When Henry Winkler’s parents fled from Nazi Germany, they had to pretend they were taking a business trip, so they weren’t able to take things an emigrating family might wish to. His Tante Anna, however, packed what became an important heirloom – in the most unlikely vessel.
She was hiding in a coffin, inside which she’d also smuggled the cutting of a spider plant, and that evergreen contraband became the source of the actor’s love of gardening.
“When Anna and her plant reached New York City, everyone in this tight circle of German Jews that my parents were part of had gotten a cutting, and when I moved to Los Angeles I took my own cutting from the plants with me,” he writes in his memoir, Being Henry: The Fonz… and Beyond. He still has “offspring” of that plant.
It’s one of hundreds of fascinating stories in the book, which he’s talking about in a tour of the UK this summer. In it, he describes everything from struggling at school due to severe dyslexia to getting his first big break as an actor. The highs and lows – and more highs – that followed are described with endearing candour, as are delicate insights into why he’s always been so desperate to be loved.
Winkler had a tough time at home as a kid, never quite feeling good enough for his father, who dismissed him a “dummer hund” – a dumb dog – because of his problems with reading and writing. His dad was clearly disappointed that young Henry didn’t want to follow him into the family wood business, and certainly didn’t appreciate his son’s chosen career until it started delivering fame and fortune. But even then, Winkler craved the love they could never provide, and found himself seeking it elsewhere.
After studying drama at Yale, he did a bit of stage acting in New York before trying his luck in Los Angeles. He quickly got a one-off part in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which attracted the producers of Happy Days. In the book he describes the sweaty nerves of the audition, and how he was determined to present the charismatic greaser, Arthur Fonzarelli, as someone with a sensitive side.
The sitcom became a huge hit and, almost overnight, Winkler couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed. A past girlfriend who’d strung him along suddenly regained interest, and at one point he was appearing at an event in Dallas with Anson Williams, who played Potsie, and 25,000 fans showed up. “He whispered to me out of the side of his mouth, ‘Do we deserve this?’ and I said, ‘That’s not the point: they’re here; we’re here. Just say thank you,’” he recalls, speaking on Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, with his beloved dogs, Sadie and Masie, snuffling around. (Hamlet, his “idiosyncratic, three-legged German shepherd on trazodone” is, sadly, not in shot on this occasion.) There’s a great story in the book about how he met Stacey Weitzman when she was working in a Beverly Hills clothes shop. She didn’t seem too fussed about who he was, and, in 1978, after a couple of years together, they tied the knot in the same New York synagogue where he’d had his bar mitzvah. By any standards, let alone Hollywood’s, 46 years and counting is an impressive time to be married, and her no-nonsense attitude seems to play an important role in keeping him grounded.
Early on in his career, Winkler turned down the role of Danny in Grease out of fear of being typecast, but it was already too late. For too many in Hollywood, he was the Fonz, and after Happy Days ended following 11 series, he struggled. As he puts it: “I could not get arrested.” During this fallow period, he did a bit of producing and directing, and played a key part in the creation of MacGyver, the long-running action series.
He also drew upon his personal experiences and teamed up with writer Lin Oliver to develop the Hank Zipzer children’s books, about a schoolboy with dyslexia who’s always getting into scrapes while trying to find his way in the world. It was later adapted by CBBC, with Winkler playing a music teacher.
After Adam Sandler gave him a role in 1998 movie The Waterboy, things really started looking up. And the acting career resurgence really began when Ron Howard – with whom he’d starred in Happy Days and whose daughter, Bryce Dallas Howard, is his god-daughter – offered him the part of hapless lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn in Arrested Development.
The success of that led to Winkler playing the acting coach (“another authority figure who lacks authority”, he laughs) in dark cult comedy Barry, and the thrill of making its creator Bill Hader laugh in the audition is something he’ll never forget. He also got a chance to go to Israel for the first time while filming Chanshi with his friend Caroline Aaron (who also starred in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel).
“Israel might be one of the most delicious countries I’ve been to,” he recalls. “We had some of the greatest meals there, and people were lovely. Soldiers stopped me and said, ‘When I was a little boy I read Hank Zipzer.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Winkler is open about how therapy helped him appreciate both how his parents’ experiences shaped their behaviours, and taught him to acknowledge and weather the anxieties he’d inherited from them, such as a fear of living beyond his means (something his father often did).
The answer, as it usually is, lay in learning to be himself. He may have blown opportunities because of being wound up to the point of being “disconnected”, he suggests. “People have said, ‘You played cool, tell me how to be cool.’ And I finally realised the answer to that question is being authentic. As the Fonz, I acted cool, but in my life I was inauthentic.”
But now, with his dogs, his family, his garden and a career that’s flourishing (he’s going to be in the next American Horror Stories series, directed by his son, Max), it’s heartwarming to see Henry Winkler happy being… Henry Winkler.
The Fonz And Beyond is on tour from June 12 to July 3
