In her 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, Penny Marshall describes herself as “a reliable person.” I was listening to the book on a road trip when I heard this self-description. The line struck me. I found myself saying aloud over the steering wheel, “I want to be a reliable person.”
But what does it mean to be a reliable person? Why am I even thinking that I’m not? I guess I feel mostly reliable. But obviously something is keeping me from feeling fully reliable. What?
What made Penny Marshall see herself as reliable? Most people my age know her as Laverne DeFazio of the Laverne and Shirley television show, the popular sitcom of the 1980s. She was also the director of the movies Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Big (1988), Awakenings (1990), and A League of Their Own (1992) and more. With Big, she was the first female director to make a movie that grossed over $100 million. She also knew—and was loved by—almost everyone in Hollywood and half of the NBA.
Penny Marshall as Laverne, 1976
Her strong Bronx accent—from which she could never deviate and was fine with that—is very entertaining to listen to. I love it. “I don’t do accents,” she says. She tells incredible stories about hanging out with her brother, Garry Marshall, and the most prolific comedy writers and comedians of the 1970s and 1980s. She was married to Rob Reiner for ten years and dated Art Garfunkel for many. She did drugs with Belushi and Aykroyd before there was a Saturday Night Live. She could call Loren Michaels anytime and say, “Put me on the show,” and he did. She and her best friend, Carrie Fisher, had joint birthday parties for 20 years, and all the big names in movies, television and the music industry in the 1990s through the 2000s showed up, sometimes even crashing the party. David Bowie was one such party-crasher. After seeing him rap, she offered Marky Mark a part in her film Renaissance Man, launching Wahlberg’s acting career. She loved sports. "No celebrity went to more Clippers games than Penny Marshall," wrote ESPN anchor Michael Eaves. She made several documentaries of sports stars, including her wacky and hardworking friend, Dennis Rodman.
Early on, her brother helped open doors for her, but told her, “You’re the one that has to walk through them.” And she did. In one of her first gigs, a Head and Shoulders commercial, she was cast as “the homely girl” alongside a young Farrah Fawcett, “the attractive girl.” That label hurt. And she laid around depressed for several days afterwards before getting on with more auditions.
It was later on during her directing days when she said, “They knew I was a reliable person.”
Being “reliable” certainly didn’t mean doing everything “right,” whatever that means. Like anybody else, Penny made mistakes and got into plenty of pickles. She could get really cranky. She was stubborn. She divorced twice. Her daughter Tracy was born out of wedlock when Penny was 19 years old—not that such things matter anymore, but we’re talking 1964. She swore like a sailor. She was a heavy smoker, checking herself into a facility every few years to try to get clean. It never stuck. She ended up with lung cancer and a brain tumor and was about to light up a cigarette in the hospital after surgery when a friend stopped her, pointing out that the multiple oxygen tanks behind her bed that could explode the entire hospital. She did manage to quit smoking after that.
When she directed, she told her actors, “Do what you’re going to do. All I ask is that you tell me, be honest with me. I won’t judge you. I just need to know what I’m working with.”
That is getting closer to what made her reliable.
Penny Marshall at the Emmys, 1988
Penny Marshall was adept at being direct and straight-forward. She would tell it like it is and apologize if she was wrong. She worked hard and concentrated on her projects. When directing, she worked 20-hour days and referred to it as a dog’s life. It didn’t mean she did it how the studio wanted her to all the time. She could argue. She could compromise. But she worked hard to stick with what she thought would work the best.
I work hard. I’m not always without judgment, but I’m not bad. It’s something that means a lot to me. I feel like a better person when I don’t judge others or myself. There’s something in that that makes you reliable.
Being straight with people and straight with yourself, now that, it seems to me, is the crux of reliability. Not everybody’s going to like you for it. But it makes a person genuine and honest. I think that’s an area where I have fallen short of reliability. I haven’t always said no when I wanted to say no. I’ve agreed when I didn’t agree. For the sake of not hurting feelings, I’ve kept opinions to myself or sugar-coated responses. And I’ve smiled when I don’t feel like smiling.
The main person for whom I’ve lacked reliability is myself. Why is a long story touched upon in other blogs and partly due to an upbringing that highly-valued being agreeable, especially as a female. That has kept me in certain situations—quite a lot of them—from being myself, from even knowing myself in the first place.
But at this point in my life, I’m sick and tired of such internal compromise. (It’s another thing all together to make compromises with other people!) And that’s Where Penny Marshall made herself the most reliable. Said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, “She was, in every particular, herself.”
“Identity was never an issue for me,” she once wrote. “I embraced being from The Bronx.”
Podhoretz said of her work, “As an actress and a director and a memoirist, [she] was able to capture and personify something very, very real.”
Like Penny, I would like to present myself as I am, unapologetically to the world. Consistently. Show up in my pajamas and not care. Let people see me grouchy when I’m grouchy. I’m working on it, but people still make me nervous, even those I know and love well. It’s so drilled into me to smile, to bend to others, to acquiesce. Sometimes, I still feel like I’m hiding in plain sight. But I’m practicing trying not to hide.
I’m also practicing writing for myself, creating for myself, which is the first step in making stories real. And understanding that not everyone is going to like me or my work. And that’s okay. That’s life. It doesn’t make me or my creations lesser. There are seven billion human perspectives in this world. I don’t need everyone to get me. And there will always be a certain amount of contrariness, just because. (The only thing I can’t abide is when people think they are superior to others. But that’s another story!)
I’m practicing being honest with myself about what I want and don’t want, about what I know to be true, to move through doubts and fears because they’re always tagging along for the ride. They just don’t have to be so loud!
And along the way, it’s okay to ask people to open doors for me. That’s tough too, being trained not to “burden” people. And I still have to be the one to walk on through. I need to rely on myself to put one foot in front of the other, whether at a shuffle or a run, or even tripping through the doorframe on my way!
And keep it real.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash