Penny Marshall on Pot

Marshall as Laverne (to Cindy Williams's Shirley)

Penny Marshall's 2012 memoir My Mother Was Nuts tells how she became a TV star, married Rob Reiner, motorcycled across Europe with Art Garfunkel, became a film director....and smoked pot.

After studying dance and appearing in musical theatre in her youth, Marshall decided to move to Los Angeles with some fellow cast members. She writes:

"On the night before we left,  Bill, Randy, and I went to the drive-in and saw The Trip, director Roger Corman's movie abut a TV director who takes LSD and goes on a mind-bending journey. Bill lit up a joint, and I smoked pot for the first time. It didn't even make me hungry."

Marshall says she liked Reiner because he "wore pajamas and didn't do drugs. His wild days were behind him." But after they married, "our house becomes a hangout for comedy's elite," naming Albert Brooks, Jerry Belson, Billy Crystal, Richard Dreyfuss, and Charles Grodin, among others.

"These were the pot-smoking years, and a lot of it was smoked at our house," she writes. "I cleaned the seeds and stems in a shoebox top. It was a skill, and I was good at it." Women weren't invited into the club. Belson would interrupt Brooks's comedy routines to say, "Can we take a break and smoke a joint?" and Brooks would get the munchies so badly he would eat Marshall's daughter's brown bag lunch meant for school the next day.

She mentions smoking cigarettes frequently, a habit she started while still in junior high. While working with Steven Speilberg, "I tried to get a Quaalude in him. They were my drug of choice. I constantly joked about wanting to know what he would be like if he relaxed."

Once, she flushed a bag of heroin down the toilet when her friend John Belushi offered it to her. "I had tried heroin once. It made me carsick," she wrote. "Artie [Garfunkel] didn't like it either, thank God. When others were chipping on the weekends, he was my ally in not doing it, and I will always be grateful to him for giving me the wherewithal to keep saying no. I wish John had done the same."

After being paired with Cindy Williams, Marshall hit the big time in TV's "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). In a "lost episode" from 1981 titled "I Do, I Do,"  the girls go to a party where Mary Jane is being smoked. Laverne wants to try it, but Shirley talks her into eating brownies instead, not knowing they were of the Alice B. Toklas variety. 

Marshall became one of the most successful female film directors ever, starting with directing Whoopi Goldberg (pictured) in Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), followed by Big with Tom Hanks, and Oliver Sacks's Awakenings with Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro. I thought it was brilliant that for Big she had the actor who played Hanks's younger self act out all the scenes so that Hanks could see what a boy looked like in them; it was also interesting to learn that DeNiro almost played his role.

I particularly enjoyed her description of directing A League of Their Own, the first women's baseball movie. She tells how she cast and re-cast the film, getting Madonna to try out on the baseball field, and standing her ground to keep the ending with the "old women" of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, for whom she says she made the movie. League was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2012. The film celebrated its 25th anniversary on July 1 (with a new Blu-ray edition).

After surviving lung cancer that metastasized to her brain, Marshall gained weight and turned to her friend Carrie Fisher, then a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig. "Thirty years earlier we had dropped acid," she writes. "Now we were microwaving our Jenny meals. What had we become?"

Up next from Marshall: Between the Pipes, the story of Manon Rhéaume, the only woman to play for the NHL, and the story of Dennis Rodman, due out in 2018.

UPDATE 10/10/17: Kathy Bates, promoting her Netflix series "Disjointed" on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, described smoking some of Bill Maher's too-strong pot at a birthday party for Marshall. No word on whether or not Marshall smoked it too. 

Hugh Hefner: Drug War Foe

Gloria Steinem in her Playboy Bunny costume, 1963

I must say I'm conflicted over whether or not to mourn Hugh Hefner's death.

As a feminist, I can't say he was a hero of mine. I read Gloria Steinem's undercover description of what it was like to be a Playboy Bunny, and it wasn't pretty. On the other hand, he supported a woman's right to choose. 

Hefner stood up for the First Amendment in more ways than the obvious one: publishing an interview with Malcom X lead to his first obscenity trial. He also helped get NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) off the ground with a donation and editorial support, and later held fundraisers for the Marijuana Policy Project at the Playboy mansion (hostessed in 2009 by Adrianne Curry and Fairuza Balk).

It was also in Playboy where former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders commented about then-Health and Human Secretary Donna Shalala's indefensible stance against medical marijuana, saying, "She has a Ph.D. in political science. That's the kind of science she practices." Bill Gates outed himself as an LSD user in Playboy, and Rush Limbaugh told the magazine in 1993 he smoked pot only twice in his life and it made him nauseous. (Others dispute the claim.)

I recently viewed the Amazon biopic series on Hefner, produced by Playboy Enterprises. It surprised me by revealing that his first girlfriend cheated on him with another man, devastating him and causing him to question monogamy. (So he acted as Shahryar did?) Episode 6 addresses Playboy's commitment to civil liberties, heightened by the hiring of editor Arthur Kretchmer, who's interviewed recalling, "Some of us were smoking dope." (Meanwhile, Hef was downing prescription Dexedrine to keep up with his grueling schedule.)

Episode 8 details the unjust drug arrest of Hef's close friend and associate Bobbie Arnstein, who committed suicide after receiving a 15-year prison sentence. Hefner was in tears when he read a statement condemning the US Government for hounding Bobbie to death. But it's also thought that she was troubled over an inferiority complex heightened by constant comparison with the Bunny Brigade.

Of course Hefner owed his success to the women who willingly graced the pages of Playboy over the years. The Marilyn Monroe estate's Twitter feed reminded us that she helped launch Playboy, by appearing on its first cover. Inside was that classic, exuberant nude of her, taken years earlier and purchased by Hef from a calendar publisher for $800.

The early centerfolds were quite beautiful, I thought, but I can't look at them today: each one has the same, unnatural body (no hips and oversized boobs; worse, little or no pubic hair). The biopic also reveals how competition from other girlie magazines forced Playboy into rancher realms.

UPDATE 2/22: A new series on Playboy on A&E also covers the Bobbie Arnstein case and interviews NORML founder Keith Stroup. 

The Goop on Gwyneth: She's a Vaper

On the heels of the news that Olivia Newton-John uses medical marijuana, another blonde icon, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, vaped her way through a cover shoot for the premiere issue of her new magazine Goop, while chatting about the medicinal use of cannabis.

“What’s really interesting to see, with all the legalization of marijuana happening, is how there’s evidence that it can be helpful in a medicinal sense for people,” she said. “That it can really be an alternative pain management system, and, in some cases, helpful for depression.

After saying, “Oh, I’ve tried it, and yes, I inhaled!” she sang the praises of her hmbldt brand vape pen, which is “apparently very tailored in terms of its balance of THC and CBD. So, there’s one that’s for arousal, there’s one that’s for calm, there’s one that’s for pain relief, there’s one for sleep. And you don’t, like when you were a teenager, smoke pot and get blazed out of your mind.”

She also spoke about the “complete opioid epidemic. And then we are as a culture, very resistant to more natural options….So, we’re just at this very interesting, I think, paradigm shift, because, we can tell that culturally people are so fascinated, and they want to try ways to take control over their health and well-being. They want to be the steward of their own ship.”

Famous (and often ridiculed) for her ultraclean lifestyle, Paltrow is the daughter of the also-luminous Blythe Danner, who starred in 2015's I’ll See You in My Dreams, featuring a pot party followed by a munchie run with Rhea Perlman, Mary Kay Place and June Squibb (pictured).

In a career that has spanned Jane Austin to Austin Powers, Paltrow won a much-deserved Oscar for her role in Shakespeare in Love, in which she played a woman pretending to be a man in order to appear on stage, a nice twist. She has authored two cookbooks and just opened a Goop store.

Gwyneth admitting to marijuana use will no doubt spawn jokes along the lines of, “This explains why she named her daughter Apple.” With more and more revelations like hers, it won’t be long before marijuana is as American as Apple Pie.