'Odd Couple' honors late Garry Marshall, 'menschiest guy...in show business'

Garry Marshall touched a lot of people's  lives over a long career as a writer, producer and actor.

On Monday, a number of them - including Happy Days stars Ron Howard and Marion Ross, Laverne & Shirley's Penny Marshall (his sister) and Cindy Williams, and Mork & Mindy's Pam Dawber - will appear in an episode of CBS' The Odd Couple in honor of the producer, who died July 19 at 81.

"He's truly like the menschiest guy I've ever worked with in show business," said Odd Couple showrunner Bob Daily in an interview in August, when Monday's tribute was still in the planning stages.

Marshall, who had originally adapted Neil Simon's The Odd Couple for television, was an executive consultant on the current series, and it was a job he took seriously, Daily said.

"When the show was picked up, [CBS CEO] Les Moonves said, 'Hey, Garry Marshall's my neighbor and he did the original Odd Couple. Maybe we'll give him like an honorary title of some kind,'" Daily said.

"And Garry called me and said, 'I will not take money that I don't earn. So if I'm going to get a paycheck, I'm coming in every week. I was like, 'Great.'"

Daily didn't hesitate, he said, "because I'd heard so many great stories about him."

Marshall, he said, "would not intrude. He never intruded. But he came to every taping of every show, when he wasn't doing a movie. And the highlight of every week was, whenever there was a costume change, they would hand him the mic and he would go in front of the audience and he would just answer questions and tell stories. And the actors would all come out. Everybody would stop for half an hour.

"Because he never told the same story twice. For like 25 episodes. He had such a backlog of show-business stories ... Always entertaining. And, by the way, I always felt like [for] the audience, it was a little bit of a letdown to have to go back to the show after hearing Garry Marshall for half an hour. Because he was so charming and entertaining."

Marshall's stories were about "Robin Williams. And Happy Days. Nobody had a better or more interesting career than that guy."

The producer  also had appeared on the show as Walter, the father of Oscar Madison (Matthew Perry). In Monday's episode, "Taffy Days," Walter has died, and Oscar, preparing to scatter his ashes behind the candy factory his father used to own, connects with some people from the past.

The veteran producer did more than tell stories, Daily said.

"Once a week he came to the writers' room and then he would come to the tapings. And he would pitch jokes on the floor — he'd whisper a joke in my ear. And that was so intimidating, but also so cool," he said.

"He would pitch the joke and he would say, 'If you like it — if you don't, no problem,' and then he'd walk away. We used them sometimes and sometimes we didn't. But sometimes we used them and they were hilarious."

"It's always frightening trying to recreate a show, and he was the guy who created the original show. He could have been a monster, but he was so generous. Always gave me credit, always talked me up to the network. He could not have been more generous or more of a mensch to me. So I'm so grateful to him."

So, too, are other TV writers, he said.

"The nicest thing was that, when he died, I put something on Facebook about it and a picture of me with him and a little thing. And as I scrolled down my Facebook feed, every single writer that I knew posted a picture of them with Garry. It was either, 'He spoke at my college graduation,' or 'He was a guest star on my show,' or 'I wrote a Murphy Brown [episode] that he was in.' Everybody in town had a Garry Marshall story. And a Garry Marshall photo."

The Odd Couple, 9:30 p.m. Monday, CBS