READ MORE FROM OUR “HAPPY DAYS” FEATURE HERE.
When he auditioned for “Happy Days,” Henry Winkler was 28 years old. The New York-raised and Yale-trained actor was nothing like what Garry Marshall envisioned for tough-guy greaser Arthur Fonzarelli. “I thought I wanted a tall, handsome blond, and in walked a short, dark-haired actor,” Marshall wrote in his memoir.
The Fonz was a bit part in the pilot, with only six lines. “[He] was really written to just point and do gestures and say very little,” Marshall said in an interview with the Television Academy.
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“I always think of myself as a sponge, and my acting education is liquid,” Winkler says. “I soak up all that liquid, squeeze the sponge dry, and use what’s left … to create different characters.”
To create Fonzarelli, he wanted to make sure he wasn’t just retreading greaser stereotypes that had gone before. So he implemented certain character quirks in his approach. “One of them was that I was never going to comb my hair,” Winkler says. “In the script, it said Fonzie’s going to comb his hair. So [in the scene] I went to the mirror and realized I didn’t have to because my hair was perfect.”
Tom Miller championed Winkler’s approach despite Marshall’s skepticism, and he won the part. He was cast opposite Ron Howard – a former child actor best known for playing Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show” – who brought a wholesome All-American naiveté to the central role of Richie Cunningham.
But by the end of the first season, it was clear which of the two characters was winning hearts and minds. “We were getting field reports that wherever Henry went, huge crowds were gathering,” Howard wrote in his memoir. During a publicity tour, “the Nieman Marcus flagship store in Dallas was completely overwhelmed by a turnout of over 20,000 people, most of them screaming girls, most of them screaming ‘Fon-zeee!’”
The network took notice, especially when ratings started to dip during season two’s early run. “[Fonzie] was loyal; he was a rebel; he was secretly loving,” Winkler says. “What I was able to do was bring so many dimensions, and the writers just kept going with it.”
Season 2, Episode 13 was the show’s big switch. Up to that point, “Happy Days” had been filmed with a single camera, like a movie, but ABC decided a shakeup was necessary to reverse the ratings slump. They were going to film this episode on a soundstage with a live studio audience.
That wasn’t all. For the first time, the episode’s central character was going to be Fonzie. The “chick magnet” Fonz shocks everyone by announcing that he’s getting married – then Mr. Cunningham recognizes the would-be Mrs. Fonzie as a stripper he encountered at a convention in Chicago, so Fonzie ends the engagement, and everything goes back to normal.
The whole affair was a Winkler showcase. And ratings spiked. From then on, “Happy Days” was a live-audience, multi-camera sitcom, and it was all about the Fonz.
Winkler recalls a striking illustration of his new status as No. 1 at Christmas, 1975. As gifts, the entire cast received identical wallets from ABC – except Winkler, who got a VCR worth thousands of dollars. If that didn’t get the message across, the network started floating the idea of re-naming the show “Fonzie’s Happy Days.”
“I was being marginalized by my own show,” Howard wrote in his memoir, a feeling that would lead him to leave the show in its seventh season, while Winkler stuck it out to the finale.
Historic Milwaukee images contributed by: John Eastberg, David Leister, Adam Levin, The Milwaukee County Historical Society, Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Historical Society.
