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But he suggested “the girl with three names” to Carl, and she got the role. Her nose was perfect, as was she. Everyone loved Mary.

What wasn’t to love? I adored her from the moment we were introduced. I think both of us had each other at hello. But I still had a couple of problems. For one, I thought she was too young to play my wife. She was twelve years younger than I was, though as time went by, no one ever noticed or mentioned that fact. Even I forgot about it. Then, during our initial read-throughs of the first episode, titled “The Sick Boy and the Sitter,” I was concerned that Mary wasn’t much of a comedienne.

It is hard to imagine. But she was stiff and proper, polite. She didn’t seem to have much of a funny bone. I saw a little Katharine Hepburn in her, but not much Lucille Ball.

Of course, I was wrong. And therein is yet another reason Carl was known as a genius and I was referred to as “the actor playing Rob Petrie.” Within a few days of reading and working together—really in no time at all—Mary got it. With Carl, Rosie, and Morey in the room, she had the best teachers. These people knew comedy like nobody else. They had funny in their bones, down into the marrow. On top of that, they had impeccable timing. Mine was pretty good, too. And Mary was the A-plus student. She absorbed everything—the chemistry, the rhythm—and emerged a comedienne herself.

I had never seen a transformation like hers, and I still haven’t. She went from black to white. The first time I stood across from her in rehearsal and heard her say, “Oh, Rob!” I thought, That’s it, we’re home.

All of a sudden, she was perfect.

Little Cahuenga Studios, or Little Desilu, became our home away from home. We spent much of that first week as a cast preparing for the pilot by sitting around a table, reading the script, and throwing out suggestions as Carl listened and wrote. He was brought up on Your Show of Shows, where they sat around the table and threw out lines. We did the same. Everybody got to suggest dialogue and work out their parts, and Carl wrote and, more accurately, rewrote the scripts as he fine-tuned each role to our personalities, strengths, speech patterns, and inflections.

Imagine humming a tune to Mozart. With perfect pitch, something I still marvel at, he captured every one of us. It made it so we didn’t have to act. All we had to do was read our parts. We were playing ourselves.

We had to hold Morey down. He was an encyclopedia with a million jokes in his head. They popped out of him at a rapid-fire pace, and they were hiliarious, except most didn’t fit the story. He wasn’t always wrong, though. Sometimes he threw in a great one, and Carl kept it.

Carl was like that with all of us. If someone offered a line and it was funny and fit the story, it stayed in. That was the ethos as we worked on the pilot, and it stayed that way for the entire run of the series.

I liked everyone instantly and the feeling was mutual. We all liked one another and everyone had a handle on the idea. Throughout the week, we knew we were headed in the right direction. The show got better, funnier, and each of us grew more comfortable in our parts. That was when I was at my most creative, when I was on the set, doing the work. With the adrenaline flowing, you never knew what might happen.

I was so nervous before taping the pilot that fever blisters broke out in my mouth. That morning we were to begin taping, I looked in the mirror and counted five of them. I thought, Poor Mary, I have to kiss her in the opening scene when I come home from work excited because my boss, Alan Brady, has invited us to a party at his penthouse home. We shot the pilot on January 21, 1961, the same day John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States, in front of three cameras and a live audience, just like present-day sitcoms do, and got laughs in all the right places, and even a few unexpected places. Toward the end, there was a big party scene at Alan’s house where everyone got to perform,