Free My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall Page B

He was a great comedian who excelled by telling funny stories rather than punch lines. He was folksy in a family way, like Bill Cosby later was on his television show. Danny was also the most religious comedian we ever worked for and a legend for his charity in founding the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. One day he invited Jerry and me to his home and showed us his beautiful swimming pool. At the end of the pool was a statue of Jesus. Jerry said, “Well, you have a good lifeguard, Danny.” I chuckled inside, but Danny didn’t laugh at all. We never joked again about religion around him. He was gracious and sweet and always so good to writers. But he was complex in a way that we sometimes couldn’t understand. One night we went to a charity event with him in a kind of seedy neighborhood of Los Angeles. He lifted his pant leg to zip up his boot, and we saw a gun sticking out.
    “Danny, you carry a gun?” I asked.
    “Always,” he said.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “I do charity work in many neighborhoods that aren’t safe. You have to protect yourself,” he said.
    It made sense but seemed at the same time incongruous for a religious man to be packing a pistol in his sock.
    Danny had a great influence on me because he was such a family man; he had a wife and kids. I wanted that, too. So with my career going so well, I decided that it was time to make a commitment in my personal life. On New Year’s Eve, 1963, I became engaged. On March 9, 1963, I married Barbara Sue Wells, whom I had been dating for over a year. We were a perfect match. I was a sick hypochondriac and she was a nurse. Originally from Cincinnati, she had moved to California in 1961, after another boy left her standing at the altar. She and her friend Donna Parmer both worked at Cedars, and before they started making money they would eat thepatients’ pudding and custard in the hospital refrigerator just to save money. When you went over to their apartment, they would serve it to guests.
    We got married in Las Vegas. We didn’t have enough money to fly our parents out, so we just invited our California friends. My father and her mother were mad about the fact we did not include them. Her father was fine with it and wished us well. My mother was only disappointed I didn’t marry a doctor, but I told her a nurse would take care of me just as well.
    Our best man was Tom Kuhn, and Donna Parmer was our maid of honor. They were dating, and they were the ones who’d introduced us. Joey Bishop paid for our hotel room at the Sands, and Phil Foster paid for us to see a show. We paid for the rest of the wedding. Our wedding party included about twenty people altogether. To us it was perfect, but to our parents, to have their two oldest children get married without them in attendance was an eternal disappointment. We didn’t have time or money for a honeymoon, and on Monday morning we were both back at work.
    Now that I was married, my job, salary, and responsibilities were carried to a whole new level. When Milt Josefsberg was head writer on
The Joey Bishop Show
, he was very generous to me. He gave me the credit as “script consultant” every sixth show. He taught me everything he had learned from writing for Jack Benny. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, Joey fired Milt. I couldn’t imagine why Joey would do such a thing, but again, he asked me to stick around. Joey was very combative with other people, but not with me. So I brought in Jerry Belson, and together we wrote scripts for Joey. Just when I was starting to really make a living, my mother and my blind grandmother moved to California. My mother had not gotten along with my father for years, and she heard that California had some nice retirement homes for the blind, where Nanny could live for next to nothing. They arrived shortly after Barbara and I got married. Unfortunately for my mother, my dad followed her out west a few months later. I told them I could help them out with rent, but I