Penny Marshall Wanted to Sex Up ‘Laverne & Shirley’
Laverne and Shirley started as a couple of trollops.
“Do you want to do a Happy Days?” Garry Marshall asked his sister Penny, according to her memoir My Mother Was Nuts. “We need two fast girls who put out.”
Penny was in. She and her pal Cindy Williams would play two gals from the wrong side of the tracks, enlisted by Fonzie to help Richie out of his dating slump. Why did the Fonz choose Shirley for Richie? “She’s a very cute girl, but she’s not your usual type of girl,” leers the Fonz. “I wanted to pick a girl who wouldn’t give you a hard time, if you get my drift. She’s — how would you say it — a good sport.”
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Shirley had sex, in other words, and she wasn’t too particular about who she did it with. From the looks of things, Laverne was of a similar disposition.
The Fonz wasn’t wrong. Once back at Richie’s house, it didn’t take Shirley long to kiss Richie’s boo-boo. If Howard and Marion didn’t show up, Richie might have become a man that very night.
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But something funny happened when Laverne and Shirley were quickly repackaged for their own spin-off series. Shirley now had a boyfriend, Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, but he was perpetually frustrated. “The girls,” wrote Marshall, “were no longer loose.”
The word “sex” was now off-limits. The characters couldn’t even say “it,” as in “Did you do it?” Writers substituted “voh-de-oh-doh-doh” for the nasty, leading to ridiculous dialogue like:
SHIRLEY: I do not voh-de-oh-doh-doh!
LAVERNE: Oh, you voh-de-oh-doh-doh.
SHIRLEY: I do not voh-de-oh-doh-doh.
LAVERNE: You voh-de-oh.
SHIRLEY: Once.
None of this was in the original plan to make Laverne & Shirley “much hipper than Happy Days,” Garry Marshall told The Washington Post, as reported by MeTV. Instead of Arnold’s, the squeaky-clean malt shop where the high school kids hung out, Laverne’s dad ran a pizza joint “full of servicemen and hard hats.”
For her part, Penny wanted to continue the working-class, risque characters that she and Williams originated on Happy Days. “I thought we should wear black neckerchiefs, tight pants, and have our hair in rollers most of the time,” she said. “But ABC wants two nice girls.”
Unfortunately for the Big Ragu, that meant sex was out. Laverne could continue to “play the field,” but not in the way that the Fonz once promised. So, despite Penny’s best efforts, Laverne and Shirley were “re-virginized for the family hour.”
