This is the story of a Hollywood marriage haunted by suspicion, jealousy, and a secret crush that Penny Marshall may have sensed all along.

Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall ranked among the most celebrated couples in television history, but tension lurked behind the scenes of their 10-year marriage that few people knew about.

Another woman was involved, a co-star, and an accusation that would linger for decades.

And what makes this story so fascinating is that Penny Marshall’s suspicions might not have been paranoia.

After all, before Hollywood royalty status found them, Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall were just two kids from the Bronx who actually grew up on the same street.

Crossing the road to meet each other wasn’t allowed.

As Penny later joked, years passed before their paths finally crossed at the committee, a repatory comedy group where Rob recognized something special about her because they had the same kinds of little things in their pockets.

Penny felt immediate attraction and complications existed since she had been married before with a young daughter named Tracy.

While Rob was 4 years younger than her, none of that mattered when April 10th, 1971 arrived.

And right after Rob finished taping an episode of his hit sitcom, They Got Married.

27 years old, the bride stood across from her 23-year-old groom, and their wedding dinner consisted of Chinese takeout.

Rob’s vows included a promise to always be her best friend, while Penny promised to try not to make him nervous.

A Hollywood fairy tale seemed to be beginning, but the cracks would appear sooner than anyone expected.

The year before their wedding, both Rob and Penny auditioned for the same television show called All in the Family, which would become one of the most groundbreaking sitcoms in American history.

Rob auditioned for Michael Stivik, the liberal son-in-law.

Everyone would come to know as Meathead, and the part went to him.

Penny auditioned for Gloria, Meatthead’s wife, and the role went to a young actress named Sally Strs instead.

That decision shaped everything that followed.

Penny later admitted something, revealing when she acknowledged that getting cast as Gloria probably would have killed their marriage since working together that closely while playing husband and wife on screen and being husband and wife at home would have been too much.

He is what made the situation even more complicated.

Penny didn’t just accept the loss and move on because she showed up to the set every single week.

sitting in the audience during tapings and watching her real husband pretend to be married to another woman.

Needle point kept her hands busy during those sessions and in her own words, “She did it to keep her hands away from her throat.

” That description doesn’t come from a woman at peace with the situation.

Norman Leah, the legendary creator of All in the Family, later revealed why Sally Struts won the role over Penny Marshall, and his explanation added another layer to this complicated story.

Sally once asked Leah point blank whether she had been the funniest one in the room during the audition improvisations.

Leah’s answer was no.

She wasn’t the funniest dot.

The reason Sally got cast came down to something else entirely.

Lear explained that he was thinking ahead about the show’s longevity and Sally could better pull off playing a daddy’s girl to series star Carol Oconor.

Penny’s personality didn’t fit that dynamic as naturally which meant the role went to someone else despite Penny being funnier in the room.

Imagine sitting with that knowledge.

Penny Marshall lost the role not because she lacked talent, but because another actress better suited the fatherdaughter chemistry the show needed.

And that actress would spend the next 8 years playing the wife of Penny’s actual husband.

While Penny watched from the audience, knowing she could have been funnier, but understanding why she wasn’t chosen, something was building inside Penny Marshall as All in the Family became a massive hit.

Something she couldn’t ignore.

Week after week, she watched Rob and Sally’s brothers work together, observing their chemistry on screen and the way they played off each other with obvious comfort between them.

The moment that revealed how deep her suspicions, ran came when Rob pulled Sally aside for a serious conversation at CBS one day.

Penny was coming to the taping that night.

And when Sally expressed confusion since Penny came every week, Rob’s answer was blunt.

Sally was not to say hello to Penny.

Dot.

An explanation was demanded and that’s when Rob admitted the truth that Penny believed they were having an affair.

Shock hit Sally at what she was hearing, but Rob explained further that Penny misunderstood Sally’s friendliness.

A comparison to a cockaspananiel puppy followed with Rob explaining that Sally just rushes up to everybody with her tail wagging and Penny didn’t understand that kind of open warm personality because it wasn’t who she was.

Suspicion replaced understanding in Penny’s interpretation.

Rob’s advice to Sally was to wait until Penny says hello first.

And according to Sally that took years.

Decades later, Sally Strs made an admission that puts Penny Marshall’s suspicions in a completely different light.

And this is where the story takes its turn.

Sally confessed that she actually was crazy about Rob Reiner.

Not just professional admiration, but real feelings.

Courtship attempts happened at one point when she sent him candy during an evening of plays he put on and dinner outings occurred between them a few times.

Nothing real ever developed from it, according to Sally.

But the feelings existed.

Paranoia doesn’t quite describe what Penny Marshall experienced when you consider that a wife watched another woman work with her husband every week, sensed something, heard everyone dismiss it as imagination, and then years later that other woman admitted having feelings for him.

Penny Marshall’s intuition may have been sharper than anyone gave her credit for.

But affair suspicions weren’t the only pressure crushing the marriage since success was tearing them apart in a different way.

All in the family ended and Rob Reiner struggled.

Finding difficulty locating work that matched what he’d had before.

While his career stalled, Penny’s career exploded during the same period as Leverne and Shirley became one of the biggest shows on television and transformed her into a superstar.

Jealousy bled into their home life.

But the simple fact that they never saw each other anymore caused even more damage.

Penny described the impossibility of running a family and doing a show while they had just moved into a new house, mentioning that Rob would cook and do the shopping while she cleaned up after him.

Actual quality time together barely existed between them.

March became Penny’s target for when she figured she would start her life again since her show shut down for the season then, and Rob’s show went on hiatus in February.

Maybe they could talk to each other for a while at that point.

She hoped a wife hoping that maybe in a few months she and her husband could finally have a conversation described something other than a marriage.

More like two people living parallel lives under the same roof.

1981 brought the divorce after 10 years of marriage and no explosive fight or dramatic courtroom battle accompanied it.

Penny later explained that their separation wasn’t due to fighting at all since things were just going a different way.

Admitting she didn’t like confrontation and wasn’t a big arguer.

A quiet ending concluded a complicated relationship.

Penny carried something with her for years afterward, a hope that never quite died.

Pride kept them together longer than they should have stayed.

She later confessed and she revealed something heartbreaking when she admitted they always thought they would get back together when they were much older.

That reunion never happened because Rob moved on, remarried, and started a new family.

Years later, Penny still expressed sadness that they didn’t work it out even after the divorce papers were signed.

Echoes of their complicated relationship surfaced in unexpected ways.

1990 brought a strange moment when Colombia Pictures originally scheduled Penny’s film Awakenings and Rob’s film Misery to release on the exact same day.

Two former spouses competing head-to-head at the box office on the same night felt uncomfortable to Penny, and she objected to the arrangement.

Penny picked up the phone and called Rob directly, asking him if he really wanted to come out the same night and whether he wanted to be looking at his ticket lines while she looked at hers.

Her exact words were that she thought not, and the shared release date eventually changed.

That phone call revealed something important about their dynamic.

The ability to communicate directly and resolve issues even years after their marriage ended.

Yet, the competitive tension between two people who once shared everything remained unmistakable.

Rob channeled his divorce pain into his work during this same period when Harry met Sally emerged from his struggles as a single man after the marriage ended.

and Rob later admitted he was in the middle of his single life with disastrous confusing relationships one after another.

The prototype for Harry in that film was Rob himself, a man shocked by his divorce and unable to find love.

Convinced he couldn’t see how he would get with anybody ever again.

The surface of Rob Reina and Penny Marshall’s story looks like classic Hollywood.

Two ambitious people whose careers pulled them in different directions until nothing remained to hold on to.

Underneath that surface existed something else entirely.

A wife who sensed something between her husband and his a Costa who actually harbored feelings she never fully acted on and a husband caught in the middle telling one woman to stay away from the other.

Whether Rob Reiner ever knew the full extent of Sally’s feelings remains unknown.

And whether Penny’s suspicions contributed to pushing them apart or reveal the truth everyone else tried to ignore stays unanswered.

Clean answers don’t exist for some questions.

Penny Marshall watched her husband play someone else’s husband for years, sitting in that audience week after week with needle point in hand, keeping herself busy so she wouldn’t lose control.

When it ended, she still wished they could have made it work.

December 17th, 2018 brought Penny’s death from heart failure due to diabetes.

And Rob’s tribute called her someone born with a great gift, a funny bone and the instinct of how to use it, living with her.

And that funny bone made him lucky and missing her became his reality.

That’s not just a Hollywood story, but a deeply human one filled with jealousy and love and regret and feelings that never fully disappeared even after the marriage