Happy days are here again for the man who was the Fonz
Like his pizzamaking, Henry Winkler’s career is on a roll, writes Alexis Soloski
Ithink I am having the best time,” the flour-dusted actor Henry Winkler says. “How am I doing?”
Winkler, a so-so cook and a champion eater, is spending a summer afternoon at Lucali in Brooklyn, learning to make pizza. He’s been rolling out a blob of springy fridge-chilled dough using a full wine bottle. (“You roll the dough, you take a sip,” Mark Iacono, Lucali’s stubbled owner says.)
The shape that flopped on the marble work top wasn’t quite a circle. It looked more like the state of Texas, Iacono observes.
“Is that good?” Winkler says. Iacono pauses. “Yeah,” he says. “As long as you have fun doing it.”
Winkler, 72, is having fun. A lot of it. So much that one of his pies burns while he is basking in the moment.
“Just for the record, I like burnt crust,” he says.
He also likes his late-career resurgence. Winkler always knew he wanted to be an actor. “I lived it, I ate it, I dreamt it,” he says. “I couldn’t go to sleep some nights – just imagining it.”
After a stint at the Yale School of Drama, he spent a decade as the Fonz, the huggable greaser of Happy Days fame, the man who actually jumped the shark. But when that series finished, Winkler’s career flagged. “I literally couldn’t get hired,” he says.
He can now. On Netflix’s Arrested Development, he plays Barry Zuckerkorn, arguably television’s worst lawyer. And he just notched an Emmy nomination, his sixth, for his supporting work as the minimally competent acting teacher Gene Cousineau on the HBO comedy Barry.
“It took me this long to be close to the actor I knew I wanted to be,” Winkler says.
Earlier that afternoon, he had arrived late to his private pizza lesson. Blame fun. While his wife, Stacey Winkler, waited at Lucali, Winkler tagged along with Iacono on a trip to the pork store and then insisted on going into every bakery they passed, snapping smartphone pictures along the way.
He returned with a mammoth black-and-white cookie (“My favourite cookie in all of America,” he says) and a loaf of lard bread that he tore into with his teeth.
“Oh my God,” he says, mumbling through crumbs.
He has a cut on his forehead (he’d walked into some scaffolding a few days ago), joking that the cast of The Boys in the Band, which he had seen the night before, had “just attacked me, all of them.”
He’s a lifelong fan of Di Fara, Lucali’s affectionate rival. But Lucali is the favourite spot of his son, Max Winkler, a director. So when Winkler found himself in New York for a few days (he was raised on the Upper West Side, but he and Stacey live in Los Angeles) he blocked out time to try it.
As Iacono sets out canisters of dough and hacks into a hemisphere of Parmesan, Winkler removes his tan jacket and ties on a milk white apron over his tattersall shirt, his ruff of silver hair tickling the collar.
He watches as Iacono rolls out a blob of dough, then covers it with a perfect nautilus of sauce, shaving strips of low-moisture mozzarella over the top and dotting it with hunks of handtorn bufala.
Then it is Winkler’s turn. “Work from the centre out,” Iacono says. “Just keep going, going, going.” Winkler keeps at it, while Iacono gathers some logs to stoke the oven.
“Are you sweating?” Iacono asks.
“Me?” Winkler says. “No. I’m enjoying.”
“Wait till I open the oven,” Iacono says.
He shows Winkler how to stretch his dough, resting it on Winkler’s upstretched thumbs. “You’ve got those famous thumbs,” Iacono says. Ayyy!
With the dough properly rolled, Winkler ladles on some sauce. He piles cheese on top, and then some more. He grates a small mound for himself, too. “I’m just going to test this,” he says. Then he tests it again.
Iacono helps him put his pizza in the oven, jiggling it off a wooden paddle. “Nice and easy,” he says.
When the pie emerges about three minutes later, still bubbling, Iacono snips fresh basil onto it, then sprinkles on Parmesan. Stacey takes a slice and feeds her husband a few bites as he works on the next one. “Oh my God,” he says.
On Barry, Winkler’s character is a wonky amalgam of nearly every drama teacher Winkler has ever had.
What does Winkler think makes a good teacher? “The will to watch growth.”
Under Iacono’s tutelage, Winkler’s pizzas grow progressively rounder (and cheesier). He patiently imparts some of his newfound wisdom to his wife as she struggles with a ball of dough. “Put your palm here,” he says. “That’s it. Now push out.” The will to watch growth.
Stacey tries to convince him to stop at a nearby bakery for an Italian ice, but Winkler has finally had enough fun. “Like a camel, I’m not eating again until August,” he says.
© NYT 2018
“It took me this long tobeclosetothe actor I knew I wanted to be”