Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 437

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Being Henry: The Fonz . . . and Beyond," by Henry Winkler.

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.

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.

Sometime that year Joan Scott went to Los Angeles to open an office there, and I had a career talk with John Kimball, the agent now running her New York office. John was glad for my success, but he had a different idea. “If you want to be known to New York, stay here,” he told me. “If you want to be known to the world, go to California.”

After Disney, we sent the books around to every children’s-television outlet in the country, but we met the same kind of resistance everywhere: the nitty-gritty of Hank in the trenches, dealing with his challenge in all kinds of humorous ways, just wasn’t aspirational enough. Not uplifting enough. But apparently the books’ fans felt differently. Lin and I wrote the twenty-eight Hank novels to be entertainment reading for the reluctant reader. And the greatest compliment I ever got came from the many, many fan letters we received. Children wrote the same thing, over and over, in seven languages: “How did you know me so well?”

Very early in my treatment, I asked my new shrink in a casual way if she had children. 

She looked me in the eye. “How would my telling you help what you and I are doing here?” she asked. 

That was an interesting moment. I am famous, I am charming—famously charming. How could she resist answering this perfectly normal, perfectly innocent (I thought) question from me, the charming Henry Winkler? 

She resisted. And by resisting, she was showing me that she wasn’t going to be impressed by my being famous and charming—nor was she going to hold it against me. She was simply showing me that she was there to work—to really help the human being in front of her—and that I had to be willing to work, too. Without deploying any of my usual crutches. I slowly realized there was still a lot of little boy in me, desperately trying to make everyone in the world love me, because my parents didn’t seem to. The little boy who knew less than everyone else.

A few years back I was the honorary chairman of the Very Special Arts Festival, at the Music Center. All the mentally and physically challenged students from the Los Angeles school system converged there for two days, singing, acting, painting, dancing with and without wheelchairs. It was the most amazing event. And one afternoon I was standing there, and I heard a little voice behind me say, “Fonz.” I turned around to see a little girl with her mother, and the mother was weeping and shaking. “What’s happening?” I asked. 

“My daughter is autistic,” the mom told me. “She just said her first word, and it was ‘Fonz.’” 

I gave that little girl my very best hug.

When I go around the country speaking publicly, a lot of children with challenges come with their parents, and especially if I see them in the audience, I speak directly to these kids and the parents about the universes we all have inside, and how people so often focus on the outside instead of the inside. I pose for pictures everywhere. At one of these events I put my arm around Richard, who was in high school and taller than me. Everybody’s taller than me. His father was very emotional. I said, “Tell me what’s going on.” And the dad said, “My son doesn’t allow people to touch him. Even the family really can’t touch him, except on very rare occasions. And you, without a blink of an eye, put your arm around him and he put his arm around you.” 

It was the Fonz who unlocked that moment, and it was moments like that that unlocked me.