40 Rare Facts About Laverne & Shirley That Are Taking Fans Right Back To Shotz Brewery

Cindy Williams became pregnant in March 1982 and, naturally, expected the show to work around her pregnancy. They didn’t. In fact, they even scheduled her to work on the very day her baby was due. So she quit and later filed a $20 million lawsuit. It was settled out of court, and the show inexplicably continued on without one of its leads.

In 2009 Cindy Williams revealed a behind-the-scenes disagreement. She explained, “Penny and I fought against them moving the show from Milwaukee to Hollywood, but there were certain producers who felt that it was the best thing to do.” She didn’t name them, but she did say, “Both Penny and I were disappointed.”

Before Laverne & Shirley started, Williams and Marshall had a spiritual encounter with famous musician Little Richard. Williams told the Reel Life With Jane blog in 2012, “He blessed us and said a prayer over us. And Penny and I often say that the success of Laverne & Shirley was due to Little Richard’s blessing.”

In 1995 Williams talked to the Los Angeles Times about how she and Marshall first met. They had pals in common prior to being hired by the Zoetrope company, which was owned by revered director Francis Ford Coppola. “They wanted two women,” Williams recalled. “We would be assigned a certain aspect of the history of America and write a spoof… It was like never say die. We never thought there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do.”

Laverne & Shirley famously finished its run without Shirley. And in 2016 Marshall revealed to the Archive of American Television that she told her co-star, “I don’t care, Cin… lay in bed the whole time and be the biggest pain-in-the-[butt] pregnant person you’ve ever seen.” But it didn’t happen.

For a while, relations between Williams and Marshall weren’t good. But in 2013 Ariana Grande, then the star of Nickelodeon’s Sam & Cat, helped to build bridges between the two. They appeared on a very special episode of the series to portray two warring showrunners. And in doing so, the pair made up.

Cindy Williams was initially uncertain about playing Shirley. She wanted to be a film star, not a TV actress. Plus, she knew that Penny Marshall would always have her brother, Garry – the show’s writer – on her side on set. And so she was almost replaced with the similarly-named actress Liberty Williams. Eventually, however, she took the role.

In December 2016 Williams told Entertainment Tonight that she hated the accent she first had to use for Shirley. “If you watch those first 13 episodes, which I refuse to watch now, I got this hideous kind of New York accent that was terrible,” she said. Williams was later told to drop the twang, which she did with relief.

In her 2015 book, Shirley, I Jest!, Cindy Williams revealed that on first seeing the set for the show, she and Penny Marshall were shocked at its luxury. Their characters were blue-collar workers! And so the two women decided instead that they would decorate the set with their own stuff from their houses. The set designers were angry at first. In time, however, they finally came around.

Pat McQueeny, Cindy Williams’ manager, was a constant presence on the set. And she was determined that her client not be overlooked — so much so that she would actually count the lines given to Williams and Marshall and complain if Marshall got more. “She made [Cindy] insecure about a job that she was doing extremely well,” Marshall wrote in her memoir.

When asked in a 2012 interview if there were any injuries on Laverne & Shirley, Cindy Williams revealed that there had been plenty. In fact, she herself had been injured so badly during one stunt that she still suffered from health problems such as sciatica years later. “But it was worth it,” she told Reel Life with Jane.

Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams found their TV fame worked out very well for them, and Cindy Williams detailed one such incident in her book. When the actresses accidentally ordered their new chauffeur to drive down a one-way street, the police pulled them over. But when the authorities realized that the passengers were Laverne and Shirley, no one got a ticket. In fact, they even got a police escort back to their hotel.

Williams and Marshall did acknowledge that the writing staff found them hard to deal with. In fact, one Christmas they handed out dartboards featuring pictures of themselves dressed as Christmas elves in the middle. “It was the hands-down favorite gift of everyone who worked on the show,” Marshall wrote in her memoir.

After David Lander split from his wife, he ended up dating his co-star Cindy Williams. But it didn’t last. And in her memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, Penny Marshall recalled the tension their break-up caused on set. “I had to put up with that s**t,” she explained.

In April 2012 Williams spoke to the blog Reel Life With Jane about her Laverne & Shirley role. “It was wonderful to play that kind of optimistic, idealistic character because, in my own life, I’m much more self-critical,” she said. “And I shouldn’t be, and as I get older, I try to pull that tar from the wheat and get that out of my consciousness and be more like Shirley.”

In her 2013 interview with The Huffington Post, Penny Marshall revealed how she and Williams would react if they disliked the dialogue they were given. She said, “We’d do things like wear stupid hats for an entire scene… so the writers would know during the run-through, ‘Guess they don’t like that one!’”

Boo Boo Kitty wasn’t ever planned to be on the show, but Williams happened to find it under a bed during rehearsal. It was cute enough to become Shirley’s stuffed animal companion on the show. However, as there was just the one Boo Boo Kitty in existence, great care was taken to make sure it was safe and sound off-camera.

In a 2015 interview with MeTV, Cindy Williams remembered how much Michael McKean and David Lander made her laugh. “The challenge was keeping a straight face when they came in,” she admitted. “Sometimes I can actually see Penny and I biting the insides of our mouths, trying not to laugh, and then having to deliver a line.”

Even though Laverne & Shirley was a spinoff in its own right, it nearly had one of its own, too. The final episode of the show, titled “Here Today, Hair Tomorrow,” was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a whole new televised story starring Eddie Mekka’s Carmine Ragusa. Alas, though, it never happened.

In a 2013 interview with The Huffington Post, Penny Marshall had some thoughts regarding Laverne and Shirley’s lack of awards success. “The writers did as well as Cindy and I and everybody else,” she said. “We were considered lower-class, which we were. We never got nominated for an Emmy. We never got nominated for nothing...”

Getting Laverne & Shirley green-lit was surprisingly easy. After the Happy Days episode about the girls had been shot — but before it went out on television — Garry Marshall had a chance encounter with the head of ABC television. He told the executive about the idea that would become Laverne & Shirley and was asked to make a pilot episode right away. It was that simple.

If you watch Laverne & Shirley now, you’ll recognize a lot of famous faces. For instance, Ted Danson played Randy Carpenter in a memorable season five episode. Penny Marshall’s best friend, Carrie Fisher, showed up, as did Marshall’s one-time boyfriend Art Garfunkel. Other guest stars included Mark Harmon, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Guest, and Jeff Goldblum.

Penny Marshall wasn’t a fan of Laverne’s wardrobe. She told The Huffington Post, “I didn’t like the fashion when I lived through the ’50s. I certainly don’t want to keep the clothes from it. It wasn’t in our brains to say that they’d be worth money for auctions, which everything is now.” She kept a single robe, but that was it.

After being given the go-ahead for the show, Garry Marshall hired Mark Rothman and Lowell Ganz to pen a short scene for the characters Laverne and Shirley. It was quickly shot on the Happy Days set right after an episode of that show, with the crowd still in place. And despite not knowing the characters yet, everybody clapped and laughed.

Do you remember when the beloved buddies traveled through time? Just kidding! But considering Laverne & Shirley is set in the ’50s and ’60s, it’s funny how there are clearly shots of 1980s L.A. in the later episodes… Oops!

Penny Marshall started drinking milk with Pepsi when she was still a kid. Her mother would tell her to finish her milk if she wanted any soda, so Marshall just dunked soda in it instead. She developed a taste for it as well. And ever since Laverne & Shirley, people have been trying the concoction and finding out it’s quite nice.

If you ever have the chance to see the little-known 1966 show Hey, Landlord!, you might notice that some of the plots bear an uncanny resemblance to Laverne & Shirley ones. That’s because its creator Garry Marshall just straight-up reused them. In fact, in some cases, the names of minor characters weren’t even changed.

Originally, the character of Squiggy was named Anthony Squiggliano. But that had to be changed to just plain Squiggy because Garry Marshall thought the show already had enough Italians in it. Both he and his sister Penny were half-Italian themselves, in fact. And Eddie Mekka, a.k.a. Carmine Ragusa, was part Italian and part Armenian.

The Laverne & Shirley theme song was iconic, but for Penny Marshall, it eventually outstayed its welcome. Indeed, after a lifetime of fans telling her to sing it, she started to become irritated. “I just don’t like when I’m asked to do ‘Schlemiel! Schlimazel!’” she told The Huffington Post. “No, I won’t. I’m too old for that.”

When Laverne and Shirley were introduced on Happy Days, they were clearly experienced gals. But not so in Laverne & Shirley. “The girls were no longer loose. They were re-virginized, I like to say, for the family hour,” wrote Penny Marshall in her 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts.

The show was so wholesome that the characters weren’t allowed to say the word “sex” or anything relating to it. “Even the word ‘it’ was controversial. For instance, we couldn’t say, ‘Did you do it?’” Penny Marshall wrote in her memoir. “The writers came up with the nonsense word ‘voh-de-oh-doh-doh’ to use in place of the word ‘sex.’”

Gradually Laverne & Shirley dipped into more serious topics, and in season three came an episode about mental disability. It was a well-meaning story about a teen called Amy, but it used terminology that would be shocking today.

In Garry Marshall’s 2012 memoir, the writer lamented how much the writing crew on Laverne & Shirley loathed his sister and her co-star. “On a daily basis, there was infighting, yelling, cursing, and so much more,” he said. The actors thought the writers were incompetent, the writers thought the actors were full of themselves, and Garry Marshall even lost weight from the stress of keeping them all in check.

Phil Foster played Laverne’s dad, but he almost didn’t get the part. Producer Mark Rothman told Mental Floss in 2015 that some ABC executives couldn’t decipher Foster’s Brooklyn accent, so they wanted him out. Eventually, however, he was kept, and the writers just decided to include jokes about nobody being able to understand him.

Penny and Garry Marshall’s father, Anthony Marshall, was also a producer on the show, but this usually made things harder rather than easier. For example, on one occasion, Marshall senior felt that his daughter had been disrespectful to him. And so as punishment, he locked her wages away in a drawer, and her brother Garry had to negotiate to get them back.

The “Schlemiel! Schlemazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!” chant in the Laverne & Shirley introduction is a Yiddish chant Penny Marshall used to sing as a child. Marshall explained in her memoir, “It came about when my brother was working on the opening montage and asked me what that funny saying was that I used to do with my friends in the neighborhood.”

Producer Garry Marshall recalled one particularly unsettling anecdote in his autobiography. At one point, he hired a new writer, Arthur Silver, to keep his egotistical actresses in check. But Silver had been on the show for mere weeks when he ran to Marshall and told him while driving past the actors, he had actually been tempted to run them down. Marshall then wisely made the decision to let him go.

When David Lander revealed his MS diagnosis, the actor decided to use his Laverne & Shirley character, Squiggy, to raise awareness. He produced a mock public service announcement while in character, but some MS charities objected. In particular, they took exception to a line where Squiggy claimed to have “caught” MS, as MS can’t be transmitted.

Garry Marshall thought, probably correctly, that the atmosphere on the Laverne & Shirley set was no place for children. And so although he let his kids visit the Happy Days set, the set where their own aunt worked was out of bounds.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2012, Garry Marshall called Laverne and Shirley his “worst show experience.” But he also said that, although the relationship between him and his sister became strained over the course of the show, they, fortunately, managed to remain friends.