Even This I Get to Experience
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Even This
I Get to
Experience
Norman Lear
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The Penguin Press
New York | 2014
PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Even This, LLC
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Excerpt from “Try to Remember” (from “The Fantasticks”). Lyrics by Tom Jones, music by Harvey Schmidt. © 1960 (renewed) by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt.
Publication and allied rights assigned to Chappell Co., Inc. All rights reserved.
Used by permission of Alfred Music.
Excerpt from “My Way,” words and music by Paul Anka, Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibaut and Claude Francois. © 1969 BMG Blue (BMI). All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “My Way” (“Comme D’Habitude”) by Gilles Thibaut, Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux, and English lyrics by Paul Anka, Architectural Music (BMI), Jingoro Music (BMI).
Photograph credits
Insert images 15, 16, 18: Mark Sennet Entertainment Inc.
Image 30: Photo by Arnold Turner, reproduced by courtesy of the author
Other photographs courtesy of the author
ISBN 978-1-101-63538-4
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. The events in this memoir are based upon real events, as remembered by the author. Conversations are reconstructed from the author’s memory and presented in a manner that conveys their spirit and intent, as recalled by the author.
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For Lyn and my six children, at whose sweet prodding I have tried to open my veins
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Part 1
Alone in a Going World
Part 2
Those Were the Days
Part 3
Joyful Stress
Part 4
Over and Next
Photographs
Acknowledgments
You haven’t overcome the fear of death until you delight in your own life, believing it to be the carrying out of the universal purpose.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Preface
WHEN I WAS A BOY I thought that if I could turn a screw in my father’s head just a sixteenth of an inch one way or the other, it might help him to tell the difference between right and wrong. I couldn’t, of course, and ultimately he—and I—had to pay a serious price for his confusion.
In late June of 1931, just out of third grade and a month away from turning nine, I was eagerly looking forward to my first experience at summer camp. A roll of cloth tape imprinted with “Norman M. Lear, Norman M. Lear, Norman M. Lear . . .” sat on the kitchen counter, waiting for my mother to cut it up and sew my name into the clothes I’d be taking with me in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, my father was about to take a plane to Tulsa. None of my friends in Chelsea, Massachusetts, knew anybody who had ever flown anywhere. It had been only four years since Charles Lindbergh flew thirty-three and a half hours in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis to get from New York to Paris, and the rare plane that was spotted in the sky had us kids chasing around in the street yelling, “Lindy, Lindy!” So Dad flying to Oklahoma was a big deal.
He was traveling on some kind of business—“Monkey business!” said my mother, who sensed that the men he’d fallen in with were not to be trusted—and for my upcoming birthday he was going to bring me back a ten-gallon hat just like the one worn by my favorite film cowboy, Ken Maynard.
“Herman, I don’t like this,” she told him. “I don’t want you to see those men.” But Herman, as always, knew better.
“Jeanette!” he screamed, the veins in his neck bulging as he stood over her with his nose all but pressing hers. “Stifle!” And off he went.
Herman Lear, or, as he preferred to be known, “H.K.”—the K standing for “King,” a name he insisted he’d been given and would never admit to having appropriated—was a man of supreme optimism. A predecessor to Arthur Miller’s salesman, Willy Loman, H.K. went out into the jungle each day with a shoe shine and a smile, pledging to come home, his fortune made, in ten days to two weeks, tops. And this—whatever he was doing in Oklahoma—was merely the latest scheme that would soon result in our being millionaires.
He was arrested upon his return on July 3 for receiving and trying to sell some phony bonds to the Boston brokerage house E. A. Pierce & Co. High on my list of vivid childhood memories is the photograph of my father on the front page of the next day’s newspaper, coming down the steps of the courthouse with one hand holding his hat over his face and the other manacled to a detective. Five weeks later he was convicted and sentenced to three years in Deer Island Prison, off Boston Harbor.
That evening our house was filled with friends and relatives offering comfort as they bought the furniture my mother was selling, she having decided on the spot that we couldn’t possibly continue to live in Chelsea in such disgrace. At one point, someone I didn’t know (but instantly disliked) offered to buy my father’s red leather chair—the throne from which he had controlled the radio dial on our floor model Atwater Kent, just as, forty years later, Archie would control the Bunker family’s TV viewing from his living room armchair.
As my mother and this scavenger agreed on a price, I was devastated. The loss of my father’s chair was like losing him twice in the same week. And, as if that were not bad enough, I would soon learn that my mother planned to take my younger sister to live with her and leave me with various relatives until my father got out of jail and the family could be reunited. I clutched all that remained of my summer dream—that unused roll of “Norman M. Lear” cloth, a piece of silent sadness which I managed to keep with me well into my thirties, perhaps even my forties—and my eyelids bit down hard on the tears I was fighting to hold back. At that point someone—an uncle or cousin or neighbor—placed his hands on my shoulders, looked deep into my eyes, and announced, with that soapy solemnity that so many adults use when they are offering gratuitous counsel to the young, “Remember, Norman, you’re the man of the house now.”
This had to be the moment when my awareness of the foolishness of the human condition was born. I was just past my ninth birthday, my father had been brought down before my eyes from a ten to a zero, my mother and sister were about to disappear from my daily life, my own identity was no more than a thin bit of fabric in m
y fist, and I was looking up into the face of this fatuous asshole telling me that I was the man of the house now. And then he added, with a smarmy smile I wanted to rip from his face: “No, no, son! A man of the house doesn’t cry.”
How could I not have developed a deep appreciation for the absurdities amid the gravity of our existence?
• • •
IN MY NINETY-PLUS YEARS I’ve lived a multitude of lives. There was that early life with my parents and relatives; a life as a kid with my blood buddies Herbie Lerner and the Schwarz twins; a life in high school zeroing in on the humor in our existence; a life in college cut short by World War II; a life as a crew member in a B-17 bomber flying fifty-two missions over Europe; a life in the world of entertainment, with sublives in television, radio, movies, and music; a life as a political activist; a life in philanthropy; a late-starting life as a spiritual seeker; three lives as a husband, six as a father (with my youngest born forty-eight years after my eldest), and four as a grandfather.
In the course of all these lives, I had a front-row seat at the birth of television; wrote, produced, created, or developed more than a hundred shows; had nine on the air at the same time; finished one season with three of the top four and another with five of the top nine; hosted Saturday Night Live; wrote, directed, produced, executive-produced, or financed more than a dozen major films; before normalization, led an entourage of Hollywood writers and producers on a three-week tour of China; founded several cause-oriented national organizations, including the 300,000-member liberal advocacy group People For the American Way; was told by the New York Times that I changed the face of television; was labeled the “No. 1 enemy of the American family” by Jerry Falwell; was warned by Pat Robertson that my arms were “too short to box with God”; made it onto Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List”; was presented with the National Medal of the Arts by President Clinton; purchased an original copy of the Declaration of Independence and toured it for ten years in all fifty states; was ranked by Entertainment Weekly fortieth among the “100 Greatest Entertainers of the Century” (twenty-nine places ahead of the Sex Pistols); ran the Olympic torch in the 2002 Winter Olympics; blew a fortune in a series of bad investments in failing businesses; and reached a point where I was advised that we might even have to sell our home.
Having heard that we’d fallen into such dire straits, my son-in-law phoned me from New York and asked how I was feeling. My answer was, “Terrible, of course,” but then I added, “but I must be crazy, Jon, because despite all that’s happened, I keep hearing this inner voice saying, ‘Even this I get to experience.’”
Early the next morning my son-in-law was on the phone again. He’d heard me say once that I wished to be cremated when I died and he was calling to ask me to please, please change my mind. I asked why. In a voice that choked a bit at the finish, he answered, “Because someday I want to take my children, your grandchildren, to a gravestone that reads, ‘Even this I get to experience.’”
• • •
THAT CONVERSATION TOOK PLACE IN 1988, and what followed from it was my determination to write this book. Several years later I finally began combing through well over a half century’s worth of notes, letters, speeches, articles, interviews, scripts, films, and TV shows in pursuit of my story. I didn’t write much manuscript, but I did make notes. Lots of notes. Looking them over a while ago, this one from mid-2000 stopped me cold:
Write about what I think is the key learning curve in life. How one can grow horizontally by becoming informed in one field, and then informed in many entirely new fields—but that horizontal growth becomes less important as time goes on. The journey that grows more important over time is the vertical journey, the journey into one’s self.
Clearly, there was a roadblock on my vertical journey. From my first long talks in 1984 with Lyn Davis, who in 1987 became Lyn Davis Lear, she steered me to understanding that my roadblock was an Everest of denial. When she heard that my father had gone off to prison for three years before my tenth birthday, she asked, “So what was that like? How did it feel?” When I told her the whole episode was like a chapter I’d read in someone else’s book, she gave me a look that said, “Uh-uh. You just don’t want to go there.” This conversation recurred periodically over the years. Occasionally things would get heated and I’d wind up crying out something to this effect: “What do you want from me? Look at my life. I’ve got you, my six kids, three of them yours, all of them in love with each other, a lovely home, a great career—how could my life be better? Leave me alone already!”
I told that story several years ago to a family friend who was also a therapist. She smiled without comment, but later said, “If you ever decide to connect with that kid whose father went to prison, why, to quote one of your expressions, don’t you try ‘wearing his hat’ and ask yourself, what must that boy have gone through?”
That question hung in my head. “What must that boy have gone through?” I began to think about him and to sleep on his story, and then one day I made a connection that informed and expedited the process. As a writer who for so many years had marveled at how often he went to bed with a script that had a second-act problem and awoke with the solution, how could I not have realized that this phenomenon might also occur in the script that was my life? In fact, it did, and soon my head was clearer and my eyes open, enough at least to bring back memories of my youth as a castaway while my dad was serving time. The retrieval of those early memories lit the path to understanding how I got from there to here that you will take with me now.
“Here” is where I am today, a nonagenarian in what the doctors tell me is excellent health, looking down my arm and wondering, as I peck away on my computer, what my father’s hand is doing hanging out of my sleeve. My family, nuclear and extended, brings me nothing but joy. I go to sleep each night anticipating and delighting in the great taste of the coffee I will be drinking the next morning—something I have done almost thirty thousand times. And, having looked back with new eyes on all the lives I’ve been so fortunate to have led, I’ve learned, as hopefully you now will, who I was as I scrambled to get here from “there.”
Even this I got to experience.
PART 1
Alone in a Going World
Go know.
—MY BUBBE LIZZIE
1
EARLY ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN 1983, I got a call from my friend John Mitchell, who was then the president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. He was calling to tell me that the academy was creating a Hall of Fame and that I, along with six others whose illustrious company it astounded me to be included among, was to be one of the first inductees.
I instantly phoned my mother back in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Now, I thought, I would finally get the maternal seal of approval that I was still searching for at age sixty-one. She answered with her usual three syllables, “Hell-oh-oh,” a sound that always seemed caught between a whine and a cry of pain. In my exultant mood, though, I heard it this time as if she’d exclaimed, at last, in a tone of naked delight, “Norman, sweetheart!”
“Mother,” I exploded, “I just got a confidential call from a friend. Nobody knows this yet so you can’t tell anyone, but the Television Academy is starting a Hall of Fame, and these will be the first inductees: the man who started NBC, General David Sarnoff; the founder of CBS, William S. Paley; maybe the greatest newscaster of all time, Edward R. Murrow; easily the best writer that ever came out of television, Paddy Chayefsky; the two greatest comedians in television history, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle; and . . . me!”
My mother didn’t miss a beat. “Listen,” she said, “if that’s what they want to do, who am I to say?”
In all the years since, I have rarely spoken publicly without sharing that story and, judging by every audience’s reaction, I think that either we all had the same mother or we all can identify with the desperate seeking of a parent’s approval.
/> A phrase leaped out at me once from Annie Dillard’s lovely memoir An American Childhood: “set down in a going world.” Actually, I thought, we are set down in many. Just as we lead lives within lives, and lives end on end, so are we set down in multiple going worlds. There is the going world we all inhabit, of course. But there is also our mother’s going world, our father’s going world, the world they have attempted to create as a couple, the idiosyncratic worlds of all the other caregivers and influencers in childhood, the worlds that all of us struggle to create in every relationship with another human being, the worlds of our imaginations, and the physical worlds of the bodies we each inhabit. It is a miracle that we mewling and puking little beings, as Shakespeare described us, survive at all.
When I was three months old, according to Lear family lore, my mother dropped me on my head while she was bathing me in the kitchen sink. Frightened, she left me there and ran to a next-door neighbor for help. Over the years this incident seemed increasingly funny to her. It became a kind of set piece in her life story, and at every retelling of it in my presence, a version of this conversation followed:
“So, you dropped me in the sink on my head and ran next door?”
“For help,” she would respond reassuringly.
“And what was I doing?”
“What could you do? You were three months old. You were screaming.”
“That’s why you ran for help?”
“Of course. I thought I would die.”
“And me?” I’d ask. “Could I have died?”
“Of course. Why else would I be running for help?”
Finally, I would cut to the chase. “So, Mother, it was a stranger who pulled me out of the sink?”
“No,” she’d say with a sarcasm that could etch glass, “she left you there to drown.” Then she’d add, “And besides, she wasn’t a stranger. We were neighbors a week already!”