1.
It was the biggest audition of my life, and the sweat stains under my arms weren’t just clearly visible, they were a cry for help.
I was in an office at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. It was a sunny Tuesday morning in October 1973. About a dozen people were in the room, all of them seated except for me and one guy, the person I was supposed to read with. He, I would later learn, was a casting assistant named Pasquale. Seated on a couch were (I would later learn) the producers Garry Marshall, Tom Miller, and Ed Milkis, along with Garry’s sister Ronny. Paramount’s casting director Millie Gussie sat behind a large and impressive wooden desk. I believe several other important people were in the room, though I couldn’t tell you for sure.
I was in an altered state.
I smiled. “Hi, how are you?” I said. Blank looks from the people behind the table.
“Okay, honesty is the best policy,” I said. “So I’m just gonna tell you that the sweat under my arms is running like the Hudson River. These sweat stains under my arms are in direct correlation to the fear that is running through my body.”
This drew faint smiles from the people who were there to assess me—but they had an expectant look about them. It was time for me to do what I was there to do. I had a couple of script pages in my hands (my palms were also good and sweaty): I had six lines to read. The show, titled Happy Days, was to revolve around a group of wholesome high school kids in 1950s Milwaukee. The character I was reading was the group’s one renegade. His name was Arthur Fonzarelli, aka the Fonz.
This Fonz was supposed to be a knockabout guy, a man of few words, rough around the edges. Confident. A guy who could make things happen with a snap of his fingers. Someone his fellow teenagers would listen to and obey unquestioningly. If this wasn’t the diametric opposite of who I was in the fall of 1973, it was pretty close. I was twenty-seven years old, soon to turn twenty-eight, a short Jew from New York City with a unibrow and hair down to my shoulders, confident about next to nothing in my life.
The one exception was when I was acting.
When I was on a stage, playing someone else, I was transported to another world, one where pretending made you successful. What I was miserable at was being myself.
I thought I had a vague idea how to play this Fonzarelli. I rustled the papers and cleared my throat. And somehow, at that moment, terrified as I was, I was able to make a firm decision. I decided that I was going to make this guy who was standing up and reading with me—Pasquale, though I didn’t know his name yet—sit down. The force of my character’s personality would give him no choice.
How was I going to accomplish this? I had no clue.
He read his first line. Something about how he’d been talking to the girls, trying to persuade the girls to come to this make-out party.
Then I opened my mouth, and something very odd happened. What came out was a voice that was not mine. One I’d never heard or used before, deeper and lower in my chest than my regular speaking voice. Assured. Authoritative. Rough around the edges. I pointed at Pasquale. “Ayyy,” I said.
I had his full attention.
“Let me do it from now on,” I ordered him, in that voice. “You don’t talk to the girls. You have me talk to the girls.”
He was backing up involuntarily.
“Got it?” I said. In that voice.
Now Pasquale was slowly lowering himself into a chair. I’m not sure he even realized he was. Now he was sitting down. Instead of reading his line, he just nodded. Silently.
Then I was done. That was it. I beamed at the people behind the table, tossed my script in the air, and sauntered out of the room, like the badass I was pretending to be.
* * *
Who was I really? That’s always been the big question—and it’s taken me fifty years to realize that there really is a me inside me. If you’d asked me back then, I would’ve told you all I knew at the time: Henry Franklin Winkler, formerly of 210 West 78th Street, Apartment 10A, New York, NY. The son of Harry and Ilse, younger brother of Bea. I had a BA in drama with a minor in psychology from Emerson College in Boston, one of the two schools of the twenty-eight I applied to that had accepted me. I’d somehow managed to scrape through four years of Emerson despite the fact that I couldn’t really read. I mean that literally. Reading was not then, is not now, and never has been my forte. At Emerson I once wrote a report on a book by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim by looking at the chapter headings in the table of contents and channeling a sense of what he was talking about: I got a B-minus on the paper.
I was a terrible student as far back as I can remember; this was a real problem for my parents. From my earliest days, the only thing I wanted to do was act: now and then my mother and father pretended to indulge me. A charming childhood photograph shows a seven-year-old Henry on the telephone: the joke I made later on was that I was calling my agent. In my senior year at Emerson I applied to the Yale School of Drama, the crème de la crème of drama schools, despite thinking, Oh my God. How could you possibly do this? It’s Yale, you’ve been told you’re stupid; it’s Yale—it’s not only the crème de la crème of drama schools, but of students from all over the world—how dare you think you can? But finally I said, “I’m just going to—I’m just gonna try.” It was the schizophrenia of: Are you crazy? How dare you? But finally—Shut up and just try it.
When I do speaking engagements, I say, “You can’t catch a fish unless your fly is in the water.”
At my Yale audition, when it came to performing the Shakespearean monologue I’d been told to memorize, I suddenly realized it had completely fallen out of my head. So instead I improvised something on the spot, something I thought sounded Shakespeare-ish, and, miracle of miracles, I got in. Into the Yale School of Drama! I mostly played fourteen-year-olds in student productions. (I was short and baby-faced.) But I got the chance to act in plays by Euripides, T. S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill. I was in the Greek chorus of The Bacchae. By my third year, I’d grown enough to play Albert Einstein in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, speaking in my parents’ German accent and wearing a curly wig and my father’s 1930s shoes, shoes that were so well made they were indestructible.…
* * *
My father had once dreamed of being a diplomat. Short, authoritative, always elegantly dressed, Harry Winkler spoke eleven languages and could be charming in all of them. He was good with people; I think I inherited that from him. He also demanded that you stand up when he entered the room. (I don’t make that demand. Thought about asking my daughter’s boyfriends to do it; didn’t.) My mother was small, round, and often sad. I would gradually discover what she was sad about. She was also often angry. She was triggered by dust. And I don’t mean dust on the floor. If dust floated by, she was off on a rant.
Harry and Ilse Winkler were refugees from Berlin. They managed to get out in 1939, just under the wire, with a subterfuge: my father, an executive in a company that imported and exported lumber, told the authorities that he had to go to the USA for six weeks, on business. He had a letter from two companies in New York wanting to buy the trees owned by the company he worked for, Seidelman. He told the same story to my mother, knowing she would never agree to leave Germany for good if her family couldn’t come with her. Her parents and brother stayed behind, as did my father’s brother and business partner, Helmut, who’d been just about to go with Harry and Ilse but changed his mind at the last minute. The Nazis murdered him, just as they murdered my mother’s and father’s whole families and millions of other Jews. I mourned that I never had relatives: my only relatives were faux—members of the German refugee community in New York.
There were a lot of lies in my family; this big one that my father told my mother to get her to the United States was the most benign. Benign as it was, though, my mother never got over it.
Harry, a clever man, had brought the seed money for rebuilding his lumber business in the US by smuggling his mother’s jewelry out of Germany. He’d bought a box of chocolates in Berlin, melted the chocolate down, then poured it over the jewelry and put the candy-coated jewels back into the box. When the Nazis stopped him and asked if he was taking anything of value out of Germany, he said, “No, you can open every bag; we’ve got nothing.” After Harry and Ilse passed through Ellis Island, my father pawned the jewelry. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but he was later able to buy all of it back.
Many of the German Jews who stayed behind as World War II began remained in Europe because they felt they were Germans above all; their Jewishness came second. The Nazis begged to differ. But my parents, strangers in this strange land of America, in this new city of New York, really were German above all. Like many German Jews, they looked down on … well, nearly everyone, but especially all those Eastern European Jews who’d been flocking to America since the 1880s. German Jews, and especially the ones from Berlin, the culture capital of the country, were just better: more cultured, more refined. Yiddish was not spoken in my household—not if Harry and Ilse could help it, anyway. German was spoken, though—it was my parents’ life mission to teach me the language. I eventually learned four sentences in German, the only four German sentences I can speak today.
Harry’s and Ilse’s German was very expressive. Take the colorful nickname they gave me: dummer Hund.
It meant dumb dog.
I didn’t find out I was severely dyslexic until I was thirty-four. For all the years before that, I was the kid who couldn’t read, couldn’t spell, couldn’t even begin to do algebra or geometry or even basic arithmetic. If I bought a slice of pizza with paper money, I had no idea how much change I was supposed to get—nor could I add up the coins in my hand. When we read A Tale of Two Cities or Ivanhoe in tenth or eleventh grade, the only thing I read was the cover. I would sprinkle water on the book and let it dry, so the crinkled pages would make it look as if I’d been poring over that book—beating it into submission! I never read one classic—the closest I got were the Classics Illustrated comic books. (And even those I couldn’t read—but at least I understood the pictures.) I consistently brought home report cards filled with Ds and Fs—first from PS 87, just down the block on West 78th, then, after I was twelve, from the private McBurney School. What did my parents make of this? They were embarrassed by it; they were diminished by it. Clearly I was just lazy, defiant, stupid—a dumb dog. So the lesson for my life was, when we are born into this world, we are separate beings from our parents, not extensions of who they want us to be. Stacey and I have a wonderful friend who is a pediatric neurosurgeon. He told us that at the beginning of his medical career he was convinced that the influence on a child was 80 percent nurture, 20 percent nature. Now, years and hundreds of patients later, he’s convinced that it’s 80 percent nature, 20 percent nurture.
I used humor to cover everything I couldn’t do—which was most things. One day, in my Hebrew class at Habonim, the German Jewish congregation my family belonged to, the rabbi who taught us was handing out report cards when I made a silly joke. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but the other kids thought it was hilarious. The rabbi gave a thin smile. “Let me have that report card back,” he told me.
“No, I just got it,” I said.
“Let me have it back,” the rabbi said, and snatched it from my fingers. And ripped it to shreds.
This was business as usual for me: wandering attention, failing grades, making jokes; humiliation. And business as usual for my parents, who felt humiliated by every bad report card I brought home, and therefore felt the need (I guess) to humiliate me back. They were somehow convinced that the more they punished me, the better my grades would be.
[GERMAN ACCENT] “You are not trying hard enough. You are not concentrating. Stay in your room. You cannot go out on the weekend. You cannot go to the temple dance. No TV.
“Dummer Hund.”
* * *
One of my father’s favorite expressions was le ton fait la musique—the tone makes the music. Meaning, it’s not so much the words that you say as the way you say them. Which, since he and my mother used to scream at me all the time, tells you a lot about my mother and father.
* * *
Apartment 10A was a big apartment, with a wraparound terrace that had views of the Hudson River. The Winklers lived in fine style. We even had a country house, in Mahopac, New York, on a lake in southern Putnam County. From the beginning, my father’s new business had some very good years. He also had some bad years—but he didn’t talk about those. He preferred concentrating on his successes, and believing more of them would come.
I wouldn’t realize for a long time that between the good years and the bad years, Harry was barely breaking even: we were constantly living beyond our means.
The apartment was big, but my room was small. And I mean small. Gray-green plaster walls. A bed that folded up against the wall when you weren’t using it, a tiny sink like something you’d see in a train compartment, and a little closet that was probably meant for brooms—it had no depth. You opened the door and the wall was right there. I hung my clothes on a pipe. I didn’t have space for a lot of ensembles.
My room was probably meant to be the housekeeper’s room if a family had a live-in housekeeper; instead, we had a cleaning lady, Aury, who came in five times a week—fancy shmancy—so the housekeeper’s room was all mine. After Aury came Rosalie, a big, wonderful woman. She was my solace. She taught me to dance at a very young age, in the kitchen. A swinging door led from the kitchen to the dining room, where my father sat at the head of the table and you did not sit in his chair. On the dining room wall hung a painting of some Flemish creep, whose eyes would move wherever you went in the room, always looking at you.
[GERMAN ACCENT] “Everysing was severe.”
My sister, who was four years older, had a real bedroom, with a real, non-folding bed, and drapes on the windows. Maybe it was because she was older; maybe it was because she was a girl; maybe my parents liked her better. I don’t know. Now and then she took notice of me; usually she didn’t. She used to have her friends over and they would listen to records and whisper together. I was the annoying little brother. Once she asked me to kiss her on the lips: she wanted to practice. Oh, that was horrible. I could just barely manage a peck.
My room was tiny, but it was my refuge. For my fourteenth birthday I got a tan faux-leather Westinghouse record player with two speakers in front that you could lift off their hinges and pull out as far as the wires went. (Once I had a dance party in the living room; Suzy Rosenbaum was my date. And we listened to Johnny Mathis. Otherwise, the record player lived on top of the shelf above the bed that folded into the wall.) And when my parents were yelling and screaming in German about something and I had no idea why they were angry with me—which was often—I would go in my room, close the door, and listen to arias from opera. Yes, opera. My mother and father, if you can believe it, used to take me to the Metropolitan Opera when I was young. Ten years old, and I had to rent a tuxedo when we went on Monday nights. So when they were screaming at me, I would close the door and listen to arias. Tebaldi. Corelli. It didn’t even have to be opera, as long as it was dramatic: Finlandia, by Sibelius. I would wave my arms, pretending to conduct. And sooner or later I would stop feeling bad.
Sitting in any class at McBurney School, I would start laughing to myself, because I would fantasize that my parents would move while I was at school, and leave no forwarding address. And I would figure out how to take care of myself.
I felt, when my parents were shrieking at me in German, or in English with their German accents, as though my brain were turning from pink to gray. As if the blood were draining out of it. And when I listened to music, it was like I was getting into an elevator in my brain and going down, down, level by level, like in a department store. And if the music really carried me away, I would reach the lowest level and my brain would turn from gray back to pink. The blood would start to flow, and I could breathe again. At those moments, I made a pact with myself that if I was ever a parent on this earth, I would be a completely different one.
* * *
I’m twelve years old, it’s a Saturday night, and I’m grounded for the umpteenth time because of my latest report card. My parents are going out to play canasta with their friends. I’m supposed to stay home and do my homework: watching TV is strictly verboten.
I’m not supposed to watch TV, but they do leave me with a Swanson TV dinner. This is a very good thing: Salisbury steak or the turkey with the stuffing and the little apple cobbler with the tinfoil you peel back so it would crisp up in the oven. I put the frozen tray in the oven, and a half hour later I have a delicious dinner—in front of the TV, just the way Swanson meant it to be.
Our TV set is an Olympic television/radio/record player. Big console at the end of the living room. And Saturday night has three important Westerns on Channel 2—Wanted: Dead or Alive at 8:30; Have Gun, Will Travel at 9:30; and Gunsmoke at 10.
My parents get home at 10:15. (So I never get to finish watching Gunsmoke.)
The second I hear the key in the lock, I move like lightning. They find me sitting at the kitchen table, conscientiously pretending to do my homework. The first thing my father does, even before taking off his coat, is put his hand on top of the TV set, to take its temperature. Still warm.
Grounded again.
Copyright © 2023 by Henry Winkler
