast. I no longer worry about that, though. I understand now how many characters I can play. Shirley is a part of me, but she is a character I play. I'm not playing myself.

"I'm not going to have the powerful impact of a Fonzie," Cindy continued. "I have a changeable face. I photograph differently if my hair is long or if it's short or whatever. I can look totally different. I was concerned about that at first but now I think I'm lucky."

Cindy started acting when she was very young. I started putting on plays in the backyard when I was about 5," Cindy said. "I'd do everything - produce, direct, and star in them. Then when I was in church camp I was in charge of the talent shows. That's probably the best work I've ever done!"

Cindy was born in Van Nuys, CA. Her family moved to Texas when she was a year old. "But we moved back to Van Nuys when I was 10," she explained. "I was 16 when I decided I wanted to be an actress. First I wanted to be a nurse. I liked the drama of it - and the costume. I could see myself throwing open the door of the operating room and crying, 'Stand back! Plasma arriving!'"

Cindy liked school. "I didn't get good grades, though," she said. "I just couldn't concentrate. I'd be off daydreaming or making jokes in my head. I'd look at the other kids and wonder about them. I was interested in people."

Cindy laughed. "One day when we were having an algebra test, the teacher has the shortest boy and the tallest boy in class hand out the test papers. I went through the entire test wondering why he had picked those two boys. They looked ridiculous together. I flunked the test.

"My parents wanted me to learn a solid, decent trade. I learned to type 30 words a minute - with 19 errors. I tried to explain that I was double-jointed and couldn't get the right pressure on the keys."

High school was the best time of her life, Cindy said. "I was into and out of everything," she explained. "I was vice president of the Girls' League, my boyfriend was class president. I went out for cheerleading, but sprained my ankle on the first downbeat. I was very involved with high school politics, and so on. But gradually I began to get involved in drama and I began to realize there was more to high school than politics and cheerleading.

"I didn't have the grades to get into the UCLA Theater Arts department, so I went to Los Angeles City College, which is also very good. I was wrapped up in theater arts by then.

"I took other credits, but dropped some of them. Art history was the only other thing I really liked. I can remember things I want to remember." Cindy smiled, remembering those school days. I took an art course and in college from a fabulous teacher. But I didn't know what he was talking about. I begged to leave the course and he let me out. Even history of the theater I couldn't remember. I wanted to get up and act! I was very nervous in college. I knew the next stop was LIFE."

She delayed taking that step as long as possible. "I was graduated from college just about the time when the era of the hippies and the Vietnam protestors was beginning," Cindy noted. "My friends were political activists. For about two years I lived with no kind of schedule. I was a waitress and so on. Then I did nothing for a while. Finally, a friend pointed out that that was wrong - and I started up again. Things began to fall into place. One thing led to another."

After minor roles in feature films and TV shows, she was chosen for a role in George Cukor's film, Travels With My Aunt, starring Maggie Smith. Then she was cast in Francis Ford Coppola's American Graffiti, playing Ron Howard's girlfriend, followed by The Conversation, and several other films. She had met Garry Marshall early in her career - and he had remembered her when he needed someone to play Shirley Feeney.

Cindy and I met one afternoon after she had been working on Laverne & Shirley all day. "It's been a long day," she admitted. "We've been on our feet all day with five-minute breaks here and there. It's like being a waitress, only you don't get any tips!"

Cindy is single and lives in Beverly Hills. "I'll go home and loaf around," she said.

"Are you a good cook?" I asked her.

"Last night I cooked a good meal," she replied. "But I rarely do that. I usually have a cup of soup - and Oreo cookies about 2 AM."

Cindy and Henry Winkler, who plays Fonzie on Happy Days, have been friends for a long time. "He's my buddy," she said. She has no special boyfriend at the moment. "I have one Siamese cat," she explained, "and I love to play backgammon and cards.

"I hope to stay unaffected by the success of Laverne & Shirley," Cindy added. "I think I will. It's a joy to be recognized. I sometimes feel very humbled by it."

Arm in arm, Laverne and Shirley - and Penny and Cindy - have sung, danced and laughed their way into the hearts of millions of TV viewers. They are making their dreams come true, all right, and sharing the fun with all of us.

[Marvo301]

Talk about people from two different backgrounds! Penny and Cindy are as different as well...Laverne and Shirley!!!!

[catlover79]

True! Still - I can't imagine anyone else besides Penny and Cindy as Laverne and Shirley. They were the best girl friends/partners in crime/slapstick duo since Lucy and Ethel!!!

[biffbronson]

Thanks so much for transcribing that! Really interesting stuff.

I think the line about Penny's mom thinking New Mexico was closer to New York than Ohio is priceless.

I can understand what Cindy meant about her hair -- she looked very different on Hawaii Five-O (in '74) with long hair, as opposed to Cannon later that same year with sort of a longish Dorothy Hamill cut.

Did you buy the book mainly for the Sierra (and Linden) section?

[catlover79]

No problem!! The only two chapters left to transcribe are the ones about Starsky & Hutch and Welcome Back, Kotter. I'll try to have those up by the end of the weekend.

As for your last question - HECK YES!!!!!

[Marvo301]

Originally Posted by catlover79

True! Still - I can't imagine anyone else besides Penny and Cindy as Laverne and Shirley. They were the best girl friends/partners in crime/slapstick duo since Lucy and Ethel!!!

Agreed!!

[catlover79]

"Betty, please pick up your HASH BLACKS!!!"

[Marvo301]

Originally Posted by catlover79

"Betty, please pick up your HASH BLACKS!!!"

That was one of the funniest scenes I've ever seen. Truly a classic.