My Happy Days in Hollywood by Garry Marshall Read Free Book Online

to pull someone off a popular show just because of race. Censorship seemed incompatible with creativity to me, but I had bosses I needed to answer to and salute to, so the show went off the air permanently.
    We all had to get special security clearance to write the news and work for the radio station because sometimes we would handle sensitive and secret information. This required filling out a series of forms and questionnaires that seemed cumbersome but essential. One day Gordon, who was now our news announcer, received the paperwork for his high-level security clearance. He called me over to look at it with him.
    “Well, would you look at this,” he said.
    I looked at the form but didn’t see anything unusual.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “Says here I’m adopted,” he said.
    “So, what’s wrong with that? Plenty of people are adopted,” I said.
    “This is the first I’ve heard of it. My parents never bothered to tell me,” he said.
    Getting security clearance turned out to be quite a surprise for Gordon, who was more fascinated than disappointed by the revelation. While he was adopted, his sister, Monica, and brother, Jerry, were biological siblings. Gordon finally figured out why he didn’t look like his brother and sister.
    I worked with another writer named Fred Roos (who later became one of the producers of the
Godfather
movies). Back then he was just a recruit from Los Angeles. When we weren’t writing material in the station, we sometimes sat on guard duty together on the night shift for the TV station they were building. I would make up jokes and tell them to Fred to pass the time.
    “I think we need a password,” I said.
    “What kind of password?” he asked.
    “Something that people need to say in order to walk by us,” I explained.
    “Okay. What is the password?” he asked.
    “Matzo. Now you say the password,” I said.
    “Matzo,” he said.
    “You may now Passover,” I said.
    Fred laughed and he wasn’t even Jewish.
    The TV station contained so much expensive equipment that our bosses worried it might get stolen in the middle of the night. We were on guard to protect it. Although we had guns, we didn’t usually shoot at anyone, because if you shot your gun you had to fill out a lot of paperwork afterward. However, if you just threw rocks at the intruders, they usually ran away in fear and no paperwork was required. So we ended up saving our bullets and throwing a lot of rocks at people and at sounds in the dark.
    The winters in Korea were terrible, even worse than the winters I spent in Chicago. I remember freezing while Fred and I sat diligently outside the base of the TV station with our rifles and rocks.
    “What are you going to do when you get out of here?” said Fred one night.
    “I want to write jokes,” I said.
    “Really?” he asked.
    “Yes. I went to journalism school, but I don’t do ‘serious’ well. I do ‘funny’ much better,” I said. “I think I could be an entertainer.”
    “Well, give me a call in Los Angeles,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”
    “What do you do?” I asked.
    “I work at the William Morris Theatrical Agency.”
    “Are you an agent?” I asked.
    “I work in the mail room. But not for long,” he said. “If you ever get out to Los Angeles, I can introduce you around to some show business people. I’m going to be a producer.”
    Walking on the midnight-to-8:00 A.M . shift with a gun in the middle of Korea, I had made my first real-life Hollywood contact.
    Shortly after I arrived at the radio station, another soldier, named John Grahams, joined our group. He was from Milwaukee and had graduated from Marquette University. He was a professional radio announcer and a professor of radio history at Marquette. We hit it off right away. He had a great radio voice, and although I didn’t have the best voice, I could write for the two of us. It took a longtime, but we finally convinced the army brass to give us our own show. We created