Blue-Collar Knight : Garry Marshall doesn’t have round-table manners, but he’s been a blessing to Robin Williams, Julia Roberts and his sister Penny

Garry Marshall’s most famous movie may be the ultimate woman’s rescue fantasy, but he’s found lately that women may like “Pretty Woman” on the screen, but they don’t expect a “Pretty Woman” ending in real life.

In Marshall’s next film, “Frankie and Johnny,” based on Terrence McNally’s Off Broadway play “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” he takes a more bread-and-butter approach to romance.

“What’s interesting about a lot of today’s women is that they believe the opposite of ‘Pretty Woman.’ Prince Charming is not coming, he got hit by a truck and they’re not looking anymore,” he says.

“Frankie is a waitress and one of those women who has given up on men,” Marshall says of the character played by Michelle Pfeiffer. “Johnny (Al Pacino) is a short-order cook in his 40s, trying for a second shot. Two very ordinary people trying to make a relationship.”

Twentieth Century Fox wanted to buy the film rights to the play for Marshall in 1987, but Paramount beat them to it, buying the project for Mike Nichols. Two years later, Nichols dropped out and Marshall was called in. “I’ve been the second choice on most of the pictures I’ve directed,” he says.

“I love blue-collar themes and I truly liked this story, that love can blossom in the depths of despair and the seediness of life,” he says of the film, which recently completed shooting in New York City and Los Angeles. The movie is scheduled to be released in October.

Marshall may have less faith in white knights these days, but he’s successfully played that role to many actors over the years. Where was Henry Winkler before “Happy Days”? Robin Williams before “Mork & Mindy”? His sister Penny, today an Oscar-nominated director, before “Laverne & Shirley”? Or, for that matter, Ron Howard, who may have been charming as Opie, part of the “American Grafitti” ensemble cast, but wasn’t a household name until “Happy Days.”

And where, most recently, would Julia Roberts be without “Pretty Woman”?

But Marshall doesn’t think of himself as a knight. At 56, he admits he’s such a bad driver he could probably never find a princess’s tower and is so shy he probably wouldn’t have been able to invite her down if he had. His table manners would surely have gotten him thrown out of Camelot. He uses the English language somewhat like Casey Stengel. After Richard Gere introduced him to the Dalai Lama as a man who “makes people laugh,” he said of the holy man, “He doesn’t do shtick!”

Marshall reached directing by a roundabout route. “I always wanted to be a drummer,” he recalls, sitting in his aggressively modest Toluca Lake office following an all-night shoot on “Frankie and Johnny,” “but I went into journalism.” In the army in Korea, Marshall wrote for Stars & Stripes, and on his return joined the New York Daily News as a copy boy. “I was never very good at it,” he admits.

He began writing material for revues and nightclub comics, among them Phil Foster and Joey Bishop. “I guess Phil Foster turned my life around,” he says today. “I was working in some revue in the Village and he came in and said, ‘You’re making three waiters hysterical, but the audience isn’t laughing. So, you got a choice. You can make the waiters and the band laugh or you can try for the audience. Sometimes it’s not the same thing.’

“He made me think about how hip, how far out I wanted to be,” Marshall says. “He made me understand there were different audiences out there. More important than that, he told me that if I wanted to write humor out of my imagination I’d ‘be out of the business in two weeks.’ He said, ‘You must look at the world through a comedy eye. You must look every day at people--their behavior, what they say, because actual people will say things you could never think of to write.’ ”

With Foster and Bishop’s support, Marshall was hired as a writer on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” and discovered a career. “I was a journalist,” he says, “I was a drummer. I was everything. I didn’t know what the heck I was. But with Jack Paar the job was very specific--no confusion. You came in each day. You wrote five pages of jokes. You handed the pages in. You sat back while he picked what he wanted. You went home.

“The pressure was to write five pages of jokes every day. I did it and I thought, ‘This is what I like to do.’ My father always said, ‘Get a job you can do if you have a toothache or a headache.’ Whenever I was sick, even if I had broken up with a girl and my heart was broken, I could still do the five pages. I was 24.”

In 1961, Marshall moved to Hollywood to write for Joey Bishop’s television show and soon joined forces with comedy writer Jerry Belson to become one of the industry’s early free-lance successes, writing more than 100 sitcom episodes for such series as “The Danny Thomas Show,” “The Lucy Show” and the original “Dick Van Dyke Show.” One year they tried to set a record for the number of episodes written in a season and did--33. “Something Joey taught me,” he says, “throw the humor away . . . throw the lines away, let them float at the side of the screen. I love that.”

Critics and fans speak with awe of Marshall’s sense of timing. He claims TV producer Sheldon Leonard explained it early on: “He said you have to break it down into three areas. One is creativity; the other is the experience to know how to market it, distribution for films or the right time slot for television, and the third is time in history.

“You sometimes have the right show at the right time, or sometimes your time just comes around,” Marshall says. “I was always doing very gentle work, big laughs but not mean-spirited humor, and suddenly, in the ‘70s, it happened.”

“The Odd Couple,” a 1969 sitcom starring Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, was the pair’s first hit and lasted for five years.

“Happy Days” in 1973 was the avatar of a show at the right time in history. “I did a pilot called ‘New Family In Town,’ ” Marshall recalls, “not a great title and it didn’t sell. At the time Universal was doing ‘American Graffiti.’ The casting director called for my pilot, watched it, and hired Ron Howard off of it to be in the movie.

“Then, ‘time in history,’ ” he laughs. “ ‘Graffiti’ was coming out, a play called ‘Grease’ was opening and ABC said ‘we have one of those lying around someplace.’ Michael Eisner at ABC and Tom Miller at Paramount said ‘Let’s do it again,’ and we did. In the second pilot we added Fonzie, and that’s what went on the air”--complete with Winkler in a leather jacket which the network, “worried about hoodlum connotations,” hated, Marshall says. The show ran 11 years and the jacket is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

In January, 1976, Marshall launched “Laverne & Shirley,” starring his sister Penny and Cindy Williams, which became the first and only television series to debut at No. 1 in the ratings.

“He single-handedly put the Paramount television department on the map,” says longtime friend Carl Reiner. “The best thing about him was when Paramount asked him what they could do for him--he only made $350-million for them that year--he said he wanted a basketball court. He didn’t realize he could have had anything.”

“Laverne and Shirley” also reflected a side of Marshall consistent with much of his work since, a fascination with blue-collar themes. “Pretty Woman,” for all its glitz, deals with the consummation of blue-collar dreams. “Frankie and Johnny,” based on Terrence McNally’s acclaimed play, is pure working-class drama.

“Years ago,” Marshall recalls, “people asked me what kind of movies I wanted to make. Some (directors) do horror movies, some do comedy. I had just come from sitcom . . . I did sitcom. I said I wanted to do something based on a play some day, because the dialogue would probably be very good. I didn’t want to do movies with hundreds of camels crossing the desert followed by tanks and this and that.”

Marshall and his sisters Penny (Carol Penny) and Ronny were raised on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, oddly enough, across the street from where Penny’s future husband, Rob Reiner, grew up. Their father, Tony, made documentary films. Marjorie, their mother, ran a dance studio in the basement of their apartment building. (After her death in 1983, Marshall built the Marjorie Ward Marshall Dance Center at Northwestern University, his alma mater, in her memory).

“My father was a great boss,” he says, “and I guess the creativity came from my mother, who had the sense of humor.”

Throughout his career, Marshall has used his family in many of his shows--the most extreme example being his sister Penny, 10 years his junior. “After a couple years at the University of New Mexico,” he recalls, “Penny came out here with a baby and a divorce and asks me what she should do with her life. I said, ‘What is it you love to do? I’ll help you do it.’ She said, ‘Nothing! I love nothing!’ I told her to go home and tell me when she loved something. Eventually she said, ‘Once, I did ‘Oklahoma.’ I liked that, I liked when they laughed at me.’ I told Penny she should be an actress and she said”--here he imitates a resigned whine--” ’I can’t. I don’t know.’ She was absolutely convinced an actress had to be beautiful and she wasn’t beautiful enough.”

Penny got a few parts here and there, Marshall recalls, and then came “The Odd Couple,” where, in the show’s second season, he hired her to play Jack Klugman’s secretary. “It was a big thing for her,” Marshall says. “She got four years on the show and learned to work. She made a lot of mistakes but they helped her.

“Then, in the third season of ‘Happy Days,’ I got stuck for a script, so we whipped up one about a couple of bimbos from the wrong side of the tracks who the boys date. We were late and I didn’t want to take a chance, so I asked Penny and Cindy, who I knew very well, to play the characters,” he recalls. “The first time they were on the show, the camera operator, Sam Rosen, said ‘Come here.’ He showed me a two-shot through the camera of Penny and Cindy standing in their costumes and said, “That’s a series.’

“I always was looking around and saying, ‘What is not out there?” he adds. “There were no blue-collar women at all. I said I thought it’s time for blue collar and took a shot at it.”

Marshall says he “just bursts with pride” over his sister’s success since. “To be honest, she’s so much more comfortable as a director,” he says, recalling that he spotted her directing talent when he played a bit part in Penny’s first film, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” “As an actress she was never sure,” he says. “As a director she knows she can do it. She has that wonderful stamina and the most powerful concentration of anybody I ever met,” says Marshall, adding with obvious pride that in the Oscar nominations this year, “10 best performances, and two of them (Robert De Niro in “Awakenings” and Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman”) are from me and my sister!”

Marshall’s father and sister Ronny were both tapped by Marshall for production slots on “Happy Days,” and son Scott, now a senior in the film department at Northwestern, appeared in the film “Beaches” (playing an Avis clerk), as did Marshall’s two daughters. It was Scott, in fact, who was responsible for “Mork & Mindy,” when the then-7-year-old asked his father to do a show about outer space. Penny’s daughter Tracy is in “Frankie and Johnny.” Marshall has also cast himself in his shows, most notably as the drummer in the band for the “Happy Days” annual prom. He has also been cast by other directors in their projects, among them the casino boss in “Lost in America” and a television executive in the current “Soapdish.”

But for his problems with driving, there might have been less family to tap. Marshall explains how he met Barbara, his wife of 28 years: “I’m a terrible driver, and she lived next door and I dated whoever was in the next building. She was a nurse, too. I am a bit of a hypochondriac and my mother always thought I’d marry a doctor.” Not surprisingly, Barbara has played a nurse in three of his films.

Oh yes, and the table habits. “You just don’t want to eat with him,” laughs Carl Reiner, “you need a poncho. Most people keep their food separate . . . he mushes it all together.” “Yes,” Marshall laughs. “I do have strange eating habits . . . I daydream when I eat.” And when he drives. A decade ago he drove home, parked his car in the garage, and realized he had moved out of the house months before.

About that time, Marshall decided to quit television. “I had become an administrative rather than a creative force, and it wasn’t fun. I told my wife I was going to bail out. I never regretted it.”

Although his first attempts at producing films--”How Sweet It Is” in 1967 and the following year’s “The Grasshopper” (Jacqueline Bissett’s first starring film) did nothing, Marshall has had more success directing. Some worked better than others, but all performed soundly at the box office.

First was 1982’s “Young Doctors in Love,” followed by “The Flamingo Kid”; “Nothing in Common,” his most critically acclaimed film, starring Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason; “Overboard” with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell and the dramatic hit “Beaches” in 1988. And, of course, “Pretty Woman.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of the Disney Studios, says: “The success of the work that Garry has been doing for literally 25 years is the best possible affirmation of his skills and talent. ‘Pretty Woman’ is the most successful film in the history of Walt Disney Studios.” It has grossed more than $400 million from foreign, domestic and cassette sales, according to Marshall.

But, as Marshall might say in his convoluted syntax (he often puts the noun at the end of his sentences). “Explaining to actors, it” isn’t always easy. “Michelle said to me yesterday, ‘We’re all talking like you now!’ Trying to think and speak at the same time is too hard for me,” he says. “I have a new thing I’ve started. I work with an Italian cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, and he said I didn’t speak English clear. So now if I speak fast, I’ll say ‘wait, wait, in English what I’m saying is. . . .’ It helps, it helps me slow up.”

Word is that he will soon be preparing a “Pretty Woman” sequel, and sometime in the next couple of years he and his sisters plan a project close to their hearts--a feature about a struggling dance teacher in the 1950s, “a career woman ahead of her time,” he says, and based on the life of their much-missed mother.

“Penny will probably direct,” he says, “and Ronny and I will probably produce it. It’s called ‘Time Step.’ My father right away calls,” Marshall laughs, “calls me on the set of ‘Pretty Woman.’ I get on the phone, and he says, ‘I figured it out. You know who should play me? Anthony Quinn!’ ”

Marshall is also hoping to see his third play, co-written with Lowell Ganz, produced in San Diego soon with George C. Scott starring. The play, “Wrong Turn at Lungfish,” had a successful run last year at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

Seeking a personal explanation for his success, Marshall muses, “I knew that in growing up the badges that you wore to be popular, to get attention, the best ones were to beat somebody up or be a ball player. . . . I couldn’t do those things. Another part of our community respected great scholars. I couldn’t do that either. But I discovered that if you made people laugh they let you hang around. I was too shy to to do that. Then I discovered if I put it on paper it all worked.”

Penny Marshall has another reason. “It’s beyond bizarre. My brother and I both had actors nominated for an Academy Award this year, and Rob too! It’s very strange. My brother and I giggle about it. . . . We look at each other and go ‘Can you believe this?’ All of us from the same block in the Bronx. It must have been the water.”