Who Killed the Fonz? Read online

  Gleb was not wrong. Three years Richard had spent on Suttree. His bank account was low. He and Pepperdine University were square through the rest of 1984, but next year he was not sure where Caroline’s tuition money would come from. And there were still the mortgage payments. The city had just bumped up their property taxes. Downsizing was not an option. Not with Marion.

  “How much does it pay?” Richard said, looking down at the table, at his hands gripping his thighs.

  “Two hundred,” Gleb said. “Plus five percent on first-dollar gross.”

  Richard took a deep breath. “That’s good money.”

  “It’s very good money.”

  It made Richard think.

  “What if I wanted to make my movie myself? How much would it cost?”

  Gleb laughed and raised his glass to his lips.

  “No, I’m serious. How much?”

  “Come on, Richard. What you want to do, you’d have to do it on location. You’d have to fly all the actors and crew out to Tennessee or somewhere that can pass for it. That’s expensive.”

  “So you did read my script.”

  “Of course I did. And I’ll be honest. I didn’t get it. Neither did anyone else. Also you’d need to hire a director of photography who can figure out how to shoot on a rocking, swaying boat. You’d need to hire a director.”

  “No, that’s me, I’ll be the director.”

  “No, no investor would go for it. You don’t have the experience. All told, you’d need five million. At least. You’re talking about a major uphill climb. Major. I just don’t have the time to help you with that. Richard, I’m sorry, but that project is finished. Listen to me: I know what I’m talking about. Take this job. Take Space Battles. Knock it out in a few weeks, cash your check, and we’ll figure out the next thing. You really have an interest in directing? I’ll talk to the prince, see if I can get you a PA position or something. Start getting some experience on set.”

  Richard glanced around the restaurant. “Funny,” he said, “it’s not at all like I imagined.”

  “What’s not?”

  “Rock bottom.”

  Gleb sighed and said, “It’s not rock bottom. It’s life. Right now this garbage is all I can get for you. This is it. This is where you are. It’s Space Battles or nothing.”

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Of course. Take a few days. But I need an answer by Saturday. The prince is leaving the country in two weeks, and we need to set up meetings before he goes. And, Richard, when I say it’s Space Battles or nothing, I mean it. If your answer is no, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more I can do for you. If you want to continue in this business, you’ll have to do it without me.”

  • • •

  AS HE DROVE HOME HE kept thinking about what Gleb had said about his friends, the filmmakers he had come up with, many of whom were not only successful writers and not only A-list directors but also serious, big-time producers as well. What Gleb had said was true. The successful ones were the ones who had accommodated the sensibilities of the mainstream. They had not been rigid about their aesthetics. They had found a way to do what they wanted to do while appealing to the masses. They had leveraged their commercial work to facilitate their personal work. Maybe that was the way. One for them, then one for you. What was it that kept Richard from just doing that? Why couldn’t he just play the game?

  That’s what it was to people in the industry now, to people like Gleb—a game. A zero-sum one. They read Variety for the latest box office figures the way stockbrokers picked apart the Nasdaq reports, the way gamblers chewed up the sports pages looking for any edge. Box office, box scores—they were the same thing to these people. It was not about stories, or film. It was about winners and losers. Nothing in between. He wasn’t naïve. Movies cost money. A lot of money. Production, distribution, marketing. None of it was cheap. And the people who put up the money weren’t doing it out of benevolence. They expected their investment back and then some. He understood all that. But when it came down to it, he still saw cinema as art, not business. If his goal was making money and working with people only interested in the same, he would have become an investment banker.

  And then he would have become a patient in a psych ward.

  His more successful friends were drawn to the material they did. They weren’t faking it. They had to do their movies the way he had to do Suttree. The question was why did he have to do Suttree? It was a question he could not answer. The enigma of the creative process, he supposed. Even if he could answer it, he would not want to.

  But maybe he was naïve. Maybe the reality of making movies was that you had to do what you did not want to do, and he just needed to accept it. Maybe he was still too much of that earnest midwestern kid he once was. Too sincere. Couldn’t lie. Couldn’t fake it. Couldn’t blow smoke. Didn’t smoke. Too clean for this smutty town. Being married to his high school sweetheart didn’t help with this veneer of edgelessness that made him just about disappear. Still madly in love after almost thirty years. Once he went to the Playboy mansion with his friend Brian De Palma, whose latest directorial effort just last weekend opened at $23 million (but who was counting?). It was not Richard’s scene. He’d spent the whole party hiding out alone in Hefner’s library, reading his first edition The Great Gatsby. Now that was Richard’s idea of a good time. With charisma like that, maybe it was no wonder he was overlooked.

  Then there was the fact that he still lived with his mother.

  It had not been planned. After his father passed, Marion decided to just stay out here. She and Howard had been talking about moving to Los Angeles anyway. The weather was nicer, the pace was more mellow, and it would put them closer to their grandkids. It would be better for Howard’s heart.

  The cardiologist had told them not to make that trip. There was an appointment coming up. A very important appointment. It would give them a better idea of what was wrong this time. Richard begged his father to listen to the doctor. And he could not get them into the ceremony anyway—they would have to watch on TV from Richard and Lori Beth’s house. “But what if you win?” Howard kept saying. Richard told him he wouldn’t win, there was no chance, not up against Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But Howard would not listen. “Think it’s every day my son gets nominated for an Oscar?” He was going to be there in person, no matter what. Richard never for a moment thought he would win, but he was still disappointed when it was not his name they called. Coming home with Lori Beth that night and having his parents there, seeing how proud they were of him, supporting him the way they always had when he was a kid—he was glad they had come. He was relieved.

  They all stayed up late that night, Howard telling Richard his favorite parts of Welcome to Henderson County. It had not played in Milwaukee. They’d had to drive two and a half hours in the snow to see it in Chicago. When it ended, they rose from their seats and gave it a standing ovation.

  “After the show,” said Marion, “your father stood outside the theater door, shaking everyone’s hands and thanking them for coming, and telling them the writer was his son. He even started signing autographs.”

  Howard shrugged. “They asked me for them.”

  Before they all turned in that night, Howard stopped Richard at the foot of the stairs. He took his son’s face in his hands. “I owned a hardware store,” he said.

  Richard was confused. “Yeah, Dad,” he said. “I know that.”

  “A hardware store. Nails. Wood.” Richard did not say anything. Howard’s eyes were glistening, turning red. Richard just looked back into them. “And my son’s an artist. A hardware store and my son’s an artist.” Richard was an inch taller than his father. Howard pulled his head down and kissed him on top of it. “My son’s an artist.”

  They were supposed to fly back in the morning. Howard did not come downstairs. Marion kept calling up to him, “We’re going to miss our flight!” Finally she went up. Down in the kitchen, Richard and Lori Beth heard her saying his nam
e. Over and over she said it. Soon she was yelling it. Yelling for them.

  They buried Howard in Los Angeles. To keep him near his beloved grandkids. Marion took over the empty in-law suite out back by the pool and gave the house in Milwaukee to Joanie and her husband, Chachi.

  “My son’s an artist.” Richard never forgot it. Maybe those words were why he could not bring himself to play the game, to bend and concede.

  Richard was lost in these thoughts. He did not see the red light until it was almost too late. He slammed the brakes to avoid making roadkill out of two young women crossing the street. The redhead slammed her palms onto the Corvette’s hood.

  “Hey man!” she shouted. But it wasn’t a she at all. “Get out of the car!” the man was saying.

  “Be cool, Axl,” said the other one, also a man, who wore a top hat. He pulled Axl away, and they crossed the street. Richard watched them walk off, stapling flyers to every telephone pole they passed, advertisements for their band. He remembered when he used to have that faith and conviction about what he was doing. That grit. He even used to have that red hair. All of it had faded these years under the Southern California sun.

  Enjoy it while it lasts, he said to himself.

  Then the light turned green and he headed home, to deliver the bad news to Lori Beth and his mother.

  • • •

  AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE in Los Angeles, Marion Cunningham had developed a passion for crystals, star charts, and yoga. She had stopped cutting and coloring her hair after her friends at the holistic health spa had told her that it was where her life force was stored and that toxins from the chemicals in hair dye could seep into the scalp and blood. They tried to convince her about reincarnation, but she couldn’t be sold, though she did believe it was a beautiful concept she wished was true. Mostly she was fanatical about her macrobiotic vegetarian diet—she was not allowed to cook for Richard and Lori Beth because they couldn’t stand all that tofu and raw alfalfa—but when her grandkids were home she would cook anything they wanted, even meat. It was fine with Richard that she had become so earthly and nonmaterialistic. In her former life as a Milwaukee homemaker, when her days were spent chopping food and sweeping floors and carrying around children and propping herself up, she had taught herself to live without wanting more.

  But walking into the house in Sherman Oaks, he was in no mood to receive a lecture on how Mercury being in retrograde had caused the meeting with Gleb to go badly. She and Lori Beth had both warned him not to get his hopes up. He had told them they were wrong. The fact that they were right made it all worse. When he found them in the high-ceilinged living room, sitting on the facing couches in grim silence, he wanted to be anywhere but where he was.

  “You were right,” he said. “Okay? Suttree is done. I was insane for thinking it would ever happen. Of course no one wants a movie like that. And I really believed they might let me direct it? Three years of my life—gone.”

  Saying it out loud made him dizzy.

  “Oh, Richard,” Lori Beth said, looking at him with pity. It was the last thing he needed.

  “Sit down, honey,” Marion said. She had been crying. It made him realize that Lori Beth had been too. They knew he would be coming home with bad news, he thought. They knew he was going to be destroyed at that meeting, and they let him go into it anyway, they didn’t try to shake him out of his delusion.

  He turned away from them. “No,” he said. He started walking out of the living room. “I need to take a walk or something.”

  “Richard,” Marion said, “sit down.” It had been years since he had heard such assertiveness in her voice. He came back and sat in an armchair.

  “Look,” he said, “I appreciate your sympathy. I really do. But—”

  “Joanie called,” Marion said.

  “From Tahiti?” Richard said. His sister and Chachi were there for their tenth wedding anniversary. “Why? Is everything okay?”

  Marion cleared her throat and looked at Lori Beth who said, “She was calling about Fonzie.”

  It took him a moment. The context was too displaced. It was not the name of a producer or an actor or a director or a studio executive. So it did not seem to be the name of anyone. “Fonzie,” he said.

  Lori Beth breathed deeply and tried to explain. “Last Thursday night, he was driving across Hoan Bridge and . . .” She could not finish.

  “And what?” She just shook her head no. She put her hand over her eyes.

  “Richard,” Marion said. “He was in an accident.”

  “What happened?”

  “Joanie didn’t know all the details. She only knew what Al told Chachi when he called to tell them: he lost control of his motorcycle and crashed into the guardrail. He went flying over the handlebars, over the guardrail, and down into the lake. They’ve been looking, but they haven’t found it.”

  “What do you mean it?”

  “The body, Richard,” Marion said quietly, sweetly. “His body.”

  Richard was shaking his head side to side, unable to stop. He moved to the edge of his chair, stood up, then sat back down. Lori Beth reached over and put her hand on his. She looked at him with crying eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she was saying.

  There was a mirror on the wall. Richard could see himself all too clearly in it. Red eyes. Crow’s feet. Steadily receding hairline. Inexplicable wobble of flesh beneath his chin—the beginnings of an old man’s neck. Each man has that moment in his life when he looks in a mirror and sees for the first time the uninteresting old man young women see when they look at him—if they look at him, which, because he’s an old man, they do not. This was that moment for Richard Cunningham. Not the day he moved Richie Jr. into his first apartment, and not the day he dropped Caroline off at college. This day. The day he realized middle age had met him like a two-by-four to the face.

  The day he learned his best friend from childhood was dead.

  • • •

  MARION AND LORI BETH LEFT him sitting there in the living room to give him some time alone. He was still there two hours later when Marion returned to check on him. She stood beside him. “You should eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll make you something. No tofu, I promise.”

  “No thanks, Mom.”

  She sat on one of the sofas.

  “Remember all the things I did just to make a living?” he said. “Lori Beth’s and my first few years out here trying to make it?”

  “I remember when you were selling watches over the telephone from one of those seedy call centers in Encino, was it?”

  “And that was the best one. And all the apartments Lori Beth and I lived in. All those dumps. Mice. Busted plumbing. The police asking about our neighbors.”

  “I used to worry about you.”

  “We were fine. It was never dangerous.”

  “I wasn’t worried about your safety, I was worried about whether you were happy.”

  “I was. Those were some of the best days of my life. We went through times that were so uncertain and so terrifying and made us ask ourselves every day if we should call it quits and just go back home and get more practical jobs, play it safe. But whenever I thought about quitting, you know what I thought about to keep myself going? I thought of Arthur Fonzarelli. I imagined what he would say if I went back to Milwaukee and told him I had quit. I pictured the look in his eyes. How disappointed he would be in me if I ever told him I had stopped believing in myself. He wouldn’t have said anything. He would have just looked at me a certain way. I can almost see it now. I would have done any job and lived in a sewer if it meant never having to let him down. So I kept at it.”

  “He always believed in you.”

  Richard was quiet. “But then at some point I stopped thinking about him. I can’t remember when the last time was, before today. I can’t even remember the last time we spoke.”

  “Joanie’s wedding,” Marion said. “Ten years ago.”

  “That was the l
ast time I saw him. But when was the last time I spoke to him? I mean, even just on the phone or something?”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. You know how he was. It wasn’t like he made it easy to stay in touch. When I first moved out here, I used to write all my friends back home letters. Everyone wrote me back. With him, maybe I got a reply once. Once. He just wasn’t a letter writer. And he certainly wasn’t the type to pick up the phone to chat. We didn’t even hear from him when your father died, remember?”

  Richard remembered. So many cards and flowers had come in that they had trouble figuring out where to put it all. Other old friends like Ralph Malph and Potsie sent condolences. But there was nothing from Fonzie.

  Marion said, “Joanie never mentions his name. I don’t think she and Chachi ever saw him around. You’re not the only one who lost touch, Richard. It’s not your fault. People drift apart. They move on to new selves. It’s what happens.” She continued, “Joanie said there’s a memorial service tomorrow. Back home.”

  “I don’t know why you still call it that,” he said.

  “I know. Me neither.”

  “Are Joanie and Chachi going?”

  “They said they weren’t sure they’d be able to get a flight. And, anyway, Arthur would not have wanted them to cut their trip short. She did say you could stay at the house if you wanted to go back. I thought you might.”

  “Of course I do. But what about you? You’re not going?”

  “I don’t know—I want to, but tomorrow is tutoring.” His mother and Lori Beth volunteered for a charity helping kids who were growing up in rough circumstances stay on track to graduate high school. Tomorrow was their day to help the kids with homework at the community center. “We’ll find replacements. Lori Beth is on the phone with them now.”