My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall Page B

chauffeur named Abe Rothman, and one day Abe was driving Jack in New York City on a publicity junket. Abe gave Jack some pages of jokes that Mark and Lowell had written. Jack liked the material and sent it to me. Despite the fact that Lowell and Mark were dropouts from Queens College, I liked their material, too. You don’t necessarily need a college degree to write comedy. So I flew them out and gave them some work as punch-up writers. They lasted a little while, and then Jack and Tony asked me to fire them, which was sad but not unusual. So I thought we had heard the last from Lowell and Mark.
    A few weeks later, however, I was sitting in the live audiencewatching a run-through when I saw them in the stands, watching the rehearsal.
    “Didn’t I fire you?” I asked.
    “Yes,” said Lowell.
    “Then what are you doing here?” I asked.
    “We have no place else to go,” said Mark.
    “We don’t have enough money to fly back to New York. So we’re trying to watch the show and learn how to improve our writing,” said Lowell.
    I was amazed by their patience and persistence. They eventually wrote another script on spec, and I bought it. Jack and Tony liked the script so much that we rehired them.
    I grew closer to Jack and Tony each year. Every Monday the three of us would go to lunch at a Hungarian restaurant on Melrose where Tony loved to eat. Jack was always starving and would eat anything. But with my allergies the only thing I could eat on the menu was eggs. So every Monday while I ate scrambled eggs with toast and they ate more adventurous Hungarian food, we would discuss
The Odd Couple
and where we wanted it to go. Jack wanted athletes and sports announcers to appear as guest stars, while Tony was always trying to get opera stars onto the show. One time he convinced the great opera diva Marilyn Horne to guest-star. I met with Marilyn and asked her what she would like to do on the show. She said ever so sweetly, “I would like to get kissed at the end.” In most of her operas she had to die by the final curtain. So in her
Odd Couple
episode she got her kiss from Jack Klugman.
    In addition to opera stars, Tony liked pretending to be a lawyer. We had several episodes in which he said lines like “I’m defending myself” or “I’m defending Oscar.” He also liked to have a sidebar with the judge and have us write schtick for him—like playing with the judge’s gavel. His most well-known courtroom episode of
The Odd Couple
was called “My Strife in Court.” In the episode, now even featured on youtube.com , he gives advice to the jury not to “assume” anything because when you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” Another funny thing Tony liked to do was jump onto a desk from the ground. So whenever we didn’t have anending, he would suggest that he jump on a desk, and he was able to do it well into his sixties.
    Tony knew when a script was funny and he knew when it was not. He wanted every script to be top-notch. He would give a speech to the writers each year that basically said this: “Soon Jack and I will be at the home for aging actors and there will be people at the home with us. We will invite them into our rooms to see old episodes of
The Odd Couple
. When I’m showing my friends these episodes at the home, I don’t want to cringe. I want to be proud and say that we did the best we could do with this show. This was our best work and we are content.” Whenever Tony gave this speech we could not help but be inspired. We wanted Tony and Jack to be proud of all of us, and the shows that we were producing and writing. The image of them not cringing at the old people’s home always stayed with us.
    While the writing for the show improved with each episode, unfortunately, my partner, Jerry Belson, got sicker. For as long as I had known him he’d suffered from ulcers. But as the years went by they got worse and he began to rely on drugs for relief and escape. Sometimes he