She is the forgotten sister in the tragedy that has engulfed the family of famed director Rob Reiner.
Tracy Reiner, Rob’s oldest child and only the one he adopted, was what her famous mother called her ‘favorite mistake’.
The 61-year-old actress, producer, businesswoman and philanthropist was born in 1964 to 19-year-old Penny Marshall, then a student from the Bronx studying at the University of New Mexico.
Tracy’s father, Michael ‘Mickey’ Henry, was a then 18-year-old college football player whose family members worked at government facilities in that state, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base.
‘This was 1963 – there were no legal abortions in the US, and I wasn’t going to go to Juárez, you know?’ Penny recounted in Newsweek in 2012.
‘Girls then were going horseback riding to try to end their pregnancies. I didn’t do that. I figured I made my bed, so I’m going to sleep in it.’
Tracy Reiner became dad Rob Reiner’s adoptive daughter after the film director married her mother Penny Marshall in 1971
Her mother (Penny, left), who gave birth to her at 19, described Tracy (right) as her ‘favorite mistake’
The young couple, both virtually penniless at the time and living off Mickey’s $100 a month scholarship money, married the weekend President John F Kennedy got shot.
‘All that was on the TV during our honeymoon in a motel was the funeral, which set the tone,’ Penny told Newsweek.
She and Mickey split two years later. He moved to Colorado and had another daughter with his new wife.
Tracy was eight when she followed her mom to California, where Penny’s older brother, Garry Marshall, had become a successful comedy writer and Penny was trying to launch a career in show business.
Garry had written for The Lucy Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s, working on the latter with Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner’s father.
Penny started dating Rob in 1970 after meeting him at an audition for All in the Family, where they were both trying out for the roles of Mike and Gloria Stivic – Reiner got the part of ‘Meathead’ Mike but Marshall lost out as Archie Bunker’s daughter to Sally Struthers.
Tracy – pictured as a child with her parents in 1976 – was raised by Reiner
Rob Reiner married Penny Marshall in 1971 after the two meet at an audition for CBS sitcom All in the Family
They married in 1971 and Rob – only 17 years older – adopted Tracy, who took his last name.
In a 2021 interview with the Hollywood Sentinel, Tracy recalls thinking Hollywood was ‘a dreamland’ compared to her more humble surroundings in New Mexico.
Aside from the Reiners, she remembers meeting other famous Hollywood families, learning how to interact with what she calls ‘these giant bravado personalities’ and operate within their culture.
‘They all laughed over the years, because I didn’t know what “Jewish” was, I didn’t know so many things, and they watched me assimilate. And I am sort of a good example of how someone can learn to do things.
‘Some of it is really coaching, and this game prepared me for things really,’ she was quoted as saying.
The nature of her relationship with Rob is unclear other than Tracy’s comments to the Daily Mail earlier this month when we reached her at her home in Taos shortly after she heard the news of Rob’s murder.
Rob and Penny – who also went on to become a film director – divorced in 1981 when Tracy was about 17
Tracy had a close relationship with her mother up until Penny’s death in 2018 at age 75
‘I came from one of the greatest families ever and now I have a lot of flagpoles missing – people who held me up,’ she said.
‘It’s not easy to lose your parents.’
She declined to comment on her relationship with Rob’s second wife, Michele, saying only: ‘We were a big family and everybody had their stuff. So I don’t know what to say.’
It’s also unclear what kind of relationship she had with her half-siblings, Jake, Nick and Romy Reiner, who are 27, 29, and 33 years younger than Tracy, respectively – an age gap that makes her old enough to be their mother.
Tracy attended various private schools in Los Angeles, counting the Jackson kids, Stevie Wonder’s sister, Molly Ringwald, Tatum O’Neil and Jodie Foster as schoolmates.
At one point, she told the Sentinel: ‘I ran away from home with Francis Coppola’s son to write a story about love.’
Her mother, in the meantime, rose to fame in her acting role as Laverne in the Happy Days spinoff, Laverne & Shirley while Tracy was a teenager.
Tracy has two daughters with husband Matthew Conlan
Tracy was still a teenager when she visited her mother on the set of Laverne and Shirley in 1979
Penny and Rob divorced in 1981 when Tracy was about 17, reportedly because they didn’t carve out time from show business schedules for each other.
Shortly after their divorce at the height of Penny’s acting career, Tracy headed east for college, at first to the small liberal arts Bennington College in Vermont, then to the New School for Social Research in New York, where she graduated with a degree in the history of storytelling.
She went on to work at restaurants in New York City, including Indochine, a celebrity hangout in the 1980s, and also behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live for three seasons, she told the Sentinel.
Her mother by then had transitioned from acting to directing popular films including two Tom Hanks movies, Big and A League of Their Own.
Tracy’s biggest role came in the latter, a movie about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, formed during World War II when male players were away.
She played Betty ‘Spaghetti’ Horn, the left fielder for the Rockford Peaches.
Tracy played Betty ‘Spaghetti’ Horn, the left fielder for the all-women’s team, the Rockford Peaches in the hit movie A League of their Own
Tracy forged close relationships on set, later telling journalist Jeff Pearlman that: ‘The cast is as close to this day as any I’ve ever even heard of on other movies. We share all of our real-life events often to this day.’
It was during the movie’s creation that Tracy became pregnant with her first child, Spencer, now 33.
In 1993, when ‘A League of Their Own’ became a short-lived TV series, she continued playing Betty Horn in all six episodes.
She also retained a connection with baseball, serving as a board member and consultant to causes related to women’s role in that sport.
Her other (smaller) movie roles included appearances in Die Hard (1988), When Harry Met Sally (1989, which Reiner directed), Pretty Woman (1990) and ‘Apollo 13″ (1995), back again with Hanks.
Her LinkedIn page also shows her association with several film production companies.
These days, Tracy keeps a low profile and balance sher time between Taos, New Mexico, and Los Angeles
Director/actress Penny Marshall and daughter/actress Tracy Reiner at The Hollywood Show in 2015
In her interview with the Sentinel, she discussed later struggling professionally in Hollywood, saying: ‘Once you’re 35 in this business, you had better have a couple of things you do because it’s not the most supportive industry.
‘It tries to be, but it’s very hard to get a job with a level income.’
She dabbled with jobs on the periphery of Hollywood for several years.
At one point in the late 1990s, she was hired to speak on ‘The Effects of Special Effects on the audience’ for a group of industry lawyers, and in 2000, she gave a speech about ‘Storytelling: From Game Design to Feature Films’ to a group of Korean public administrators.
California state records show she filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in 2012.
In 2013, the Sentinel reported, she started heading a team that funded and marketed a new medical software company in 2013.
‘I love lens history and projection as well as farm and water technologies and alternative energies,’ she said of her work at the time.
Tracy has two daughters, Vivella/Viva and Bella, with husband Matthew Conlan.
Tracy, Matt, and the two girls surprised Tracy’s mother, Penny Marshall, on the live set of the Rosie O’Donnell show –Rosie’s big break was in A League of Their Own.
Spencer, then 19, stayed backstage, too shy to appear on camera.
Tracy said in an interview that she home-schooled her girls. When asked by the Sentinel how she managed a blended family with five kids and how that impacted her career, Tracy said, ‘It’s made me sane.’
‘I am better now at being me and being a parent and an artist then I ever imagined.’
The LA County Medical Examiner has ruled Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths a homicide, caused by ‘multiple sharp force injuries with a knife by another’
Reiner with his wife Michele and their three children, Jake, Nick, and Romy
Conlan is a military veteran who worked as a producer on a documentary about Dennis Rodman that his mother-in-law, Penny Marshall, was directing before her death in 2018 at age 75.
‘She phoned that morning,’ Conlan was quoted as saying at the time. ‘She said, ‘What are we doing with Rodman? We’ve got work to do!?’
Public records show that he lived for several years at a New Mexico address (in Taos) that he shared with her, but now may be living in Tennessee.
Tracy has expressed mixed feelings about Hollywood, telling Pearlman: ‘I love the effort and creed of film people – but show business is a cold and vain world’.
‘I lived here as a kid so I learned to say no and was protected from a lot of really f***ked-up people and also had to deal with a lot of really f***ked-up people,’ she said.
‘My family was into therapy and I was sad from my parents splitting and for me therapy was not fun. It was very serious and not really helping me be funny and laugh more.’
Still, she has stayed close to the industry by serving as a board member – including the once-president and current vice president – of the Women’s Club Hollywood.
