Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [59]
“What is it with you?” he said. “Every scene is opening night?”
“Yes,” I said, incredulous. “Isn’t it with you?”
But it was with Bill Persky, who was a co-creator of the series, along with his writing partner, Sam Denoff. As the Executive Producer I worked closely with both of them, but I had an immediate bond with Billy. He liked women, and was one of the first men I’d ever worked with who had no problem having a woman as a boss (even one in her twenties). There weren’t a lot of guys who did. Lucille Ball was our landlord at Desilu Studios, where we rented our soundstage. She had real power—she owned the studio. Tony told me years later that, whenever someone was looking for me, the joke was “She’s having a meeting in the men’s room with Lucy.” That was the climate in the late Sixties, which made Billy unusual. He really seemed to understand the feelings of a young woman. He had grown up with a sister and had three daughters. So he got it.
I depended on Billy a great deal during the first year of the show, and we quickly became friends. One day he developed serious muscle spasms in his neck—obsessiveness can do that to you—and was confined to his bed by his doctors. I was worried about him, and worried about how the show would proceed without him.
At the table with Billy Persky—on the same side, in more ways than one.
Billy loves to tell the story of my coming to his house to discuss some trouble we were having with the script we were about to shoot. There he was in traction, lying absolutely flat on his back with a nine-pound weight pulling on his head. He couldn’t see anything but the ceiling, so he had to wear a special pair of glasses that were actually mirrored cubes, cut diagonally so that he could see down even though he was looking up—kind of like a periscope. But since he couldn’t move his head, he could only see me when I was directly in front of him.
Undaunted, I paced back and forth at the foot of his bed, passionately laying out the script’s problems, oblivious to the fact that he was flat on his back—and oblivious to the mirror’s limited range of vision. Billy could barely move, but he desperately tried to follow me with his eyes as I darted back and forth in his mirrored glasses. At one point he moved his head to try to catch my fleeting image, and winced in pain. I felt terrible, so I sat on his bed to comfort him—which caused the mattress to depress and him along with it, as the weight stayed stationary, almost pulling his head off. Then we burst into uncontrollable giggling at the absurdity of the situation. We were obviously made for each other.
A few months later, I was in the makeup room at the studio, about to begin the day’s work. I took a brush to my hair and, after a few strokes, I froze in pain. I couldn’t get my arm to come down. I had my own muscle spasm, and ended up in a similar hospital bed and neck brace.
My father came to visit me. He walked into the room, stood at the foot of the bed and said, “If you live, you’ll be a big star.” Then he lectured me on pacing myself.
Now he tells me.
FOR THE SECOND YEAR of That Girl, we had the great fortune of getting Danny Arnold to produce the show. Danny had produced the first year of Bewitched, and would later create a hit show of his own, Barney Miller. He was superb at everything—writing, directing, editing, producing—and was the ultimate obsessive. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. I would leave the studio at 9:30 P.M. after a day of shooting—having first arrived that morning at 5 A.M.—and I would see the lights on in the editing room and know Danny was still there. A man like that makes an obsessive like me sleep like a baby. Someone was minding the store.
Danny did so many great things for me. One of them was to bring in a female story editor, Ruth Brooks Flippen. Until Ruth joined our all-male staff, I had felt like a lonely voice in the wilderness,