Henry Winkler is working through some things

Actor grapples with dyslexia, family issuses in memoir

It comes as little surprise that Henry Winkler is “charming - famously charming,” as he shares in “Being Henry: The Fonz … and Beyond,” which arrives on Halloween, the day after the actor toasts 78.

It comes as more of one that Winkler is, by his own admission, constantly scared, easily wounded, riddled with self-doubt, perpetually self-involved, childish, cheap, unforgiving and petty. Here is a fellow who once complained to his saint of a wife that their daughter “really hurt my feelings.”

To which Stacey replied, “But she’s three.” Winkler chose to include all this - a veritable DSM worth of unbecoming behavior - as well as Stacey’s voice and frank observations (she asks, “Now I have another child?”) in his memoir. And yet, true to his claim, in conversation he charms. The smile beguiles. The leonine locks, now silver, enchant. He chats as though you’ve been pals for eons.

“I tell you, this is one of the scariest moments of my career,” he said on a recent Zoom call from his home office in Los Angeles, his 2018 Emmy for HBO’S “Barry” and roses from his garden on a table behind him. Attired in full Upper West Side therapist, a blue nubby shawl-collar cardigan cloaking a checked shirt, he asked: “Are people going to be interested? Did I leave anything out?”

Possibly, though not likely. Winkler only started therapy, meaningful therapy, at age 70. He’s still working through many issues, in his life, in his memoir, in conversation. Which only endears him more. You want to brew him some tea, pat his arm. His tender memoir isn’t explicitly dishy. It’s an excavation of his challenges, pain and neuroses.

Winkler doesn’t so much nurse a grudge as midwife one - if necessary, for eternity. “Night Shift” co-star Michael Keaton, who ghosted Winkler in the early 1980s. Winkler’s demanding, withholding German immigrant parents. Director Alan Schneider and Winkler’s producing partner, TV director John Rich. The last four, mind you, long gone from this world.

“They’re dead, they can’t defend themselves. Should I talk about the dead like this?” Winkler writes about Schneider and Rich. “And out of the ooze in the Magic Eight Ball comes the answer: Yes, I should, because they were the worst.”

About criticizing his parents, “my wife said to me, ‘You have to pull this back. No, no, no. You can’t say this,’” the actor said.

Winkler did. His memoir details their severe parenting style and impossible standards, their calling him names and treating him as a failure, the way he fantasized about them moving away while he was at school and leaving no forwarding address.

“Harry’s and Ilse’s German was very expressive,” he writes. “Take the colorful nickname they gave me: dummer Hund. It meant dumb dog.”

Winkler is “severely dyslexic,” though he didn’t learn this until his early 30s, a pattern of late revelations and triumphs that punctuate his life. “I was really angry because I had something with a name. I now knew that I wasn’t stupid,” he said. “All that humiliation, all that name-calling was for nothing,” the last word offered with the sort of dramatic disdain common in the acting workshop his character Gene teaches in “Barry.”

He repeatedly failed geometry, passing on the fourth try with a D-minus. “And from that day in August of 1963 until this day in October of 2023, not one human being has ever said hypotenuse to me,” he said. “So what the hell was that about?”

He applied to 28 colleges to be accepted at only one, Emerson in Boston.

“I still cannot read,” he said. “I learn through my ear.” The father of three and grandfather of six claimed to have “read only a few books in my life that I’ve actually finished.”

Yet Winkler is the co-author of around three dozen children’s books with Lin Oliver, including “Detective Duck: The Case of the Strange Splash,” published this month. “Being Henry” is based on 75 hours of interviews with veteran biographer James Kaplan. “Though Henry is profoundly dyslexic, he’s a supremely verbal and witty man,” Kaplan said by phone from Westchester, N.Y. “Everybody loves him.”

Winkler writes, “I can’t remember not feeling an intense need to perform.”

The role of Fonzie on “Happy Days” came on his 27th birthday. Winkler’s second big break, self-involved, needy Gene, arrived at age 72. Winkler’s first reaction when asked to read for the part from a select group of actors was to ask: “‘Is Dustin Hoffman on that list?’ Because, if so, I have no shot. I’m not even going in.” Hoffman was not. Winkler memorized the scene - this was no time to punt - and landed the role, plus two more Emmy nominations.

“I love the Fonz. He is nothing other than a gift,” Winkler said, speaking of him as though he were a real person in another room. “I understand him. My God, he is so talented. Oh, he’s funny. He’s so good. And a guru, you know. Really nice fellow, but he was the Fonz, right? But that never made me resent him, because I had done this incredible thing that introduced me to the world.”

Winkler worried so much about being typecast as a slicked-back, comb-dependent, aaaay-uttering exemplar of cool that he turned down the lead in “Grease.” Yes, that one.

What came next was producing, including “The Hollywood Squares” and “Macgyver,” the latter running for 13 seasons in two iterations.

So Winkler’s a mogul? He shrugged. “I’m a mogulette.”

Slowly, parts appeared. Adam Sandler celebrated Winkler in “The Hanukkah Song” (“Guess who eats together at the Carnegie Deli/bowser from Sha Na Na and Arthur Fonzarelli”) and cast him repeatedly, first as Coach Klein in “The Waterboy” (1998). Winkler said, “I love him, and I think he loves me back.”

He was signed to appear in an episode or two of the beloved comedies “Parks and Recreation” and “Arrested Development,” and ended up appearing in many more. As OB/GYN Lu Saperstein on “Parks and Recreation,” “I delivered every star’s baby.” Winkler did 32 episodes of “Arrested Development” as criminally incompetent Bluth family attorney Barry Zuckerkorn. He appeared as an art collector in Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch.”

“I think there’s an emotional component to being dyslexic. I did not have a self-image growing up. I did not have one until age 70,” he said. “The first question the therapist said to me is ‘Where are you? Where’s the you?’ I had no idea what she was talking about. I did not know that it was missing. All the time, I was editing my life.”

Winkler’s insecurity about his intelligence and abilities, his lifelong struggles with reading - words like “schedule” affixed to his computer as prompts - caused him to keep “pushing ahead with unbelievable tenacity. It’s a gift. And I don’t know that I would be here talking to you right this second if I didn’t have this challenge.

“You imprint that people think you’re stupid. You know you’re not. I did not know what I didn’t know,” Winkler said. “I see my life as a block of Swiss cheese. So many holes. My life’s journey is to fill in those holes to make it a block of cheddar.”