That Day I Met the Fonz and Couldn’t Speak
This story originally appeared on The Mid.
I have been lucky in life to have met both heroes and sex symbols alike.
Andy Warhol, one of my earliest idols, gave me 15 seconds of his steely gaze after the premiere of the film in which I had three lines: “You were good,” he said, typically laconic, before turning his back to chat with Marisa Berenson. I spent several hours with Al Gore, talking about NASA; I drank tea with Afghani warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, talking about Proust. Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing took me out to lunch at a three-star restaurant in southern France, where we downed an entire bottle of Chateau Lafite. Stevie Wonder and I were seated next to one another at a dinner, where I was able to tell him, in person, how his music helped me survive adolescence.
Stevie Wonder and the author, 2013 · © Josh Berger
As for sex symbols, I learned the true meaning of the phrase “writer’s block” while trying to finish my third book on a film set, as a shirtless Chris Pine jumped rope not five feet away. I spent a Memorial Day weekend in Hyannis Port, watching Rodinesque chiseled Kennedys play an intense game of football. The kid who played Ponyboy in The Outsiders was one of my first lovers, on a secluded beach in the South Pacific when we were both 17. My friend Josh and I briefly shared a table at the River Café in London with his friend Ralph Fiennes.
Forgive the hideous name-dropping. I sound like an asshole, I know. But I have deliberately dropped them as prelude to a comparison: Never once during any of these interactions did I ever feel uncomfortable, unworthy, or lesser. I did not lose my voice. My palms did not sweat. And aside from sending my daughter a surreptitious text under Fiennes’ table — “Guess who I’m with? Voldemort!” — I did not react in any way that might be seen as untoward, weird, or immature.
I’ve always been one to see people as people, none more equal than others.
Until I met…the Fonz.
“Heeey.” · © elzey/flickr
Let’s backtrack for a moment. To a young girl like me — who watched Happy Daysreligiously from its premiere in 1974, when she was 8, up until its last episode in 1984, when she was 18 — Henry Winkler was not just an actor on a favorite TV show. For many women of my generation, whose adolescence straddled the Fonzie era, Winkler’s character became the psycho-sexual blueprint for every man we’ve ever straddled since.
Jerry Solomon, my intense fifth-grade crush, was not only Henry Winkler’s doppelganger, he was prone to holding his thumbs up and emitting a mock Fonz-like, “Heeeeeyyyy” on the playground. Every single one of my teenage boyfriends and college beaus, and that photographer who abandoned me in Afghanistan: all Fonzies. My type became such an embarrassingly predictable, bad-boy-who’s-really-a-good-boy-(who’s-sometimes-actually-just-a-bad-boy) type, that when I finally met a man who wasn’t a Fonz, I ended up marrying him.
Which worked for many years until it didn’t.
But back to meeting the Fonz. This was back in 2001. My first book, Shutterbabe, had just been published, and I was invited by Oprah’s then-new network, Oxygen, to come on Gayle King’s show to plug it.
I arrived in the greenroom. I’ve been in many greenrooms, frequently with famous people I don’t recognize because I’m old. The only reason I knew Chris Brown was with me that time in The Today Show greenroom was because a younger friend who was watching the show from home texted, “OMG, you’re backstage with Chris Brown?”
To which I replied, “Who dat?” Which is even more pathetic than if I’d replied, “Who’s that?” since anyone who knows to respond “Who dat?” should have heard of Chris Brown.
When Henry Winkler walked in, I’d just eaten a giant slab of watermelon with my hands. I was still chewing, in that way one chews when you’ve taken too big a bite, but it would be rude to spit out half. “Hi!” said the Fonz, “I’m…”
I gasped, audibly, before he could finish. Watermelon juice dribbled down my chin.
“…Henry.” He reached out his hand, super friendly and kind. “Nice to meet you.”
What I would have said, had my heart not dropped into my kneecaps, was this: “You don’t want to shake this hand, it’s covered in watermelon juice.” What I ended up saying — and doing! — was nothing. Not a word. Not a peep. Not even a handshake.
Clearly, the Fonz was used to this. “Whatcha’ here for?” he said.
I held up my book and kind of waved it. Whatever words came out of my mouth, if any, were not in English. They were a mix between Sanskrit and caveman.
“For me?” he said, grabbing the book.
I nodded. It was my only copy. I was supposed to read some of it out loud on the show, but who cared? Gayle and I could just trade recipes or gossip about Oprah.
“Then you’ll have to sign it.” The Fonz handed it back, with a pen. It was 2001. People still carried pens. “What’s it about?”
At this point I’m sure he thought it was a touching, feel-good memoir about how I’d overcome severe mental retardation and deafness, not a coming-of-age tale about fucking a Fonzie — actually several — in various war zones. I honestly cannot remember what I said after that or what I wrote in his book; I just remember being whisked from the greenroom to makeup, kicking myself for not being able to have a normal conversation with the man who’d permanently imprinted his archetype on my psyche.
“Oh my God,” I said to the makeup artist, who was younger than me by a decade. “I can’t believe the Fonz is here, and I couldn’t even open my mouth and have a normal conversation with him. I’m such an idiot!”
She had no idea who I was talking about.
“The Fonz!” I said, “You know, the guy who wears a leather jacket and goes…”
“Heeeeeeyyyy!” said Winkler, who’d snuck up behind us. He winked at me in the mirror.
Keep it together! I admonished myself. He’s just a person! He’s Henry Winkler! Not the Fonz! Stop deifying him!
“I started reading your book,” he said. “It’s awesome! You were in Afghanistan? With that jerk?”
Somehow, somewhere deep within me, I found the wherewithal to respond. “Yes,” I said. “I was. And the funny thing about that jerk was that at first he reminded me of…” No more watermelon juice on my chin or Sanskrit on my tongue. I’d been given a second chance at speaking to the man who set the mold for all who followed, and I wasn’t going to screw it up twice. “Look. I just have to say something,” I said, “to get it out of the way. Because if I don’t say it, it’ll just be sitting here between us, this colossal unspoken thing, and I won’t be able to comport myself or have a normal conversation, cool?”
“Cool,” said Winkler.
I took a deep breath. “I had a huge crush on you for, like, a decade,” I said, blushing. “My entire adolescence, in fact. There. That’s done. Phew. I feel much better. You must get that a lot.”
Winkler smiled. “Can we talk about Afghanistan now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s talk about Afghanistan.”
Henry Winkler at the 13th Annual Producers Guild Awards in March 2002. · © Vince Bucci/Getty
And as we sat there and chatted, covering everything from war zones to politics to marriage and kids and Judaism and back again, I wished I could reach back in time to tell my pimply, awkward, flat-chested 13-year-old self, that girl in the braces and Wallabees and Farrah Fawcett wings who thought she was an ugly, unlovable runt who would never meet a Fonzie, let alone kiss one, that one day she’d be sitting in a chair, getting glammed up for the cameras, sharing stories of the various Fonzies in her life with none other than the Fonz himself.
Oh, and Henry? If you’re out there and reading this: L’chaim and thank you. For everything. For your role as the Fonz — I’m pretty sure I speak for the majority of women of my generation on that front — and for your kindness in that greenroom way back when. I’m sorry I stole your pen. I didn’t mean to. I just got caught up in a perfect moment on one of the Happiest Days of my life.
