Henry Winkler hadn’t clocked how famous he was until he asked for his fanmail to be sent to his apartment. It was 1974, he was 28 and had landed a gift of a role in Happy Days, a sitcom about a preppy midwestern teenager and his friends and family. As the strutting high-school dropout Arthur Fonzarelli, AKA the Fonz, AKA Fonzie, Winkler was meant to be a peripheral character, though he was an instant hit with audiences – so much so that producers wanted to change the title to Fonzie’s Happy Days (Winkler begged them not to). When the fan letters arrived, there were 50,000 of them.
“Box after box, and I read them all,” he says. “Some of them were just a sentence in crayon, others were so dear and thoughtful. And get this: I pulled out one and it said” – he adopts a comedy German accent – “‘I sink zat Fonzie eez very good and ABC should give him more to do on ze show.’ I looked at it and thought: ‘I know that handwriting. That’s my fucking mother.’”
