By Fred Robbins
Submitted by taxifan

Brash, sunny, funny Tony Danza, star of NTV's popular Who's the Boss? sitcom, who receives a staggering amount of fan mail, should know that audiences like him. But he's hard-pressed to explain his appeal. Flashing that ingratiating grin, he shrugs and says, "My father used to say that I was a 'knockaround guy.' I mean, maybe that's it. I'm just a regular guy."

But he's much more certain about one thing. Right now is "the happiest time" in the 37 year-old life of Tony Danza.

I can't imagine being any happier," he told me when I caught up with him recently in Hollywood. "the show is wonderful. My son (16 year-old Marc Anthony) is doing fine and making great grades in school. My daughter, Gina (who's three), is well. And I have a wonderful wife. So, I mean, I have a lot to be thankful for.

This past summer, in a beautiful outdoor ceremony at Malibu, surrounded by family and friends (400 in all), Brooklyn-born Danza was married to blond Tracy Robinson, a native Californian. At the time they wed, 27 year-old Tracy, whose first marriage this is, was a furniture designer for the chic Saporiti-Italia emporium in Los Angeles. Now, with her bridegroom's wholehearted approval, she has opted for another kind of career.

"I want her to be what she wants to be, which is a housewife," says Danza. "She wants to raise kids and that makes me very happy. I think that's what we're here for - to raise a family." So they have every intention of making the earliest possible start at fulfilling this mutual dream.

"I feel that I wasn't enjoying my life, even though I had all the success in the world, until I had this woman," Danza went on. "Success, you know, is nothing unless you have somebody to share it with."

"For quite a while there, I was complaining that I was all alone, that I didn't have anybody. The truth is, I wouldn't give anybody a chance. The minute I'd get involved, I'd find a way out. And it wouldn't take much for me to make my escape. Each time, I think I realized it would never work.

"Then I met Tracy. And I knew she was everything I always tried to think the other women were. Everything I tried to make the others into, she really is. Besides being soft, feminine and gorgeous, Mama mia, can she cook! Tracy is strong. Such will power. She revels in strength, and I find inspiration in that. She uses her love to make me strong."

To win Tracy - in fact, even to ask her out - Danza had to play a waiting game. And patience has never been his prime virtue.

When mutual friends introduced them at a softball game four years ago, tracy had been involved for some time with another guy. But the minute she broke of with this fellow, Danza made his move. Fast.

"When she finally went out with me," he says, "I found myself talking about marriage. I mean, like that - first date!"

This second marriage of his is "forever" and "different," says the actor, "because I do have my feet on the ground. I wanted to get married. I wanted to be with somebody." And that had not been entirely the case the first time around.

After graduating from a Long Island high school, Danza had gone off the University of Dubuque, in Iowa, on a wrestling scholarship. During his freshman year there he started dating a teen-aged coed whom he'd first spotted roller-skating outside the student union. Within months, though neither had planned it that way, they married.

As Danza confided early in his television career, "We got in trouble. If you want to put that down, OK, put that down. I was brought up Italian and righteous and taught to do 'the right thing.' So I got married, I gave it a shot for four or five months. The girl and me, we're still good friends."

Soon after the birth of son Marc Anthony, Tony and Rhonda separated, though they were not divorced until 1974. But they always remained on such agreeable terms that, years after the divorce, there was a brief reconciliation - which didn't work out.

During that time, however, their second child, Gina, was conceived. It was then that his former wife agreed that Marc Anthony needed a father's influence and should live with Danza in California.

Returning to New York after getting his university degree (in social studies), Danza, the son of Italian immigrants, worked at various occupations. He was a bartender, cab driver, dishwasher in a temple, furniture mover and part owner of a car wash and tavern.

On the side, his continuing interest in athletics led him to take up boxing, participate successfully in several Golden Gloves competitions, and eventually turn professional.

"Tough" Tony Danza, as he was billed, proved to be a natural middleweight contender. (When he retired from the ring, after becoming an actor, it was with an impressive 10-3 record.)

His start in acting began when a representative of a movie company, planning a film about boxing, went on a scouting expedition to Gleason's gym in Manhattan, where Danza trained.

Though a screen test followed, the movie project was dropped, and Danza, going back to boxing, wrote off the whole experience as "a joke."

Eventually Danza was signed to act in a pilot for a TV series, Fast Lane Blues. ("$5,000 for three weeks' work, he enthusiastically inserts "Unbelievable!") The pilot didn't sell.

Next Danza met producers of a film called The Warriors, about New York street-gang warfare.

Recalls Danza, in the Brooklynese he has not entirely shucked off, "So I shows them the poster 'Tough" Tony Danza. I said if they wanted to see a real warrior to come to my fight, which was like three days later, my first main event. They came. Now this guy I was up against was supposed to be a tough guy, supposed to take me. But he walked right into a left hook. In about 47 seconds he ends up in first row. And the movie producer said it was the greatest audition he ever saw."

Sent to Hollywood to be costumed for the picture, Danza chanced to meet - in a studio hallway - TV writer-producer Jim Brooks. And it was destiny time.

Brooks had a new television series coming up titled Taxi. One of the characters in it, as a cabbie and part-time boxer, was a guy called Phil Ryan, an Irish heavyweight. No sooner did Brooks have Danza read for the part that Phil Ryan became an Italian middleweight named Tony Banta.

Instead of The Warriors, Tony Danza, unknown, untutored and unexpectedly and actor, found himself co-starring - and easily holding his own - in Taxi, a smash hit.